Black Light

vaudevillian who weighed three hundred pounds and was buried with his notices, choked to death on a cornichon. The women would strain and groan, but at last it was done. Robins and thrushes would alight upon the mounded earth, to hunt for insects there, and butterflies drawn by the flowers.

As a child I thought the cemetery was the most beautiful, even idyllic, spot in Kamensic, with its flowering dogwoods and shads and forsythia, and so many apple trees it might have been an orchard. Daffodils bloomed underfoot, and more of the tulipa saxatilis; there were bluebells and periwinkles and, everywhere, ivy. And of course there were the gravestones themselves, carved figures of winged foxes and men with the heads of birds, of lionesses and deer and serpents, commemorating the dead from wars and influenza, fire and cancer and noose. The strains of the flute would die into the sound of wind in the leaves, and the children would run off to play quietly among the grave markers. When the coffin was lowered the villagers shared the task of heaping soil back upon it; and when this was completed the last part of the ceremony was performed. Mrs. Langford would produce several bottles of red wine. My father or one of the other men would open them, and the bottles were passed around. Everyone drank from them, even children—I can remember spitting out my mouthful, and my mother smiling gently as she wiped off my mouth with her handkerchief. Sometimes only one or two bottles were quaffed this way; sometimes a dozen or more. Then everyone would leave—not very quietly, either, and generally to my house or the Wellers’. People would speak fondly of the deceased, but there was no sense of genuine grief or bereavement, even with the suicides of the village children. It was as though you one day discovered a dead chipmunk in the woods, half-buried in the leaves; but every day thereafter it was harder and harder to find, until at last it was gone, completely swallowed by the earth.

So it was with Kamensic: swiftly and remorselessly as an ermine, it devoured its own young.

Somehow it never appeared strange to us. After all, what else did we know? It was the early 1970s, we were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. We absorbed Kent State and the Manson Family, evacuated our classrooms for bomb threats and stayed home from school when Albert Shanker called our teachers to strike. Death just seemed to be an occupational hazard if you were young. What shocks me now is how we were all expected to simply take it for granted, how often we met on the playground or school parking lot and spoke in whispers, glancing over our shoulders as a brother or sister of the deceased would arrive and take their place among us. Famous or notorious as Kamensic’s residents were, there were no talk shows, no tabloid headlines, and certainly no school psychologists waiting to comfort the bereaved. Even when Phillip Lawton’s son died—the New York Times reported it as a bad reaction to a bee sting, but we heard otherwise— and the television crews appeared, the people of Kamensic drove them away.

“Have you no decency?” cried DeVayne Smith at the train station where the reporters had gathered, his basso voice quavering with rage. “Go from here, now—go—”

They went. Confronted with the angry mob that had rushed to Lawton’s side—not just DeVayne Smith but Gracie Burrows, Constantine Fox, my own parents, and Axel Kern—the reporters shot a few seconds of taped footage, got into their vans and fled. Fifteen minutes later, heading south on Route 684, a deer ran in front of the van and it crashed. The footage never aired. Lawton’s son was buried in the Kamensic Village cemetery, alongside a weathered statue of an angel with folded wings and a wolf’s muzzle.

5. Children of the Revolution

HILLARY AND ALI AND I were inseparable as the petals of a rose. Ali had been my best friend since the first day of kindergarten. We had stood in the playground weeping as our parents left us, and then fallen into each other’s arms, wailing—a story which we heard repeated, say, a thousand times over the years. Ali was slight and fey, as I was big-boned and (much against my will) commonsensical. As a girl she wore white fishnet stockings and plastic go-go boots to parties, her long black hair so thick that when you ran your fingers through it they stuck, as though it were taffy. My own hair was a mess, thin and lank. My mother finally gave up on it and brought me to her hairdresser in the city.

“Chop it off,” she ordered, snatching up her copy of Women’s Wear Daily and sinking into a pink lounge chair. And chop it off he did, leaving me with a horrible pixie cut. I was tall for my age, skinny as a rail. With my cropped head I looked like a very young ex-con and was constantly mistaken for a boy. It wasn’t until I was thirteen that I rebelled and insisted on growing my hair out. It took two years, but by the time I reached high school I was a reasonable facsimile of a girl, with shoulder-length hair and narrow hips, though still too quick-tempered and clumsy as a young St. Bernard.

Hillary, on the other hand, remained blithe as ever. He was one of those kids whose popularity transcends the rigid class barriers of high school. The jocks liked him, the freaks who smoked pot between classes, the kids in the Honor Society, teachers: everyone. Once a guy from Mahopac called Hillary’s father a fag, and even though Ali pointed out that, technically, this was true, Hillary sat down and patiently explained the word’s etymological origins until the guy finally shrugged.

“Well, shit, if you don’t care that your old man’s a fag, neither do I,” he announced, and bought Hillary a beer.

In 1974, nobody cared; at least not in Kamensic. David Bowie had appeared on Don Kirschner’s Rock Concert wearing eye makeup. Duncan had seen the New York Dolls perform in drag at Club 82, and even Hillary sometimes wore electric blue mascara to parties. I made my own bid for bisexual chic by dressing a la Joel Grey in Cabaret, in a moth-eaten tuxedo and battered top hat. I still have a Polaroid photo that Ali took of me then: strange lunar eyes so pale they seemed to have no irises, upturned nose and dark eyebrows, a slight overbite that had failed to yield after three years of braces.

“God, look at me,” I wailed, when the offending image dropped from Ali’s camera onto my living room floor. We were going to a cast party, Ali resplendent in a red leotard and Danskin skirt, me in my tatty Marc Bolan finery. “I look like—I don’t know what I look like.”

“You look fine,” said Ali, shoving the camera in her leather satchel. “‘Divine decadence.’ Right, Unk?”

My father nodded, giving me one of his mock-solemn looks. “Charlotte is jolie- laide. Interesting-looking. Like her mother.”

At this my mother frowned over her script, her face larded with Christian Dior unguents. “Charlotte is far more jolie than laide. And I am not interesting-looking.”

“You’re beautiful, Audrey,” Ali said soothingly and with the assurance of someone who truly was. Even at seventeen she was petite, just five feet tall, with a round smooth body, small round breasts and milk-white skin, freckled all over. She still had that wild mane of black hair framing a wide, expressive face— freckled cheeks, sweetly pursed mouth, honey-colored eyes, a small gap between her two front teeth. Hillary teased her and called her Colette, which for a little while made Ali hope that perhaps he was in love with her. They slept together a few times, but then Hillary started going with a Swedish exchange student with even more fabulous hair, and that was the end of that.

Ali’s parents did indeed get divorced. Ali lived with her father in Kamensic, and spent alternate weekends in the city with her mother, a one-time principal dancer with the New York City Ballet and former Balanchine muse. Ali’s father, Constantine, was a set designer. Ali had inherited his gifts—she would have made a wonderful illustrator, with her eye for the grotesque combined with her skills as a draftsman—but Ali wanted to be a dancer. She had studied since childhood at Madame Laslansky’s famed Manhattan studio, but despite the years of training she moved with an oddly stilted grace. Not like a dancer at all; more like a fox stalking, stopping to listen, and then flowing forward, always on the balls of her feet so she looked slightly tippy-toed, as though she were about to pounce. In our freshman year she auditioned for both the Joffrey and the School of American Ballet, but was turned down for both.

She was different after that. Wilder—she’d always been wild, but now there was a hysterical edge to everything she did, from dancing at parties to streaking during away football games at Carmel and Goldens Bridge. When I think of Ali I think of her naked: she shed her clothes like a toddler, unthinkingly, stripping to slide into the lake or to join some boy in the mossy woods behind school. Or else she wore leotards, black Danskins and black Capezios on her tiny feet; a ragged flannel shirt tied around her waist so the sleeves flopped against her thighs, her glossy black hair slick against her skull.