(Me? I’m not a barbecue fan, he says. Having the grace to flush slightly on the ears. Aren’t you afraid that they’re going to burn a cross in front of your window? he adds with a smile.)
I’ll never write about that place again, I say. Just one thing, though—
(What?)
What would you have called them?
He takes his time lighting up another Kretek Jakarta. His eyes, through the foreign smoke, grow as remote as Aunt Noah’s, receding in the distance like a highway in a rearview mirror. And I have a moment of false nostalgia. A quick glimpse of an image that never was: a boy racing me down a long corridor of July corn, his big flat feet churning up the dirt where we’d peed to mark our territory like two young dogs, his skinny figure tearing along ahead of me, both of us breaking our necks to get to the vanishing point where the green rows come together and geometry begins. Gone.
His cigarette lit, my cousin shakes his head and gives a short exasperated laugh. (In the end, it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference, does it? he says.)
Un Petit d’un Petit
I’m swatting fallen leaves with a hockey stick in front of the Victorian castle where I dream through school hours with other captive heroines, when a car pulls up. The car is a station wagon, green as the Philadelphia suburbs around us. And the girl behind the wheel is wearing green as well, a pleated tunic that means she goes to Chew Academy, our rival down the road. She rolls down the window and leans out with the air of a baroness addressing a roadside peasant. “Have you seen Dogface?” she asks.
I don’t know her, but from the car and the nickname—an elegant sibling appellation for my best friend, Edie—I know she has to be Edie’s older sister Gus, whose beauty is a tribulation to the rest of the family. “Big eyes and big tits” is the capsule description I’ve heard of Gus, but what strikes me is the phenomenal whiteness of her skin as she sits there in all that green, a pallor like candle wax that culminates in an incandescent burst of red-blond hair. She has bound up this hair with a silk scarf in a topknot that makes her look like a fifties movie star, and the impatient majesty with which she sits behind the wheel discounts any idea I might have that she is just a schoolgirl like me. All in all, an unsettling apparition to face beside a hockey field on a bleak fall afternoon. As I stand transfixed in my sweaty gym clothes and graceless fourteen years, she looks me over with amused contempt. I direct her to Edie down at the Old Gym and continue on my way, only now with the feeling of stepping along on invisible stilts, my head high above the thinning treetops. It’s the same feeling I get every September when I fall in love with that year’s English teacher.
For some time after that, worshiping Gus is a private luxury like a certain kind of candy I hoard in my locker: a shell-shaped bitter chocolate with an Italian name. It goes on outside of my friendship with Edie, which is another story altogether: a normal adolescent catalog of lachrymose confessions, gut-wrenching fits of mirth, and shared musing on future lives of art and turpitude. And it has nothing to do with the broth of intimacy and rivalry that simmers around Edie and Gus. It’s an undemanding crush in which I simply allow myself to relax into bedazzlement whenever she flashes by. My encounters with her at Edie’s house and in other places take on an intensity that encloses the details in a magnified wall of sensation so that in my memory they line up gleaming like a row of crystal balls.
At a New Year’s Eve party, I watch her clowning with her guitar, surrounded by clusters of infatuated boys. In a wailing, cornball voice, she sings “Dona Dona”:
On a wagon bound for market
There’s a calf with a mournful eye…
It is Gus’s party, which Edie and I have been allowed to attend on sufferance because a freak blizzard has thinned the ranks of her friends, students from prep schools and colleges up and down the East Coast. Snow dervishes spin against the windows and make the fire sputter in the sitting room of the bland suburban house filled with Boston and Philadelphia antiques. The prettiest girls wear jewel-colored Indian dresses, and the most desirable boys are dressed like ranch hands or factory workers. It’s not a costume party, just the seventies. They all keep moseying out into the storm to ingest various chemicals, though at the time I’m aware only that some Olympian mischief is going on. Mousy and prim in a wool A-line skirt and matching sweater, I sit sipping a digestive liqueur made by monks, a drink I chose because it was in the least intimidating bottle. No one talks to me, and I have spent most of the evening feigning absorption in a coffee-table book of nursery rhymes rendered wittily in nonsensical French. Un petit d’un petit s’étonne aux Halles—Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall. Edie, prettier and bolder, has just abandoned me to chat up a Haverford sophomore when Gus crosses the room and stops in front of me.
“You! What have you got on your legs?” she asks, in the loud, flippant tones of a social triumphator, who knows that whatever she says or does will add hugely to the general jollification. A numbness comes over me, as I observe the firelight gleaming on her bright hair and slightly prominent white teeth: it is the swift anesthesia that
