Anthropology of an American Girl

Boys will be boys, that's what people say. No one ever mentions how girls have to be something other than themselves altogether. We are to stifle the same feelings that boys are encouraged to display. We are to use gossip as a means of policing ourselves -- this way those who do succumb to sex but are not damaged by it are damaged instead by peer malice. Girls demand a covenant because if one gives in, others will be expected to do the same. We are to remain united in cruelty, ignorance, and aversion. Or we are to starve the flesh from our bones, penalizing the body for its nature, castigating ourselves for advances we are powerless to prevent. We are to make false promises then resist the attentions solicited. Basically we are to become expert liars.

It's better to keep grief inside. Grief inside works like bees or ants, building curious and perfect structures, complicating you. Grief outside means you want something from someone, and chances are good you won't get it.

Since he knew things at the beginning, maybe at the end he knew things too. That we had gone as far as chance would take us. That nothing is more sacred than youth or more hopeful than turning yourself over to someone and saying ~ I have this time, it is not a long time, but it is my best time and my best gift, and I give it to you. When I revisit my youth, I re-visit you.

And loneliness. I should say something of loneliness. The panic, the sweeping hysteria that comes not when you are without others, but when you are without yourself, adrift. I should describe the filthy province of mind, the blighted district inside, the place so crowded you cannot raise the lids of your eyes. Your shoulders are drawn and your head has fallen and your chest is bruised by the constant assault of your heart. (p. 37)

It was frankly sort of confusing, the way everyone stared at our bodies exactly as they tried to erase the ideas of our bodies from our minds. We were supposed to get over ourselves but no one was supposed to get over us. The female body was our worst handicap and our best advantage -- the surest means to success, the surest course to failure. (p. 72)

When you lose your parents as a child, you are indoctrinated into a club, you re taken into life's severest confidence. You are undeceived.

The unusual thing about quiet is that when you seek it, it is almost impossible to achieve. When you strive for quiet, you become impatient, and impatience is itself a noiseless noise. You can block every superficial sound, but, with each new layer extinguished, a next rises up, finer and more entrapping, until you arrive at last in the infinite attitude of your own riotous mind. Inside is where all the memories last like wells, and the unspoken wishes like golden buds, and the pain that you keep, lingering and implicit, staying inside, nesting inside, articulating, articulating, through to the day you die. (p. 240)

Having to talk to people was the one thing, but soliciting conversation was something else. If I acted squirmy or didn't make eye contact, they would want to know what was wrong, and I would have to say, Nothing, since nothing really was wrong. Nothing is an easy thing to feel but a difficult thing to express

Mr. O'Donnell was at the library counter, performing the sort of grim rituals librarians perform with index cards and stumpy pencils and those rubber stamps with columns of rotating numbers. "Ms. Auerbach! What will it be today? Camus? Cervantes?" "Actually I'm looking for a book of poetry by Emily Dickinson" He paused somberly, toying with the twirled tip of his mustache. No matter how seriously librarians are engaged in their work, they are always glad to be interrupted when the theme is books. It makes no difference to them how simple the search is or how behind on time either of you might be running - they consider all queries scrupulously. They love to have their knowledge tested. They lie in wait, they will not be rushed.

Kindness is everything . . . When you receive it and express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things. It's life, demystified. A place out of self. Not a waltz, the the whirls within a waltz.

Jocks were pretty much exempt from the standards that bound the rest of us. Teachers and administrators humor them because it's in everyone's interests to coax them through school and get them out of the building. Since it's unethical to turn them loose on society, they get sent to college to be kept out of the mix until their frontal lobes develop more fully. As enticement they are given sports scholarships that will later amount to nothing, not even good health.

Mine is not a smiling face. Strangers on the street always say, Smile! But my muscles do not naturally go there.

The most awful hunger is the type that is satisfied too soon, before it moves you, before you are moved by it, before it becomes protracted and superior, a motivating business, making you honorable, graceful, clever - a hunter.

It was then that I began to write. Writing helps when you can't talk to your friends; it wasn't that my friends were untrustworthy, it's just that I would never discuss something that was hardly real as though it were really real. Often people do this, forcing friends into authenticating an imaginary life.

Lying is a full time occupation, even if you tell just one, because once you tell it, you're stuck with it. If you want to do it right, you have to visualize it, conjure the graphics, tone, and sequence of action, then relate it purposefully in the midst of seemingly spontaneous dialogue. The more actual the lie becomes to the listener, the more actual it becomes to the teller, which is scariest of all. Some people really get to believing their own lies.

Now that I'd experienced being a woman to a man I was in love with, I'd become self-conscious about being a woman to the world in general. Of course, being female is always indelicate and extreme, like operating heavy machinery. Every woman knows the feeling of being a stack of roving flesh. Sometimes all you've accomplished by the end of the day is to have maneuvered your body through space without grave incident.

Say it ' he said the words caught at the base of his throat. 'No one.' 'No one ' I sad I swore 'but you.' I said it because it was true. There was no one but him and there never would be. I loved him with pain and with something greater than pain with a barren ache that pealed not in the heart but in the desert dry alongside it. I know it was so even then: if in his arms I was a woman beyond them I was nothing.

Kate lost a mother," I said, "but I lost a nothing." Kate doesn't feel that way," Jack assured me. But what about everybody else besides Kate? How can I ever explain to anyone what she was when she and I had no name? People need names for everything. I wasn't a relative or a friend, I was just an object of her kindness." He wiped my cheeks, saying Ssshh. I buried my face in his shoulder. True kindness is stabilizing," I went on. "When you feel it and when you express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things. Like all there is to achieve. It's life, demystified. A place out of self, a network of simple pleasures, not a waltz, but like whirls within a waltz." You're the one now," Jack said definitively. "That's why you met her. She had something she had to pass on." (p. 95)

Optimism is when you're not sure where life is going to take you, so naturally you anticipate the best possible outcome

Hell is only loneliness, a place without play for the soul, a place without God. How could there be God in loneliness when God is presence?

I shook my head. I couldn't remember the time before, or the way it used to be. There were things we used to do, factual things, and those were easy to recall--playing, biking, singing. As for the things we'd conjured and believed, those were harder to recapture. I wondered if ideals existed only because there was so much to be learned in the loss of them,

Sometimes a day is a symbolic day, and you behave symbolically. Sometimes you search inside for a feeling, and, finding none, you remember that no feeling is frequently the most possible feeling.

Sometimes all you’ve accomplished by the end of the day is to have maneuvered your body through space without grave incident.

It was strange to experience in one night the difference between wanting something you cannot have and having something you cannot want. I wished it wasn't my time to learn it. No one else seemed to be learning much of anything.

This is where I falter. This is where I lose myself. This is where years invert and minutes reverse and ideas of what was good and right upend. This is where time is dispersed, thrown down like leaves or stones to be read. It's difficult to say what really happened. I know that my heartache was indescribable, the depth of my loneliness astonishing. I know that I worked very hard, and I never intended to hurt anyone. I cannot describe a life dispossessed of happiness.

But in fact there are infinite subtleties to identity-that is to say, there is the way that you are, which is the sum of the way you are becoming and the way you have been, which does not take into account the way you secretly wish to be.

Kindness is everything...When you receive it and express it, it becomes the whole meaning of things, a place out of self.

My hand reaches for his eye. He does not pull away but breathes into my touch. His normal lid drifts closed, and beneath my fingertips the distended one throbs, as if the eye below is straining to see. In his heart there is a girl; she is me. No contract keeps her; she goes with him, she goes alone, precipice to precipice, on every ledge agreeing again to leap. She is with him, she has been with him, every minute. No one can know what we know. Just us. If you listen, you can hear it. In the wide sound of the rain-us.

I wondered if Kate would harden as my mother had when she was young and her own mother died. Some people exist quite well in injury. It's like having gills to breathe underwater. Some people are clever about not drawing others into their affliction. You could hardly tell by looking at my mother that she was a stranger to providence.