ANTHROPOLOGICAL
OBSERVATION #14:
Unlike her predecessors, the twenty-first-century adolescent is less consistently adept at traditional performance work, such as dancing or singing.
Six days postparty, and I still had not talked to Margo. We were practicing the rigorous art of at-school avoidance. Aside from one tense run-in in the upstairs bathroom — Margo had refilled her bag so hastily to avoid me that she’d dropped her lip gloss onto the floor and left it — we hadn’t seen each other. Walking the halls alone now, I felt like a woman in a space suit, invisible, apart, breathing a different atmosphere from everyone else. I missed talking to someone at my side. I missed having a best friend. I hadn’t seen Jimmy once since the party. And I’d taken to eating lunch on the empty stadium bleachers, where neither Paul nor Margo would have thought to find me.
After finishing my Miss Livermush essay, I had composed a letter. It went like this:
I decided I’d give myself another week before I sent it. But in the meanwhile, I had to continue going to high school.
What I Did This Week
(Instead of Talking to Margo)
French was one of my favorite classes, mainly because it was small and Ms. Gerard was fun. We made French food and learned French cuss words. (Tanesha and I had gotten the idea to write one-act plays in French to practice our dialogue, and we’d argued that cuss words would authenticate our conversations.) Ms. Gerard had even done a whole lesson on French vocabulary words for cosmetics, since cosmetics are so emblematically French.
Tanesha and I were meilleures amies, at least for one full class period a day. I’d wondered if Tanesha might count as an actual meilleure amie — especially now that I’d ruined things with Margo. We talked a lot to each other, and I loved hanging out with her, but, still, she remained an At School Friend. She was a Cool Black Girl, and Margo and I were merely Socially Unremarkable White Girls, a subcaste of the Smart Pretties. The Cool Black Girls sat at a different lunch table, and they danced really cool-ly at school dances or on the sidelines of football games. In PE one time, Tanesha and her friends had tried to teach me to pop, lock, and drop it, but as I shook my scrawny butt to the ground, I worried that I looked ridiculous and pathetic rather than fun and willing to try new things.
ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
The racial breakdown at Melva High was essentially half white and half black, with a tiny dash of “Other.” People got along for the most part, but mostly in accordance with the At School Friends system. At least we all went to the same prom, unlike some high schools I’ve heard about.
When Ms. Gerard turned to the board, I whispered to Tanesha, “Hey, Tanesha. Can you help me learn how to dance? In time for the Miss Livermush Pageant?”
She looked askance at me. “I thought you hated dancing.”
“Well, it’s Miss Livermush … and it’s not like I’m going to get any points from the talent portion of the competition anyway, but I need to do something, and I thought maybe dancing wouldn’t be too hard … if you could help me.”
“You think I can dance because I’m a black girl?” she asked.
“Ummm. I think you can dance because I’ve seen you dance, and you can dance. But I’ll be honest and say dancing was definitely not among the gifts handed down to me by my pasty Scotch-Irish forebears….”
Tanesha winked at me. “Just leave it to me,” she said. “After school today. Meet in the auxiliary room in the gym.”
After school, I stepped into the auxiliary room and saw Tanesha and another girl. Their backs were turned to me as they both bent over a CD player in the corner. Tanesha looked up.
“Oh, hey!” she said. “There you are! We were just figuring out a song. I’m guessing you want to avoid anything too hip-hop, but I was thinking maybe Beyoncé? Everyone likes Beyoncé, especially moms. All moms secretly love Beyoncé.”
I stupidly had not considered what I would dance to. Beyoncé? Maybe this made sense. Something poppy, something crowd-pleasing, something in between Shania Twain and Shostakovich.
“Or what about Bob Dylan?” I asked.
“No. I hope you’re kidding. Definitely not,” Tanesha said.
“Okay. Beyoncé, then.”
“You’ve got it,” she said, “and hey, I haven’t introduced you. Do you know Susannah? She goes to school in the county, but we dance at the same studio. I thought she might help. Susannah, Janice. Janice, Susannah.”
The girl next to Tanesha stopped fiddling with the CD player and turned toward me. She smiled a friendly, radiant, beautiful Victorian girl smile. Her teeth were like a string of nice pearls. Her lips had a little cupid pout. She wore a tweed skirt and a ruffled shirt that would have looked dowdy on anyone else in the world, but only made her look interesting.
“Hi,” I said, my stomach sinking down to my feet. “We do know each other. We’ve met. Through Paul.”
Susannah, still beaming, walked over to me. As I was reaching out to shake her hand, she rushed forward to embrace me in a full hug.
“Of course,” she said into my back, not releasing her embrace. “Of course! So good to see you.”
“Good to see you too,” I said into a mouthful of her hair. “Thank you for helping me.”
ANTHROPOLOGIST’S NOTE:
People who have mastered the art of warm friendliness are far more annoying to hate because they reinforce the notion of your own hateful, bad person-hood. All the while you are busy hating them, you are made sick with the knowledge that they probably do not possess a hateful bone in their body. Nor are you even worthy of their jealousy. It wouldn’t occur to them.
Susannah gracefully pulled off her skirt and shirt, revealing leggings and a tank top underneath. She began stretching, pressing her hands all the way against the ground. Her body was like a piece of licorice. I was out of my depth.
Tanesha turned on the music.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s get down to business.”
For those who have not had the experience of learning a choreographed dance: It is terrible. First, I watched Tanesha and The Friendly Victorian Beauty perform.
“It’s easy!” Tanesha shouted. “We kept the routine pretty basic and short!”
They moved completely in rhythm with the song and each other. They shimmied their hips and did a little dip. There were a lot of sidesteps. I can do sidesteps, I thought. It’s just like walking, only sideways, rhythmically … and I can walk.
Then I stood up and tried to follow along. I just let loose — gangled my gangles, lankied my lankies, shimmied my bony knees to the ground. It was not like Beyoncé's dance moves, but it was certainly as close to Beyoncé as I’d ever gotten.
But an hour later, I only had the first five sidesteps down pat. Beyond that, I got lost. I didn’t fall on my face. I didn’t trip. I just couldn’t keep up. Everything was too fast, and my muscle memory was too slow, too feeble. My muscle memory was geriatric.
“You’re doing great!” The Beautiful Excellent Victorian Dancer shouted. “You’re doing awesome!”
It occurred to me how much more humiliated I would be doing this if she, Susannah, were also going to be dancing in the pageant. With Paul as her escort too. I swallowed, blinking back tears.
“Let’s keep at it,” I said. I was trying.
An hour later, we sat down and drank bottles of water. I still had not really mastered the routine.
“How am I looking?” I asked, a little short of breath. “Much better!” The Victorian said with her sweet cupid lips. I looked at her and wanted to cry.
“Ummm. Is there anything else you were thinking about doing for your talent?” Tanesha asked, grimacing a little as she said it. “Not that you’re doing a bad job. Not at all. But it’s new for you, that’s all.”
“No, no,” I said. “I understand. Forget it. Hey, I made an effort, but I don’t think dancing’s my thing.” I thought of the paper I’d written back in the fall, my genius paper “Margaret Mead, Melva, and Me: An Anthropologist Comes of Age in the Land of Livermush.” That might work. “I’m an anthropologist. I should represent that to the judges. I could read this paper I wrote a little while back.”
“Does that count as a talent?” Susannah the Lovely asked, blinking her sweet doe eyes.
“Well, I consider it a talent,” I said. My voice sounded colder than I’d intended. “So it’ll have to count.”
“Are you entering the pageant, Tanesha?” The Victorian asked.
“No,” Tanesha said. “I mean, I guess I could if I wanted to, but … I dunno. I’ll be at the dance afterward, though. Everyone’s going to the dance.”
“Is it weird that way?” I asked. “This weird social divide? It makes me squeamish.”
Tanesha threw up her hands. “Yeah, but I guess you could say I have other priorities,” she said. “Livermush Princess is not high on my list.”
I turned to Susannah. “What about you? Are you dancing as your talent?” I asked her.
Susannah wound a strand of hair around her finger and did not reply. Then she looked up at me. “I didn’t have the GPA,” she said. “I didn’t qualify.”
I stared at her. The GPA wasn’t that hard to get, was it? It hadn’t occurred to me —
“Hey, it’s no big deal,” Tanesha said, reaching over for Susannah’s shoulder. “Who cares?!”
Susannah was crying! Just a little bit. She looked away and wiped her eyes quickly.
“I’m such a baby,” she said. “No, it’s not a big deal. I was just a little disappointed, that’s all. School’s not my thing.” She looked at me. “You’re really lucky, Janice,” she said. “I mean, I’m a tiny bit jealous. Paul was always telling me how interesting you are, and you’re smart, and …”
FACT:
My mind had officially been blown. Susannah, The Beautiful Victorian, with her retro aesthetic and her dancing ability and her status as The Official Girlfriend, was jealous of me?!
“Susannah, what are you talking about?” I said. “You’re so beautiful and cool and talented! And being smart is totally different from being good in school. Look at Einstein! Seriously. I’ve been intimidated by how cool you are this whole time!”
She looked at me and burst out laughing. “Paul was right about you,” Susannah said, smiling. “You are great.”
“Thanks,” I said, feeling generosity flood through me like June sunlight. I’d managed to help Susannah feel better, and for some reason I suddenly felt at least 24.3 percent cooler myself. She wasn’t so bad, The Perfect Victorian. “We should hang out sometime — all of us, Paul, some others. Get a group together.”
“Oh,” Susannah said, blushing a little. “Well, sure. We’re still friends, me and Paul. But you did know that we broke up, didn’t you? A while ago.”
I was so surprised I couldn’t even say anything.
“Come on, y’all. I’ve gotta get out of here in a little bit,” Tanesha interjected. “An anthropology essay sounds like the right thing for the Janice Wills I know, but let’s practice this dance one more time just in case. You never know when you might need to impress somebody on the dance floor.”
And we got up and did it. Or they did it, and I did most of it — and that was okay.