Chapter Two

Unadulterated Yankee Crap

Hilda had two basic organizational choices open to her with respect to chronological events, both real and imagined. She could simply start at the beginning, wherever she decided that was—the Garden of Eden, say—and go through to the end. No one does that anymore. It’s unfashionable.

Or she could take the low road, beginning with Abigail’s “savage act of assertive self-realization” and then segueing back to the Garden, or whatever. I think this is what she should have done, considering the vulgarity of her subject. So we could open with the killing itself. Something like

February 13, 1979. The Eve of Valentine’s Day. Chopmist Hill, Rhode Island, on Route 6, east of the 102 intersection. Moonless night. 11:30 p.m. Conditions: snowing lightly, temperature barely 32º.

No one happening to spot the ancient ’56 Plymouth plowing west at a sedate pace could have guessed that inside a man and woman were playing out a primal struggle for survival which could only end in death for one of them. Emotionally the temperature inside the car was 211 and climbing.

The woman was softly crying, her gentle, defenseless body shaking. Somehow she had enraged him. Somehow she had set him off again. If only she could understand how. Maybe, she thought, if we get home in one piece, he’ll go right to sleep. Dear God, let him sleep. The man’s right hand left the steering wheel and backhanded her savagely, without warning, across the face. “I’m going to kill you, Abigail,” he said, in a terrifying new voice, a low silky purr. “I’m finally going to kill you.”

And so on. Nice and junky. And then, after…again and again, forward, reverse, forward, reverse, and all the time screaming, with every sickening thump, “No more! No more!”…we could cut to the beatific birth, and all the attendant ironic contrast.

Here’s my guess: Hilda’s editors pleaded with her to do it this way, but our Hilda would never pander to the baser instincts. Guy would never forgive her for it. What we get, instead, is careful, plodding evidence for Abigail’s ultimate canonization. Hilda starts, of course, with what she thinks is the beginning: the pedigree.

Chapter 2

Solid Yankee Stock

 

So we learn that Abigail’s first American ancestor was one of the “First Americans”! See, this is the thing about Abigail. She has just as much contempt for Hilda as I do, if not more. My sister is not stupid.

…descended not, as might be supposed, from Cotton Mather, but instead from one J. Herkimer, of Bristol, England, who booked passage on the Mayflower in 1620. Though there is no further record of Herkimer in the colonies, he does not appear on the list of the dead, and apparently, in 1625, he married one Mary Willett…

Mother paid a cut-rate genealogist to come up with a Mayflower ancestor, and he obliged, but all he would tell her was that Herkimer disappeared from view upon his arrival at Plymouth. Mother made up that stuff about Mary Willett, probably to amuse herself and us. Mother was not a snob. She just liked a good story.

We believed in J. Herkimer, First American, for about the same length of time we believed in our different birth dates. As I recall, accidentally discovering the truth about our birth led us, or rather me, to look into the other matter. After a great deal of correspondence, much of it transatlantic, I learned that J. Herkimer, who really was our ancestor, was also the only passenger on the Mayflower to return to Southampton with her crew in the spring of 1621.

If you ask me, here’s what happened. Herkimer, my Herkimer, a threadbare, desperate, misanthropic little loser, uneducated and unfit for any aspect of life, arrived in the New World, took one good look around, announced, to an empty hall (people had stopped listening to him weeks ago), “This place isn’t worth the powder it would take to blow it to hell,” turned on his heel, and stalked off.

Of course, the ship had to wait for winter to pass before leaving for England, so that while he didn’t have the opportunity for just this dramatic crispness, he did have plenty of time in which to harangue the miserable settlers with variations on his prophecy of doom. J. (for Jeremiah) Herkimer had quite a time for himself that winter harassing the frostbitten, alarming the exhausted. For a few months he managed to preserve, just, the fiction of compassionate concern, confronting the beleaguered pilgrims with looks of such elaborate pity that they could not stand to look at his face, and many a good man turned to his goodwife as Jeremiah glided out the door and muttered, “Jesus, I hate that guy.”

Eventually he dropped all pretense, and while Squanto patiently explained to the ragged circle of survivors the principles of corn-planting, Herkimer rolled on his back on the soggy spring ground, hooting and slapping his thighs, and if he hadn’t been about to sail away he would have been beaten to death.

He got off one parting shot—“So long, suckers!”—as the stiff sea breeze mussed his thinning hair, and the creaking tub carried him toward the eastern horizon and the one sure thing which lay beyond.

He died penurious and bitter, or at the very least confused, in 1635, in Cheddar, England (twenty miles west of the original Frome), leaving a wife and ten living children. I have no idea how he had supported himself or them, but I like to imagine him as a speculator, in futures of some kind.

 

Eventually, as they will, Herkimers turned into Mathers, and one of them, Alfred, made it back here, in 1893, to work as a textile machinist. Alf was part of the other wave of English immigrants, which wave has never, to say the least, achieved the cachet of the first. Alf’s people were garden-variety wretched refuse, and for a time, and despite the fact that they didn’t have to learn a new language, they managed to be an embattled ethnic group. The Portuguese, who had been there far longer, looked down their noses at them, and made fun of their awful food and their strange ways. They told English jokes.

Between Alf’s people and the children of the first wave, the Real Yankees, lay an unbridgeable class gulf. And while I’ve always found the distinction hilarious, Alf apparently didn’t. When he was forty-five he married a visiting schoolteacher from Indiana, and, soon after the birth of Jabez in 1923, Alf quit his job and moved his family to Indianapolis, where he could masquerade successfully as a Real Yankee, and school his offspring in their bogus heritage. When Jabez reached his majority, Alf sent him east, to claim his cultural birthright.

So much for Solid Yankee Stock.

This was the third and final blow in the trinity of our disillusionments, and it affected us just as deeply as the news about our ordinary single birthday and J. Herkimer, First Un-American, which is to say, not in the least. My sister was born knowing she was special, and so was I. We both knew she was special, and that this had nothing to do with her being a potential member of the DAR. It made us a bit sad on Father’s account, until we realized that he never knew about the fraud, and died believing in it, taking comfort from a relatively innocuous lie, which makes him lucky, really.

Your True Yankee died out long ago, anyway, in the collective American imagination; which is to say you never come across him in a movie. The Redneck lives and thrives, and the Western Loner, and the Stoic Farmer (Solid Pioneer Stock), and so on. These are archetypes, but they stand for extant individuals, who really are Ethnics, with their Ethnic ways, like fiddle-playing Cajuns; and the people of Minnesota and the Dakotas really do embody something, with their musicality and their plain-spokenness and their Scandinavian lilts. And even though every human being has an inalienable right to be judged by his own actions, it does seem to me that every American but the Yankee comes from some still-living subculture which gives him a starting point to do with as he will.

Of course these groups vary enormously in vitality, and it may be that the Yankee is only the first of many inevitable casualties, as we all homogenize. Whatever the cause, the Yankee has become a pure Idea, an abstraction, and because nobody really knows one, none of us can ever agree on just what the Idea is. We talk about Yankees, but without a great deal of coherence, since we have lost our ostensive definition. They turn out movies about “Yankees,” and they never, never get the accent right (even though we can’t all agree on what the right accent was). All you have to do is show some raw-boned moron sucking on a pipe and muttering “Ayah” and audiences of all regions outside of ours will thrill to the stereotype; but nothing much follows the “Ayah.” Your Hollywood Yankee is either (a) implacable, taciturn, darkly mysterious, fatalistic; or (b) righteous, taciturn, deadpan, gently cynical, mythically decent. In either event, your Real Yankee is the world’s furthest thing from a fool, which may be why we won’t bury him no matter how badly he stinks.

Abigail claims that there are Real Yankees still, up north in Maine and Vermont. But those are a lot of slow-talking, full-of-themselves Yankee impersonators, in my view. Of course, there are plenty of Country People up there, as there are still everywhere, but they’re just Country, and Country is the same all over.

Whatever the truth, it’s a fact that the Yankee in southern New England is a shmoo, a leprechaun. An Idea. Rhode Islanders with English names talk in hushed tones about so and so being a Real Yankee and with the same reverence with which Arizona people talk of ghostly Indian tribes, who are out there somewhere, but whom no one has actually seen. Just watch their faces when they talk about old Mrs. Sprague, down the road and up the hill, watch their delighted smiles when they say “real Yankee.” How badly they need to believe.

The people with English names, that is. The clear majority of Rhode Islanders, who do not have English names, couldn’t care less about Solid Yankee Stock.

 

Our bogus heritage did influence us as children, but not in any way intelligible to Hilda. Our parents left Indianapolis in 1938, deciding to settle here in the Plantations rather than New Bedford. We were born in Providence, in the Lying-In, but to Hoosier parents dedicated, for two different sets of reasons (Father, out of obligation to his father; Mother, for sheer love of romance), to seeing that we were always mindful of our roots. We were raised on tales of the Mayflower voyage and the legendary deprivations of that first winter, but we were also raised by people with flat Indiana accents, which both of us picked up and still retain today. They sent us off to public school with weird speech patterns and imagined, I think, that our blood superiority would be tacitly recognized and acknowledged.

There was nothing tacit about it.

They called me Dork from the first day of first grade. I have been called Dork all my life. I don’t run home crying anymore. I used to beg Mother to change my name, and she would remind me of how special it was, and strong, my Solid Yankee Name.

Abigail, who had a much easier time of it, punched Nick Pappas in the mouth for tormenting me. And then he jumped on her and ground her face into the snow and I had to pull him off. We were seven. I remember it clearly because I was so surprised and impressed by my sister’s championing me, and then confused by how easy it was to pull Nick off her. I had thought her overpowered, in trouble. But she was twice his size and could have thrown him off any time.

That night was the last time I tried to get my name changed. Abigail backed me up. I even had a new name picked out: Stella. Stella, for the prettiest girl in class, a slender child with olive skin and hair the color of milk chocolate. “Stella is a Greek name,” Mother said.

“I want to be Greek,” I said.

Our parents laughed and explained that “we can’t just be everything we want to be.”

Oh, really?

“Besides,” Mother said, “you don’t realize how lucky you are to have a nickname already. Not every child receives one. You didn’t, did you, Jabez? And you both have been given yours already. Abby and Dork.”

Abigail and Father snorted, at the same instant, and their faces turned pink.

“What’s so funny?” Mother asked. “It’s no sillier sounding than Hank, or Jack, or…Gert. I think Dork is a nice—”

Father covered his eyes with his hand, and Abigail pounded the table with the handle of her spoon.

“What is going on?” They shrugged and shoveled food into their mouths and would not look at her or me. Mother was really angry. She took a slow breath and resumed eating in silence, and finally said, “We think you’re both rude. Don’t we, Dork?”

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Later that night Father must have explained things to Mother. Abigail explained them to me. Abigail at seven knew what a dork was, and quite a few of the other names by which it is called, and something of its function. Well, I did too. I could hardly help knowing, since in our inseparable preschool days I had accompanied her on her fact-finding missions. We went with little neighbor boys into garages and basements and behind bushes and under card tables tented with sheets on rainy days. She had an old flashlight Father had given her, and she made the battery last. She always invited the boy to inspect her, and he was always too scared, or too smart. She always invited me to join in, and I was always too scared, or too smart.

My sister’s face at such times became entirely opaque to me. I could never tell if she was in control or not. It seemed that something was in control, of the three of us, especially Abigail. What strikes me about it now is the total absence of nervous giggling. Abigail was never, never embarrassed by sex, and so it was impossible to be embarrassed about it in her presence. Which was, in a way, quite horrible. What do you do if you can’t laugh?

I bowed out of these sessions shortly after, on our sixth birthday, on which I got my little nurse’s uniform and she got her doctor’s kit. (We had not asked for these. How did they know? Why did they help us?) The whole thing became too frightening then, the possibilities too threatening. It was bad enough when she operated on me, or on the boy, or the other girls. (We didn’t use other girls much; they giggled.) There was never enough oxygen in our rainy-day tent, in our dusty attic, in the sunny open air. It was too soon, too soon. And when she lay beneath my hand, with her eyes softly shut, and did not move…We could do anything. Anything. We did nothing. But we could have done anything.

I told her I wasn’t interested anymore, and that it was a stupid thing to do. This was the first time I ever really hurt my sister, and she surprised me with the generosity with which she let me know it, her disinclination to hide her sorrowing face. But she never argued with me about it, or needled me.

When she lay in bed beside me and explained what a dork was, she was being kind.

 

Dirty girls have piggy faces and shifty eyes. Dirty girls always look unwashed, whether they are or not, and only other dirty girls will befriend them. Dirty girls always look cornered, desperate, as indeed they should, with their lives just begun and their backs already to the wall in a dead-end alleyway. My sister never was a dirty girl. She has been known about and talked about all her life, and when she got in trouble no one who knew her was surprised; but no one who knew her was happy about it, either, in the way we are reassured by the self-destruction of dirty girls. She was, from the beginning, just too powerful to be dismissed like that.

Also, as I said, she wasn’t a giggler. She didn’t find dirty words intrinsically funny. She found dirty words intrinsically interesting. When she laughed at the dinner table she was laughing at Mother’s ignorance. She adored Mother—we both did—but she always thought Mother’s innocence funny, whereas it plain worried me.

Mother was always giving us terrible advice. For instance, kids used to ride us about our Indiana accents. “Are you from the South?” they asked.

“We’re real Yankees,” we would say. This confused the issue, considerably.

“Why do you talk like that?”

“Like what?”

“Say summatime.”

“Summertime.”

“Summerrrrrtime.” Laughter. “Say byank.”

“Bank.”

Hilarity. “Say gool.”

“Goal.”

“Steer.”

“Stir.”

“Draw.”

“Drawer.”

“Drawrrrrrrr. What part of the South do you come from?”

“Our parents are from the Midwest.”

“What part of the South is that?”

They weren’t being cruel. Just skeptical. They were trying to figure things out, same as us. And though we were never hated, they always kept us somewhat apart from them. They suspected, I think, that we belonged at arm’s length. They suspected we thought ourselves better than they. This is because Mother was constantly warning us not to.

When we complained about feeling left out because English was spoken in our home, and our grandparents didn’t come over on a boat, and we didn’t have an Old Country, our mother instructed us to the effect that “all Americans are the children of immigrants. Yours just happened to emigrate a very long time ago. The fact that the boat your ancestors came over on was the Mayflower does not make you better than anyone else.”

Naturally we repeated this speech many times, to the children of people who just happened to emigrate twenty years before.

Dorcas: “The name of the boat just happened to be the Mayflower.”

Abigail: “They came over in 1620 instead of 1920. Big deal.”

Dorcas: “We are all the children of immigrants.”

Abigail: “Ours just happened to speak English.”

Dorcas: “We’re no better than anyone else.”

Child of recent immigrants: “No shit.”

 

Mother was always sending us out into the world with instructions on how to win friends, and it didn’t take us long to figure out that she didn’t have a clue. “When the other children call you by…that name,” my mother said to me (after the night Father explained to her about dorks), “you just look right at them and say, ‘Do you know that when you call me…that name…you hurt my feelings very badly?’ Just look right at them and say it straight. You’ll be very surprised at how quickly they change their ways.”

Mike Callahan, my nemesis, couldn’t believe his luck. “Awwwww. I hurt your feelings. You gonna cry? HEY EVERYBODY! THE DORK IS GONNA CRY, BECAUSE HER FEELINGS AREHURT…”

“All right. When they call you…that name…just answer to it, as though it didn’t bother you at all. Don’t give them the satisfaction of reacting to it. You’ll spoil their fun, and in no time they’ll get tired of teasing you and begin calling you by the right name.”

Again I delighted the bullies and their sycophants, who, after two weeks, showed no signs of boredom with their magical ability to make me acknowledge at their every whim that my name was a dirty word. In one way Mother was right: they did tire of using “dork” to get my weird, obliging attention, and soon they began calling me “Ass Hole.”

“When they call you…that word,” advised my dear mother, “you just look right at them and say, in a voice clear as a bell, ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will hurt me not.’”

The next day Mike Callahan called out to me in the playground during recess. “Ass Hole! Yeah, you! Watcha doin’, Ass Hole?”

I walked over and stood in front of him and his semicircle of snorting admirers, and I said to him in a voice clear as a bell, looking right at him, “You are a stupid, ugly little boy, and an Irish Catholic, and when you grow up you’ll belong to a labor union and live in a tenement and have ten kids and turn into a big stupid drunk.”

Mike Callahan looked as if he had been axed in the center of his forehead. His face turned red and his eyes filled and he was apparently struck dumb. This was one of the happiest moments of my life.

My mother hung up the phone. “Did you call Mike Callahan an Irish Catholic?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why?”

“I wanted to hurt him,” I said.

When Abigail came up to bed that night she brought me some supper. “Mom’s still mad,” she told me. “She keeps saying to Dad that she can’t understand deliberate cruelty in a child of hers. Dad just laughs.” Abigail watched while I munched cold chicken and carefully wiped my greasy fingers on the napkin she had brought. “Why did you do it?” she asked.

“I already said. To hurt him. He’s been hurting me forever.”

“I know that. I mean, why did you admit it?”

It was my turn to stare at Abigail. It was the first time we ever regarded each other across the Ethical Divide.

“Okay. Pretend you’re Mom. Say, ‘Why did you call Mike Callahan an Irish Catholic?’”

“Why did you call Mike Callahan an Irish Catholic?”

Abigail wiped the conspiratorial expression off her face and assumed the piercing innocence of a child martyr. “Did I do something wrong, Mother? Is it bad to say that someone is an Irish Catholic? Isn’t that what he is? I was just saying what you and Father say all the time.” A plump tear appeared in the inside corner of each eye. “I’m sorry, Mother,” she said, “and I’ll never, ever do it again.”

What strikes me about it still is not how good she was at it, moving me almost to tears of pity in spite of everything, but how strange she was to me at that moment, and from then on, really. I know Abigail better than anyone else in the world, and if I were asked to explain this or that particular thing, I could probably give a fairly accurate account of her motivations. I can report that duty has never played an even minor part in her decisions; that she is moved solely by the desire for pleasure and the avoidance of pain; that she derives pleasure from an astonishing variety of sources, and pain from astonishingly few; and so on. I can even predict her behavior, with a respectable success rate.

But I don’t understand her at all. To understand you have to do more than predict and explain. You must feel some degree of empathy. I have a greater understanding of cats and internal combustion engines and Iranians than I do of my twin sister, Abigail.