It’s the last day of school for Evelyn. She’s bunking off. She’s not with anybody else. There was no one she’d have even thought to have asked. The last day of school, she thinks. It’s bullshit.
She’s sitting at her mother’s graveside eating her lunch and sipping from a small bottle of vodka discreetly sequestered in her bag. There are a few rabbits running around the willow trees that circle the small courtyard. The trees’ dense overhang is pillowy with light, the sky above rectangular and transparently deep enough to believe that something could be teleported into its surface. Down there in the secretive ground was its entry, she’s sure. She touches her bob of hair, newly bleached blonde this morning, the tingle of peroxide still buzzing around her scalp, and glances around headstones that declared loves lost and life’s short-handed achievement. A cushion of moss laying over every hard truth in the area. Still, it’s not a wholly unpleasant place to be and Evelyn comes here a lot to think about her life and to talk with her mother whose absence seemed at the very least approachable here. Not that she actually talks out loud or anything, it’s more like they’re watching t.v together and she believes her mother can intuit her mood and thoughts via a psychic proximity. It’s dumb, she knows.
Evelyn finishes her ham sandwich and brushes the crumbs from her skirt. She brings the vodka out of the satchel and grabs her lighter. She turns the tape over in her Walkman, rummages through the small satchel again and pulls out a baggy looking joint. She arranges the objects around her skirt and then chooses three. She presses play on her battered looking Walkman with one hand and lights the joint with the other. She loves this Walkman, loves its Star Wars junk aesthetic, loves the pencil shaded tippex coiling around the chunk of its body and spelling her name in a cramped hand. She loves how shit it is. How the shittiness retains the subversive function of its action. The Velvet Underground’s “Sunday Morning” bends the air. She looks at her mother’s grave, runs her hand over its gravel. She uncaps the vodka. The grass leans towards her in time with the vocals. Evelyn can feel her mother’s spirit through the music. Then the music stops and the breeze is just one more ungoverned thing happening to her. Evelyn’s eyes start to feel cold. She wipes them with her sleeve. She’s losing it.
She checks the tape, takes the batteries out, licks their top with her cracked riverbed tongue then recoils— makes a face— takes a large sip of vodka after a quick look around— pulls another, similar face— before placing the batteries back in the Walkman and pressing the play button down hard with both thumbs. There is a brief chewing noise followed by a sagging, vanquished groan.
Evelyn infers out loud that nearly everyone she has ever talked to is a prick. She apologises to her mother, thinks about her father, about her father and, well, what to call her now? Dad’s girlfriend I suppose, shudder. She thinks, mum I miss you.
She sits for another half hour or so on her knees, smoking pot and sipping from the vodka. Evelyn crying in fits and starts, and leaving the moment she becomes too conspicuous to herself.
She starts to walk up the hill towards her home and then stops. It’s the last day of school for fuck’s sake. She stares at the Walkman, assumes an attitude of prayer, makes a wager, presses play. A distended noise winds into the outro of “Teen Age Riot” from Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation.
Evelyn turns around and walks down the hill almost smiling.
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Source : “She’s Losing It”: An Excerpt from ‘The Autodidacts’
