Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  The barn had become dark. Though I could see very little, I could hear many things: the echo of my footsteps in the room I occupied, the sound of night beyond those walls, my mother’s laughter, ascending the hill from the house, traveling on the platform of a breeze. I could almost smell the Chablis on her breath and the mint from the package of gum in her coat pocket—the smells were like fairies escaping. I could almost see her reenact the drama of her day for her friends—bodies wedged into couches and chairs, denim legs jutting across tabletops, drowsy hands passing a joint, passing a bottle, wrists exposed, voices going, “So what happened next, Rene?” Reen, short for Irene.

  Her friends were always there. If ever it looked like they might leave, they wouldn’t. Someone might stand and stretch but then just use the toilet, or tuck in a loose shirt and ask if anyone felt like making a run for more beer. If I ever passed through, they would confer with me congenially, dipping close to my eyes with cigarettes, natted hair, and home-sewn clothes stinking of patchouli and musk.

  If my upbringing made me sensitive to affectations of tolerance and to the irony of that particular hypocrisy, I could hardly be blamed. All I ever heard as a child was how everything is cool and everyone should be cool, and yet they were so very quick to judge new shoes or a clean car or to cogitate over the dementia behind matching furniture or monogrammed stationery. I couldn’t help but have developed an aversion to the epoxied stench of incense and the smut of overfilled ashtrays and the sticky liquor rings on tables that had to be cleaned on Sunday mornings. Hiding in my room at bedtime as a little girl, I would drink my dinner of chocolate milk and bury myself beneath hundreds of stuffed animals tied together in twos with rescued ribbon and bits of yarn, one neck fastened to another or belly to belly, buddied up in case of fire, in case they would have to be tossed from the window. I would rub my feet together to distract myself from the noise of the party, the singing, the laughter, the music—Joplin, Dylan, Hendrix.

  “I love you,” she would say. My mother, popping her head in.

  I was sitting on the barn floor, drawing rooftops. There were all these great rooftops by my dad’s place in Little Italy. My father was good about taking me up to the roof of his building whenever I wanted. He always waited while I drew, either reading or just looking around. It wasn’t necessary for him to wait, but between him and his business partner, Tony Abbruscato, they had about a thousand rooftop horror stories.

  Kneeling before my paper, I looked deep into the space Jack might have occupied, and imagining him, I smiled. I thought of him smiling also, a fair angel’s smile, his features transmitting a regard so strong as to defy the inconvenience of his factual absence. Had he been there actually, he would have persuaded me to join the party in the house. Jack hated to miss a party. Though I missed him, I was thankful to be beyond the influence of his flesh, the lips that could nudge me with an inflexible kiss through the door of my own home.

  “Mom’s back, you know.” Not Jack, but Kate. She was leaning in the doorway, her head poking through. “Feel like coming up front?”

  Yes, my mother, I knew. The laughter and the mint. The sweet wine and music. I wasn’t sure what I felt like, being alone or being with people. Neither seemed good. I wondered what was expected of me; if I had known what was expected, I might have done it. I tried to think, but at the same time there was something I needed to forget, something of which an answer to her question might have reminded me.

  Kate waited for an answer, and when none came, she left. Her feet clocked down the wood steps outside. In a few seconds the screen door in the back of the house squeaked open and slapped shut. Then nothing. Not silence so much as the absence of sounds affiliated with me. There was the loose, careless clank of silverware, and cabinet doors smacking, and the thud of the plumbing every time the kitchen faucet was shut off. There was the distant muffle of voices—Kate rejoining the party, Mom asking if I was coming. Maybe not. Maybe she did not ask about me at all.

  5

  When I came home from shopping at the A&P on Saturday, he was there, at my mother’s desk, swiveling in her chair, slumped and belligerent, the way you sit at ice cream counters, like at the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton. It was as if he’d always been there, all summer long, occupying that very chair.

  A scratchy copper beard dusted his chin, making a wafery layer like penny-colored frost on a windowpane. His hair touched the base of his neck. It was the color of gleaming wheat. Jack might have looked healthy, except that beneath his crystalline blue eyes were velvety pouches, and his cheeks were raw and drawn very far in, like a pair of inside-out parentheses. It was possible he had not eaten or slept in days. It’s strange to realize you have sustained yourself on a memory of a person that has become untrue. The phantom face of my summer was not the face before me. And, yet, it was Jack.

  “Your hair grew,” he said. His voice was the same, still so beautiful.

  I stopped at the base of the stairs and lowered the groceries to the floor. “I hate it.”

  “So cut it,” he said, moving toward me, lifting me, and we spun.

  I tested his existence; my hands felt for the body beneath the shell of his clothes. I confirmed the feathery pressure of his hair on my cheeks. The solid wall of his slender chest, the subtle protrusion of his right shoulder blade. He was real, with a smell that was real and a slightly sticky gleam to his skin. I rested my head in the bony basin between his ear and his shoulder.

  “Are you crying?” he asked. He tightened his grip. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s just, you kept coming, like a ghost, like, floating.” For a long while I couldn’t speak. “Sometimes I would feel that you were with me, and you seemed so real. Now you’re here, but I’m not sure. You seem less real than before.”

  His eyes studied mine, scanning cautiously. He breathed deeply, heavily, as if taking some of me down with the air.

  “Have I changed too?” I asked.

  “You have.” He drew back my hair one side at a time, trailing with his gaze the path of his fingers. Adding gravely, “But it’s okay.”

  Jack kissed me and his lips on mine were dry. He tasted like black licorice, like anise.

  “My mother told me everything,” he said, “about Kate’s mom.” He touched my cheek over and over with a chapped finger. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”

  My eyes opened wide, admitting light from my mother’s desk lamp. If you don’t want to cry, you can stop yourself by looking into light. 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.

  Later we were sitting on opposite ends of the couch, drinking black coffee. Our legs were interlocking and I was rubbing my feet together beneath Jack’s tailbone. I used to rub my feet behind my dad’s back when he was reading or when he and Marilyn were watching that old detective show, Mannix, or the crazy Dean Martin program, the one with the spiral staircase. My father’s apartment was always freezing.

  “They’re whirring like a little machine!” Jack said of my feet, and right then WPLR played “Maybe I’m Amazed.” The song had played the first time we met, and by coincidence we often heard it play, which sort of made it our song, even though everyone said it was queer to like Wings. Jack left my feet exposed when he stood to raise the volume.

  “I want to cover this song with the band,” he said, plopping back down. He and Dan Lewis and Dan’s cousin Marvin, also known as Smokey Cologne, had a band—Atomic Tangerine. In a moderate shriek, Jack sang along with the radio. “Der ner ne ner ner ner ne ne.”

  When the song was over, we heard a sound behind us. We tilted our heads back over the couch arms. Kate was standing in the entry near the front door.

  “Katie!” Jack called. He stood and started to step around the couch, probably to give her a hug or say sorry about her mother dying.

  “Hey, Jack,” Kate said dismissivel
y, avoiding eye contact.

  There was a pause, which made it hard for him to know what to do. He darkened and returned to me. For a while we just sat. Kate craned her neck to regard herself in the mirror over the fireplace, then she removed her sweater and dropped it playfully on top of me.

  “How did Drama Club go?” I asked.

  “Fine,” she said, shaking her hair loose. “We did improvisations.”

  “A school club on a Saturday?” Jack asked with derision. “Is it a Communist club?”

  Kate approached the mantel and stepped on the hearth to regard herself more closely. “It’s theater, Jack,” she said. “You have to be committed.” She turned and smiled falsely. “Oh, well. I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone.” She stomped up the stairs, the door slammed, and her stereo switched on. Her stereo, not the house stereo. All of a sudden there were two. We soon heard the sounds of Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning” blasting through the ceiling.

  “Did she flip her lid when her mother died, or what?” Jack looked to the stairs. “Lovebirds? Theater? She’s turning into fucking Blanche DuBois.” He plucked her sweater from my chest, pinching it and draping it across the coffee table. “How long has this been going on?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t remember the time before, or the way it used to be. There were the 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.

  Jack pulled me close, kissing my head. “I never thought I’d say this, but let’s get the fuck out of here and go to my house.”

  It was almost seven. We had only a half hour to be alone at Jack’s house. His parents were finishing dinner at Gordon’s in Amagansett, where they’d had a six o’clock reservation. At seven-fifteen his mother would deliver his father to the Jitney, and by seven-thirty, she would be home. Mr. Fleming would be back in Manhattan two and a half hours after that. They had an apartment on Madison Avenue and Eighty-seventh Street. He worked at Ogilvy & Mather, the advertising agency.

  “Nothing creative,” Jack would say; he was always quick to set people straight before they tried to connect Jack to his dad. “He’s senior account manager for Schweppes. You know, the carbonated sodas. Schweppervescence.”

  “How come your father’s going back on a Saturday?” I asked.

  “Because I came home today,” Jack said. “He can’t get away fast enough.”

  At the Fleming house, Jack’s sister’s dog Mariah barked, so he gave it a kick. Not really a kick, just a kind of dragging push to one side with the top of his foot. Inside, the air was heavy with the scent of cologne. It spooked me to think of Mr. Fleming’s barrel-chested shadow appearing suddenly to block a doorway.

  “What perfume does he wear?” I wrinkled my nose. “Lagerfeld?”

  “Cat Piss,” Jack said. He yanked open the refrigerator door. It smacked the counter and glass bottles clanked. “He must think he’s gonna get laid on the bus.” Jack grabbed a yogurt, tore off the lid, and flung it into the sink like a Frisbee. He tilted his head back and drank from the cup. Halfway through he paused. “Want some?”

  “What flavor is it?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t hit fruit yet.” He swallowed a little more. “Not the kind you like. It tastes purple.”

  “Blueberry,” I said. “Forget it.”

  Mariah skulked past our ankles as we moved to the hallway. “Keep away from that beast,” Jack warned. “It’s an operative.”

  I asked what an operative was. He said like a spy.

  He started up the stairs, his filthy sneakers knocking into the shallow depths. There was something wretched about the sight. “I’ll wait here,” I said. Mr. and Mrs. Fleming didn’t like us to go upstairs when they were out.

  Jack reached for my hand. “C’mon, Evie. I swear, we’ll just be a minute.”

  On the southwest side of the attic, Jack had constructed a retreat for himself. He liked to say it was the only room in the house uncontaminated by damask and deodorizer. The windows were shuttered, the paint on the walls was charcoal gray, and the floors were bare wood because three months after we’d met, Jack had torn out the rug. It was the day before he was supposed to leave for boarding school—Labor Day Sunday, 1978. He’d intended to destroy the whole room and after that, the whole house, including the carport.

  “Especially the carport,” he’d declared. I had no doubt that he meant it. Unlike most people who say they hate their parents, Jack really did.

  He’d tried in all sincerity to talk to them, to apologize for certain things, to reason with them about his feelings, to ask them to please let him spend his junior and senior years in East Hampton, to not send him away. I’d gone with him for moral support—only not all the way. I waited at the end of the street, on the porch of the Presbyterian Church. I brought a book, figuring it might take a while. But Jack reappeared in ten minutes.

  “That was fast,” I said. “What happened?”

  “What happened,” Jack repeated. “Hmmm, let’s see.” He took my book from me and began to slap it against his thigh. “I try to reconcile. I swear to conform. I sit there, totally fucking humiliating myself. I tell them that I don’t want to lose you.”

  “And,” I prodded softly.

  “My mother’s sure we’ll stay friends. She says, ‘You can write.’”

  I hated to hear his voice sound desperate and alone when it did not have to be, not when I was right there.

  “Then,” Jack said, “the fat bastard goes to the barbecue grill, totally ignoring me, and says, ‘C’mon, Susan. I don’t want those ribs to char.’”

  “Char,” I said, “Wow. Who uses a word like char?”

  “Fat bastards,” Jack stated. “Ad agency homos. Neocons. That’s who.”

  At dawn the following morning, he took a knife to his room. After cutting the curtains and shredding the carpet, he’d intended to start on the walls, but beneath the rug in the center of the room, he’d discovered a very old Christmas card with stained edges that looked like it could have been from around the early 1900s. Inside, in childish handwriting, it said, Eveline.

  He jammed the open card into my hands. I was in my underwear and a T-shirt, and we were standing in the driveway by the garage because it was early and that was the back way to my bedroom if you didn’t want to wake up other people. He was winded from running and covered in the fine white matter of demolition. He yanked me into the sunlight, handed over the card, set his hands on his thighs, and bent to catch his breath.

  I looked from the card to his face. “I don’t understand.”

  “I found it! In my room. I was pulling out the carpet.”

  I asked was he sure.

  “Of course I’m sure!”

  “Maybe someone put it there,” I said. “Like, planted it.”

  “That rug’s been there for years,” he said. “Besides, no one we know is that interesting. What would be the point?”

  He dropped to the dew-soaked grass. I dropped too.

  “Listen,” he instructed. “I’m cutting and tearing out the rug, I’m throwing the pieces down the stairs, and I’m raising all kinds of dust and shit to really piss them off, and just when I’m about to bust the windows or pry off the molding, I see this paper on the floor.” Jack gestured with his hands as he spoke, which he almost never did. “I go to the paper, I lift it. It’s a Christmas card. There are angels on front. Did you see the angels?” he asked.

  “I saw them,” I said.

  “Look at the fucking angels,” he insisted, pushing the card back at me.

  “Yes,” I swore. “I see.”

  “And this, did you see this?” Jack opened it again and tapped at my name. It was scrawled in loopy script that dipped to the right, in old-fashioned penmanship—Eveline. “I might have killed him,” he said. “I might have done it this time, if h
e came up those stairs.” He looked at the ground, numb. “You had to see me. I had a knife in one hand, and in the other hand I had the card.”

  He left for boarding school in Kent, Connecticut, later that day without a fight. He took the card with him, and in the Flemings’ driveway, where we said goodbye, he vowed to me privately, but before God and whomever the fuck else, to take it with him everywhere he went for the rest of his sorry fucking life, as a mystic but tangible reminder that no matter how far apart he and I might grow, at the core we were one, that we were meant to be one, that things would work out as nature intended, and that no one could prevent destiny’s unfolding, not even us, because we were connected—spiritually. “Understand?” he said, as his sister, Elizabeth, leaned on the horn of the family’s New Yorker.

  “I understand,” I said, because truly I did, and to seal the vow we kissed. He popped the passenger door. Before getting in, he gave a final wave of the middle finger to his parents, who were largely concealed behind the living room drapes. Then he left, and he stayed away at Kent until he dropped out at Thanksgiving. He was gone just three months, though it had felt more like a thousand years.

  Jack was emptying his knapsack from summer. It smelled like heath and wax and mold, and it was covered in President Carter campaign buttons from 1976: JERSEY LOVES CARTER-MONDALE, UAW FOR CARTER-MONDALE, END THE NIXON LEGACY—VOTE JIMMY CARTER, and Jack’s particular favorite, CARTER É BRAVISSIMO. The smell was probably from camping in the mountains, but with Jack you never knew. He pulled the card from deep inside his bag and laid it on the desktop. I touched it, the inside part with my name, for luck, then I sat on the bed. Jack’s bed was built into the room, wedged square and high into the corner. When you sat, your feet did not touch ground. Attached to the long wall above it was a shelf for shells, fossils, field guides, and bottled things such as butterflies, and also bones and books. A World of Fungi, The Stranger, Demian. In Demian, Jack had found Abraxas.