Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  “That death marker thing is cool,” I whispered to cheer him. Jack could be quick to turn, and suddenly he seemed down. “Instead of cemeteries.”

  “Ah, forget it. It’s a bogus idea. There’d be bodies everywhere.”

  “Not bodies. Markers. Bodies get cremated.”

  “True,” he said with new interest. “Highways would be littered.” We hated highways.

  “I want my marker to be suspended in midair, only not hitting the mountainside, just like if I died of shock during a fall from a peak. Or maybe projected upward like the Batman logo, if that’s even possible.”

  “Sure it is,” Jack speculated, “if you got shot out of a cannon.”

  “But you’d have to be a clown to die like that.”

  “That would blow,” Jack said. “Dying as a clown.”

  I asked him where he would like his marker to be.

  Jack said, “Right here.” He touched the inside of my elbow.

  One time after Jack and I met, I mentioned him to my friend Denny. Denny and I were lying on the steps outside the barn. The door behind us was open, and light from inside seeped out to form a pale pond around our reclining bodies. We were like seals on an iceberg.

  “Seals are fat,” Denny said. “Besides, it’s July.” He was breaking pieces off of sticks and throwing them at fireflies. “Let’s be shipwrecked. On an atoll.”

  When I had to pee, I went behind the barn. It would have taken too long to go to the front house, and I never knew when Denny might just take off. He was private with his personal life, and he often made plans he did not share.

  “Hey, Den,” I called, “what do you think of Jack Fleming?”

  “Jack Fleming?” Denny called back. “He’s cute, if you like the grungy look. Why?”

  “I saw him at the restaurant.”

  “Not working, I hope,” Denny said. “He’s a little hostile for the service industry.”

  “He came in with his mom and dad,” I said when I came back. I lay against Denny’s belly, and he began to play with my hair.

  “It’s so fine,” he said of my hair. “Like the white stuff in corn. Those limp fibers inside.”

  “He gives me a funny feeling,” I said, meaning Jack, “like I’m supposed to do something.”

  “Have you ever heard him sing?” Denny asked. “I was at a party at Dan Lewis’s house and their band was playing. The band sucked, but when Jack sang alone, it was pretty incredible.”

  “What did he play?”

  “Normal stuff—covers of other people’s songs, I guess.”

  “I mean, what instrument.”

  Denny said, “Oh, he played the guitar.”

  A few weeks later, Jack and I had sex. We were sixteen and we drank rum. It started out when Jack came to find me in the barn. Instead of talking, he leaned against the wall and watched me draw. He had just gotten the cast removed from his leg, and it was the first time I’d seen him without crutches. An orange glow warmed his face; it was from an outdoor light coming through the glass. I wiped my hands on my legs and pushed the loose hair from my eyes with the back of my wrist. When I stood, Jack pulled my face to his, giving me a kiss.

  The Fourth of July fireworks erupted over Main Beach as we made our way from my house to his. When you walk at night in East Hampton, the sidewalk goes black before you, and the world pitches left. It’s the massive roots of the trees that split the concrete walkways.

  “You okay?” he kept asking, and I kept saying, “Yes.”

  David’s Lane is stately and broad. I’d passed Jack’s house on my bicycle about a thousand times, but it looked brand-new now that I knew that Jack lived there. An open plaza of grass led to a beige colonial façade. Inside was beige as well, parchment-colored and bland, with furnishings that were measured and moderate.

  Things were the opposite at my house. My mother was constantly picking up some moldering armoire or fusty wall-mount ironing board at the dump and hauling it home. I would find her waiting for me on the front lawn, bewitched by some relic. “I practically had to wrestle Dump Keith out of his wheelchair for this one,” she’d say.

  Somehow we were always alone on those nights; it was possible that she didn’t want distraction or interference. “You and I can move furniture better than any two men,” Mom would call out proudly as we maneuvered hulking items through doors and up staircases. Every corner of the house became eligible for overhaul. Phones would be moved, drawer contents rotated, bedrooms swapped, bulb wattages finessed, chairs recovered. Surrounded by staple guns and fabric remnants and tools given to her by my father, we would pick at TV dinners of meat loaf and apple cobbler as we rewired old lamps, antiqued the woodwork, anchored mirrors into brick, and outfitted tables with perfectly pleated fabric skirts.

  To make space for a new piece, she would give others away. Nargis Lata, her professor friend from the college, took the “electric couch,” a bizarre wooden chaise with embedded metal plates for heating the extremities. Big John got the hassock embroidered with black leprechauns, Dad and Marilyn got the Balinese crèche, and for Christmas one year, Walter the mailman got the knee-high copper cannon. He came to collect it on a Sunday in his sagging blue station wagon. My mother said that out of his postal uniform, Walter looked “laid bare and brought to the light of day.” His Rottweiler wouldn’t let us near his car.

  “There’s a fine bit of irony, Walter,” Powell said. “Usually dogs prevent your approach.”

  I navigated the Fleming house, listening to the pressurized pops of fireworks exploding, counting booms—sixteen, seventeen, twenty. On the kitchen counter, beneath a fawn Princess wall phone was a prescription bottle with his mother’s name on it: Susan Fleming, 500 mg, BID. Refill 3. Three refills seemed like a lot. Three seemed like a condition. Next to a list for Rita the maid was a neat stack of stamped envelopes—paid bills to mail. A pair of men’s leather strap sandals were near the back door on a new straw mat, and hanging from a hook on the white wainscoted laundry room wall was a key chain with a shiny BMW tag. The dryer bounced confidently. I was pretty sure that the Flemings never had checks returned or put locks on the telephone dial to keep people from using it or walked around collecting all the lightbulbs in a straw basket and putting them in the car trunk whenever the Lilco bill got too high. The last time Mom did that, someone rear-ended the Scamp and all the bulbs broke.

  I wondered how it felt to be rich, or to have money, or at least to have some sense of sufficiency. At my house we lived in chronic fear of what the next day would bring. The only time that terror got suspended was on a birthday. That’s probably the point of birthdays, to give people a break from black unknowns, to indulge the person for a day. You hear it all the time—For Christ’s sake, it’s my birthday.

  And yet, despite his family’s means, it did not seem wrong to say that Jack’s had been a life of deprivation. Except for his record collection and his guitars, all the items in that house belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Fleming exclusively. When we were at my house or in town, it was easy to forget about his relations—he was just Jack. But the more familiar I became with his home, the more inextricably bound to those people I found him to be. His parents maintained control largely through tactics of guilt and fear, through threats of withholding, by calling what they’d accumulated “their own,” as though whatever had been earned hadn’t been drawn from the bank of family time, against family interest.

  Jack patted the kitchen counter, gesturing for me to sit. He reached into a cabinet above the wall oven and got the rum. “One hundred eighty-one proof,” he informed me. “My old man picked it up in Jamaica. On a golf trip. With his lady friend.”

  “He has a girlfriend?” It seemed hard to believe. It would have made more sense for Jack’s mom to have someone else. She was actually attractive.

  “A lady friend,” Jack corrected. He hopped up next to me, breathing in through clenched teeth because his leg was still sore. “He’s had several that I know of. He loads them up on gimlets and recou
nts his sob story of white male supremacy—prep school, Ivy League, two cars, Madison Avenue apartment, house in the Hamptons, condo in Bermuda, spoiled kids, spendthrift wife. Women feel sympathetic, thinking he’s devoted but misunderstood. Then he drags them back to his lair—our place in New York—and he pops them. The family is his script. He gets his money’s worth for supporting us.”

  Jack took a few belts from the bottle, drinking expertly, but when it was my turn to take a mouthful, I held my breath, knocking the liquid down like screwing a cap on a jar with the heel of my hand.

  I said, “That’s really gross.”

  “The rum?”

  “Your dad.” Though the rum was gross too. “Does your mother know?” I didn’t like to know something about her life that she didn’t know. If there was a code, that would surely be breaking it. Sometimes life is irreverent, and you accidentally discover you are a party to irreverence, and it’s hard to know what to do.

  Jack shrugged. “His most recent conquest is the receptionist from Ogilvy. She’s not the sexy type of receptionist assholes snag in movies,” he related in his darkest drawl, “but the terrifying type they end up with in real life.”

  “You saw her?”

  “I walked in on them screwing in the maid’s room. I came into the city on a Tuesday to go to the frigging orthodontist. He must not have gotten the message, but what else is new? Elizabeth was in a coma once for two days after a bike accident before we found him—he’d called in sick to work, then took off for a ‘midweek getaway,’ neglecting to mention it to my mother. Anyway, I got to the apartment and heard gagging from near the kitchen. I thought someone was choking. I figured the super had come up to fix a leak, maybe, then swallowed a chicken bone during his lunch break. Unfortunately, no one was dying.”

  I took the bottle from his hand and placed it behind me, out of reach. His hands came together in his lap. I hadn’t yet heard him talk that much. His delivery was controlled, his voice made richer by the lack of inflection.

  “Couple years ago, I found a stash of creepy love letters in the basement ceiling rafters. I run to my mother, thinking, She’s free. But she refused to read them, saying that I was mistaken, that I was out to demean my father, that I needed more therapy. Even if I could have gotten her to admit the affairs were true, she probably would have taken the blame for the failed relationship, for her frigidity—that’s his descriptor of choice. Frigidity? More like common sense. Who knows who he’s been with?

  “I admire his originality,” Jack said sarcastically. “Instead of being grateful that my mother and sister give him the fucking time of day, that worthless piece of shit wakes up and says, ‘I have an empty apartment, an absent family, a high-paying job, and I live in a city full of desperate women—What damage can I inflict today?’ It’s like a criminal with a loaded gun and a full tank of gas, or a plantation master with a whip and a horse. They’re all thinking the same thing: if I don’t use these conditions to my advantage, what a waste of weapons.”

  I put my hand on the back of his neck and swept aside his hair. He had beautiful white-blond hair to his shoulders. He never brushed it—it just twisted and tangled softly.

  He looked from his hands to my face. His ice-blue eyes worked in earnest, as though taking in more of me than I could present. The fireworks were still popping, but the finale would soon be coming. “C’mon. Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

  As we mounted the first and second flights of stairs to his room, I felt somewhat like a trespasser, especially after Jack’s story. But the third set was thinner and steeper. It had a curious turn at the top and a feeble light at the end, giving it the feel of a tunnel leading from one world to another. With each step we detached ourselves further from everything and everyone we had ever known. The privacy we felt was unlike any other, coming as it did when we needed it most. Ours was a very lucky privacy.

  Jack was before me, we were near the bed, we were kissing, we were lying back, descending. The smell of his bed was the smell of him, only multiplied. It confused me to be initiated into his aloneness; it confused me to know such a place existed, such a repository of untried masculinity and pathetic virility, such a site of self-love and self-abuse. The quilt bubbled around my body and the weight of Jack was good, reminding me of the times I have been buried in sand. I pressed my hips into his because it seemed like the right thing to do, although the part that longed for pressure was farther down and deeper in. My muscles raised me, uncertainly at first, in a practicing way, each time squeezing more expertly, each time tightening an invisible tube inside.

  I thought we might have been waiting for something. I thought maybe it was me. My hand journeyed from his shoulder, drifting fitfully down, and he lifted himself so I could reach where he seemed to know I was going. He was leaning and supporting his body on his left knee, making room. His head hung to watch, his hair cascading around my face like a paper waterfall. With my finger I traced the teeth of his zipper upward from its base to its flap, and as I started to draw it down, the zipper pushed itself open from pressure. Everyone knows about the parts of a woman, but you never hear about the parts of a man, not in any specific regard. Even in great artwork, men’s genitals are under-realized, scribbled or shadowy, as if the artist wanted to be courageous, but only sort of. As if there were some incentive to keeping men mythic, as if the part and the man were the same, and preserving the mystique of one meant preserving the power of the other.

  But in my hand was a contradiction of skin and muscle, something solid but fragile, potent but meager, something both majestic and vile. Jack seemed helpless to the way it stood parallel to his belly. It occurred to me that grown-up men such as teachers and coaches know but keep secret the way erections make boys defenseless. Maybe women know, but maybe it’s late already when they find out. It seems like something girls should know too, and earlier, the way boys are capable of such delicate reversals.

  On our way out of the house that night, we passed the piano. Jack faltered, touching it. Though he used to perform for his parents, now he only played when they were out. He tried to deprive them of pleasure whenever possible, he said, but I knew it was because they made him feel hateful, and he couldn’t touch something he loved so much with hating hands. He sat on the ebony bench, and just when I thought he’d forgotten I was there, he reached to pull me to his side.

  “Eric Satie,” he said of the music he played for me. “Trois Gymnopedies, Number 2.” Then he tried something melodic and easy, something you’d hear on the radio. Over and over he practiced the same few bars with a single hand.

  “Whose is that?” I asked. “It’s pretty.”

  “No one’s,” he answered. “I just made it up.”

  6

  Our bodies lay entwined in a musty navy-blue sleeping bag. The flannel interior had a rodeo pattern with tiny cowboys on bucking chocolate horses, swinging golden ropes against a wan blue sky. I wondered if such places exist. If they did, someday I might like to go there. My head rested in the space between Jack’s arm and chest. Above us, night was an absorbent black, like felt.

  “You haven’t told me anything,” he said. “It’s been three weeks.”

  Though I didn’t feel like discussing Maman’s death, he seemed to want me to discuss it, or need me to discuss it, and so I agreed, since part of harmonious living is conceding to the wants and needs of others, even if you don’t feel like it.

  “First you left, then I went to my dad’s, then right away Kate called, saying, ‘Come home.’ I guess it was still June. After that the days merged into one hazy, humid streak.”

  Kate and I witnessed the moody stillness of summer as if from the backseat of a speeding car, catching only glimpses of sundresses in pink and lime, and shapeless straw bags. Crickets in the morning, the solitary hum of a mower pulsing through grass, the menacing banter of gulls, the whoosh and patter of flapping things at the beach. Kites and towels. It was like a memory of all the summers I’ve ever had, chopped up and stuck tog
ether.

  Jack said, “A montage.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”

  On the train from Manhattan back to East Hampton, I placed my head against the mottled graffiti-etched glass. A grime smell from the vent that ran along the lower edge of the window filled my nose. I replayed Kate’s phone call in my head until it was like a meditation.

  Is it you?

  Yes, it’s me.

  I took my mother to the hospital.

  Oh. Is your brother there?

  Not until the weekend.

  Do you want me to come?

  Yes. There’s a train at nine.

  It was hot when we arrived in East Hampton. The crossing bells rang slowly as the train ambled into the station and landed on its chin like an exhausted bovine. The scene was like a portrait of itself, a preternaturally still landscape of poetic components—a station house, a deli, a dry cleaner, a pickup truck, a mailbox resting squarely on sloped grass, trees in tight rows. I stepped out and moved along the platform, feeling dizzy and vaguely lost, though my house was just a few hundred yards away.

  “I don’t know why, but I called home,” I told Jack.

  When I saw my reflection in the pay phone, I could see stains beneath my eyes from crying on the train. I kept making mistakes dialing. My fingers kept slipping from the holes.

  Eventually I got through. There were funny rings like gargles, then my mother answered.

  I said, “Hi, it’s me.”

  “Hi, you!” she said. “Where are you?”

  “At the train station.”

  “Well,” she prodded gently, “come home.”

  “Have you heard from Kate?”

  “I have. Kate took Claire in to the hospital this morning.”

  I wondered what was the difference between taking someone to the hospital and taking someone into the hospital and taking someone in to the hospital. If there was a difference, she seemed to be referring to it.