Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  I rested my knee on the same chair I’d used at dinner. While we were eating birthday cake, Mom had told the story of a new student who’d ordered a soda at a fast-food place but was given a cup of lye instead. He drank it and permanently lost the use of his voice, but he won four hundred thousand dollars in a lawsuit. He decided to apply the winnings in part to the expense of an education, which he would not otherwise have been able to afford.

  “See that?” she’d said, slapping the tabletop lightly with two palms.

  “Well now, that really is something,” Powell said, brushing down his mustache with his napkin and considering the dark peculiarities of fate.

  “I think I’ll go to Mary’s party,” I’d said as I cleared the dishes.

  “Need a ride?” Powell had asked.

  “No, thanks. I’ll take my bike.” I hadn’t wanted to bother him on his birthday. The bike had affected my destiny; I’d arrived late and alone, and by the time I got there, everyone was very drunk. Like the guy who ordered a soda but got lye instead—had the timing of his day transpired differently, he might have gotten a Coke after all.

  I scanned the kitchen hopelessly. Around me lay the gruesome evidence of a seemingly inconsequential chain of events, which, as it turned out, had not been inconsequential after all. I was feeling hysterical. I wanted to laugh, but instinct would not have it. I wanted to move, but there was no place to go.

  I threw my ruined underwear into the garbage, then sat in bed and stared at the clock, watching the numbers flap. I timed my headaches.

  At 4:09 A.M. it occurred to me that someone might see my underwear in the trash and pull them out, thinking I’d made a mistake. I returned to the kitchen and cut them up with scissors, then shoved them into a cereal box, a Rice Krispies box I emptied. I crammed the package down to the bottom of the can and covered it with other garbage. When I pulled my hands out, they had jiggling flecks of congealed chicken grease on them. I lifted the bag from the can, tied it, and dragged it into my room. Then I returned and put a clean liner in, wondering how people manage to conceal murder. What do they do with their consciousnesses? I could do nothing with my consciousness.

  Morning hummed when it came, like a choir of light, and in the clear, I showered. I could not select clothes: I kept trying things until the contents of my dresser were emptied onto the floor. My skin was itching, and there were hives vining up around my neck like ivy. Since I couldn’t pick one outfit, I wore several. In the mirror I looked homely, like a straw corn doll with stick-out hair and no neck. I looked like the product of impoverished child artisans.

  It was very cold in Powell’s car while I waited for the 6:17 train to pass. As soon as it rumbled by, I started the engine and pulled out of the driveway, stopping first at the nature trail, where I fed the leftover Rice Krispies to the ducks. From there I went to the dump, where I had the distinction of being the first customer, if in fact dump users can be considered customers. In Paris, some women are the first customers at the boulangerie, where they wait on the dim blue cobblestone rue for the doors to open so they can buy bread. I wondered would I ever be one of those women. It hardly seemed possible.

  I teetered on the precipice of the sandy mound and swung my arm back to hurl the bag into the abyss. Vulture seagulls swarmed down. I wondered whether they would pick so far through the bag that they would arrive at the cereal box and my underpants, and then would they fly about with shreds of stained cotton hanging from their beaks. I unbuttoned one of the several sweaters I was wearing and listened to the repetitive caws of the gulls. I stood on the edge of the pit of sand feeling like a slave in the Roman Colosseum, with the wind whooshing like a wild opus through the seemingly endless sky above me.

  Back at home, Mom and Powell were in the kitchen having breakfast. I considered telling them what had happened, but I couldn’t bear the proud way they looked at me to change. Besides, Powell would have ended up going over to everyone’s houses, and there would have been confrontations and arrests, more than likely of him.

  The telephone rang, awfully. Bllwanngg!

  “Whoa!” my mother shouted.

  “I’ll get it,” I yelled, diving to prevent a second ring.

  Nico Gerardi’s voice cracked through the wire. “Hello?”

  I took the phone to the staircase, nearly to the top, where I sat, facing up. The carpet felt especially synthetic. Sometimes it hits you, the way a carpet is just weird fake stuff.

  He asked was I okay.

  “I guess,” I said, wondering what would he have done if I’d said no. And, who’d told him to call? His father, his brother? How many people already knew, when I’d told no one?

  He kept talking and I kept listening, trying to stay in the present, to keep my mind from receding into recall.

  “I think it’s gonna rain today,” he said. “Do you?”

  “Do I—what?”

  “Think it’s going to rain. Or not rain. You know, get sunny.”

  Nico and L.B. had families who denied them nothing. Their parents bought them their favorite foods, gave them new cars and nice clothes, intended to pay in full for their college tuition, and dispensed generous allowances without demanding responsibility in return. Such parents are wrong to shelter children so completely, to condone immaturity, to exempt boys from basic social requirements of fair exchange. People can get hurt that way.

  “Sun, I think,” I said. “Or rain. I’m not sure.”

  In the end, Nico said nothing of the remotest relevance to me. I really wanted to know if it had had to be me, or could it have been anyone? And did his tendency to commit acts of violence have to do with genetics or environment? The only thing I learned, I learned by supposition—the event had not transformed him or L.B. They were clean. They had no bruises or torn flesh. They had no remorse. There was no larger lesson for them. To them, it was just a night, a lucky night. As for me, I’d been critically altered.

  Jack examined every inch of my face as if it were unfamiliar to him and yet also very familiar. “You were wrong to keep it to yourself. You let your shame silence you. It’s exactly what they were counting on. You protected them.”

  It was an interesting point, that shame can take your voice away. Maybe it was so. Maybe I thought that if I kept my humiliation to myself, it would go away faster. And if I shared it, then I would have to wait for everyone else to forget also, and them plus me could take a very long time. I tried to recall the half-life of uranium-238. Whatever it was, that seemed about right.

  The living room had turned dark. A shroud seemed to cover Jack’s head; he seemed to be in mourning. His anger had been replaced by his customary self-analytical brooding, and that was, in fact, progress for the worse. I knew I had to speak to keep him from venturing to a bad place, but I could think of nothing to say. I wanted to lean on his shoulder; instead I lowered my head to my own lap.

  Once I had a long conversation with a deaf woman, one of Mom’s students named Monica. Afterward I needed to sleep for a while. I knew only the ASL alphabet and very few signs—dead and hungry and uncle—which were not sufficient to convey with any specificity the content of my thoughts. Jack and I were having similar problems. I possessed all this information, but, for whatever reason—survival or shame—my vocabulary was limited. Jack was handicapped as well; he had more space inside than things to fill it. He could only reach forth with his considerable cerebral might to capture and claim my reluctant impressions.

  Jack suggested we take a walk up to Georgica Beach, so we did. Though I saw him every waking hour for the remainder of Thanksgiving week, and he even sat alongside me as I slept, those were the last words he spoke to me until the Sunday night his mother took him back to boarding school in Connecticut.

  We received a collect phone call that evening. The operator said, “From Jack, for anyone.”

  My mother said, “Yes, of course, we’ll accept,” and she handed the receiver to me.

  “Where are you?” I asked him. Car horns and a PA syst
em were blaring in the background.

  “Port Authority,” he said. “I just got off a Greyhound.”

  “What? What about boarding school?” I asked.

  “I’m quitting,” he said. “Fuck it.”

  The next day Jack was back at East Hampton High School, where he remained until we graduated. Once he returned, life became bearable again, though I did not dare tell him. To say things were better would have been to imply that at some point they had been worse. Where would he have gone with his malice if I had confessed how much more painful the public humiliation had been than the private? How might he have treated himself upon learning that people preferred to think poorly of me rather than think of two football players as rapists? I did not tell Jack that after the rape I’d gone to Denny’s car at lunchtime every day. That I’d carried all my books all the time so I wouldn’t have to stop at my locker. That boys in the hall would cram their hands in the pockets of their jeans and laugh or sigh overloudly, blocking my way if I wanted to pass. That girls jumped on the opportunity to denigrate me, as though they’d been waiting. Not everyone was cruel. Not Denny or Marty Koch or Dan Lewis. Not the yearbook people. Only the popular ones, which is a confounding fact of social science—that is to say, the most-liked people behaving the least likeably.

  The only good thing about Maman’s illness was that Kate ended up having to stay in New York for the week after the incident. When she returned, she was too despondent over the diagnosis to have been included in any gossip. Possibly I was incorrect; people can be quite heartless.

  But once Jack returned to school, and we were together as a couple again, it dawned on people that I had not agreed to sex with Nico and L.B., or tried to trap them into dating me, as some girls had suggested. And that actually, I had no interest in them. Suddenly, not only did I possess the practical knowledge of their astounding sexual ineptitude, but my situation showed that they had to steal sex because no one was giving it to them voluntarily.

  From then on, all the boys treated me with deference and civility. Possibly they felt bad for me. Possibly they were awed by the fact that I hadn’t told on Nico and L.B. By having the boys as allies, daily life became easier than ever. I wasn’t proud of this, but I wasn’t ashamed either. Things just happened to unfold this way, so I followed the rules of survival—snatching every minor advantage, immodestly seizing help wherever you can find it. The part that bothered me was the girls. Nothing was forgotten or forgiven with them—that is to say, them forgiving me.

  Jack also never recovered. Periodically he would go on a tirade about how the sacredness of sex had been ruined. He would sink into a penetrating wretchedness marked by a prolonged and seething silence. I never asked what went on in the sulfurous corridors of his mind; I did not care to know. God knows we all have fantasies of retribution.

  “You don’t understand,” he would say once he was able to speak of it again. “I just can’t clear it from my mind.”

  I moved on because I had to, because pain gets heavy when you carry it far from its source, like a bucket of water hauled miles from a stream—it acquires a whole new value, which is the sum of its primary essence and your secondary investment. If I thought about it too much, I would start to forget things, important things, such as meals and homework. Once I found blood on my leg; perhaps I’d been scratching. Another time I was walking; who knows to where. I kept telling myself that it was enough to pity Nico’s and L.B.’s criminal lack of kindness, and to feel sorry for all the lies they’d been told—about women and themselves—and for the way they went very fast, like midget dogs, when they had sex. Maybe the cruelest revenge was to say nothing, to inform no one, to satisfy myself with the fact that they’d already hit the limits of their dubious potential, that for them, only stinking crisis lay ahead.

  I wasn’t sure about the right way to think. I just tried to do my best with the little I had.

  “Whom you all know by now,” Mr. McGintee was saying, and everyone clapped as a dark figure leaning against the lower left wall of the auditorium gave an abbreviated wave.

  I squinted to find Jack, on the opposite side of the room. He was right there, squinting back at me.

  Mr. McGintee shouted a few closing remarks as everyone rose. “Roles will be posted. Rehearsals start next Wednesday. Don’t forget to sign the paper going around.”

  Kate lingered near the edge of the stage, and Jack idly ascended the aisle to my left. The lanky muscles of his thighs expressed themselves beneath the paper-thin denim of his jeans. He was wearing a white Oxford shirt over a faded blue Columbia University T-shirt that was the color of his eyes.

  “Nice entrance,” he said, straddling the arm of the seat by mine, gnawing at his cuticle and kicking at a loose piece of carpet strip.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him.

  “I’m like you,” he said. “Just waiting for someone.”

  The group at the base of the auditorium began to thin, passing by us on the way out. Billy Martinson charged up after Troy, saying, “Give it to me, you little shit.”

  Kate arrived right after. “Hey! You owe me five dollars, Evie.”

  “Don’t tell me—Oklahoma.” I’d totally forgotten Oklahoma.

  “Our Town.”

  “Our Town?” I repeated. “That’s strange. I’d been figuring musicals.”

  Jack grabbed my knapsack and followed Kate out. I followed also. As I moved to the door, I glanced over my shoulder. A handful of people were at the bottom. No one I knew, though I felt—I don’t know—as if I’d left something behind.

  “We had a bet,” Kate explained to Jack as she held the auditorium door for us. “About the play. She wasn’t very nice.”

  “She’s not a nice girl, Kate,” Jack said as we spilled into the lobby. “You ought to know that.” He tossed my knapsack to me, thrusting it like a medicine ball. “I’m going to Dan’s. See you.”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Kate asked.

  I wan’t sure. Lots of things probably. I just shrugged.

  Kate was combing her hair when we got to her locker, so I opened it for her. I’ll never forget the combination, 10–24–8, or the way she looked as she started to collect her stuff. She was smiling to herself. I leaned onto the locker alongside hers and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my palms. I remember feeling sort of tired, sort of electric and free. Like I just didn’t care. Like there was nothing in the world that could possibly bind me. Like I belonged nowhere and everywhere.

  We headed toward the side exit, our shoulders grazing as we walked. It was five o’clock. One long, low ribbon of sunlight slipped through the parted doors at the far end of the hall, creating a visible channel of dust in the air, and I could smell the rich, ripe aroma of just-cut grass. The school was uninhabited, but there was influence to its stillness. To this day, I believe I can render it, the feel of it—the shining, the glowing, the empty. I remember thinking, Something’s coming. I could feel it coming.

  She breathed in. She said, “I think I’m in love.”

  Then she blushed, and the hollows of her cheeks flushed with pink, like light warming rubies, coming up through them. Her eyes were pleading, as if calling on me to join her somehow. I remember turning. I remember exactly what it was to turn.

  I saw a figure, a man. He was several paces behind us along the wall. His presence seemed to consume the entire width of the corridor, cleaving the air like an angry black slash. Never in my life had I seen anything so profoundly extrinsic, so exotic, so mystifying. His eyes were not on Kate, they were on me. He seemed to know me as I knew him; instantly we entered into confidence. He smiled, one swift and contemptuous smile, as if he’d caught me committing some crime that rendered me eligible for his coercion. And though I could not name what I had done, I felt the accuracy of his instinct. Nothing could conceal the perversion in me that was manifest to his eyes. I turned back. Whoever he was, he was inside—like a bullet, lodged.

  The clock on Kate’s dresser said 9:05. She
came over in a towel and sat next to me on the edge of her bed. The mattress rocked like a motorless boat. I grabbed a Seventeen magazine from her table and started flipping through it. She always had all these magazines.

  “So, what do you think?” she asked.

  I was looking at this article in which Mariel Hemingway was demonstrating her favorite exercises. You had to hang over crossed legs and lay both palms on the floor while straightening your knees.

  “Think of what?”

  “Of Harrison.”

  Outside, the railroad crossing bells began to clank, and beyond the window the night blinked red. Within seconds, the whistle blew and the house began to shake, buoyantly, then furiously, then less and less as the train moved west. After a brief buzzing silence, the second set of chimes rang and the gates lifted.

  “Is that his name? Harrison?”

  “Harrison Rourke,” she replied.

  Rourke, I thought, not Harrison. Rourke sounded more accurate. “I don’t know. He’s kind of old.” Old wasn’t right. Old was the only thing I could think of. That and him filling the hall behind us, a terrifying miracle of engineering, like a jet plowing through an alley.

  “He’s not old,” she said.

  I had the feeling I should mention the way he looked at me. If I didn’t mention it then, I never could, because Kate would want to know why I hadn’t said anything from the start. But often what feels implicitly true seems less true when you put it into words. I didn’t want to sound crazy.

  “Is he a regular teacher?” I asked. “Or an outside guy coming in?”

  Kate got up to put on a record. “An outside guy. The people who donated the money this year for the drama program hired him. They visited one day with Alicia Ross’s parents. They had a driver for their car.” After the spongy opening lull of the album came the crisp pops of music, and magically, a guitar. It was “Can’t Find My Way Home” by Blind Faith.