Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  I turned, saying, “Jack,” but before I could say more, he stopped me.

  He rolled nearer to me and pressed his forehead to mine. “The way you say my name. I can hear myself in it.”

  We returned to town with him leading; Main Street seemed particularly immense. I had my hand in his coat pocket and the seam of the pouch cut against my wrist. His jacket smelled waxy; it had that special coating to block the rain. Jack was unusually quiet; I wondered if he could sense the space between us.

  As we walked past the window of Rose Jeweler’s I noticed an iridescent egg-shaped opal framed by a brocade of gold and attached to a chainlike thread. The necklace rested securely in the cinched center of a sapphirine cushion, like a bug in a palm. I stopped dead, pulling back my hand. It looked just like one of Jack’s eyes.

  “What is it?” he asked, turning. He came up slowly behind me. The reflection of his eyes joined the jewel in the glass, all three swimming.

  I couldn’t help myself. I began to cry.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked again.

  I pointed to the opal. “Don’t you see? It’s the color of your eyes.”

  I pulled the necklace from the deflated balloon. Jack was behind me, removing the chain from my hands, unclasping it, hanging it about my neck, arranging it on my collarbone. I felt its frail burden. I did not like the bubbling sputters the people made or the thoughts they were surely thinking. They knew nothing about the warbler or the eye, nothing about Rourke.

  “Speech, speech!”

  I said nothing. Jack’s lips met mine. His kiss was flat. “Here,” he said, handing me something blue and small. I swallowed it.

  When quiet came, it came loudly, like an explosion, like an avalanche of nothingness.

  Denny laid the gifts on my lap. I looked to see the people, but the people had gone. Okay, okay, Denny kept saying to no one in particular. Hold on, and, I’m not ready, or I’m coming.

  Kate was there on the floor next to us, with me on the bench, and Jack across the room leaning against a broken dresser. Jack was watching me with the living-dead look of a portrait. I wondered what it was in me that interested him so.

  Denny dropped down next to Kate. He was exhausted, he said. I thought he should sleep. I thought we should lie down and I would pull the threads from the hem of his dress shirt and say all the things I’d never said. That I loved him. That it didn’t matter to me that he was gay, which I’d never said, which of course I did not have to say. I wanted to tell him he did not need to hide himself from me or from anyone. That he was chivalrous and so very handsome.

  Save the ribbon, Denny said with a wink. I’ll make you a hat.

  I pushed my back against the wall and bit at the rubber tag of my tongue. I opened the first gift. Everything felt a little imperious, a little rigid but also light, like a Japanese tea ceremony, though I had never been to one. I wondered when would I get to Japan, how would I ever find the time? Denny and Kate were at my feet, Jack still at the dresser. Packages were coming apart, their innards passing off to the right and the left before I could even see.

  Don’t worry, Kate said. I’m making a list.

  Open the heavy one, Denny said. It’s from me.

  It was a Janson’s History of Art. Between the beige twill covers, the sheets were cool and superior, unlike newspapers which are cheap with leaking ink because their origins are local and insurgent, as if they have been made in basements by the thinking people you know.

  I thanked Denny, I thought I did, I definitely did because he nodded several times, and he blew a kind of kiss. He was eating a baked potato. I did not know where it had come from. When he lifted it, it sagged in the center and curled at the edges like a canoe.

  Now mine, Kate said, handing me a box with silver wrap. Inside was a rust-red cashmere sweater—Maman’s. I drew it to my skin, breathing deeply. I was not trying to recall Maman’s smell or how it had felt to hold her. I just liked the shield the sweater made, the way I could hide behind the barrier. When I dropped the sweater down, Denny and Kate were still there. They had not moved; their faces were like moons at my knees. Jack was in the same place too, though surely time had passed. I wondered, did Jack feel what I felt when what I felt was so very high? Did he feel he wanted to move but couldn’t, that his legs were sponge? But no, I was wrong, my legs were moving, I could see them rise up like puppets being lifted by hidden hands. And me going up too.

  Denny surrounded me with bear arms. Oh, honey. Kate’s hand light on my shoulder. I thanked them both, for everything. Everything.

  Jack and I were alone. I told him I wanted to dance.

  He said, Oh, shit.

  I careened to the stereo and shuffled through the horizontal strip of records. I was flicking them—right, right, right. Going fast to find an album. Something exactly right, I didn’t know what, but I knew I wanted it instantly. Not instantly, previously. Instantly was too late. Drugs make you insane over time. Drug time is a window between the moment you feel high and the moment you feel less high. I found a record. I pulled it from its jacket.

  What did you pick? Jack asked dryly. Bee Gees?

  The Cars, I said, and I dropped the arm over the turntable. The needle slipped, making a choking parrot sound.

  Jesus, Jack said, take it easy.

  As I danced, I felt the wiggly pressurized feeling of diving to the bottom of a pool, then swimming rapidly to the top. When your hair sweeps back from your skull and your arms are limp like fins that trail the central chesty force of your movement. I felt elastic and wet like a cheerful dolphin. In the water you don’t worry about the action of your hands; hands are always engaged in water. I was dancing, making figure eights with my body, using all my muscles, going ever so slightly up and down.

  Jack sat at the table, his feet propped on a chair. He was carving a candle with a cake knife. Evil hips, he said. You didn’t learn that from me.

  You’re all I’ve got tonight. You’re all I’ve got tonight.

  I need you tonight.

  Later we were lying in the center of the room, overlapping. I could not tell where I ended and Jack began. We were two halves of something the same, each of us companionless. We were both our essential parts; and yet, for all that we were, we were nothing that we were not. I wished Denny had stayed; his stomach made a nice pillow.

  I sighed sadly.

  Jack asked what happened to the cheerful dolphin.

  I miss Denny, I said.

  To make me happy Jack put on the White Album. I’d left it on the dashboard in summer and the vinyl had warped into wide scalloped waves that bubbled hypnotically off the turntable. I liked to watch the record circle lazily, up and down, up and down, like a Hawaiian flower. My head was on Jack’s shoulder. If I closed one eye, the zipper tag dangling from the neck of his sweater became like a skyscraper. Pigs were snorting—that meant next came “Rocky Raccoon.”

  I asked him please to sing. He said I would have to wait for “Julia.”

  He fed me a piece of my birthday cake, pressing bits into my mouth. It tasted cheap, like box cake with crackled tricks inside; they could have been anything, since Denny made it. Once he filled a cake with Barbie shoes. I spit out the stuff in my mouth. It landed on the floor and I looked at it. My mouth had transformed the cake from black into trenchy brown, and the proof of that internal operation nauseated me. I thought I might vomit.

  Don’t leave, I said to Jack, dropping back.

  Never, he promised.

  The floor near my legs creaked eerily. Jack was kneeling over my belly, making a bridge with his groin. His hunched body cast a huge shadow against the wall. When “Julia” came he did not sing. I tried to say this, but nothing came out. I kept moving my head all the way from one side to the other. I was not sure why, except to say that my head was my only mobile part.

  What’s that, baby, Jack asked, not really asking.

  I couldn’t remember, though I knew it had been important. I did not like him to call me baby.
>
  I thought I felt him undressing me. I thought I felt the rimy wind pass through the tunnel made by the small of my back arching off the filthy plank floor. I thought I felt his fingertips touch the recesses beneath my hip bones. He may have had sex with me. I thought he did; I wasn’t sure.

  Winter & Spring 1980

  I know another’s secret but do not reveal it and he knows that I know, but does not acknowledge it: the intensity between us is simply this secret about the secret.

  —JEAN BAUDRILLARD

  14

  I am in a room, high up, near some sort of exposed beams. The back of my head smacks the ceiling, and hair that is not my hair hangs around my face, uncoiling stiffly like the tails of chameleons. There is no motion, and time has fallen off its continuum, like gears skipping intervals. I am kept up, pushed up, by what I do not know. On one beam there is writing, code writing, a wicked code, legible to me—legible, and so I am wicked, I think; yes, I must be wicked.

  My eyes opened from the nightmare, then immediately closed again, squeezing tight. The twilight seemed robust when I felt so very feeble, so I decided to lay in bed and wait for people to come home and switch on appliances. I wanted all the machines to be on. I did not like the way the appliances were sitting there, arrogant and fat and proving through muteness that everyone was elsewhere, involved with other things, things separate from me.

  I switched on the lamp and retrieved the note from Jack that was beneath it. Yellow lamplight soaked the page. Faded gray letters were penciled between the blue rules, strung together and nearly indecipherable. There were words—love and me and mystery, also key and sleep. I fell back onto the mattress, dropping Jack’s note to the floor. My quilt felt soft around my neck, and I nestled into the pillow. Tiny shellfish burrow into the floor of the bay, hiding there. From the safety of their beds of sand they listen to the clamoring of the sea.

  That morning I saw him at the record store, through the picture window of Long Island Sound. I was inside; he was walking past. There was no reason for me to turn from what I’d been doing, but when I did, Rourke was there. He stopped and stared incautiously, as though bewildered by me, or provoked. He was wearing a navy-blue down jacket that yielded obediently to his body, and his right hand was crammed halfway inside his jeans pocket. Under his open coat was a pine-green shirt with several unfastened buttons, and the waist of his pants came low around his hips. His black hair was wavy, tousled.

  I smiled. He did not smile back.

  He reached for the front door. It whooshed open, then clattered to a positive close. I returned to the wall of albums, and experienced that futile feeling of waiting when there’s no avoiding the thing you’re waiting for. If I tried to leave, he would watch my body on the way out, the way I was bound tight in my jeans. The store was empty except for the two of us, so there was no chance of disappearing among others. I slipped behind a display rack.

  He started talking to Eddie, the record store guy. As they spoke, Rourke kept taking pieces of something from his hand, nuts maybe, or candy, and eating them. His jaw moved in even claps, and the muscles at the base of his cheeks flexed into knots. He hadn’t shaved.

  “It’s definitely inferior,” Eddie was saying.

  “It really is crap,” Rourke agreed, and from his coat pocket he withdrew a bottle of lime-green Gatorade, raised it to his lips, and drank.

  There was something especially sexy about the random way he was dressed, making it easy to imagine him in bed that morning, thinking thoughts just as I had, jerking off probably, then deciding to alleviate a morning’s boredom by going into town for a while. I flipped mechanically through the section of albums marked S and imagined that I’d been home with him, wherever it was that his home may have been. I had thoughts of being beneath him, and alongside him, my body to his body, his hands on me, holding me, and his mouth, and his smell. For a moment I felt dizzy. I’d never had such thoughts so vividly: it was like thinking of things we’d already done.

  Eddie was much scrawnier next to Rourke than he was beside Jack, practically like a voodoo doll. His badly scarred skin and arched eyebrows were visible to me just above the albums in the wooden aisle dividers as he led Rourke down the row by mine. They drifted to a halt at the Ps, facing me. I lowered my head over the record well, pretending to read.

  “Petty was influenced by Roger McGuinn of the Byrds,” Eddie said. “McGuinn’s the one who figured out how to get the long sustains by using a compressor with the Rickenbacker. That’s how he got Coltrane’s horn sound on ‘Eight Miles High.’”

  Eddie had an encyclopedic knowledge of music. The store had an “Ask Eddie” lockbox for questions. Answers got posted on a chalkboard by the register. Everyone took the process seriously, especially Jack, who regarded the system as something along the lines of “Ask God.”

  “Yeah,” Rourke said, his voice slipping away from Eddie, moving sinuously, calling to me. Our eyes met. “I know McGuinn,” he said softly. “He toured with Dylan.”

  All the features of the place we inhabited vanished, leaving me alone, with him alone. My heart began to beat rapidly. I adjusted the underwire of my bra beneath my left breast because I did not like to feel my heart against it, the way the blurps felt so miniature, the way the organ strived but failed to be timely. Weeks had elapsed since I’d seen him last, and though I’d thought of him, those thoughts had not affected my mood or disposition. Yet having him before me now, I knew I’d been deprived. I recalled the way he looked at me through the store window. Despite his obvious interest and my real desire, we were impotent with respect to circumstance, and that made me angry, and my anger bound me to him. Rourke understood: he seemed angry as well. In those moments we stepped out equally, we confessed equally, we were rendered equally weak, and as weakened equals we met, victoriously, at some median of daring and possibility.

  I was thinking, I must, oh, you know, say something.

  Eddie pulled out Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes, then they returned to the front. Rourke’s eyes passed over mine once more. I looked away.

  Rourke paid, and while he waited for change, he took his wallet between his teeth and yanked his pants up by the belt loops. Eddie inquired about his New Year’s plans. I couldn’t hear the answer. Probably Rourke’s plans involved a girl. When he left, he just left, not looking back, with his head high and his eyes steady on their course, causing me to wonder if perhaps I was wrong. It was possible that he pitied my naïve infatuation.

  ——

  Right after knocking, Kate burst into my room, her coat still on. “I’m sorry!” she said brightly. “Were you napping?”

  “Can you go put the radio on for me?” I asked. “And the lights.”

  “Sure,” she said. She hopped back out to the living room, and within seconds, the lights were on and the radio burst to life. It had been broadcasting all afternoon, transmitting to bodies in kitchens and cars. I had the sickening feeling I’d missed so much.

  When Kate returned, she dropped down on the foot of the bed. “I was at the movies,” she said. “The matinee. With Harrison Rourke.”

  I was surprised. I couldn’t help it. Sometimes Kate surprised me. I said, “What?”

  “Actually,” she amended, “he was alone in the theater, so we asked if we could sit with him.”

  “Who’s we?” I asked.

  “Michelle Sui. Michelle was with me.” Kate played with the zipper on her parka. “He said he saw you in the record store. Did you see him?”

  “It was pretty crowded in there.”

  “He said you never say hello.”

  “I don’t really know him.”

  “Well, he knows you,” she said. “You should try to be nice.”

  I tried to put him out of my mind, the effortless way he had been dressed, the lazy curl of his hair, the hidden influence of his chest beneath his shirt. Unfortunately, the memory proved too powerful to erase. The muscles between my legs squeezed to hold nothing. There was a shiver in my groin, this
nagging need to push my hips, and an opposing pull inching up my back.

  “Listen,” I said, going blank on her name for a second. “Kate. Let’s just drop it.”

  “My God,” she replied, offended. “What did he ever do to you?”

  For a long time we just sat there. I wondered if she was sweating beneath the bulk of her coat. I toyed with Jack’s letter, folding it into an origami swan. Kate said Rourke said he’d seen me; he told her I never say hello. Rourke did not exactly lie to her, but he did not exactly tell the truth either. He spoke in code to reach me, or so I thought. I had no proof.

  “You’re coming to Coco’s New Year’s party, right?” she asked. “You’re invited.”

  “I feel a little sick,” I said, gesturing to my throat. “Thanks anyway.”

  “Want to come upstairs with me while I get dressed? I don’t want to be alone.”

  Between the twin closets in her room, there was an alcove and, squarely in its center, a window. I sat and propped my feet against the sill and looked into the snowy gray sky, which appeared to be hollow, like it had depth, like you could climb inside if only you could get close enough. I listened to the sounds of Kate dressing: the crinkle of paper-covered hangers, the slippery whisper of plastic bags, the oaky snap of dresser drawers, the clank of miniature buckles, the thin tap of pointed heels against the floor. It was strange to think that I would be home, safe in the ease of my solitude, but Kate would be out. When you set forth, things really do happen.

  “What do you think?” she asked. She was wearing light black pants and a silk blouse, ivory and sleeveless. It’s weird that people like Kate who normally have strict rules about seasonal dressing, such as no rayon or short sleeves in winter, suspend those rules for New Year’s Eve, the one night they probably ought to dress practically.

  “What about the blue sweater Lowie gave you?”

  She extracted the sweater from the section of her closet devoted to blues, held it to her chest, and pirouetted before the mirror. “It’s not too juvenile?” she asked.