Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  She unpinned her hair. In the mirror her eyes were like plums. It was strange to reconvene there, in the same spot where earlier she’d been looking forward to the evening. Jack always said the trick to happiness is to expect things to be shitty, then you won’t be disappointed. “Just keep a low-level plane of dissatisfaction going,” he’d advise.

  Dan called up the stairs. “Happy New Year!”

  “Oh, gosh,” Kate said, shaking herself awake. She came halfway to me, and I came as far to her. Our cheeks met like praying hands. “Happy New Year,” we said in unison, sending the words out into the universe beyond the petite round of each other’s shoulder.

  To commemorate the snow Jack put on Oscar Peterson’s version of Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night.” It was the snow song, the anthem to the snow.

  We cuddled on the couch, the four of us, eight legs, eight knees and feet, all high and drinking tea, facing the fire, thinking but not believing that it would be our last New Year’s together. We had all just sent in our college applications. If everything went as planned, in one year, I would be in Manhattan at NYU and Kate in Montreal at McGill. Jack would probably be in Boston at Berklee for music, if he went anywhere at all, and Dan would either be at Tulane in New Orleans for jazz studies, or at Juilliard, where his dad was a teacher.

  “I have some thoughts,” Dan said, “on the psychology of perception and the problems of consciousness. Does anyone mind?”

  Kate and I did not, but Jack stipulated provisions.

  “No talk of functional neuroses or maladjustments. No dream analyses.”

  “Actually,” Dan said, “I was just thinking about qualities that are essentially incommunicable, like color. For instance, take roses. Kate and I can both call a rose red, though I might see coral and she might see pink.”

  “Do you mean color blindness?” Kate asked.

  “Not exactly,” he guided gently. Dan was always gentle with Kate. At parties he would dedicate songs to her, or he would write compositions called “Kate 9” or “Kate 16.”

  “My point is that it’s impossible to know that what I see matches what you see when we both say red. Comparisons of redness aren’t possible. Redness is ineffable: it has to be experienced to be known.”

  “Big deal,” Jack said. “Perception is variable. If you perceive a speeding car to be forty feet away when it’s really four feet away, and I perceive it to be four feet away, I’ll jump, and you’ll get hit. Relative perception doesn’t change the position of the car, and it doesn’t affect the color of a rose. The rose doesn’t care what color you think it is.”

  “I’m not saying that physical absolutes don’t exist,” Dan said. “You’re right—the rose is the color it is. I’m saying absolute perception doesn’t exist. That no one interpretation is more valid than another. Like redness, or jazz, or—”

  “Nationality,” I added. “Or race.”

  “What’s your point, Daniel?” Jack wanted to know.

  “Well, I’m just thinking about the candle again.”

  “That’s it!” Jack swatted at Dan. “Get rid of that fucking thing!”

  “I’m just saying,” Dan said, defending himself with crisscrossed hands, “Evie has a point: art doesn’t have to be held accountable to accuracy, and there’s no one right way to look at things. Clearly, the candle’s artist was not looking to ‘prove’ a bird.”

  “In terms of the ‘ineffable,’ we’re not talking about the birth experience here,” Jack said. “We’re talking about a piece of shit candle. Maybe there is no bird, but, for all we know, there was no artist either.”

  Kate wanted to know what happened to the rose.

  Jack said, “Exactly, Kate.”

  And for a long time we were silent. I felt bad for Dan. It was nice of him to try to defend me, but he should have known better than to argue with Jack.

  By three-thirty in the morning a curtain had closed on the house. The snow fit like a second house on the house, or a skin, and inside was bright without lights, snow bright. Shortly before Jack and Dan went home, Denny and Michelle arrived. I gave them my room, which was biggest. Michelle took my bed, and Denny took the floor, as usual, just lying flat on his back with his long legs crossed and his hands behind his head. It was a funny way to sleep, as though staring up at the clouds on a summer’s day.

  All things through the living room window were pale cinder. My palms and cheeks left cool dripping circles on the frost-covered glass as I measured the frailness of the membrane that shielded me from the universe. I wondered by what accident of chance I’d been blessed with shelter. There were creatures whose only sanctuary was the flat valentine heart of night. If I looked, I believed I could see them, with their nestling necks and heavily lidded eyes, huddling in clusters between twigs and rocks, sharing fur and feathers, breathing in shallow puffs to make heat.

  “You’re seeking to control your world,” my mother speculated when I told her that I always wake up at night to look out the window.

  I didn’t disagree, because my mother seldom fawns on me. When she does, she does so excessively and briefly, like a toddler mothering a baby doll. But, in fact, control is not a requirement of mine. It’s just that I’m in awe of the darkness, and reassured by it—its obstinacy, its unmovability—so many things happen there. Beyond the metropolis of any night is a new day—beyond that, a new night to follow. If you look, you can see them, stacked like panels one behind the other. If you listen, you can hear them move. And you can think about your part to play being so very small.

  The phone rang. I lifted the receiver and walked with it from the desk to the front door, pulling until the cord could stretch no farther. I stepped out into the snow, my bare legs vanishing to the knee.

  Was I clear from the sky? Was I a speck, a stain, a tiny spot to spoil the white—tiny, so tiny—the eye of a needle, the head of a pin, a nick in the void, aimed like a compass through the inaugural waste to the place I knew Rourke lay? Or did I not appear, was I incapable of being seen, was I nothing to no one? Was I wrong to feel manifest, wrong to feel seeable? Wrong to feel like a giant just to know he was alive?

  “Evie,” Jack called. “You there?”

  “Hey,” I said, barely audible.

  “They’re still there,” he informed me, meaning the tracks.

  I didn’t reply. He was reaching to me. I felt him reaching.

  He said, “Do you know what you made? A fleur-de-lis,” he said. “It’s nearly perfect. One part at the top was fucked up, but I fixed it.”

  I thanked him for calling. On prairies there are creatures like weasels who live in packs. One stands sentry while the others sleep. The one waits, scrawny and long, perched on hind legs, reading the landscape with coalified eyes, scouting for predators. Its generosity is not without incentive. It gets to run first.

  15

  The assignment in art class was to render one object from several vantages—the Object Project. I’d chosen an onion; Denny had picked a clock. Miss Lilias Starr from Baton Rouge was handing out a newly mimeographed list of considerations:

  External—Superficiality! Command.

  Surface—Tenderness! Durability! Watertight?

  Skeleton—Concretization. Uprightness vs. Decline.

  Positive and Negative Space—Yin/Yang.

  Center—Viscera/Gut/Breadbasket.

  Mood—Disposition/Habits/Dreams and Regrets.

  Denny lifted the damp purple sheet to his nose and sniffed deeply. “My clock looks cheerful, but it’s not. Its breadbasket is leaking.”

  “That’s really gross,” Alicia Ross said. Alicia was doing a bird’s nest.

  Denny shivered and pulled his denim jacket tighter. Two metal buttons on his breast pocket read NO NUKES and THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. “It’s so cold in here, I should have picked a space heater.”

  Miss Starr flitted like a fairy about us, materializing at our elbows in aromatic bursts. She smelled like eucalyptus. Her hair was dyed green, the colo
r of Granny Smith apples. Everyone said I was lucky because I’d been to her studio, and she’d been to my barn, and she insisted I call her Lilias. Her studio was a potting shed behind a cottage off Springs Fireplace Road, near the house where Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner had lived. “It has no plumbing,” she explained when I visited, “so I pee in a bottle. But the light’s divine.”

  She appeared at the bench where Denny and I were working, carrying a still life she’d painted—a bowl of flowers, very accomplished, velvety and Dutch. It reminded me of a painting Dad and I had seen at the Met. “I think the artist’s name was Brueghel,” I said.

  Miss Starr flicked her hair back behind her neck. “Oh,” she cooed, “do you think so?”

  When she left, Denny whispered, “Kiss ass.”

  Mr. McGintee from the Drama Club sauntered in about halfway through the class. Directly behind him was Rourke. From the moment he came in, he was all that I saw and all that I could see; it was strange, as if the door had opened and water had flooded through. He was wearing a camel hair dress jacket with a crewneck sweater beneath; his hair was windswept, his skin olive-brown. I returned to my work, dipping my head. Why did his name sound Irish when he looked Mediterranean, like the type of person who vacationed on yachts? Sometimes my mother spoke of the “Black Irish”; maybe he was that kind. His eyes settled on my face; I could feel the way they settled. I bit at the top of my turtleneck, hiding my lips and chin.

  I breathed a cleansing breath, telling myself, God, Jack is so much better than Rourke is. Earlier that week, I’d seen him three times in one day. The first time there were people, so he ignored me and I ignored him. The second time we were alone and our bodies defied our minds: I felt myself come to a stretching stand in the yearbook office exactly as he loitered at my doorway, hunting through his pockets for elusive items, coins or keys. I didn’t say hi, though my body advanced. I stopped on my side of the door frame. He seemed surprised, and he froze, just looking up at me, smiling. Later that afternoon, I was in the main office delivering my letters of recommendation to the guidance office, and he passed by. He leaned on the door frame and smiled at the flank of thoroughly enamored secretaries, saying, “Any of you ladies plan on answering that phone?”

  Mr. McGintee walked around and remarked on Miss Starr’s still life, saying, “It’s nice.”

  “Eveline says it looks Flemish, like a Brueghel. Would you agree?”

  He smiled vaguely. “Absolutely!”

  Rourke moved to greet Alicia Ross, who was fussing with her bird’s nest. Together they looked ravishing and dark, like Spaniards or Arabs conferring. He would speak and she would respond, brisk and sure, with the charismatic self-confidence of a well-bred someone. Alicia had attended Spence in Manhattan until tenth grade, but she transferred out when her dad came to their summerhouse to recuperate from heart surgery. Mrs. Ross didn’t want Alicia to graduate from East Hampton, but Alicia didn’t care. She adored her father; we all did. He would often take six or seven of us out to O’Malley’s for burgers and fried mozzarella sticks.

  Alicia would imitate her mom. “You’ll never get into an Ivy League! You’ll lose all fashion sense! You’ll marry a dentist!”

  “What’s wrong with dentists?” Denny asked.

  Alicia shrugged. “I guess she thinks they’re kind of, you know, dentisty.”

  I liked Alicia. She was overanimated and uncommonly direct, but within her resided a colossal humanity. She made hats and wore them with pious flair, like Southern church ladies. And she always remembered things I said.

  “How’s your cousin?” she’d ask.

  “Which one, the one who’s converting?”

  “No, not the physicist, the potter.”

  The only problem with Alicia was that she was always talking about her father’s famous clients; he was an entertainment lawyer. You had to steer your way through dialogue with her to avoid irrelevant references.

  “Parker and I saw one when we were skiing,” she stated on one occasion. We were in art class; she was speaking of bobcats.

  “Can you hand me the glue?” I requested.

  “Sure,” she said, reaching for the bucket. “We were in Aspen and—”

  “What do you think of this?” I lifted my decoupage.

  “You need a wider margin,” she suggested. “Anyway, he’s even—”

  “Wider? Are you sure?”

  Alicia crammed in her sentence. “He’s more gorgeous in person, if you can imagine.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Parker!”

  “Parker who?”

  “Parker Stevenson, silly. From The Hardy Boys.”

  Miss Starr was explaining that the family who had donated money for the drama program had also earmarked funds for the art and music departments to create original works. The senior art class would be responsible for creating backdrops and costumes.

  Alicia tugged twice on the lapel of Rourke’s jacket, saying something to make him smile. Then she spun on her stool, and her black hair bobbed serenely about her face. I wondered how they knew each other when she was not even in drama.

  Cathy Benjamin asked, “When are the drawings due?”

  “You’re the experts,” Mr. McGintee said. “You tell us. A week? Three days? I’m guessing here.” He waved a half-erect index finger around the room. “Any suggestions?”

  An uncanny quiet descended, as quiets often do. I was about to be called on. Sometimes you just know. I lowered my head, engrossing myself in my task.

  “Miss Auerbach,” McGintee declared. “Your thoughts?”

  I didn’t bother to look up. “Is Our Town even supposed to have scenery?” In Kate’s playbook, I’d read something about no scenery. It was in Thornton Wilder’s notes.

  Mr. McGintee laughed as though something was funny. “Bravo! If only our actors were as familiar with the script. Isn’t that right, Mr. Rourke?”

  Rourke was still next to Alicia. He stepped forward, his body soaking emphatically through space like an inky spill. He located without effort the precise center of the room.

  “The script calls for no scenery,” he said, him looking at me, me looking at him. “That’s true.” His voice was mossy and opaque; it had this lastingness, this abidingness. “But I think we can get away with some set design without compromising the integrity of the play.”

  No one moved when he spoke, not even Miss Starr. I bit a tag of flesh on the inside of my cheek and continued with my onion, with the silky feel of it. I’d penciled a luxurious arc that tapered to a flush and narrow run, with feathery stuff at the end. I inclined my head to view my drawing. I supposed it was madness to think I knew him. I knew nothing about him.

  “How about, like, a village green?” Dave Meese asked.

  I touched the actual onion. Its barrier was no more than a dried membrane, papery brown and tearable. It was ironic that something so potent could have such a fragile shell.

  “How about a chapel?” I heard myself say.

  McGintee said, “What’s that, Eveline?”

  Denny answered for me. “She said, ‘a chapel.’”

  “Wonderful! A chapel. And, Dave, yes—a village green.”

  Miss Starr told us to set aside the Object Project and see what we could come up with for the play. We all instantly complied. She was a huge fan of spontaneity. Frequently in the middle of class she would call out a challenge. Two minutes—low tide! Ten seconds—a toe!

  Rourke came toward me, and the room behind him collapsed in the wake of his steps. He touched down at the bench on my left. He was close, his leg brushing my leg, the scent of him captivating me. I could almost hear his blood, the cadence; in my mind I trailed its avenue.

  He lifted the rendering of my onion, raising it an inch from the table, tilting it, asking softly, “What is it?”

  “Well, it’s not an onion,” I said, and he smiled. “It’s the feel of an onion.”

  He reached for a new piece of paper and slid the sheet to my belly. Be
neath the umbrella of his protectorship I took my pencil to paper and began to draw freely. It was not difficult to do with sunlight bearing down on the snow in the courtyard, and the light drenching us, making all things around us chalk and silver. I remembered a place I’d visited with Dad and Marilyn, a town in winter; Amherst. They’d taken me to see the home of Emily Dickinson, where the floors squeaked like slowly stabbed things, and through the purling windows daylight was sterling and merciless. After lunch, my father bought Marilyn a Rookwood vase from an antiques store in a barn near a stone bridge. I waited on the stairs of a clapboard church beneath trees with no leaves.

  Rourke’s arm moved minimally, signaling for me to stop. I formed two more lines. We studied the paper. It was unifying to share a visual object with him. Until now we had only looked at each other. I imagined what it would be like for us to have a child, the way we would observe it, separately and sometimes together. The steeple of my church extended at a peculiar angle, tipping forward like an antler or horn, and the main body of the building was low like a plank. Rourke took the paper from me.

  “I’d like to take this,” he said, meaning the drawing. He spoke softly. No one could hear but me. It was strange—the size of his arm, the whiteness of my hand.

  He had not moved, not physically, but he was receding. I thought he was brave. I couldn’t bear to abandon the solace conceived by our nearness, knowing that as soon as he was gone, I would be left to confront the known range of my own frontiers, the plaintive vacancy there. He had filled it so perfectly.

  He was waiting for an answer.

  My eyes focused keenly on nothing in particular—a name carved in the art shop bench, Winn, a date that followed, ’76. I wondered where Winn was. Four years was a long time to be gone.