Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  “I had a dream,” I said, speaking because he willed me to. “I was a cutout. On a swing.”

  From each end of the chain, he grasped a doll’s hand, a fist really—there were no fingers—and, gently, he pulled. The hair was perfect. He smiled. “Which one are you?”

  I stared widely. “Which side is the front?”

  “This side,” he said. The side facing him.

  I pointed to the third from the right. “This is me.”

  Dishes clattered in the kitchen. I startled, but he did not move, except to reassign his weight to the opposite leg. He seemed disinclined to give my dolls back. Maybe he was going to take them away, like he took the chapel. But instead, he released them reluctantly into my reluctantly receiving hands. There was a single second during which we each held one end of the dolls, and, in that second, I felt a riveting and arduous bliss.

  “No more hail,” he said, looking out the window. Then he stood. Though I was sitting, I felt I might topple without him there. My hand grabbed the floor.

  “See you soon,” he pledged confidentially as his arms entered the sleeves of his jacket.

  “Yes,” I said, pledging too. “Soon.”

  “What were you two talking about?” Kate asked as we watched Rourke’s car pull out onto the street. The headlights scanned her face through the window, and implications of raindrops slithered across her cheeks, skulking left to right like legions of obedient insects. I thought of an old detective movie, The Big Sleep or The Maltese Falcon. Kate and I had come to inhabit a menacing realm of extremes—shadows and light, desire and aversion, faith and betrayal, wins and losses; in that realm, we were liars, each of us.

  “Nothing,” I said. “The rain.”

  Kate hoped I was friendly, at least.

  I told her I thought that I was.

  She fell back onto the couch. “I can’t believe he was actually here.”

  “Neither can I,” I said, agreeing. It felt good to agree with Kate. It had been a long time.

  19

  There was a strip of casement windows painted olive-green that separated my bedroom from the backyard. I taped my cutouts to the glass. Thirteen hours earlier, Rourke had held them. His fingerprints were there, though I couldn’t see them.

  At eight-thirty the phone rang. I rushed to the living room, sliding in my socks to stop the second ring so no one would wake up. I liked to wake up first, before everyone else, with all the colliding needs and popup hair, the talk over cold cereal of nightmares and tooth grinding. The cats clustered at my ankles, sticking to my feet like a crazy beard, like from one of those make-a-face magnet shavings games.

  “It’s me,” Denny said. “Did I wake you?”

  I whispered, “No.”

  “Good,” he said, whispering too. “I stopped at Guild Hall on the way back from Woolco last night to get out of the hail. Did you see the hail?”

  “Yeah, it was beautiful.”

  “Not really,” he said. “It practically cracked my windshield. Anyway, rehearsal was cut short, so the place was empty except for Richie—the lighting guy, you know Richie—and Paul Z., and that new kid Jason from AP Lit. They said the scenery had just arrived, so I went to check. The flats were completely wet. Someone drove them over in the rain.”

  “Well, that was stupid.”

  “I guess they borrowed a flatbed before the rain started. Richie helped me pull everything apart so it can all dry. There’s some damage, but nothing too bad. I’m getting Dave Meese at ten. Want me to get you too?”

  “No, I’ll ride my bike over.”

  “Okay. I’ll see you around ten-thirty,” he said, and he hung up.

  I left right away, though it wasn’t nine. I wanted to be outside. I wanted to be cold. First I stopped at Dreesen’s to get old bread from Rudy, then I rode to the nature trail, passing Jack’s house on the way. The light in his attic room was on—maybe he was practicing guitar, or maybe he had fallen asleep that way. Sometimes he got scared.

  The ducks were hungry. They got out of the water and came to me, climbing rocks and waddling briskly. They ate the bread as fast as I could supply it, and when it was gone, they left. Jack despised waterfowl. He said he did not feel obliged to creatures with liquid feces. “Give me another piece,” he would urge when he went there with me; then he would squeeze the Wonder Bread into pellets to chuck at them.

  I rode fast down Main Street, like a rocket. Right before the offices of The East Hampton Star, I leaned into the vacant oncoming lane and bounced onto the sidewalk in front of the white brick theater, where I came to a skidding halt.

  Guild Hall is a community arts center, though the community didn’t use it much, at least not like they did the VFW on Main Street or Ashawagh Hall in Springs, where they held pancake breakfasts and potluck weddings. Sometimes plays were held there, sometimes art shows or classes, lectures or films. It was good that the Drama Club was having its play there. The high school auditorium didn’t even have a curtain.

  The theater was empty and hardly lit. Cast call wasn’t until noon; I knew from Kate’s schedule on the refrigerator. And I still had forty-five minutes before Denny got there—an hour if you factored in his certain lateness. From the top of the auditorium the sets looked okay; actually, they looked great. They were monochrome collages of geometric shapes—the “chapel” was a huge vertical ivory diamond jutting from a horizontal polygon, and the “village green” was a trapezoid in smoky rust, like fox fur, because Dave Meese had decided that in the village it was autumn.

  At the end of the far left aisle, there was an archway leading backstage. I went through and immediately ran into Rourke. We collided in the boxy shaft between two doorways. He retreated, so did I, each just a step. Scarcely two feet of air divided us—I had to tilt my head to see his face. Burgundy drapes cloaked the door behind him, and the dreamy glow from a safety bulb gave the vestibule the appearance of a tasteful coffin.

  “I was just coming to get you,” he said. “I saw you from backstage.”

  “Oh. I came to fix the flats.”

  Rourke shoved a hand into his pocket, debilitating himself, neutralizing something. I’d seen him do it before. In the record store. In the art room. “Sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have left so early last night.”

  “It was raining pretty bad,” I said. I was glad he’d left, since, after all, he’d come to my house.

  “Yeah. It was bad.”

  I didn’t mind my work getting damaged; it’s the nature of art to yield. When you’re an artist, you possess a drive, you clear yourself of it, you relinquish the outcome. Susan at the laundry by Dad’s house gets crazy. Once, Chihuahua Man draped the shirts she’d ironed for him over his forearm. Chihuahua Man has four Chihuahuas and nothing else—no family, no car, no phone. His dogs run loose, crapping up the sidewalks, and all the old ladies with buckets yell and throw bleach. That day, Susan raised the hinged countertop that sequestered her from the rest of the world, and she ran out front. I’d never seen her legs before. “Take the hanger! Take the hanger!” She was within her rights to yell, since it’s rude to demean someone else’s labor, but, for all she knew, he was going to take the shirts home and let the dogs sleep on them. Sometimes the best you can do is your small part, perfectly. For months after, it was the talk of the neighborhood—What could Chihuahua Man have been doing with those nice shirts? “I don’t get it,” Tony Abbruscato kept saying. “He don’t even own leashes.”

  Rourke asked how long did I think it would take.

  It was hard to think clearly with him standing there. “I haven’t seen them yet.”

  “Let’s take a look,” he said, leading me back through the stage door, holding it for me. At the light board he paused to survey the bank of switches and levers. There was a crack and the stage was illuminated. A sultry pressure cosseted the back of my neck as I crossed to the rear, him behind me. I felt strangely three-dimensional walking with him; I was conscious of the back of me, the sides and the top. Even my fe
et felt like new feet. I wiped the palms of my hands on my legs. They felt active, buzzing kind of.

  I loosened a bent shingle from the chapel. He was alongside me. “The glue will have to dry before I can paint. It might take a few hours,” I said. “Will I be in your way?”

  His breath, my ear. “You won’t be in my way.”

  In his shadow everything felt right. If it was wrong to be close, I didn’t care. I didn’t care if we were seen, and I didn’t care by whom. It was a feeling of being outside the world. By providing me with what I’d been seeking, he proved not only that I had been seeking, but that I’d been correct to seek.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, and I felt myself list. I felt him tend as well, then stop, then straighten. Him whispering, “That okay with you?”

  I emptied my knapsack, and tubes of paint spilled onto the floor. While waiting for Denny, I paced the stage. Walking onstage is the same as walking in life, only the lights make you feel like a star, and when you reach the edge, you have to turn back to center. Maybe that’s why the English excel in theater, because Britain is insular. People there can venture only so far before hitting an end, before having to fold in. America is a wasteland; here we ramble without modesty or restraint, leaving things behind, just picking up and going when things get complicated. Actually, America was a wasteland; now it’s all built up.

  It was almost eleven, and still no Denny. I stretched out on the floor, lying there, and I drifted, going in and out. I wondered if I’d chosen the wrong talent, if in fact talent can ever be a matter of choice. The theater was the first place I’d ever felt happy.

  Within several minutes, I felt light pressure on my chest, like a cat’s paw. I raised my head and found a lily. “A peace offering,” Denny’s voice said. “Sorry I’m late.” He was standing over me, wearing the purple velvet newsboy hat Alicia had made for him. He looked like a dyed mushroom. “Don’t ask me what took so long.” He tossed his coat near mine and launched into a rambling explanation anyway.

  The lily was exquisite. Six petals burst from a tubular casing, proud and electrifying like fireworks inscribing the sky. I touched one. It was bumpy, with a lone blaze of yellow crimping it down the center. The fragrance was combative: a gluish, maudlin aroma. I would have liked to draw the smell. It reminded me of Maman’s funeral.

  “Then,” Denny concluded, “we couldn’t find green tape for the Village Green.” He plucked three softening coffee cups from a paper bag, handing one to me. “I tried Vetault’s Florist. Jen Miller was working and I bummed the tape from her. The flower too.”

  I sat up and popped the lid off my cup.

  “The ham sandwich is yours, the chips are for Dave, and the soda’s for me. I’m back on Tab. I need to lose ten pounds by Wednesday.”

  “What’s Wednesday?” Dave Meese asked as he hopped up onstage.

  “Day after Tuesday, Dave,” Denny said. He took off his hat and set free a mop of black hair. Denny had gorgeous hair. His cheekbones were high under his eyes and his teeth were perfect. Everyone said he looked like Elvis, which really upset him. “They don’t mean Memphis Elvis or Elvis at Sun Records,” he’d complain. “They mean Elvis in Hawaii. ‘Caught in a Trap’ Elvis. Fat sweaty Elvis. Elvis on dope.”

  “What’s up, Evie,” Dave greeted me as he set down his tool kit and dropped his maroon snorkel jacket on the pile Denny and I’d started. Dave was a good artist, but his gift was rigging. He’d been making booby traps since first grade. By sophomore year he’d figured out how to get from one part of the high school to another without touching ground, just by going through ceiling ducts and roof accesses. Dave was the only one allowed to touch Jack’s guitars besides Dan and me. “When the shit hits the fan, you’re gonna need a guy like that,” Jack would say. “Rigging is a practical art, like growing crops or skinning deer.”

  From the figureless murk of the theater came the springy gong of a seat bottom folding up and smacking its frame. I squinted to see Rourke heading up the aisle to the lobby. I wondered how long he’d been there. It occurred to me that he hadn’t left at all, that he’d been there the entire time.

  While waiting for the glue to dry, Denny, Dave, and I watched rehearsal from the audience. We sat about ten rows back, across the aisle from Mr. McGintee and Toby Parker, the music teacher, who were observing, though they had not removed their coats.

  “Oh, gee, look who’s pretending to earn their paychecks,” Denny said. “This is the first time I’ve seen them in weeks. And the show opens in five days.”

  Rourke dictated cues to Richie, who was backstage at the lighting board, and to Paul Z., who was operating the spot from the top of the auditorium. First the lights would blacken, then they’d rise to a uniform faintness. That was the cue for Peter Reeves to step out from the wings to deliver his monologue as he arranged furniture.

  Peter had the part of the Stage Manager. In Our Town, the Stage Manager remains on the periphery during the entire play, conversant both with performers and the audience but allied to neither, leading me to wonder if loneliness is the price you pay for omniscience. Peter was a good actor; I’d heard Rourke had helped him with his monologue for NYU Drama. If Peter got accepted to NYU and if Denny got accepted to FIT, they planned to get an apartment together in the city. And if I got accepted to NYU, they wanted me to be their roommate too. “And if,” Jack said sarcastically at the time of the offer, “Denny’s mom marries Peter’s dad, they could adopt you, and you three could be triplets.”

  “Good job, Peter. Take a break,” Rourke said. “Let’s skip to the flashback.”

  Kate and Tim came out, and Tim growled and playfully chased Peter offstage. There was an awkward pause. Rourke filled it. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  Tim began. “Can I carry your books home, Emily?”

  “Why, uh, thank you. It isn’t far.”

  The two moved stiffly across the stage. Tim was lousy. Kate wasn’t great, but she wished so strenuously to please that she semi-succeeded. It was like real life—she could be exceptional at anything, as long as her vanity found some incentive in it. Unfortunately, her vanity found so many disincentives to being exceptional that she ended up doing very little, or giving up bored halfway through. My mother often used Shakespeare to caution her, saying, Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

  Rourke stood near us, one hand gripping his jaw. I could read his body through his sweater—he appeared ready to spring. He snapped at Richie and the lights changed fast. The actors faltered and stared out. “Go on,” Rourke insisted.

  “He seems pissed,” Denny whispered. “Probably because those goons are watching.”

  “They’re not stopping on their marks,” Dave said, meaning Kate and Tim. “They’re out of sync with the lights. They keep delivering lines in the dark.”

  Kate and Tim began again, and again the lights ended up trailing them rather than moving with them. Richie cursed, and Rourke suddenly bolted, jogging to the front and vaulting onto the stage.

  “Holy shit!” Denny said.

  Rourke startled when he faced the performers, as if surprised to find them there, or himself there—in the center, in the light. He gripped his temples with two fingers, sucked in one cheek, then exhaled. He faced Kate and smiled an introductory smile, then he took a step, a meaningful step, a transforming step. There was no frame; yet he seemed to have crossed a threshold. He dug his hands into his pockets and inclined his chest when she spoke, listening closely as he shepherded her as if down a country lane. He was leading her powerfully, but invisibly. I could tell because as the two moved through shadow and glare, I understood their lines for the first time, though I’d been listening repeatedly. I heard the threat of consequence. The lighting plan kind of linked courtship and tragedy: you couldn’t help but think, It’s because Emily marries George that she dies.

  I didn’t feel jealous, but I felt, I don’t know, somewhat sick about the logical look of him with a girl.

  Rourke withdrew abruptly, turn
ing to Tim. “Got it?”

  Tim nodded, and they shook hands, and everyone clapped, except me, and Denny, who whistled, and McGintee, who yelled, “Bravo!”

  Rourke jumped down and took to the aisle. A shock of hair fell forward. He ran a hand through it, and his eyes passed uncomfortably over mine. “Okay,” he called. “Again, guys.”

  I stood and left. I went backstage, going as far as I could from the front, far from where he was, all the way to the last dressing room. Rourke’s voice trailed my steps. I squatted in the corner and wrote on my arm with a pen I found there.

  Sorry for my eyes, sorry to have seen you so.

  The dressing room door opened; it was Denny. He knelt behind me and played with my hair. “You know, I was thinking that maybe you should go home and get some sleep. I’ll drive you, then I’ll come back to finish the scenery with Dave.”

  “I have my bike.”

  “I know. I’ll put it in the trunk. I’ll drop you and come back.”

  He helped me to a stand, and when I stood, he rolled down my sleeve to cover the writing on my arm. He led me through the auditorium, and he retrieved my stuff. Rourke was busy so I didn’t say goodbye. Denny loaded my bike into his car, and he took me home, where I slept straight through to Sunday morning, except for one brief exchange with Jack.

  “Actually,” Jack said, “I sat with you for three hours.”

  20

  When we got to the dressing room, Kate told me to stay. Michelle Sui and Adrienne Parker were there, hunched over a cracked console, somberly applying makeup. Adrienne was the music teacher’s daughter, and a very good cello player. Sometimes she played with Jack and Atomic Tangerine. The mirror was fingerprinty. Uncapped tubes and jars were everywhere. Clothes and shoes and stockings had been thrown all over. Two gray wigs rested freakishly on Styrofoam heads—the wigs were skewed, making me think of drunken monsters. I said I’d wait up front.