Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  Caroline Boylan was above me, offering her hand. She was standing in the center of a group of girls; I’d obviously fainted again. Caroline wasn’t wearing a shirt or bra, so I couldn’t help but notice that her breasts were strange, sort of like cabinet knobs. In eleventh grade, the television show The $10,000 Pyramid had chosen her to play in its national teen tournament, making her into a lesser sort of celebrity. As I lay there, the memory of her on television returned to me, her giving clues to her partner from Appleton, Wisconsin, for “Things That Have Sauce.” Biting her lower lip, nodding, leaning forward, like a hood ornament, saying, Pizza, spaghetti, spaghetti, pizza, pizza, pizza.

  “Thanks,” I said, coming up to sit. “I’m all right.”

  The crowd disbanded in the sulky way crowds disband, like they haven’t quite gotten their money’s worth. I made my way onto the bench beneath the wall of lockers and lowered my head and squeezed the muscles in my thighs to send blood back up, because that was what Dr. Scott said to do whenever I felt faint. My parents kept sending me to him for tests, but everything kept being normal. He would just say that I was blessed with unusually low blood pressure, which should not be a problem “for anyone who actually eats and sleeps.”

  “You okay?” Someone must have told Coach because it was her voice I heard, and when I lifted my head, it was the myriad surfaces of her body that came into complex focus through a mist of puckered stars. Her dimpled knees and distended belly were known to me and I was comforted by the sight of them. Perhaps there was nothing wrong with her; perhaps she was just straightforward about the inescapable fact of herself. “Need the nurse?” she asked.

  The nurse would just give me a place to rest. But it’s impossible to rest when everything smells like the sweet of Band-Aids, and when the kidney pan she puts near your mouth is covered in those crazy black finger smudges, and there are depressing posters about alcohol abuse and car wrecks. You just sit and wait for an appropriate amount of time to pass before you can leave, hoping nobody you know comes in for some really gross and graphic problem. If they do, the nurse puts up a screen that you can totally see through. Before you leave, you have to thank her like she actually did something to heal you.

  “Can I just stay with you?” I asked.

  Coach gazed widely, blankly. She nodded once, and her oaky brown button eyes folded back into the confectionery flab of her face. “Let’s go out to the tennis courts.” She did not help me up, but she did get me a cup of cold water and a bag of salted cashews from her desk while I pulled on my shorts and sneakers. Together we crossed the deserted gymnasium, which was a queer sort of distinction.

  The cyclone fence around the courts was cloaked in green tarps with cutout flaps—I sat and rested and waited for things to end, things such as the day and the tired way I felt. The sun beat against my lids, creating geometry underneath, wandering and upraised like swimming braille. The tennis balls smacked the rackets and hit the spongy ground to create a succession of hollow pops.

  In the cavern of my room, after Rourke had left the night before, I was stricken with an incompetent longing, a clumsy physical loneliness. I was not clever with that lonely feeling, with its drift and wicked magnitude. I caressed my own body, seeking heat, seeking relief and restitution, seeking rewards withheld; and in the end I felt I had transgressed. It was not me I wanted but him, and that was a sorrowful offense, sorrowful because I was an animal and he was an animal, yet we lay separately in the gaping obscurity of one anonymous night on earth.

  I did not change from my gym shorts or bother to go in to get my books. After the final bell rang, I just walked from the court, cutting through the side yard to the street. I was about to head home when I noticed the GTO parked in the front lot, and without even thinking I turned back to the building. I quickly navigated the crammed halls by minimizing myself—everyone else had grown so much bigger during the day that if you just stayed low and tight, you could cut through pretty easily.

  In the crowded lobby, by the guidance office, Rourke was talking to Mr. McGintee. They shook hands amiably, saying “Good luck” and “Take care,” and when McGintee slipped into the auditorium where janitors were setting up for the spring concert, Rourke cut directly through the pack to meet me where I stood.

  He said hi. I said hi. He seemed younger, or maybe just tired like me. There were lines beneath his eyes. “How are you?” he asked. I got the feeling he was referring to the previous night with Jack.

  “I’m okay,” I said, and together we walked, him behind me. I was aware of my thighs in my shorts, the bareness of them, the way I knew he was looking.

  “I have to pick up a check,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the car.”

  I sat on the entrance steps and watched everyone leave. The car, he’d said, not my car. As the last yellow bus took the bend going from the school lot to Long Lane, a set of shoes appeared on the sidewalk before me—caramel-colored loafers with tassels. It was Mr. Shepard, finishing bus duty.

  “Miss Auerbach,” he said definitively, as though he’d come upon me in the thick of the jungle.

  I blocked the sun from my eyes and looked up at him.

  He smiled tightly, and his chin gathered into his neck in that skeptical way that older men have, which they use on you when no one else is looking, and which is frankly just a patronizing manner of flirting. Skepticism suggests they know more than you do, and a superior intelligence is the only seductive power that remains to them at older ages, or so they think. Lowie once dated an alligator handler from the Florida Keys who was very handsome at forty-five. And firemen are always sexy, no matter how old, as are men who work at sea, like Powell. In general older men can be attractive as long as they use their accumulated experience to bully things other than you, such as reptiles, fire, and the ocean.

  “Late to come, late to leave,” Mr. Shepard remarked as he started for the lobby. “Your timing is off today.” I actually thought my timing had been good. At the main entrance, he encountered Rourke, who was on his way out. Rourke drew in his chest and swept his arm like an awning to hold the door from inside. Shepard looked from Rourke to me and from me to Rourke—figuring, figuring darkly.

  Rourke jogged down the steps. “Let’s go.”

  In the car, we sat, and the leather was warm. Traces of him were everywhere—the confidential fragrance that had incubated beneath the roof, the microscopic shed of skin, the fingerprints on the vinyl dash. I felt an uneasy resolution—like everything was finally right, and yet nothing was very right at all. He had his last check; I had six more weeks of school. When I considered his keys, the slick conviction of his hand as it forced them into the ignition, I felt envious of the vehicle, of its prominence in his life. I squeezed into the gap between the bucket seat and the door, and the car moved from its spot. As he swerved left from the lot onto the main driveway, the car leaned against its two right wheels, against my side, and I heard a giant swish of wind—my door, flying open.

  Tentacles of air pulled at my chest, suctioning me, summoning me. I felt wind on my face, and my knees pulling right as if inside there were pieces of metal and outside there were magnets. I began to slide, and I thought, I am going to die. I am going to plunge through the air and smash down and spill out across the asphalt. For some reason I thought of my fetal pig from bio lab—its starch-white face, the sock on its left rear leg. It was stiff and narrow like a wooden pull toy. I should have objected to dissecting it.

  The whole thing took long, so long, seconds ticking and unticking, space transforming telescopically between the status of my body and that of the ground, until at last it came, not the fall, but Rourke’s hand, curling like a whip around my ribs. I actually thought to break his grip, to continue my fall—I’d been so tired lately. But he would never relent. Though I didn’t know if he loved me, I knew that he would not allow himself to be defeated in action. My right arm reached left, my fist clutched his sleeve, the car straightened, and my door slammed shut.

  I collapsed in
a ball against him, and he held me, shifting gears over the bridge of my ribs, his forearm jerking up and back, his hand returning each time to my body. Other than that, Rourke did not move, and I did not move, but we were breathing, both of us, our chests rising, falling, rising. We made our way slowly through East Hampton Village and eventually around to my street, at which point each muscle of his hand eased as if coming loose one at a time, and my body peeled itself from the electrifying shelter of his.

  The screen door shot open like a slap. Kate leapt from the front porch and skipped across the slate walkway. She leaned on the passenger window, looking in. “This is a funny surprise,” she said with an inquisitive frown.

  I popped the door, shoving her a little and slipping past; I didn’t want her to change the way I felt. I proceeded to the garage entrance and into my bedroom, where I stripped before the mirror and examined my naked body to see what it was that I felt, when what I felt was ever mortal, ever viable and real. I looked like a girl, and I looked like a woman, and in my eyes was a consecrated knowledge.

  Suddenly there were so many things to think about. On the one hand, it had been very mechanical: a door opened, and I nearly fell. On the other, I’d confessed a willingness to die, and he’d confessed an unwillingness to let me. And his instant concern elicited in me instant trust. I’d never felt trust that way before.

  The near miss provided a reminder about the fugitive constitution of life. Perhaps death is always so proximate; perhaps life and its loss are two opposing states—life as suspension, death as the reverse, as a dissolution of structure. Reverend Olcott says hell is simply a place outside the society of God, and that God is what you conceive Him to be. Maybe hell is an absence of presence, a wall down—loneliness. That was the part Jack went out of his way to confront—the ease of loneliness, each time telling himself that an end could be simple and near, simpler and nearer than living and its requisite effort, when no one hears the things you say, when everyone has their own ideas of you, when everything you want is impossible to achieve, and every day you’re dying anyhow. I thought I understood. If I’d melted through the divide, if I’d passed from one side to the other, it would have been better to leave Rourke then, at the exact moment his body had confessed a need for my body, than to prevail and endure the inevitable anguish of the inevitable loss of him.

  Jack had felt the same, only for me. On the tracks the night before, he’d said, I fucked up. By that he meant that he’d waited too long, that our time had gone by, that all that had been good was gone, that he should have had the courage to end it first. Love is exactly like starlight, he’d said. By that he meant that love has its time, which is not necessarily your time. You have to be big, I think, or old or brave or rich or mad, or something other than what I knew myself and Jack to be, to make love’s time your own.

  The front door slammed and I grabbed a blanket, covering myself. Kate ran into my room, breathless, saying something about Harrison and Friday night, something about going out, two friends in town.

  “Will you come?” she said. “He said to ask.”

  Beneath the blanket my fingers jammed the welt on my rib cage that he’d made when he grabbed my side in the car. The pain radiated in an imperfect circle. I liked that he had caused it.

  “He’s outside waiting,” Kate urged. “He leaves for good on Monday.”

  She didn’t want me to go because she wanted my company. She didn’t want me to go because he’d asked. She wanted me to go because she was afraid to go alone. I thought she had reason to be afraid. It would have frightened me too, to be her, to be beautiful but deaf and blind to incentive, to have the world venture no farther than my immaculate façade.

  In her words I heard him speak. I heard him remind me that I am alive, and therefore, forgivable. That I cannot despise myself for my failings when it is those failings that make me desirable. That love has its time. That nature does not favor those who would resist its hour and its course.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  26

  The row of budding wildflowers ran like tiny tombstones alongside the barn. Delphiniums and phlox will come first, then irises and astilbes. Tiger lilies are always last. It’s usually not until July that they ascend and promptly collapse, their overlong necks buckling beneath the heft of their blossoms. There’s a lesson in that, I’m not sure what, but I liked tiger lilies least.

  I wiped my hands on my jeans and regarded my painting. The canvas was five inches square, depicting celery-green shoots with darjeeling-purple tips, little Vs that had lost the logic of perspective. V as a shape is piercing and effective—the head of an arrow, the edge of a blade, a plow, a beak, the tip of a plant that creaks up through soil, the cooperative formation of migratory birds and schools of diligent fish.

  My mother walked over, coffee cup in hand. “Eveline, that’s beautiful,” she said. “Is it for me?”

  “Sure,” I said. “You can have it if you want.”

  “What a gorgeous day!” she exclaimed, as though it were the first she’d ever lived. She breathed deeply. At thirty-eight, her skin was clear and firm and her body was slender. She’d had the good fortune of exacting revenge on the standards of beauty popular during her adolescence. In the 1950s, she was considered scrawny, but in the sixties and seventies, she was an ideal, perfect for fashions that did not work on shapelier women—wide link belts and paisley A-line dresses and bodysuits with twin bear-ear cutouts around the abdomen. Even poverty became her. It enhanced the atmosphere of liberty and luck you felt in her company. When she entered a room, people stood, recalling like a crisis all the hopes they had.

  It was a gorgeous day; all the colors had come alive. The sky was candy-orange, the color of those spongy Easter treats—not Duck Peeps, but the melony ones called Circus Peanuts that taste like bananas. Why are they shaped like peanuts when they taste like bananas, and what did the circus have to do with it? It was a strange set of falsifications. Jack and I placed some on the tracks once to see if they would widen, but instead they disappeared, possibly sticking to the train wheels. “Well,” Jack said that day as we watched the last car vanish around the bend, “I hope at least we slowed the fucker down.”

  My mother sat alongside me, and she took a sip from her mug. “Can you believe I was married at your age?” she asked out of nowhere. Her observation was largely scientific, making the fact that I was the product of that union into something only slightly more than extraneous. “You’ll have so much fun at the Talkhouse tonight,” she continued. “Kate’s excitement is infectious. Don’t forget to say hi to Kevin Fitzgerald, if he’s tending bar.”

  I pressed my palms into my eyes. If I pressed hard, maybe I could erase myself.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked uncomfortably. “Is it Jack?”

  “Jack?” I said, surprised. “Kate maybe, but not Jack.”

  “Kate?” She seemed surprised too. “What about Kate?”

  “I don’t know. We’re just—not clicking.”

  “What do you mean not clicking?”

  “It’s like, we’re going at different speeds,” I said, striving for clarity, though to hear myself, I didn’t sound very clear. “We’re, like, not close anymore, you know, spatially.” I amended that. “Not spatially—I don’t know.” I gestured with my hands. “She’s not moving.”

  Unfortunately, my mother thought she understood. Things were usually better between us when she didn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about. “The first thing you need to do,” she said, “is to get over the idea of growth as measurable by speed and distance.”

  As she spoke, I began to gather the paintbrushes that I’d strewn on the grass. It was difficult to see them in the twilight, and I felt bad about that, about them maybe feeling lost.

  “Linearity and progress are completely male notions,” she counseled. “Evolution is not necessarily linear. You can’t think in terms of you girls having been shot from the same pistol. You come from entirely differ
ent guns. One has bullets, the other has—”

  “A flag,” I said.

  “Exactly,” she said. “A flag.”

  I counted slowly to ten, then stood. She stood also, and she hugged me, whistling as she returned to the house. She seemed satisfied with herself for having been there for me.

  Kate’s door would not open. “Watch the ironing board!” she called.

  I squeaked through the gap and discovered her testing shoes of various heights. The light from a candle flirted against her, throwing her shadow upon the wall. I sat for a while and watched as she dressed. I wondered if being loyal meant being honest or being kind. If there had been a cohesive truth to tell Kate about Rourke and me, it would have felt cruel to relate it, and yet it didn’t feel right to say nothing either. It was hard to see her employ her best strategies to win—something. She wasn’t even sure what.

  “What do you think,” she inquired. “Collar up or collar down?”

  “Down,” I replied. “I guess.”

  “You guess, or you’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Sure down, or sure up?”

  Neither was good, actually. “Up.”

  “Ugh,” she said, ripping off the shirt. “What is wrong?”

  Maybe something was wrong, since my mother had asked the same question. The change in our friendship didn’t seem to bother Kate in the least. She didn’t seem to care that we were forging ahead blind and dumb, relying on habit in the absence of devotion. Maybe such breaches are obligatory in the biological sense. Maybe it would not do for girls to evolve beyond pubescent attachments, to exceed basic constancy.