Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  My mood was lapsing. I’d lost the sensation of being connected to Rourke, and that loss dispossessed me of motive and prudence. I forgot who I was and what I was doing and what was the point of everything anyhow. I had the idea of walking through to the rear exit and then out. It would have been funny to go without telling him, except for the part about no car. I felt unhinged: if things couldn’t get better, I wanted to make them worse. I felt myself become acquainted with my capacity for extremes. I had the idea I could be completed by risk. I began to like the bodies touching mine.

  Rob handed me a beer over my shoulder and gestured with his chin to a vacant booth on the far side of the partition. Together we cut around, and when I inched across the seat on my knees to the farthest end, he followed. Then came Kate, and last Rourke on the end opposite me. Mark swung a chair to the outside of the table and he straddled it. Rob arranged the clutter left by previous occupants, building a meticulous mountain of plastic, paper, and glass.

  “So, Monday’s D-day,” I heard Mark say to Rourke. “Departure day.”

  Rourke said, “Yeah, Monday’s the day.” I wondered if Rourke was happy when he talked or not. He didn’t seem happy.

  “Too bad. We could have all been out here together this summer.”

  “We still can be, Mark,” Rob said. “We’ll just stay at your parents’ house—for free.”

  Mark laughed. “Anytime you need a place, you have one.”

  I was peeling the foil from the neck of my beer bottle. Rob nudged me. “You know what they say about people who do that?”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “That they’re sexually frustrated.” He winked and took a swig of his own drink.

  “I haven’t found that to be true,” I told him. “But I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Ha!” Mark said. “She got you!”

  Kate whispered to Rourke. He inclined his head obligingly. A slender lock of hair fell by his face, skimming with caution the lashes of his right eye. With her he seemed easy, approachable—a boy, a brother, a son, a friend. It pained me to see him that way. I could not evoke that in him. I smiled despite my epic disgust, because it was impossible not to admire the handsome look of him. Kate said he was nice. Maybe that was true, maybe to her and to all the world he was.

  Hips moved across the dance floor exactly at the height of my eyes. The hips belonged to normal people having normal fun. I wished I were one of those people. I wished I’d left the building when we’d first arrived, when I’d had the chance. I wished there was a way to leave but stay. That’s the appeal of drinking and drugs—leaving but staying. It was good that I didn’t have anything more than a beer. Sometimes you see some girl slooped up against a wall, half-unconscious. Basically she felt the way I did, only she’d gotten her hands on liquor and drugs. I looked around for Mick Jagger. He’d been to the Talkhouse several times. That would be good, to see Mick Jagger—you know, like, not a totally wasted night.

  Mark stood. “I’m gonna take a walk,” he said. “Be right back.”

  The table felt different without him, uneven, as if missing a critical component. I didn’t know Mark well enough to name the missing part, but I suspected I’d lost an ally.

  I stood, saying I was going to take a walk too.

  Rob shifted. His instinct was to accompany me, but he had Rourke to consider. Rob would never disappear with me, especially if it meant leaving Kate and Rourke alone together. They could all get up, but Rob would never give up a good table.

  Mark was at the jukebox. I walked toward him and looked down into the meadow of luminous tags.

  “I knew you’d come,” he said.

  I believed him, though I didn’t even know I’d come. Having exercised my freedom, my freedom felt good.

  “Pick some songs,” he suggested.

  My finger floated above the glass. “M-Five. A-Seven.”

  He inserted the quarters, pushed the buttons, then faced out, watching the dancers, not really watching. “That’s quite a dress,” he said, his lips hardly moving.

  “It cost three dollars,” I confided, still reading the tags.

  “That works out to about a dollar an inch,” he said, looking at me for just as long as he thought I could bear. There was a slippery quality to him, like if you set down an object it would slide. “Next time I see you, I hope you’ll be wearing a two dollar dress.”

  He was no more than a foot away, in the near darkness. I looked away.

  “He can’t see,” Mark said, cutting straight through to the place I was. “Don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “Oh, you want him to see.”

  Actually, I didn’t want that.

  “If you’re uncomfortable,” Mark said, “let’s go back.”

  I didn’t want to go back. I wanted to go farther into the crowd; I wanted to embed myself. There was a post between the jukebox and the bathrooms, and I moved to it. I leaned back and the wood pushed between my shoulder blades. Mark propped his arm on the post alongside my neck, facing me, making a barricade between me and all the rest. I liked the wall he made.

  The jukebox finished a song, then whirred to a new start. It was the Four Tops.

  Bernadette. People are searching for—

  the kind of love that we possessed.

  Some go on searchin’ their whole life through

  And never find the love I’ve found in you.

  “Do you know the lead singer’s name?”

  “Levi Stubbs,” Mark said matter-of-factly.

  I reached for his sleeve. “Listen,” I said, adding his name, “Mark. I love this part. The false ending. The way he screams her name. Bern—a—dette.”

  Mark nodded as we listened.

  “I’ll never be loved like that.”

  He shook his drink, looking into it. “I doubt that.”

  I wondered why he was there. There must have been a reason. I asked, “Why are you here?”

  “In East Hampton? My parents have a house here.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “You mean—tonight.”

  “Yes, tonight.”

  “To see you,” he said. “To find you.” That’s when I first saw the eyes. They were gunmetal gray and speckled like the underside of certain fish. His hair was straight and sand colored, long around his face. I eased the glass from his hands and swallowed some of what was inside, coughing up a little cranberry. “Would you like one?” he asked.

  “No, thank you,” I told him. “I’ll just share yours.”

  The song changed and he drew me to the center of the blackened floor. Before pulling me in, he said something, I wasn’t sure what, but I smiled and held him, laying my head on his shoulder, grateful that he had stepped up and given me shelter when I needed it. Being in a bar is somewhat like being homeless if you cannot be with your friends. You wander and linger and land wherever there’s room and heat, sometimes getting in trouble, sometimes not.

  Tell me somethin’ good, tell me that you love me, yeah.

  Mark was good, better than Denny. Maybe it just felt better to dance with Mark than with Denny. He wrapped one hand around my waist, bracing my back, and our hips affixed, bone to pelvic bone.

  Your problem is you ain’t been loved like you should

  What I’ve got to give will sure enough do you good.

  We oscillated, bending and rising in controlled, compact arcs, our torsos hanging slightly back. My left arm dangled loosely, my right arm held him. There was resistance in my abdomen and a tautness in my legs, and our shadows trespassed long against the tables, transfixing the crowd, restoring Rourke’s customarily heavy countenance. I was glad. It hadn’t been good to see him happy, knowing for certain he was not.

  By the time we returned, Kate had moved into Rourke’s seat and Rob had slid into mine. Rourke had taken Mark’s chair and turned it away from the dance floor. Rob was bending over a plate, halfway finished with a burger. There was the broad smell
of onions.

  Mark gestured to the dance floor. “Kate?”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “Please, no.”

  “Thank God,” Mark said, pretending to collapse back against Kate, nudging her farther in.

  “What’s wrong? Need a bed?” Rob said derisively, not meaning Mark, but me and Mark.

  Mark ignored the comment. He reached across for Rob’s plate, lifted the bun, and said, “Brave man.” I could see that Mark was not the type of person who would waste time with innuendo and sarcasm or who would let anything work at cross-purposes to determination. I’d never thought of sarcasm as a waste of time, but it’s true—it is. And Mark was fast. He’d reached me quickly, quicker than anyone. I hadn’t even noticed him coming.

  I set my left knee on the edge of the banquette, and my right thigh pressed into the rim of the table near where Rourke was seated. The waitress delivered a drink to Mark, which he pushed in my direction, and I pulled out a few pieces of ice to eat. My stomach swelled in tandem with my chest. Rourke leaned back in his chair and stared into the middle distance. I thought I knew what he felt. He felt what I’d felt the day I’d seen him in the gym. The time his legs came on either side of me and the lip of his underwear was visible beneath his shorts. When he was wet and there was the smell of sweat. I’d wanted to leave, but I couldn’t move.

  “You know,” Kate said in a sarcastic voice, “there’s a hole in your stockings.”

  Everyone looked. I raised the hem to see—the dress didn’t have far to go. Kate was right, though I didn’t like the way she’d called attention to me. I took the stirrer from Mark’s glass and inserted it into the hole, jerking my wrist. The crossed edge of the stick scratched my leg, and the nylon shredded like a limited web.

  Kate said, “Christ, Evie!” and Mark said, “Shit,” and Rob muttered something I couldn’t hear.

  Rourke managed to express gross disinterest. I didn’t care what he thought or what anyone thought. If he wanted to leave me free, he could not exactly object to the applications of my freedom. I was no more than the shameless thing they’d made of me—a woman, a fiend, my own lowest form. There was a trippingness to it that I liked, a capability I’d been missing. Why remain polite but powerless, in love but a beggar?

  “You take the front,” Rourke directed Mark over the roof of the car, then he propped the driver’s seat forward and took my arm, guiding me in behind him.

  “Hey, no complaints from me,” Mark said. “It’s cramped as hell back there.”

  He sped back through the fog. We were going so fast I wondered if we would crash and disintegrate into mist. Kate was on the other side of Rob, sleeping lightly. Rob remained serious and silent, staring ahead through the windshield from his place in the back as though he might have to grab the wheel and take over at any instant. Mark just kept chatting professionally with Rourke, who kept replying, professionally as well.

  I wished it was winter. In winter you can scrape ice on the inside of your window. I wanted to scrape ice. I wanted my window to be coated in that shattery type of window frost. I breathed onto the glass and with my finger spelled out my name—Eveline. Was I still me when I did not feel like me? Was I the girl my mother bore, my father adored, the one Jack loved? Jack. I thought an unthinkable thought, something about asking for mercy, about going back in time, back to him.

  The car thrust to a laborious and inexact stop at the intersection by the post office in East Hampton. The placid mechanical hum and puckered clicks from the streetlight slit the air, and the bloody electric haze it made warmed Rourke’s face as he looked left into the dead May night. Though he was in profile, I could see his eyes. I could see his fear, and in it, the place where I resided.

  Rob’s voice came, soft under his breath, breaking through to Rourke, “Green light.”

  When we pulled into the driveway, Mark and Rob stepped out of the car, with Mark helping Kate, asking when she thought she would be heading to college.

  Rourke leaned down and gave me his hand, lifting me out. In the slender murk produced by our bodies, his hair touched my hair and his breath mixed with mine. When I turned to go, his left hand caught my waist, cupping it, his body pushing up behind me. Bending slightly, his right hand came down around my front to grab my right inner thigh. I was lifted slightly as his fingers found the run in my stockings, and through the shreds he found my skin, clutching up into obscurity.

  27

  The families of graduating seniors emptied out of cars, sheepish in uncommon splendor, like milling clans at the origin of a parade. There is something spent about the families of teenagers; possibly it’s the look of exhausted loyalties. Perhaps it’s only right that we grow overbig in someone else’s space. Perhaps we need to tire and differentiate, leave and adapt.

  “Hey, Evie,” people kept saying, and I kept saying, “Hey.”

  Sara Eden joined me on the curb in front of the school, where I was sitting, waiting for the ceremony to begin. Sara looked especially pretty all dressed up. Her eyes sloped at the farthest edges, like the opened wings of a tropical bird. Her skin was rich dark brown like a friar’s robes, her teeth perfectly even. A car engine quit alongside us. Sara waved. I listened to the tinkling fuss of her bracelets. “That’s my cousin. Marika.”

  “What a pretty name,” I said. “Marika—like a spice.”

  Sara pulled her braids back incompletely on the side nearest me in the disarming way that some girls have. Though I had not felt sad before, with Sara there I felt sad. She was going to Georgetown, in Washington, D.C., and D.C. is one of those places people never come back from. They don’t necessarily stay, but they almost always go from there to elsewhere. Sara was asking me about Alicia’s graduation party. I’d already said no, to Alicia and also to her, but it occurred to me that I might not see either of them so much anymore.

  “So what do you think? I’ll pick you up at five, okay?”

  Sure, I said, five is fine.

  I’d remained in place for fifteen days after Rourke moved away, not leaving my house, moving only to touch the things I knew he’d touched—the door frame, the bookshelves, the couch, the paper dolls and the sailboat I’d made, the section of the kitchen counter on which he’d leaned. I kept my schoolbooks on a windowsill in my mother’s bedroom upstairs, where I labored to observe beyond the greening leaves the street his car had traveled. There was a chair, petite with a round swirling mauve seat and painted black wood. It was not a comfortable chair, but it was there that I sat every day until dark, except for brief hours at school, briefer hours in bed. Everyone was good to me and kind, deferring, always deferring. They seemed afraid for me, though it wasn’t necessary. They didn’t know me. They didn’t know that my path had been decided, that when I moved through the present, it was as if through a paraffin corridor. I would have spoken of such things, but it was likely that I would not have been heard. When anyone asked what I was doing, I would say, studying. If no one answered the ringing phone before I got to it, I would lift the receiver and drop it. It was always just someone calling, just a person, not Rourke.

  From a quilted, sequined sack, Kate withdrew a tangle of bobby pins. She secured her graduation cap, tilting her head into the light at funny mannequin angles, contemplating space beyond the cafeteria window. An impeccable razor line separated the two halves of her hair. How long ago had the strands at the bottom been by the scalp? Maybe the ones on the bottom were there last time Maman cooked veal for dinner. I’d never thought of hair length as a measure of time. It’s sickening actually, the way hair sprouts from pores, squeezing up like famished worms even after a body is dead.

  “Still in a bad mood?” Kate asked.

  On my hand I was drawing a cup. I had no idea why a cup. I was looking down, trying to avoid the last circus of my peers. A red construction paper sign on one of the doors had been changed from PICK UP GOWNS HERE to PICK UP GIRLS HERE. Paulie Schaeffer and Mike Stern were wrestling by the kitchen, Dana Anderson was applying a second coat of
nail polish, and Regina Morris was crying because her school ring had dropped behind a radiator—janitors were on the way. Marty Koch was drinking an orange soda. Dressed in his gown he looked like the nebbish cousin of a vampire. Others milled wistfully—Kiki Hauser and Min Kessler, Adam Sargent and Lynn Hyne—each borne down with memories, and yet each preparing to step experimentally into the half-light of a new life.

  Cameras were flashing—zic-zhing, zic-zhing.

  Have a great summer!

  Good luck out there!

  See you next life!

  Jack appeared. I didn’t see from where. He thrust his gown at Kate. “Fix this piece of shit. The snap’s busted.”

  “I can’t believe you broke it already,” she said.

  “The snap sucks. All snaps suck. Snaps are for fags,” Jack said blackly.

  As Kate hunted for a safety pin, he turned to face me. It was like meeting a puppy I’d given away. I found myself searching for signs of neglect. Wine-colored sacs hugged the undersides of his eyes, attaching like nesting cocoons, like bloody slings. The knuckles of his right hand were badly scraped. Skin flapped over in certain parts and was missing entirely in others. The blood looked dry but not old. His T-shirt said, It’s cool to love Jesus. I was surprised to see him. I had not expected to see him.

  “How are you?” he wanted to know.

  “I’m okay.” I extracted a strand of hair from the corner of his mouth. “You? You okay?”

  “Me? Oh, yeah, sure. I’m okay.”