Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  He said to sleep if I wanted to; I didn’t want to.

  At the end of an exit ramp, a Volkswagen Beetle waited to turn. The GTO cruised down and closed in on it. We turned as well, left then right, going up a hump into a gas station. Rourke’s wrist flipped, and the engine shut, and you could hear a ring through the silence.

  “Better use the bathroom,” he said.

  Our doors closed simultaneously, whump, whump. As Rourke reached for the pump, a graying man in a windbreaker approached from the garage office. Al was stitched on his jacket opposite the Texaco logo.

  “Good morning, there,” Al said, setting his hand on the pump. “You’re out early.”

  Rourke said something I couldn’t hear, and Al laughed, answering, “You bet.”

  My head was hanging as I stepped over oil stains and embedded chips of glass in the asphalt. There were patterns, and in the patterns, gleaming variations—tiger likenesses and fighter pilots. If you looked, you could find them. Also I saw my legs, my knees and calves, and beneath them the carob dirt unpacking, smoking up as I walked, adhering in a film to my bare feet and ankles. In my hand were my shoes from the graduation party the night before. I put them on before going into the bathroom.

  The dented steel door creaked mightily. I rinsed my hands and face with cold water and combed down my hair with my fingers. I wondered what Rourke felt like to wait for me. He’d never been mindful of my needs before. I hoped he wouldn’t think less of me for them. Being in love is like leaning on a broken reed. It is to be precariously balanced, to teeter between the vertical and the horizontal. It’s like war: it’s to demand of one’s sensibilities the impossible—to expect paranoia to coexist with faith, chance with design, to enlist suspicion insensibly in certain regards and suppress it blindly in others.

  He was inclined against the hood on the driver’s side. His arms were folded, and his legs were stretched out and crossed at the ankle. His feet were on the oval island that housed the pumps. My stomach felt weak to see him again, the fullness of his shoulders, the gesture of his body. When I neared, he looked over, turning because he knew to turn, because of messages sent between the sex of us. Al spoke, and Rourke answered, not taking his eyes off me. I knew what he experienced when he watched me walk, because I felt my body’s response. I felt myself become at once everything I was originally and everything he had taken and touched. I felt my skin assume the burden of the sunrise. I felt the luxury of flesh beneath my dress. My lips were chapped and my hair damp and unbrushed, and when I stepped, my foot touched down with the beneficence of angels. In my heart dwelt a primitive kindness. Mostly what I felt was relieved to live for his regard.

  “I don’t know which is prettier, young lady,” Al said, “daybreak, or you.”

  Rourke stretched back across the hood to hand me a Coke. He must have gotten it from the soda machine while I was in the bathroom. I cracked open the can and drank. The sugar was shocking.

  “That’s no breakfast,” Al chided as we climbed into the car. He rested one arm on Rourke’s open window. The other waved in some unseen direction over the roof. “Try Adrienne’s—it’s a truck stop up the road.” The hand on the window was mottled and chapped, with the thumb splaying stiffly. I found myself hoping that Al had been in love once, that when he was in his prime, he fulfilled it.

  Rourke thanked him, and as we turned onto the service road, he asked if I was hungry.

  I told him no, not really.

  No one had been awake when we’d stopped at my mother’s house after Alicia’s party. Rourke parked at the head of the driveway, and our feet made even sounds on the gravel as we walked, though his sounds were heavier than mine. I hadn’t asked him to accompany me, and he hadn’t offered. It was just that when I got out of the car, he got out also, and when we met at the hood, he took my hand. Of course we would not encounter resistance on the inside. In my mind it was not a possibility or even a consideration. My entire life had led to that moment of autonomy, and I was grateful for the authority I’d been given over myself.

  Rourke opened the back door to my bedroom for me, propping it with his arm and drawing me through. He looked around sweepingly, assessing everything. As the things he viewed came to life, these things as I had known them turned dead. I knew without question that I would never again live at home. If I was mistaken, if, in fact, I would be driven back, it would be because I had failed or because I had brought failure upon myself. I would not fail. He stood with me by my dresser, him leaning on the wall and me opening drawers. I emptied out the art supplies from a small canvas tool bag, and in it I packed two T-shirts, a pair of jeans, a pair of shorts and a dress, my favorite sweater, one pair of shoes, a bathing suit.

  “Anything else you need,” he said, “we’ll pick it up.”

  Highways narrowed as we shot down the New Jersey coast, taking the Garden State past Asbury Park, Ocean Grove, Sea Girt, and then numbered routes that turned to single-lane stretches flanked by hilly embankments with painted houses. At the shore we trailed the flight of the boardwalk, and a hot wind caressed my face. I wondered if I climbed through the window, would I float. It seemed like the air out there formed a belt of heat and salt, a parallel place to crawl upon.

  “This one’s for Leeanne out in Mountainside,” the deejay said. Then came “Bennie and the Jets.”

  She’s got electric boots, a mohair suit,

  You know I read it in a magazine.

  I was changing my clothes. He was driving, and he’d told me to.

  I reached through my bag for my bathing suit, and when I found it, I put it on, sliding my dress above my hips and pulling up the bottoms, and slipping the shoulder straps off my shoulders and tying the top piece around my chest. In the side-view mirror I could see the elongated hollow at the base of my neck, the downward pools of my collarbone, the rules of my chest, and above that ladder, my face. New lines marked the skin beneath my eyes, preclusive new lines. I pushed back my hair. Somewhere were my barrettes, in the seat or on the floor.

  We pulled into a parking lot at Point Pleasant and stepped out onto the already steaming tar. I could smell the unctuous glue of it. We walked up the ramp, and at the top I shaded my eyes from the glare. The boardwalk spilled out in either direction like a carpet, like a platform that made you spectator to the sea. It seemed to extend along the entire coast. I imagined it dipping intermittently—tucking underground, coming back up, like sewing stitches. It was awful, yet somehow democratic, with all the people there talking and reading, walking and running. There were old people strolling with cups of coffee. You hardly ever saw old people at the beach in East Hampton.

  Near the water he dropped the towels he’d carried from the car. The sand was not like the sand at home; it was flatter and darker. I pulled off my dress and waded into the ocean, going until my feet didn’t touch. Rourke was sitting contemplatively in the morning light; the ice-blue dress shirt he’d worn since the party was half-open and wrinkled. Behind him the arcades and game galleries were creaking uniformly to life, forming a low-rising headland of noise and neon, despite the early hour. The sky ride and the photo booth, the Ferris wheel and the merry-go-round, the batting cage, the signs for strollers and umbrellas for rent—the antediluvian relics all securely fastened, looking as though nothing short of a flood could remove them. He undressed and entered the water also, and soon his arms were around my waist. I wrapped myself around him. He carried me farther out, just the two of us, and water, water all around.

  When I opened my eyes from sleep, I knew where I was but not how long it had been. It had gotten very hot. I could hear a common whirr, a public rustle. My head was heavy from the heat; I could hardly raise it. Through the glare I saw that hundreds of people had settled around us while we slept. I reached for Rourke, but he was gone; alongside me in the sand was the impression left by his body. He must have been waiting for me to wake up, because exactly when I wished for him to reappear, he did, coming from the direction of the water, blocking light a
nd noise like a spread cape or carbon overlay. Moisture traveled from his skin, and cold.

  He kissed me. I could taste salt from the sea. He said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  I stood and went to the water to cool off. I was glad it was still June. In June, nothing bad happens; old songs sound new again and all of summer remains. Only hours had passed since we’d started, I reminded myself, and hours is not so far in. When I got back, he was in his jeans and shirt, and the towels were draped over his shoulder.

  The way we walked was smooth, two of us moving as one. His arm cut across my back, high to low, and his fingers gripped the handle of my hip bone. I observed the things around me—the Mechanical Gypsy Fortune Teller, Jenkinson’s Aquarium, the Daytona Driving Game, and those stuffed cats you knock down with softballs—Three down wins choice. Dolls must be flat. There were the rides that once you died for—the Whip, the Ski Bob, the Swings. There were fat ladies in skirted bathing suits and peddlers hawking baby hats with names in Day-Glo toothpaste script, racks of flexible sunglasses, and raffles—Ten chances to win a red Corvette. And that game with the gun that shoots water into the clown’s mouth with the bell that screeches long and hard and forever-seeming. Through the waves of heat came the nauseating gum smell of honey-roasted peanuts and the greasy snap of sausage and the crack of frying zeppole. Children waving beehives of cotton candy and picking carameled apple from their teeth, going, “Let’s go to the bumpa cauz.”

  At a storefront with the sign “Psychic Readings by Diana,” a girl in a tangerine miniskirt and a bikini top leaned in the arch of the curtained door and called to us. “Come, come.” Rourke ignored her, and I felt relieved, though I wasn’t sure what I was afraid she’d say.

  It was a Sunday, so adults were everywhere—leather-skinned women squinched into belly shirts and stripped-down guys with chains and nesty chests and meandering scars. All of them occupying the top of the food chain, all of them immune, impermeable, oblivious—the cutting edge of evolution.

  We slowed when we approached a low brick corner building with no marking other than faded red letters at the top that were modern and straight and missing in part. C-R-I-T-E-R——N. As we neared the entrance, we saw a couple of guys with gym bags go in. One stopped when he saw us, and he waited at the unmarked door. He was overbuilt so his head appeared smaller than it actually was, and his hands did too, perhaps because of the thickness of his wrists. His eyes were bloodshot. He had red hair and red freckles beneath random bruises, and his ears were knuckled up like knotty growths. His jaw was enormous on the left. It looked as though it had just been broken.

  Rourke said, “Looking good, Tommy.”

  Tommy ignored Rourke, confining his gaze to me. He checked me out like I was meat and he was shopping. I wasn’t afraid with Rourke there, but still, I didn’t like to think of those freckled hands.

  Rourke pulled out an envelope and handed it to Tommy. “Give it to Jimmy.”

  “Not goin’ in?” Tommy mumbled. It sounded like gargling.

  “Not today,” Rourke said.

  Tommy shook the envelope near one weird ear. “What is it,” he chuckled, “a Dear John?”

  Rourke stepped forward twice, coming close to Tommy, dangerously close. He inspected Tommy’s jaw, first the good side, then the bad. Tommy stood frozen. He reminded me of a dog getting sniffed by another dog: it was in his best interest to be polite, but he might decide to bite anyway.

  “Not a chance,” Rourke said, and he took my waist, pulling me away.

  On the way back to the car, Rourke bought two ice-cream cones, and we sat in the shade of the carousel house to eat them. I wasn’t hungry, so I gave what I couldn’t finish to Rourke, and we watched the ride go round. Something about it made me sad—the riderless horses, the exhausted wheeze of the calliope, and the greasy flicker of the mirror pendants.

  He pulled me close. There was a space between his arm and his chest that seemed to have been made just for me. It was warm and I could feel his heart beat. “What is it?” he wanted to know, his voice soft and unobstructed, free from the burden of other listeners.

  “It was such a long time ago,” I said, “when I was little.”

  We walked along the water’s edge the rest of the way, silently collecting pieces of beach glass that we found in the sand, jagged peppermint treasures. I gave them to him, and he put them into his shirt pocket, saving them for me, for later, which was nice. Nice to think there would be a later. Back at the car, he kissed me, and a breeze picked up out of nowhere. A wish, I thought, granted.

  The house was the color of silver wheat. It was upright and immaculate, Victorian but modest. Some of the houses we’d passed really drew attention to themselves, but not this one. Its face was guarded by mammoth rhododendrons, with clusters of pink flowers set high and low, quivering like choirs of butterflies on the bendable ends of branches. I wondered about his parents, and as I did, Rourke became clearer to me: it obviously had taken special talent on their parts to manage something so wild.

  The car idled at the front of the driveway while he emptied the mailbox. He walked back over, sifting through papers, extracting certain pieces and examining one envelope in particular before getting in, wedging the pile on the dashboard, and easing the car to a stop at the driveway’s end. He turned off the engine, and we sat. And it was nice, and it was strange, because though it was not home, it was as good as home, and in fact, it was better—it interested me more.

  A brick walkway led from the car to the backyard, passing through a wooden gateway. On the other side was a garden in full bloom, enclosed on three sides by a high wall of yew. There were birds, their calls colliding, creating a miniature symphony of sound. Rourke reached into the iron frame of an outdoor light fixture and withdrew a key, then he unlocked the door to a ground-floor apartment.

  I followed him into a sun-filled studio. The mottled plaster walls were off-white and bare, and the woodwork was charcoal-gray. It smelled like recent construction, as though it had just been renovated. To our left, two glass-paned doors opened onto a brick patio, and in the corner opposite the entry, there was a modest kitchen with new appliances.

  He set my bag on top of a stack of packed cardboard boxes that lined the entry. I figured they were from when he moved out of his house in Montauk the previous month, though I supposed it was possible he had not unpacked because he was leaving again to go somewhere else. Rourke moved to the kitchen counter and rifled through the remainder of his letters, popping a few apart. The room was hot, so I stepped around the couch and unbolted the doors to the yard, splitting them for air.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, and he disappeared down the hall.

  When he left, a certain heaviness in me was alleviated; I felt my consciousness seep back into my body. Sometimes you see people on television get awakened from hypnosis. There’s a dumb blink followed by an apish inner inquiry as to how long they’ve been witless and what degradations might have occurred. If it is a cartoon or a comic, there are stars about the eyes.

  I just remained in place at the patio doors, waiting for him to return. Watching the day lower like the curtain on a play you wished would never end. I could hear the summertime nothingness, the haunting children’s voices, advancing, then waning. And yet, I did not slip beyond Rourke’s field of influence. It was as if we were sharing the same web or net: no matter what position he occupied, I would be moved.

  His voice called my name; I met him in the corridor outside the bathroom. He was wet with a towel around his waist. On his hips and on his sides, the muscles were like cords and knots. There were drops remaining on his chest; I touched one, and the water parted. The shower was still running, so I passed Rourke, undressed, and stepped in. The heat of sunset warmed the bathroom window, and also the stall.

  When I came out, he was there, dressed in jeans, holding a towel. He dried my neck and shoulders, then wrapped me up and drew me in, leaning his face on the top of my head, and I began to cry. When the tears
came, we did not speak of them, either of us. Maybe it was the closeness of him, the excruciating nearness. Maybe as a vessel I was too delicate for a love so whole: it felt beyond my capacity to keep. Hanging limp over the doorknob was a dress that we’d bought on the way home from the beach—rayon red and moody, with a high waist and a halter top. He held it for me to step into. The zipper tugged at the curve of my back. In the mirror we were enigmatic, my eyes so tragic, my dress so low, and Rourke, a triumph of masculinity. He drew on a navy sweater with a short zipper at the neck, and he watched as I combed back my hair with my hands, put on lipstick, and fastened my shoes. I felt no shame before him. Shame was a luxury. We had no time for shame.

  Everyone stopped and stared when we walked into Mineo’s. Waiters made way, flattening their chests and inclining their heads. Rourke escorted me through the cramped space, the broad heat of his palm making an impression on the small of my back. People were waving from a booth in the rear. They seemed to be expecting us. Rourke introduced me to a woman named Lee who was pretty like a doll, and her husband, Chris, who was twice her size and who had skin like polished metal. I’d never seen skin like that. Later Rourke told me it was that way from taking steroids. The other guy was Joey, Rob’s brother, whom I’d met the night before in East Hampton.