Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  I didn’t know what he was getting at, but I was convinced of my parents’ irrelevance regardless. I thought of his house in Spring Lake, his apartment, those giant rhododendrons. And his chest, disfigured in a fight over his dead father. You didn’t need to know his parents to feel them; they were incorporated into the boy they’d raised. Whatever it was that had attracted him to me was the result of absence, not presence.

  “It’s not what you might think,” I said, though it was too late, really, to speak of myself. “It’s like something else, like never having been heard.”

  He laid his hand on my thigh, and for a moment we froze, immobilized by the insinuation of sex, by its promise to restore us to conditions of denial, to get us past the putrid business of relating. I focused on the dashboard.

  Rourke withdrew his hand with excessive caution, as if from a house of cards, and he lifted my face—reverently, like a chalice. “Something,” he said, kissing me, “about you.”

  His mouth, that mouth, nearing, advancing, seeking in vain to capture all that I did not have and could not give. His wrists joined beneath my chin, supporting my head. His thumbs pressed my cheeks.

  “Do you know what I feel?”

  I said yes, yes I did. I knew a kiss was not enough and sex was not enough and living with him was not enough. I knew the irony of having failed despite the extremes of our consummation, that it was not conceivable to reach the place we needed to go. Around his eyes were beautiful creases. His knuckle dug into my jawbone, forcing my head sideways, my ear to his lips.

  “And you,” he said. “You would do anything.”

  “Anything,” I said.

  I began to cry. I thought to wipe my eyes, but I liked looking as I felt, a thing half-dead. He covered my mouth with his palm, and he waited, breathing, driving himself back. “Then I’ll ask for what you can’t give,” he said. “Nothing.”

  The light from the moon off the ocean beat against the car like a stationary rain, bathing us in a pool of white, turning everything the color of bones. In such light I could see: I could see he was alive, extraordinarily alive, and I could see his will to persevere. I could see that he had abandoned that will when he’d met me, and that he needed to return to it. I could see the hatred that followed from his need, the rage at his defeat in wanting me. It was the fiend he believed himself to be that expressed itself in the light.

  We remained in the car until daybreak, and we had sex for so long that inside I hurt. I thought I understood. We had to go until there was no going back, until it was certain that we could not meet again without recalling the degradation of our final night, until all that we’d shared had turned irreclaimable. His eyes never stopped staring. They seemed to shed their own color, like casting off black. The wry malice in his face, the animosity, the challenge to his successor—could he see him? It seemed that he could see him. Rourke seemed to be leaving in me some message or a sign, changing me for good.

  In the end, the car was moving, and I was receding, every second thinning more. Through my mouth, my breaths sounded like those of a felled animal. I could hear the hydraulic thunder of the engine, like a sound from some contiguous time, and the fizz of the wind through glass. I raised one hand to my window. My hand was heavy like lead reaching into the dead sunrise.

  I dreamt I was hauling boxes through tides of sand. I was alone, and the terrain was rugged. I passed a figure suspended in the cliffs, red and robed and supported by string, warning me. Ahead of me was my destination, a camp—snakelike, ophidian, like a low, slinking train of lantern lights. From the camp I knew I could be seen walking alone. On the way, I met a woman. She was crying, and on her face were burnt braids. These have not disappeared, she said, since coming to America. Disappeared is a beautiful word, I thought—appeared, dis-appeared. I also met an eagle, decrepit and drooling. It said, Your mother was luxurious and your father was luxurious. I asked the eagle what I must be, and he said, What you were meant to be. The last part of the dream was about a figure, several figures melded to one. They lifted me; they pulled away; I levitated. There was an imposing wetness on my legs and around my neck. And hands, sure and soft, there but hardly there.

  I felt for my head—my hand couldn’t find it; it hurt to think where it had gone. I did not move from my back. I could not. Slowly and by degrees, questions formed in my mind, not many, only so many as my intellect could tolerate. I felt pressure in my pelvis. I wondered if I needed to pee.

  “What happened?” I asked, or tried to ask.

  A cup met my lips. “You had a fever,” he said.

  My eyes, they opened, and my hand drifted up to stop the sunshine. Rourke raised my shoulders inches from the pillow and shifted me to face away from the window. Beneath the sheets I was naked.

  “How long—”

  He said two days.

  Two days. I remembered speaking. “What did I say?”

  He moved to where I could see him easily. “You just slept.”

  I met his eyes; they had grown small. He’d spent two days alone with his trespass and his lust. Two days to think what it meant to abandon me, betray me. I wondered did he fuck me while I was sleeping.

  “What did I say?” I repeated.

  “You apologized,” he said, cautious not to tender his voice. “You said you were sorry.”

  He carried me to the bath, and set me down in the water, feet first, then his hands on my arms, helping me to sit. He sat too, on the rim of the tub. I straightened my legs and shivered as he trickled water from his hands onto my head, my back, my chest, and he helped me wash. I looked up, and he looked down, and there was an admission in his eyes that matched the feeling of admission in my own. It was not supposed to have ended this way, with him clinging so kindly to the shell of me and our eyes meeting. Had we left each other after the car, we would have had only the worst to sustain us. But the accident of my illness had ruined everything. His presence by the bed, the remedial caress of his hands, the way he’d nursed me like a dressless doll through an anxious sleep, the pouring of water, the pouring of water—I couldn’t think anymore. My heart was thoroughly broken.

  “I thought—I guess I thought you would go someplace close.”

  He looked at me carefully, so there could be no doubt, and he said, “It won’t be close.”

  Random Seasons 1982–1984

  Reason does not move in the circle of natural life.

  —SIEGFRIED KRACAUER

  We have lost naïveté.

  We can achieve nothing that will transcend

  the fatal games of appearances.

  —ALBERT CAMUS

  32

  This is where I falter, where I lose myself. This is where ideas of what is good and right upend, and time is dispersed, thrown down like leaves to be read. It’s difficult to say what happened. I know that my heartache was indescribable, the depth of my loneliness astonishing. I know that I worked very hard, and I never intended to hurt anyone.

  I cannot describe a life dispossessed of happiness. Episodes and events stand out as happy, though that happiness was the sort of euphoria you feel at a party you throw for yourself, when you say how much fun you’re having, but you’re sick inside with self-loathing, wretched all the more for having come so close. What I missed was something lost. What I’d lost was my very self. Perhaps I was resilient: perhaps if called upon by God, I might have survived fire or famine. But who is so able as to endure heartbreak? Heartbreak is a puzzle apart—pieces missing, pieces mutilated. It is to be consumed by the wait, and I was.

  I became someone new. She was a mystery. She was striking, like the frayed end of a live wire. She was reckless, because in order to drown, you need to hang by the degenerate edge of the sea. I remember her, pleading into the faces of friends, but for nothing. Who did they see when it was not herself that she showed? What was it they wanted when her lack outweighed her capacity, her desperation exceeded her gifts, her competence eluded her? If she was loved, it was because it’s easier to be lo
vable than to be honest. If she loved in return, and it’s not impossible that she did, it was a thin sort of love, emaciated and apt to vary, a love that would not alter his design or fracture his standing. Often I regretted the confusion I caused.

  Of course there were angels—there are always angels—people with the soul capacity to see beyond your mask, who come forward to say something meaningful to the purity in you. But no one possessed the power or the will to move me from my circle of sorrow.

  If there are rules for finding your way through darkness, I tried to follow them. I tried to behave my way out of pain. I gave away the little I had, unencumbered by a desire for reciprocation. I had no reason to lie, no agenda to keep me from listening. My small assurances were trusted, and it gave me a numb sort of gladness that those closest to me valued my attention. And yet that attentiveness was not without flaw; it was limited and erratic, governed by arbitrary factors such as dreams and the seasons, cars and passing shadows. I would be moved suddenly to sadness and detached from the requirements of time. A color or noise, a texture or smell. A reflection or a trivial wind, or sunlight receding menially against a building. Sometimes I would get almost to where I was going, only to turn home again. Back home, wherever it was that home happened to be, I would sit in the gentle coma of my affliction, thinking of Rourke.

  This is not easy. This is when my youth escapes me, when I age, with everything shutting down. These are years without accident or incident, when the end of each day is determined before it begins—when there is no possibility of seeing him.

  There are people you hear about, laborers who knead the guts of the earth for poor reward, people too indigent, too cowed by cold and hunger and lightlessness to object to the conditions of their existence. They drink themselves to sleep, and why not? Certain conditions are not meant to be tolerated, certain states are so deprived of tenderness that you discover the meaning of hell. Hell is only loneliness, a place without play for the soul, a place without God. How could there be God in loneliness when God is presence?

  33

  “You can’t bring that bird in here.”

  The bird twitches lamely in my scarf. Mark approaches from the couch, dropping his Wall Street Journal, crossing over.

  I don’t understand. I say, “It’s already here.”

  “You can’t keep it here. It’s full of disease.” He ushers me onto the terrace. “Set it free.”

  I look down twenty-five floors. I say, “It can’t fly.”

  “It’s a bird,” he says. “It’ll figure it out.”

  Mark doesn’t know about birds. We once saw a documentary about condor eggs stolen from their nests and hatched in captivity. The narrator said that those eggs were the last, and the risk of them being eaten by predators was very great. In the movie, puppet bird heads nursed chicks through rubber gaskets in incubators, and wildlife technicians scaled mountains to set fattened chicks in place of the eggs they’d stolen. The camera remained on the babies as they sat blinking and shivering, awaiting the likely rejection of their mother.

  “Why are you crying?” Mark had asked. “They’re being rescued.”

  He could not conceive of the depth of the mess. He could not see the calamity of a genetic last chance, of having your offspring stolen because you cannot be depended upon to provide. In his way, he tried to help.

  “Let’s fly to Washington, D.C.,” he suggested soon after, “to see the cherry blossoms. And the zoo.”

  On the airplane the stewardess in first class catered to us. Her tag said Jana. When Jana bent, she bent low. She served us croissants and fruit salad with real silverware and mimosas in real glass, and when we dropped things like sunglasses or sugar cubes, she retrieved them. Jana seemed to think she could get something from us, or anyway, from Mark, like maybe he would leave me on board and take her instead. Humans are remarkable in terms of need. We all have plans like maps in the mind.

  “Here y’all go,” Jana said, leaning down to hand me aspirin, revealing exquisite cleavage. The saturated color of her eyes bled into the white, making a subordinate color, which was spooky. If I had eyes like that, I might have become a stewardess too.

  In our room at the Hay-Adams, I played with the curtains, opening and closing them—White House. No White House. When Mark went for a run, I ended up in the lounge. The bartender seemed to think I needed a margarita, and after I finished it, I thought I needed another. There was a stack of cocktail napkins, and I had the urge to draw—not so much to draw as to feel the pen squish into the cushion of paper. I drew intertwining things—feathers and patchwork quilts, corncobs and tatters of burlap.

  Eventually Mark rushed in. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” He talked overloud as if to a dog he’d left tied to a parking meter. Mark doesn’t like people to think he is not tending to things. He over-tipped the bartender, then steered me toward the door. “So you’ve been drawing!” he said, loudly. He was always trying to get me to draw.

  In the early morning before the zoo, we went to the cherry blossoms. We were the first there, and it was nice to circle beneath the continuous, low, and protective parasol of flowers. The Washington Monument appeared unexpectedly here and there through the branches like a stylus referring to the infinitude of heaven. Actually zoo is incorrect. Zoos are conservation societies now, which is why there are pie charts and bar graphs in the doorways of every exhibit. But visitors who do not want to read about the importance of environmental equilibrium can still enjoy the sight of submission. They can see primal needs confront civility.

  Mark told me the animals have no memory of home. And yet I could see traces of savagery and pride. In order to persevere, they assign home to a position within themselves; they store it, safeguard it. By their eyes they say—We will return. Look into the eyes of anyone who has suffered diaspora and you will find a home, implicit and original, glinting like specks of starlight. You will envy them. You will wish their home were your home. You will know irony because you have nothing as substantial to assist your identity.

  Maybe home is elusive to so many because it is not a place we should be seeking, but a zone of self-determination. In order to arrive there, you must first relinquish false knowledge of a false self. You must allow your learned rendition of reality to turn back to conjecture, allow your life to grow small again, like someone beloved left at a railway station, growing narrower and shallower as the train pulls away, a hugeness waning. And then when it’s far gone, you can actually see it. Your home. Yourself.

  “There’s one there.” Mark pointed to a tiger. “Blanche.”

  She was high in the grass, the fake zoo grass. I saw her eyes and chocolate flame markings. I saw her panting at rest. It seemed to me that she was missing the moonlight. I wondered if she missed the moonlight as much as I missed drunken walls of cattails by the bay and barefoot walks across parking lots coated with the frailest layer of sand, blown like glitter from the palm of a giant hand. Could she still hear the thudding bluster of wind against the night the way I could still hear the roaring fortress of the sea? Did she too hate her hunger—when her appetite stirred, did a plate appear? The most awful hunger is the type that is satisfied too soon, before it moves you, before you are moved by it, before it becomes protracted and superior, a motivating business, making you honorable, graceful, clever—a hunter.

  I turn in from the terrace. The broken bird jerks and trembles. “I’ll keep it someplace small,” I say. “I won’t catch a disease.”

  Mark sees we have reached an impasse. On certain subjects I cannot be moved. “Let’s get Manny,” he declares brightly.

  Manuel the super is in his office in the swill-green subbasement, pouring black wax coffee from a thermos. He drinks ten cups a day. He is diabetic. When I said that to Mark, he asked how would I have come to know such a thing. I said I assumed that anyone who drinks that much coffee is not drinking it for caffeine but for milk and sugar. The next time Mark saw Manny, he asked him directly, and Manny confirmed my guess,
only he didn’t use the word diabetic. He said, “Technically, yes. I have a litty touch of The Sugar.”

  On an otherwise vacant metal desk is a miniature TV showing The Dukes of Hazzard. While Mark explains the situation with the bird, Manny glides evenly to the cradle of my arms, steaming cup in hand. “Twisted wing,” he surmises, using one pinky to check. His voice dips beneath Mark’s, speaking only to me. “Don’t worry,” he says with a wink. “She’s not broken.”

  There is a cardboard box in a cove behind the service elevator, and when Manny kicks it out, a thousand keys jounce like sleigh bells against his uniformed navy thigh. Manny builds a bed of rags. “We’ll keep it in the boiler room. I’ll tell Frank to lock the cats.”

  It takes four days for the bird to heal. Manny constructs a Popsicle-stick splint, though we never actually use it, and Frank, the assistant super, buys it a seed ball. It isn’t a very pretty bird, just a sparrow.

  “Technically,” Manny says, when we finally release it into the courtyard, “we could have freed her sooner.”

  Everything with Manny is always technically this and technically that. We watch the bird skip and flutter. Spring is here. There are crocuses. It scares me to see them poking out like little green horns. How did spring come again so quickly? It seems just to have passed. It’s strange, but I’ve lost track of birthdays and seasons; in my memory there are islands that have turned dark.

  “But it was happy,” Manny concludes. “Maybe it needed a vacation. It’s gotta be tough, being a bird like that in a place like this.”

  We drink Stolichnaya at Café Luxembourg, and we lament the decline of America. We blame groups. Blaming groups shows that you yourself are not involved but that you are intellectually connected, especially if the group you blame appeared in Sunday’s New York Times. When I say “we” I do not mean me, though I cannot exempt myself insofar as I am present. When a pack of wolves mangles a carcass, it doesn’t matter which one’s not eating that much.