Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  Rourke is present all around, clear in my memory and in my mind. All the areas where I remember him to have been are brought into focus. There are the seats we sat in on the night of that play, the night he said he was looking forward to the end of all this, the night he kissed me on the cheek at Dan’s house. And, though it is not cold, I feel cold, and I recall the way that I loved him, and the blind faith of seventeen. I was never afraid then, though I’m always afraid now, which is incorrect, since the worst has already happened. Perhaps at first he did not love me, perhaps he never loved me. But if he wanted me only for sex and readiness, at least that’s better than being with a man like Mark who wants you for reasons you cannot even fathom. Without the knowledge of why you are desired, you are powerless, an object. Love is not reciprocal.

  At The Palm we will eat meat, and I will be made to speak. Not much, maybe just what did I think of the show and is my food okay. “They’re going to mention Christmas at the Breakers,” Mark warned. “Try not to say anything negative about Florida. Or about being afraid to fly.”

  From the moment we arrive at the restaurant, Mrs. Richard Ross—Theo—will capture the attention of every decent gentleman, as she is breathtaking and ageless, with cascading blond hair and a sea-salted, rose-hip-oiled body, and silk blouses skimming skirts that go narrow to her knees. Over a succession of chilled vodkas, Mr. Ross will tell stories of celebrities and money, because that is what is expected of him, but when he digresses inevitably into tales of his youth, he will address me to the exclusion of the others. Unlike the others, I know what it is to have nothing and to lose everything. Unlike the others, I am not imperiled by my need or his nostalgia. He was just a man once, unprivileged, a fighter of sorts, much like Rourke, and I see that—that is to say, I grasp that, and he senses my grasp. He senses what I truly feel—that few things in life are more beautiful than the bareness of a man.

  In any event, he is kind, as is his wife. It’s kind of them to take care of me and to treat me like family when I am not. It is right to respect your children’s choices. And the Ross family is a nice family to have if you have no other.

  I stop by to visit my mother on a Sunday morning one weekend in East Hampton. I hear her through the screen door before I see her.

  “Well, the apple and the fly symbolize sin and evil,” she is saying speculatively. “And the cucumber and the goldfinch are redemption.”

  “I need seven letters,” my aunt says. “Symbol of Christian sway—how about cypress?”

  “Cypress is longevity,” Powell replies.

  “Try crosier,” my mother says. “The bishop’s staff, the shepherd’s crook.”

  “That fits,” Lowie says. “With an S or a Z?”

  I step in past the door, saying hi.

  Mom leaps to greet me. “Eveline!” Right away her face darkens. “Have you been sick?”

  Powell also stands. He kisses me and steps back, squinting as he regards me. “She looks good to me, Babe. Same as always.”

  “She just grew,” Lowie insists quietly, drawing her cane in front of her, but not getting up. “Come over here, honey. Sure you did.”

  “She has at least four inches on me, Low,” my mother remarks indignantly. “And she’s no heavier. She needs at least ten pounds.”

  Powell tips his head. “Maybe your mother’s right. Maybe.”

  Mom lectures me on the perils of health foods. She is biased against health foods. She thinks if you use them, you belong to a giant mind-control society. As if consumers of cigarettes, alcohol, sugar, and soda do not belong to a giant mind-control society.

  “You don’t have to work in the city this summer, Eveline,” she suggests. “Stay at home. We’ll install a bathroom in the barn. You can work at the Lobster Roll again.”

  It’s nice of her to think of me, but sometimes even the nicest plans are unbearable. “The gallery is fine,” I reassure them. “I answer phones and file slides and design invitations to openings. And New York is nice in summer with no one there.” In the mornings SoHo is like Paris, damp and hueless blue. “I’ve been thinking of calling Dad and Marilyn soon. Maybe we’ll go to the movies. Or try one of those walking tours they take, like through Harlem or Brooklyn Heights.”

  My mother’s brow contracts. She and Powell seem unmoved. But if she is contemplating my dishonesty, she’s also calculating the effort required to engage with it. She decides to let it go, and frankly, who can blame her? I wouldn’t want to try to talk to me.

  After catching up with all the stories over several cups of coffee, I walk the two miles back to the Ross’s Georgica house, depressed to leave but comforted somewhat for having been vigorously treated. I’m always handled so delicately by Mark and his family. Sometimes I find him staring at me the way you might stare at a fish you keep, like he’s convinced I don’t see him back. How ironic—Mark thinks he’s so considerate, so cultured, such a gentleman, and yet, I’m apparently so adversely altered by his company that people who have never worried about me before, not even when I was in really bad shape, suddenly worry.

  The city glints amiably beneath a mannerly drizzle, so I go slow, taking the long way from the Varick Street station to the East Village, pausing to read the plaques on brownstones, stopping at the record store on Carmine Street and the chess shop on Thompson. In the chess section of the newspaper, you read of cornering and abducting, lunging and capturing, yet here players sit face-to-face, inert and imperturbable, insouciantly grazing knees and sharing breath. The combination of mental vigor and physical inertia is weird, like the glacial way reptiles hunt. And the little chessmen are regal and fiendish, like from gory visions you might have had. I buy myself a knight.

  “A replacement?” the man asks.

  “Yes,” I say. “A replacement.”

  McSorley’s is so packed there’s not enough room to choke if you had to. Whenever a girl walks past the sign shop in tight clothes, Tony Abbruscato says to my dad, “Hey, Anton, take a look at this. There’s not enough room to choke in there if you had to.”

  Mark and his crowd are in back, half-sitting, half-standing at a table. There is the attorney they’ve all slept with, Marguerite, who’s been engaged unsuccessfully four times. Brett’s with his new girlfriend, Rachel, who is not a model but a former model. There’s a difference: a former model is just as vain as a working model, only a former model is just so happy to be out of the industry. Mark’s friend Anselm is with his fiancée, Helene de Zwart. They’re all calooshing their mugs like it’s Oktoberfest in Germantown. Mark’s tie is flapped over his shoulder as if blown by a strong wind. I know exactly the kind of night it’s going to be.

  They see me and wave. I unzip my coat. Brett leaps to his feet and croons loudly; he used to be in a band.

  “There she was just a-walkin’ down the street, singin’ …”

  The bar joins in,

  “Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do.”

  Right off, a couple of guys step in front of me, blocking my way, asking would I like to stop at their table instead of where I’m headed. Mark and Brett bust over, and there is nonsense shouting and miscellaneous intimidation, culminating in a few clapped backs and an upturned chair or two. As our group gets escorted out, Marguerite stands, fashionably posed, toe-deep in sawdust, clutching the milky top to her Chanel Pierrot suit, paying the tab. Marguerite always manages to be fashionable, even in the midst of picking up the bill during a bar fight. Shopping is her life. She will tell you all about the three Bs—Bendel’s, Barneys, Bergdorf’s—and how she never wears underpants because they corrupt the clean line of slacks. She rarely speaks to me, though she does stare an awful lot, and once I caught her in Mark’s bedroom, going through my drawers.

  The first time we met, she looked me over and exclaimed to Mark, “Au naturel!”

  Mark always apologizes for her, which is unnecessary. She’s one of those women who make you sad, no matter how scrupulously they dress or how much money they claim to make or what fabulous event they suppose
dly attended the previous evening. Of course there are women who have the opposite effect, inspiring complete admiration and awe. They wear blue jeans but no makeup and they have gorgeous eleven-year-old sons. All the best women have good skin and gorgeous eleven-year-old sons.

  Outside on a murky unlit Fifth Street, the group straightens their ruffled jackets and calculates what to hit next—Odeon for burgers or Chinatown for pork fried rice. Brett pees in a doorway. The urine makes the shape of a lizard on the ground.

  Marguerite takes my hand. “Oooh, how short your nails are! So easy to manage!”

  Mark picks me up at the gallery after lunch on Fridays and we go to East Hampton. Other employees stay until six, and some work through the weekend. I never asked for the abbreviated schedule; Mark arranged it. It doesn’t make me tremendously popular with the staff, though the salespeople are careful to remain friendly in case I have any power over Mrs. Ross.

  “You’re there to build a résumé,” Mark says, “not to make friends.”

  Each week he pulls onto the curb and bounds up to retrieve me because I don’t always recognize the car. There’s always a different car—he is perpetually testing, borrowing, buying, trading vehicles. The beloved 356B Porsche remains in East Hampton, except for those special occasions when he needs to make a dramatic impression. Whenever I hear that, I think of the first time he showed it to me—and how, yes, I was dramatically impressed.

  Today Sara Eden is there. She has just arrived from Washington, D.C., for a family reunion, so she is driving out with us. As Mark escorts me to the car, Sara steps out and moves toward me. I’d forgotten how beautiful she is. I hang my head slightly, feeling ashamed.

  She kisses me hello and her fingers make a circle around my wrist bone. “You’re white as a sheet. When was the last time you saw a doctor?” she whispers sharply once Mark is out of earshot.

  Mark drives south down the cobblestoned Mercer Street; he likes to take the Manhattan Bridge straight off of Canal. The architecture in SoHo deceives. Loading docks and freight elevators allude to industry, though there no longer is any. Behind the cast-iron façades, abandoned factories have been gutted and sterilized to make loft apartments. No one cares to think too long or hard about the long-term consequences of the loss of American manufacturing. Except my father, whose first job was at Shuttleworth Carton Company, a die-cutter on West Broadway, and who complains that moving industry to where it can’t be seen isn’t stopping industry. He always says that we’re still polluting the same goddamned planet.

  “Every idiot thinks they’re entitled to flushing toilets and a space station future, but nobody can make a cardboard box anymore,” he would lament when he and Marilyn walked west to SoHo to see me. “If we keep sending the dirty work overseas, what happens in the next depression?”

  My father is always talking about the next depression like you can set your clock to it, though if it’s coming, no one in New York seems concerned. They’re there to get what they can for themselves for as long as possible before cutting out to follow their dream. Chiseled blondes in Agnès B. miniskirts, hip Asian girls in obtuse shoes from Tootsi Plohound, and gray-haired gallery directors in tortoiseshell eyewear sell transparencies of Jesus and close-up photos of genitalia and elysian landscapes in oil copied off of overhead projections. At openings, girls with body-painted breasts serve drinks but fail to hold anyone’s attention. Faces whoosh at you as though ejected from fireplace bellows saying, What a fabulous show! During lunch, people swarm the pay phones like flies on fruit, waiting peevishly to call their answering machines, the latest must-have devices. They bang in numbers with lightning-fast accuracy, desperate for messages, for recognition, for distinction among the masses.

  Lately I’ve been thinking of Cuba. I imagine it to be the last original place. All you ever hear of Cuba is, There is no freedom there! Television is state-controlled! Yet for all the supposed freedom in America, there is a confounding deficit of ingenuity in terms of thought and taste. Style is dictated by the controlling influences and concerns of a mass marketplace. People are trained to be dutiful consumers—we all want the same stuff, not because it’s good or useful, necessary or lasting, but because we allow ourselves to be convinced that we can’t live without it. We forgo all logic of quality and durability.

  If you travel internationally, you will feel shocked by contemptuous talk of America. To hear your fellow citizens characterized as barbarian shoppers who know nothing of love, food, health, and religion, but everything of lawsuits, fast food, and guns, is to experience a national fidelity of which you may not have thought yourself capable. And yet, you’re at a loss for a convincing defense. It’s difficult to refute the accusation of misapplied liberties when rifles are sanctioned but public breastfeeding is not.

  At least in Cuba, television doesn’t pretend not to be state-controlled, and supermarkets don’t stock pre-decorated cakes. In the United States, supermarkets carry pre-decorated cakes, walls and racks of them viewable through specially molded plastic flip lids. There are probably factories where women and children labor without protection and bathroom breaks to make lids for those cakes, and that place is undoubtedly governed by exactly the sort of despots Americans vilify. It’s impossible that all the supermarket cakes are purchased and eaten—where do they go when they expire? Do they expire? Why do we need so many? What is so psychologically valuable to the American public about the idea of excess and its obvious corollary—waste?

  Sara has been to Cuba through an international program. She says I would love it.

  “Don’t say such things,” Mark says as he pulls onto the Manhattan Bridge. “You might not realize it, Sara, but Castro makes prostitutes of his women.”

  “Most men make prostitutes of their women, Mark,” Sara says pointedly.

  Mark might not be wrong about inequity in Cuba, because Cuba is a dictatorship. Then again, Sara cares about equity and Mark doesn’t. So, his attack on Cuba is insincere but valid, and her defense is sincere but incomplete. Talk is funny; it’s like a volley with no one getting anywhere; it’s better not to bother trying. If it’s blasphemous to imagine running away to someplace different, I remind myself that we are a nation of refugees, and so it would not be so very un-American to reject one orthodoxy for another in pursuit of more pertinent freedoms.

  “It’s beautiful, Evie,” Sara says fearlessly. Was she always so unafraid of him; I can’t recall. “It seems untouched by time. Everybody sings.”

  Quite often in summer, Mr. and Mrs. Ross will go out to Los Angeles to conduct business. During those weekends, the East Hampton house loads up with chic yuppie strays. Consuela loses dominion of the kitchen to heavyset debutantes with sweaters wrapped around undulating waists, and perfect Bordeaux-colored toenails poking out of high-heeled mules. They assemble tuna shish kebabs, chug Chardonnay, discuss diaphragm sizes, and play house to the combed-down boys on the patio. There’s always this squall of perfumes and constant talk of fat. I never knew until then that cherries were so fattening.

  “Everything has a fat content,” Mark’s cousin Luce says with a wink. “Everything.”

  Mark knows they don’t like me. He misses no opportunity to force them to endure public displays of affection. He defers to my judgment on the most mundane matters and calls me his better half. Frequently he will grab me and break into an impromptu slow dance. The girls flick mascara-crusted eyes over pink drinks with paper umbrellas that perforate rows of fattening fruits, and they watch us scornfully, thinking foul thoughts of what it is I must do to make him condescend to want me. At the lavishly set patio table, outfitted with Mrs. Ross’s best crystal, linen, and sterling, Mark interrupts any prolonged conversations I might be having with other men, saying things like, “I worked too hard to catch her, Aaron. I’m not about to lose her.” If it’s suggested that we join the others for the nightly skinny-dipping, Mark laughs loud. “Forget it,” he’ll say. “I’m not sharing.”

  Despite annual overhauls, the Ross house is
essentially the same as the first time I saw it, big and breezy with bound copies of entertainment and fashion magazines in the bookshelves along with the complete works of great authors such as Dickens and Twain and Austen, which are not really books but trompe l’oeil containers for stowing valuables. Of course, classic law texts and journals line the coniferous-green walls of Mr. Ross’s office, but they are of little interest to me as that room is too dismal to visit. Even when Mr. Ross uses it for private phone calls, he drags his armchair out into the hallway. It is the only fixed space in an ever-changing décor.

  “What the hell happened here?” Mr. Ross demanded of his wife after one particular renovation. He’d just returned from L.A. to find vines stenciled and painted on all the walls, connecting room to room. “Are those supposed to be leaves?”

  “Blakely calls it Byronic,” Mrs. Ross replied matter-of-factly. Blakely is the decorator.

  “Byronic!” Mr. Ross removed his jacket at the entrance and stepped tentatively into the living room, looking skyward into bogus foliage. “It looks like Pan might skip through!” He loosened his tie. “Now you listen to me, Theo. An East Hampton home is a country home, and a country home should have a country atmosphere. This place looks like a Lily Pulitzer whorehouse!”

  Mark won’t let Blakely near the cottage. He knows I like it as it is, serene as an attic in Europe, with the lambent tread of light coming everywhere at once like little footprints of little animals. He turns off the central air and we lie in front of fans, and through the parted shutters pieces of the beyond blow in—rushes of pollen and random butterflies and flower petals like baby bonnets. At night when the moon is high, I see them skate down the stray prongs of light, and I pretend they are fairies, dancing.