Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  We dance until dark, moving the way the Jamaicans do. The men press their penises against the women’s thrust-back asses, and the whole place is a party. From outside you could probably see the little shack shaking, going side to side.

  Back at the hotel there is the sanitized rendition of Jamaican culture. We reenter the walled and gated property, return the motorcycles, and end the evening with a civilized stroll by the water’s edge. We stop at the bulletin board to sign up for upcoming activities. The next day we take the glass-bottom boat tour at ten, and in the afternoon I rest by the pool while Mark goes with Richard to work on his swing. I don’t ask if swing means tennis swing or golf swing. In New York, it means squash swing. Dinner that night is followed by a rum punch festival in front of a calypso show with steel drums, limbo dancing, and crab racing. The crabs get soaked in beer. I don’t like the crabs part. It makes me sick, but I stay anyway, because, just because.

  Dudley arrives with a cup of Blue Mountain Coffee for me. His grandmother drinks several cups a day, he told me one afternoon, and she is ninety-six. Dudley is our waiter; every day and night we get him. He is soft-spoken, clear and proud, with prominent cheekbones upcurving like stripes beneath his eyes. He is a king from another time. Now he clears tables and rectifies silverware, making all things parallel and perpendicular. When he puts down the china cup, the act is delicate, though if he wanted, he could crush it. I look at Dudley and am overcome by shame. I honestly don’t know what to do about the nauseating fact of myself. He understands, I think. He nods to me, knowingly, quietly, pushing the coffee cup closer.

  The world beyond our suite is silent. The sea is not far beyond our terrace, but I can’t hear it because the sea doesn’t move where we are. There is just the sound of the ceiling fan over the bed blowing my hair and the ribbons of my dress. Tick, tick, tick.

  Mark tosses down a box, and the bed rocks. It is long like a pen box, only heavier. Unless it’s a very nice pen. I try to remember the weight of a nice pen, but my mind is a mess from rum and Halcions. I can’t remember how many pills I’ve had. Nothing can eradicate the images of the flat sea and stifling air, the coarse sand and ever-present air-conditioning, the walled hotels and unhappy island inhabitants.

  “Open it,” Mark says.

  I roll from my back to my side, my head coming last. The hinges on the box snap to bite. Like crocodile jaws. Inside I find a diamond bracelet, a queue of ivy leaves or linked arrowheads. It seems to move, so I pull away. Mark unfastens it and lays it flat on the starched sheet. It looks like a procession of angelfish. Once clasped, the fish will swim nowhere, just in a perpetual ring about my lame wrist. How sad, my wrist, a universe.

  “That was funny today,” he says, “that woman and her bracelets.”

  I touch each link, count each fish. There are eight—oh, eight, my number, another coincidence, one to leave unmentioned. It will be my secret, my secret way to wear the bracelet, something to think about as I am forced to tolerate the talk it will generate. Everyone will say how lucky I am, how lucky we are. Mark is so generous, so kind, so faithful—I’ve never seen him look at another woman! It’s true. He works hard to keep me, since we are joined by nothing of substance—just filament and fiber; it would take so little to set me adrift. Everyone believes he is nice, which he is unless you happen to be sleeping with him, in which case he is not, with the things he wants to do to you. It doesn’t even matter to me what he does, and that is worse. When you don’t care what a man does, he comes up with new things until you do. I feel bad that he cannot get through, that my tolerance is high, that my indifference exposes him for what he is—contemptible in the dark. Perhaps all men fall under the spell of their perversions when given the chance.

  He drops onto the bed, first his knees, then his hip and thigh, then his elbow by my ribs. My wrist goes up; the cold metal slaps around. I feel him fasten it once, then again, hitting a special lock. I lie back, floating, my body in free fall, and yet some determined piece of my mind keeps jerking me back. It is as if I am on the brink of discovery, but of what? My mother calls the feeling presque vu, the almost seen, a lost word or phrase that rests on the tip of the tongue, the nagging feeling that there is something you have forgotten to remember. It has to do with Jack, and the night a long time ago when he gave me the opal necklace and a pill to drug me. But I am looking for something more elusive than that connection, a deeper realization having to do with the incentive to give such a thing. Jack was terrified of losing me then, and it was the appearance of Rourke that terrified him. Maybe Mark is terrified too. My eyes pop open. Suddenly I think, Rourke.

  He has a flu. He smells like illness, and the bedroom in the apartment stinks like a teenage boy room, like semen and budding funk. I wash his tanned back and legs with cool water, then I go to the bathroom and flush my prescription pills, and also all the aspirin. I tell Mark we are out of aspirin, and that I have to go buy some. Without lifting his head he waves. He knows I’m lying. He also knows I’ll be back. I have nowhere else to go.

  Carlo is at the front door. “Where you going, Miss Eveline?”

  “For aspirin. He’s sick.” I don’t bother to say “Mark.”

  “I have aspirin downstairs. It’s too late to walk alone.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “He needs other things too. From the pharmacy.”

  “What pharmacy? No pharmacy’s open this late.”

  “On the East Side. There’s an all-night pharmacy.”

  I take Broadway to Columbus Circle, and as I walk I watch my reflection in the store windows—my hair swept back, my lips the color of lilacs. Beneath my eyes the bones make a V. I behold something imposing but tragic, resistant but capitulating, something like the flag of a poor but proud nation. I cut east on Fifty-ninth Street at Central Park South. And then at the Plaza, I head south for a few blocks, though the pharmacy is north.

  When people say time heals, they are wrong. Time simply extinguishes hope. New mothers are told to let infants cry at night to learn to sleep alone—Just a week, and you’re free! Yes, it takes one week of hysteria for the child to learn it can count on no one. It takes one week of abject misery to break the spirit, to inure it to abandonment and betrayal. Maybe it took longer with me, but by then I was grown. If I’ve devoted myself to Mark’s happiness it’s because I can’t see well or perceive well. If he laughs or is happy, then I know things are okay. If he feels cold, I take a sweater. In the absence of true love and true joy, maybe it’s best to treat happiness like any other need—hunger, exhaustion, thirst—factually recognized, functionally resolved.

  Rain finally comes. I want it to rain hard. When I hit Madison Avenue and turn uptown, it begins to fall swiftly, and I swallow drops. I walk until I am drenched, until there is a feeling in me that is clear, shining like the street, slick like the slush of a city bus.

  Fall 1980

  It was in the fall of 1915 that I decided not to use any color until I couldn’t get along without it and I believe it was June until I needed blue.

  —GEORGIA O’KEEFFE

  34

  The first thing I heard was someone say the date. I thought I heard October, though that didn’t seem right. The next was how fortunate I was, which was funny. I didn’t feel fortunate.

  “You’re a lucky young lady. You got a good bump.”

  It was a woman. My eyes tried to fix her. Her lines were out of register, like she’d been drawn by a broom. She was inserting a needle into the top of my hand. “I’m a nurse,” she explained. “My name’s Tilly. Do you remember what happened?”

  A pig getting its throat cut. A swirling world like dancing. Faces in a ring.

  Did I think I could manage a few questions, Tilly wanted to know. My age and name she got from my driver’s license, but there was no insurance card.

  “Do you have insurance?”

  My feet were bare. I wondered who had my shoes.

  A man in greens entered. “Hello there. I’m Dr. Tollman.” He felt my head,
manipulating it. My hand reached up. There was gauze and tape in a line above the eye bone. “Minor injury, no big deal. We’ll get some film anyway, just to be sure. I’m mainly concerned about your blood pressure—70 over 50. You’re completely dehydrated. I’ve ordered a bag of fluids.”

  He shined a penlight in my eyes, panning it from side to side like they do in the movies. His eyes were brown, his hair sandy and straight. “You’re in the ER at St. Vincent’s,” he explained. “You passed out on the subway. Lucky you didn’t hit the tracks. Ever fainted before?”

  “A couple times,” I said.

  “When you get your period? Tilly says your underclothes were bloody.”

  I did not respond. He waited a moment, then leaned back, slapping the side of his legs twice. “We’ll run some blood just in case. Anyone we can call?” He waved loosely. “Parents, anyone?”

  “I can bring a phone over if you want,” the nurse prodded. “There are jacks everywhere.”

  “Take your time,” Dr. Tollman said. “We’re not throwing you out.” There was a commotion nearby, and he popped to attention, long-necked and perky alert. “Be right back,” he promised as he passed through the curtains. Then ducking in again he said, “Hey Tilly, get some urine on her.” Tilly didn’t laugh despite the unfortunate choice of words.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  “Yes?” Tilly lifted her face from her work.

  “I do have someone to call.”

  Dr. Mitchell wrote illegibly on my chart. I wondered what she was writing. She seemed to be writing more than I was saying.

  “Of course, it’s rare for a pregnancy to occur while using birth control, but not impossible. You probably missed a pill or two. Miscarriages, however, are not uncommon. We used to think they were late periods. In terms of the fainting episodes in the past, you must take better care of yourself. You can’t go very far using more energy than your body manufactures.”

  “How far was—it?”

  “Judging by the lab work, I’d say ten to twelve weeks.”

  The end of July. I wondered what we’d been doing then, what he’d been wearing, did it rain that day. I remembered one rainy day in particular.

  I dressed and we met in Dr. Mitchell’s office. On her desk was a latex mold of female genitalia and a laminated flip-book depicting ailments—tumors, warts, cysts. There were also photographs of her children.

  “You’ll need a D and C,” she stated. “Do you know what that is?”

  I said like a vacuum.

  She said, a vacuum, yes, or a scraping. “You might still have tissue inside. You don’t want an infection. I’ve made arrangements for tomorrow. They’ll squeeze us in at nine.”

  I touched my belly as I walked down the hall. A scraping. How absolutely Rourke would be removed. There would be no trace. A little tissue, a little infection, at least that was something to hold on to. Maybe a scraping would be best. Yes, a scraping.

  The feeling after leaving Montauk that summer was the one that persisted, which was that I wanted to die. I would have killed myself as soon as Rourke dropped me at home, but then I’d never see him again, and true love is devious. I remembered Jack once saying to me, I could cut my wrists, put a bullet through my skull. If I thought I could reach you. But nothing can reach you. My God, I thought, Jack.

  There was no narrative completeness to the last day. It transpired in sick and silent fragments, like snapshots deadly passing, with no story to fill the places in between. Rourke’s grim shadow in the bitter predawn light, sitting vigil over me on the edge of the bed as I passed fitfully through a fevered sleep, his eyes boring holes through open space as though his will could forge the future. Clean clothes for me at the foot of the bed. The Montauk cottage, a broom-swept shell, cleared of almost all our belongings. The car, idling and meticulously packed; the brightness of the sun, the whiteness of the sky; the neighbor’s three-legged dog, blocking the end of the driveway and Rourke leading the dog home by the collar. Us on opposite ends of the moving car, not speaking, my face against the padded vinyl door. My mother’s house, completely empty of people; him carrying my bags directly to my room, leaving them there, turning to go. Me alone on my knees surrounded by thrown clothes and overturned drawers, with the dresser sitting hideously dismantled like a mouth missing teeth. Me again, somewhere else entirely, the barn maybe, leaning upright against the wall, clutching it, as though I were on one of those carnival gyroscope rides, erect and perpendicular and holding hard because real life is centrifugal, because in the middle of everything is nothing.

  And intermittently, sound. Cars rolling blithely up the street; the pernicious rap of the kitchen clock; the agitated whisk of my breath; my voice, hoarse from sobbing. I spoke to myself; there was no one else to speak to. Be brave, I kept saying. Be brave. Maybe there was something else I needed to be, but I couldn’t think of the word for it.

  On my bed there were messages. Labor Day weekend—I’d missed the entire thing. Kate had come from Canada to get the rest of her stuff. Where are you? I’m with Marie-Helene. Meet us later! I didn’t know anyone named Marie-Helene. Why had Kate written the name as though I knew it? Sue from the Lobster Roll had called twice, the first time asking where I was, the second time asking if I felt better. Rourke must have called to tell them I was unwell and could not work. The thought of him calling on my behalf was overwhelming. I ran to the bathroom and vomited twice. Not much, just the food he’d given me that morning before driving me home. A banana and some toast. The phone messages in my hand accidentally got wet, and the papers attached to one another, the ink soaking and swirling. The stack flipped into the toilet, landing in a muffled plock. The bottom note I read backward. In my mother’s handwriting it said, something, something, taob, which was boat in reverse. A message from Mark Ross.

  At NYU, I did not unpack, just in case—in case of what, I wasn’t sure. I kept my suitcase packed at the bottom of the closet, a few shirts and coats hanging. I never missed a single class. Classes were the only way to move forward: they marked time. I kept thinking, December. I only have to make it until December. If it was a good day, I might think, May.

  I wrote a letter to Rourke—four times, ten times, copying, recopying, my words gaining greater distance from their original meaning with each draft until they became just a string of shapes, like operating instructions in another language, strokes and little arches, buckled bridges and circles with proud sashes. I wanted to tell him that since he left there was this absence. I did not send the letter. I did not want to trespass.

  My dorm room was in Brittany Hall on the corner of Tenth Street and Broadway. It was a spacious room on the fourteenth floor with casement windows overlooking the gothic spire of Grace Church. It was bigger than Denny and Peter Reeves’s whole apartment on East Fifth Street. My roommate, Ellen, was big and agreeable like a barmaid from a Dickens novel, though that could not have been accurate since she was Greek and Jewish, and Dickens never wrote about big Greek Jewish barmaids, not memorably anyway. Ellen’s family lived in a just-built mansion in Rye. Her dad was the chief heart surgeon at Albert Einstein Hospital in the Bronx, which amused my father immensely since he was a sign-painter and Dr. Christopolos was a cardiologist, but their kids wound up in the same goddamned place anyway. I didn’t bother to elucidate the more salient differences—upon graduation I would be forty thousand dollars in debt and Ellen would be loan-free, settled into an investment condo, a guaranteed job, and the white leather seat of a brand-new BMW.

  Ellen had the highest standards for personal care of anyone I’d ever met. She was entirely devoted to her own comfort. Thursdays to Mondays she anxiously returned to her parents’ house in Rye weighed down with homework and laundry because it was just so nice up there. Besides, it’s common knowledge that dormitory washing machines spread disease.

  “Be careful,” she warned the first time I used the laundry room. “My cousin Ruth at Tulane found a used condom stuck to the drum.”

  Instead of a stere
o or typewriter, Ellen brought spa supplies to college. She had rolling wooden massage devices and fleecy slippers and velour bathrobes and giant plush Egyptian towels. There were vanilla balms for night and peppermint splashes for day and a constant supply of homemade brownies and 3-percent milk in her Permafrost mini-fridge. In the bathroom there were plaque picks and callus shavers and orthopedic shower shoes and super-cushiony toilet paper. Her goose-down quilt added five inches to her bed, and beneath her mattress her brother Stefan had laid three-quarter-inch plywood for added lumbar support.

  I never heard her mention boys, not once. She was far too cunning to allow sex to endanger her lavish lifestyle. And since I did not infringe upon her sufficiency, we got along well. She treated me with benevolent indifference, and I found it admirable, actually, that she was so extremely disinclined to be idle, motivated as she was to get out of the city and return to the comforts of home. She went to bed at ten, got up at seven, and was in classes or the library all the hours in between. She wasn’t unsociable; she simply had no time for anything other than an hour or two of television every night, Dallas or Knots Landing. Invariably she shifted the TV set toward my bed so I could see too.

  Ellen was a busy girl; you couldn’t blame her for not noticing.

  ——

  “You okay?” she asked. “You’ve been sitting for, like, three days.”

  Ellen poked at the desk lamp near my bed, turning it on, and the yellow light broke the blue of morning, which was a relief. The room had been like a pond with me at the bottom. Ellen took an involuntary step back, an instinctive step, thinking quick, in case I was contagious. On her shoulder was a duffel bag full of laundry. She was on her way home, which meant it was Thursday. I was pretty sure I’d lain down on Tuesday.

  “Are you feverish?”