Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  “It sounds like you’re in the next room,” I say. Maybe “next room” is not what I mean. Maybe I mean somewhere closer. As I tell her about Jack, she is silent. I wonder, Am I speaking too softly? Can she hear me?

  “I hear you fine,” she says. For a long time there is nothing but the sound of intermittent sighs. Kate seems angry about the news, which is not what I’d expected, though it has a consoling effect on me. I feel as if I am somehow off the hook—a hook, some hook. Every time I think to fill the silence, I remember that it’s Kate on the other end, so I don’t have to. Besides, in my head is just random nonsense, like the time she, Mom, and Jack were trying to catch a rat, or the time Jack brought Steve Schumacher’s goat over to show Kate and it ate Aunt Lowie’s new walking cane, or the Valentine’s Day when Jack bought us the heart-shaped pizzas.

  “I don’t know how this could have happened,” Kate states bitterly. “It’s just so absolute. It’s absolute.”

  She obviously can’t attend the funeral, but there’s a place she can go in Brittany on Friday, an island called Ile d’Ouessant. “It’s flat with cliffs overlooking the Atlantic, and there are massive rolling waves that smash against the rocks. It has a bird reserve and wild rabbits. I can take a ferry.”

  She says something else, but I miss it. The phone is heavy, so I switch hands. I have to keep switching hands. I have the idea that my wings have been broken. That’s not just a figure of speech; I actually feel broken wings, like parts of my upper self are unpinned and hanging.

  Kate falls silent, still there, on the other end, in a cottage, in France. When the phone rang it made the funny European phone sound. She seems to know about my wings, or at least guess about them because finally when she talks again she says that after arriving in Paris from Canada last month, she took a train to Brittany and on the way she stopped in Chartres to visit the cathedral. “We went there with the French Club, remember?”

  I do. There are kings and queens carved into the door jambs.

  “In the Royal Portal,” Kate confirms, “that’s right. In other doorways there are some saints and biblical figures. Remember we kept skipping all the tours and going to cafés to drink coffee and draw? You were like, ‘Who wants to go all the way to France to be stuck with loud, badly dressed people from home?’

  “But that day in Chartres I was afraid we would miss the tour bus and get lost in the middle of France. And you said, ‘Kate, you speak the language. You can’t get lost. Getting lost just means not understanding.’ Do you know I always think of that?”

  I suppose I’m fortunate to have someone think of me when they visit a cathedral. Mark’s friend Marguerite says that shopping at Saks makes her think of her mother. Those were our happiest times, Marguerite says, tears in her eyes. Just shopping, not caring. As for me, I don’t think of Chartres where Kate is concerned, but of a day in ninth grade when she was in marching band. Before her mother died, before Jack. The parade started at the East Hampton Library and ended at the Windmill on North Main Street, where there were speeches, mostly about the sacrifices of war. The kids didn’t listen since it was pretty much guaranteed that they were heading into lives free of public sacrifice. They just kept poking one another, making noise, stealing hats.

  Kate and I sat on the curb by the Methodist Church, and Jay Robbins joined us beneath one of the old giant elms, the three of us forming a leggy adolescent row, with them in those white polyester band pants with side stripes. He laid his trombone on the lawn, and the length of brass grazed a patch of purple tulips. The instrument was shining and gold, making a regal loop against the flowers. Jay had brown eyes and his nose was covered in a fan of freckles. When we were in fourth grade, he did one hundred fifty sit-ups for the presidential fitness test with all the boys looking on, and that same year he’d given Kate an I.D. bracelet for her birthday. She returned the gift, but she did so kindly, the two of us riding our bikes over to his house on Sherill Road after dinner one night. I waited in the driveway while they sat on the porch and talked. In the end, Jay seemed content with the fact that he’d been treated respectfully, more so than he might have been with actually going steady, and as it turned out, their friendship lasted a long time. Jay had driven Kate and Maman in to Sloan-Kettering several times, and he had taken Kate to both proms, though he had a girlfriend who lived about an hour up the island, in Mattituck.

  I always think of that parade and of Jay Robbins with his trombone. Kate’s natural femininity had allowed him to respond with natural masculinity, and in the end everything had been resolved. I didn’t feel as scared about boys after that. But that was in the time preceding infiltration—by other girls and by ideas of propriety. Before infiltration, you could really count on girls like Kate to guide you through the labyrinth. Unfortunately, girl guides go from being trackers in the Native American sense to being hostesses in the crowded steak house sense. Who knows how it happens.

  If friendship is like a cathedral, then forsaken friendship is like roofless ruins, like a formerly glorious structure. In the World War II photos my dad has of bombed cathedrals in Cologne or Dresden, they’re not merely blackened ribs; they’re hollowed houses of worship, still symbolic of something, just as significant as what they stood for originally—intention, faith, place. I felt connected to Kate, but also sort of out in the open.

  “On Saturday we leave for Grasse. In Provence. It’s where perfumes are made.”

  “That will be nice. You’ll see lots of flowers.”

  It must feel good to possess a genetic immunity, to take shelter in your ethnicity, to vanish into your ancestry. Exactly as I form the thought, I set it free. I wouldn’t want to live in France or anywhere else, not when the story of America is still unfolding. Not when I speak the language, when there is no getting lost, when there is still so much to understand. For me there is no security greater or better than entrepreneurial security, cowboy security, the security of infinite possibility. We say goodbye and I hang up first. I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just that there is nothing to keep me from putting the phone down first, nothing that makes me think—Slow.

  49

  I go first to the mimosa. It does not appear to have grown, and yet it has, which is the remarkable thing about trees. They are secretive about their growth. My mother is next, in the backyard; her face in the daylight, how I know it, the shape of her eyes and the color. She has been cleaning. In her hand is a towel and a spray bottle full of vinegar and water. She does not use chemicals anymore, she informs me, wiping her hair from her forehead with the back of her free hand. “The water table is fucked.”

  Tomorrow there will be a party in the yard, a birthday party for a friend from the college, Jann, who was formerly Jan when he was a she. Did I remember Jan? I must remember.

  “I do remember. She wore half-glasses.”

  “Bifocals.”

  “Exactly, yes, bifocals.”

  My mother rubs the film from the tabletops—there are all these tables but no chairs—and she tells stories. She is not insensitive; she simply talks around my feelings for my sake. Possibly she has always talked around my feelings for my sake. It occurs to me that maybe I am difficult, that I’ve always been difficult, especially for her, as we are so unalike. Possibly she gave more than I knew. She trusted I would be okay, even if she could not trust herself to make me that way. Good night, my Eveline, she used to say. Didn’t she used to say that?

  I lean to give her a kiss. She kisses me back, then returns to the tables, setting down candles, the kind with plastic nets. I lift one, smelling it. It smells of citronella, of Jack.

  “There’s mail for you in the barn,” she says. “I put it in a basket and tied it with a blue ribbon.”

  In the barn there are several boxes. I cannot say exactly what it is I’m searching for, but I stop at a stack of journals. Inside I find an account of my past so vivid that it’s like looking at myself through special instruments for the observation of the very small or the very far. But just because
there is evidence of me doesn’t mean I can be found; in fact, I am irrecoverable—we are irrecoverable. I meant to say we.

  It’s difficult to come upon yourself at the genesis of your own path, when everything was beautiful and new. The loss of newness has less to do with gaining years than with shutting down to possibility. You start to become selective about pleasure because you no longer trust life to bestow it at random. You refuse to wait for fortune, you lose faith. You become someone who looks into another person’s eyes but refuses to see the story there. As the protective net for the self tightens, the net for others widens. This is how Jack fell through.

  I read somewhere that the word nostalgia derives from two Greek ideas—nostos, meaning return, and algos, meaning pain—together suggesting a painful return. And yet, though I feel pain, I can’t say I long to go back. I don’t miss the way I was; I don’t regret what I have come to be. What I feel has only to do with time. I am simply too late. I’ve learned so much, but ironically, it is impossible to revisit ignorance with knowledge. These keys cannot unlock those doors.

  The bluestone at the base of the barn steps is washed in sunlight. The warmth rushes into my bare feet; it’s an old warmth, a same warmth. To my right is the bed of wildflowers I planted, tangled at the base like siblings sleeping. Shooting through the thicket is a cluster of rose vervain that Marilyn and I planted one day when she and Dad visited. We stopped at Miss Amelia’s Cottage in Amagansett for an antiques fair, and Marilyn bought a starter tray of the flowers and two tufted Chinese benches that I’d admired. Dad said the seats were probably made in Pittsburgh, but I imagined they had belonged to imperial Chinese children. I could see the children sitting, upright and attentive, listening to a tutor, their slippered feet dangling. When Marilyn took them to be re-covered on Grand Street, the upholsterer offered to buy them from her for fifteen hundred dollars. She refused, though they’d cost only two hundred.

  My father said, “We could’ve bought a new car!”

  “No, Anton, we’ll keep them for Eveline, for when she gets her own house someday,” Marilyn told him emphatically. “We never would have seen their value.”

  I go farther into the grass, toward the driveway, to the train tracks. There is this sensation, long lost to me, of lightness of being, of oneness with the atmosphere, of looking into sky, this very sky, with nothing before me and nothing behind. Despite the little I knew and the little I had, I recall the feeling of inalienable possession.

  What I miss, what I’d possessed, may be no more than immunity. If modern life can be seen as something high-speed and pathogenic—replicating and duplicating and by necessity unoriginal—then childhood by comparison is a period of blessed insusceptibility. Maybe the loss of innocence is part of some practical operation. Maybe there are lessons in its fleeting frailty. Possibly through such sacrifice we remain captivated by joy, bound to its safekeeping when we come upon it.

  Oh, the crossing bells, and the train thundering by. I hold my ground at the tracks, the meeting place of two converging lines—the vertical pole connecting heaven to earth, the gods to the dead—and the horizontal pole, the crossbar, the tracks, the line connecting start to finish, the place you imagined from to the place you imagined into.

  Alone again and left to wonder, Am I lost, or do I remain—am I perennial? Have I stopped becoming, or do I prepare? There are pilgrims who walk and walk, through years, through nations, seeking answers to questions they don’t know how to formulate.

  I walk at night in East Hampton, and the world tips and turns. I stumble along, thinking dead thoughts. Skateboards and scarecrows and spitting contests, the circus star antics of boys, tipping cows and three to a bike. Soaring twilights in November, walking home late from the movie theater, kicking through fallen chestnut leaves, green with crispy borders, like melting stars or witches’ shoes. The heat of the hood of a car in summer, the cupped pop of softballs. I don’t know whether or not this is home, whether or not it would have me, whether or not I would be had by it. I know only that I reached a plateau on these streets, some dead end of understanding.

  I call my mother from the pay phone in the alley near White’s Pharmacy. A stranger answers. He sounds British, with a swarthy Manchester accent. In the background there are the sounds of a party. The one for Jann. I ask for Irene.

  “’Ang on, luv,” he says. There is a portly plastic clunk as the receiver drops. I hear him shout to someone, “Get down, then, and give us twenty!” Then raucous laughter, then unanimous counting. “One, two, thirteen, fifteen, twenty!”

  Cheers and more shouting and more counting and the party again, and when no one retrieves the phone, I hang up. The heels of my socks are damp from popped blisters, so I sit on the back step of the pharmacy, tearing away the dead skin.

  By the time I return to my mother’s house, everyone has gone. A note for me is on the door. Went to the Sea Wolf. Meet us down there!

  I linger in the doorway. I don’t feel like going out, but I don’t feel like going to bed either. I’m not hungry; there is no television. I don’t want to go into Kate’s old room. I don’t want to go into my old room. The whole thing feels dangerous, just being here. Going back home is like reentering a burning building. You evaluate the necessity. You map out a safe course. You decide to go sequentially and in reverse, one room at a time so you don’t lose your way—it would be so easy to get lost in there. You wish you had another choice; you do not. There is something you must rescue.

  As always when my mother leaves, the house is unbearably free of her presence. The living room is unusually still, as if it has been recently and rapidly evacuated. Darkness is broken by the weak mustard glint of a kerosene lamp. Glasses are half-full, pillows and sweaters lie about, the sound of Bob Dylan seeps through the cigarette smog. Three more albums are queued on the spindle; two are stacked on the turntable.

  My feet stick as I walk. It must have been a good party. Ha ha, my father once said on a New Year’s visit. I lost a shoe there in front of the stove.

  I tour the somnolent blue living room, feeling tranquil, feeling numb, in an elegiac sort of trance. The legion of her belongings forms an evidentiary matrix. These artifacts of the heart prove presence and endurance of presence—that is to say, her own. Like a vessel in marble she channels through the objects around the house, aberrant and sheet-like, frozen-in. I recall myself as a child waiting stubbornly among these very things for something vital and real to appear or to transpire that could move me, reach me, touch me. I come upon the archaeology of my need with delicacy. One must confront one’s innocence with caution when it has gotten you nowhere, when it has proven itself fallible, when no more remains, when you discover that you have outspent the purity of your heart.

  It is not an easy memory—me, awaiting requital or redress, hoping for someone to take responsibility for me. Though I quickly remind myself that, as a child, I endured no more than mild disequilibrium, nothing perilous or vile, that I was loved in a sense, and cared for, and so on, and et cetera, just as instantly, I acknowledge that I am brushing off as usual the accountability of my parents, absolving them of inattentiveness because it was benign, assuming responsibility because I am capable. Capable is what they made me to be.

  For the first time ever I recognize something dangerously polemical about the point of view I have long maintained. When I remind myself that professed love cannot compare to something desperate and original, which part of me is speaking? The part at peace with my own competence, or the part that detests it, the part that longs to be swept away?

  Have I been in pursuit of emotional detachment because personally I prefer it, or because it is all I have ever known? How curious to have found a defining love, the tenderness for which I believe I’ve longed, something reciprocal that moves the spirit and bears time, and to have lost it. How resourceful of me to turn a story of achievement into a more familiar one of loss. Such loss is a form of control. Have I been working all along to secure my own failure, to collapse
the machine that was made of me?

  I go back around, one final time. I do not touch the things my mother has chosen to keep; they are not mine. If it is evident that I am not present here, that there is no shrine to me, I feel close to her, uniquely. It is as though I have moved from behind to make her acquaintance, growing taller every step. I feel grave with an understanding of her that is new.

  I move to the picture window. I remember when nights were starlit but black. I remember the clear air and the sharp strike of footsteps and the fever of Rourke’s voice. I loved him, I love him, from the very beginning I loved him. I cannot understand how it happened, how it turned to this, when the view is the same view, when the tree does not appear to have grown, when her face is the same face, when once I was a girl.

  50

  The clicking of the bike slows to a sharp staccato as I lean across Newtown Lane and cut toward the park. Herrick Park in East Hampton Village dangles as if by magic in the redolent air, like a tin marionette. It reminds me of the abandoned World’s Fair site off the Long Island Expressway in Queens. My parents brought me to that fair in 1965. I remember running through the grass into my mother’s outstretched arms. And my father, behind her, our three figures pebble-like in the wake of the colossal, skeletal globe. The Unisphere. Besides a brief memory of walking with them beneath a movie marquee in winter, of me with my head against my father’s shoulder and the soft bounce of my mother’s head moving alongside us, that is all I have of the three of us together as a family.

  The bike pops onto the curb, tumbling over mounds of grass like a billiard ball. On the bench near the bike rack is an elderly black man in a baseball cap. In his mouth is an unlit cigar. I wonder what he takes when he leaves the house, probably the cigar and the hat, maybe a five-dollar bill, some matches.

  By the sun, it is nine. Six hours to go until the service.