Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  A young couple in khakis, loafers, and Lacoste shirts with upturned collars reads the papers while their two children gyrate on the rubber tire swings. I wonder if they have all they ever wished for. It must be nice to have all you ever wished for, if that’s even possible. It might be that every time you get one thing that you want, another wish pops up automatically, like in that hand-stacking game. Not only do the mother and father have matching clothes and haircuts, but they share height. I don’t remember women and men matching so well previously. Somehow it’s a sign of the times—physical equivalency, emotional economy. It all refers to an eradication of risk. Rourke and I would not have been good at matching. That is why we failed. It’s shameful to have failed where lesser people have triumphed. On my womb is a reminder of my insufficiency, an imprint, forever impressed, like a cave painting, like a running horse etched ten thousand years ago.

  Sometimes Mark says, “What’s wrong?”

  I tell him that my uterus aches.

  “Still?” he asks. “Is that possible?”

  The swings are free. I take one, tucking the chains inside my elbows. My chest slumps down, my shirt bellows out, and my heels make quarter moons in the dirt. When I was little, I drew a field filled with swing sets on manila nursery paper—pairs and pairs of inverted V’s connected at the top by horizontal lines, very big and very small—small implying distance. I must have been four. It is strange to think about why I would have been experimenting at such an early age with perspective.

  “You felt friendless,” Jack once explained. “Friendless when you drew it and friendless into the future, as far into the future as your miniature mind could calculate. And it doesn’t just represent a fear of future friendlessness—look at the clarity of those lines—it represents determination. Sensational!”

  I gave the drawing to him. He and Dad framed it, then he hung it near the porthole window across from his bed so it would be the first thing he saw in the mornings. Mornings were hard for Jack. I wondered if the drawing was still there.

  The slide is across from me. It swells and recedes as I swing. Slides are deceptive—all that climbing just for a shot back to no place. That was how Jack lived in the end—in a rut, working for the ride. But when you swing, there is no ground to gain, no peak, no low. You learn to linger, to be airborne; you are like a final chord suspended. If nothing comes next, nothing comes full, weighted, exquisite. I lean back, making my body straight, swinging and hanging upside down. I wish my hair could drag on the ground. Sometimes I dream it can.

  A little boy chases a ball, and his father catches him, flipping him over his shoulder. The boy squeals. It has been a long time since I’ve heard a squeal. The old black man rolls the ball back to the child, a redhead in overalls. It is a striped beach ball so big that the boy can’t see beyond it when he holds it. I know what it is to hold that ball, to crane my neck but still not perceive my steps, to feel unreliably the path before me, to read the world in terms of hot and unabashed colors, to inhale the sweet ambrosia of melting plastic.

  “Goodbye, sir,” I say as I collect my bike.

  The man on the bench nods. “Good day, good day.”

  I take my leave, slowly clicking away.

  Last night I dreamt of the sea. I dreamt of water all around, tossing and rocking a house, my house. It was a dream of Jack. We were in the house, and the water was high, and he sang, and the house rocked. And we rolled, gently also, like babies in a cradle. I rolled, and he rolled especially, and his singing was beautiful.

  51

  A girl stops at the end of the aisle. It’s really hard when you’re a girl to imagine yourself to be the way other girls are. They can look so soft. Not soft like how they feel when you touch them, but soft like they look when they hurt. She has burgundy hair pulled back at her shoulders and large breasts like she would be warm in winter. Her eyes are bright and small and blue, and her mascara is smeared. She wears a straight cotton skirt with multicolored stripes and a camisole beneath a fringed orange jacket that is fastened with a vintage white plastic belt. She looks like Dusty Springfield, except for the red hair and the tattoos.

  “Eveline?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Hi.”

  She offers her hand. “I’m Jewel. You know my cousin. Dan.”

  “Oh sure. I’ve never met you, have I?”

  She shakes her head. “I was abroad for high school, in London.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “You used to live by the train.”

  “Yes, that’s right, by the train.”

  I wonder what she’s saying. She seems to be saying something. I take up my sweater from the seat alongside mine, inviting her to sit. I was saving the place for Denny, but he’s late, as usual. Jewel folds into the chair as if the string that had been holding her got clipped, and she begins to cry. It’s funny, I can hardly make out her sobs; they’re getting mixed among the sobs of all the other people. It’s one of those kinds of funerals, the communal sobbing kind, where it comes together and makes a kind of music.

  Despite the sounds of grieving, the warm marine after-light of day coming through the tents in the Flemings’ backyard is beautiful. I feel as though I am in a swimming pool. People have begun to creep up politely on the outer side of each aisle, brushing against the white hydrangeas, which means there are no chairs left and almost two hundred guests have come. I know the exact count of chairs because I signed for them when they arrived this morning.

  “One seventy-five, right?” the driver double-checked before letting his men unload. The driver was Billy Martinson from high school, from European history class. Nico Gerardi’s friend. Billy seemed happy to see me. He told me he’d dropped out of SUNY Oswego after one year, that he’d gotten out of the “party business,” so to speak, and into the party rental business, the delivery aspect of it. Billy had the dubious distinction of having clocked more deliveries than any other party trucker in the Hamptons, whatever that meant. Probably just that he was a menace on the local highways.

  “The secret to success,” he informed me, “is the ability to be in two places at once.”

  “One seventy-five, that’s right,” Mrs. Fleming confirmed, tying her robe tighter. She kept making her robe tighter and tighter all morning, though it wasn’t even slipping open.

  One hundred seventy-five chairs sounded like a hell of a lot to Mr. Fleming, who appeared from the kitchen, Bloody Mary in hand, complete with celery stalk stirrer. When his wife reminded him that the service was scheduled for Friday afternoon and that colleges were out for summer, she sounded stretched and wilty, like she would not have been able to withstand an objection from him should he choose to make one. He ended up saying nothing, which had less to do with the fact that he agreed with her than that Billy and I were standing there, staring at him. As usual he seemed gigantic, though that was more in attitude than actuality. It was true that the service would most definitely be crowded, not only for the reasons Mrs. Fleming had mentioned. Though he may have had damaged relationships, Jack had had messages.

  Mrs. Fleming shrugged and shook her head, quaking with her mouth agape as though she didn’t know what to say, or how to speak, or what it was that anyone even wanted. She drew a strand of white hair behind her right ear and tightened her robe again, trying to collect herself. It was the nearness of her husband that had thrown her. I did not surmise this; I knew it absolutely. Just Mr. Fleming standing there, with that Bloody Mary, looking, well, looking exactly like Mark.

  Billy asked, “The chairs, Mrs. Fleming? Where do you want them?”

  “This way,” I said, taking over, and the men followed me up the driveway around the west side of the house to the service area.

  Billy examined the tautness of the tent ropes and the fixedness of stakes. “Who did these—Party Animals or Monumental Tental Rental?”

  “Monumental, I think.”

  He shook his head. “You should have called us.” He handed me a card. “Next time.”

  I’d
arrived at the Flemings’ at about nine-thirty that morning. I’d been thinking about going over all week, only I hadn’t. I just kept driving by the house, making sure things appeared normal, that lights came on at night and cars moved around in the day. When my mother found out what I was doing, she got mad and told me to knock on their damn door. She told me this was no time for bullshit city manners.

  “I don’t want to impose,” I said.

  “Kindness is not an imposition.”

  “Maybe they need space.”

  “They don’t need space,” my mother said. “They need someone to answer the fucking phone.”

  I was pretty sure the Flemings didn’t like anyone using their phone. Jack always said how his mother would bleach it every time someone touched it.

  “There’s no one better equipped than you to make sure the family is holding up—especially that woman—and to see to it that Jack is properly represented. You are a diplomat,” she said, and liking the sound of that, she added, “A diplomat of the dead.”

  “Your mother’s right,” said Powell, who had flown home from Anchorage for the funeral. “Imagine you had died first. Jack would be sitting right there where you are, telling us what and what not to do—what music to play, what clothes to wear, what stories to tell.”

  My mother looked at Powell quizzically. “Do you really think he’d be sitting?” she asked. “I imagine he’d be lying. You know, sprawled out on the couch.”

  Powell nodded as he considered that. “I suppose so. Lying and crying.”

  “And being a tremendous pain in the ass,” Mom added.

  “You’re right, Irene. He wouldn’t be worth shit.”

  Though I could not exactly imagine the Flemings giving me a warm welcome, I trusted my mother’s opinion. She’d been to hundreds of funerals. She was always the first to volunteer in cases of crisis. If anyone tried to discourage her from attending yet another memorial service, she’d say, “There’s nothing worse than poor turnout at a funeral. I certainly hope you’re not alone on the day you bury one of your people.”

  When the chairs were set—in curves rather than lines, no lines for Jack—I came in from the yard and found his mother sitting in the living room, dressed at last. She was wearing a taupe pant suit and on her lap lay a closed book, an album of some kind. Though she said nothing, there were two cups on the table and a plate of those triangular sandwiches without crusts. I figured I was supposed to join her.

  She transferred the book to my lap as though passing a clipboard in a doctor’s office, without fanfare or emotion. It was a photo collection of Jack’s life that she had assembled from family events—weddings, graduation parties, birthdays. She intended to display it at the memorial. I didn’t have to look hard or long to see that Jack was miserable in every shot, despite the fact that he had successfully bastardized all his dress-up clothes. There were Boy Scout badges Superglued onto his wide-lapeled Brooks Brothers suit and flames painted onto his one silk tie, and Wacky Pack stickers varnished onto his good shoes. I could not see the shoes in the photos, but I knew they were there. The shoes were legendary. Denny had borrowed them for the senior banquet even though they were two sizes too small, and when we’d danced, he’d moved like magic, not missing a single step.

  I was overwhelmed. I hadn’t seen pictures of him in so long. I wanted desperately to restore him. I couldn’t understand why it was not possible to do so. Me just thinking, his voice, his voice. His face, his eyes, his voice. I realized that I had not neared the bottom of my pain, that my sorrow was stronger than I could ever be, coupled as it was with the sickening knowledge that I’d wasted years with Mark that could have been spent instead with Jack—helping him, if that would have been possible. I held the book close to my face, squinting.

  “Is something wrong?” Jack’s mother asked in her deflated sort of monotone, not looking up from the book.

  “I forgot my glasses,” I said, lying.

  “Glasses,” she said dismissively. “You’re awfully young for glasses.”

  I stayed that way with her for the better part of an hour, going through photo by photo, squinting and sinking further into despair, because I couldn’t exactly leave her alone with the wretchedness of memories on the day of the funeral. After the funeral it was going to have to be every man for himself. And, besides, Rita the housekeeper had made a fresh pot of coffee, and though I’d often walked past the Fleming couch, I’d never sat on it. It was actually quite comfortable. Mrs. Fleming didn’t seem worried in the least about me holding a cup of coffee and eating sandwiches while flipping through the overstuffed album and blowing my nose, despite the very real potential for spills, which led me to wonder whether Jack had not made more of her cleanliness neurosis than she deserved. I kept looking up, half-expecting Jack to walk in, to join us. I thought it was something we could have gotten through well together—not the funeral, but coffee with his mother. I was sorry we’d never tried.

  I heard myself say, “Do you mind if I open the drapes?”

  She struggled with the suggestion as though having some cognitive lapse, as though a word or term I’d used were foreign to her. She moved her mouth, but nothing came out.

  I stood and drew back the curtains on each window. “It’s pretty today,” I said. Rays of sunshine charged in at varying angles like they’d been waiting. “Isn’t it pretty?” Pretty as a word might not have been an appropriate choice for a funeral day; however, I used it with authority. The day was mine, I’d decided, and even if it wasn’t, I intended to take it. In old film noir movies, the detective takes on someone else’s problem, and in the process of solving it, solves his own. He works backward through the crime while moving forward in his mind to crack his own riddle. In such narratives the crime is a metaphor, and the riddle is a metaphor, and quite possibly, beginning at the end is also a metaphor, a prescriptive for successful living. The way it goes is this—The story starts when I enter it.

  Mrs. Fleming flinched as though stunned by the flare of oncoming headlights. Then she settled back, looking wide-eyed and stony.

  “Are you okay?” I asked, not sure if she knew who I was anymore. She didn’t seem flustered or disoriented; as a matter of fact, she appeared to have made her way back to safety. This was nothing new, I realized, and here lay the riddle of her chill—she was incalculably depressed. Of course Jack would have wanted to save her. Of course he would have tried. And, of course, his every effort would have been undermined. Yes, this is where he’d gotten lost. How sad. In his little-boy mind, he’d been her failure. Rourke had felt this way too, except that Jack had felt a companion disgust unknown to Rourke—Jack’s father was no hero as Rourke’s had been.

  And the riddle of Jack was the riddle of us. Him not wanting to smother me as his father had his mother, but him not being able to stop. Him psychologically resorting to the tools and terms that had given his father power over others. Him holding me, teaching me, coming whole to my need with his need, and in the end, him leaving as he came, carrying away his pain as if in a suitcase, because I’d done nothing to relieve his burden.

  “Look at this one,” Mrs. Fleming said, tapping a page we’d passed at least twice before. I opened my eyes wide.

  It was a picture of the two of them, Jack as a baby. In it his hair was white and hers was white. They looked lovely, mother and son, and hopeful with the new bond between them. He was no more than twenty pounds with his symphony-shell ribs poking over his diaper and his ankles like twigs. And his eyes, searing blue as though the color had been branded onto his face, as though he’d been awakened already to the nonsense of inequity.

  “Never side with your husband over your children,” she confided in a hiss. I turned to find her eyes. There was something eerie about the vacancy there, the hollow helplessness, the pathological refusal to invest in anything beyond the sphere of her own unhappiness. Looking at her, I felt the way others must have felt when they looked at me. She looked as if she were suffering from vertigo. “They�
�ll tell you to do that. Never do that. Men are disposable. Children are not.”

  We were interrupted by a crash from the floor above. My hand jerked, and coffee spilled narrowly onto the saucer. The china shook unevenly, and I carefully lowered my cup to the table. The house had been so quiet, I’d presumed we were alone.

  Mr. Fleming shouted, “Susan! Where did you put my cuff links?”

  More unnerving than the sound he made was the fact that she had invoked him only seconds before the sound. She had detected him before he’d become detectable. Just as she’d been seducing me into doubting her connection to him, she demonstrated the strength of the bond.

  “I didn’t put them anywhere,” she replied to the banister. “They’re on your dresser.”

  She waited in case he was going to yell some more, then she returned to me with a joyless smile. “Jack loathed him. I loathe him too. I stayed married because I had no alternative. I had to consider their college, their future,” she said. “What would I have done? Aging, with two children. Who would have hired me? Who would have loved me?” She took back the book. “At least my son had the courage to die. His father will cling to life until the bitter end. Unless I kill him first. I’d like to kill him first.”

  A procession of somber guests passes the row of Jack’s belongings that Elizabeth and I arranged on the garden wall before the service. There’s the stuffed mouse I made, the harmonica my mother had given him, his drawings, his skateboard, his surfboard, his books, his mother’s photo album.

  Jewel is still next to me. “Did you love him, Jewel?” I get the feeling she did.

  She hunts through her tapestry purse and nods.

  “From when?”

  “December 1980,” she whispers, withdrawing a tissue. “Dan and I ran into him at the John Lennon vigil. Jack was high. He hardly recognized us. He hadn’t seen me in years, but Dan, well—We took Jack back to my parents’ apartment on West End Avenue and we hid him in my room. He didn’t talk for two days. The third morning he was gone. I didn’t hear from him until he showed up at my apartment at Yale two months later. He was in bad shape again, so I cleaned him up and drove him back to school in Boston. That summer we got a room together in the East Village. In September, he dropped out of Berklee and came with me to New Haven.”