Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  I didn’t tell Mark about the service, so he is absent. But Alicia is there, standing in back. I smile at her, then I adjust the microphone so I can be heard. I want my voice to go far.

  “The Teton Mountains are in northwest Wyoming. The highest peak there is 13,766 feet. I’ve never been to the Tetons, but I know the average annual temperature at night and the average rainfall in May because Jack wrote it all down on the leg of my favorite jeans. Every time I washed the jeans, he would rewrite everything. I’ve never been to Yosemite either, but I know there are granite domes that look like hooded monks and sequoia groves that stand like clusters of elephant legs. There are boreal forests in Wrangell–Saint Elias National Park in Alaska, and carpets of wildflowers on the banks of Lake Clark in Anchorage, and petroglyphs of bighorn rams near the Arches National Park in Moab, Utah.

  “Jack buried a picture of me in the ancient Blackfoot hunting grounds on the Continental Divide in West Glacier, Montana, and also a silver fork I had as a baby with my name etched on it. He said it would keep my spirit safe. He drew a map for me to find the spot, in case I’m ever out that way.

  “Elvis Presley’s ‘One Night with You’ was originally recorded in 1956 as ‘One Night of Sin’ by Smiley Lewis, the best rhythm and blues man New Orleans has ever seen. Jack never forgave Elvis for not giving Lewis credit. If you dared to suggest that it wasn’t Elvis’s fault, that in general he helped to popularize black music, Jack would say, ‘Bullshit. He should have done all the originals as B-sides.’

  “Besides Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five,’ Trois Gymnopedies, Number 2 was Jack’s favorite piece to play on piano. It was written by Eric Satie in 1888 as an accompaniment to athletes. Jack’s favorite year in music history was 1959. In 1959, Miles Davis recorded ‘Kind of Blue’ with Bill Evans, and Oscar Peterson did a version of Cole Porter’s ‘In the Still of the Night,’ which we would listen to whenever there was snow. If you happen to find a copy of that song, listen to it when there’s snow and you’ll know a place in Jack’s head that’s really nice. Was really nice.

  “I can draw sixty-two species of wildflower from memory. Jack used to quiz me, and I would get points for speed. I’ve worked since I was sixteen, first in a restaurant and then in an art gallery, but the only money I’ve ever felt good about earning has come from flower drawings. I’ve sold sixteen so far, two last week, on Tuesday. They say Tuesday is the day he died. I thought of Jack that day, how proud he would have been, how the money was like our money. I keep wondering if I was thinking of him at the moment he was sitting with that gun, maybe thinking of me.

  “I can name every snake and every cloud. Jack’s favorite cloud was cirrus because cirrus clouds are far, and he liked to look far. ‘Look, Evie,’ he would say, ‘they’re like horses’ tails!’ He wanted them to be my favorite too. I agreed with him as often as I could, only not in the case of clouds. I preferred stratus. Stratus are the brooding ones, low like anguish, like neglected boxcars in the rain, like crying in your favorite hiding place—like Jack.

  “Turgenev wrote of nihilism in Fathers and Sons in 1862. Jack did not teach me that; my mother taught that to Jack, and I happened to be in the room. He was complaining about morality, how it’s a hollow construct, how the only possible reform is revolutionary reform. ‘Go read Turgenev,’ she told him. ‘Then talk to me.’ And he did. Possibly she meant to show Jack that he was thinking like the great thinkers. Possibly she meant to show him that his thoughts were not necessarily original. In either case she felt it was his duty to go further. She always spoke to him very fast, like it was a race, like she had to hurry, like Jack needed to get out of his head as quickly as possible.

  “I should mention how hard this is for my mother. Like the rest of us, I’m sure she wishes Jack would have called when he was in trouble. Unlike the rest of us, she has to live with the knowledge that she actually would have done something about it. She would have thrown herself on him, like he was on fire.”

  There is crying, ongoing like a faucet running. Under the tent the air is hot. I bend my knees and hold the lectern tight. “Those are the easy things. There are other things. Not so easy.

  “Jack believed that society is hypocritical to place so much value on the sanctity of individual human life, while tolerating famine, war, extreme poverty, racial cleansing, environmental destruction, capital punishment, species extinction, and other crazy stuff, such as fattening calves in cages or force-feeding geese with tubes.

  “‘It’s so stupid,’ he would say. ‘Suicide is intolerable but all too frequently, genocide is not. Why the double standards?’

  “It’s hard to say whether Jack felt instinctively that suicide was the best possible solution to his problems or if he became intellectually convinced of a pro-suicide position because he found the anti-suicide position to be so condescending. He hated therapy, probably because he had been sent so much at such an early age. He rejected the theory that oversimplified rhetoric would inspire desperate people in desperate circumstances to discover the previously elusive joy of living. ‘Besides,’ he would say, ‘every therapist is on the family payroll. They have the incentive to find problems and side with their employers. We might as well ask the housekeeper her opinion.’

  “His body was his alone, he said. He said that by the time he found himself in trouble, any feelings of entitlement others might have would not be real reflections of real relations. They would be false or residual. ‘If love isn’t getting through,’ he would say, ‘it’s not real. If we’re not sharing it, it’s not love. It’s fanaticism. It’s Pentecostal. The gift of tongues.’

  “It all used to make sense. But now I see it was only Jack making sense. Because despite his having prepared me, I’m bereaved. Despite our separation, I’ve lost a piece of myself. Despite the fact that I tried to be fair, I wonder if I behaved irresponsibly. If I can’t say that my moving on with my life was right or wrong, or him ending his despair was right or wrong, I can say that today is worse than yesterday, and yesterday was worse than the day before. When Dan called to tell me Jack was dead, I was not surprised. Now I feel that the day should never have come, and I’m ashamed of myself for expecting it. I feel more guilty and more betrayed as time passes. Guilty because I should have done something, and betrayed because he promised I wouldn’t feel this way.

  “If I have to give up my right to sorrow in order to respect his right to die, I’ll never recover. If I absolve him of this crime, he stays an invalid, a freak, a victim. If I don’t hold him accountable, I make a choice, as if I am godly. I’m not godly. He has to share his burden of the blame for not finding a solution. I mean, look around. We’re not talking about Jack’s one life, or my one life. We’re talking about at least as many lives as are here today. It’s inconceivable that we all failed.”

  Powell is straight ahead, looking at me with concentration, staring evenly, attentively, as he stares perhaps at the sea.

  “I wasn’t sure I was going to come up here. I kept trying to think of what he would have wanted, for me to talk or for me to not talk. If you had it all figured out that Jack wanted you to do one thing, it usually turned out that he wanted the other.”

  People laugh, though I didn’t intend to be funny.

  “I thought of trying to reach him. I used to be able to reach him. I don’t mean like calling up a spirit. I mean the difference between mindless thinking and really thinking—it’s like combining everything outwardly known and everything inwardly known and letting it shuffle together like cards. And then in a way, invisible things really do begin to appear.

  “Elizabeth reached him. You probably noticed the change in the air when she was up here. When she spoke, she was very brave, and all we’d forgotten of Jack became clear—he became clear—and we reclaimed him from his own terrible version of himself. The way he was good, the way she’s always known that he loved her, the way she loved him too. The way he felt himself beyond repair but held out hope for her.

  “I spent this morn
ing with Mrs. Fleming, talking and looking at pictures, and Jack was clear then too. But his mom was also clear. I found myself wishing that I’d spoken to her sooner, that I hadn’t depended upon him to arbitrate, that I’d been as willing to question his ideas of things as he’d been mine. That I’d been a better friend. His view of her was not entirely accurate or fair. Jack could be so unforgiving; above anything else, that led to his isolation. It was after sitting with his mom that I decided to speak today, not worrying what he would have wanted, just making his job of forgiving her my job.

  “Not everyone who kills themselves lives as Jack did at the end. Many violent suicides are committed by supposedly normal citizens—parents, teachers, scholars, doctors, bankers, movie stars. Some just kill themselves over time, through more acceptable means. Pills, alcohol, smoking, reckless driving, bad diet. You have to question the discrepancy between their public accomplishments and their anti-social behavior. What face did they show, what lies did they live, what passed for love that was not love at all? You have to wonder whether an extreme need to please or to succeed is not just a convenient, socially approved way of encrypting the darker corridors. And if that false face is accepted by others, it breaks the wearer doubly: the person isn’t known, and the attention they receive isn’t trustworthy. The wearer of the disguise proves what they believe deeply, that people around him are just stupid.

  “Jack was different: he hid nothing. He was known, and so whatever love he received was real. Everyone acts like his honesty came easily, like he had it and we didn’t. But it was the product of an arduous labor. Look at the photo album on the back table. When he was forced to comply socially, he did so as a fully formed Jack, not as anyone who could ever be mistaken for the rest of us. His was a stylized resistance; he was an artist. And Mrs. Fleming admired Jack’s will. If she made an error by concealing in the secret support of his ideals her own secret need for freedom, it was only because she’d hoped he would live more freely than she did. Today I was thinking that every challenge he made to the established order came across to her more or less like a grasp for liberty. It’s obvious to me that she loved him very much, and for the same reasons we did.”

  I stand a little straighter. “What she didn’t count on is that he would only become free if she would as well. I think he was making her a bargain. He had no intention of getting out alone.”

  52

  The valets are dressed for the wedding in polo shirts and khaki shorts. Alicia didn’t want them wearing red, white, and black, looking like waiters from a cheap restaurant, so she bought them outfits. Mark has been complaining for weeks, saying that the degree of planning that the wedding has required is obscene, though I know he actually envies Alicia and Jonathan the storm of attention.

  I leave the car with the valets and cross the lawn. I make it as far as the enormous copper beech tree when I hear my name. Eveline! Alicia is peeking through the vertical window in the foyer. She looks perfect from far away, girl-like, like a wife in an advertisement for diamonds. As I go to her, I feel the burden of every step and inside something waning. I look at my new shoes. They seem inadequate, like they cannot possibly be counted on for support.

  The house is cool, bustling but organized. Girls in satin A-line shifts with bouquets of sweet William surround Alicia, bucking coyly, like a pack of does. They are pretty in taupe and pink and with the pillbox hats Alicia made them, though it’s hard to tell the difference from girl to girl. The taupe of the dresses is the same taupe Jack’s mother wore to the funeral. Taupe must be the color. Alicia’s cousin Mirelle is wearing the dress that had been made for me before I dropped out. I wave and smile, saying thank you for helping out, and how pretty she looks.

  Alicia’s raven hair is parted in the center, just as she likes it, flat to mid-skull, where cumbrous braids accumulate into a type of turban or hive in which six blood-red roses are enwreathed. During discussions with the florist, Mrs. Ross had suggested pink or yellow, but Alicia had refused. When my opinion was solicited, I just said that Alicia was an artist, and she knows about such things. Mrs. Ross, always an adoring mother and art enthusiast, was satisfied with that. I’m glad now about the red; Alicia looks beautiful—truly, she is an artist. Her neck is bound in a choker of freshwater pearls, at least ten strands thick. Her beaded gown is fitted at the bodice, becoming full at the hips. The beads catch light, making motion. With her high forehead and hollow cheeks and ravishing stillness, she looks like a black-figure silhouette in an Etruscan tomb painting.

  Tears fill her eyes. “This feels bad,” she says. “Unbelievably bad.”

  I scrape a square of glitter from her cheek. What has she been glittering? Menus maybe, or gifts for the kids. She’s that way. It’s unfortunate that Jack’s suicide has touched her wedding, but that is life and she is part of the living. Marriage of all things has to withstand its share of troublesome associations. Anyway, there’s nothing I can do. She seems to think I can do something.

  “What you said yesterday at the funeral, about normal people with the need to please, people with a false face—”

  I wave my hand, stopping her. I can’t tell her the truth and I don’t feel like lying. It would be nice to think that her super-social sensibilities will lead her to some place of relative freedom and self-empowerment, but I’m not sure they will, and besides, such sensibilities didn’t exactly help her father. I reach into my pocketbook and withdraw a piece of onyx onto which I carved a flower.

  “For you,” I say. “For luck.”

  She clings to me. In her dress she feels stiff, like underneath is corrugated stuff, like a hurricane could not raise her. Maybe that’s the point. In a gown the bride cannot get away. She cannot turn back. She belongs to man, to family, to community. Like a hot air balloon moored by sand and ropes. “I wish you would stay for the reception,” Alicia says.

  Mrs. Ross taps us apart. “That’s enough, girls. Evie, dear, go sit.”

  Jonathan’s brother, Evan, meets me at the base of the center aisle. Evan didn’t want to be a groomsman. He wanted to play guitar during the service and sing “Turn, Turn, Turn,” but Mr. Ross said no. He’d have enough on his mind without having to worry about a goddamned minstrel.

  “Sorry about your friend,” Evan murmurs as we walk, him leading me, grand and slow. In the middle of the section on the left is Rob. Next to him, Rourke. My body becomes desirous, though truly I mourn. Jack was right to call me feral. I force down the life of me, like snapping a whip at a beast. I think of Elizabeth eating meat and Jack staring. I tell myself, Jack is staring.

  Evan delivers me to the second row, to a padded white folding chair behind Mark’s grandparents, who are so small I have to lean to kiss them. As I lean, I am completely conscious of Rourke and Rob, mute and upright, eight rows behind me, observing the supple arc of my spine. The string quartet begins Mozart’s “Minuet in G,” and Mark and Alicia’s cousin Sam and his second wife, Abby, who is seven months pregnant, join me. Abby is not in taupe, she is in teal. A teal net hangs off her teal hat. Abby and Sam own a baby furniture company on the Upper West Side. One of her gloved hands touches my arm. “We heard about your friend last night at the rehearsal dinner. Are you okay?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Thank you.”

  Sam leans over. I see the map of his goatee, the grand plan of it. “We’re terribly sorry.”

  Mark’s father made the announcement at the rehearsal dinner the night before. The dinner was at 1770 House, a historic inn and restaurant on Main Street in East Hampton, which the Ross family had taken over for the weekend.

  Mr. Ross explained to family and bridal party members that a friend of mine and Alicia’s had died, and that due to my particularly close relationship with the deceased, it would not be appropriate for me to participate in a wedding just one day after the funeral.

  I didn’t hear the announcement; I was at my mother’s. But I’d come to the Ross house to finish the place cards hours before the wedding, and Mr. Ross informed me of wha
t he’d said. By the time I arrived there, Mark had gone to play some tennis with Brett, and the bridesmaids were lined up waiting for stylists. I opened the shoe box of cards I’d finished two weeks earlier and added all the table numbers. Mr. Ross waited patiently. As soon as I wrapped up the calligraphy pens, he said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Mrs. Ross suggested I stay. “She’s had a rough week, Richard. She might like to be included in the styling session. I don’t know what we could do with that hair, Eveline, but how about nails and makeup?”

  “Don’t be conniving, Theo. She has no intention of staying past the ceremony.”

  “Richard, I—”

  “We’ve been through this a dozen times. She’s leaving after the ceremony. Besides, have you seen these girls when they come out? They look like hookers.”

  Mr. Ross and I strolled past the fountain and the newly erected tents. I was relieved to think that the tents were not the same ones used by the Flemings. Had the events been separated by more than one day, it might have been possible. All those sedimentary tears, caught in the vinyl, dripping down and around the wedding party.

  I’d given away my bridesmaid dress to Mirelle, so I had to stop by Mark’s cottage to collect a spare dress and a pair of shoes for the ceremony, and when I did, Mr. Ross waited for me in the hallway. Though the cottage was in fact theirs, he and his wife had always afforded us the strictest privacy. In the three years I’d lived with Mark, they’d never stopped by without an invitation, though Alicia would walk in all the time.

  My suitcases were in the center of the room. I hadn’t seen them since I’d packed to leave the city after the fight. I ended up going without them when I got the news about Jack, just taping a note to the top and heading for Penn Station.