Anthropology of an American Girl

by Hilary Thayer Hamann

  At the mention of Mark, we both shoot a glance in the direction of the bridal party. Through the screened walls of the porch, we can see that half the guests are still waiting in line. We’re sitting low, so there’s no way for him to spot us. Rourke is still out there, so Mark won’t think to worry.

  Rob turns back. “Long story short, two years later, worst morning of my life—grad school graduation and it’s like, Time is up. My whole family’s flying in and I haven’t gotten through to Anthony. All that’s happened is he’s compromised me. Remember I told you about cheaters? Their job is the failure of your character. So I’m crashed on the couch in his, whatever, bungalow, out of my mind high from the night before—from an hour before—and there are scumbags all over the place—girls, guys, guys dressed like girls, and vice versa. And I’m scanning each face. How did these fucking losers ever look okay to me?

  “In my mind, deep down, I’m thinking—praying—that Tony’s gonna walk down the stairs in some sharp suit like it’s Easter in the neighborhood and I’m seven and he’s seventeen, and he’s gonna chase everybody out, and he’s gonna say, Let’s go, kid. You got a big day ahead. Or else my family’s gonna pull up, and Joey’ll be there all tight with Pop, with my mother in the backseat of the rental car at the end of the driveway, her hands folded on her pocketbook, and my old man’ll go, ‘Go up and get your brother, boys. Tell Anthony we’re going home.’

  “But nothing. Nothing. Nobody wakes up, nobody comes. Hours go by. By nine o’clock I’m freaking out. I gotta go. I gotta go. My heart is speeding like it’s gonna bust, and I want to grab something, a lamp, a golf club. I’m looking to start breaking shit. Get the cops there. Cops would be better than nothing.

  “Just when I think I can’t take it anymore, the front door creaks open. Harrison. He doesn’t set foot in the place. Too contaminated. I don’t want him in there anyway. I jump up and meet him at the doorway.

  “‘Let’s go,’ Rourke says. ‘You’ve done what you can.’

  “I snap. ‘Fuck you, you fucking prick. I’m not leaving.’ I go to him, ‘You don’t know about family because you don’t have one. I’d rather be dead than leave my brother.’ All of a sudden, boom. Harrison hauls back and knocks me down. Full force. Flat. It was like getting hit by a train.

  “Then he looks down and says, ‘He’s not your brother. I am.’”

  I think of Mrs. Rourke saying, Do you know, I still wonder what “the wrong thing” could have been. I wonder, was it the part about Rob taking death for granted, or the part about the brother, or the part about Rourke not having family? All, possibly all.

  “Harrison pulls me up, and I’m sitting there—bleeding and crying on the front steps for—shit, it’s gotta be twenty minutes. I know Anthony fucking heard me. Everybody heard me. All down the street people were coming out of their houses.

  “‘If he doesn’t come down,’ I said, ‘it’s gonna be the last time I see him.’

  “‘One time is gonna be the last time,’ Harrison said. ‘Let’s make it today.’

  “He waited until I was ready. Then he picked me up and took me over to the gym and got me iced and stitched. I couldn’t even stand, I was so screwed up on blow and no sleep and adrenaline. He had the doctor over there make sure my cheekbone wasn’t shattered. It was a double fracture. See?” Rob points to the left side of his face.

  I’ve seen it before. I touch it, fingers flat, going over. “This eye is smaller, isn’t it?”

  “But the vision’s twenty-twenty. That’s all I care about. I could’ve had surgery, but I don’t give a shit, except for the sinus problems. Besides, girls are into it. So Harrison takes me to our place in Ventura, gets me fed and cleaned up, and we make it to graduation on time. My family saw me, and they practically shit. My mother starts sobbing and Mrs. Rourke goes white, but you know what?” Rob drags his fingers across his lips, zipping. “Nobody said nothing—Harrison was with me.”

  Rob looks at me. “Sometimes you love somebody and it’s like you can’t see the top of the building because you’re hugging the ground floor. I know you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

  “That’s why I give you credit for letting go of your friend—Jack.”

  “I’m not sure I did the right thing.”

  “C’mon. You were just a kid, and you let go before you had to. Most people wait for a warm bed. Not you. There was no guarantee with Harrison. In fact, odds were against it. But you treated Jack with respect, and that respect probably kept him going more than you realize. Not me. I just hung around with my brother, stealing time. Now Tony is lost. I got off easy with a busted face—my brother’s got the sickness. Last time I talked to him, he was down to 148 pounds from 190.”

  “Shit. I’m sorry, Rob.”

  “I’m just saying, you would think for all that time in I would’ve gotten better results. But you gotta keep your own world pretty fucking tight if you want to control other people’s outcomes. You can’t start sacrificing yourself to someone else’s twisted view. Like Harrison said, ‘You’ve done what you can.’ I think about that a lot. You do what you do and hope for the best. Once you hit a place of diminishing returns, you have to back off, regroup. I couldn’t save my brother because he didn’t want saving. Neither did Jack. Harrison saved me because I wanted it, I wanted to get the hell out. Biggest lesson of my life—there is no family other than the one you make for yourself.”

  “Jack used to say that.”

  “Well, there you go. Smart kid. But there’s math involved,” Rob says. “You don’t just need friends; you’ve got to be a friend. If there’s nobody to track you, to challenge you, to offer resistance, put up a fight, you become some phony fuck doing constant reinvention. Believe me, it’s not easy. My brother Joey is a pain in my ass, we argue a lot, but someday it’ll be worth it. When one of us needs a wall, we’ll turn around and it’ll be there. Other times, there’s no work involved. You got an automatic fortress. Like Harrison. Like—”

  “Lorraine.”

  “Actually, I was thinking of you.”

  We leave the porch and walk to where the limos and the people wait, over to where the bride and groom will pass, where the flower petals will fly. Where I thought Rourke might be, but he’s not.

  “I gotta tell you,” Rob says, “I lost it last week when I found out you left the fight. I coulda killed my sister. I told her to keep an eye on you.” He points to the top of his hand. There’s a crescent burn along the length of his knuckles. “Next morning she hit me with an egg pan. ‘Self-defense,’ she told my father, as if I would ever set a finger on her, that she-wolf. My mother bandaged me up and called Mark’s apartment. Mark said you were all right. That’s it. No news about a dead friend. Nothing. I grabbed the phone. ‘Lemme talk to her,’ I said, and he goes, ‘Forget about it.’”

  “I left before Mark got home that night,” I explain. “I went back early to pack my bags and leave, but then the call came about Jack. So I just walked out and left my stuff and took the first train to my mother’s.”

  “I didn’t expect you to make it through the whole fight anyway, though I didn’t quite count on you leaving the premises either. I just figured you’d sit in the lobby, the car. Not vanish into the dead of night. I keep forgetting who I’m dealing with.”

  “Sorry.”

  Rob shrugs. “So you packed your bags, huh? How come Mark doesn’t seem to be aware of his single status? He’s telling everyone you two are jetting off to Italy on Monday.”

  “I haven’t had the chance to talk to him. I will tonight.”

  Oh, there’s Rourke. On the far side of the garden with a redhead—Diane Gelbart. Diane will be sitting at table three with her parents, which I’d hoped would be six away from table nine, where Rourke and Rob will be, but in fact the tables are back-to-back, because the caterer plotted them in loops. I saw the blueprint this morning. It looked like a drawing of intestines.

  Diane’s poppy-red hair moves in unison,
like it’s covered in plastic wrap. Her flower-print black-and-red wraparound dress reveals perfect knees. She seems to have been plucked from a photograph in a vintage issue of Vogue. She’s like one of those giant fashion models—all clothes, all posture, huge and hard at work. She spies me from beneath the wide brim of her hat. I must be of enormous interest to her, just as she once was to me. Now I feel nothing—not exactly nothing.

  I look to the street. “How is he?”

  “Twenty grand richer,” Rob says. “So I guess he’s fine.” He kicks at the grass. “I don’t suppose I have to tell you it was a straight fight. Whatever Mark thought or said—”

  I wave my hand, silencing him. I knew Rob would never set Rourke up for a loss. Mark only had to think Rob was desperate enough to do that. Mark had been suckered. Of course it had to be a legitimate purse and a legitimate gamble: Rourke works as a trainer for the Olympics. He would never damage the reputation of the organization or the guys he trains. At the Cirillos’ barbecue Joey said it was gonna be the best year ever for U.S. fighters, that thanks to Rourke the team had a chance of taking twelve out of twelve golds in L.A. Rob didn’t disagree. Like the numbers man he was, he just said, “More like ten out of twelve.”

  Mark was also wrong when he said Rourke had lied to me. Rourke never lied to me. He didn’t have to. There was nothing a lie could have secured from me that the truth would not have. And as for Rourke, he wouldn’t have wanted anything he needed to lie to attain. The only thing Mark got right was that Rob did need to control outcomes. That’s why Rob relied on Mark’s hatred of Rourke, Mark’s ignorance of true friendship and true love, and Mark’s idea of Rob as criminal and corrupt to help raise the stakes of the match. In the end, need brings you down, Rob had said. Mark’s other mistake was in thinking Rob needed cash. Rob never needed cash. Rob would never even suggest he needed cash unless he was trying to scam somebody; it would have been too much of an implication of incompetence.

  “There were, like, six hundred people there,” Rob says. “Harrison still has a huge following, and Vargas is a sweetheart. Everybody loves that kid. Throw Mark and his buddies into it, and forget about it, the money was flying. It was like duck or get hit. Uncle Tudi fronted for licenses, fees, purses in escrow. The take at the door covered expenses three times over. But milking Mr. Tennis Togs was worth the whole thing. The look on his face when those numbers were read—shit. I can’t believe you missed it. Vargas nearly lost his skull in the tenth.” Rob enacts it minimally—hissing and closing one eye, stuttering his head back to the right.

  “Harrison was down three years, so I had excellent odds. But use your brain, you know he’s gonna take it—his record, his style, his character. He trains fucking Olympians. He’s in the ring every day. He’s got the whole martial arts thing. Add to that the incentive to burn Mark, and, well, let’s just say I kept my mouth shut and made a few bucks.”

  “Uncle Tudi too.”

  “Sure. He set the odds. And a couple people I had to take care of. My old man, Ray Peña, Joey, Harrison. You.”

  “Me?”

  “That’s right, you. You know what’s the matter with you? I finally figured it out. Ninety percent of the time you think smart. Numbers and letters. Regular stuff. The other ten percent, I swear, you read pictures in mist or some shit.”

  There is more to what he feels he owes me, more he isn’t saying, such as what gave Harrison the “incentive” to burn Mark.

  Vivica comes by with rose petals. Vivica is Brett’s new girlfriend, the fifth since I’ve known him. Brett waves to Rob through the thickening crowd. He taps his watch impatiently.

  Rob drags his head to one side like he’s annoyed. “I got an hour,” he calls over. “What’s wrong with that kid?” he asks me under his breath. “I got a tip on a horse. He wants to rush over to OTB in Southampton to place a bet. Meanwhile, I could make it all the way into Belmont in an hour. Feel like taking a drive with us?”

  “Actually, I’m leaving.”

  Rob furrows his brow. “Where to?”

  “My mother’s.”

  “Oh, sure, right. It’s not right for you to be out,” Rob says, then he laughs. “That’s gotta be killing Mark, you going AWOL in front of Harrison and Diane at the family wedding. He’s one sore fucking loser. You know, I had to take Uncle Tudi to his office to collect for the fight,” Rob says indignantly. “Like somebody stole my lunch money. That’s a seriously nice office, by the way, with the double-paned glass and those carved African heads. What do you call them?”

  I shrug. “Carved African heads, I guess.”

  “How long has he had that space?”

  “A couple weeks.”

  “Anyhow, I offered to clear all debts in exchange for the Porsche. He said he’d rather send it off a cliff. My uncle told him that could be arranged—anytime. Tudi was pissed off because he don’t like Wall Street. Besides, Mark ran a check on the licenses and permits, which I figured he would. Believe me, I dotted every fucking i.”

  The bridal party is on its way. I can’t see over the heads of people around us, but there’s a cheer, which means they’re on their way. Rob scans the approaching faces. “Damn. If you leave, who am I gonna dance with?”

  “You’ll find someone.”

  “Last time you said that, I ended up dancing with your friend Dennis all night. I got, like, three guys’ phone numbers.” Rob shoots a glance past me. Mark must be close. “When did you say you’re gonna talk to him?”

  “Tonight. Before everyone leaves.”

  “Why don’t you come back in the morning?”

  I shake my head. “It won’t work. He’ll come find me. He’ll come to my mother’s in the middle of the night when it’s too late for me to object.”

  “I suppose I oughta be happy,” Rob mutters. “But to tell you the truth, I got a sick feeling in my gut.”

  I feel the compression of the major vessel in my arm as Mark draws me away from Rob, neither of them acknowledging the other. Rob just crosses over to his car, which is next to Rourke’s car, both of which, unlike all the other hundreds of cars going in either direction down the street, are simply parked in the neighbor’s driveway. He lowers himself slowly into the Cougar and takes another look at me. I’ve seen this look on Rob’s face before. Like he wishes he didn’t have to get mixed up with dames. Like he wishes he could just go make a bet and grab a beer. I feel sorry for him. Men hold your doors and pull your chairs and carry your bags when they’re too heavy, but they can’t protect you from the one thing that scares them most—you and another man.

  He gets into his car and starts his engine, and it’s like thunder.

  Alicia and Jonathan charge through a rain of petals. There is a convivial uproar. Everyone hoots and whistles and claps, except me, except Rourke. He is tall and grave across the way, with Diane at his side, his eyes momentarily on mine, and then they are gone, he is gone, with the white of the veil whooshing past, and the black of her hair, the blood of the roses, the heads going down against the storm of lights. Whoomf. The door. The second and third limos pull forward. These are for the bridal party. They are going to East Hampton town pond to take pictures.

  “If you still insist on leaving,” Mark says to me, “the limo driver will take you to your mother’s house after he leaves us at the pond. I’ll have someone pick you up later.”

  “I’ll drive myself. Where’s the BMW?”

  “I had it parked on the far side of the house. I’d have to have twenty cars moved to get it.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I’ll walk.”

  “No,” he states emphatically. “I cannot have you walk.”

  “Denny will drive me.”

  “Must Alicia lose all her guests? Why not just ask my father to take you?”

  The limo driver taps on the horn. Mr. and Mrs. Ross are in the front seat, watching through the windshield. Mark waves and smiles brilliantly, giving the thumbs-up sign.

  “C’mon,” he says. “They’re waiting.”<
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  53

  It’s nearly dark at Georgica Beach. There is no one there but me. I walk west, my legs pressing into the sand. I climb the jetty to the end, though the rocks are slippery. At the end I stand tall and lean over, like a carved figure on the prow of a ship, like a wooden mermaid. The wind makes gains; the sea surges, pounding the shore. Rain is coming. The clouds are walking to me, approaching like armies—shields very raised.

  After the wedding, the limo driver left me in front of my house. No one was home so I went to the barn. I heard the familiar shotgun snap of the door as it ripped to the side—chuck chuck. I thought of Jack opening the door and Rourke standing once alongside it. And of Kate coming through it, and Denny too.

  The inside was saturated by twilight; the room seemed to be the recipient of an interior rain. The wood walls were bare except for old pin marks from my drawings. My mother had taken them all down to protect them. Last year, or maybe the one before, my father had made a beautiful box lined with acid-free paper, and together my parents had given me my own drawings as a gift. They wanted me to open the box, to go through my early work, but I wouldn’t, not with Mark there. I just thanked them and returned the box to the barn.

  The box of drawings was still on the dresser where I’d left it; I was about to open it when I saw the pile of mail. There’s mail for you in the barn, my mother had said on the day I’d arrived, one week before. I tied it with a blue ribbon.

  I steady myself on the wet rocks and pull the package from my sweatshirt. The envelope is crimped and rumpled. The postmark is legible even through the clouds—New York, New York. There it is, not quite faded, not quite lost—in one corner, May 28, 1984; in the other, my address, my name, Jack’s handwriting.

  Eveline Aster Auerbach

  This is the last object he and I will have touched, an object with intention and direction, with energy passing direct from him to me—life energy. The water slaps the jetty, filling in around me. The ocean. Jack drifting, Jack alone. Alone again, alone some more. Jack, out there. I can almost feel him through the mist. I hold my breath and close my eyes to break the seal. The envelope doesn’t open easily. I have to tear it, and it saddens me to think how well he secured it. The contents slide into my hand—his black book. It’s been so long. The cuts and the scratches, many, many more than there were four years ago. It looks deepened. I flip through until I find a card stuck between two pages. It was the card he’d found in his room under the carpet that time, the holiday card: Eveline. On the pages themselves are two blocks of writing: a letter and a song. The song is written alongside musical notations and dense, uneven bars.