Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,102

up. “Bye.”

The train rocked back, readying itself, then it jolted westward. It was strange that I’d never said goodbye to Rourke, and yet, despite the odds against seeing him again, there was always another time. It was risky, like gambling. One day I would miscalculate, and there would be no next time. I looked through the scraped window at America’s nearly first night sky, thinking, Once, Jane boarded a plane bound for the States.

Cars were parked askew all down my street, like porcupine needles, and from the head of the driveway, I could hear strains of “Danny Boy.” Through the front window there was a sea of heads lit by candlelight, filtered by the gauze of smoke. I slipped past into the kitchen.

Lowie and her boyfriend, David Hill, were at the table, and Mom was getting a refill from a pitcher of beer for Lewis, her disabled friend. Lewis referred to himself as a crippled dwarf or a twisted midget. “Anything but a small man,” he’d say. “Small is relative.”

When they saw me, they all shouted, “Evie!”

Lowie was first to kiss me. “Kate just called.” Kate was in Montreal; her brother’s baby had arrived—a boy named Jean-Claude. For months the plan was that I would fly up with her, but when the time came, I couldn’t leave. I don’t know, just, Rourke, the nearness of him. “I didn’t realize the baby was a C-section,” Lowie said. “Isn’t that a shame?”

“You can’t deliver every baby yourself, Low,” Mom said.

“It was just seven pounds, Irene. It’s abuse of women by the medical establishment.”

“And the insurance providers,” Lewis added as he climbed up the chair onto the seat.

“Let me get you the phone book, Lewis,” Mom suggested.

“The chair’s fine, Irene. Thank you.”

There was food on the counter, edible food. “Let me fix something for you, Eveline,” David said. He was a cook at the American Hotel in Sag Harbor. Occasionally, on a night off, he and Lowie would stop by with the sort of food I never saw, not even on holidays—roasted lamb with rosemary sauce and Yukon gold potatoes au gratin and brussels sprouts sautéed in fresh ginger. “I’d cook for you here, Evie,” he would say, as we’d unload pans and trays from his car, “but your mother’s got no knives, no pots, no silverware, and no ingredients. The few plates she has that aren’t chipped are covered in cigarette ash, and half the time she’s surrounded by a starving multitude. I’m not a rich man!”

David handed me a paper plate, and I sat. Lowie asked how the parade was.

“Montauk was okay,” I said. “I went on a motorcycle ride.”

“Who with?” my mother wanted to know.

“A girl I met. Jane.”

“Jane what? What was her last name?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t ask.”

“That wasn’t smart,” Lewis said sternly. “What if you got into an accident?”

Lowie said, “Who would’ve given the hospital your blood type?”

“I don’t even know her blood type,” my mother admitted.

“How can you not know her blood type?” Lowie reprimanded. “You’re her mother.”

In the sanctity of my room, I lay in bed, and the fluid in my horizontal body compressed. I felt half-full, like the tide in me was lowering. I found a sheet of good paper and I drew a tornado. The hard part of drawing a tornado is the frenzy of contradictory motion—lightness and leadenness, a thing there and not there, heaving and still, cruel and oscillating.

There was music coming from the living room—slow clapping, a harmonica, a guitar. I opened my door. Through the crowd, I saw my mother on the Eskimo dogsled chair she’d gotten at the dump. She was low to the ground, elbows on knees, harmonica in her hands. Jack was next to her on the enamel blue hearth, playing guitar. The room was silent except for her humming and the squeak of Jack’s fingers moving along the strings. He began to sing “Jesus Met the Woman at the Well,” which, according to Jack, had been recorded by Canadian folksingers Ian and Sylvia, and also by Peter, Paul and Mary.

He said, woman, woman, you’ve got five husbands

And the one you have now, he’s not your own.

Soon Mom joined in—

She said, this man, this man, he must be a prophet

He done told me everything I’ve ever done.

At the end came applause, and my mother hugged Jack, and he smiled. He loved her, everyone did, and she loved him with a special love she reserved for things so flawed. Jack especially admired the way she played harmonica. “The