Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,131

beings.

—JULIA KRISTEVA

28

Rourke drove through the last remaining darkness. The preliminary azure cool of morning was coming up full around us, clear as the whistles birds make. The ground ascended like a platform into day, and across it we shot, passing from one highway to the next—rolling west, rolling south, with the sun rising and the ellipse of the planet beneath. I felt defiant and alive, like a criminal in the midst of a crime—visionary and dissolute and removed from the world about me. I felt I had entered the tempo of my era. When you study explorers such as Magellan or Cortés, you follow lines across oceans and continents. The miles and the perils, the forfeiture of lives and hearts, the years lost and monies disbursed, are all reduced to trails of dots and arrows. Rourke and I were that way—no more than the eye could see, paving paths through the universe, the look of us amounting to the entirety of our story.

He said to sleep if I wanted to; I didn’t want to.

At the end of an exit ramp, a Volkswagen Beetle waited to turn. The GTO cruised down and closed in on it. We turned as well, left then right, going up a hump into a gas station. Rourke’s wrist flipped, and the engine shut, and you could hear a ring through the silence.

“Better use the bathroom,” he said.

Our doors closed simultaneously, whump, whump. As Rourke reached for the pump, a graying man in a windbreaker approached from the garage office. Al was stitched on his jacket opposite the Texaco logo.

“Good morning, there,” Al said, setting his hand on the pump. “You’re out early.”

Rourke said something I couldn’t hear, and Al laughed, answering, “You bet.”

My head was hanging as I stepped over oil stains and embedded chips of glass in the asphalt. There were patterns, and in the patterns, gleaming variations—tiger likenesses and fighter pilots. If you looked, you could find them. Also I saw my legs, my knees and calves, and beneath them the carob dirt unpacking, smoking up as I walked, adhering in a film to my bare feet and ankles. In my hand were my shoes from the graduation party the night before. I put them on before going into the bathroom.

The dented steel door creaked mightily. I rinsed my hands and face with cold water and combed down my hair with my fingers. I wondered what Rourke felt like to wait for me. He’d never been mindful of my needs before. I hoped he wouldn’t think less of me for them. Being in love is like leaning on a broken reed. It is to be precariously balanced, to teeter between the vertical and the horizontal. It’s like war: it’s to demand of one’s sensibilities the impossible—to expect paranoia to coexist with faith, chance with design, to enlist suspicion insensibly in certain regards and suppress it blindly in others.

He was inclined against the hood on the driver’s side. His arms were folded, and his legs were stretched out and crossed at the ankle. His feet were on the oval island that housed the pumps. My stomach felt weak to see him again, the fullness of his shoulders, the gesture of his body. When I neared, he looked over, turning because he knew to turn, because of messages sent between the sex of us. Al spoke, and Rourke answered, not taking his eyes off me. I knew what he experienced when he watched me walk, because I felt my body’s response. I felt myself become at once everything I was originally and everything he had taken and touched. I felt my skin assume the burden of the sunrise. I felt the luxury of flesh beneath my dress. My lips were chapped and my hair damp and unbrushed, and when I stepped, my foot touched down with the beneficence of angels. In my heart dwelt a primitive kindness. Mostly what I felt was relieved to live for his regard.

“I don’t know which is prettier, young lady,” Al said, “daybreak, or you.”

Rourke stretched back across the hood to hand me a Coke. He must have gotten it from the soda machine while I was in the bathroom. I cracked open the can and drank. The sugar was shocking.

“That’s no breakfast,” Al chided as we climbed into the car. He rested one arm on Rourke’s open window. The other waved in some unseen direction over the roof. “Try Adrienne’s—it’s a truck stop up the road.” The hand on the