Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,132

window was mottled and chapped, with the thumb splaying stiffly. I found myself hoping that Al had been in love once, that when he was in his prime, he fulfilled it.

Rourke thanked him, and as we turned onto the service road, he asked if I was hungry.

I told him no, not really.

No one had been awake when we’d stopped at my mother’s house after Alicia’s party. Rourke parked at the head of the driveway, and our feet made even sounds on the gravel as we walked, though his sounds were heavier than mine. I hadn’t asked him to accompany me, and he hadn’t offered. It was just that when I got out of the car, he got out also, and when we met at the hood, he took my hand. Of course we would not encounter resistance on the inside. In my mind it was not a possibility or even a consideration. My entire life had led to that moment of autonomy, and I was grateful for the authority I’d been given over myself.

Rourke opened the back door to my bedroom for me, propping it with his arm and drawing me through. He looked around sweepingly, assessing everything. As the things he viewed came to life, these things as I had known them turned dead. I knew without question that I would never again live at home. If I was mistaken, if, in fact, I would be driven back, it would be because I had failed or because I had brought failure upon myself. I would not fail. He stood with me by my dresser, him leaning on the wall and me opening drawers. I emptied out the art supplies from a small canvas tool bag, and in it I packed two T-shirts, a pair of jeans, a pair of shorts and a dress, my favorite sweater, one pair of shoes, a bathing suit.

“Anything else you need,” he said, “we’ll pick it up.”

Highways narrowed as we shot down the New Jersey coast, taking the Garden State past Asbury Park, Ocean Grove, Sea Girt, and then numbered routes that turned to single-lane stretches flanked by hilly embankments with painted houses. At the shore we trailed the flight of the boardwalk, and a hot wind caressed my face. I wondered if I climbed through the window, would I float. It seemed like the air out there formed a belt of heat and salt, a parallel place to crawl upon.

“This one’s for Leeanne out in Mountainside,” the deejay said. Then came “Bennie and the Jets.”

She’s got electric boots, a mohair suit,

You know I read it in a magazine.

I was changing my clothes. He was driving, and he’d told me to.

I reached through my bag for my bathing suit, and when I found it, I put it on, sliding my dress above my hips and pulling up the bottoms, and slipping the shoulder straps off my shoulders and tying the top piece around my chest. In the side-view mirror I could see the elongated hollow at the base of my neck, the downward pools of my collarbone, the rules of my chest, and above that ladder, my face. New lines marked the skin beneath my eyes, preclusive new lines. I pushed back my hair. Somewhere were my barrettes, in the seat or on the floor.

We pulled into a parking lot at Point Pleasant and stepped out onto the already steaming tar. I could smell the unctuous glue of it. We walked up the ramp, and at the top I shaded my eyes from the glare. The boardwalk spilled out in either direction like a carpet, like a platform that made you spectator to the sea. It seemed to extend along the entire coast. I imagined it dipping intermittently—tucking underground, coming back up, like sewing stitches. It was awful, yet somehow democratic, with all the people there talking and reading, walking and running. There were old people strolling with cups of coffee. You hardly ever saw old people at the beach in East Hampton.

Near the water he dropped the towels he’d carried from the car. The sand was not like the sand at home; it was flatter and darker. I pulled off my dress and waded into the ocean, going until my feet didn’t touch. Rourke was sitting contemplatively in the morning light; the ice-blue dress shirt he’d worn since the party was half-open and wrinkled. Behind him the arcades and game galleries were creaking uniformly to life, forming a low-rising headland of noise and