Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,160

he would leave me on board and take her instead. Humans are remarkable in terms of need. We all have plans like maps in the mind.

“Here y’all go,” Jana said, leaning down to hand me aspirin, revealing exquisite cleavage. The saturated color of her eyes bled into the white, making a subordinate color, which was spooky. If I had eyes like that, I might have become a stewardess too.

In our room at the Hay-Adams, I played with the curtains, opening and closing them—White House. No White House. When Mark went for a run, I ended up in the lounge. The bartender seemed to think I needed a margarita, and after I finished it, I thought I needed another. There was a stack of cocktail napkins, and I had the urge to draw—not so much to draw as to feel the pen squish into the cushion of paper. I drew intertwining things—feathers and patchwork quilts, corncobs and tatters of burlap.

Eventually Mark rushed in. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” He talked overloud as if to a dog he’d left tied to a parking meter. Mark doesn’t like people to think he is not tending to things. He over-tipped the bartender, then steered me toward the door. “So you’ve been drawing!” he said, loudly. He was always trying to get me to draw.

In the early morning before the zoo, we went to the cherry blossoms. We were the first there, and it was nice to circle beneath the continuous, low, and protective parasol of flowers. The Washington Monument appeared unexpectedly here and there through the branches like a stylus referring to the infinitude of heaven. Actually zoo is incorrect. Zoos are conservation societies now, which is why there are pie charts and bar graphs in the doorways of every exhibit. But visitors who do not want to read about the importance of environmental equilibrium can still enjoy the sight of submission. They can see primal needs confront civility.

Mark told me the animals have no memory of home. And yet I could see traces of savagery and pride. In order to persevere, they assign home to a position within themselves; they store it, safeguard it. By their eyes they say—We will return. Look into the eyes of anyone who has suffered diaspora and you will find a home, implicit and original, glinting like specks of starlight. You will envy them. You will wish their home were your home. You will know irony because you have nothing as substantial to assist your identity.

Maybe home is elusive to so many because it is not a place we should be seeking, but a zone of self-determination. In order to arrive there, you must first relinquish false knowledge of a false self. You must allow your learned rendition of reality to turn back to conjecture, allow your life to grow small again, like someone beloved left at a railway station, growing narrower and shallower as the train pulls away, a hugeness waning. And then when it’s far gone, you can actually see it. Your home. Yourself.

“There’s one there.” Mark pointed to a tiger. “Blanche.”

She was high in the grass, the fake zoo grass. I saw her eyes and chocolate flame markings. I saw her panting at rest. It seemed to me that she was missing the moonlight. I wondered if she missed the moonlight as much as I missed drunken walls of cattails by the bay and barefoot walks across parking lots coated with the frailest layer of sand, blown like glitter from the palm of a giant hand. Could she still hear the thudding bluster of wind against the night the way I could still hear the roaring fortress of the sea? Did she too hate her hunger—when her appetite stirred, did a plate appear? The most awful hunger is the type that is satisfied too soon, before it moves you, before you are moved by it, before it becomes protracted and superior, a motivating business, making you honorable, graceful, clever—a hunter.

I turn in from the terrace. The broken bird jerks and trembles. “I’ll keep it someplace small,” I say. “I won’t catch a disease.”

Mark sees we have reached an impasse. On certain subjects I cannot be moved. “Let’s get Manny,” he declares brightly.

Manuel the super is in his office in the swill-green subbasement, pouring black wax coffee from a thermos. He drinks ten cups a day. He is diabetic. When I said that to Mark, he asked how would I have come to know such