Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,167

I wouldn’t want to try to talk to me.

After catching up with all the stories over several cups of coffee, I walk the two miles back to the Ross’s Georgica house, depressed to leave but comforted somewhat for having been vigorously treated. I’m always handled so delicately by Mark and his family. Sometimes I find him staring at me the way you might stare at a fish you keep, like he’s convinced I don’t see him back. How ironic—Mark thinks he’s so considerate, so cultured, such a gentleman, and yet, I’m apparently so adversely altered by his company that people who have never worried about me before, not even when I was in really bad shape, suddenly worry.

The city glints amiably beneath a mannerly drizzle, so I go slow, taking the long way from the Varick Street station to the East Village, pausing to read the plaques on brownstones, stopping at the record store on Carmine Street and the chess shop on Thompson. In the chess section of the newspaper, you read of cornering and abducting, lunging and capturing, yet here players sit face-to-face, inert and imperturbable, insouciantly grazing knees and sharing breath. The combination of mental vigor and physical inertia is weird, like the glacial way reptiles hunt. And the little chessmen are regal and fiendish, like from gory visions you might have had. I buy myself a knight.

“A replacement?” the man asks.

“Yes,” I say. “A replacement.”

McSorley’s is so packed there’s not enough room to choke if you had to. Whenever a girl walks past the sign shop in tight clothes, Tony Abbruscato says to my dad, “Hey, Anton, take a look at this. There’s not enough room to choke in there if you had to.”

Mark and his crowd are in back, half-sitting, half-standing at a table. There is the attorney they’ve all slept with, Marguerite, who’s been engaged unsuccessfully four times. Brett’s with his new girlfriend, Rachel, who is not a model but a former model. There’s a difference: a former model is just as vain as a working model, only a former model is just so happy to be out of the industry. Mark’s friend Anselm is with his fiancée, Helene de Zwart. They’re all calooshing their mugs like it’s Oktoberfest in Germantown. Mark’s tie is flapped over his shoulder as if blown by a strong wind. I know exactly the kind of night it’s going to be.

They see me and wave. I unzip my coat. Brett leaps to his feet and croons loudly; he used to be in a band.

“There she was just a-walkin’ down the street, singin’ …”

The bar joins in,

“Do wah diddy diddy dum diddy do.”

Right off, a couple of guys step in front of me, blocking my way, asking would I like to stop at their table instead of where I’m headed. Mark and Brett bust over, and there is nonsense shouting and miscellaneous intimidation, culminating in a few clapped backs and an upturned chair or two. As our group gets escorted out, Marguerite stands, fashionably posed, toe-deep in sawdust, clutching the milky top to her Chanel Pierrot suit, paying the tab. Marguerite always manages to be fashionable, even in the midst of picking up the bill during a bar fight. Shopping is her life. She will tell you all about the three Bs—Bendel’s, Barneys, Bergdorf’s—and how she never wears underpants because they corrupt the clean line of slacks. She rarely speaks to me, though she does stare an awful lot, and once I caught her in Mark’s bedroom, going through my drawers.

The first time we met, she looked me over and exclaimed to Mark, “Au naturel!”

Mark always apologizes for her, which is unnecessary. She’s one of those women who make you sad, no matter how scrupulously they dress or how much money they claim to make or what fabulous event they supposedly attended the previous evening. Of course there are women who have the opposite effect, inspiring complete admiration and awe. They wear blue jeans but no makeup and they have gorgeous eleven-year-old sons. All the best women have good skin and gorgeous eleven-year-old sons.

Outside on a murky unlit Fifth Street, the group straightens their ruffled jackets and calculates what to hit next—Odeon for burgers or Chinatown for pork fried rice. Brett pees in a doorway. The urine makes the shape of a lizard on the ground.

Marguerite takes my hand. “Oooh, how short your nails are! So easy to manage!”

Mark picks me up at the gallery after lunch on Fridays and we