Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,168

go to East Hampton. Other employees stay until six, and some work through the weekend. I never asked for the abbreviated schedule; Mark arranged it. It doesn’t make me tremendously popular with the staff, though the salespeople are careful to remain friendly in case I have any power over Mrs. Ross.

“You’re there to build a résumé,” Mark says, “not to make friends.”

Each week he pulls onto the curb and bounds up to retrieve me because I don’t always recognize the car. There’s always a different car—he is perpetually testing, borrowing, buying, trading vehicles. The beloved 356B Porsche remains in East Hampton, except for those special occasions when he needs to make a dramatic impression. Whenever I hear that, I think of the first time he showed it to me—and how, yes, I was dramatically impressed.

Today Sara Eden is there. She has just arrived from Washington, D.C., for a family reunion, so she is driving out with us. As Mark escorts me to the car, Sara steps out and moves toward me. I’d forgotten how beautiful she is. I hang my head slightly, feeling ashamed.

She kisses me hello and her fingers make a circle around my wrist bone. “You’re white as a sheet. When was the last time you saw a doctor?” she whispers sharply once Mark is out of earshot.

Mark drives south down the cobblestoned Mercer Street; he likes to take the Manhattan Bridge straight off of Canal. The architecture in SoHo deceives. Loading docks and freight elevators allude to industry, though there no longer is any. Behind the cast-iron façades, abandoned factories have been gutted and sterilized to make loft apartments. No one cares to think too long or hard about the long-term consequences of the loss of American manufacturing. Except my father, whose first job was at Shuttleworth Carton Company, a die-cutter on West Broadway, and who complains that moving industry to where it can’t be seen isn’t stopping industry. He always says that we’re still polluting the same goddamned planet.

“Every idiot thinks they’re entitled to flushing toilets and a space station future, but nobody can make a cardboard box anymore,” he would lament when he and Marilyn walked west to SoHo to see me. “If we keep sending the dirty work overseas, what happens in the next depression?”

My father is always talking about the next depression like you can set your clock to it, though if it’s coming, no one in New York seems concerned. They’re there to get what they can for themselves for as long as possible before cutting out to follow their dream. Chiseled blondes in Agnès B. miniskirts, hip Asian girls in obtuse shoes from Tootsi Plohound, and gray-haired gallery directors in tortoiseshell eyewear sell transparencies of Jesus and close-up photos of genitalia and elysian landscapes in oil copied off of overhead projections. At openings, girls with body-painted breasts serve drinks but fail to hold anyone’s attention. Faces whoosh at you as though ejected from fireplace bellows saying, What a fabulous show! During lunch, people swarm the pay phones like flies on fruit, waiting peevishly to call their answering machines, the latest must-have devices. They bang in numbers with lightning-fast accuracy, desperate for messages, for recognition, for distinction among the masses.

Lately I’ve been thinking of Cuba. I imagine it to be the last original place. All you ever hear of Cuba is, There is no freedom there! Television is state-controlled! Yet for all the supposed freedom in America, there is a confounding deficit of ingenuity in terms of thought and taste. Style is dictated by the controlling influences and concerns of a mass marketplace. People are trained to be dutiful consumers—we all want the same stuff, not because it’s good or useful, necessary or lasting, but because we allow ourselves to be convinced that we can’t live without it. We forgo all logic of quality and durability.

If you travel internationally, you will feel shocked by contemptuous talk of America. To hear your fellow citizens characterized as barbarian shoppers who know nothing of love, food, health, and religion, but everything of lawsuits, fast food, and guns, is to experience a national fidelity of which you may not have thought yourself capable. And yet, you’re at a loss for a convincing defense. It’s difficult to refute the accusation of misapplied liberties when rifles are sanctioned but public breastfeeding is not.

At least in Cuba, television doesn’t pretend not to be state-controlled, and supermarkets don’t stock pre-decorated cakes. In the United States, supermarkets carry pre-decorated cakes, walls