Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,172

leg and he had to have surgery. He ended up winning a twenty-four-thousand-dollar settlement.

“If I’d been one step forward,” he’d confided with shock and horror at the time, “it would have killed me. It just wasn’t my time.”

If Denny had been killed by a falling air conditioner, everyone would have said that it was destiny. People would have to say that, just to give meaning to something seemingly meaningless. But he didn’t die, and so the incident becomes irrelevant and remains largely undiscussed, which is regrettable, because of all the remarkable things about life, the most remarkable are the near misses.

When he arrived, he said he’s almost ready to get back to dancing and that we should sign up for instruction soon. He’d bought us a series of lessons for Christmas last year, or possibly the year before. Mark kept telling me it was too dangerous to go, that those dance studios are really just money-laundering fronts.

“Getting any sleep at all?” he asks.

“Sort of. Not really. A little, I’ve been dreaming.”

“Well—good! Dreaming is good. It’s brain work. It’s a sign of health. You know, I read somewhere that death row inmates have disproportionately fewer dreams than the rest of us,” Denny says as he pays the check. “And that a majority of them choose Dr Pepper as their last drink. Wouldn’t that make a great ad campaign?—‘The last word in soda—Dr Pepper.’”

The weight of the rain lifts; the sun presses through. The street dries rapidly, making me think of those hooded rollers in car washes. Denny and I make eye contact through the picturesque vapor, which is awkward—awkward because I want something from him, which feels like asking for money to buy pills. I want him to remind me of where we started, since where he started and where I started is the same. I wonder if he retains the impression of me and of Rourke like keys to a former house.

I ask Denny, “Do you remember me then?”

“Very well,” he says. “You were happy.”

“You need some rest.”

“Rest is all I get,” I tell the doctor.

She says, “Obviously not the right kind.”

I didn’t even know there were different kinds.

Dr. Mitchell replies, “Well, first of all, rest at home is cheating. You still have the phone and bills and mail and shopping and cooking to deal with. You know, cleaning and laundry.”

I do not bother to tell her I do nothing, pay for nothing. It’s too embarrassing.

She prescribes Halcion and an extended vacation.

“Don’t you have a school break coming up in February?”

“Yes,” I say, thinking, Mark has put her up to this.

Jamaica is hot, hot like you will need emergency services. It is a lonesome and detestable heat, a broad, blinding heat, like being tied to a post at a crossroad. Like there is no shelter, no friend. No help in sight. Just you, left to burn.

In the tropics I think without reprieve; maybe it’s the heat or maybe it’s the medicine, with outside sounds that grow softer and inside ones growing louder. There is a long dock with a thatch-roofed awning at the end; in the morning I go out there to where the world is orderly, where it is arranged in plates of color—white and blue and blue. Like the candle we used to look at in high school, discussing whether the bird was flying on the plane of the sea or on the sky. I wonder about that conversation, about why we kept having it, and about all the probing conversations of our adolescence. There was a simultaneous coming to consciousness. It was like a circle of ladders wide at the base and tapered at the top—with each of us stepping up together, testing in tiny rises the ideal of a singleness of perspective, gaining by rungs new things to swear by, going as far as we could possibly go before forsaking the ascent altogether.

What is it that we were hoping to obtain? Did we speak in the pursuit of unity because we could not speak in the pursuit of power? Is that why early allegiances are discontinued, because eventually you must demand of friendships some advantage? I certainly don’t need to become more politically liberal or artistically aware or socially open-minded to survive; as a matter of fact, my opinions often cripple me. Was it that we had nothing pertinent to give one another anymore, such as sound investment advice or better career credentials? All Mark’s associates just make one another richer. It feels incredible, how hard