Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,173

I tried, how much I lost—the luxury of time and friends and poetic aptitude, the modest opulence of home, where definitions of success extended no further than the pleasant close of the day you were in, where dreams of paradise were enough to sustain you.

Through these thoughts, thoughts of Rourke appear. Is this soul preservation I am feeling, or the vanity of sorrow returning? I don’t mean to go back to grief. It’s just, there are memories of days when I did not have to do, but only to be, when I was desired for the little grace I was. I tell myself, We all lose such days. Why should I be any different?

Mark helps me to advance, despite my own aversion to my betterment. It hardly seems just with so many going untended in their despair, but somehow I feel cheated. I feel dispossessed of leverage. The fact of my living a life of privilege precludes me from reflecting on privilege—there are rules about thinking or saying too much about your place if your place is an especially comfortable one, even if you arrived there by accident. Though I’m conscious of the comparative ease of my position, I can’t access it in my head—it’s like pushing peas through molasses. If privileged is not how I feel, it is how I look, and how I look is how I am viewed, and view is everything. It’s irrelevant that I myself possess nothing, that I am more destitute than ever. If I am dependent, if I am subjected to views with which I disagree, if I live a life of compromise, it’s a life I’ve chosen. I am wholly responsible.

My mind turns naturally to my parents: to my mother’s struggle to support us while she attended college and graduate school, though she could have married anyone she wanted and attained financial security; to my father in his Ray-Bans and khakis, ready for a drive in his Plymouth station wagon to Gaslight Village in Lake George or the Danbury Fair in Connecticut, grateful for the inglorious luxury of a two-day vacation and a full tank of gas. Stuffed into the visor there would be maps and site brochures to caverns and motel recommendations and a leather pouch filled with change for the tolls. In a cooler would be the lunch he and Marilyn had made when they’d gotten up at five in the morning.

The day Mark and I pulled up to the sign shop in the Porsche, Dad came out with Tony. When I introduced my father as an artist, he shook Mark’s hand and said, “Actually, son, I’m a sign-painter.”

And me, not an adult, but a sick shell, void of fury, purpose, instinct. Not even a sellout, since sellout implies that there is some superior identity I’ve left behind.

Mark is coming. I feel the bob and creak of the dock with every step he takes—forty-seven steps. It’s time for breakfast. At breakfast, the tables are immaculately set upon a curved concrete lagoon beneath huge tracts of cranberry-red bougainvillea where middle-aged Teutonic couples who do not touch in the night suck back poached eggs from thick silver spoons like sucking back oysters off of shells, and where the silence is uncanny until the arrival of our party—we are twelve. When we arrive, we create chaos. There is turbulent chair-switching and table-shifting and off-menu ordering. There is the flamboyant tying of slipped bikini straps and the indecent cross-table sharing of food and the rummaging through beach bags for cameras and aspirin, lotion and sunglasses.

Mark kneels behind me on the dock and puts his arms around my waist. “What are you looking at?”

“Home,” I say, because as a couple, we are not without our virtues. I speak the truth when asked, and I never care to hear what he chooses not to tell. He doesn’t mind that in my heart I betray him. I steal because I’ve been stolen from. It would take forever to replace all that has been taken from me. He knows that.

“Did you take your pill this morning?” Mark asks. I tell him yes, I took two.

Ocho Rios is about an hour’s drive from the Half Moon Hotel, where we are staying. To get there, we rent motorcycles. Brett found six Triumph Bonnevilles through a British expatriate in Montego Bay. We take off east down the road—steep and angry highlands to the right, tranquil Caribbean to the left. We stop for beer at a place called the Famous Lovely Lynn’s,