Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,174

a roadside shanty made of sundry timber and corrugated tin painted a caustic berberine-yellow.

A Jamaican man with an elongated head and spooling facial hair observes us from an aluminum folding chair. Lynn opens twelve tepid bottles of Red Stripe—there is the limp chzzt, chzzt of bottle caps snapping off. She sets the beers next to piles of bananas and neat rows of pineapples and peeled-back coconuts. I know she’s Lynn because right away Brett asked, “Are you the famous Lovely Lynn?”

The man in the chair wants to know my birth date, which I give. He tells me my number. “Eight.”

I turn my bottle in my hands and think of the number eight—stacked Os, a pair of glasses, segments of an earthworm, bubbles fused.

Mark takes a swig and makes a gratified sound. Lynn smiles at him. He inquires about her bracelets. Her arms are loaded with them—silver, gold, colored plastic.

“Fifty-two,” she says, dangling her wrists in air. “One for each week.”

“These three are identical,” Mark says. “They only count as one.”

The man continues to inspect me. “Whatever happened to you happened through eight.”

“We started going out when she was eighteen,” Mark chimes in.

“No. Not eighteen,” he reports flatly to Mark, all the while his eyes boring into me. “Seventeen—one plus seven—eight. She knows what I’m saying.”

Yes, I know what he is saying. Rourke.

Mark stiffens. He pays for the beers, then gives the guy twenty bucks. “Buy your lady another couple of bracelets.”

At a local happy hour club named Bloody Mary’s Jerk Pork BBQ, we all dance on a stage that cuts through the tables like a runway. For some reason, it’s dressed on the sides in drooping velvet. It looks like a fancy coffin—a catafalque, a draped casket for presidents and kings. I remind myself to smile and to be pretty. It’s hard to remember anything when I have the heavy feeling that Rourke is looking, that he’s coming, though it’s not likely that he will find me, since it’s dark where I am. I wonder—when Rourke left, did he give me up to Mark consciously, like laying a baby on the steps of one particular house?

We dance until dark, moving the way the Jamaicans do. The men press their penises against the women’s thrust-back asses, and the whole place is a party. From outside you could probably see the little shack shaking, going side to side.

Back at the hotel there is the sanitized rendition of Jamaican culture. We reenter the walled and gated property, return the motorcycles, and end the evening with a civilized stroll by the water’s edge. We stop at the bulletin board to sign up for upcoming activities. The next day we take the glass-bottom boat tour at ten, and in the afternoon I rest by the pool while Mark goes with Richard to work on his swing. I don’t ask if swing means tennis swing or golf swing. In New York, it means squash swing. Dinner that night is followed by a rum punch festival in front of a calypso show with steel drums, limbo dancing, and crab racing. The crabs get soaked in beer. I don’t like the crabs part. It makes me sick, but I stay anyway, because, just because.

Dudley arrives with a cup of Blue Mountain Coffee for me. His grandmother drinks several cups a day, he told me one afternoon, and she is ninety-six. Dudley is our waiter; every day and night we get him. He is soft-spoken, clear and proud, with prominent cheekbones upcurving like stripes beneath his eyes. He is a king from another time. Now he clears tables and rectifies silverware, making all things parallel and perpendicular. When he puts down the china cup, the act is delicate, though if he wanted, he could crush it. I look at Dudley and am overcome by shame. I honestly don’t know what to do about the nauseating fact of myself. He understands, I think. He nods to me, knowingly, quietly, pushing the coffee cup closer.

The world beyond our suite is silent. The sea is not far beyond our terrace, but I can’t hear it because the sea doesn’t move where we are. There is just the sound of the ceiling fan over the bed blowing my hair and the ribbons of my dress. Tick, tick, tick.

Mark tosses down a box, and the bed rocks. It is long like a pen box, only heavier. Unless it’s a very nice pen. I try to remember the weight of a nice pen, but my