Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,177

of female genitalia and a laminated flip-book depicting ailments—tumors, warts, cysts. There were also photographs of her children.

“You’ll need a D and C,” she stated. “Do you know what that is?”

I said like a vacuum.

She said, a vacuum, yes, or a scraping. “You might still have tissue inside. You don’t want an infection. I’ve made arrangements for tomorrow. They’ll squeeze us in at nine.”

I touched my belly as I walked down the hall. A scraping. How absolutely Rourke would be removed. There would be no trace. A little tissue, a little infection, at least that was something to hold on to. Maybe a scraping would be best. Yes, a scraping.

The feeling after leaving Montauk that summer was the one that persisted, which was that I wanted to die. I would have killed myself as soon as Rourke dropped me at home, but then I’d never see him again, and true love is devious. I remembered Jack once saying to me, I could cut my wrists, put a bullet through my skull. If I thought I could reach you. But nothing can reach you. My God, I thought, Jack.

There was no narrative completeness to the last day. It transpired in sick and silent fragments, like snapshots deadly passing, with no story to fill the places in between. Rourke’s grim shadow in the bitter predawn light, sitting vigil over me on the edge of the bed as I passed fitfully through a fevered sleep, his eyes boring holes through open space as though his will could forge the future. Clean clothes for me at the foot of the bed. The Montauk cottage, a broom-swept shell, cleared of almost all our belongings. The car, idling and meticulously packed; the brightness of the sun, the whiteness of the sky; the neighbor’s three-legged dog, blocking the end of the driveway and Rourke leading the dog home by the collar. Us on opposite ends of the moving car, not speaking, my face against the padded vinyl door. My mother’s house, completely empty of people; him carrying my bags directly to my room, leaving them there, turning to go. Me alone on my knees surrounded by thrown clothes and overturned drawers, with the dresser sitting hideously dismantled like a mouth missing teeth. Me again, somewhere else entirely, the barn maybe, leaning upright against the wall, clutching it, as though I were on one of those carnival gyroscope rides, erect and perpendicular and holding hard because real life is centrifugal, because in the middle of everything is nothing.

And intermittently, sound. Cars rolling blithely up the street; the pernicious rap of the kitchen clock; the agitated whisk of my breath; my voice, hoarse from sobbing. I spoke to myself; there was no one else to speak to. Be brave, I kept saying. Be brave. Maybe there was something else I needed to be, but I couldn’t think of the word for it.

On my bed there were messages. Labor Day weekend—I’d missed the entire thing. Kate had come from Canada to get the rest of her stuff. Where are you? I’m with Marie-Helene. Meet us later! I didn’t know anyone named Marie-Helene. Why had Kate written the name as though I knew it? Sue from the Lobster Roll had called twice, the first time asking where I was, the second time asking if I felt better. Rourke must have called to tell them I was unwell and could not work. The thought of him calling on my behalf was overwhelming. I ran to the bathroom and vomited twice. Not much, just the food he’d given me that morning before driving me home. A banana and some toast. The phone messages in my hand accidentally got wet, and the papers attached to one another, the ink soaking and swirling. The stack flipped into the toilet, landing in a muffled plock. The bottom note I read backward. In my mother’s handwriting it said, something, something, taob, which was boat in reverse. A message from Mark Ross.

At NYU, I did not unpack, just in case—in case of what, I wasn’t sure. I kept my suitcase packed at the bottom of the closet, a few shirts and coats hanging. I never missed a single class. Classes were the only way to move forward: they marked time. I kept thinking, December. I only have to make it until December. If it was a good day, I might think, May.

I wrote a letter to Rourke—four times, ten times, copying, recopying, my words gaining greater distance from