Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,178

their original meaning with each draft until they became just a string of shapes, like operating instructions in another language, strokes and little arches, buckled bridges and circles with proud sashes. I wanted to tell him that since he left there was this absence. I did not send the letter. I did not want to trespass.

My dorm room was in Brittany Hall on the corner of Tenth Street and Broadway. It was a spacious room on the fourteenth floor with casement windows overlooking the gothic spire of Grace Church. It was bigger than Denny and Peter Reeves’s whole apartment on East Fifth Street. My roommate, Ellen, was big and agreeable like a barmaid from a Dickens novel, though that could not have been accurate since she was Greek and Jewish, and Dickens never wrote about big Greek Jewish barmaids, not memorably anyway. Ellen’s family lived in a just-built mansion in Rye. Her dad was the chief heart surgeon at Albert Einstein Hospital in the Bronx, which amused my father immensely since he was a sign-painter and Dr. Christopolos was a cardiologist, but their kids wound up in the same goddamned place anyway. I didn’t bother to elucidate the more salient differences—upon graduation I would be forty thousand dollars in debt and Ellen would be loan-free, settled into an investment condo, a guaranteed job, and the white leather seat of a brand-new BMW.

Ellen had the highest standards for personal care of anyone I’d ever met. She was entirely devoted to her own comfort. Thursdays to Mondays she anxiously returned to her parents’ house in Rye weighed down with homework and laundry because it was just so nice up there. Besides, it’s common knowledge that dormitory washing machines spread disease.

“Be careful,” she warned the first time I used the laundry room. “My cousin Ruth at Tulane found a used condom stuck to the drum.”

Instead of a stereo or typewriter, Ellen brought spa supplies to college. She had rolling wooden massage devices and fleecy slippers and velour bathrobes and giant plush Egyptian towels. There were vanilla balms for night and peppermint splashes for day and a constant supply of homemade brownies and 3-percent milk in her Permafrost mini-fridge. In the bathroom there were plaque picks and callus shavers and orthopedic shower shoes and super-cushiony toilet paper. Her goose-down quilt added five inches to her bed, and beneath her mattress her brother Stefan had laid three-quarter-inch plywood for added lumbar support.

I never heard her mention boys, not once. She was far too cunning to allow sex to endanger her lavish lifestyle. And since I did not infringe upon her sufficiency, we got along well. She treated me with benevolent indifference, and I found it admirable, actually, that she was so extremely disinclined to be idle, motivated as she was to get out of the city and return to the comforts of home. She went to bed at ten, got up at seven, and was in classes or the library all the hours in between. She wasn’t unsociable; she simply had no time for anything other than an hour or two of television every night, Dallas or Knots Landing. Invariably she shifted the TV set toward my bed so I could see too.

Ellen was a busy girl; you couldn’t blame her for not noticing.

——

“You okay?” she asked. “You’ve been sitting for, like, three days.”

Ellen poked at the desk lamp near my bed, turning it on, and the yellow light broke the blue of morning, which was a relief. The room had been like a pond with me at the bottom. Ellen took an involuntary step back, an instinctive step, thinking quick, in case I was contagious. On her shoulder was a duffel bag full of laundry. She was on her way home, which meant it was Thursday. I was pretty sure I’d lain down on Tuesday.

“Are you feverish?”

Maybe I had a fever, I wasn’t sure. There were cramps in my abdomen, like mice squinching through narrow tubes.

“It’s food poisoning,” she said definitively. “That cafeteria is shameful. I keep telling you not to eat there.” She thought for a moment, then asked if I wanted her to wake up the RA.

I shook my head. That would just be the beginning of a chain with every next person passing off responsibility, right through to my parents, who’d end up handing all decision-making back to me anyway. “You should go,” I said. “You’ll miss your train.”

Ellen considered my advice, but some fundamental sense of ethics prevented her from