Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,179

taking it. She dropped her bag, opened my closet, and dug through my suitcase for clothes. She helped me slip on a pair of sweatpants and replace my T-shirt. When it came time for feet, she knelt on one knee and sucked back her lips with determination, manipulating the shoes, never once checking her watch, though surely she was thinking she might miss her train.

The transaction was extraordinary, not because we were strangers, but because the business of helping was obviously new to her. If I regretted having to inconvenience her with private problems, I appreciated the changes in her as she condescended to assist me. There was a give to her stiffness, an elongating of her cheeks, a paling of her complexion. She looked smaller when not so confident, and genteel, like a lady from a mannerist portrait. I thought to tell her, but it would not have come out right.

“Okay, let’s get up,” she said, taking my elbow. “One, two, three.”

There was blood on the sheets. I tried to cover it, but my hand skimmed the blanket ineffectually. She could not have missed it, though she said nothing. Despite my obvious abnormality and her absorbing fear of contagion, she conducted herself graciously, which I decided had to do with good breeding.

There happened to be two available cabs rolling down Tenth Street. Ellen hailed both at once with a superhuman whistle and a mighty wave of a mighty arm. She put me in the first. “You gonna be all right?” she asked.

I managed to say yes. “Sorry about your train.”

“There’s another one in fifteen minutes.” She handed me a twenty-dollar bill. I declined but she insisted. “If anything happens to you, who knows who they’ll stick me with.”

She got into the car behind mine, and the two cabs waited side by side at the red light on the corner. I sat, she sat, each of us awkwardly chauffeured. I imagined what it was to be Ellen Christopolos of the ubiquitous E.S.C. monogram, charging up to Grand Central to catch the 7:55 to Rye, popping into Zaro’s Bread Basket and ordering with a certainty that was enviable and supreme a toasted raisin bagel and a coffee before buying magazines to breeze through on the train as she anticipated the luxuries that awaited her at home—Jacuzzis and tuna salad with fresh dill and a full-time housekeeper. On Friday night, there would be a movie and Chinese food with her grandparents. On Saturday, a few hours at Saks. No one would have guessed at her association with a hemorrhaging girl. I would have liked to make it up to her somehow, find a way to erase the knowledge she’d received prematurely concerning the dizzying and rancid phenomenon of carnal life.

The light changed, and her cab flew east across Tenth, while mine made the right down Broadway. I could see by the ponderous set of her jaw that she’d been making a picture of me as well. She’d been envisioning the squalid uncertainty of modern disease and remedy, the putrid working back to probable cause, the foul business of changing and cleaning bloodstained linen, the dismal occupation of a life without guardians, without ethnic net or religious shield, without refuge or resource. How unnecessarily expanded her mind must have been to review a life as luckless as mine. How relieved she surely was not to be me, poor and parentless, desired but defiled by the opposite sex.

The cab left me at University Place near Health Services, which of course was closed at seven-thirty in the morning, since any respectable student illness occurs during business hours. The walk to the Astor Place subway was macabre, with chained storefronts and cyclones of trash whisking down the Eighth Street corridor. I would have taken a cab, but I thought to save Ellen’s leftover money for later. I must have thought things might get worse later. I recall being cold except for the parts of me that were hot. I recall the sheer slope of subway stairs going from street level down to the train platform. I know the train arrived: there’s an image of the owlish face of the Number 6 implanted in my head. And the train’s crippled dynamics, the labored jerk and groan of the brakes, the spitting inside-out puff of the doors, the garbled declarations by some recently paroled conductor, the porpoise-gray benches, the scattered souls.

Who knows where I was headed. I seemed to have had an East Side hospital in mind. Lenox