Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,196

he knew Rob had you here at five in the morning.”

I promised I wouldn’t come back, and Uncle Tudi seemed satisfied.

He jerked his head to me, asking Rob, “She met your mother?”

“Not yet,” Rob sputtered, and his uncle shot him a look. Rob threw up his hands. “Whaaat?”

“Lemme tell you something,” Tudi said to me. “My sister, Fortuna, is a lady. Rob was raised decent, with manners. But he was a change-of-life baby for her. That’s why he’s spoiled.” He lifted a finger to Rob but said nothing. Rob also said nothing, then he nodded and kissed his uncle again.

Before we got to the door, Uncle Tudi called out. He was waddling to catch us. “Boneless pork,” he said breathlessly, handing me a package the size of a shoe box. “It’s nice.”

“She doesn’t have a stove, Uncle.”

“Whaddaya mean no stove?”

“She lives in a dormitory.” Rob backed away, taking me along. “You know. College.”

“Next time I see you two,” he warned as he withdrew the pork, “it’s in daylight!”

We spent what remained of the night on a stoop on Horatio Street. A jaundiced glow from the inside filled a second-story window across the way, and we watched it like a movie. Something had come over Rob, something not unfamiliar to me. A constitutional shift, sort of a shutdown. Sometimes he just stopped, like a machine idling.

“How long have we known each other?” I asked.

“One year,” he said. “St. Patrick’s Day.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “Seems like longer than a year.” That meant that eight months had passed since I’d seen Rourke.

He lit a cigarette. “Seems like a year.”

“I liked you as soon as I saw you,” I confided.

“Oh, yeah?” he said. He jiggled his knee lightly.

“What did you think when you saw me?”

“I thought you were good-looking.”

“Did you tell that to Rourke?”

“Not in those exact words.”

“You don’t remember?”

“I remember.”

I had the feeling that I owed him an apology. I thought to say sorry. I thought to thank him for coming. Only I couldn’t thank him, or say sorry, or say anything really, not when I would have had to look at him with gratitude in my eyes and still let him know he’d failed. He was the closest thing to Rourke, but he was not Rourke.

“How you been?” he wanted to know.

“Good,” I said. “I’ve been good.”

“You been all right?”

“I’ve been all right.”

I lied because Rob didn’t need to know details. He didn’t need to hear how Rourke stalked the periphery of my nights, stealthy as a feline in my dreams, mad as a dream cat. How my heartbreak kept me alive, keeping me whole the way your skin keeps your pieces in. You cannot live without skin. You don’t think to manufacture it, but absently you do. Every seven days it’s new again. I didn’t tell the truth because Rob might say, Try to be happy. People often say that. But it’s difficult to move beyond certain losses. Fire, for instance, as Rob had said, and death. It gets to where you can’t even talk to people who haven’t suffered as you have. I lied because I didn’t want him to know what it means to be sick. All the time, sick. I lied because he knew the truth anyway.

“I haven’t slept with Mark, you know.”

Rob drew in for the last time from his cigarette. “Not yet,” he said. “You will.”

Spring 1984

Try always, whenever you look at a form, to see the lines in it which have had power over its past fate and will have power over its futurity. Those are its awful lines; see that you seize on those, whatever else you miss.

—JOHN RUSKIN

38

The Water Club is near the heliport on the East River. If you’re careful about where you sit, you can avoid the sorry sight of dormant helicopters, which look like women with wet hats. That is where Alicia and Jonathan announce their engagement, over dinner, the four of us alone. The announcement is no surprise. Mrs. Ross had told us weeks before; she’d wanted to prepare Mark.

“He’s a pansy,” Mark had said bitterly. “The asthma, the Mercury Zephyr, the backgammon. He’s allergic to mesquite. How can anyone be allergic to mesquite?”

“Jonathan treats her well,” Mrs. Ross said. “She’ll be deprived of nothing.”

“Except in the bedroom,” Mark mumbled.

His mother smacked him on the shoulder. “Oh, stop it.”

Mr. Ross shrugged. He tries to think of the big picture. His children are nice-looking, well-off, and connected, and that’s going to have to be enough since he’s dying and will