Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,204

girls sticking together.”

Something about the skittish look in her eyes and the freckles around her nose and her plump hand lying mildly on my wrist made me wonder if there’s a formula to humanity—such as all anyone wants is to be loved, even the employees at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Lorraine wasn’t necessarily hateful. It was her frustrated love for Rob that made her seem that way. When they first met, that love had likely been an agreeable love, but at some point it changed. Maybe he’d been too opaque, maybe she’d pressed too hard for answers. Maybe she should have quit back at the best time, while feeling capable and desired.

Just as I started thinking that Lorraine should have kept custody of that first love, I could see myself—cinched behind a screen of heartache, committed to the legend of my own sorrow, clinging to something spent, holding out for something hopeless, contributing to the disintegration of whatever Rourke and I had once shared that was good and true and private.

I remember that moment. I remember setting it all to drift like a stick in a river. I remember telling myself, Just let go.

“No problem, Lorraine,” I said. “I hope things work out for you guys.”

The bottommost item in the box was a scrap of paper with phone messages taken the week after that art show by my roommate, Corrine. Corrine became my roommate in sophomore year, when Ellen got an apartment, a hygienic duplex on East Twenty-first Street with a terrace facing the Empire State Building. Sometimes I would go to Ellen’s for dinner, sometimes with Mark. He felt she was my one respectable friend, and she felt he was equally respectable and unquestionably clean, and they were both happy for me and happy over the stalwart and prosperous fact of each other. Once Ellen had a cocktail party and asked me to come early to help set up, and she introduced me to guests as her best friend from school, which depressed me. I felt she deserved better.

Corrine was an economics major who danced to the Go-Go’s and Cyndi Lauper and Katrina and the Waves in orange shirts with cutoff collars and turquoise leg warmers. She would do splits and backflips in the room. That’s all I knew of her, since I never slept in the dorm again after freshman year. Beginning in sophomore year and going through to graduation, I stayed at Mark’s. We didn’t make a big deal out of it, it just sort of happened that way. I only stopped by the room to shower and dress on busy days or after using the gym if Mark wanted to go out someplace downtown like Il Cantinori or Chanterelle. But by my junior year, Mark kept telling me, Go off of housing, for God’s sake.

When Corrine called me at Mark’s apartment about the calls from Rourke, I jumped on the subway, got off at Sheridan Square, then ran fast to East Tenth Street to pick up the message.

12/18/81. 7:50 pm. Harrison Rourke

Harrison again, 10:30 pm.

HR 1:15 am. Meet him at the Mayflower Hotel, Room 112.

I gripped the list of messages, turning it over—it was pale green, accountant’s green, torn from one of Corrine’s graph books. As I turned it, I wondered if Corrine had written while on the phone with him, or if she’d written after she’d hung up. For some reason it mattered. She told me that she’d tried calling me until 2:00 A.M., but there was no answer. Mark and I were at his company’s holiday party.

Instead of going to class after getting the messages, I went back uptown to Mark’s, walking the whole sixty blocks. Once inside the apartment, I stared at the phone and thought about calling. Possibly Rourke had not yet checked out. Possibly he was sitting there by the phone, waiting for it to ring. I stared and thought, thought and stared, and one complete day transpired that way, with me not leaving the apartment. Tuesday became Friday, and by then I thought it had become too late to call.

“You must be getting home after dinner,” Mark said when he arrived home from work that Friday night. Typically Mark left the apartment before me in the morning and returned after I did. “Manny told me he hasn’t seen you all week.”

“Actually, I’ve been staying in,” I told him. “Headaches.”

A few days later, the phone rang at Mark’s. It was Christmas Eve.

I was quick to pick up. I knew it