Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,210

the way women taste and smell. If only women had voices.

41

I throw my legs over the side of the bed. My head is pounding, though I had nothing toxic the previous night. Mark is on the phone in the living room. When he hangs up, he comes in carrying juice, and he sits, facing me. His face looks stiff like a shield.

“If you’re not too disgusted, I’d like to apologize.”

I shrug. “Whatever.”

“No, not whatever. Don’t say whatever. Say what you feel. I behaved shamefully.”

I say nothing. He can’t handle what I feel. I feel released. “It was embarrassing, that’s all.”

“I’m sorry you were embarrassed. What else?”

I have nothing to add. “That’s it,” I say.

He reaches over and pets my hair. “I was drinking gin. You know I can’t drink gin.” He follows me to the bathroom and watches me wash and dress. “It’s not like I was with another woman. C’mon, I’m a wreck about this.”

This is only a partial lie. Obviously he’s a wreck about something. “Forget it, Mark.”

“Oh, no,” he states with sudden menacing rectitude, “just the opposite. I won’t forget it. In fact, I’ve called everyone. I just got off the phone with Rob. I took all the blame.”

I brush my teeth. I wonder if there’s a difference between taking the blame and being to blame. If there’s a difference, he’s referring to it. At the door, I grab a coat and my knapsack.

“Where are you headed?”

“School.”

“The gym?”

Mark doesn’t like me to go to the gym. He says it’s a pickup scene. If I promise to avoid the basketball courts and the weight room, and just go to the pool and sauna, he’ll say that’s worse because of the lesbians. Once I said, “What are you talking about? I’ve never noticed any lesbians,” and he said, “That’s precisely the problem.”

“The library. I have to finish my papers.”

“I thought you finished your papers. Aren’t they due Tuesday? You should have told me. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have dragged you out last night and we could have avoided this entire mess.” At the elevator, he kisses me on the forehead, speaking into my temple. “I have your graduation present. I spoke to the travel agent this morning. We’re going away the day after Alicia’s wedding. I wanted to surprise you, but we’ll need to have your passport ready. What would you say to Italy?”

Italy, I think as I board the elevator. It’s the least he can do.

I spend the day walking around the city, and when it starts to rain I take a twelve-dollar cab ride to Pinky’s, Rob’s cousin’s bar in Brooklyn. Rob’s over there at least once a week, though he lives in Jersey. It has something to do with gambling. The driver takes Third Avenue to the Queensboro Bridge because there’s been an accident on the Williamsburg and the Manhattan is closed for repairs.

The streets glisten from an evening rain. Outside is warm, even for May. Through my window I hear the tick of tires against wet pavement, and on the radio, I listen to a lecture about relationships.

“Consider, for example, what happens when we walk,” the speaker explains. “Our intrinsic reality is, quite simply, that we are moving in a given direction toward a given destination. Extrinsically, however, we are reliant upon the earth beneath our feet. If the earth were as absent in reality as in our perception of reality, our legs would swing in air.

“People seek equity in love as though love is a business. They look for equitable investments and gains. But relationships,” he continues, “can possess equities separate from those that can be easily named or known. Equity can exist, independent of interpretation of equity, which, of course, is variable. By seeking quantifiables, we lose sight of mystery—the real binding power.”

The taxi slows to a stop at Fifty-eighth Street and Third Avenue, near Alexander’s department store, before making the turn onto the bridge ramp. Creaking up to consume my entire field of vision is that bizarre mural of globular buttons over Alexander’s corner doorway, like a collection of random hemi-sected eyeballs, like some insane manifestation of things urging me to see. And so I see.

If it never occurred to me to move beyond the idea of having been abandoned by Rourke, it’s not because I’d been victimized, but because in my mind one is a victim when one does not triumph. The parts of me that came to life with Rourke were parts I could not have conceived of alone;