Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,218

bar and cracks his back to the right. I wonder what he’s going to do. He looks like he’s going to do something. “Do me a favor,” he says to me. “Don’t say anything yet. Just think. Think back on everything. And remember what I told you in the beginning—be careful.”

42

Rob said to think, so I do, though it is difficult to find in myself what happened. Though the memories are there, my mind has transformed them, remaking them over the years into a thing finally crippled, finally deformed, abbreviated, in measure like bones missing from a body.

The first thing is the letter from Rourke, just checking in. The next is the night in the meat district, when Rob came to my dorm room. That was in April 1981, months after Rourke, but still before me and Mark. I’d seen Mark three or four times, never seriously. There was Rob’s sudden phone call—I’ll be over in twenty minutes—and then the delicate way he acted when he saw me, like he was picking up petals that had fallen off a flower. Obviously Mark had told him by then.

After that is a Sunday, one week later. Rob and Mark showing up at my dorm. They were going to play football. “It’s a beautiful day,” Mark said, swinging open my closet door, “you should get out.”

I can still see them standing there looking in at the empty hangers, then down to the ground at my suitcase, realizing that I’d never even unpacked from the start of the year. Rob turned away like he didn’t want to see, but Mark kneeled and went through my stuff like a surgeon, careful not to disrupt the piles that were folded and belted.

“This is perfect,” he said, withdrawing something white. He placed it on my shoulders. “C’mon, let’s head to Central Park!”

Rob’s Cougar was double-parked on Tenth Street. I sat up front next to Rob and we pulled out, turning down Broadway. There was a deli on the northeast corner of Ninth Street. Mark ran in for coffees and sandwiches and a pack of Wrigley’s for Rob. While Mark was in the store, Rob combed back his hair with his fingers, then threw a lithe muscular arm over the back of the seat. I could feel the electricity behind my neck.

“He’s coming back,” Rob said, clearing his throat as though he wanted to be very precise. “For a couple days. He’d like to see you. You gonna be okay about this,” Rob inquired gravely, “or what?”

I said I’d be fine.

According to Rob, Rourke had been fighting full-time down in Miami with a world-class trainer, but was coming up north because he had agreed to help a friend on a job in Rahway, in Jersey. The trainer in Miami was that guy Jimmy Landes; the friend in Jersey was the Chinaman, and the Chinaman needed Rourke because Rourke knew martial arts and could defend himself, and Rahway was dangerous. No one told me any of this direct or outright; I learned in pieces that day. They must have thought it was the best way to tell me, in pieces.

“What’s Rahway?” I asked Rob later. We were sitting in the grass, on the Great Lawn.

“It’s a prison,” he said. “Maximum security.”

Three days after that I saw Rourke.

We all met at a restaurant at a marina in Jersey. There were sail masts towering disproportionately from the low, flat ground as if to tear night from the sky. And stars like shattered dishware, recklessly strewn. And the excruciating clarity of the vast beyond; the clinking, chiming ropes; the welted slap of the water against the wharf; the flap-flap-flap of plastic grand-opening flags that draped the raised butts of dry-docked boats. I had to walk on my toes to keep my heels from sinking into the sandlot.

“Rob ever take you here in summer?” Joey asked Mark.

“Couple of times,” Mark answered.

“Nice sunsets, right?”

“Gorgeous,” Mark agreed. “I was here with you guys for Eddie’s wedding.”

“That’s right,” Joey said. “Eddie M. That bastard.”

Under his breath, Rob said, “He is a bastard.”

Mark palmed Lorraine’s back as we walked up the stairs. “What do you think, Lorraine? Nice place for a wedding.”

Rob stopped at the landing, facing us. “I’ve often thought about marriage. But it always ends up being just that—a thought.” He busted out laughing. Lorraine gave him a whack and walked on.

“Why you gotta say such stupid shit?” Joey wanted to know, he and Rob walking abreast. “I swear.”

We approached a round candlelit table in