Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,219

a room to the left of the restaurant’s entrance, and right away, before sitting, Rob excused himself. He had to make a couple calls. He looked at me before he left, and he winked like everything was gonna be okay. I watched him fold into the crowd at the bar. Then I couldn’t see him anymore, but I stayed staring into that same spot just in case he might return to fill it.

“Sit down, Eveline, sit down,” a voice was saying. The voice belonged to Lee, the same Lee from the year before, who was there with Chris, her husband. That was the first time I’d seen them since the previous summer, when she said she’d wanted to be an artist. I sat and pulled my chair all the way in.

“You have your driver,” Mark was saying, “your mid-iron, your putter, and your spoon.”

“There’s also a brassie, a mashie, and a niblick,” Brett added.

“A niblick!” Joey’s wife, Anna, said. “You guys have got to be joking!”

Brett had driven out with Mark and me. I’d never met him before that night. They picked me up at school after eighteen holes in Eastchester. On the way down to Jersey they spoke of peaches. Open-heart peaches, open-rock, open-seed. “Freestones are the ones from which the pits are easily removed.” Mark drummed the syllables on the dashboard for my edification—Free-stone. “Get it?”

But from the moment we arrived at the restaurant, Mark didn’t talk to me. He just watched, as if eventually I was going to fall, and he was going to have to catch me.

“Lobsters all around,” Joey said to the waiter. “Three two-pound, lemme see, five three-pound.”

When Rob returned to the table, Joey started in on him, asking what he was up to and who was he calling. Rob picked sesame seeds off of bread sticks and ate them one at a time. As he chewed, his jaw flexed, making two dark creases that arced parenthetically from his cheekbones.

“From running fights to running numbers. And my mother had big hopes for him,” Joey said. “Her baby.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not dead yet.”

“Yet is right,” Chris said. “You don’t have a bodyguard anymore.”

Rob tilted back his chair. His arms hung straight off his sides and his thighs were apart. “My mother wants me to be an accountant. I go, ‘Ma, think of me as an accountant with a mobile office.’”

“Very funny,” Joey said. “Four years of college, then grad school, and he’s standing on street corners. My parents had to take out a second mortgage to pay tuition.”

“I don’t stand on corners.”

“Run slips, whatever. You’re in the wheel. You’re a spoke.”

“I don’t run slips either. You know what, Joey, you don’t know what the fuck I do. Wheel. Spoke. Where do you get this shit from—Baretta?” Rob’s chair slapped down; Lorraine shifted an inch to the right. “First of all, if there was a wheel, I’d be at the hub. Number two, I paid back Mom and Pop three times over. And while we’re at it, do you think major brokerages recruit guys like me? Harvard Mark and his buddy Brett over here’ll each make partner at Goldman in a couple years, but I’d be walled up in some cubicle, crunching numbers, making fifty grand, thinking up scams. You know how easy it is for me to think up scams?” Rob mashed his teeth together. “There’s a big difference between a prison-bound entrepreneur and a prison-bound clerk.”

“True,” Chris said. “Only one can afford a good lawyer.”

“Besides,” Rob added, “Lorraine over here is very high maintenance. Very Park Avenue.” His hand slipped up from her shoulders into the uncivilized nest of her hair. She rolled her eyes. If Lorraine had been a cat, she’d have been a calico—pretty but peculiar. She carried a huge pocketbook, which always contained the thing Rob needed most. “Hey, Rainy,” he’d say, flicking his fingers into his palm, “got a deck a cards?”

“How come your father can’t get Rob a job at some corporation?” Joey asked Mark. “Something honest.”

“Corporations honest?” Rob mocked. “Ha! Go back to pissin’ on fires, Joey.”

“No problem,” Mark said convincingly. “My father loves Rob.”

Lee leaned over to me. “So, how’s everything with you? School?”

“Yeah, how’s it going, Eveline?” Chris inquired.

“It’s going okay.”

“She’s all A’s,” Rob said. “Forget about it.”

“And it happens to be a very rigid curriculum,” Mark added.

Rob said, “It’s not like she sits around drawing pictures all day.”

I wondered why they felt they had to defend me. I wondered if I seemed dumb.

Past the heads