Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,221

to notice his discomfort. One fact of life is that it’s simpler to live vicariously than to live free. They singled him out because he’d gotten away and they hadn’t, and obviously that would reflect badly on them unless he happened to be specially endowed.

He looked at me. I looked away. Despite Rourke’s attentiveness—his voice as it petitioned my ears, the tenderness I saw in his eyes—I couldn’t act as I felt. Though I longed to assure him of what he already knew, that nothing had changed, that I loved him all the more the less he tried, my head was reeling. I had the sick sense that I was facing another confrontation, another loss. I could not bear another loss.

Rob broke into talk about St. Patrick’s Day in Montauk, about the day he and I met. “Evie gets off a red Ducati driven by this big blonde and she walks away like she doesn’t even know the girl. She passes off her helmet to some guy with a club foot, and two huge dogs start following her. German shepherds. And in the background they’re playin’ that accordion thing, the thing the fire department plays. What is that thing? Jesus, I’m drawing a blank. C’mon, help me out here.”

Lorraine poked her stirrer through her drink like she had a job to do, which was to perforate the bottom of the glass. “The bagpipes.”

“That’s it,” Rob said. “The bagpipes. I was thinking, This girl is different. Very different. Right, Harrison?”

Rourke nodded, once. “Very different.”

After dinner, they decided to stop off and get dessert at a fancy pastry place. In the parking lot there came the usual figuring out of who was going in which car. Lee, Mark, Brett, and Chris went in Mark’s new Saab because Chris was thinking of buying one. Joey and Anna rode with Rourke in the GTO because there was a thunking noise in the rear on hard acceleration that Joey was pretty sure could be cleared by re-routing the parking brake cables. Rob didn’t give me a choice. He just said, “C’mon, you ride with us in the Cougar. It’ll give me an excuse in case Lorraine gets any ideas.”

All three of us sat up front, with Lorraine in the middle. She kept putting lotion on her hands. Whenever it vanished, she would begin again. Rob was singing.

You’re just too good to be true. Can’t take my eyes off you.

You’d be like Heaven to touch. I want to hold you so much.

As he sang, Lorraine looked out the windshield at nothing. The perfumey heat of her against my left side and the cold of the door on my right combining with the smell of Jergens was nice, but bittersweet. I figured Rob didn’t want me to ride with Rourke because Rourke didn’t want to ride with me.

We had to stop at Rob’s house to walk the dog. Rob was the only one who could walk it because it was a Doberman he’d rescued from a gas station. Rescued meant stolen, but Rob had no problem with that, since the dog had been abused and the stinking fuck owed him money. The idea of Rob having to rush home a couple times a day to walk the dog was funny. He was always shooting off to deal with something urgent and unexplained—picking up the cake for his nephew’s communion, catching the end of a Little League game of some troubled kid, getting his grandmother at the hairdresser’s, shoveling snow at a neighbor’s house, dropping off a deposit at the bank for his father.

The place where Rob was living at the time was cramped, and with all of us inside it felt like a Winnebago or the cabin of a boat. We barged in on his roommate, a guy they called Uncle Milty, who was lying on the floor watching the Rangers play Edmonton. He leapt to his feet and tucked in his shirt when we came in, and he made us a snack platter.

“You should’ve told me you were coming,” Uncle Milty said from the kitchen. “I woulda bought sodas for the girls.” He was short; just his chest and head were visible over the island that divided the two rooms. He loaded up a cutting board with olives and leftover tuna and a couple of tubes of Ritz crackers still in wax paper.

“Damn, Uncle Milty,” Joey said, grabbing some cheese cubes. “You’re hospitable.”

He and Chris were on the sofa, checking out the end of the game.