Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,253

down candles, the kind with plastic nets. I lift one, smelling it. It smells of citronella, of Jack.

“There’s mail for you in the barn,” she says. “I put it in a basket and tied it with a blue ribbon.”

In the barn there are several boxes. I cannot say exactly what it is I’m searching for, but I stop at a stack of journals. Inside I find an account of my past so vivid that it’s like looking at myself through special instruments for the observation of the very small or the very far. But just because there is evidence of me doesn’t mean I can be found; in fact, I am irrecoverable—we are irrecoverable. I meant to say we.

It’s difficult to come upon yourself at the genesis of your own path, when everything was beautiful and new. The loss of newness has less to do with gaining years than with shutting down to possibility. You start to become selective about pleasure because you no longer trust life to bestow it at random. You refuse to wait for fortune, you lose faith. You become someone who looks into another person’s eyes but refuses to see the story there. As the protective net for the self tightens, the net for others widens. This is how Jack fell through.

I read somewhere that the word nostalgia derives from two Greek ideas—nostos, meaning return, and algos, meaning pain—together suggesting a painful return. And yet, though I feel pain, I can’t say I long to go back. I don’t miss the way I was; I don’t regret what I have come to be. What I feel has only to do with time. I am simply too late. I’ve learned so much, but ironically, it is impossible to revisit ignorance with knowledge. These keys cannot unlock those doors.

The bluestone at the base of the barn steps is washed in sunlight. The warmth rushes into my bare feet; it’s an old warmth, a same warmth. To my right is the bed of wildflowers I planted, tangled at the base like siblings sleeping. Shooting through the thicket is a cluster of rose vervain that Marilyn and I planted one day when she and Dad visited. We stopped at Miss Amelia’s Cottage in Amagansett for an antiques fair, and Marilyn bought a starter tray of the flowers and two tufted Chinese benches that I’d admired. Dad said the seats were probably made in Pittsburgh, but I imagined they had belonged to imperial Chinese children. I could see the children sitting, upright and attentive, listening to a tutor, their slippered feet dangling. When Marilyn took them to be re-covered on Grand Street, the upholsterer offered to buy them from her for fifteen hundred dollars. She refused, though they’d cost only two hundred.

My father said, “We could’ve bought a new car!”

“No, Anton, we’ll keep them for Eveline, for when she gets her own house someday,” Marilyn told him emphatically. “We never would have seen their value.”

I go farther into the grass, toward the driveway, to the train tracks. There is this sensation, long lost to me, of lightness of being, of oneness with the atmosphere, of looking into sky, this very sky, with nothing before me and nothing behind. Despite the little I knew and the little I had, I recall the feeling of inalienable possession.

What I miss, what I’d possessed, may be no more than immunity. If modern life can be seen as something high-speed and pathogenic—replicating and duplicating and by necessity unoriginal—then childhood by comparison is a period of blessed insusceptibility. Maybe the loss of innocence is part of some practical operation. Maybe there are lessons in its fleeting frailty. Possibly through such sacrifice we remain captivated by joy, bound to its safekeeping when we come upon it.

Oh, the crossing bells, and the train thundering by. I hold my ground at the tracks, the meeting place of two converging lines—the vertical pole connecting heaven to earth, the gods to the dead—and the horizontal pole, the crossbar, the tracks, the line connecting start to finish, the place you imagined from to the place you imagined into.

Alone again and left to wonder, Am I lost, or do I remain—am I perennial? Have I stopped becoming, or do I prepare? There are pilgrims who walk and walk, through years, through nations, seeking answers to questions they don’t know how to formulate.

I walk at night in East Hampton, and the world tips and turns. I stumble along, thinking dead thoughts. Skateboards and scarecrows and