Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,254

spitting contests, the circus star antics of boys, tipping cows and three to a bike. Soaring twilights in November, walking home late from the movie theater, kicking through fallen chestnut leaves, green with crispy borders, like melting stars or witches’ shoes. The heat of the hood of a car in summer, the cupped pop of softballs. I don’t know whether or not this is home, whether or not it would have me, whether or not I would be had by it. I know only that I reached a plateau on these streets, some dead end of understanding.

I call my mother from the pay phone in the alley near White’s Pharmacy. A stranger answers. He sounds British, with a swarthy Manchester accent. In the background there are the sounds of a party. The one for Jann. I ask for Irene.

“’Ang on, luv,” he says. There is a portly plastic clunk as the receiver drops. I hear him shout to someone, “Get down, then, and give us twenty!” Then raucous laughter, then unanimous counting. “One, two, thirteen, fifteen, twenty!”

Cheers and more shouting and more counting and the party again, and when no one retrieves the phone, I hang up. The heels of my socks are damp from popped blisters, so I sit on the back step of the pharmacy, tearing away the dead skin.

By the time I return to my mother’s house, everyone has gone. A note for me is on the door. Went to the Sea Wolf. Meet us down there!

I linger in the doorway. I don’t feel like going out, but I don’t feel like going to bed either. I’m not hungry; there is no television. I don’t want to go into Kate’s old room. I don’t want to go into my old room. The whole thing feels dangerous, just being here. Going back home is like reentering a burning building. You evaluate the necessity. You map out a safe course. You decide to go sequentially and in reverse, one room at a time so you don’t lose your way—it would be so easy to get lost in there. You wish you had another choice; you do not. There is something you must rescue.

As always when my mother leaves, the house is unbearably free of her presence. The living room is unusually still, as if it has been recently and rapidly evacuated. Darkness is broken by the weak mustard glint of a kerosene lamp. Glasses are half-full, pillows and sweaters lie about, the sound of Bob Dylan seeps through the cigarette smog. Three more albums are queued on the spindle; two are stacked on the turntable.

My feet stick as I walk. It must have been a good party. Ha ha, my father once said on a New Year’s visit. I lost a shoe there in front of the stove.

I tour the somnolent blue living room, feeling tranquil, feeling numb, in an elegiac sort of trance. The legion of her belongings forms an evidentiary matrix. These artifacts of the heart prove presence and endurance of presence—that is to say, her own. Like a vessel in marble she channels through the objects around the house, aberrant and sheet-like, frozen-in. I recall myself as a child waiting stubbornly among these very things for something vital and real to appear or to transpire that could move me, reach me, touch me. I come upon the archaeology of my need with delicacy. One must confront one’s innocence with caution when it has gotten you nowhere, when it has proven itself fallible, when no more remains, when you discover that you have outspent the purity of your heart.

It is not an easy memory—me, awaiting requital or redress, hoping for someone to take responsibility for me. Though I quickly remind myself that, as a child, I endured no more than mild disequilibrium, nothing perilous or vile, that I was loved in a sense, and cared for, and so on, and et cetera, just as instantly, I acknowledge that I am brushing off as usual the accountability of my parents, absolving them of inattentiveness because it was benign, assuming responsibility because I am capable. Capable is what they made me to be.

For the first time ever I recognize something dangerously polemical about the point of view I have long maintained. When I remind myself that professed love cannot compare to something desperate and original, which part of me is speaking? The part at peace with my own competence, or the part that detests it, the part that longs