Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,255

to be swept away?

Have I been in pursuit of emotional detachment because personally I prefer it, or because it is all I have ever known? How curious to have found a defining love, the tenderness for which I believe I’ve longed, something reciprocal that moves the spirit and bears time, and to have lost it. How resourceful of me to turn a story of achievement into a more familiar one of loss. Such loss is a form of control. Have I been working all along to secure my own failure, to collapse the machine that was made of me?

I go back around, one final time. I do not touch the things my mother has chosen to keep; they are not mine. If it is evident that I am not present here, that there is no shrine to me, I feel close to her, uniquely. It is as though I have moved from behind to make her acquaintance, growing taller every step. I feel grave with an understanding of her that is new.

I move to the picture window. I remember when nights were starlit but black. I remember the clear air and the sharp strike of footsteps and the fever of Rourke’s voice. I loved him, I love him, from the very beginning I loved him. I cannot understand how it happened, how it turned to this, when the view is the same view, when the tree does not appear to have grown, when her face is the same face, when once I was a girl.

50

The clicking of the bike slows to a sharp staccato as I lean across Newtown Lane and cut toward the park. Herrick Park in East Hampton Village dangles as if by magic in the redolent air, like a tin marionette. It reminds me of the abandoned World’s Fair site off the Long Island Expressway in Queens. My parents brought me to that fair in 1965. I remember running through the grass into my mother’s outstretched arms. And my father, behind her, our three figures pebble-like in the wake of the colossal, skeletal globe. The Unisphere. Besides a brief memory of walking with them beneath a movie marquee in winter, of me with my head against my father’s shoulder and the soft bounce of my mother’s head moving alongside us, that is all I have of the three of us together as a family.

The bike pops onto the curb, tumbling over mounds of grass like a billiard ball. On the bench near the bike rack is an elderly black man in a baseball cap. In his mouth is an unlit cigar. I wonder what he takes when he leaves the house, probably the cigar and the hat, maybe a five-dollar bill, some matches.

By the sun, it is nine. Six hours to go until the service.

A young couple in khakis, loafers, and Lacoste shirts with upturned collars reads the papers while their two children gyrate on the rubber tire swings. I wonder if they have all they ever wished for. It must be nice to have all you ever wished for, if that’s even possible. It might be that every time you get one thing that you want, another wish pops up automatically, like in that hand-stacking game. Not only do the mother and father have matching clothes and haircuts, but they share height. I don’t remember women and men matching so well previously. Somehow it’s a sign of the times—physical equivalency, emotional economy. It all refers to an eradication of risk. Rourke and I would not have been good at matching. That is why we failed. It’s shameful to have failed where lesser people have triumphed. On my womb is a reminder of my insufficiency, an imprint, forever impressed, like a cave painting, like a running horse etched ten thousand years ago.

Sometimes Mark says, “What’s wrong?”

I tell him that my uterus aches.

“Still?” he asks. “Is that possible?”

The swings are free. I take one, tucking the chains inside my elbows. My chest slumps down, my shirt bellows out, and my heels make quarter moons in the dirt. When I was little, I drew a field filled with swing sets on manila nursery paper—pairs and pairs of inverted V’s connected at the top by horizontal lines, very big and very small—small implying distance. I must have been four. It is strange to think about why I would have been experimenting at such an early age with perspective.

“You felt friendless,” Jack once explained. “Friendless when you drew it and friendless