Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,286

think she’s been expecting you since you two met.”

It would be nice, I think, to spend a summer there, drawing flowers in the yard, listening to her typing. “I’d like to go to your house,” I say. “It’s a nice house.”

One thing I never thought I’d see is tears. Even the bad eye, it cries.

The sheets are soft and dry, like cooking flour when you are little and you dig in with a metal spoon. Lying there with him is like unfurling in clouds or swimming in silk or crossing from air to water. He holds me like he is unwilling ever to release me, and though his face is rough, I feel no roughness. He braces himself on one elbow, his fingers going down each rib, counting them as though I might have lost one since last he checked. His palm trails the underside of my left breast. He secures my hips; his knee slips up between my legs, bracing them apart. He looks into the gap between our bodies. I look too, at his chest tapering into the drum of his waist, at his abdomen, at the curvature of me beneath.

He breathes in. “The first time I saw you,” he says, “it was like seeing a river. Something that could be touched but not held. Something there but not there. I never wanted anything so much in my life.”

Before checking out, I spoke to Mark’s father. My instinct was that it would be right to call, and Rourke agreed.

I reached Mr. Ross at his office. His secretary put me through directly, which broke my heart. I didn’t mention Mark, I couldn’t. I guess he couldn’t either, because he didn’t.

“And your things, Eveline?” Mr. Ross asked.

“I guess they’re still at the cottage.”

“What would you like me to do?” he asked.

“Maybe someone can take them to my mother’s.”

“I’ll take them myself,” he said. “I’d like to see your mother.”

I thanked him. I felt Rourke’s hand on my shoulder, staying, waiting.

“Am I overstepping if I ask whether you’re all right?” Mr. Ross asked. “I’ll keep your confidence, of course, but I do feel—well, you understand. It’s as though you’re—”

“I’m all right. I’m fine.”

“You’re with Harrison?”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“Well, then,” he said, and he repeated, “Well, then.” He didn’t sound sad, but he didn’t sound happy; he sounded like he felt what I felt, which was a little of both. “I suppose it was meant to be.”

“Yes, I think so,” I said, and I thanked him again, from the bottom of my heart. Those were the last words we ever spoke. Six months later he was dead.

——

The GTO is brought around to the hotel entrance, and he helps me in. The door closes and also the trunk, and those closing sounds join other closing sounds from other cars and cabs with other luggage. In the heat it all makes a thick and thumping collage.

We regard the changing landscape as we drive from Manhattan to the airport. There is that colossal cemetery in Queens with all the forgotten dead, looking like a knee-high metropolis, with its skyscraper tombstones. We pass beneath furry tails of jet exhaust, letting every other car go by. Even school buses outpace us. If he is trying to miss his plane, he won’t. Not today. Today I feel a way I’ve never felt. In a cup on the dashboard are the pieces of beach glass we found that first day in Jersey, the day at the shore. I reach for them, pouring, palm to palm.

My mind draws pictures. The house I was born in—a brownstone, a door leading to an apartment on the left, another door, a couch behind it, the television my father watches at night, the one my mother collapses in front of, crying when the president is assassinated. The tub where I play when I bathe, twirling and sliding, up and down; and my mother—when she walks past, she sings. I remember a tune that haunts me still.

When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez, and it’s Eastertime too—

Mornings are cold. My clothes are warmed on the open oven door, me sitting in front, wrapped in a blanket while she moves, singing still. There is one dress of magenta velvet, a dress she made for me. It has a tiny trail of pale yellow flowers on the collar. To this day I try to paint the colors.

In another home, I am five. Five is not three. Three is when you see things and do not know