Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,49

to me. He’d come from Colombia in 1976, from Pereira. His real name was Raúl. I would have liked to know about his home, about what had made his family leave it for East Hampton of all places, but I didn’t want to make him nervous with talk. We both knew that it would have made the story of my assault far more plausible if I’d blamed him for what the others had done. It would have made me a more credible victim. It was good of him to take a chance on me.

“Thanks, Raúl,” I said, waving my hand weakly.

He ran his fingers through his hair, scratching the back of his scalp. “No problem, Evie.”

Rocky walked to the rear of the car, lifted the bike out of the trunk, and waited for me to join him. Then he stood watchfully as I moved down the driveway. The dimmed headlights of the two idling cars poured onto the ground. They were waiting headlights, fraternal and discreet. When I reached the garage door, I turned and waved again, not realizing then that the timing of Rocky’s benevolence, the gentlemanly readiness of his heart, had reversed in one elegant gesture the violence I’d experienced. In fact, it saved me. It was poetry, really—the random enmity, the random good.

Jack was saying that I should have done something. That reporting it to the police would have been cathartic. “You know,” he said, “like, helpful.”

It was a funny suggestion, the part about the police, coming from him. I was sorry for my involvement in an incident that would cause him to betray the basic tenets of his thinking.

Even if he was right, it was easy to say in retrospect what would have been the sensible thing to do. At the time, I did not feel sensible. At the time I was too busy thinking. Should I slice off the top layer of my skin? Should I scrape the lip marks from my neck? Would I use a knife for that, and with that knife could I make a pocket in my belly wide enough for a hand to reach in and remove the contaminated organs? I had the compulsive desire to scrub each fleshy gelatin piece of myself in acid. Periodically throughout the night I would tell myself to get over it, to act practically, to take a shower. Instantly after, I would drop back to the floor of my room, made sick by the thought of my own body, afraid to glimpse even the smallest portion of my undressed self. It didn’t seem possible that they’d had ink on their fingers, but somehow I was sure that underneath I looked splotchy like a zebra. Not a zebra, but one of the spotted kinds of animals. I just thought of zebras because of the sorrowful way they hang their heads.

“Have you seen those cops?” I asked Jack, trying to bolster his mood with complaints. My hands made circle motions around my eyes. “Those mirrored aviator glasses they wear?”

“Yeah,” Jack muttered. “Fucking assholes.”

Maybe the image of me talking to my own bloated reflection in gleaming Ray-Bans would make him understand how pointless it would’ve been to file a report. Still, if I could have guessed that telling the police would have profited Jack, I might have done it. He seemed to need to know that some manner of justice had occurred. It was like sticking a pin into a bruise, to hear him wish so naïvely for equity.

Jack’s body had not yet moved. He was like a jetty rock, obstinate and motionless against the savage force of the sea. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do or say so I waited, passing time by thinking of things I knew. I knew that he loved me desperately, never more so than at that moment. I knew that he was ready, aroused for once by the honorableness of his emotions, and yet the anger that moved him had no means of expression. How betrayed he must have felt by his belligerent pacifism, by the ambivalence he’d constantly displayed. He was thinking that the attack had not been arbitrary, that it had happened to me for a reason. He was thinking the reason was him.

“Don’t you see,” I said. “It’s like trying to catch a flying bird.”

Nothing could have changed what happened. No cop or court would have had the jurisdiction to do what was fair—to vacuum the grizzling glue from my insides and cram it back