Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,6

nothing like anyone else in my family. Even my birth was hard for my mother. I was breech. She tore, she vomited, she got more stitches than there are states. When the nurse handed me over, my mom was terrified. “I’m supposed to take care of that?” she says whenever she tells the story. “She looked like an owl.”

My aunt Lowie is a midwife, so I’ve seen three childbirth films. When babies come out, they wear a bewildered grimace as though they have arrived by train and are peeping about the platform for the friend who promised to pick them up. It’s not nice to think of myself as having been left at the station. I know my mother loves me; she frequently says she does. But it’s one thing for a child to be the recipient of an affection that is conscious of its lack, and it’s another to know fervent devotion, to be a blessing in the flush and the sweat of loving arms.

You cannot recover from a bad birth. The stigma lingers for a lifetime the way bad luck really does last seven years after a mirror breaks. The special gravity of a mother’s first disappointed glance impresses itself on the infant’s waxy blue skin. On my forehead is just such a mark, slightly off-center, to the left—that is to say, to my left. You can’t actually see it, but you can sense that it’s there. There is a prohibitive aspect to my looks, just as some rivers run too wild for a person to cross.

In the beginning of that summer, before Maman died, Dad and his girlfriend, Marilyn, took me to see an Italian movie, L’Avventura, which is about disillusionment and other sixties stuff. Afterward my dad asked what I thought of the film. I told him that I liked Monica Vitti, the film’s star. Monica Vitti has this mesmerizing way of leaning against walls and staring out to view nothing, as though the horizon is millimeters away, as though the great distance we all dream into is bearing pestilently upon her skin.

“I think she’s my favorite actress,” I said.

Marilyn tapped Dad’s arm. “See?”

Dad nodded. “I’m impressed, Marilyn.”

“During the film I told your dad that you remind me of her,” Marilyn said.

Did I really seem so sad? Monica Vitti seemed sad to me. She gave the impression of having lived a better past, of having returned to the present to discover how pointless things have become. She is untouchable, unsaveable: she too has the mark.

“You guys want to catch a cab?” Dad asked.

It was drizzling on Second Avenue. The sidewalk was not completely wet, but there was already that dusty smell of rain on cement.

“Mind if we walk?” I said.

Later that night, while my father was reading in the living room, Marilyn and I went into their bedroom. The only light came from the street, so I could scarcely make out the furniture—the walnut armoire with its pewter-finish grill of bamboo shoots, or the matching bureau loaded with bargain books from the Strand and old jewels in tortoiseshell boxes and a terra-cotta bowl of photographs, mostly of me. Or the low bed that was neatly dressed in one of those grandmotherly white spreads with nubby protuberances.

We knelt at the open window, reaching to feel the rain. Cars swished dreamily up Elizabeth Street. Tangerine strands of hair broke free from Marilyn’s braid and fluttered in the breeze like kite tails. Her skin was powdered. It’s always nice to kiss her cheek; it brings to mind the gentler things.

“Do you think I’m pretty?” I asked.

She turned to face me. “I do.”

“But not like Kate.” Everyone always said how pretty Kate was.

“No, not like Kate,” Marilyn said, adjusting her elbows on the slanted, overpainted sill. “You’re more beautiful than Kate.”

I felt bad, like I’d forced a compliment from her; I hadn’t meant to. “My parents don’t think that.”

She turned back to look out. “I think they’re afraid of the way you look.”

I didn’t feel frightening, the way my parents found me to be, or difficult, the way others seemed to see me. I felt nothing, really, other than a sense that inside I was very small. Maybe all that anyone perceived was their inability to inspire my trust.

Though Jack was not there, I needed him to be there, so I imagined him. I often did this, and often we would speak. I asked him if getting older means you can’t trust anyone. In the mirror, I focused until my