Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,65

say that my head was my only mobile part.

What’s that, baby, Jack asked, not really asking.

I couldn’t remember, though I knew it had been important. I did not like him to call me baby.

I thought I felt him undressing me. I thought I felt the rimy wind pass through the tunnel made by the small of my back arching off the filthy plank floor. I thought I felt his fingertips touch the recesses beneath my hip bones. He may have had sex with me. I thought he did; I wasn’t sure.

Winter & Spring 1980

I know another’s secret but do not reveal it and he knows that I know, but does not acknowledge it: the intensity between us is simply this secret about the secret.

—JEAN BAUDRILLARD

14

I am in a room, high up, near some sort of exposed beams. The back of my head smacks the ceiling, and hair that is not my hair hangs around my face, uncoiling stiffly like the tails of chameleons. There is no motion, and time has fallen off its continuum, like gears skipping intervals. I am kept up, pushed up, by what I do not know. On one beam there is writing, code writing, a wicked code, legible to me—legible, and so I am wicked, I think; yes, I must be wicked.

My eyes opened from the nightmare, then immediately closed again, squeezing tight. The twilight seemed robust when I felt so very feeble, so I decided to lay in bed and wait for people to come home and switch on appliances. I wanted all the machines to be on. I did not like the way the appliances were sitting there, arrogant and fat and proving through muteness that everyone was elsewhere, involved with other things, things separate from me.

I switched on the lamp and retrieved the note from Jack that was beneath it. Yellow lamplight soaked the page. Faded gray letters were penciled between the blue rules, strung together and nearly indecipherable. There were words—love and me and mystery, also key and sleep. I fell back onto the mattress, dropping Jack’s note to the floor. My quilt felt soft around my neck, and I nestled into the pillow. Tiny shellfish burrow into the floor of the bay, hiding there. From the safety of their beds of sand they listen to the clamoring of the sea.

That morning I saw him at the record store, through the picture window of Long Island Sound. I was inside; he was walking past. There was no reason for me to turn from what I’d been doing, but when I did, Rourke was there. He stopped and stared incautiously, as though bewildered by me, or provoked. He was wearing a navy-blue down jacket that yielded obediently to his body, and his right hand was crammed halfway inside his jeans pocket. Under his open coat was a pine-green shirt with several unfastened buttons, and the waist of his pants came low around his hips. His black hair was wavy, tousled.

I smiled. He did not smile back.

He reached for the front door. It whooshed open, then clattered to a positive close. I returned to the wall of albums, and experienced that futile feeling of waiting when there’s no avoiding the thing you’re waiting for. If I tried to leave, he would watch my body on the way out, the way I was bound tight in my jeans. The store was empty except for the two of us, so there was no chance of disappearing among others. I slipped behind a display rack.

He started talking to Eddie, the record store guy. As they spoke, Rourke kept taking pieces of something from his hand, nuts maybe, or candy, and eating them. His jaw moved in even claps, and the muscles at the base of his cheeks flexed into knots. He hadn’t shaved.

“It’s definitely inferior,” Eddie was saying.

“It really is crap,” Rourke agreed, and from his coat pocket he withdrew a bottle of lime-green Gatorade, raised it to his lips, and drank.

There was something especially sexy about the random way he was dressed, making it easy to imagine him in bed that morning, thinking thoughts just as I had, jerking off probably, then deciding to alleviate a morning’s boredom by going into town for a while. I flipped mechanically through the section of albums marked S and imagined that I’d been home with him, wherever it was that his home may have been. I had thoughts of being beneath him, and alongside him, my body to his