Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,92

couch. I wished he would have selected the guitar instead. He was less sure of himself on guitar, and his vulnerability plus his refusal to relent was beautiful. I wished he would be beautiful.

Denny and Kate were at the base of the stairs, laughing. Kate’s face was flushed. I could see they’d been drinking. Denny caught me and reeled me in, squeezing like toothpaste. The smell of cheap Chablis mixed with the smell of his deodorant depressed me.

A flurry at the front door was accompanied by shouting and whistling. The teachers had arrived. Dr. Lewis, Micah, and Jim Peterson came in first, then Mr. McGintee, Toby Parker, and Lilias Starr. Rourke came last, shedding ounces of midnight cold as he filled the foyer.

McGintee complimented everyone. “Terrific job! Top shelf all the way! And that meeting house,” he said, giving me a firm wink. “The sets were the finest we’ve ever had.”

“Thank you,” Denny said, patting me on the back, using my arm to pat him on the back. He thrust my hand into the crowd. It stuck out like a little clock arm. “Her hand is like ice!”

“Maybe she’s anemic,” Lilias said.

“You do look pale, Eveline,” Micah agreed.

“My God,” Denny said to me, “don’t faint again.” And then to the crowd, “Last week I found her passed out on the darkroom floor.”

There were general expressions of concern for my health. Rourke reached for my hand, forgoing false propriety. He collected it as though taking up a baby, baby homeless something. In his hands my bones felt like bird bones, like crayons or small pencils. I demurred with a smile, and I pulled away. Not a smile, but a vague flickering. It was nice for a moment to have him, and sad to have to lose him.

I burrowed my hand into my jeans pocket, and looking down, I moved obediently to the living room, where I found Jack, leafing through a songbook, getting ready to sing. He appeared wafer-thin, wraithlike, there, but not there. My body moved about the perimeter of the grand piano which was already crowded with people who had come to listen.

Dr. Lewis joined Jack on the bench. A cigarette hung precariously from the corner of his mouth as he slapped his legs establishing a light rhythm prior to Jack’s playing. Then real banging—Smokey, whipping the lid of the piano with the heels of his hands. And Jack’s fingers hitting the keys, thump-thump, thump-thump-thump. And him singing Muddy Waters:

Who’s that yonder come walkin’ down the street?

She’s the most beautiful girl any man would want to meet.

I wonder who’s gonna be your sweet man when I’m gone?

I wonder who you’re gonna have to love you.

In his voice there was new weight, masculine weight. Jack had never been hurt by me before. At least I’d given him something, even if only just a passport into sorrow. When the last chord came, he jammed the piano one final time—bwomp—and he smiled mordantly into the crowd, his eyes latching on to no one and nothing. His rejection of me was correct; I understood it had to be that way. If in life there is flow, a current or a course, I had the feeling I’d found it. They began a second song, Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne, my favorite, he knew. He sang it so beautifully.

Past the piano on the southern side of the room, a wall of windows overlooking the porch extended from floor to ceiling. I moved behind the frayed drapes and went to the farthermost window, the top half of which was open. Pantigo Road lay ahead. The oily gloss of the street and the sound of passing cars suggested it was raining. Wheels on wet pavement make a very particular going-home sound, serene and conclusive. I wondered what Marilyn was doing. Maybe she was making tea, scooping stray leaves from a wrinkled paper sack with Golden Assam stamped in withering red. Maybe she and Dad were reading. If she was looking out the window at the rain, perhaps she was thinking of me.

“I’m leaving,” Rourke said, his voice coming practically from within my mind.

I was not surprised. Lots of things were in there—him too. My eyes didn’t leave the street. I was in some unattended place, some dangerously unattended place. He was on the porch, on the other side of the wall, leaning against my open window. I did not look to see him, but I could feel him, the way you can close your eyes and feel a hand