Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,10

out, for the day and for life. Sometimes it’s best to focus on practical matters, just to get through. After Maman died that summer, life became very mechanical. I would eat dinner right after lunch and get ready for bed before night. I marked time. I would consider the task at hand until it was completed, then I would consider the next, never giving my mind a minute to scramble in the circuits of its cage. There’s something to be said for automatic living. It makes looking forward to things seem unreasonable. When you stop looking forward to things, you get used to low expectations and you realize, What’s the big deal about success anyway? If we’re all to attain everything we’ve been conditioned to desire—wealth, fame, education, prestige, security—then those things will become so prevalent that they’ll be meaningless. And it’s a populated planet. Such uniform comfort would not come without a cost. Someone somewhere would have to pay for all that success.

According to Jack, the only way to maintain dignity is to give up wishes before they don’t come true. Maybe that’s too extreme. Maybe the best you can do is to refrain from wishing for wishes that are not your own, such as for ranch houses and nice cars, for capri pants and lamb chop dinners and husbands with good haircuts. Sometimes you have no choice; you inherit your parents’ wishes. Some parents work hard to guarantee their children’s progress. They don’t want any slipping back. That’s why every now and then you meet some poor kid whose life is controlled as if by committee.

My particular future was not so vigilantly guarded. I was to start from scratch. The best thing about my family’s indifference was that I had the freedom to fail miserably.

I stepped behind the teacher’s desk to reach the blackboard, and I pulled down the map of the Soviet Union. Kate always said that when she made a lot of money she was going to buy a wall map for me, the kind with lots of sheets. I took a seat in the corner of the room, alone by the window, wondering what Kate was going to do to earn all that money.

Annie McCabe, Breanne Engel, and Darlene Nappa slipped through the door kind of all at once and assembled in an L-shaped cluster in chairs near the teacher’s desk. Annie began to whisper, and their three heads probed forward rigidly like construction cranes. I looked at the clock—two minutes to eight. And they were all so done. Annie was wearing stockings and a long straight silk skirt. Base makeup covered her from forehead to chest. A stringy ring of mocha stained the collar of her blouse.

Wow, I thought, and on such a hot day! Girls are truly game as soldiers, with the brave things they do to their bodies and the harsh conditions they are able to tolerate.

Darlene looked jaundiced, like a past-due celery stalk, concave and green with bushy stuff on top, and Breanne was beige and emaciated with a kind of polymer quality to her complexion—she looked trapped beneath her skin, like food through Tupperware. Her frosted hair was dry and frazzled at the ends and tied in such a way as to be neither up nor down. Her eyes were wide and shaking. Kate said Breanne takes Dexatrim.

——

About a month or so after the funeral, Kate and I saw those girls at Main Beach. It must have been late August because there was litter and guys with cigars. Litter and guys with cigars usually appear in the Hamptons around late August. That’s when the group-house renters come. Breanne had gotten so thin her skin appeared to have been shucked off and reglued. She reminded me of this candy my father used to get for us in Chinatown, the kind with a translucent rice wrapper that’s like paper, only you eat it, and it melts in your mouth.

“She looks like one of those Chinese candies my dad gets,” I said to Kate.

Kate tilted her head furtively into the shady spot between our shoulders, going, Sshhh! We were on our stomachs facing the water. It was late afternoon, and the beach was changing, the way beaches do in the late afternoon—young people go and older ones come, and suddenly there are dogs. A yellow Lab was making wide, dripping circles around an abandoned sand castle, and a couple in hats sat near us, facing their chairs to the west.

“She makes herself throw