Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,124

all four dog heads were floating around him like alter egos. “I used a toothbrush to do the fur,” he said. “I cut off all but ten bristles then melted back the toothbrush wall with a blowtorch.”

I thanked him, and together we looked out the window.

“I forgot to tell you,” he remarked soberly. “L.B. got off the waiting list at Tulane. He’s going for pre-med. I mean, can you imagine getting him as your gynecologist? Or Coco as a lobbyist for the lumber or sugar industry? It terrifies me to think of these people with checking accounts and voting rights. They’ll reverse the progress of the entire preceding generation! We’re doomed.”

I pressed my Chihuahua rock against my cheek. It was warm. Denny must have had it on the dashboard in his car. It was strange how much things had changed since we were kids, or since we’d started high school. No one was liberated, not the way my mother and her friends had been—free from consensus and imitation. No one wore homemade clothes or marched on Washington anymore. The closest we’d come to history was Jack and Smokey getting arrested at Shoreham power plant for climbing the fence during an anti-nuke demonstration.

Record store Eddie hadn’t received a single inquiry in the “Ask Eddie” box for months. Everyone just read Rolling Stone as if there were nothing to learn about music beyond what magazine editors saw fit to present, as if published information could ever truly be free of advertiser influence. “It’s not that they don’t care about answers; they don’t even know how to ask questions anymore,” Eddie told me and Kate.

Even feminism had been stripped of its legitimacy and relegated to tasteless jokes about women picking up dinner date checks or carrying their own luggage or standing on buses while men sit. There’d been some collapse, some shattering of invisible walls, some backlash from liberalism, some conservative revival. And yet, no matter where you stood idealistically, your involvement couldn’t be willed away: everyone bore some responsibility. If Denny, Jack, Kate, Dan, and I represented one extreme, and Coco, L.B., Pip, and Nico represented the opposite, we were still relatives of the hour. Society had never felt more like a bizarre arrangement.

“Have you ever seen something normal magnified that ends up looking like tubes?” I asked.

“Yes,” Denny said right away. “Bark.”

“Once I saw something,” I said, “possibly bark. It was a gnarled mass of tunnels. Maybe there’s similar architecture to society, only more fragile, like a nest of twisted glass that gives us shape but that can shatter at any instant from the slightest stress.” Jack’s absence was conspicuous; I felt the trauma of not having him to complete me, to interpret for me. I added, “I imagine they look like glass canals.”

“Neat,” Denny said, encouragingly, obviously relieved that I was talking. “Like an ant colony, only positive space, not negative.”

Denny seemed to understand, so I continued. “It’s like, we work and work to construct these systems for the good—civil rights, the environment, mind expansion—then they all shatter, like fragile avenues, like they were too delicate to sustain weight. Maybe there’s a limit to human tolerance for idealism.”

“It’s true. For a while we were doing well,” Denny said. “But no change is ever secure so long as someone else has the incentive to blow it off. Look at reconstruction in the South. You get the tragedy of the Civil War, the beauty of the Gettysburg Address, the death of Lincoln, and racists still figure out how to segregate the South—through legislation!” Denny adjusted his chair. “Then again, difference is essential to freedom. And to adaptation. No one wants a fascist state.”

“Maybe everything that gets built has to fall apart,” I said.

“Maybe. The process shakes us from complacency, and inspires us to build new avenues. In fact, it might not even be mechanically possible to have acts of liberalism without conservatism, or heroism without cowardice, or revolution without tyranny—”

“Or love without loss,” I said, and I don’t know, with Denny there, I just started to cry.

He reached to hold me. “Don’t worry, honey. He’ll be back.”

——

“Eveline is going to NYU,” my mother was telling Coco’s parents, “to study art history.”

I stood a little behind them. Coco was there too, with shiny coral lips and newly frosted hair, sipping cola from a clear plastic glass.

My father looked confused. He turned to Powell. “What happened to art?”

Powell just shrugged. “Or photography?”

I did not wish my parents any harm; however, I didn’t know why