Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,16

said, “How awful.”

By that she meant Alice. Kate thought Alice was a poor thing. I thought the awful part was the note. It was written by an expert, by someone who believed what he or she was writing; then it was dispatched into the world, only to be casually disregarded by some other expert. It’s hard to believe in anything anyone says when experts are constantly contradicting each other. Pip was as sure in gym as I was in art, but Alice was also sure about something, and so was Coach, and Alice’s doctor. It’s too bad that certain things matter so much when you are the one they matter to, but in the grand scheme, no one else cares, not really. I wondered who else besides Coach thought rope climbing mattered to girls but periods didn’t.

The barn had become dark. Though I could see very little, I could hear many things: the echo of my footsteps in the room I occupied, the sound of night beyond those walls, my mother’s laughter, ascending the hill from the house, traveling on the platform of a breeze. I could almost smell the Chablis on her breath and the mint from the package of gum in her coat pocket—the smells were like fairies escaping. I could almost see her reenact the drama of her day for her friends—bodies wedged into couches and chairs, denim legs jutting across tabletops, drowsy hands passing a joint, passing a bottle, wrists exposed, voices going, “So what happened next, Rene?” Reen, short for Irene.

Her friends were always there. If ever it looked like they might leave, they wouldn’t. Someone might stand and stretch but then just use the toilet, or tuck in a loose shirt and ask if anyone felt like making a run for more beer. If I ever passed through, they would confer with me congenially, dipping close to my eyes with cigarettes, natted hair, and home-sewn clothes stinking of patchouli and musk.

If my upbringing made me sensitive to affectations of tolerance and to the irony of that particular hypocrisy, I could hardly be blamed. All I ever heard as a child was how everything is cool and everyone should be cool, and yet they were so very quick to judge new shoes or a clean car or to cogitate over the dementia behind matching furniture or monogrammed stationery. I couldn’t help but have developed an aversion to the epoxied stench of incense and the smut of overfilled ashtrays and the sticky liquor rings on tables that had to be cleaned on Sunday mornings. Hiding in my room at bedtime as a little girl, I would drink my dinner of chocolate milk and bury myself beneath hundreds of stuffed animals tied together in twos with rescued ribbon and bits of yarn, one neck fastened to another or belly to belly, buddied up in case of fire, in case they would have to be tossed from the window. I would rub my feet together to distract myself from the noise of the party, the singing, the laughter, the music—Joplin, Dylan, Hendrix.

“I love you,” she would say. My mother, popping her head in.

I was sitting on the barn floor, drawing rooftops. There were all these great rooftops by my dad’s place in Little Italy. My father was good about taking me up to the roof of his building whenever I wanted. He always waited while I drew, either reading or just looking around. It wasn’t necessary for him to wait, but between him and his business partner, Tony Abbruscato, they had about a thousand rooftop horror stories.

Kneeling before my paper, I looked deep into the space Jack might have occupied, and imagining him, I smiled. I thought of him smiling also, a fair angel’s smile, his features transmitting a regard so strong as to defy the inconvenience of his factual absence. Had he been there actually, he would have persuaded me to join the party in the house. Jack hated to miss a party. Though I missed him, I was thankful to be beyond the influence of his flesh, the lips that could nudge me with an inflexible kiss through the door of my own home.

“Mom’s back, you know.” Not Jack, but Kate. She was leaning in the doorway, her head poking through. “Feel like coming up front?”

Yes, my mother, I knew. The laughter and the mint. The sweet wine and music. I wasn’t sure what I felt like, being alone or being with people. Neither seemed good.