Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,161

a thing. I said I assumed that anyone who drinks that much coffee is not drinking it for caffeine but for milk and sugar. The next time Mark saw Manny, he asked him directly, and Manny confirmed my guess, only he didn’t use the word diabetic. He said, “Technically, yes. I have a litty touch of The Sugar.”

On an otherwise vacant metal desk is a miniature TV showing The Dukes of Hazzard. While Mark explains the situation with the bird, Manny glides evenly to the cradle of my arms, steaming cup in hand. “Twisted wing,” he surmises, using one pinky to check. His voice dips beneath Mark’s, speaking only to me. “Don’t worry,” he says with a wink. “She’s not broken.”

There is a cardboard box in a cove behind the service elevator, and when Manny kicks it out, a thousand keys jounce like sleigh bells against his uniformed navy thigh. Manny builds a bed of rags. “We’ll keep it in the boiler room. I’ll tell Frank to lock the cats.”

It takes four days for the bird to heal. Manny constructs a Popsicle-stick splint, though we never actually use it, and Frank, the assistant super, buys it a seed ball. It isn’t a very pretty bird, just a sparrow.

“Technically,” Manny says, when we finally release it into the courtyard, “we could have freed her sooner.”

Everything with Manny is always technically this and technically that. We watch the bird skip and flutter. Spring is here. There are crocuses. It scares me to see them poking out like little green horns. How did spring come again so quickly? It seems just to have passed. It’s strange, but I’ve lost track of birthdays and seasons; in my memory there are islands that have turned dark.

“But it was happy,” Manny concludes. “Maybe it needed a vacation. It’s gotta be tough, being a bird like that in a place like this.”

We drink Stolichnaya at Café Luxembourg, and we lament the decline of America. We blame groups. Blaming groups shows that you yourself are not involved but that you are intellectually connected, especially if the group you blame appeared in Sunday’s New York Times. When I say “we” I do not mean me, though I cannot exempt myself insofar as I am present. When a pack of wolves mangles a carcass, it doesn’t matter which one’s not eating that much.

“You and Mark are so cute!” Naomi exclaims in the bathroom. Everything happens in the bathroom. The clock stops. There is a kink in the spin of the world. She comes out of the stall sniffing, pinching her nostrils. “It must be wonderful to be in love.”

I don’t think I’m in love. I don’t know, maybe I am. I smile, sort of. I think I smile.

We return to the table, me behind her, her ravishing ass ticking like a metronome set high. She hits shoulders, practically, of men in chairs on the way. We sit side by side. Naomi is a model. Sitting next to Naomi is like sitting next to a Kleenex. When you ask a question, she tilts her head and flits her eyes and asks you to repeat yourself, which you don’t bother to do, because whatever you asked the first time was already so abridged for her benefit that it does not bear repeating. We order the same meals. That is to say, she copies mine.

“Yeah, that,” Naomi simpers on the heels of my order, handing back an unopened menu. It occurs to me that she cannot read.

Mark and Richard Spencer switch to Chivas Regal Royal Paisley, and they discuss supply-side economics, the $235 price of Hanson Citation ski boots, fluctuations in the index, and fishing in Argentina, which is the place to buy land. Richard is Mark’s boss; he is the one with the dent in his head that makes him appear cleavable. “Mia and I are going in September. Why don’t you join us?” Richard says of Argentina, adding discreetly, “Everyone there is white. It’s not what you’d think.”

Richard’s girlfriend Mia’s name is not pronounced Mee-a, but My-a. This you must know without being told. If you cannot intuit this, it confirms your lack of sophistication. Then you will be ostracized and Mark will never make partner at work.

Mia loves September. “All the new fashion!”

Mark looks at me, his eyes wide, his manner encouraging. I’m supposed to reply. His head makes miniature downward jerks as if he’s watching me struggle to tap out a dance he’s already perfected.

“Fashion—and—September,” I say. “Yes, I