Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,17

I wondered what was expected of me; if I had known what was expected, I might have done it. I tried to think, but at the same time there was something I needed to forget, something of which an answer to her question might have reminded me.

Kate waited for an answer, and when none came, she left. Her feet clocked down the wood steps outside. In a few seconds the screen door in the back of the house squeaked open and slapped shut. Then nothing. Not silence so much as the absence of sounds affiliated with me. There was the loose, careless clank of silverware, and cabinet doors smacking, and the thud of the plumbing every time the kitchen faucet was shut off. There was the distant muffle of voices—Kate rejoining the party, Mom asking if I was coming. Maybe not. Maybe she did not ask about me at all.

5

When I came home from shopping at the A&P on Saturday, he was there, at my mother’s desk, swiveling in her chair, slumped and belligerent, the way you sit at ice cream counters, like at the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton. It was as if he’d always been there, all summer long, occupying that very chair.

A scratchy copper beard dusted his chin, making a wafery layer like penny-colored frost on a windowpane. His hair touched the base of his neck. It was the color of gleaming wheat. Jack might have looked healthy, except that beneath his crystalline blue eyes were velvety pouches, and his cheeks were raw and drawn very far in, like a pair of inside-out parentheses. It was possible he had not eaten or slept in days. It’s strange to realize you have sustained yourself on a memory of a person that has become untrue. The phantom face of my summer was not the face before me. And, yet, it was Jack.

“Your hair grew,” he said. His voice was the same, still so beautiful.

I stopped at the base of the stairs and lowered the groceries to the floor. “I hate it.”

“So cut it,” he said, moving toward me, lifting me, and we spun.

I tested his existence; my hands felt for the body beneath the shell of his clothes. I confirmed the feathery pressure of his hair on my cheeks. The solid wall of his slender chest, the subtle protrusion of his right shoulder blade. He was real, with a smell that was real and a slightly sticky gleam to his skin. I rested my head in the bony basin between his ear and his shoulder.

“Are you crying?” he asked. He tightened his grip. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s just, you kept coming, like a ghost, like, floating.” For a long while I couldn’t speak. “Sometimes I would feel that you were with me, and you seemed so real. Now you’re here, but I’m not sure. You seem less real than before.”

His eyes studied mine, scanning cautiously. He breathed deeply, heavily, as if taking some of me down with the air.

“Have I changed too?” I asked.

“You have.” He drew back my hair one side at a time, trailing with his gaze the path of his fingers. Adding gravely, “But it’s okay.”

Jack kissed me and his lips on mine were dry. He tasted like black licorice, like anise.

“My mother told me everything,” he said, “about Kate’s mom.” He touched my cheek over and over with a chapped finger. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”

My eyes opened wide, admitting light from my mother’s desk lamp. If you don’t want to cry, you can stop yourself by looking into light. It’s better to keep grief inside. Grief inside works like bees or ants, building curious and perfect structures, complicating you. Grief outside means you want something from someone, and chances are good you won’t get it.

Later we were sitting on opposite ends of the couch, drinking black coffee. Our legs were interlocking and I was rubbing my feet together beneath Jack’s tailbone. I used to rub my feet behind my dad’s back when he was reading or when he and Marilyn were watching that old detective show, Mannix, or the crazy Dean Martin program, the one with the spiral staircase. My father’s apartment was always freezing.

“They’re whirring like a little machine!” Jack said of my feet, and right then WPLR played “Maybe I’m Amazed.” The song had played the first time we met, and by coincidence we often heard it play, which sort of made it our song, even though everyone said it was queer to like Wings.