Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,22

of the worst period of a particularly shitty life, I met you.”

Because of his broken leg Jack had had to cancel his annual Outward Bound trip, which meant he was stuck at home with his family. For weeks he wasn’t even able to climb the three flights to his room, so he had to sleep in the den, or, as he said, in the transverse colon of the house, where all the shit sits and ferments before moving through. Jack was forced to endure the petty mechanics of family life—every dinner and phone conversation, every key jingle and cabinet slam.

Once, he and his dad fought so bad that Mr. Fleming called the police.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I threatened him with a weapon.”

“A gun?”

“No,” he confided, “I couldn’t reach the gun. A knife.”

“A knife? Your leg was broken! He couldn’t possibly have been scared.”

Jack shrugged. “What can I say? I have excellent aim.”

I knew Jack from school; everyone did because of Atomic Tangerine. Prior to that he and Kate had had the same piano teacher, Laura Lipton, a songwriter from Sag Harbor whose dog, Max, was a television actor—Ken-L Ration, Chuck Wagon, and so on. Occasionally Kate’s lesson would encroach upon Jack’s, and she would play with the dog just in order to stick around and listen. She would call me after to say how well Jack Fleming played.

We never actually spoke until the day in early summer when he came with his parents to the Lobster Roll, where his older sister, Elizabeth, was a waitress and I was a busgirl. I watched him from across the room. I’d never seen anyone so uncomfortable in my life. As his father talked without pause, Jack stared through the window out onto Napeague Highway, clanking his spoon against his cast, keeping a secret rhythm. He would lower his face to the table to sip his water. His broken leg was propped onto a second chair.

Elizabeth asked me to carry over the drinks. “Please. I can’t deal with them.”

The cocktail tray rested on the flat of my left forearm, and I bent to deposit each drink carefully. I couldn’t help but notice the way the afternoon sun encountered Jack’s face, the glassine glow to his eyes. When I looked into them, I could not look away. They became a beautiful horizon, dominions of clouds and winds of ice and insinuations of birds. I considered sadly the world he saw through those eyes. Probably nothing in real life could match the purity of vision they beheld.

Mr. Fleming asked my name.

I set down his plastic cup of chardonnay. I said, “Eveline.”

“Eveline? Fan-tas-tic!” He began to sing. Eveline, Evangeline.

I delivered Jack’s Coke, and my breast accidentally grazed his right arm, a little beneath his shoulder. We both kind of froze.

“Which of your parents reads Longfellow?” Mr. Fleming demanded. Jack shifted protectively as though to block me.

“My mother,” I replied, “teaches poetry. Short stories and Shakespeare too. But I think my name is from Dubliners.”

“Joyce—bah. Overrated,” Mr. Fleming barked dismissively. “Let’s see, let’s see now, Longfellow. It’s been quite some time.”

“Where does she teach, dear?” Mrs. Fleming interrupted.

“Southampton College,” I said. Mr. Fleming cleared his throat and begin to recite. “Gentle Evangeline—et cetera, et cetera, something, something, something—When she had passed it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.”

Jack glowered at him and clapped three times very, very slowly.

“Well, now, Eveline-Evangeline,” Mr. Fleming said. “What do you intend to do with the great fortune you will have amassed by the end of summer?”

“Oh. I’m not sure. Probably just buy paints and stuff. You know, art stuff,” I said.

He was silent—they all were—stunned no doubt by the humorless sincerity of my reply. As I delivered straws and cleared away soiled appetizer plates, I felt for the first of many times the intensity of Jack’s gaze and the blood that pooled darkly in my cheeks.

At the waitress station, Elizabeth garnished glasses of iced tea with lemon wheels, and she spoke of Jack. I listened from the far side of the lattice divider. It was funny to see her face after seeing his—his was so much prettier. Her parents had tried everything, she said. She said that Jack had seen psychiatrists since he was seven, that he was a noncompliant patient, that he had been on more medications than there are states, that he was talented in music, and that he had just been enrolled in boarding school near their grandparents’ house in Connecticut. He was leaving in September. “He