Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,25

often made plans he did not share.

“Hey, Den,” I called, “what do you think of Jack Fleming?”

“Jack Fleming?” Denny called back. “He’s cute, if you like the grungy look. Why?”

“I saw him at the restaurant.”

“Not working, I hope,” Denny said. “He’s a little hostile for the service industry.”

“He came in with his mom and dad,” I said when I came back. I lay against Denny’s belly, and he began to play with my hair.

“It’s so fine,” he said of my hair. “Like the white stuff in corn. Those limp fibers inside.”

“He gives me a funny feeling,” I said, meaning Jack, “like I’m supposed to do something.”

“Have you ever heard him sing?” Denny asked. “I was at a party at Dan Lewis’s house and their band was playing. The band sucked, but when Jack sang alone, it was pretty incredible.”

“What did he play?”

“Normal stuff—covers of other people’s songs, I guess.”

“I mean, what instrument.”

Denny said, “Oh, he played the guitar.”

A few weeks later, Jack and I had sex. We were sixteen and we drank rum. It started out when Jack came to find me in the barn. Instead of talking, he leaned against the wall and watched me draw. He had just gotten the cast removed from his leg, and it was the first time I’d seen him without crutches. An orange glow warmed his face; it was from an outdoor light coming through the glass. I wiped my hands on my legs and pushed the loose hair from my eyes with the back of my wrist. When I stood, Jack pulled my face to his, giving me a kiss.

The Fourth of July fireworks erupted over Main Beach as we made our way from my house to his. When you walk at night in East Hampton, the sidewalk goes black before you, and the world pitches left. It’s the massive roots of the trees that split the concrete walkways.

“You okay?” he kept asking, and I kept saying, “Yes.”

David’s Lane is stately and broad. I’d passed Jack’s house on my bicycle about a thousand times, but it looked brand-new now that I knew that Jack lived there. An open plaza of grass led to a beige colonial façade. Inside was beige as well, parchment-colored and bland, with furnishings that were measured and moderate.

Things were the opposite at my house. My mother was constantly picking up some moldering armoire or fusty wall-mount ironing board at the dump and hauling it home. I would find her waiting for me on the front lawn, bewitched by some relic. “I practically had to wrestle Dump Keith out of his wheelchair for this one,” she’d say.

Somehow we were always alone on those nights; it was possible that she didn’t want distraction or interference. “You and I can move furniture better than any two men,” Mom would call out proudly as we maneuvered hulking items through doors and up staircases. Every corner of the house became eligible for overhaul. Phones would be moved, drawer contents rotated, bedrooms swapped, bulb wattages finessed, chairs recovered. Surrounded by staple guns and fabric remnants and tools given to her by my father, we would pick at TV dinners of meat loaf and apple cobbler as we rewired old lamps, antiqued the woodwork, anchored mirrors into brick, and outfitted tables with perfectly pleated fabric skirts.

To make space for a new piece, she would give others away. Nargis Lata, her professor friend from the college, took the “electric couch,” a bizarre wooden chaise with embedded metal plates for heating the extremities. Big John got the hassock embroidered with black leprechauns, Dad and Marilyn got the Balinese crèche, and for Christmas one year, Walter the mailman got the knee-high copper cannon. He came to collect it on a Sunday in his sagging blue station wagon. My mother said that out of his postal uniform, Walter looked “laid bare and brought to the light of day.” His Rottweiler wouldn’t let us near his car.

“There’s a fine bit of irony, Walter,” Powell said. “Usually dogs prevent your approach.”

I navigated the Fleming house, listening to the pressurized pops of fireworks exploding, counting booms—sixteen, seventeen, twenty. On the kitchen counter, beneath a fawn Princess wall phone was a prescription bottle with his mother’s name on it: Susan Fleming, 500 mg, BID. Refill 3. Three refills seemed like a lot. Three seemed like a condition. Next to a list for Rita the maid was a neat stack of stamped envelopes—paid bills to mail. A pair of men’s leather strap sandals were