Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,252

the length of brass grazed a patch of purple tulips. The instrument was shining and gold, making a regal loop against the flowers. Jay had brown eyes and his nose was covered in a fan of freckles. When we were in fourth grade, he did one hundred fifty sit-ups for the presidential fitness test with all the boys looking on, and that same year he’d given Kate an I.D. bracelet for her birthday. She returned the gift, but she did so kindly, the two of us riding our bikes over to his house on Sherill Road after dinner one night. I waited in the driveway while they sat on the porch and talked. In the end, Jay seemed content with the fact that he’d been treated respectfully, more so than he might have been with actually going steady, and as it turned out, their friendship lasted a long time. Jay had driven Kate and Maman in to Sloan-Kettering several times, and he had taken Kate to both proms, though he had a girlfriend who lived about an hour up the island, in Mattituck.

I always think of that parade and of Jay Robbins with his trombone. Kate’s natural femininity had allowed him to respond with natural masculinity, and in the end everything had been resolved. I didn’t feel as scared about boys after that. But that was in the time preceding infiltration—by other girls and by ideas of propriety. Before infiltration, you could really count on girls like Kate to guide you through the labyrinth. Unfortunately, girl guides go from being trackers in the Native American sense to being hostesses in the crowded steak house sense. Who knows how it happens.

If friendship is like a cathedral, then forsaken friendship is like roofless ruins, like a formerly glorious structure. In the World War II photos my dad has of bombed cathedrals in Cologne or Dresden, they’re not merely blackened ribs; they’re hollowed houses of worship, still symbolic of something, just as significant as what they stood for originally—intention, faith, place. I felt connected to Kate, but also sort of out in the open.

“On Saturday we leave for Grasse. In Provence. It’s where perfumes are made.”

“That will be nice. You’ll see lots of flowers.”

It must feel good to possess a genetic immunity, to take shelter in your ethnicity, to vanish into your ancestry. Exactly as I form the thought, I set it free. I wouldn’t want to live in France or anywhere else, not when the story of America is still unfolding. Not when I speak the language, when there is no getting lost, when there is still so much to understand. For me there is no security greater or better than entrepreneurial security, cowboy security, the security of infinite possibility. We say goodbye and I hang up first. I don’t mean to be rude. It’s just that there is nothing to keep me from putting the phone down first, nothing that makes me think—Slow.

49

I go first to the mimosa. It does not appear to have grown, and yet it has, which is the remarkable thing about trees. They are secretive about their growth. My mother is next, in the backyard; her face in the daylight, how I know it, the shape of her eyes and the color. She has been cleaning. In her hand is a towel and a spray bottle full of vinegar and water. She does not use chemicals anymore, she informs me, wiping her hair from her forehead with the back of her free hand. “The water table is fucked.”

Tomorrow there will be a party in the yard, a birthday party for a friend from the college, Jann, who was formerly Jan when he was a she. Did I remember Jan? I must remember.

“I do remember. She wore half-glasses.”

“Bifocals.”

“Exactly, yes, bifocals.”

My mother rubs the film from the tabletops—there are all these tables but no chairs—and she tells stories. She is not insensitive; she simply talks around my feelings for my sake. Possibly she has always talked around my feelings for my sake. It occurs to me that maybe I am difficult, that I’ve always been difficult, especially for her, as we are so unalike. Possibly she gave more than I knew. She trusted I would be okay, even if she could not trust herself to make me that way. Good night, my Eveline, she used to say. Didn’t she used to say that?

I lean to give her a kiss. She kisses me back, then returns to the tables, setting