Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,26

near the back door on a new straw mat, and hanging from a hook on the white wainscoted laundry room wall was a key chain with a shiny BMW tag. The dryer bounced confidently. I was pretty sure that the Flemings never had checks returned or put locks on the telephone dial to keep people from using it or walked around collecting all the lightbulbs in a straw basket and putting them in the car trunk whenever the Lilco bill got too high. The last time Mom did that, someone rear-ended the Scamp and all the bulbs broke.

I wondered how it felt to be rich, or to have money, or at least to have some sense of sufficiency. At my house we lived in chronic fear of what the next day would bring. The only time that terror got suspended was on a birthday. That’s probably the point of birthdays, to give people a break from black unknowns, to indulge the person for a day. You hear it all the time—For Christ’s sake, it’s my birthday.

And yet, despite his family’s means, it did not seem wrong to say that Jack’s had been a life of deprivation. Except for his record collection and his guitars, all the items in that house belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Fleming exclusively. When we were at my house or in town, it was easy to forget about his relations—he was just Jack. But the more familiar I became with his home, the more inextricably bound to those people I found him to be. His parents maintained control largely through tactics of guilt and fear, through threats of withholding, by calling what they’d accumulated “their own,” as though whatever had been earned hadn’t been drawn from the bank of family time, against family interest.

Jack patted the kitchen counter, gesturing for me to sit. He reached into a cabinet above the wall oven and got the rum. “One hundred eighty-one proof,” he informed me. “My old man picked it up in Jamaica. On a golf trip. With his lady friend.”

“He has a girlfriend?” It seemed hard to believe. It would have made more sense for Jack’s mom to have someone else. She was actually attractive.

“A lady friend,” Jack corrected. He hopped up next to me, breathing in through clenched teeth because his leg was still sore. “He’s had several that I know of. He loads them up on gimlets and recounts his sob story of white male supremacy—prep school, Ivy League, two cars, Madison Avenue apartment, house in the Hamptons, condo in Bermuda, spoiled kids, spendthrift wife. Women feel sympathetic, thinking he’s devoted but misunderstood. Then he drags them back to his lair—our place in New York—and he pops them. The family is his script. He gets his money’s worth for supporting us.”

Jack took a few belts from the bottle, drinking expertly, but when it was my turn to take a mouthful, I held my breath, knocking the liquid down like screwing a cap on a jar with the heel of my hand.

I said, “That’s really gross.”

“The rum?”

“Your dad.” Though the rum was gross too. “Does your mother know?” I didn’t like to know something about her life that she didn’t know. If there was a code, that would surely be breaking it. Sometimes life is irreverent, and you accidentally discover you are a party to irreverence, and it’s hard to know what to do.

Jack shrugged. “His most recent conquest is the receptionist from Ogilvy. She’s not the sexy type of receptionist assholes snag in movies,” he related in his darkest drawl, “but the terrifying type they end up with in real life.”

“You saw her?”

“I walked in on them screwing in the maid’s room. I came into the city on a Tuesday to go to the frigging orthodontist. He must not have gotten the message, but what else is new? Elizabeth was in a coma once for two days after a bike accident before we found him—he’d called in sick to work, then took off for a ‘midweek getaway,’ neglecting to mention it to my mother. Anyway, I got to the apartment and heard gagging from near the kitchen. I thought someone was choking. I figured the super had come up to fix a leak, maybe, then swallowed a chicken bone during his lunch break. Unfortunately, no one was dying.”

I took the bottle from his hand and placed it behind me, out of reach. His hands came together in his lap. I hadn’t yet heard him talk