Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,262

I beg you to indulge me. If one is a gardener, one cannot treat a rose as one would any other flower. A rose wants coddling, and to be sure, few people have the patience for it—so much of the product, so much of the time, is a wall of thorns. Why does God give us the rose? To humble us, to better us, to encourage forgiveness and understanding. And for those who show forbearance, the reward is divine. Yet it occurs to me that the rose is not only the reward, but the acknowledgment of the success of our efforts—the sensitivity, the tenacity. It is the proof of the virtue of faith. The rose singles out the tender. God has strategically placed the pure in the midst of the perilous to separate out those who can and will strive to reach for an ideal. My suspicion is that once you have been called upon to love this way, once you have proved your capacity, you will be called upon again.

“I traveled down from Boston to let you know that your experience with Jack was not a failure; it was an experience. We can’t rewrite Jack’s life. But we can redouble our efforts the next time we meet someone like him. I ask you to be courageous of heart. I ask you to remember that if you were hurt in this instance, it was not because you deserved to get hurt, or were foolish to get hurt, it was because you risked getting hurt. I ask you not to forsake the willingness to risk.”

Elizabeth looks ravaged. Her eyes are swollen and pink and big for their sockets, like thyroid eyes. The pace of her speech is the opposite of Father McQuail’s. She speaks into the microphone as if she is sedated, though having spent the afternoon with her, I know she is not. She is simply determined to own up to her part.

She thanks Father Michael on behalf of her family, then she says, “I’m two years older than Jack, but Jack was ahead of me in everything. School, music, art, ideas, and now, suffering. He became a vegetarian when he was ten. That didn’t stop the rest of us from eating meat several times a week. I remember sitting at the table, tormenting him with steak. He would stare back with a blank stare, marveling at the spectacle of me being an animal eating an animal, and sure enough, I would start to feel like an animal eating an animal. After dinner I would make myself throw up. I never touched meat again after leaving for college. I can’t even stand the smell of it. I’ve moved from two apartments because of the odor of cooking flesh. I won’t let my parents cook it when I visit, or before I visit—and for my sake, they don’t,” she says, “though they didn’t offer Jack the same courtesy. I honestly don’t know how he coped.”

“At nine, he hung a sign he made from a torn sheet out of his bedroom window to protest the Vietnam War and the Kent State killings, and, at thirteen, he boycotted toothpaste containing nonessential additives. He used apples and dental floss for weeks until Dan found natural stuff at the health food store. My parents used to have him play piano like a trained pet at their cocktail parties until the time he said, ‘Here’s a little song I wrote just for you,’ and the lyrics were the ingredients of sliced white bread played along to this really bad piano bar tune. They never asked him to play again. In high school—I don’t even know why I’m telling you this—I used to hide my feminine hygiene products in a box in a dresser drawer. Once Jack walked in on me going through the box. I screamed for him to get out, but he only came farther into the room.

“‘Elizabeth,’ he said, ‘don’t be ashamed. Please. I’m saying this because they never will.’” She wipes her eyes. “‘Please,’ he said to me. ‘Please.’

“Jack loved the blues from the time he was a baby, which was uncanny considering that in our house we never listened to anything but Bobby Vinton and the Carpenters. Just to show you what kind of an asshole I was, I used to tell him, ‘The blues suck.’ Last night I locked myself in his room. I don’t know how many of you have seen his room, but it’s the coolest space. I was