Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,28

it’s late already when they find out. It seems like something girls should know too, and earlier, the way boys are capable of such delicate reversals.

On our way out of the house that night, we passed the piano. Jack faltered, touching it. Though he used to perform for his parents, now he only played when they were out. He tried to deprive them of pleasure whenever possible, he said, but I knew it was because they made him feel hateful, and he couldn’t touch something he loved so much with hating hands. He sat on the ebony bench, and just when I thought he’d forgotten I was there, he reached to pull me to his side.

“Eric Satie,” he said of the music he played for me. “Trois Gymnopedies, Number 2.” Then he tried something melodic and easy, something you’d hear on the radio. Over and over he practiced the same few bars with a single hand.

“Whose is that?” I asked. “It’s pretty.”

“No one’s,” he answered. “I just made it up.”

6

Our bodies lay entwined in a musty navy-blue sleeping bag. The flannel interior had a rodeo pattern with tiny cowboys on bucking chocolate horses, swinging golden ropes against a wan blue sky. I wondered if such places exist. If they did, someday I might like to go there. My head rested in the space between Jack’s arm and chest. Above us, night was an absorbent black, like felt.

“You haven’t told me anything,” he said. “It’s been three weeks.”

Though I didn’t feel like discussing Maman’s death, he seemed to want me to discuss it, or need me to discuss it, and so I agreed, since part of harmonious living is conceding to the wants and needs of others, even if you don’t feel like it.

“First you left, then I went to my dad’s, then right away Kate called, saying, ‘Come home.’ I guess it was still June. After that the days merged into one hazy, humid streak.”

Kate and I witnessed the moody stillness of summer as if from the backseat of a speeding car, catching only glimpses of sundresses in pink and lime, and shapeless straw bags. Crickets in the morning, the solitary hum of a mower pulsing through grass, the menacing banter of gulls, the whoosh and patter of flapping things at the beach. Kites and towels. It was like a memory of all the summers I’ve ever had, chopped up and stuck together.

Jack said, “A montage.”

“Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”

On the train from Manhattan back to East Hampton, I placed my head against the mottled graffiti-etched glass. A grime smell from the vent that ran along the lower edge of the window filled my nose. I replayed Kate’s phone call in my head until it was like a meditation.

Is it you?

Yes, it’s me.

I took my mother to the hospital.

Oh. Is your brother there?

Not until the weekend.

Do you want me to come?

Yes. There’s a train at nine.

It was hot when we arrived in East Hampton. The crossing bells rang slowly as the train ambled into the station and landed on its chin like an exhausted bovine. The scene was like a portrait of itself, a preternaturally still landscape of poetic components—a station house, a deli, a dry cleaner, a pickup truck, a mailbox resting squarely on sloped grass, trees in tight rows. I stepped out and moved along the platform, feeling dizzy and vaguely lost, though my house was just a few hundred yards away.

“I don’t know why, but I called home,” I told Jack.

When I saw my reflection in the pay phone, I could see stains beneath my eyes from crying on the train. I kept making mistakes dialing. My fingers kept slipping from the holes.

Eventually I got through. There were funny rings like gargles, then my mother answered.

I said, “Hi, it’s me.”

“Hi, you!” she said. “Where are you?”

“At the train station.”

“Well,” she prodded gently, “come home.”

“Have you heard from Kate?”

“I have. Kate took Claire in to the hospital this morning.”

I wondered what was the difference between taking someone to the hospital and taking someone into the hospital and taking someone in to the hospital. If there was a difference, she seemed to be referring to it.

On the walk home I was confused by the prismatic brightness of the sun. I felt a scalding heaviness, an urging into ground. I stared at my feet, clinging as best I could to each moment. With every step forward, I took two more down, walking heavily in the heat like entering at a diagonal