Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,3

wondered, When did she get so small? Kate and I followed her from room to room, and the floorboards grunted. In the dining room, her fingers skimmed the keys of her husband’s piano. He’d died one year before; immediately after burying him, Maman had become terminally ill. Sometimes you hear of people who are so much in love that they die together.

“I did have this piano tuned yesterday, Catherine,” Maman said in hobbled English, “in case you do ever wish to play again.” Ca-trine.

I adjusted the armchair Kate and I had moved to the kitchen weeks before, when the side effects of the chemotherapy had started to become severe. We lowered Maman down by the armpits, the way you bring a toddler to a stand, only in reverse. I tucked the chair under the table, inching her closer until she sighed, “Ah bien.”

Kate prepared dinner, and the room came to life with daunting pops and sizzles. It’s shocking sometimes, the grief-stricken noises of food. I drew a chair alongside Maman’s. I hoped it was a somewhat happy birthday with us there, and all her treasures from France—linen and glass and those plates with painted peasants. I wondered what treasures I would keep when I got older. No one in East Hampton really made anything, at least not in the specialty manufacturing sense. I’d probably have to settle for an old map of the bay or a jar of sand. Kate and I once bought these clamshell dolls in Sag Harbor, an undersea barbershop quartet, but they were not exactly keepsakes. They had clipped feathers for eyebrows and mussel-shell shoes and crab-claw hands. They were funny for about a week, then they got really depressing.

On a slender strip of wall near the window to Maman’s left was a tiny oil painting, my first. She kept it in an elaborately carved frame without glass, with just a hole on top for a nail. The painting looked nice that way. I liked to prop things I drew or painted against the posts in the barn behind my mother’s house, or else thumbtack them to the shelves around her desk. My dad would always stick things I gave him into the sun visor of his car or into some book he happened to be reading. “Pretty good,” he’d say, “but off-center.” According to him, everything I did was pretty good but off-center. Unless it was a photograph, in which case, he’d say, “Pretty good, but you cropped the head. And it’s off-center.”

The painting I’d given to Kate’s mother was an oil of a white rose, overblown and beginning to withdraw. Maman had the same quality of a flower receding. There was something eloquent about her admission of resign, something august about the inalterability of her position. I squinted to make her young again. If she could no longer be called beautiful, she possessed something better—a knowledge of beauty, its inflated value, its inevitable loss.

Maman spoke that day of the sea. In her velvety drone, she recalled sailing by ship to America. “The sea is generous,” she said. “She is there when you need her. Like a mother.” Her dying voice was a black sonata; it defied time. Though it was May, I could think only of the coming autumn, of a world without her in it. “Ecoutez,” she said. “La mer, et la mère. Eh?”

I heard Kate say something. I looked across the kitchen, but she was not there, the kitchen was not there, not the food, not Maman. Everything had disappeared. The sweet castle of my hallucination had gone down, vanished. We were still sitting on the porch, Kate’s knee knocking against mine. Our eyes resisted communion; they scanned the new jet sky, contemplating the black, wondering whether heavens, whether angels.

2

“Big John’s coming over tonight,” my mother said. She was next to me, wiping the kitchen counter, her thin arms making sweeping circles on the blade- and burn-scarred Formica. “He’s Powell’s friend from the Merchant Marines. Did I mention that he’s an expert birder?”

I was eating my usual dinner of spinach out of a can, and, as usual, green juice dripped onto my shirt. My mother rubbed the spots with her sponge. “Hold still,” she said, somewhat exasperated. Softly she added, “Be sure to ask John about his duck decoys.”

Later that night, Big John’s voice cut past the opened windows and into the yard. I was outside, moving my things from the barn, where I’d stayed for the summer, back to the front