Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,31

might answer the phone and say I was working a double shift, in which case my father would say that he had spoken with me earlier, and that I hadn’t mentioned it. I considered covering myself. I considered telling him the same lie I’d told Kate, or even better—approximately the same lie. I could use the opportunity of a conversation with my father to undo the lie to Kate. I could have told him that I was supposed to fill in for someone at the restaurant but that the waitress called and said she decided to go in after all. That way if he talked to Kate, and Kate found out I hadn’t worked an extra shift, the original lie would sound super-authentic. But I’d never lied to my father, or to my mother. They’d never given me a reason to.

Lying is a full-time occupation, even if you tell just one, because once you tell it, you’re stuck with it. If you want to do it right, you have to visualize it, conjure the graphics, tone, and sequence of action, then relate it purposefully in the midst of seemingly spontaneous dialogue. The more actual the lie becomes to the listener, the more actual it becomes to the teller, which is scariest of all. Some people really get to believing their own lies.

The funeral parlor was air-conditioned and minty. I felt guilty to be relieved to be out of the heat. The walls were lined with flowers that flaunted life, jutting triumphantly into the room.

I asked Jack if he’d ever noticed how arrogant cut flowers can be.

“Actually, yes,” he said, on his parents’ dining room table they could be very arrogant.

My mother and father, Marilyn, Powell, Aunt Lowie, and I signed the guest book, then we took our seats. I walked unsteadily, feeling a little sick from the flower fragrance. Mom informed me that the original intention of funeral flowers was to mask the scent of the dead.

“When Uncle Billy died,” Lowie said, “he was waked on a board in the living room. Remember, Rene? The board was really a door off its hinges propped on a table and a borrowed sawhorse.”

“In those days,” Mom said, “children had to kiss the corpse.”

From my position behind Kate, I was forced to abide the procession of crying faces, crying and advancing for meaningful embraces and European kisses. I felt bad for Kate, sitting and standing, standing and sitting, each time smoothing out the back of her midnight-blue crepe skirt. If there were rules, she seemed to know them—I wondered how. Together with her brother, she acknowledged each person’s nearness to the dead and helped the group in its struggle for order—who grieved most, whose pain was most real—because in life there is always hierarchy, and it is frankly not profitable to remain modest and anonymous, not even at a funeral. Kate set aside her own despondency to render gratitude for sympathy received.

There was a lyrical aria, Parisian and melancholy, a woman softly singing. My eyes fixed resolutely on the casket; I admired its workmanship, the hinges, the handles, the cherry veneer, the quilted interior. In the crushingly tiny window of my view, I could see people pass, coming upon the body, looking as if looking were nothing, as if her remains were naturally laid out, naturally speechless. I stood and joined the line, moving slowly forward. At each end of the coffin were thick candles in amber glass, massive pekoe sentinels stationed on twining iron holders. Behind them was a framed photograph of Claire with her late husband and their two children. It was a picture I’d taken.

Maman lay still in her pleats of fluted silk. Physically, little had changed in the days since we’d last spoken. I wouldn’t say she looked peaceful, necessarily, but she had the look of self-possession, of satisfied detachment from the relationships that continued to bind survivors to the grind of existence. What I saw was what I’d never seen elsewhere—the look of being done. Maman would give a neat swipe of her arm whenever she’d had enough of whatever, of dinner, of an argument, saying, “Fin.”

She looked well, I thought, with the slenderest of smiles. I kissed my fingers and touched her cheek, leaving her to rest in kingdom and cradle.

——

The last time we spoke, it was a Friday. July thirteenth. Four thirty-three in the afternoon.

Kate had gone outside to talk to the doctor with Laurent and his wife, Simone. I sat at the bed and held