Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,4

house for the school year, and every time he let loose with another bird whistle I could almost see the breeze from his breath in the leaves. He kept going on about ducks this and ducks that—coots, broadbills, ringnecks, widgeons.

I ventured into the kitchen at eleven o’clock. Mom perked up when she saw me. “Hi!”

Big John waved. He was a beefy, black-bearded man. Everything he did was loud. He talked loud, he breathed loud, he even sat loud. His chair creaked and moaned as gross spurts of wind shot out of his nose before getting recalled through his teeth. People who amplify like that are scary, especially when they do so at the beach or on a public phone or in your kitchen late at night.

“Big John’s telling me about—” My mother faltered elegantly. She turned back to him. “What is it that you’re telling me about?”

“ATVs,” he said with a giant sniff.

“All-terrain vehicles,” she said experimentally. “Fascinating.” She patted the seat next to hers. “Come. Join us.”

I went to the sink for a glass of water. “No, thanks. School starts tomorrow.” My back was turned; I could hear a match burst to life.

“Oh,” she said, drawing in on her cigarette. “Right. And when is Jack back from Oregon?”

“What’s he doing up in Oregon?” Big John interrupted.

“Eveline’s boyfriend does Outward Bound,” Mom said. “River rafting. Mountain climbing.”

“I’m not sure when he’ll be back,” I said. “I haven’t heard from him.”

She tilted her head and squinted, smoking, lost in thought.

Big John cleared his throat, and my mother and I startled. “My brother runs a Harley dealership in Hauppauge,” he shouted to no one in particular. “He’s got ATVs, dirt bikes, mopeds, bicycles, skateboards—the whole gamut, basically.”

“Let’s just say John’s brother is into wheels,” Mom joked lightly.

“Basically.”

“Well,” I said. “Kate told me she gets up at six. I’m going to turn off the stereo.”

“Six?” Mom said. “We’re a ten-minute walk from the school!”

“I guess she has to do stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“I don’t know—hair, ironing.”

“Ironing? I don’t know if we even have an iron.”

“I think she brought her own,” I said.

My mother seemed blue. Maybe she was upset about Kate’s not having a home anymore except for our ironless one. Maybe she was worried about where Jack had disappeared to and what trouble he might be in. Most likely she was dreading the prospect of hearing Big John’s voice without the muffling accompaniment of the stereo or without me as a distraction. I took the electric fan from the top of the refrigerator.

“Hot?” John inquired.

“No, not at all,” I said. “It’ll just cut down on noise.”

“Okay, then, night,” he offered, waving again. His hand knocked the edge of the glass table. There was a nasty crack.

Mom lurched across, examining the table. “Is it broken?”

“Nah.” He looked at the glow-blue school ring throttling his pinky finger. “It’s fine.”

“I meant the table,” she said.

He inspected it. “Oh, that. Just a small scratch.”

As I set the fan on my desk and plugged it in, the 11:07 passed, filling the bedroom with light. The Long Island Rail Road ran fifty feet from the side of my mother’s house. The windows rattled and the furnishings skidded and the pictures cocked sideways when trains passed, but it was a quaint intrusion, a topic of conversation, more amusing than threatening. The LIRR travels between the farmland of the East End of Long Island through the sprawling cemeteries and housing projects of Queens, into the center of Manhattan. In the middle of the ride there are identical houses with identical yards. Each lawn indicates nature. Each box indicates home.

“It’s not dying that scares me,” Jack would say whenever we went to my father’s apartment in the city. “It’s Levittown.” He planned to live in the mountains with guns. “The Rockies probably. You coming?”

“Yes,” I would lie. I could never live on the toothy tip of anything, but it wasn’t good to make Jack sad. When Jack felt sad, he hung his head and you couldn’t lift it if you tried. I preferred the apocalyptic terrain of cities—the melting asphalt, the artificial illumination. Unlike Jack, I looked forward to the future. At least when things are as bad as they can get, they can’t get worse. The future would be untouchable, hypervisual, and intuitive, a place where logic and progress have been played out to such absurd extremes that survival no longer requires the application of either.

“Notice how all it takes is the Force to blow up the entire Death Star?”