Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,40

the drawer for rubber bands and half-burnt candles and paper clips and other weird stuff such as broken sneaker laces and corroded batteries and lamp wicks, so I used a garbage twist thing instead. Every kitchen has a drawer like that—a chaos drawer, filled with everything except the one thing you need. Chaos, because chaos is pretty much like having everything but the thing you need.

The Scamp pulled into the driveway, and within minutes my mother was coming through the door, singing out, “Gir-rls.” Instantly there was lightness. In other houses, “good” houses, where bills are paid and dinner is made from scratch and you get one of those fancy watermelon basket cutouts filled with fruit balls on your birthday, parents walk in and everyone gets sick to their stomach.

She came over the kitchen threshold, struggling dramatically under the weight of her bags. “Hello!” she said, in a British accent, referring to the visitor. “What have we here?”

“Some Guy,” Kate said. “A hitchhiker friend of yours.”

“Don’t tell me,” she said. She closed her eyes, tapping her forehead. “Riff. Rug. Bop.”

“Biff,” he said with a half-grin and a backward jerk of the head, not knowing whether to be insulted. Biff. No wonder he preferred “Some Guy.”

“Of course,” she said with delight, and she sat. “Biff. From Santa Monica.”

“San Diego,” he replied. “Good memory.”

Beyond the window, daylight languished. The shade moved strategically across the grass, advancing the way an army does. I reminded myself that it was Saturday, though I had the Sunday feeling. I wished Jack would come, but he and Dan and Smokey Cologne had gone into the city for a concert at CBGB’s. He would show up tomorrow, after the noon train whistle, smelling stale like smoke and rum, his bloodshot eyes an extra bright blue.

“Where you going?” Mom asked me.

“To mow the lawn,” I said.

“Don’t be silly. It’s October. Sit down.”

“Yeah,” Biff said. “C’mon, sit.” He pulled out a chair.

It was nice of them, it really was, but Kate said nothing, so I figured it was best to go.

I pushed the sky-blue mower in diagonal lines over the lawn. Powell had spray-painted it blue because he didn’t want me to be outside looking down and seeing nothing of the heavens. Our neighbor Ernie Lever was mowing also. Ernie rode his tractor mower on his postage-stamp yard like a bumper-car cowboy, jerking back and forth, snapping his neck. He’d chopped down every tree on his property to make for easy driving. I waved—I had to, it was a family rule.

“He’s a Republican with a colostomy bag,” Powell explained. “That makes him twice as eligible for Christian kindness.”

The last tree Ernie cut was a giant maple. I cried that day. Everyone gathered around me, patting my knees, rubbing my shoulders, offering icy rags. “It’s not about me,” I told them. Whenever you’re upset, people always think it’s about you. “It’s about the tree.”

No one disputed that what had happened was senseless, yet they defended Ernie’s right to tend to his own house. This was no surprise. I’d heard such logic before. Adults accept unacceptable behavior because they secretly don’t want anyone criticizing their own actions. Then they encourage kids to tell the truth like it’s so easy.

My mother tried to cheer me. “Think of the saplings it sired! The biological work it did!”

“Ernie mowed all the saplings,” I stated bleakly.

Trees corroborate the past. Years are chronicled in the rings. The hurricane of 1938 pummeled Long Island, but that tree survived, only to be sawed to shreds on an innocuous spring day by Ernie, a retired machinist from Astoria, Queens. I wondered how far it might have grown. Maybe it would have broken right through his house, then cut clear across town, making an idle sort of getaway.

“Be reasonable, babe,” Powell said, taking my hand. “We can’t save every one.” His wolf-gray eyes leveled to convey the gravity of his point. His hair was also gray. It swept back around his ears, and his voice was kind. When he came home after months away, he would have a bushy mustache. When he came home, it was always a three-day party with everyone participating, even me.

“But we knew this one,” I said.

The night it was cut, I went outside and found the stump. It was stubbornly attached to the arc of the earth, right where the tree used to be. Of course there was no better or more logical place, but the sight of it surprised me nonetheless. There was something harrowing