Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,42

period history was homeroom. Mrs. Kennedy stood at the door to her classroom, ushering kids through. Between me and her the floors were like concrete playing cards. Each slab had thin metal rims and flecks that were putty-yellow and olive-green.

“Terrazzo,” Dad told us the first time he came to help Denny and me build sets for a play. “In Friuli, Italy, people used to take stones from the riverbeds to make paths. A couple of guys would stand on opposite sides of an alley, and saw back and forth, grinding down the high stones with a rock attached to a wood pole. Eventually Palladio adopted the style for country houses, using marble remnants in polished cement. Remember I told you about Palladio and the villas?”

My father was constantly sharing facts with us, telling us for instance that nutmeg can be a deadly poison, or that there are warts under the tail of the true descendants of the eighteenth-century Carthusian stallion Esclavo, or that Picasso painted “Guernica” in response to the Nazi terror bombing during the Spanish civil war in 1937. “You can never be sure what might turn up on a test,” he would say, demonstrating an overly high estimation of the educational system.

My father had been born during the Great Depression, and his mother had been widowed shortly after. Despite his intelligence, she had not been able to send him to college. Since getting discharged from the army, he spent every free minute reading anything he could find, from manuals on refrigeration to textbooks on the Constitution. “Lincoln was self-taught,” my mother would always say to encourage him. “And look what he managed to accomplish.”

“Lose something, sweetheart?” Mrs. Kennedy asked me.

“Oh, no, Mrs. Kennedy. I’m just looking at the floors. They’re beautiful.”

She looked down and smiled, which was nice. Smiles suited her. Mine is not a smiling face. Strangers on the street always say, Smile! But my muscles do not naturally go there.

Stephen Auchard was reading The New York Review of Books. Kate was thumbing through Glamour. We said nothing to one another, which was correct, because no one speaks in homeroom. Homeroom is an alphabetic grouping, having nothing to do with compatibility and everything to do with chance. It’s a random civic assignment, like jury duty.

The PA system squawked, and Mr. Martin, the assistant principal, started the announcements with a garbled Pledge of Allegiance. Before senior year everyone would stand and recite the Pledge. Those were optimistic times. Optimism is when you’re not sure where life is going to take you, so naturally you anticipate the best possible outcome. But by the time you are eighteen you have a hint already of what your life is going to be like, and if that hint is not so wonderful, you might as well just stretch across radiators and desktops and ignore the announcements, halfway thinking about the night before, halfway thinking about the day ahead.

Karen Baker usually slept through the Pledge. Karen was a cashier at Brooks Discount on Main Street. Every afternoon she wore a name tag pinned droopily onto a strawberry-red overshirt, the kind with snaps that ladies in Little Italy call a housecoat. Sometimes Jack and I would see Karen behind Brooks by the dumpster, on cigarette break. She smoked Parliament Lights, which Jack liked to say aren’t so much cigarettes as they are expensive toothpicks.

Eddie Anderson worked at Texaco on North Main Street. Eddie definitely could not be bothered with the Pledge. He wore pressed Bad Company T-shirts, though his fingers were stained purple from motor oil. The ratty hair on his head was neatly parted and tamed in such a way as to have the effect of a giant letter M. Every day after homeroom he took the bus to Riverhead because he wanted to be a boat mechanic. He went to BOCES—Board of Cooperative Educational Services, a trade school. Jack said Eddie would end up the richest guy in the class. “Better nail him now, Katie,” Jack would tease Kate.

Cheryl Bromley, who used homeroom to file her nails, was going to be a hairdresser and a makeup artist, so she also went to BOCES for training in—something, I wasn’t exactly sure what—hair and makeup probably, though that seemed an improbable course of study.

If certain people could not be blamed for a lack of enthusiasm in regard to the Pledge, it certainly didn’t feel right for the rest of us to leap up and swear allegiance to a nation that was already working out