Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,46

also the senior guidance counselor, made the announcement that auditions were officially closed.

“That is, unless Miss Auerbach has decided to sacrifice art for the stage. What do you say, Eveline?” Mr. McGintee called.

I drew the door closed and slipped quickly into a seat in the top row. “Oh, no, I’m just waiting for someone.” I didn’t have to say Kate, since everyone knew. Mr. McGintee knew also.

“Do you girls have a moment?” Mr. McGintee had inquired, as Kate and I passed the guidance office on the first day back from summer. “Just for a chat.” He had high wiry hair and wiry glasses, and he looked as dry as an old cattail. Like he could use a stiff drink.

While he spoke in private to Kate, I sat in the empty waiting room, trying not to touch anything. The guidance office always made me uncomfortable, maybe because it trafficked in the fate of children, sort of like a doctor’s office deals in the fates of the sick. Nothing much happens in either place except waiting of the most agonizing variety. The secretary’s clock radio was playing “Sweet Home Alabama.” I noticed that it was tuned to WPLR, the local rock station, which must have been an after-hours thing. Usually it was kept tuned to light favorites.

The door to Mr. McGintee’s glass cube whooshed open, and he invited me to join them. Inside he perched on the edge of his desk and asked questions that were not exactly questions. “So, have you two had an opportunity to review the events of the summer?”

Kate said, “Yes. We have.”

And I said, “Yes. We review a lot.”

“Very good,” said Mr. McGintee, slapping his knee. “Ter-rif-ic.”

It’s not always a crime to lie. Sometimes it’s easier to give people the answer they expect than to explain what you really think or feel. No one likes to admit it, but conversation is never truly spontaneous. Everyone works toward a goal, and few people like to be surprised. You can prevent a lot of mutual embarrassment and tedious negotiation simply by pinpointing your partner’s aim at the outset.

Mr. McGintee had spent a lot of time and money earning his degree in educational psychology, and you couldn’t blame him for trying to get some use out of it. He didn’t want honest answers about how Kate was doing, just some key phrases that would allow him to classify her feelings as “normal” and call her case closed. It’s like asking someone, “How was your summer?” You don’t really want details.

But Kate could not speak of her suffering because words could never convey her specific feelings. I’d seen her sorrow. It came in the way she sat motionlessly in her room in our house watching the day skulk from orange to blue. It came in the way time passed twice as slow for her and also around her. We would sit for what felt like hours.

“What time is it?” I’d ask with a yawn.

She’d say, “Ten minutes past the last time you asked.”

Invariably she overdressed. And when she cooked or washed dishes, she leaned against the counter with her legs tightly wrapped, one around the other. Her grief expressed itself in trepidation. She was afraid to move, as though movement might draw her irrevocably from the sphere in which her mother had resided.

“Why did you drop French, Catherine?” Mr. McGintee asked the top of her head. Kate’s hands played with the fabric of the upholstered guidance chair, which was beady like dehydrated oatmeal.

“She’s already fluent,” I said. “How much better is she supposed to speak it?”

He shushed me. “The point is, French Five would have raised your class rank, Kate,” he said, and his eyelids fluttered. “The point is,” he counseled, “we need to consider your future.”

He nodded meaningfully to me, asking for backup on that, as if I had any kind of secure future myself, or as if I’d had any experience with the luxury of family outside of what I’d known from Kate’s. There was nothing anyone could do, really. Kate had lost an entire way of being—red wine in her water glass, pounded veal for dinner, a platter of cheese and fruit for dessert, strolls around Town Pond with Maman’s perfectly pressed skirt crinkling stiffly like tissue paper. On Saturdays there was dancing, Yves Montand or Jacques Brel, and when the song ended, Maman would spin, clapping twice by your eyes like a joyful, brazen someone—Ha! Ha!

How could he possibly help? Part of Kate passed when her parents