Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,5

I would tell Jack. “The future won’t be jet packs and space stations; it’ll be aboriginal. The language of the physical will atrophy. Our minds will coil inward, and our eyes will grow large to see beyond the seeable. No one dies in the future. We’ll all preserve ourselves to be reconstituted.”

“That’s the whole fucking problem,” Jack would say. “I don’t want to live forever. I’m having trouble with the idea of Tuesday.”

I held my face close to the air from the fan and said “Ahhh,” with my voice going choppy. In the mirror on the desktop, I could see my hair blowing up. It wasn’t a lot of hair, but it felt like a lot in the wind. I was squinting, so my eyes looked like cat eyes.

“They’re the color of absinthe,” my father likes to say, which is an odd compliment, since the definition of absinthe is a green drink of bitter wormwood oil—whatever that is.

My eyes are pointed at the ends like cartoon flames or the acuminate tips of certain leaves. Beneath the green are smoldering circles. They mark the place my skin is thinnest, and so my soul the closest. Mom’s boyfriend, Powell, says that the soul is contained in the body. He says if instruments are made from your bones when you die, the music tells your story. Powell got his bachelor’s in anthropology from Stanford and his master’s in engineering from Columbia, then he joined the navy before moving on to oil rigs. He goes away for months at a time to places like Alaska or the Gulf, where he reads meters and plays harmonica. Powell can play “This Land Is Your Land” on harmonica better than anyone.

One disorienting fact about staring into a mirror is that the person you see is the opposite of what you truly look like. I tried to explain it once to Kate. She was playing with her hair, looking in a mirror, changing the part from left to right.

She said, “It looks better on the left.”

“Actually,” I said, “though your hair is parted on the left of your true head, it’s parted on the right of your mirror head. What you mean is, It looks better on the right.”

“That’s not what I mean.” She probed her scalp. “It’s on the left of my head here,” she said, holding the spot, “and it doesn’t switch places there.” Kate tapped the mirror.

“You have to inhabit the image,” I explained. “If you inhabit the image, the part is on the right. But, if we were in the world, looking at the girl in the mirror—”

“We are in the world,” she interrupted flatly, and by her voice, I knew she was done. Kate could be reluctant to explore topics that require a detachment from vanity.

“Anyway,” I sighed. “What you see is the opposite of what everyone else sees.”

Kate brushed steadily. “No, Evie. What you see is the opposite of what everyone else sees.”

Later, Kate tried her makeup on me—cover stick and frosted eye shadow and face powder and Bonne Bell lip gloss. She was applying all these layers, saying the job of cosmetics is not to conceal but to enhance. She turned me to face the mirror. “Ta da!”

I looked rubbery, sort of embalmed. My cheekbones were gone and my lips glittered like one of those plastic bracelets with sparkly stuff inside. My eyes burned and my skin felt itchy. I smelled like cherry gum. I made my way to the sink, groping walls. As I rinsed, I watched myself—anyway, the opposite of myself—reappear in the mirror. Kate’s reflection buoyed and skulked next to my own. She seemed to think I was being difficult. I felt bad about her thinking that. Something felt different between us—I felt something coming, not obvious like a wave but sneaky like a drip, a subtle sort of rising.

It’s true that I can be difficult, though that is no fault of my parents. They are extremely good-natured people. They remained friends even after they got divorced. My father always says he married the prettiest Irish girl in New York, and my mother says she married the one funny German. It’s true my father is funny, and true as well that my mother is pretty like her sister, Lowie, even if Lowie walks with a cane. Lowie had a fever when she was little. Maybe not a fever. Maybe fever is just what everyone says.

As for me, I arrived dark and detached, and though everyone waited, I became