Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,64

silver wrap. Inside was a rust-red cashmere sweater—Maman’s. I drew it to my skin, breathing deeply. I was not trying to recall Maman’s smell or how it had felt to hold her. I just liked the shield the sweater made, the way I could hide behind the barrier. When I dropped the sweater down, Denny and Kate were still there. They had not moved; their faces were like moons at my knees. Jack was in the same place too, though surely time had passed. I wondered, did Jack feel what I felt when what I felt was so very high? Did he feel he wanted to move but couldn’t, that his legs were sponge? But no, I was wrong, my legs were moving, I could see them rise up like puppets being lifted by hidden hands. And me going up too.

Denny surrounded me with bear arms. Oh, honey. Kate’s hand light on my shoulder. I thanked them both, for everything. Everything.

Jack and I were alone. I told him I wanted to dance.

He said, Oh, shit.

I careened to the stereo and shuffled through the horizontal strip of records. I was flicking them—right, right, right. Going fast to find an album. Something exactly right, I didn’t know what, but I knew I wanted it instantly. Not instantly, previously. Instantly was too late. Drugs make you insane over time. Drug time is a window between the moment you feel high and the moment you feel less high. I found a record. I pulled it from its jacket.

What did you pick? Jack asked dryly. Bee Gees?

The Cars, I said, and I dropped the arm over the turntable. The needle slipped, making a choking parrot sound.

Jesus, Jack said, take it easy.

As I danced, I felt the wiggly pressurized feeling of diving to the bottom of a pool, then swimming rapidly to the top. When your hair sweeps back from your skull and your arms are limp like fins that trail the central chesty force of your movement. I felt elastic and wet like a cheerful dolphin. In the water you don’t worry about the action of your hands; hands are always engaged in water. I was dancing, making figure eights with my body, using all my muscles, going ever so slightly up and down.

Jack sat at the table, his feet propped on a chair. He was carving a candle with a cake knife. Evil hips, he said. You didn’t learn that from me.

You’re all I’ve got tonight. You’re all I’ve got tonight.

I need you tonight.

Later we were lying in the center of the room, overlapping. I could not tell where I ended and Jack began. We were two halves of something the same, each of us companionless. We were both our essential parts; and yet, for all that we were, we were nothing that we were not. I wished Denny had stayed; his stomach made a nice pillow.

I sighed sadly.

Jack asked what happened to the cheerful dolphin.

I miss Denny, I said.

To make me happy Jack put on the White Album. I’d left it on the dashboard in summer and the vinyl had warped into wide scalloped waves that bubbled hypnotically off the turntable. I liked to watch the record circle lazily, up and down, up and down, like a Hawaiian flower. My head was on Jack’s shoulder. If I closed one eye, the zipper tag dangling from the neck of his sweater became like a skyscraper. Pigs were snorting—that meant next came “Rocky Raccoon.”

I asked him please to sing. He said I would have to wait for “Julia.”

He fed me a piece of my birthday cake, pressing bits into my mouth. It tasted cheap, like box cake with crackled tricks inside; they could have been anything, since Denny made it. Once he filled a cake with Barbie shoes. I spit out the stuff in my mouth. It landed on the floor and I looked at it. My mouth had transformed the cake from black into trenchy brown, and the proof of that internal operation nauseated me. I thought I might vomit.

Don’t leave, I said to Jack, dropping back.

Never, he promised.

The floor near my legs creaked eerily. Jack was kneeling over my belly, making a bridge with his groin. His hunched body cast a huge shadow against the wall. When “Julia” came he did not sing. I tried to say this, but nothing came out. I kept moving my head all the way from one side to the other. I was not sure why, except to