Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,70

the hair that had come loose from his ponytail was frozen in strips. Dan flopped onto the couch, saying “Happy New Year!”

Jack’s eyes surveyed the room gloomily. Everything transformed beneath the dismal heft of his regard. He narrowed his eyes to view me. I didn’t move. It was like standing still to let a bee buzz past.

“We passed your tracks,” he said, leadingly.

I said “oh,” and I moved past the couch. “I’m making coffee. You guys want some?”

Dan grabbed at my leg. “Hold on. The ones in the parking lot. You really made them?”

“I guess.”

“And Jack figured it out? That’s fucked up. You two are totally fucked up.”

“It’s a small town, Daniel,” Jack barked. “A gnat’s-ass town.”

Jack followed me to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and began to hunt around. I jumped onto the counter and waited for the coffee to finish. “So you must be feeling better,” he said, plucking olives from a jar, “seeing that you went out.”

I ignored his question and turned to watch the coffee bubbles burst through the spout of the pot. “How was rehearsal?” I asked.

“We fucked with the music for that stupid play, and by the time we got to Tangerine, those guys were too wasted to rehearse. Dan puked twice and Smokey passed out on the floor,” Jack muttered in disgust. Jack did not like people to pass out or vomit. He said it defeated the whole point of getting high. Why waste money and drugs, he would say, when you could lick raw chicken to achieve a similar effect. “I tied Smokey’s ponytail to the drum stand,” Jack said, “so he’s in for, like, a totally rude awakening.”

“I’m glad you came,” I told him, which was true; I was glad.

That seemed to make him happy. “I came up with a decent melody—want to hear it? Da-da da-da da-da dum dum da da-ah da.”

“God, Jack. That’s really beautiful.”

We listened to Ella Fitzgerald singing “Cow Cow Boogie,” and every time the song ended, Jack would lift the needle back to the beginning.

That cat was raised on local weed,

He’s what they call a swing half-breed

Singin’ his Cow Cow Boogie in the strangest way—

We were staring at this candle we really liked. Each side depicted the same scene in a translucent mosaic of eggshell-white, moon-yellow, lapis-blue: the seashore, with equally spaced planes of sand, sea, and sky, and directly in the center, a flying bird. Because the landscape was collapsed, it was hard to tell whether the bird was flying over the beach or over the ocean.

Dan looked inside. “Are you sure that’s the original wax?”

“Positive,” I said.

“It’s the candle that Jesus blessed,” Jack said caustically.

Dan respectfully replaced it. “It’s definitely over the beach,” he declared, referring to the bird. He wiped his wire-rimmed glasses with the hem of his shirt. “If it were over the ocean,” Dan speculated, “it’d be closer to the line between sand and sea.”

Jack agreed. “If the bird had been positioned at the bottom of the middle instead of at the top, you would think low—small. Small, meaning farther away, meaning over the ocean.”

“But it’s high in the middle,” Dan went on, “meaning big and near. It’s over the sand.”

“Exactly.” Jack sucked on a joint as he spoke, his voice constricting with a chestful of smoke. He offered the end of it to Dan, and Dan accepted it gingerly.

It didn’t seem exact to me. The candle had no converging lines, no infinite distance, no vanishing point. There was no inferred single light source—after all, it was a candle. There were three flat planes and a bird within a field with no apparent dimension. Comparatively the bird was huge. And it was on the central plane—the water.

Dan screwed his face to one side and coughed. “She doesn’t seem convinced, Jack.”

Jack squeezed my shoulders. His cheek on my cheek. “No? Why not?”

“The way it looks. I suppose you can apply laws of perspective to something without perspective, but why bother? Meaning can be conveyed perfectly well without math and science. After all, Giotto painted gold rings on the heads of saints—the rings are obviously halos, not sunrises.” I pointed to the candle. “There’s no reason to think about close or far, over, or under. There’s just on.”

“You are very fucking high,” Jack said to me. “Aren’t you?”

Maybe I was. “Where did you get that pot? It’s pretty trippy.”

“From Frankie,” Jack said.

“Fat Frankie?” He was always talking about Fat Frankie.

“Yeah, except he’s not fat anymore. He lost fifty-five pounds.”

“Fifty-five!” Dan exclaimed. “That’s almost