Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,71

half my body weight.”

“He went on that Moonie thing. That thing Dennis does.”

“The Scarsdale Diet?” I said. “That’s weird.”

We were interrupted by a thump at the front door—Kate. We all called out, “Kate!” She stomped her feet on the mat and unwrapped her scarf. Behind her through the glass was a wall of white, like a down quilt. “Oh, no,” she moaned, “not the candle, again.”

“Katie,” Jack said, “who’d you kiss at midnight?”

“No one, Jack,” she replied. “Yet.”

Dan stood, combing back his hair. “What time is it?”

Kate draped her coat over the banister and checked her watch. “Twenty to twelve.”

Dan said, “Shit. I thought it was, like, two in the morning.”

“That’s because you’ve been drinking since breakfast,” Jack said.

“The roads are really bad,” Kate told us. “Coco is having people sleep over. Denny and Michelle are coming here. Did Mom call?”

“She did,” I said. “She’s staying at Lowie’s.”

Dan asked if Kate had seen the tracks I’d made in the snow by the A&P.

“Tracks?” she said dismissively. “I didn’t see any tracks.”

“Maybe they’re gone by now,” Dan speculated.

Jack peeked to see my face, to see if I was sad, then he held me. Jack was most virile near a hearth fire. If in public he used me—the look of me—to indicate his mannishness, by a fire he was truly invincible.

Kate went upstairs to get undressed, and I followed. From the corner of her bed, I watched her shadow on the floor beneath the partly opened bathroom door. She seemed quiet. I wondered what had happened. Maybe someone had hurt her feelings. Hopefully, it had just been overbright lighting or cheap cologne or music by Journey or Boston. Coco might have served pigs in a blanket, with blankets made of Bisquick. Or possibly she’d had mismatching cocktail napkins. If the cocktail napkins were Halloween leftovers with pictures of grinning pumpkins and arched black cats, that could be depressing.

“How was the party?” I asked.

“Everyone was drunk. They were acting like complete assholes.”

I retied the string on my sweatpants. It embarrassed me when Kate cursed, not because I objected to profanity, but because she was not particularly good at it. Jack swore so effectively and so constantly that he would exercise restraint for emphasis. When Kate said “asshole,” she pronounced the A like in aha or like when you stick out your tongue at the doctor’s office. AAAAhhhhh.

She unpinned her hair. In the mirror her eyes were like plums. It was strange to reconvene there, in the same spot where earlier she’d been looking forward to the evening. Jack always said the trick to happiness is to expect things to be shitty, then you won’t be disappointed. “Just keep a low-level plane of dissatisfaction going,” he’d advise.

Dan called up the stairs. “Happy New Year!”

“Oh, gosh,” Kate said, shaking herself awake. She came halfway to me, and I came as far to her. Our cheeks met like praying hands. “Happy New Year,” we said in unison, sending the words out into the universe beyond the petite round of each other’s shoulder.

To commemorate the snow Jack put on Oscar Peterson’s version of Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night.” It was the snow song, the anthem to the snow.

We cuddled on the couch, the four of us, eight legs, eight knees and feet, all high and drinking tea, facing the fire, thinking but not believing that it would be our last New Year’s together. We had all just sent in our college applications. If everything went as planned, in one year, I would be in Manhattan at NYU and Kate in Montreal at McGill. Jack would probably be in Boston at Berklee for music, if he went anywhere at all, and Dan would either be at Tulane in New Orleans for jazz studies, or at Juilliard, where his dad was a teacher.

“I have some thoughts,” Dan said, “on the psychology of perception and the problems of consciousness. Does anyone mind?”

Kate and I did not, but Jack stipulated provisions.

“No talk of functional neuroses or maladjustments. No dream analyses.”

“Actually,” Dan said, “I was just thinking about qualities that are essentially incommunicable, like color. For instance, take roses. Kate and I can both call a rose red, though I might see coral and she might see pink.”

“Do you mean color blindness?” Kate asked.

“Not exactly,” he guided gently. Dan was always gentle with Kate. At parties he would dedicate songs to her, or he would write compositions called “Kate 9” or “Kate 16.”

“My point is that it’s impossible to