The Adults (10 page)

I looked around for Mark. I hadn’t seen Mark since the burial. I had stood directly opposite him at the graveyard, next to my mother and Mrs. Trenton, who whispered to us, “She got a flat headstone so he wouldn’t seem so
dead
when everybody went to visit.”

My mother was dipping raw broccoli in blue cheese dip. She was still talking to the curly-haired man. She was leaning against the bookshelf. She was wearing a sweetheart neckline, and she was flirting. If she had known she had blue cheese on her lip, or that the curly-haired man had a hole in his back pocket, or that my father was walking toward Mrs. Resnick at that very moment, that my father could look at Mrs. Resnick across a room and think about her legs spread on a bed for him, that he could close his eyes and feel her breasts still on his hands like a film of soap, the way they had consumed each other, deeply and consistently, with their hands and mouths—if my mother had realized any of that at all, she would have cried right then and there. But she was laughing, talking about property tax.

“Don’t,” my father said to Mrs. Resnick, who was about to pour herself a glass of wine. He took the merlot and set it down, and the moment took on an eerie, holy air, like a battlefield torn apart by bombs, and the only movement for miles was the smoke rising to the clouds, revealing everyone on the ground dead.

“Oh, seriously, Victor,” Mrs. Resnick said, and walked away with the bottle as a brown chunk of hair fell loose from her updo.

Richard stood next to me, watching me watch them. He looked evil and sad in a suit, like a shrunken mobster.

“What?” I asked, shrugging my shoulders.

“You know what,” he said.

I panicked, so I said, “Listen, my psychology teacher told me that sometimes people kill themselves just because they’re overwhelmed by the largeness of everything, like this guy who was promoted at his law firm five years ago. So he slit his throat.”

“That’s dumb,” he said.

It was, sort of. I didn’t understand it either. Mrs. Resnick came back in the living room, her hair loose around her face now, drinking the red wine. My father watched her from afar.

“She must be trying to kill the baby,” Richard said.

“What the hell are you talking about, Richard?”

Richard and I became worse people around each other.

“She’s pregnant. You didn’t know?”

I glared at him. “Just because she’s fatter doesn’t mean she’s pregnant,” I said.

“It’s your dad’s baby,” he said.

“I don’t even know what you are talking about,” I shouted at him.

“My mom told me.”

I had to get out. Mark had to be somewhere. I slipped on my clogs and headed to the front door, which was blocked by Mrs. Trenton and Mrs. Bulwark, holding tiny plates of food.

I stood tall and forced them to reckon with me.

“So she’s pregnant?” I asked, my arms crossed.

Mrs. Trenton blushed, looked away, then muttered, “Oh, sweetheart.”

Mrs. Bulwark picked up a jalapeño popper from her snack plate. “I love Mexican, don’t you?” she asked.

I didn’t know what stating one’s preference was supposed to mean in such a context. In such a house, in such a foyer, in such a space between people, everything I knew was losing its defining feature.

I ran out the door and slammed it hard behind me. I must have spent half my life slamming doors. I spent the other half looking for Mark. And there he was, on the front stoop, hunched over with a cigarette and a bag of iced animal crackers at his feet.

An hour later, all of the elephant crackers were decapitated and I was finishing my cigarette faster than Mark was his. It was the inevitability of winter that made me nervous, and suddenly, smoking felt like something you should always, always do to keep warm. I inhaled and inhaled and then inhaled again until all the trees became one, until I felt certain that the largeness of everything was mostly unfixable. I exhaled, soiling the sky with my breathy clouds of self-pity. Being an adult, it seemed, was horrible. But being a child was awful too, and moving from one state to the other only meant you were moving closer to death, with so much and so little to talk about all at the same time, and how was that even possible?

I wanted to smoke until I was so old, I would already be dead.

“Did he leave a note?” I finally asked.

“No,” Mark said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not sure what to say.”

“Say anything,” he said. “I don’t really care.”

“Okay,” I said. I paused. If I did not look left at Mark, the curb we sat on could have been any curb, in any neighborhood, anywhere. We could have been any two people. So I began.

“Once in the third grade, I wrote a story about a bee detective in search of stolen money from a restaurant,” I said. “The story ended with the bee going home to find the money under his bed. He forgot he stole it. My teacher kept asking me, ‘How did the bee forget that he stole the money? I just can’t believe a bee would do that!’”

Mark laughed. For a moment, I believed I had fixed everything. Mark seemed interested. He didn’t look at me but handed me another cigarette. I rolled it between my palms.

“The worst part was,” I said, continuing, “it wasn’t even my story. It was the plot to some stupid movie we watched in Spanish class. The whole thing happened in Spanish.”

But when he didn’t respond, it was clear I hadn’t fixed anything. His father was dead. Buried. Bloodless. And Mark had not looked at me once during our conversation. This only felt like my fault. I was becoming too irrelevant to inspire awe, like Jesus Christ resurrecting in front of a bunch of Eskimos, less relevant every time my mother and father walked past me in the kitchen, my father with boxes in his arms, my mother with the phone, and me in the doorway looking down at myself, thinking, Are those even my feet?

I thought about reaching out to put my arm on his back, the way I had reached out to touch Mr. Basketball. But I couldn’t. I spent the first half of my conscious life never being touched by anybody, except for pediatricians with toxic eyes who put stethoscopes under my shirts and against my chest, explaining that my heart beat too slowly for someone my age. “She has more in common with the dead than the living,” one of them joked, to which my mother said, “We’ve always known this about her.”

I put the cigarette in my mouth so Mark would come close to my face and feel my breath when he lit it up for me. I needed him to feel that I was still alive. But he didn’t even glance over. He didn’t even light my cigarette.

My mother suddenly interrupted. “What are you doing out here? Are you
smoking
?”

“I’m just being
outside
,” I said coolly. She still had the blue cheese on her lip, which had dried into a crust, but the heat from the house had melted some of her eye shadow and made her appear to be crying purple blood.

The cigarette hung from my lips.

Mark stood up, paused like he was deciding something important. Then, he walked into his house. There, on his stoop, watching him walk away from me for a second time, I just couldn’t take it. I was going to vomit. I opened my mouth wide and let the cigarette fall onto the stairs. It rolled down two steps, until it hit a tiny puddle left over from last night’s rain.

My mother smiled a little, considered this a small victory. She had gotten me to stop smoking. She won. My life as a smoker was over. Every moment felt like a new kind of death.

“It’s time to leave,” she said.

“Why?” I asked. “Where’s Dad?”

“He’s staying. Come on, Emily.”

“He’s
staying
?”

We didn’t speak on the way home. It was too difficult to know what to say. I hopped over cracks in the dirt like a five-year-old, using my youth as a form of communication with my mother, hoping it would remind her of another time when I was sure we were happier, when my father loved her and she loved my father, when everybody who was dead or pregnant was supposed to be, when I braided my pigtails without complaint and counted worms in the woods without ever getting bored, when my mother and I held hands and weren’t embarrassed about how much we loved each other, neither of us compelled to scream how
okay
everything would be.

I thought about hugging my mother, but for some reason, the intimacy seemed rude, like a forced confession.

“You have blue cheese on your lip,” I finally said to her as she opened our front door. “You’ve had it on your lip through the entire party.”

She didn’t respond. She didn’t even say, “Emily, that wasn’t a
party
.” She didn’t even wipe it off.

When we got inside the house, I said it again just to make sure she heard me. I was her daughter after all, and I couldn’t let my mother walk around with blue cheese on her lip for the rest of her life.

“Mom!”
I screamed. “You have blue cheese on your lip!”

“I know, Emily,” my mother said. “I heard you.”

My mother covered her face with her hands. Body language, Ms. Nailer told us, was a way of getting your point across without having to say anything. It was the easiest way to fight, without being accused of looking for a fight. Sometimes, I thought my mother exclusively communicated in body language. I remember walking through my front door after school with bloody knees from the playground, and my mother would just have gotten home. She wouldn’t be surprised that I was bleeding. I was a child. That was what children did. They fell down and then bled. That was the only thing you could expect from a child. And yet, my mother’s face would tighten, even though it was her job as the adult to wipe the blood off and tell me it would be okay, better than okay, but her lips would purse and her breath would shorten and she would be angry. That was what upset her the most. That was what upset me the most. How could she be mad at me for bleeding? How could you be mad at a tiny thing who only had questions? Why do I bleed and fish don’t, Mom? Is that supposed to make me feel better about eating them?

“You had it on your lip throughout the whole party!” I shouted. I couldn’t stop. “By the bookshelf, by the bar, even when you were talking to that ugly man.”

“I know I know I know I know!”
she shouted, louder with each recitation.

My mother took my father’s antique Norwegian pewter bowl in her hands. She held it in the air like a trophy and threw it on the ground. So she had known about the affair. She kicked the broken pieces across the floor.

And the pregnancy.

She grabbed his dictionaries from the shelf and chucked them through the window, because who cared about a window? Who cared about my father’s paintings, I thought, as my mother dumped his real Matisse print in the sink and ran water on it. Who cared whose baby it was, who cared if it lived, who cared about the blue cheese? What did it even matter if it was on your face? That was the saddest part about it.

My mother took his miniature ivory elephants and threw them against the wall. She smashed vases and ripped plants from the soil, tore curtains from the rods. She was destroying our house. And when my father walked in the door to see her dumping his Cocoa Puffs on the ground, he did the most surprising thing. He paused. He went to speak. He walked over to the Matisse print in the sink and said nothing. He dropped the mail and walked toward her. The cereal crunched under his feet. My mother didn’t yell, she didn’t move away. I wanted to scream,
Don’t touch her!
but my voice was lodged in my throat like a gumball. He wrapped his arms around her. She laid her head against his shoulder, and for the first time in my life, I watched my mother cry. She sobbed hard into the pocket of his suit jacket, while my father repeated, “I’m so sorry.” They held each other for what seemed like hours until my mother silently broke from the embrace.

I sat at the kitchen counter and drew my name backward with the juice of a stray tomato slice cut for the reception. Y-L-I-M-E. Nobody wiped my name for four days.

M
ark returned to school in November and everybody wanted to either eat lunch with him or touch his hair. The suicide had given our daily routines an urgent and excited motion for which everyone was privately thankful. One of the Other Girls ran up to him in the cafeteria so fast she spilled her green beans on the floor when she halted, and told him that as soon as she heard the news she cried and changed her dog’s name from Q-Tip to Mr. Resnick. In high school, everyone was always saying the wrong thing and then laughing too hard afterward.

“He’s gotten super popular,” Janice told me in the lunch line. There was always a crowd around him, offering Doritos and halves of their turkey sandwiches. “He’s like a celebrity now. One of those celebrities that are, like, famous for no reason, or by accident, or for something horrible, like Selena who got famous from dying, or Magic Johnson for contracting HIV.”

Things were changing for me too.

I had begun to feel haunted. My hair extended past my shoulders, my face sagged, and I didn’t know if it was me that I felt like or someone I didn’t even know or if those were the same exact thing. People I didn’t know approached me in the hall, asking what it felt like to watch a man die, telling me that in some ancient religion a person who witnessed a man’s death carried around the spirit of that man for the rest of her life, and could I draw an accurate picture of the corpse? They wanted to know: could I sleep at night? Why didn’t I try to stop him? If I didn’t even try to stop him, would that make me a murderer according to the United States criminal justice system—a debate topic Leroy Hannah posed to our social studies teacher.

The Other Girls followed me down the hall, asking, Why didn’t you wake us up? What’d it look like? Did you scream? Did you touch it? And at first, these questions bothered me, but over time their curiosity proved harmless. At least they were interested. At least they wanted to talk about the suicide like it was something real that happened, unlike my father, who closed the discussion forever one night at dinner by saying, “It’s their own private business.”

“It was terrible,” I said, closing my locker. “He was so still.”