The Adults (15 page)

“It smells like smoke down here,” he said, walking closer to me. “You know, Emily, this is a smoke-free zone.”

“I wasn’t smoking,” I said, my neck red around the throat.

“Sorry, sorry, I was just kind of joking,” Mr. Basketball said. “You all right?”

“I wasn’t smoking,” I said.

“I believe you. What was going on down here?”

“Nothing,” I said, looking at my feet.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, what do you say we get you out of here, huh?”

Mr. Basketball held out his hand and stepped closer to me. If Mr. Basketball really was sleeping with Janice, this must have felt normal to him, his face close to mine, his gritty stubble compared to the youth of my cheek. I knew that if I reached out and touched him, the way I touched him on the stoop, he would step even closer, press himself against me. He would lift up my shirt and slide off my bra. He would put his mouth on my breast, and everything would feel soft again.

I was shaking. Inside my shoes, my toes were cramping.

Then he did the most unexpected thing. He laughed.

“It’s all wildly confusing, I know,” he said. Then I laughed too, like we had some kind of understanding. I took his hand and we walked out of the basement. We walked back to class so I could get my bag. On the way, Mr. Basketball explained how adolescent confusion was a prerequisite to knowing something absolutely when I was older.

W
hen I got home, I was relieved to find a note from my mother saying she was shopping for my birthday dinner. I took off my shirt, bit into an apple, and put the radio on.

The phone rang. It was Mrs. Resnick.

“Hi, Emily,” Mrs. Resnick said. “I’m really sorry to bother you, but I need to go to a doctor’s appointment and I just don’t know where Mark is. He was supposed to watch the baby. Will you come over and watch Laura for a bit?”

Laura was tiny. To be expected, I suppose. In her crib, she was wrapped in a pink blanket. She had eyes and a nose in reasonable distance of each other, but the most surprising thing about her was that she looked like nobody, some kind of generic baby you’d see on television.

When I first stood over her miniature body, I didn’t know what to say to her. I picked her up, looked her in the eye, and said, “Your mother slept with my father.” She didn’t blink. So I tried playing peekaboo with her and that was when she started crying. “Peekaboo!” I said, and popped my head up over the crib. She kept crying until she tired herself into sleep.

I stood in front of Mrs. Resnick’s bed. My feet were soft on the burgundy carpet as I walked around the mattress, staring at the plaid bedspread, trying to imagine if my father had ever slept here, if they rolled around and touched each other’s thighs and laughed about their stupid, stupid families. I lay down, turned on the television.
The People’s Court
was ending.

It turned out, I never cared who won. I got bored. I searched through the desk drawers. Stamps, pens, paper clips, cough drops, Post-its, Mr. Resnick’s death certificate. In her closet, I tried on all of Mrs. Resnick’s shoes and kept the red silk high heels on my feet as I walked toward a brown box on the floor of the closet. It was the kind of box that held secrets: love letters from Mr. Resnick in college,
kissing you in the elevator, still taste it on my tongue
. A pair of dirty baby shoes, and then bills, tons of unpaid bills. Bills from Stamford Hospital and the psychiatric clinic and checks for thousands of dollars from my father.

In her dresser drawers, Mrs. Resnick’s underwear was mostly nude and cotton like my mother’s, except for a few lace orange and red pairs with bows on the back that didn’t have much ass coverage. I imagined she wore these only when she slept with my father. I picked up one of her bras and wrapped it around my body to see if it fit.

“I’m home, I’m home
I’m home
, Mom!” Mark shouted loudly, walking into his mother’s room. “Oh,” he said, horrified to see me holding his mother’s bra.

“What the hell is Emily doing here?” Richard asked behind him, eating tuna right out of the can.

“Playing dress-up,” Mark said.

I was so embarrassed I stood there and waited to perish. Richard sat on the bed.

“So if tuna is the chicken of the sea,” Richard said, turning over the tuna can in his hand, “does that mean chicken is the tuna of the earth?”

“Richard, shut the fuck up,” Mark said.

“Jesus,” Richard said.

Mark walked over to Richard and took the vodka. He walked toward the closet. He ran his hands over his father’s pants.

“Remember when my dad would call us up to his room and count his pants, Emily?” Mark asked.

“Yes,” I said.

Mr. Resnick had an unreasonable amount of pants. That was one of the things I remembered most about him. “Look at my pants,” Mr. Resnick would say to us. “That’s an unreasonable amount of pants. I haven’t changed pants size in twenty years. You know how many pants you collect in twenty years? This many pants.” He pointed to all his pants. “That’s an unreasonable amount of pants.” Mark and I would run to his room and laugh until we were sore.

“The night before he killed himself, he called me upstairs to say it again,” Mark said. He took a blue pair off the hanger. He put his feet in the holes and pulled them up to his waist. “He had so many pants!” Mark repeated. He hunched over like his father, shook his arms, one hand holding the vodka, and kicked out his legs as he walked in circles in the closet. “Mark.
Son
. Look how many pants I have!”

Richard broke out into hysterical laughter from the bed.

“Shit,” Mark said, sitting down on the floor of the closet. “Dad. You were just a collection of fucking pants.”

It sounded cruel, but I knew what he meant. When my mother was volunteering at Stamford Hospital two or three days a week, she put me in charge of handing out the lollipops in the oncology ward when she couldn’t find a babysitter for me. There were always sick children walking by and they’d be bald with illness. It seemed to me, standing there with a strong immune system and a fistful of candy, that illness stripped the youth right out of their bones, and there I was trying to hand it back to them. I was too afraid to approach the sick children, so I waited for them to come to me, these tired little people with bloodless faces and tiny sneakers, Jean or Harriet or Betsy who already seemed dead to me. Jean or Harriet or Betsy would usually smile at me, and ask for one of the lollipops while her mother was talking to one of the doctors. “Blue, please.” Jean or Harriet or Betsy was still alive enough to know what color she always wanted—children, it seemed, were creatures of favorites. I gave out a blue lollipop and she smiled as she tore the plastic off with one hard tug. A few months later, Jean or Harriet or Betsy usually died, and nobody ever announced it or told me, I would just have an abundance of blue lollipops left in my hand at the end of the day and that was how I knew they were dead.

Mark opened the vodka and looked around for a cup. He couldn’t find one, so he just drank out of the bottle. “Want some?” he asked me. He handed the bottle to me.

I looked at them both, smiling at me. These were my childhood friends. Bark and Prickard, captains of the Space Rock, my sledding partners, the boys who buried me in leaves, and tugged on my pigtails, and lent me their water guns when mine had run out of water. I didn’t smile back, but I took the vodka. It was my birthday after all. If everybody was planning on being drunk for it, so was I.

I swallowed a mouthful. It burned down my throat but it felt surprisingly good. I took another one. “Happy birthday, Shiny Forehead,” Richard said.

Mark kicked off his sneakers, and they hit the wall. This woke Laura up in her crib under the window and she started crying. Richard licked the bottom of the tuna can with his tongue.

“That’s fucking nasty, prickhead,” Mark said. “Do you know how much bacteria is on that shit?”

I walked toward Laura.

“Hey!” Richard said, throwing the tuna can, jumping in my way.

“Don’t be stupid, Richard,” I said. “She’s a baby.”

Richard’s eyes were red. His nose was runny. “Exactly. She’s
just
a baby.”

Mark laughed.

“To the fucking baby!” Mark shouted. “Cheers!”

Richard took a shot. And then Mark. And then me again.

“Cheers,” Richard said.

“
Salud
,” I said, something I heard my father say once.

“To god in the highest!” Mark said.

“Hey, your parents have a computer too,” Richard said. It was 1997, and some people in the neighborhood just got their first computers. For about thirty minutes, the novelty of the computer and vodka made us all friends again. Mark sat at his mother’s desk. Richard and I were on the bed thinking of weird things for the computer to say, and Mark typed the phrases on the keyboard, pressing Speak Text.

“Make it say, ‘I ate my fucking parrot.’”

“Make it say, ‘I ate my fucking blasphemous parrot.’”

And we laughed, and typed in more things, and then laughed, and typed in more things, and I was rolling on the bed, getting dizzy from all of the vodka, which was new and corrosive to my stomach, and Mrs. Resnick’s picture frames swirling in my head. My head hurt. I couldn’t tell if the ceiling fan was on or not. Richard was against the headboard watching me, holding on to the heels of Mrs. Resnick’s shoes.

“Make it say, ‘I ate my Mom,’” Richard said.

I closed my eyes, dizzy. I listened to Richard laugh a little, his breath audible, wafting air out his mouth. Mark typed on the keys. The computer spoke and stopped our hearts:

“Muh dad is fuck-een dayed.”

“Muh dad is fuck-een dayed.”

“Muh dad is fuck-een dayed.”

Richard tickled my feet. I was drunk for the first time in my life, and I felt like a semisolid, like I was melting, or just about to harden, and I worried that Richard’s fingerprints would make permanent indents on my ankles, the way I had pressed my thumb into a rose petal at Mr. Resnick’s burial so that my fingerprint would fall with the rose and accompany him underground forever. I kicked at Richard’s face.

“Don’t touch my feet!” I shouted at Richard, and ripped my legs away from him, accidentally kicking over the vodka bottle on the nightstand. It broke and the vodka spilled out the cracks. Mark, who was at the computer, looked at the broken glass and then at me.

“Pick that up!” Mark screamed.

“
Jesus
,” I exclaimed, reaching over the edge of the bed.

I remember Mark walking over to Laura angrily and me calling out for him and Richard shirtless above me. I remember thinking, why hadn’t I seen this coming? This was always coming. Richard had always been coming for me. Following me. Pulling my hair and poking my armpit and hovering above me. Richard’s skin was smooth and hairless in the abdomen, but his chest looked like it was covered in asiago cheese. “Just touch it,” he kept saying, above me.

“Where’s Mark?” I asked, looking around the room. Laura was screaming behind me, louder with every second. It sounded like her throat was cracking down the middle. I worried Mark loved me less every second. I worried that Richard would never get off of me and that somehow I deserved all of this. Richard widely smiled and I was scared. “
Get off!
” I yelled at him, and he pushed me back down on the bed. I lifted up my knee into his crotch hard.

“You
torched
my skin,” Richard said. “Feel it.”

Richard lifted up my shirt and lowered himself until our chests pressed together. He moved up and down on me, and I could feel the smooth parts, and then the textured parts. The scar felt like a zipper against my breasts.

“Feel it,” he said, and took my hand to his lower chest. “This part.”

I spit on his face. “I’d rather die.” It was somewhat true.

“Then maybe you will.” Richard took out his lighter from his pocket. “Maybe I’m just going to light you on fire,
cunt
, see how you like it.” Richard opened my mouth with his finger.

I bit his finger hard.

“Dang!” he said, pulling his finger out.

He started kissing me. Richard’s mouth was heavy on mine, and it was hard to breathe. I put my hand at his throat, and he was ripping at my shirt, his hand cupped around my breast, his saliva acidic and thick.

“
What the hell?
” Mark said when he stood over us with Laura quiet in his arms. He stood there for a moment and watched Richard jump off me.

“What the hell were you doing?” Mark asked.

Standing there in the dark of Mrs. Resnick’s room, I looked around at my childhood friends, and Laura sitting in Mark’s arms, and that was my question exactly: what the hell were we doing? We weren’t children anymore. Laura was the child. She was the one sitting in Mark’s arms, asking something large and permanent of us. And I was fifteen, drunk and underneath a boy for the first time in my life, and nothing was as I wished it to be. I was drinking vodka while my half sister cried, and the thought never occurred to me that I would have to do more for this girl than just be her neighbor. Before she was born, I imagined Laura as this thing in the corner of our lives that we’d rather not mention, but no; she was alive and breathing. She needed bottles and shoelaces and pumpkins with her name cut out in bubble letters, she would wobble down the need-to-be-gated stairs, she would need moments upon moments of everybody’s happiness, happiness that sometimes didn’t wake up before she did. She was crying and the sodium chloride down her face was real.

Mark was waiting for an answer. “What were you doing?” he said to me. “You
like
Richard?”

“
No!
” I shouted. “He forced himself on me. Why didn’t you try to help me?”

Mark looked angry.

“Why didn’t I try to help you?” Mark shouted back. “Why didn’t you try to help my father!”

“What?” I asked, confused.

“You just stood there! How could you just stand there while he was killing himself?”

“I couldn’t do anything! He was too far away!”

“How long were you watching?”