The Adults (2 page)

“Isn’t Emily so beautiful?” my mother asked Mrs. Resnick, twisting her gold tennis bracelet around her wrist.

My mother asked this question everywhere we went. The grocery store. The mall. The dentist. Nobody had yet disagreed, though the opinion of the dentist was still pending.

“Don’t you think that if the dentist really thinks I am beautiful he can notice it on his own?” I had asked my mother once, fed up with the prompt. “Don’t you think pointing it out to the dentist just points out how
not
beautiful I must be?”

“It’s just a point of emphasis,” my mother had said. “It has nothing to do with you, Emily. Just a way into conversation.”

“Adults need things like that,” my father sometimes added.

But Mrs. Resnick hesitated, while Mark scratched a freckle on his arm like a scratch-n-sniff.

“
Mother
,” I said, and rolled my eyes so Mrs. Resnick and Mark understood that I too thought this question was unacceptable.

Mrs. Resnick had a bad habit of never looking at me, so she tried to size up my entire existence using only her peripheral vision. Medium height. Dirty blondish brownish hair. Scraggly, mousy, darling little thing that apparently had no access to an iron or a bathtub.

Hours before the party, my mother tugged at her panty hose, wiped her fingers across my cheeks, and said, “Go take a bath. You’ll come out smelling like the beach.” This was strange, since I just got home from the beach. And I never knew why smelling like the beach was always considered a good thing, especially when the closest beach was the Long Island Sound, and I wasn’t even allowed to stick my head under.

“I don’t want to take a bath,” I said. “I don’t like baths.”

“Everybody likes baths,” my mother said.

I did not like baths. I understood the warm water felt nice against my skin, but after five minutes of sitting in the tub, it became painfully apparent that there wasn’t much to do in there. I would pass the time by shaving every inch of my skin, including my elbows, and reciting jingles I heard on the television—“Stanleyyy Steemmmmer,” and “Coca-Cola Classic, you’re the one!” When I would be older, one of my boyfriends would work as a flavor scientist for 7Up and would be addicted to bathing with me, his body on mine nearly every night, spilling water and secrets about the beverage industry, explaining that New Coke was an elaborate marketing scheme, designed to taste bad, predicted to fail, so they could reintroduce Coke as Coca-Cola Classic and make everyone want it more. “It worked,” he would say, filling my belly button with water as I sang. “Look at you, giving them free advertising in the tub.”

“I’ve thought about it,” I had told my mother in the kitchen, “and I don’t want to smell like the beach. I’d much rather smell like something else, like a wildflower or a nest of honeybees.”

“Emily,” my mother had said. “I don’t even know what that is supposed to mean.”

I had explained that Mark, who was a junior lifeguard at Fairfield Beach, had found a box of dead kittens floating at the edge of the shore when he combed the sand before his shift was over. Mark said they were the saddest things he had ever seen, floating by a broken buoy, curled up like they were sleeping. “But they weren’t sleeping,” he had whispered in my ear. “I mean, they were
dead
.” I explained to my mother that smelling like the beach meant smelling like a place where tiny animals could not survive, where cardboard boxes contained not presents but sad corpses of beautiful things that were now impossible to love. My mother sighed and blended the garlic.

*   *   *

“Yes, very beautiful,” Mrs. Resnick finally said, and this settled all of us into a strange sort of ease. Mrs. Resnick straightened out the hem of her lime green dress, and my mother pointed out that my father had recently planted tiger lilies in our backyard. Did they go with the neighborhood décor?

“This neighborhood has a very specific floral nature,” my mother said.

Mark and his mother nodded. They already knew this.

“Well, you kids be good,” my mother said, and stuck her fingers to my lips in a not very covert attempt to remove the Revlon. “And take some pictures, please.”

That morning my mother had shoved a Polaroid camera in my face and said, “We need a party photographer! It could be you!” like it was a career move she might make me interview for. I snapped a picture of the two women walking away from us, our mothers, mine tall and alive in a coral party dress that was cut low enough to suggest breasts, and Mrs. Resnick walking next to her, rounder at the hips, in a lime green fabric with pearl embroidery so high on her chest it suggested that once upon a time, in a faraway land, there were these breasts. The skirt was cut at the calf, making her ankles look fatter than they should have. “Cankles,” Mark said in my ear. “Calves and ankles that are the same width.”

My mother picked up two empty beer bottles and a dish of shrimp tails off the ground before making a full waltz back into the center of the party, Mrs. Resnick wiped her glasses clean with a napkin, and I thought, Those poor adults. Doomed to a life of filth, finding it everywhere they went. At the beach, the only thing my mother could see was the empty Fanta bottles, sandwich wrappers, Popsicle sticks littering the sea, and when the sun set over the water, Janice’s mother said it looked just like when she sorted through the garbage can with a flashlight after Janice threw out her retainer. My mother and Janice’s mother shared a big laugh and quickly grew hot in their chairs, dried out from Saltines and peanut butter and talking. They walked to the water but never went in, moving away from the waves like the mess was nothing but an accidental oil spill that would turn their toes black. Janice and I sat on the wet sand and rubbed the water up and down our newly shaved shins, while our mothers looked on, nervous about the way we were already abusing our bodies. They held up sunscreen bottles, rubbed cream on our noses. We fussed, squirmed, accused them of horrible crimes, threatened to wipe it all off in the water, stare straight into the sun until our corneas burned and our flesh flaked off, until we had taken in the worst of the Sound with our mouths. They sighed, tugged at our faces, threatened to bring us home, to end our lives right there! But I was never scared. I knew our lives were just beginning and that their lives were ending, and how strange it seems to me now that this was a form of leverage.

I
like the feeling of Belgian endive against my upper lip,” I said to Mark an hour later at the vegetable table, running a piece of it against my mouth. My mother thought it was best we served vegetables with names nobody felt comfortable pronouncing. Stuffed Belgian endive for the Americans! she had shouted, and witloof chicory salad for the Europeans! And if anybody is to say,
Where’s the pâté de foie gras?
tell them the God’s honest truth, Emily: ’tis not the season for ridiculous meat spreads.

“I like foods based on their textures,” I continued.

“You’re weird,” Mark said.

“Shut up,” I said. When Mark insulted me, it felt like praise.

I looked around for my father but instead saw his two brothers, Uncle Vince and Uncle Vito. Our last name was Vidal, so their names always seemed like a joke to me—Vince and Victor and Vito Vidal—but my grandmother believed names that invoked alliteration produced successful people. Galileo Galilei. Harry Houdini. Graham Greene. And my grandmother would have continued the list if she were still alive.

My uncles were talking to Dr. Trenton. Dr. Trenton’s son Richard was in my class at school and had told everybody that his father gave Mrs. Trenton a brand-new nose (and removed our senator’s jowls). “Mr. Trenton was literally redesigning his wife the way he wanted to!” I had told my parents at dinner, my rage calculated and ultimately irrelevant.

“Where’s your father?” I asked. Mark’s father hadn’t attended a neighborhood function in over two years now, and I wondered how he got away with that. I could barely remember what he looked like, even though he was one of the few adults who had always made it a point to talk to me at these patio things, probably because the other adults wouldn’t talk to him. He wasn’t a crowd favorite, my mother had said once, as though people should be ranked like sports teams. She said Mr. Resnick asked too many questions. “He was always like, ‘Quick, what’s the only river that goes north and south on the equator!’ Honestly? This isn’t school. It’s a party!”

“The Congo,” I had said.

“Don’t be absurd, Emily.”

It had been years since anybody had seen him. I missed Mr. Resnick, how he would walk by me, put a hand on my shoulder, point to his forehead, and say, “Quick! A widow’s peak, or a man’s peak?”

“He’s at home,” Mark said. “Where’s your father?”

“Whereabouts unknown.”

We laughed. Mark and I liked the adults most when they were gathered together at parties. Alone they were boring—boring and powerful—saying any boring thing and getting away with it. At dinner, all my mother wanted to know was, “Have we estimated our summer expenditures?” even though there were a million other good things to be discussed, and my father looked at the pot on the stove and all my father wanted to know was, “Is this actual seaweed?” And when I stabbed my fork into the kale before my father properly sat down (his arms had to be fully rested on the table so we knew he was almost relaxed), they both said, “Emily, have you no manners?” Or rather, where did I last leave them? And I said, “In my locker at school,” because sincerity was a form of weakness at the dinner table. My father looked down at his plate of kale and said, “And thus the carnivores went extinct.”

My mother narrowed her eyes and said, “Well, who needs them anyway?”

But when they were all together at my father’s fiftieth birthday party, when I lifted the aluminum foil covering the food trays to sneak a shrimp in front of all the adults, my mother smiled and said, “Oh, children.” Just like that, the differences between us were darling.

The birthday party was so much like a corporate networking event, some of the adults introduced themselves with name, title, business; Henry Lipson, vice president, Stratton and Stratton. My father was one of the more successful investment bankers with Lehman Brothers. Everybody knew this. That was why he was leaving the New York branch soon, to bring his talents overseas. Everybody knew this too. Alfred announced it by the vegetable table.

“He’s leaving,” Alfred said. “Even though nobody will talk about it. But it’s final. He’s moving to Prague.”

“I know,” Mrs. Resnick said. “I heard.”

My mother approached gravely with a tray of dead shellfish. “Alfred,” was all my mother had to say to end the conversation and make Alfred eat some shrimp. Mrs. Resnick walked away, claiming shellfish allergy. “Everybody is so allergic these days,” said my mother. “Don’t you think it’s getting a bit pretentious?”

Whatever their title, the adults all had the same question. Where in the hell are the napkins, Emily, if not right on the table?

“I don’t know,” I said to Alfred. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of this.”

I took a picture of the empty spot on the table where the napkins should have been. I was a fourteen-year-old girl documenting the invisible failures of our party and Alfred thought that was the funniest thing he had seen so far that night. He puffed on a cigar and the white smoke curled out his nostrils and some seemed to get caught in his nose hairs. Sometimes, when he smiled, he looked as though he couldn’t even breathe and that this was hardly relevant.

“Mom,” I said. “We have a problem.”

“Photograph the guests,” she said, without even turning around.

My mother pointed to the napkins and sent me to light the candles that had gone out. I meandered through the white chairs with white lace tied around the backs and watched Mark by himself at the vegetable table appraising the squash. I wanted to return to him, but as soon as the party started, I had acquired all these chores from my mother, whose lipstick was starting to crack at the corners of her mouth, something that happened to her when she was talking and drinking too much, which was something that happened to her when she was nervous, wiping her mouth with a napkin after every sip. I lit the candles and listened to the adults around me, the way their words sounded coming out of their mouths.

“Get this,” said Mr. Bulwark. “My wife counted up all the deaths in the Old Testament. Took her two years.”

“Good fucking God,” Mr. Lipson said.

“Fish babies,” Mr. Lipson said. I lit the candle on their table and held up the camera. Mr. Lipson opened his mouth to put in the caviar and stopped midbite as though I had caught him red-handed, eating my peers. I took the picture.

“Anyway,” Mr. Bulwark said. “It’s a stupid project. But a project nonetheless.”

Mr. Lipson agreed; wives should always have their projects.

I wiped crumbs off their table like a waiter and walked over to the Trentons.

“The mother and child aren’t going with him,” Mr. Trenton said as I approached from behind.

The mother and child. I didn’t like the sound of that. In the entire canon of Western literature, nothing good ever happened to the mother and child, and Mrs. Trenton could see I understood that.

“Edward,” Mrs. Trenton said. “Have a carrot.”

Mr. Trenton looked up and saw me. “Such a wonderful party,” he said to me. I nodded because I knew that was something everybody at this party was forced to agree with.

I lit their candle. “Thank you, sweetheart,” Mrs. Trenton said, suddenly sweet over her drink. “Richard will be coming by shortly, to say hello.” Mr. Trenton turned the carrot in his mouth like a lollipop.

I returned to Mark, my stomach sour.

“Mrs. Bulwark self-published a book. Called
God: A Murderer
,” I said. “Mr. Bulwark thinks it’s a ridiculous idea, to count up all the deaths in the Old Testament and write a book about it. Embarrassing, frankly.”

“Alfred thinks Bob should get a shingles vaccine,” Mark said, leaning closer. “But Bob already had chicken pox. Alfred doesn’t understand why that matters.”