The Adults (40 page)

Mark and I stand quietly by the bar until Mr. Bulwark approaches.

“My wife,” Mr. Bulwark says. He puts three carrots on his plate. “She was a novelist, did you know that? She was such a smart woman, that one.”

“She was,” Mark says. “I remember. She taught me how to play chess.”

Mrs. Bulwark is also dead.

We stand like this for the rest of the night, until our feet can’t take it anymore, until we sit down in the chairs and I open my mouth to say something and then I stop because I am afraid of who we both have become. Will our new selves like each other? Mark puts his hand on my back.

“Once, you threatened to murder my father,” I say.

“I did,” he says. “I’m very sorry for that.”

A week later, my mother holds a tag sale, selling my father’s stuff from the attic. There is so much left over from his life I joke with my mother that our yard looks like the Waste Not, Want Not display at the MoMa. We try to sell his collections of Herman Melville, business dictionaries, and Tom Wolfe, but it turns out that the people in my neighborhood won’t want to read them. Someone buys his old electric razor that is ten years out of date. Some people buy his old college T-shirts. Some of them buy parts of his old Matchbox car collection. Then, they drive away in their Volvos and their Infinitis and their Mercedes and parts of my father become scattered all across town. Mrs. Resnick shows up late, right before the sun is about to set and we are about to close, as though showing up in the nick of time to collect the remains of my father is the art of their romance.

“Is there anything left?” she asks, tears in her eyes. She moves the hair out of her mouth, yet she still does not look at me. I almost cover my mouth with my hand. I am screaming inside my head.

My mother looks around.

“Scarves,” my mother says. “There are some of his scarves left.”

Must you take everything from us? I want to shout.

“How much?” Mrs. Resnick says. She brings out a wad of singles, and her fingers are shaking. One of the dollars falls to the ground, and nobody ever bends over to pick it up.

“Just take them,” my mother says. “They’re free.”

Mrs. Resnick takes my father’s plaid scarves. Even though I thought I had forgiven everyone for everything, there is a child inside me that wants to rip them from her and scream, “Those are
ours
! Those are
ours
!”

My mother says, “Okay, I’m going in to take a hot bath.” Mrs. Resnick leaves and as she says good-bye, I think, That woman has never properly looked me in the eye and I don’t know who is to blame for any of this.

Then Mark arrives. He walks across his lawn, and I drop candlesticks carelessly in boxes, and my heart pauses, as though it is taking the time to fall in love all over again, even though it will feel impossible to love at this moment, even him. But it feels equally impossible not to believe that anybody walking toward me on the lawn is not on a mission to return something.

He helps me put away the tables. We work silently. Things have to be categorized. Leftover socks. Golf tees. Old calculators. Empty binders. We sit in the garage and mark the boxes—
Total Junk
.

Useful Stuff
. Then Mark takes the marker and adds
(Not Really Though)
.

Mark pulls a silver necklace with a ruby in the middle out of my father’s brown safekeeping box. He starts to speak, then thinks better of himself. We are silent.

“Is this your mother’s?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “Is it your mother’s?”

Mark never answers. He reaches out his hand and touches my hair. People are always touching my hair. Why are people always doing this?

“Emily,” he says, “I am so sorry.”

“No,” I say. “I am so sorry.”

And then he leans close to my face.

“No, you must understand,
I am sorry
.”

“No, but
I’m
sorry.”

We go upstairs to my room. We lay there and we rest like this every night for a month. Sometimes when we can’t sleep, we debate over which appliance in my house is making the most commotion. Or he makes me do conversions to the metric system until I fall asleep.

“How many meters are in a mile?”

“Oh, Jesus, I don’t know.”

“One thousand six hundred and nine.”

“How many miles are in a knot?”

“I don’t know. Blah.”

Then he says something like, “Well, it’s like you don’t even want to talk acreage.”

And when I fall asleep, I dream that I am riding a bike, and the bike’s parts are falling off as I pedal. I don’t even notice. “What a magnificent sight!” someone shouts from behind me. Sometimes, this makes me wake up and cry. This person feels like the only thing missing from my life. Sometimes it feels like my father. And when I wake up in a panic, Mark is there. The problem is not the nightmare at all.

“How could your mother have slept with my father?” I say.

“How could your father have slept with my mother?” he says.

“Your mother had such ugly hair,” I say.

“Your father had a fat ass,” he says.

And then we laugh like children and lay our heads back down on the pillow and forgive each other. Sometimes, it feels like we are always forgiving each other.

“I slept with Mr. Basketball,” I say once during breakfast, when we are tired. “I dated Mr. Basketball on and off for nearly ten years.”

“You
what
?” he asks, but never drops his fork. Most of the time he isn’t even holding a fork. He is by the toaster, burning bread. It is exhausting in this way, but also honest. He slams the burnt bread down on my plate as though I lived my past only to hurt him, and burnt bread feels like an appropriate punishment for being someone he can’t recognize at the moment.

I dream of Mr. Basketball some nights, on the side of I-90 that curves around the bend of a mountain. I dream of Jonathan, swimming in hotel pools. In my dream, he is waiting for something that never shows up, a car, a lizard, a book. I am always farther away.

On the anniversary of Mr. Resnick’s suicide, Mark has too much to drink and confronts me. He asks me to recount his father’s suicide, step by step.

I explain to Mark that my mouth was dry that night. I saw his father through the window, walking. That I hadn’t seen him in so long, I wanted to say hello. That even after he was dead, I still felt compelled to say hello, but I knew the only people who spoke to the dead were either insane or my aunt Lee.

Mark politely asks me not to joke around.

“Let me tell you how it happened for me,” he says.

He tells me how he watched his father walk out the door that morning, hoping he would just keep walking down the street until he got lost. He was so tired of counting his pants and taking care of him, so tired of feeling bad for him, scared of him. “Did you know that I didn’t laugh for forty days after my father killed himself?” he asks me. “Did you know that I tried on every single one of his pants? There are seventy pairs.

“One night, two months before he died, my father had a breakthrough. He walked all the way from the basement, into the kitchen, out the door, got the mail, and came back in. We all cheered, my parents laughed, even though now that I think about it, it was such a minor victory that it was almost more of a setback, really. They laughed, and my father walked over to her and kissed her right on the lips. We all thought this was a new beginning. That the new treatment was working. That my father would become a man again, he would go back to work, my mother would return to him. They made love that night. I know because I heard them.”

Mark says that the night before his father killed himself he had another breakthrough. He didn’t shake for hours. He walked up and down the stairs. But nobody smiled. Nobody laughed. He was angry, Mark says. He knew it couldn’t last.

“I watched him walk out the door that morning,” Mark says. “He was walking so well. I thought it was a good thing.”

He says that he spent a long time hating my father. “I hated him for everything,” he says. “Even Laura. But now I think it was good. She got a father, you know? At least for a little while.”

And everything is always exactly like my mother says: your father’s funeral was a dreadful success. Everything went according to plan—he was born, he got lungs and he got cancer and he died and we put him in a box and we carried him to his grave, well, your uncles did, but I put out platters of carrots and cheese and his position in the company is being given to some guy named Greg, who will really benefit from it, I think. Can you believe Mr. Bulwark made that joke, saying, It’s about time Victor gave the company a free meal! That was a bit insensitive, don’t you think? Don’t look at me like that, Emily, I only laughed because I was the host. A host must make her guests feel comfortable. And I only walked away from his grave because honestly, Emily, I couldn’t bear watching them put dirt on him.

“The Resnicks are leaving,” I say to my mother. “Do you want me to go say good-bye to them for you?”

“No,” my mother says. “I’ll do it. Just let me sit here for a moment.”

“Okay,” I say.

“That was nice of Mrs. Resnick and Mark to stop by,” my mother says. “She really is a nice woman, that Mrs. Resnick. A bit dowdy, but we can’t fault someone for their shape.”

Exactly. Her shape is so standard. Regular. Rounded at the hip. Her shape makes her look exactly like a person. “We can’t fault her for that,” I say.

“We probably should,” my mother says. “But, of course, we won’t.”

“There are things we can’t help,” I say.

“Of course,” my mother says.

It’s like watching a man suffocate. That’s what it’s like, Emily. That’s what it
is
. And how does it help him any to watch? And just because someone puts your husband in the ground and you drive away it doesn’t mean you’re leaving him. What are you
supposed
to do? You have to leave him. And when people come up to you in the receiving line and say, “I’m sorry for your loss,” I want you to show them exactly what you’ve lost. Look them in the eye and cry hard. Cry your guts out because nothing is sadder than an adult who forgets how to be a child. Did you know there is a word for that?

“Mom,” I say, “there are so many things I don’t know.”

“Honey.” My mother sighs. “Your late twenties is not the time for playing dumb.”

Neoteny! That’s the word. Your father taught it to me actually. He said, Gloria, what’s a seven-letter word for retention of youth into adulthood? And I said, Hey, Victor, I’ll give you youth! Remember, Victor, being in your twenties and sitting in cars and laughing about how our parents didn’t understand us? I played my music too loud and I was too glum at dinner and I was not putting in the effort a child needs to put in to continue being a child. He was too skinny and he was never good at caring about sports and he was always yelling at his father when he picked on his mother. Being misunderstood is okay around someone else, Emily, when someone else understands your misunderstandings, it is funny then. Just remember that.

“I try to remember that,” I tell my mother.

“I know you do,” she says. “You’ve always understood.”

My mother gets up to collect the empty paper cups that are blowing off the table from the wind. She is still a beautiful woman, even when she is bending over, picking up trash. I sit there, and I watch my mother say good-bye to my father’s friends. Children’s lives are always beginning and adults’ lives are always ending. Or is it the opposite? Your childhood is always ending and your adult self is always beginning. You are always learning how to say good-bye to whoever you were at the dinner table the night before.

I hear my mother through the wind, laughing, as though she is not the kind of person who could ever die, and I am proud of her, because it takes strength to live like this, even though she will die, someday when my hair is thinner and her heart is slower, when distance allows us to feel and understand everything much better. I am proud of her; even though the jokes she is telling aren’t hers, the pride is: “It’s about time Victor bought you guys a free meal!” I watch my neighbors and my father’s coworkers laugh, as they stick out their hands, and pull my mother close and give her a kiss on the cheek. I watch as my mother never looks away from their faces. Her hair gets caught in her mouth. She brushes it away before anybody notices. Bill puts his arm around her. She says, Good-bye, and thank you so much for bringing the coffee cake. We loved it. And the bruschetta. Everybody just really loved the bruschetta. They nod and my mother doesn’t even cry, even though the bruschetta was soggy and the coffee cake fell on the floor halfway through the reception, and my father’s body is just a memory now, leaning over the plate of kale on the stove, singing, “And thus the carnivores went extinct!” And thus the carnivores went extinct, along with Alfred, and Lehman Brothers, and Top Hat Cleaners down the street, and the Norwegian pewter bowl, and 50 percent of the adults. I watch my mother stand tall and say good-bye to our life that is spread out on white tables and chairs, sectioned on platters, dripping in cold marinara sauce, next to a house that never really felt like ours anyway, even though it has to be ours, because that is where we hung our pictures on the walls and picked pennies out of the carpet and left coats on the backs of chairs as though this life belonged to nobody else.

Thank you to my agents Molly Friedrich and Lucy Carson, and my editor Alexis Gargagliano.

Thank you to Kathryn Davis, Marshall Klimasewiski, Kellie Wells, Kathleen Finneran, and Peter Johnson for your support and guidance.

Thank you to my colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis for your friendship and feedback.

Thank you to Jacob Labendz, Kyle Winkler, and Dustin Iler for your editorial help.

Thank you to Joe for being my human thesaurus.

And thank you to my family for all those backyard barbecues.

Alison Espach
received her MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Her fiction has appeared in
McSweeney’s
and other journals. She grew up in Connecticut and now lives in New York City, where she is currently teaching creative writing.