The Adults (5 page)

“Eskimo women chewed on their husband’s shoes when they got back from hunting,” Ms. Nailer said between sips of her coffee. “Their teeth would wear down over time. I want you all to rub your teeth and feel grateful.”

We did as such.

These were the things we learned freshman year: Even Eskimo women (who did not like to be called Eskimo women) needed to get married in order to survive (one person couldn’t tend to the igloo and also hunt all day for the seals); it took fifteen days for a peeled banana enclosed in a jar to be fully infested by tiny maggots, and it took another fifteen days after that for all the maggots to consume the banana, and this whole affair was called decomposition (something that would happen to us one day, said Ms. Nailer). We learned that most records were not necessarily achievements: Janice’s ancestors were responsible for executing hundreds of “witches” in seventeenth-century Germany; Brittany Stone’s parents had been divorced and remarried three times; soda cans have nine teaspoons of sugar (which makes you fat); William Taft, heaviest president of all time, was so fat he couldn’t get out of his tub, which wasn’t supposed to be funny, Ms. Nailer said. It was wrong to make fun of fat people (Taft couldn’t help it), or the mentally challenged (extra chromosome), or the Unfuckables (they’ll never get fucked), or girls wearing their mothers’ gold jewelry (their mothers were usually dead), and we knew all of this, even though none of us could recognize the difference between “discreet” and “discrete,” Missouri or Mississippi, good people or bad people (but I was pretty positive reptile eggs had tough outer coverings and amphibian eggs lacked outer coverings, which was why they were laid in water, water that contained over nineteen species of box jellyfish, the most venomous animal in the world, a bite that nearly no one ever survived, unless you were smart and had on your panty hose).

Ms. Nailer pushed up her yellow Dior glasses. The Other Girls were cross-legged behind their desks, whispering hurtful things about everyone sitting in front of them.

“Annie’s nose is so large, she descended from a rare line of prehistoric bird.”

“Annie the Bird’s ears stick out so bad, from the back, she actually looks more like a bear than a bird.”

“Annie the Bird or Bear hasn’t shaved since the Cambrian Period.”

“Annie the Bird or Bear is so tall, she can fuck all the teachers standing up,” Richard Trenton said, chiming in from across the room.

At Webb High you were either Fuckable or Unfuckable. Anything else you might have been was secondary. There were so many students, nearly two thousand, it was very possible, if not guaranteed, you would know only 50 percent of your graduating class. The only way to survive was to organize everybody into categories, so every five people could be treated as one, four hundred as two. That way, you felt like you knew everybody without actually having to.

Ms. Nailer made us put unpeeled bananas in jars so we could draw pictures of decay in our notebooks for a whole semester. We had to observe the banana turning to mush, and then draw every new maggot that hatched. We had to open the jar every week and describe the scent.
Nasty
, I wrote on my lab sheet.
Even nastier
, I wrote a week later.

Annie the Bird or Bear was Richard’s lab partner and she was standing tall and proud, holding their banana jar level with her massive breasts, confident that Richard was not someone who could ever hurt her, even though I figured he was the only person who would. She took pride in her new high school identity the way a superhero uses their defining mutation as a source of power. She made boys bleed in the parking lot. She scared away lunch tables just by sitting down at them, the students scattering like sparrows. She embraced her solitude and used it as a form of freedom. She spread her lunch out on the whole table like she was happy about all the room, made animal sounds down the hallway, bird calls, bear cries, lion roars. Mostly everybody thought this was hilarious; they fell against their lockers, crippled by laughter that spread like a disease as Annie the Bird or Bear walked by, neighing like a dying, vengeful creature.

I could hardly watch. But, of course, I did.

It was September of freshman year, when the earth began to tilt away from the sun, the flowers still upright, the shrubs on their last breath, the bees slowing in flight, making dizzy, drunken loops in the air like parade planes.
EVERYTHING IS CHANGING
, Ms. Nailer wrote on the board in all caps and drew an arrow pointing to the outside. Her observations, while not mind-blowing, were at least correct. Caterpillars were lined up on my driveway like remains of a drive-by shooting, and when I added their souls to our dinnertime prayer, my mother said, “Emily, enough about the caterpillars.” My mother and father started to maximize the efficiency of our dinnertime appeals to God as though prayer was a science of exclusion. We no longer prayed for a successful town apple festival like we normally did at the start of fall; or for Ms. O’Malley, my thirty-year-old algebra teacher who needed a new heart pump, because she got one; or for my father’s gums to quit receding, because it stopped being funny.

My father was still living with us until he moved to Prague after New Year’s Eve, but if you weren’t listening hard, you wouldn’t even notice. Every night, my father kicked his shoes off and they hit hard against the wall, the bed squeaked as he slid under the sheets across the hall from my mother, and if I was tired enough, I mistook the creaks of his bed for the cracks of his bones. I had nightmares of his skeleton breaking at the joints, and I woke to his spoon clacking against his six
A.M
. cereal bowl. From my bed, I could hear him put the coffee grinds in the trash can, the bowl in the sink like any good father, and for a moment that was what he sounded like—any good father who cleared his throat and walked out the door to go to work.

But he couldn’t just leave like that, like any good father. One morning before school I jumped out of bed to say, “I saw you,
Dad
,” to stand wounded and victimized in front of the door until we both remembered everything: my father and Mrs. Resnick with their mouths pressed together; my father and my mother both teary-eyed and pink-faced on the porch in August, blowing their noses and then laughing deep sorrowful laughs, and me listening from my bedroom wanting to shout,
It’s not funny!
; my father and mother ten years ago at the kitchen counter, my mother spreading stone-ground mustard on wheat bread, my father singing with the bread knife to his lips, me in baggy green jeans shouting, “Make me a turkey sandwich, please!” and my father tapping me on the head, saying, “Poof! You’re a turkey sandwich!”

I ran down the stairs, but by the time I walked into the kitchen, my father was out the door. I looked at the clean table and the orange bowl in the sink and my throat went dry. He was gone. Not even a crumb left on the floor. And when my father was gone, sometimes he didn’t come back for days. Sometimes he went on business trips to California. Sometimes he went to Europe. Sometimes he just went places and I didn’t know where, and I wouldn’t even know he was away on a trip until I woke up at eight in the morning fully rested.

My father’s blazer was hanging on the back of one of the chairs. I grabbed the jacket and ran out the front door as fast as I could. “Dad!” I shouted, but his black car was already at the end of the street. I ran after the car, waved my hands, screaming his name, but he didn’t hear me, and I wondered afterward if I even shouted it at all.

My mother stood in the frame of the wide-open door with a glass of orange juice waiting for me to return.

“What?”
I said, mortified.

“Emily,” my mother said, frowning. “Why don’t you stop worrying about your father, okay?”

I threw the jacket back on the kitchen chair, but it slid and fell to the tile. I had no idea what she meant, but she put her hand on my head and said, “Good girl.”

“If Annie the Bird or Bear was an amoeba,” Richard said to a bunch of the Other Girls, “I bet she wouldn’t even reproduce with herself asexually, she’s that ugly.”

“Richard!”
Ms. Nailer yelled, finally hearing us, or finally recognizing us, turning away from the chalkboard to look at Richard, and then Annie, and then Richard again. Her white bra was visible through her shirt. She spilled her coffee on the desk, stepped backward, got chalk on her ass, and then laughed like it was an accomplishment that something finally touched her ass. She wasn’t a disciplinarian by nature. Ms. Nailer’s presence in the room offered no more protection than a fruit fly; she just buzzed from one shoulder to the next. Her interests were elsewhere, and she always reminded us that she was only a high school biology teacher as a last resort. She had been in the seventh year of her Ph.D. in body history when her funding ran out.

“This is high school, kids,” Ms. Nailer said, wiping the coffee off her desk with her hand.

I stood hopeful with my banana, waiting for Ms. Nailer to slap us across the faces if that was what it took to put an end to all this misery, to save us from the horrors of each other, from Richard. Richard was constantly taunting Annie the Bird or Bear, created a comic strip of her nose doing absurd things every day, like “ABOB’s Nose Goes to the Grocery Store” or “ABOB’s Nose Goes to the Doctor,” and passed them around the room. Everybody unfolded the paper, smiled, said nothing when he did this.

Ms. Nailer put her hands on her hips and smiled too, as though our cruelty was playful, a game we used to get closer to her.

“You can’t go around making statements like that until you properly understand what you are saying,” Ms. Nailer said. She was a skinny but doughy woman, like someone had ripped the muscles out of her body. “Richard, your comment implies that beauty is some objective thing, when really beauty is an evolving process of natural selection.”

The class was silent.

“What does ‘ugly’ even mean? Can anyone define ugliness? Or beauty, for that matter?” she asked.

Ernest Bingley tried his hardest. “Beauty is the unconscious pleasure of looking at something artistic,” he said.

“Let me teach you all a lesson,” she said. “And this is going to be the most important lesson of your lives.”

We groaned. It was too early in the morning to understand such things.

“Just like everything in science,” she said, writing
SCIENCE
on the board, “beauty has evolved over time. Beauty is real, but it is also crucial to keep in mind that it is equally an ideal established by the culture in which you exist. Beauty in the eighteen hundreds was much different than what we think beauty is now.”

The Other Girls were fascinated, the first time all year they had visibly reacted to something Ms. Nailer had said. One of them raised her hand and wanted to know what was considered beautiful back in the day. One of them couldn’t imagine a world where Brittany Stone wasn’t the most beautiful girl in school. Brittany Stone said she couldn’t imagine a world where Ms. Nailer was the authority on all matters of beauty. Neither could I really. Every day, I tried to be surprising in my footwear, and Ms. Nailer did not, standing in front of the classroom, fully formed in her ugly suede flats and her two-piece suits that she probably got from Talbots, where we sat on benches outside the fitting rooms in snug tubular dresses that made me feel like a hollow tube of toothpaste, picking our scabs, watching Janice’s mother try on mustard suits that were too broad in the shoulders.

“Back in the day,” Ms. Nailer said, “scientists used a mathematical formula to decide who was beautiful and who was not. There was such a thing called the Facial Angle.”

“Huh?” asked Ambrose, the albino boy who sat in front and answered most of Ms. Nailer’s questions with, “According to Satan.”

“Richard,” Ms. Nailer said. “Please come up here.”

Richard looked around, nervous. He rose from his seat. Ms. Nailer got out two rulers from her desk and Richard halted in front of the class rabbit.

“I’m not going to hit you,” Ms. Nailer said. “Come closer.”

Richard walked toward her. She put two rulers to Richard’s face and measured him vertically and horizontally, the two rulers intersecting at his ear.

“The angle that the two rulers create determines if a person is more human or more primate,” Ms. Nailer said. “This is obviously an imprecise measurement, but I’m getting one hundred degrees!”

“Richard’s a primate?”

“Actually, no,” Ms. Nailer said. “Far from it. One hundred degrees was approximately the angle you will find in the faces of classical Greek art.”

Richard smiled as though he had known it all along. People booed.

“Scientists theorize that people are attracted to other people with similar facial angles. Meaning, Richard is most likely attracted to women who best represent the ideal of classical Greek beauty.”

“That’s racist,” someone said. “Richard’s a racist.”

“It’s not racist,” Ms. Nailer said. “It’s evolution.”

“My dad said evolution is racist.”

“People picked partners based off similar facial angles for thousands of years, but subconsciously. It wasn’t until recently that people started to understand attraction through the lens of science.”

“Measure my face!” Brittany Stone shouted out.

“And my face!” Martha Collins said.

I knew Martha from elementary school, but we stopped being friends in the sixth grade when she asked me if I wanted to play this game called Cats in the House, which required taking off all our clothes, including our socks. When I protested, she said, “You don’t see cats walking around the house with clothes on, do you?”

“I just don’t see why we have to be naked,” I said. I left her house and the shame of it all kept us from speaking for three years, until we ended up in biology together. She was the only person I knew sort of well, and it seemed that when you were a freshman walking into a classroom, you saw only a string of people you couldn’t sit next to for some reason or another: girls who didn’t know you, girls who thought your angular features were obnoxious, or Richard, who spent his whole life battling me for Mark’s full attention and publicly exposed my armpit hair in the fifth grade. He had pointed at my armpit in the lunch line and said, “Ew, look, she’s got armpit hair.” “That’s just dog fur, you idiot,” I had said. Richard laughed at me and shouted, “Emily is growing dog hair.”