The Adults (7 page)

O
n Sundays, Richard and Mark chucked crab apples at each other across the street. From my window, I was able to see the objective of the game: they were trying to hurt each other.

Five years ago, Richard, Mark, and I would have been at the cold spring that ran through our woods, where Richard held one of my Barbies facedown in the water until I was positive it had drowned, until I said, “Richard! Stop!” and he looked at me and said, “Emily, it’s just plastic.” Richard was the boy who knew things like this, and I was the girl who didn’t realize that the things I chose to love were never meant to be seen in any real, human way. Mark, who always just wanted to get along, was in the background and said, “Why do you guys have to fight all the time? I don’t understand why you have to fight.”

Inside my house, nobody was home, except everybody, but it was easy to feel like those were one and the same. My mother was watching television. My father was in the basement. My father was on the verge of leaving us. He didn’t say it like this. In fact, nobody said it like this. We weren’t allowed to speak of his distance. It only upset my mother. We just watched him move slowly out of the house one box at a time, as though it were becoming a tiresome project to leave this life behind, an operation that required way too much packing tape. I was at the window, or outside on the driveway, or somewhere else entirely, and if anybody bothered to ask what I was learning in school, this was the answer I was preparing: a person can feel equally alone anywhere; you can be just as lonely in biology class holding a rabbit as you can standing next to a window in the middle of September as you can watching older people on television take each other’s clothes off.

My mother and I watched
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
at eight.
Touched by an Angel
at nine. Every Sunday we decided something different. We decided we probably wouldn’t watch
Touched by an Angel
if it didn’t come on right after
Dr. Quinn
, if they didn’t show a small preview before we had time to lose interest. We decided we liked eating grapefruit, but then my mother declared that the labor of eating it was too demanding for a snack. We decided the hot one on our favorite after-school soap opera was never going to find out that his brother, who was blind with a heart condition, was having sex with his lover and we decided that you could never justifiably get mad at someone who was sleeping with the blind, considering the woman who was doing so also had amnesia, and we decided we had enough energy to tolerate this tease of a story line. We decided it didn’t matter who made their beds when. This meant we were finally liberated.

“From what?” I asked my mother.

“From linens,” she said. I had never felt particularly oppressed by linens, so it made more sense to me when my mother added, “From rules, from intolerable mornings, and that includes linens.”

At some point, my mother would ask, “What’s new?”

“The right side of my face is smaller than the left,” I said, munching on a pretzel.

My mother laughed. “That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s true. We measured it in science class.”

“Who measured it?”

“Martha.”

“Well, Martha obviously doesn’t know how to measure correctly.”

“How would you know?” I asked. “You don’t even know Martha.”

“I’m your mother. I’ve stared at your face for fourteen years.”

“Well, that’s just sad,” I said.

Janice called. Over the phone, Janice and I laughed about all the things the Other Girls had said that week, and I welcomed the relief from my mother. “Brittany told Mr. Basketball that she was worried about him because he had such an amazing body,” Janice said, and when I laughed, she added, “I’d die without you.” I agreed, even though I knew I wasn’t the type of person who would die from grief. I was the kind of person who would sit with grief on the couch until grief died, who would watch reruns of game shows while grief guessed the price of a can of green beans. Seventy-nine cents! Grief was always right. Grief went to the supermarket a lot.

I hung up the phone.

“Shouldn’t you
be
somewhere?” I asked my mother accusingly.

“Like where?” my mother asked.

“I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t.

“Let’s just watch the show, Emily,” my mother said.

When my father came up from the basement, my mother got up and made chicken fajitas. As she seasoned the chicken, she nonchalantly dropped comments about the plumber and the water that dripped from the upstairs shower into the basement, and didn’t that bother him? How could that
not
bother someone? This was what my mother needed to know.

My father got out the vodka from the liquor cabinet and when he caught me staring, he dropped in two ice cubes and looked at me like,
Well, this is still my house, Emily, still my liquor
, and then to distract me from his lingering presence, he asked, “What have you been learning in school?” By this point in the night, the kitchen had overheated from the chicken on the stove, my parents held crystal glasses of iced vodka between their fingers, and my milk was warm and forgotten in front of the television.

“Women are the inversion of male body parts,” I said, and when my mother stayed silent at the stove and didn’t argue, I added, “Men literally
turned inside out
.”

It was my father who protested and said, “That’s barbaric, Emily.”

“Ms. Nailer said so,” I said.

“I don’t care who said what,” my father said. “Don’t repeat things like that inside or outside of this house.” He gave me the stern look that reminded me he was my father, six feet tall, hands nearly the size of my head, and even though he was the one who slept with the neighbor, even though he needed to be punished somehow, denied his meals like a misbehaving Victorian child, the truth was, he owned this house. He had bought the vodka, the refrigerator, even the space between the doors was his, as he filled up the frame every night with his tall body, announcing, “I’m home!” His largeness always seemed so unfair to me—a man was born with all the power—so I picked up my father’s glass of vodka on the table, took too big of a gulp, and said, “My fucking friends are fucking sleeping over Friday,” proud and defiant. Both of my parents looked at me like I had thrown up all my carrots. It was moments like this when I couldn’t stand either of them, when I blushed and excused myself from the table and said, “Well, don’t you people see that I live here too?”

“Did you know that blow jobs are like when your brother used to shove ice pops really far down your throat and you wanted to gag?” one of the Other Girls said Friday night, leaving unwelcome kiss marks on my bedroom mirror.

“My brother never did that to me,” Janice said. “That’s really weird your brother did that to you.”

Janice and I looked at each other and laughed. Even though I was distinctly aware in which ways I was losing Janice during freshman year, I was always aware of the moments she chose to stay with me.

We were eating marshmallows in my room and bad-mouthing our parents like they were nothing to us but drunk blond people.

“It’s so annoying when they look at you,” said Brittany, draped in her mother’s mauve nightgown, the breast cups large, lacy, and unfilled. The truth about Brittany Stone was that she got ugly at night; she popped her pimples and wore thick red glasses and her retainer was too large for her mouth. This was a great relief. “My mom was just looking at me the other day. And I was like, ‘
What
do you
want
, Linda?’”

The packing tape ripped loud from down the hall like crows crying out in an emergency. The Other Girls were sprawled out on my rug like sickly dogs that hadn’t eaten in days. The heaviest one claimed she hadn’t.

“Well, a corn on the cob,” Martha said. “Yesterday. My dad, like, seriously made me. He, like, shoved it down my throat, shouted out something about anorexia being an artificial disease of the rich, a product of too much time on my hands, and he wouldn’t tolerate it in his house, and I was like, ‘Dad! Don’t you see how Freudian this is?’ My dad’s stupid like that.”

“My dad is stupid too,” Janice said. Janice was a slobbery talker, saliva sometimes flying out of her mouth when she got too excited. “The first time I got my period I was in my bed and my dad came in and saw the blood all around me and said, ‘What the hell happened, Janice?’ I was like, ‘Dad, I’ve been murdered in my sleep.’ He was like, ‘You couldn’t have been murdered, you are talking.’ He’s always acting like a doctor. He’s like, ‘
I am a doctor
.’”

“I didn’t know your dad was a doctor,” Brittany said.

“He’s not really,” Janice said. “He’s a natural pathologist. He thinks he can cure people with herbs and tapping on parts of their bodies and things and chanting in their faces. Like a witch. Like, he thinks he’s a witch.”

The refrigerator hummed downstairs. Outside, a metal trash can was knocked over. Martha pressed her ear up to the window screen and asked, “What
was
that?”

Martha was scared because someone on my street got robbed for the first time ever last week. Mrs. Bulwark stood outside her brown house and cried while waiting for the police to show up. My mother stood with her at the curb, going over which items had been taken. Television, she said. The microwave. The toaster oven.

“Or maybe not,” Mrs. Bulwark said. “Maybe I didn’t have a toaster oven? I can’t remember.”

When the police showed up, the adults were gathered on Mrs. Bulwark’s lawn, wiping their long bangs off their faces and adjusting their postures as if it was the first time they had to act human all day. I was in the front of the crowd fingering the blades of grass like I was the head of the search team and my curiosity was something professional, listening to my mother win over the affection of Mrs. Bulwark with gentle affirmation. “Of course you had a toaster oven, dear,” my mother said. “Everybody on the block has a toaster oven.”

Mrs. Trenton whispered to Mrs. Resnick next to me, “What a terrible brown house.”

The neighborhood had gotten really into pastel the last few years. It started when Alfred’s wife painted their whole house a soft pink during menopause. Looks Like Linen it was called. People raved. A magazine came, made the family hold up a rotisserie chicken, and then photographed it. A few months later, Mrs. Trenton’s house was Mint Leaf. Ours became Celery Powder. The Resnicks’ house turned Yellow Feather. Mark and Richard painted one side of the house black last year when his parents went to St. Thomas for a week. When they returned, Mrs. Resnick screamed so loud, our salt and pepper shakers rattled together.

“Lucy,” Mrs. Resnick said in a halfhearted attempt to scold.

I stared at Mrs. Resnick. My one and only skill at fourteen: yelling at people without actually yelling. From where I was standing, Mrs. Resnick looked heavier than she did at the party. The evil part of me was glad. There had to be some kind of punishment for what she had done and if it was only twenty pounds, so be it. I stared and stared and Mrs. Resnick never looked at me, not once, and I didn’t understand how she could stand there and not fall to her knees asking for everybody’s forgiveness.

“Maybe it’s the White Lady,” Janice said.

The White Lady was a ghost story that all the parents of Fairfield told their children. She was rumored to be a tall, thin, pale woman of average height who haunted the Holy Church, the oldest church in our town with a tiny graveyard in the back, for no apparent reason. Janice believed in the White Lady but only because she had nothing else to believe in. Her father was pagan and her mother was Jewish. She said it was either the White Lady or Janicism, which sounded too much like racism, so she doubted it would ever really catch on. But mostly it was because her father swore he saw the White Lady one night, and she worshipped her father. We all did really. Our fathers were the ones who were constantly leaving us, but they were also the men who would always love us, despite our broken conversation and frizzy hair and periods in our beds. Fathers were men who were just trying to understand, while mothers were women who were trying to change us, buying us pads instead of tampons, clarifying shampoos when all we wanted was moisturizing.

“Your father is a liar,” Brittany said to Janice. “That’s what it all boils down to.”

“All fathers are liars,” Janice said. “If you want to be a father, you have to be prepared to become a liar. Like, just the other day my dad told me that when I was seven he accidentally stepped on my hamster on the stairs. I wasn’t mad. Because, I mean, what was the hamster doing on the stairs? That’s what you’ve always got to ask yourself.”

This diffused the tension. We laughed, and I thought, Maybe I did like my new friends. It was nice to have people to talk to like this. And Janice was probably right. Fathers are liars, and the noise was probably a raccoon or something; I’d probably find all my garbage eaten in the morning. “That’s so boring though,” said Brittany, shifting her retainer. “I wish it was a killer. The White Lady. I’m bored.”

She took out her retainer and the saliva dripped on my rug like fishing line.

Everybody began to slowly fall asleep, but I couldn’t. Life moved in opposite directions at dawn and it was too unsettling to watch the world fight with itself, the sun and the moon awkwardly present at the same time, everything so disappointingly circular, like a dog trying to eat its own tail.

I got up to get a glass of water. Janice and the Other Girls were passed out on my white shag carpet, their mouths open like drunks, chapped at the corners. I crept over their bodies, passed my mother and father asleep in separate beds, and walked downstairs to the kitchen.

The kitchen was ambient and still at dawn, the light refracting through half-filled jars of sugar and dried fruits, making everything appear a little invisible, a little godly. I walked across the tile, compelled to pray for something. I was religious at the most unexpected of times, in the morning, when the world seemed empty and unused, and I tried to feel grateful for the peace, the cleaned spatulas. Someone always restarted our life at dawn and this was supposed to be comforting.