Such a Fun Age

by Kiley Reid

  “Well, I used to be a boxed wine fan myself,” Alix said, “but you know I didn’t buy this, right?”

  Emira sat down and settled Briar on her lap. “Hmm?”

  “Oh yeah, I don’t really buy wine anymore. Or a lot of other things.” Alix took another sip. “I’ve been doing this for years. I just write a wine company and say that I’m doing an event and I’m testing out wines. And then they send me a few bottles for free. This one is from”—she turned the bottle’s label toward her—“Michigan, I think.”

  “So does that mean you have an event coming up?”

  “When my book comes out, I will.” Alix winked.

  Emira laughed and said, “Dang, okay.”

  “I read dis now!” Briar announced, lifting up a board book. “I read dis one.”

  Emira said, “Okay, go for it.”

  Briar tolerated being read to during the day, but Alix’s child was the only toddler she knew of who didn’t enjoy partnered story time before bed. Instead, Briar liked to be held as she “read” to herself before her eyes cast a sleepy focus on the pages in front of her. She constantly shushed the person holding her, even when they hadn’t said a word. Alix tried to hold her voice at a smooth level to keep Briar happy and keep her sitter talking.

  “Are you doing anything fun tonight?”

  Emira nodded. “Just going to dinner.”

  “Do you know where?”

  Emira crossed her arms over Briar’s lap. “This Mexican place called Gloria’s.”

  “Gloria’s?” Alix clarified. “Is that the one that’s BYOB? And really loud?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “I’ve gone there. That’s fun. Oh, you should take this with you.” Alix flicked the wine bottle. “I can’t have more than a glass since I’m still pumping.”

  When Emira said, “Really?” Briar looked up at her and said, “Shhhh, no Mira, no no.”

  Emira placed a finger in front of her mouth, and Briar turned the page. Emira mouthed, Thank you, and Alix said, “Of course.”

  This is good, Alix thought. We aren’t there yet but we’re getting there. Alix knew that her aspirations for a relationship with Emira were possibly too high because of what she’d seen with her girlfriends and their sitters. Rachel and her nanny, Arnetta, often discussed their divorces, their least favorite children in Hudson’s class, and the most attractive fathers. Tamra once took the day off from work and allowed her kids to skip the first half of school to watch their beloved sitter, Shelby, have a speaking role on a daytime soap opera. And Jodi was always picking up scarves and lotions because her sitter, Carmen, wore things like that, or she might want to try them. Alix didn’t know what Emira liked, or what she didn’t like, or how she stayed so skinny, or if she believed in God. It wouldn’t happen all at once, but she had to keep trying, even if it meant being the first to speak at every silence, and with Emira, there were many.

  “Are you going there with girlfriends?”

  Emira smiled and shook her head no.

  Alix let a cartoonish, gossipy expression go into her eyes. She said, “Ooohh,” and Emira laughed. Her lips came together in a flirtatious secrecy. “Well, come on. Is he cute?”

  Emira nodded in thoughtful consideration. She took one of her hands up next to her face and made her fingers flat as she whispered, “He’s really tall.”

  “Yesss,” Alix said. Emira laughed again. Alix felt like Emira’s laughter was still backed by a small token of toleration, but she didn’t care. This conversation was better than any of the ones she’d had with Peter’s co-workers. She rocked Catherine and said, “Where’d you meet him?”

  “Umm . . .” Briar slammed the first book shut and moved to the second. Emira ruffled her bangs. “We met on the train.”

  “Really? That’s cute.” In her arms, Catherine had started to fall asleep, but her lips continued in a furious rhythm for a now-empty bottle. Alix placed the bottle on the table and stuck her pinky in her daughter’s mouth. “Is it your first date?”

  “That’s for the horsies,” Briar said into her book. “We need a map.”

  “It’s like . . . the fourth?”

  “Shhh, Mira,” Briar said.

  “Okay, shh,” Emira whispered back.

  Alix shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Sorry.”

  Emira mouthed, It’s fine.

  There was a very small window of time where Catherine would fall right asleep in her crib, and Alix knew that this was it, but she didn’t want to break the moment just yet. She couldn’t ask what his name was. That would make her sound so old. And she couldn’t ask what she really wanted to know, if Emira had slept with him yet, or if sleeping with someone before they were together was a thing Emira did, if sleeping with someone, for her, meant anything at all. It was officially six minutes after seven o’clock, the latest Emira had ever stayed. Alix knew she could ask one more question before she had to let her go. “Do you think it could be serious?”

  Emira slumped and laughed. “I don’t know,” she said. “He’s cute. But I’m not tryna get like . . . wifed up anytime soon.”

  This sentiment made Alix squeal inside.

  She wanted to ask Emira when her mother had gotten married and tell her that her own mother had been twenty-five. She wanted to know if Emira had had serious relationships before, and what this new guy did for a living. But Briar’s whispers had turned into nods, and Emira placed a hand on the child’s forehead so she wouldn’t bang it into the table. Phil Collins started pouring from the speakers. Both of their glasses had turned transparent and empty.

  Alix did two long nods and said, “Good for you.” She touched the wine bottle, stood with the baby in her arms, and said, “I’m going to put this by your bag.”

  Seven

  There was a two-story Starbucks near the Chamberlain house where freelancers and college students camped out for hours. After babysitting, Emira typically walked to the second level—seemingly to meet other classmates and friends—and changed her clothes in the single bathroom. Tonight, over jeans, she changed into a white T-shirt, oxblood-colored booties, and Shaunie’s maroon varsity jacket with a textured letter S on the front left side. Emira applied lipstick in the mirror, put her hair into a ponytail, and texted Kelley, I’m late I’m sorry I’m running.

  Gloria’s was always at max capacity. There were permanent Christmas lights on the walls along with hanging sugar skulls, roses, and dense patterned blankets. Emira stepped through couples and groups waiting outside and past a hostess calling, “Reuben, party of six!” When her eyes adjusted inside, she saw Kelley seated in a corner.

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “You’re fine, you’re fine.” Kelley touched her elbow and kissed the side of her face. When he pulled back he smiled and said, “Is it weird if I say you smell like a bath?”

  Kelley Copeland was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He had an older sister who had one child, and two younger brothers who worked at the same post office his father had worked at for twenty-eight years. Kelley made a huge effort to avoid screens after ten p.m. He read only print books, and before bed, he wore embarrassingly large, orange-tinted glasses that were called Blue Blockers. He spent half his day staring at a computer, coding and creating interfaces for gyms, yoga retreats, physical therapy sessions, and spin classes that required their participants to sign up using apps with campy copy and push notifications. Emira knew that Kelley had broken his collarbone twice, that he became “irrationally furious” when people didn’t hear their names being called out at coffee shops, and that he was grossed out by the thought of drinking whole milk, but what she didn’t know was what it was like to sleep with him a second time.

  Four days after their night at Luca’s, Kelley asked Emira if she could get coffee before she went to work. Emira screenshotted his request and sent it to Zara, who replied, I can’t tell if you’re getting
hired or dumped rn. Coffee with Kelley felt strangely formal. It was as if they were pretending that they hadn’t had sex the last time they saw each other, that she hadn’t repositioned his hands away from her hair (he’d said sorry twice and she’d said it was fine), and that he hadn’t very cutely removed the remote control he’d sat on, placed it on the side table, and said, “Sorry. As you were.” In a very trendy place with lots of natural light and four-dollar cold brews, Emira kept expecting Kelley to give her a promotion, or ask her about a time when she had to be part of a team. But he asked her about where she was from, who the most embarrassing person she followed on Instagram was—she didn’t have an Instagram account; his was a pet raccoon—and if she ever, while doing something very ordinary in her day, suddenly remembered a dream she’d had the night before.

  If Kelley had ever met Emira’s mother, she would have said something along the lines of, “That boy likes to talk.” Kelley definitely did that thing where he asked her questions with the intention of explaining his own answer afterward. But he did plenty of listening on his own, and Emira didn’t mind. Kelley was silly in a way that wasn’t loud or obnoxious. He once initiated a game of guessing what people were listening to on their headphones as they walked by. Another time, after passing two crying babies, he’d looked at Emira and said, “Breakups are the worst, am I right?” And once, as they were leaving a basketball game behind a small child singing “The Song That Never Ends,” Kelley whispered in Emira’s ear, “I will give you seventy-five dollars to take your Coke and dump it on that kid’s head. But you have to do it right now.”

  Emira settled in across from him, removed Shaunie’s jacket, and took him in. “I would have been very on time . . .” she said. “But my boss has been really into asking me questions and wanting to talk.”

  Kelley looked back down to the menu and used the candlelight to see. “Is she afraid you’re gonna sue her for sending you to the whitest grocery store in Philadelphia?”

  “I have no idea. Oh! But wait!” Emira reached behind her seat and into her bag that hung off the side. She retrieved the recorked bottle of wine that Mrs. Chamberlain had set near her charging phone. “She did give me this, though.”

  Kelley pulled out his phone and used the light to read the label. “Your boss just gave this to you?”

  “She asked if I wanted some and then she was like, ‘Take it.’”

  “This looks extremely expensive,” Kelley said. “Do you mind if I look it up?”

  “No, go ahead.” Emira reached for a chip and dipped it into salsa. “She didn’t even buy it. She writes wine companies and tells them that she has an event coming up and then they just send her shit.”

  “Seriously?” Kelley’s face lit up with the brightness from his phone. “What does she do again?”

  “She’s a writer,” Emira said. And because she had recently Googled Mrs. Chamberlain and saw pictures of her with college-aged students, Emira added, “And maybe a teacher? I don’t know. She’s writing a history book that’s coming out next year.”

  “Holy shit.” Kelley looked at Emira and squinted. “This is a fifty-eight-dollar bottle of Riesling.”

  Emira said, “Damn,” but she wasn’t surprised. Mrs. Chamberlain had expensive tastes that she never openly acknowledged. Instead, she enjoyed telling Emira about the bargains she acquired. She’d divulge the exact price of a rug that was a “steal,” or she’d say she “felt good” about finding a cheap flight for Christmas. Emira couldn’t help but wonder why Mrs. Chamberlain couldn’t feel good paying full price for things when she could obviously afford it. Emira often looked up the cost of things that came from Mrs. Chamberlain’s home, suggestions, and lifestyle. In every one of her purses was a tube of mascara called Juice Beauty, which came in at twenty-two dollars each. She’d once stayed at a hotel in Boston that Emira discovered was three hundred sixty-eight dollars a night, on weekdays. And one day, when Emira explained that she’d bought Briar new shorts after she sat in mud, Mrs. Chamberlain dug into her wallet with an urgent apology: “Let me pay you for the shorts. Will thirty dollars cover it?” Emira had bought the packet of shorts at Walgreens, and they were $10.99 for two. When Emira relayed this interaction to Zara, Zara was beside herself that Emira didn’t accept the surplus. “The fuck is wrong with you?” she’d said. “You tell her, ‘Yes. The shorts cost thirty dollars exactly. You are very welcome, good-bye.’”

  “Well.” Kelley handed the bottle of wine back across the table. “I brought beers because I thought that we were honest, working-class people, but if I’d known you were trying to seduce me . . .”

  “Right. Uh-huh.” Emira smiled around the chip in her mouth. This was another thing that she’d decided she would let Kelley get away with: considering himself working class. Kelley worked at one of those fancy offices where everyone sat in the same huge room with plush headphones on and there was unlimited cereal and La Croix. But instead of reminding him of this, and the fact that he lived above a CrossFit in Fishtown, she said, “Not gonna lie. It’s the best wine I’ve ever had.”

  They ended up drinking the beers because Gloria’s had a rule that you couldn’t drink anything that was already opened. Emira slipped it back into her bag, and Kelley said, “We’ll work on that later.”

  They talked about their days, but underneath it all, Emira kept thinking, If you don’t fuck me tonight I’m gonna be livid. It seemed—and this was just her opinion that was backed by Zara’s confirmation—that Kelley was still slightly hung up on their age difference. In the same way that white women were often overly accommodating to her when she found herself in specific white spaces (dental offices, Oscar parties in which she was the only black attendant, every Tuesday and Thursday at the Green Party office), Kelley was overcompensating for the implications of their age difference by taking Emira to places that were completely unsexy, and ending the night kissing the space next to her ear. Emira had been surprised by how rhythmic and chemical their first night together had been—this, in her opinion, usually took time—but after two dates of “Have you ever been to Europe?” and “What would you do if you won the lottery?” she was ready to go back to his place. On his couch, that first night, Emira hadn’t thought of Briar, or her impending health insurance problem. Or even the fact that her rent would be going up by ninety dollars as soon as the new year began.

  Kelley held his arms up behind his head, then quickly removed them as a waiter stopped by to deliver their plates. “So I think it’s time you told me about the losers you dated before you met me,” he said.

  Emira laughed. “Oh, it’s that time?” She set her beer back on the table.

  “Mm-hmm. And also what they’re doing now and how miserable they are without you.”

  “Oh wow, okay.” She readjusted in her seat. “Well . . . I dated someone this summer for a few months, which was fine for a minute. But then he started to send me motivational quotes all the time . . . ? And I was like nuh-uh, I can’t do this shit with you.”

  “I need to see at least one of them.”

  “I probably deleted them.” Emira cut into her enchiladas and tried to remember. “But yeah, he’d text me all these pictures and quotes that were like, Michael Jordan didn’t make his high school basketball team, and I was always like . . . okay, and?”

  “Alright, so no quotes for you. Do you want another?” Kelley pointed to the bucket of beers and Emira nodded.

  “I dated a musician for a year in college and that was fine but dumb. I think he’s touring with some band now and tuning their guitars.”

  Kelley finished chewing and said, “Why do I feel like that band is like, the Red Hot Chili Peppers or something?”

  “Please, I know who that is.” Emira smirked. “And then I dated a guy for like, ten months from high school into college. But it was long distance for the second half so that was dumb, too.”

  “Huh.” Kelley wiped his face with his
napkin and set his hands on the table. “So you haven’t had like, a long, serious relationship?”

  Emira smiled as she chewed. “Well, I haven’t had a long, serious life, so no. Is this you tryna tell me that you were married with kids or something?”

  “No no no . . . why do I have the impulse to say, ‘Not that I know of!’”

  Emira faked a gag and said, “Please don’t.”

  “I know. Ignore that.” Kelley shook his head and started over. “My last girlfriend and I met in college but dated years after. She now delivers babies on a reservation in Arizona . . . I had a girlfriend for two years at the end of college, and we say Happy Birthday or Merry Christmas sometimes. I think she lives in Baltimore. I had a girlfriend for a little while during my freshman year. We’re still cool. And . . . you went all the way back to high school so I guess I gotta play, too. When I was seventeen I had a girlfriend who was the richest girl in town.”

  Emira crossed her legs. “How rich are we talking?”

  Kelley raised a finger. “I’ll tell you how rich. We took a school trip to Washington, D.C.—she was in the grade above me—and like thirty of us were on the same plane ride. She was the first one on the plane and I was right behind her. And after she found her seat, she set her luggage down in the aisle, and then she just sat down. Without putting it away.”

  Emira’s head dipped and her ponytail swung. “Did she expect you to do it for her?”

  “No.” Kelley leaned into the table. “She expected people on the plane to do it. I opened the overhead and she was like, ‘Don’t mess with the plane!’ She’d never been on a plane where the staff didn’t put your luggage away for you.”

  “Are there planes like that?”

  “Evidently in first class.”

  “Oh shit,” Emira said. “Does she own her own plane now?”

  “Probably. I’m fairly certain she’s in New York. I just remember that like, well, this sounds weird, but it was one of those loss-of-innocence moments where things kind of click, you know? And I had a lot of moments like this with her—that’s another story—but I remember that most of my classmates had never been on a plane, and probably wouldn’t again for a long time. And here’s this girl who travels in first class and doesn’t understand why there’s no leg room. And my seventeen-year-old mind was like, ‘Oh hey, people live very different lives.’ Do you know what I mean?”