Such a Fun Age

by Kiley Reid

  “Mm-hmm,” Emira said. “Yeah. This is like, the opposite, but when I was little, I went to this girl’s house for a sleepover, and when I went into the bathroom there were three huge cockroaches in the middle of the floor. I screamed, but this girl was like, ‘Oh, you just shoo them out of the way.’” As she said this, Emira flicked her napkin gently in imitation, as if she were cutely herding very tiny sheep. “And I was like, you do what? And when I think back I’m like, okay yeah, that girl was mad poor. I think she and her sister slept in the same twin bed. But at the time the cockroaches seemed like a bigger deal. It shook me, I was like, ‘You live like this?’ And now I’m like oh, wait, most people live like this.”

  “Eeek, exactly. That’s a really good one.” Kelley wiped his mouth, cringed, and nodded. “Okay, yeah, I have another one. When I was little, my little brother loved that show Moesha. Do you remember that show?”

  “Of course I remember that show.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense ’cause you’re closer to my little brother’s age.”

  Emira made a face and said, “Cool, Kelley.”

  “Sorry sorry sorry. So yeah, anyway . . . my whole family was sitting around the table at dinner, and out of nowhere my little brother, who was like six, goes, ‘Mom, why is Moesha nigger shit?’”

  Under the mariachi music that suddenly seemed quite loud, Emira’s eyes went wide and her mouth twisted as if she’d found a hair in her food. Kelley went on.

  “My mom was like, ‘What?’ And my brother goes, ‘Michael’s dad told me to turn it off because . . . ’ Well, I’m not gonna repeat it, but he obviously had no idea what that meant. But I was older, so I did. And I saw this kid’s dad all the time. And I was like, Holy shit. You’re a bad man, Michael’s dad. I’m looking at evil when I see you at school.”

  Emira stared at Kelley and her heart started to double.

  The two of them had only discussed race once, and barely. At the basketball game, a group of black teens saw Kelley hand Emira her ticket, and one, very much wanting to be heard, said, “That’s a damn shame.” Kelley did a very cute half salute in their direction and said, “Okay . . . thank you, sir. Thank you for your service.” When they made it to their seats, Kelley sat with his legs spread and leaned in to her ear. “Can I ask you a question?” Emira nodded. “Have you ever dated . . . ” He trailed off, and Emira thought, Oh Lord. She crossed her legs, thinking, It’s whatever. Let’s just watch the game. “Have you ever dated,” Kelley started again, “someone who wasn’t . . . so tall?”

  Emira laughed and shoved his shoulder. “Boy, stop.”

  Kelley raised his shoulders in mock-concerned defense. “It’s a legitimate question. Would your parents be mad if you brought home a . . . tall guy?” Emira laughed again. She didn’t call him out on stealing that joke from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Maybe that was part of the joke. They never discussed it again.

  Emira had dated one white guy before, and repeatedly hooked up with another during the summer after college. They both loved bringing her to parties, and they told her she should try wearing her hair naturally. And suddenly, in a way they hadn’t in the first few interactions, these white men had a lot to say about government-funded housing, minimum wage, and the quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. about moderates, the ones that “people don’t want to hear.” But Kelley seemed different. Kelley Copeland, with his dadlike humor and exaggerated expressions and his affinity for saying the same word three times (hey hey hey, listen listen listen, no no no), could apparently acknowledge that he was dating a black woman, and that she could appreciate a good story over the need for decorum, but still . . . shouldn’t he have said “the N-word” instead? Maybe save the whole thing for the seventh or eighth date? Emira couldn’t tell. Sitting across from him, she wrestled with feeling moderately appalled that he had said the whole thing, with that painfully distinctive hard r sound at the end, but as she watched the veins in his hands move as he took a last bite, she settled on, You know what? Imma let you get away with that too.

  “What did Michael’s dad look like?”

  “I mean, I’m sure he looks like most dads in Allentown.” Kelley put his fork at the side of his plate. “But now when I think of him I picture him in a cowboy hat on a front porch with a—”

  Emira reached across the table to stop him before he did another impersonation. She lowered her voice and asked, “Do you wanna go back to your place?”

  Later, in Kelley’s bedroom, he sat up in bed and said, “We forgot to drink the wine.” He put shorts on and walked out to the kitchen.

  In a T-shirt of his that read Nittany on the front, Emira got up to pee. She took a selfie in Kelley’s medicine cabinet mirror and sent it to Zara, who replied, I can’t stand you rn. It was 11:46 p.m.

  Kelley retrieved two glasses and set them on the island counter at the center of his kitchen. Emira brought the bottle wrapped in a purple plastic bag and stood at the other side.

  “‘Little Lulu’s Ballet Academy,’” Kelley read. He removed the bag and set the wine on the counter. “That sounds like a complete nightmare.”

  “It’s not. I take Briar every Friday and it’s like, my favorite thing.”

  “This is the one I saw at the grocery store?”

  “Mm-hmm. She’s terrible at it.” Emira stretched her arms up over her head and felt the bottom of the T-shirt begin to reveal her behind. “All the other girls are very shy and graceful, but Briar is always yelling that she wants a grilled cheese and shit. Next week is our last class. It’s a Halloween party and we’re very excited about it.”

  Kelley poured the wine into the two glasses. “Will you be dressing up?”

  “I will be a cat. And Briar will be a hot dog.”

  “Nice. That classic cat-and-hot-dog combination. Are you ready for this?” Kelley placed a glass in front her. “Oh wait, you already tried it. Am I ready for this? Yes. Yes I am.”

  With his eyes on Emira, Kelley did a very showy swirl of the wine in his hand. He took a sip, let it hit the back of his throat, and said, “Oh wow.” He nodded as he placed it back on the counter. “Shit, yeah, this tastes like a country club.”

  “I told you. It almost makes me sad ’cause I’ll probably never have it again.” Emira leaned her forearms onto the counter. “Do you think your high school girlfriend is drinking this in first class right now?”

  Kelley laughed. “Probably, yes.” He eyed Emira before he added, “You wanna know how I broke up with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s awful,” he warned. “You can’t leave after I tell you this. There was like, a lot of other bullshit involved with her and how she wrote me letters all the time and all this other stuff, but when I actually ended it, I said, ‘I think it would be best if we went our separate ways, and that those paths never again connected.’”

  Emira covered her mouth. Against her palm she said, “Noooo.”

  “Yep.” Kelley took another sip and said, “I thought I was very cool.”

  “What is wrong with you?”

  “I was seventeen years old.”

  “Yeah, I was seventeen once too, bro.”

  “Okay okay okay, I don’t know. She wrote me all of these very flowery and poetic letters all the time, and I think I felt like I had to break up with her in the same elevated tone, but it did not go down that way. And I’d like to say that that was the dumbest thing I ever did in high school, but it most definitely was not.”

  Emira stood up straight. “What else did you do?”

  “It wasn’t exactly things I did but . . . things I thought? Like . . . you know how Valentine’s Day was invented by card companies? What I thought I heard was car companies. Till college, I thought that like, Toyota and Kia invented Valentine’s Day. Which I did think was odd, but still a thing that happened. Actually, no, wait. Even worse than that? I thought that the word lesbian had a d
on the end? Like—lesbiand? And I thought it was a verb.”

  “Kelley.” Emira covered her mouth again. “No, you didn’t.”

  “I absolutely did,” he said. “I thought that one woman could lesbiand the other. Till I was like, sixteen. Why am I telling you this?”

  Emira laughed. “I honestly don’t know. But tell me the breakup line one more time.”

  Kelley put both hands on the counter and cleared his throat. “‘I think it would be best if we went our separate ways, and that those paths never again connected.’”

  “That’s really beautiful.”

  “Thank you.”

  Emira leaned against the counter with her hip bones first. She watched Kelley take the fifty-eight-dollar wine bottle and tip the remaining liquid into her glass.

  “Do you want to call me an Uber?” she asked.

  Kelley set the empty bottle on the tile. “Not really, no.”

  Emira nodded and said, “Okay.”

  Eight

  Back in New York, long before Catherine was born, Tamra poured wine into three glasses. “Everyone has to share their most embarrassing moment.”

  “I love when Tamra drinks,” Jodi said, “because she turns into an eleven-year-old girl.”

  The four women sat on wiry patio furniture next to plastic shovels, pails, and a kiddie pool covered in leaves in the ivy-surrounded space that was Rachel’s backyard. Tiny white lights hung overhead. On the other side of the sliding glass door was a downstairs studio that Rachel used for guests. A queen-sized bed folded out from the wall where a very little Briar slept with her thumb in her mouth. Tamra’s daughters, Imani and Cleo, slept next to her, on the other side of Jodi’s daughter, who was soon to be a big sister (Jodi sipped a club soda with lemon). Rachel’s son, Hudson, was in Vermont with his grandma. It was the first time the four women were together without the immediate presence of their children.

  Rachel quietly closed the sliding door with her elbow and her slippery black hair whipped behind her. “My answer to this question is more of a time period, and it is defined by my son’s penis.” She set four white plates on top of the table, next to a large pizza with tomatoes, pepper flakes, and basil on top.

  “Don’t tell me this, la la la la.” Jodi raised her hands to her ears. She’d learned three days prior that she was pregnant with a little boy, whom she would later name Payne. Her thick red hair glowed as she reached over a large bug-repellent candle for the same slice of pizza as Alix. She retreated and said, “No, Alix, you go first.” It was Jodi whom Alix had first met in the waiting room when Briar had her four-month check-up. Jodi had introduced her to Rachel and Tamra, and Alix could still feel Jodi’s sweet concern and the gestures she made to make Alix feel at ease.

  Rachel sat back with her arms at the sides of the patio chair. “In the grocery store, in the line for coffee . . . ‘Mommy, a penis is private.’ ‘Mommy, you can’t play tag with a penis.’ ‘Mommy, I have a penis and our dog has a penis and you lost yours so you need to be more careful.’”

  “Oh God,” Tamra said. “Why is he being all Freud on you?”

  “Okay, so these guys already know my embarrassing moment,” Jodi said, turning to Alix. “But Prudence went to a church camp with her cousins last summer and one of her counselors called me in because Prudence had carefully explained that her mommy took little boys and girls into a room and put them in front of a video camera.”

  “Oh no.” Alix laughed.

  “And the children that cried?” Jodi leaned forward. One of her green eyes went wide and the other closed. “Those were the bad ones, and they don’t get to come back again.”

  Tamra chuckled through her nose. “I remember this.”

  Rachel shook her head. “I fucking love that kid.”

  “And”—Jodi held up a finger—“only the good boys and girls got to come back, and Mommy puts them on camera more, and when you’re on camera you have to do exactly what Mommy says, even if you cry.”

  Alix said, “I’m guessing she wasn’t invited back to camp.”

  “I had to go in and everything.” Jodi pulled a chunk of crust off her pizza and took a bite. “I was pulling out my business card, I pulled up my website. I became this crazy person sitting in a kid’s chair way too small for my ass, telling them that I’m not a pedophile and that I cast children in feature films.”

  Tamra looked to Alix. “What does Briar think you do for a living?”

  Alix picked up her wine and said, “Briar is fairly certain that I work at the post office,” to which Tamra replied, “Okay, that’s not so off.”

  “Hudson thinks I buy books for a living, which is sometimes pretty accurate,” Rachel said. “Jo, what does Pru think you do now?”

  “I think I just covered this. Mommy is a pervert.”

  The women laughed into their wine and mozzarella.

  Alix looked to Tamra. “And what do Imani and Cleo think you do?”

  Tamra put down her glass. “Oh, they know I’m a principal.”

  “Ohhhh, how odd.” Rachel sighed. “Tamra’s perfect children are perfectly aware of their mother’s perfect job.” As she said this, Rachel clasped her hands together at the side of her head as if she were an animated princess. Alix realized that Rachel was quite tipsy, and she felt an affinity for her, this group, this moment. She loved hearing their voices and seeing them take large bites of their pizza, and how the sun took so long to go down in the summer.

  Tamra smiled beneath the cluster of dark freckles that gathered underneath her eyes. When she shook her head, her long, neat dreadlocks shimmied behind her elbows. She was the only one eating her pizza with a fork and knife. “Imani would disagree with you on the perfect-job part,” she said. “But my most embarrassing moment was in college for sure. I started my period in a lecture hall on my second day at Brown. And I was wearing white shorts.” Tamra said this slowly, hitting the t’s hard with a tight bottom lip. “A very nice girl gave me her jacket to tie around my waist, but this was after a bunch of people had seen. I didn’t drop the class,” Tamra congratulated herself, “but I sat in the back row all semester, and asked other students to go up and turn my tests in for me.”

  “Good for you,” Jodi said. “I would have deferred.”

  “Alix’s turn,” Rachel said. “You have to say yours, and it’s gotta be better than periods, penises, and pedophiles.”

  Alix had a tomato slice in her mouth. She spread her fingers and waved them in front of her chest. “Uh-uh.” She swallowed. “Mine is . . . not fun.”

  “Okay, is no one hearing me?” Jodi raised her right hand. “Ped-o-phile.”

  “She has a point,” Rachel said.

  “Okay, okay,” Alix said. “Mine was in high school.”

  In the summer before her junior year, Alex Murphy’s grandparents died, two days apart. They were written about in the local newspaper, and their joint funeral, held in a tiny chapel on a Thursday afternoon, was standing room only. In public, Alex’s father properly mourned the loss of his parents, but in private, Alex’s parents rejoiced over a surprise inheritance of what came close to nine hundred thousand dollars. Grandma and Grandpa Murphy had plots picked out in a cemetery, side by side, and not far from Grandma Murphy’s parents, but before the burial, the funeral home made a massive mistake. Grandma and Grandpa Murphy were accidentally cremated. Alex and her family went through with the funeral and pretended there were bodies in the closed caskets in front of them.

  Rachel gasped and Tamra said, “Oh God.”

  “Yeah, it was a huge deal,” Alix said. “So my parents used their inheritance to get this big-time lawyer, they sued for a shit ton of money . . . they won. And then immediately went insane.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Murphy, who looked shockingly alike with light hair, skinny legs, and round, paunchy bellies, moved Alex and her little sister, Betheny, from Philadelphia to
Allentown. They wanted land. “Like, land land,” Alix explained, and they purchased a seven-bedroom house on a rolling green hill; what Alix now recognized as a textbook McMansion. There were four digits to punch to open the front gate and enter the long stretch of driveway. There was a balcony off the master bedroom where you could spot the flagpole of Alex and Betheny’s new high school. And there was a double staircase framing a fireplace where Alex and her sister would never end up taking pictures before they left for prom or graduation. “From day to night, my whole life changed,” Alix said. “My mom got her eyeliner tattooed. We had a movie theater in our house. I’d never been on a plane before, and suddenly we were flying first class to Fort Lauderdale.”

  The Murphys also purchased the services of Mrs. Claudette Laurens. Claudette was a light-skinned black woman with curly gray hair who kept the home clean, cooked weekly dinners, and watched game shows with the Murphy girls when they were home sick. It was Claudette who taught Alex how to make a cobbler, how to sew a button, and how to drive a stick shift. Claudette was the only person in the world to whom Alix still signed her letters as Alex, but instead of going into her deep affection for Claudette, Alix told her girlfriends about the pointless purchases her parents had no business buying (self-portraits done by real artists, loafers with real gold coins on the tops, guitars and pianos once owned by rock stars).

  “Alix, I feel like I’m learning so much about you,” Rachel said. “So much of this makes sense.”

  Jodi agreed. “Is this why you hate clutter so much?”

  “Well, yeah.” Alix rolled her eyes. “When your parents become crazy, trashy rich people who put rhinestones and monograms on everything and get six—six!—Pomeranians, you end up throwing a lot of stuff away. At the time I was like, ‘This is awesome! I can buy all the CDs I want!’ but they weren’t even that rich. It was ridiculous.” Just speaking about it, Alix could smell the inside of her parents’ home, the one they’d since had to give up to custody of the state. Outside were SUVs with vanity license plates and cheetah-print steering wheel covers. Inside was an overly air-conditioned blast with cardboard boxes containing new purchases constantly piled next to the front door. It perpetually smelled empty, like a model home, the kind you find in a ranch-style housing development where the kitchen drawers are glued shut and the sinks have never been connected to water. The Pomeranians roamed the house and left poop everywhere that looked like piles of moldy grapes.