Adults and Other Children

by Miriam Cohen

  “I’ll take the Diet Sprite,” Yael’s mother says, and the waitress has no choice but to stay and take the rest of their drink orders.

  Yael’s father gets just water, for him. Yael orders a milkshake, which is supposed to be only for dessert.

  The drinks come. The paper around her mother’s straw is a swirl like a ribbon. Her father’s just-water has a snowflake of dust floating in it. Then the rolls come, and the rolls are the best thing about this restaurant. Everyone knows that.

  Yael’s mother says, “I shouldn’t.”

  “So don’t,” Yael’s father says.

  He raises his eyebrows at Yael. He can make it so his eyebrows go all the way up. She’s supposed to laugh.

  Yael sucks her milkshake through her straw until enough has gathered that her cheeks are full.

  The waitress comes back. She taps her notebook with her pen. “Ready to order?”

  Yael’s chest is a fist. Chocolate-chip waffles are the only thing she wants.

  Suddenly, she feels mean. “A cheeseburger,” she says.

  A cheeseburger is the most non-kosher food in the world. Eating a cheeseburger is the same thing as killing someone. She leans back in her chair and just waits. The sky will fall in.

  The waitress squints at Yael. “I don’t think…” she says, breaking off to smile at Yael’s parents.

  “What kind of cheese do you want?” her mother says. Her voice sounds like someone else’s voice. “American, mozzarella, cheddar?”

  “You’re forgetting Swiss, feta, brie,” her father says. He sways back and forth in his seat. Yael checks under the table, and, yes, his legs are scissors.

  The waitress says she’ll give them some more time.

  But Yael would understand if she doesn’t come back. The waitress is running out of some more time to give them. Soon, the restaurant will close, the waitress will go home, and Yael and her parents will have to leave, too, having eaten nothing, but Yael now allowed, somehow, to eat cheeseburgers. Tomorrow, there will be no school for Yael because she has been suspended. But when the school bus does come for her, because one day the suspension will be over, she is not sure if the bus will be able to find her. She isn’t sure she’ll still be in the place she’s supposed to be.

  Her father gets up and leaves the table. It’s just Yael and her mother. They don’t have a ride home anymore. Yael’s mother doesn’t seem to mind. She drinks her Diet Sprite. Yael waits for her mother to remember that they are in public, that on her head, it’s just her hair.

  RECESS BRIDES

  The new boy had the whitest skin. Veins streaked his temples like grass pressed into glue, splotches of giraffe skin freckles blooming up from a knit turtleneck. Jonah, Ms. Davidson explained to the class, could only attend school during the winter months, because of his condition. She lowered her voice on the word “condition,” as if it were a secret only hers to tell. Jonah was also not allowed outside, but because it was important that Jonah feel welcome, since this was his first time ever in school, everyone had to spend one recess a week indoors with him. Jonah’s parents had been generous enough to donate board games to the class. Ms. Davidson showed the class the laminated cards with Jonah’s address printed on them for after-school play-dates. She paused before handing out the cards, tapping the pile twice on her desk.

  Ms. Davidson picked Karin to stay inside with Jonah first, because Karin’s last name was in the middle of the alphabet, and, Ms. Davidson said to the class, that was even more unfair than being at the end of the alphabet. She winked at Karin, as if she was giving her something everyone wanted. It made Karin feel like apologizing for not being better. She focused on the dried snot at the wooden edge of her desk, so it wouldn’t seem like she wanted, especially, to stay inside with the boy allergic to the sun.

  Lila, best friend to everyone, whispered across her desk that Karin’s chance to be a recess bride had been today. Oh well, Lila mouthed. Karin rubbed her knuckle against her eyeball and tried not to think about the toilet-paper train she wouldn’t tuck into the elastic of her uniform skirt. Ever since Ms. Davidson came to school wearing an engagement ring so huge some kids thought it was the kind that came in a plastic egg, or at the bottom of a cereal box, they found themselves drawn to the utility shed, where every recess became a wedding. The boys didn’t play, so girls were called upon to act as grooms, best men, fathers-of-the-brides. There had been, in real life, a silver-scripted wedding invitation on each of their desks. The countdown was getting short.

  Jonah didn’t speak the entire morning. When Ms. Davidson asked him direct questions he shook his head, or nodded, but stayed silent. And every time he outright ignored her, instead of receiving an X next to his name on the behavior chart, Ms. Davidson she smiled at the new boy as if, in the slight shifts of his neck, he was telling her something she’d wanted very much to know. Karin worried she might not be able to keep from hating him.

  During recess, Ms. Davidson left Karin and Jonah unmonitored in the classroom. She set the Monopoly box on her desk and pulled up two chairs. “So you’ll have some room,” she explained.

  Karin kicked at the metal sides of Ms. Davidson’s desk. The boom was low and echoing. “Do you want to play Monopoly?” she asked Jonah.

  He chewed on the inside of his lower lip. His lips were bright red against his skin, and she wondered if being inside his body hurt. Jonah opened the Monopoly box and unfolded the board. He took a metal shoe.

  “This is me,” he said.

  Karin took a horse.

  She wanted recess to be over. She pictured her classmates outside, wondering who got to be the bride today instead of her, and who was stuck being the groom.

  “Did you get invited to Ms. Davidson’s wedding yet?” she said.

  He crossed his arms and held his elbows. “I couldn’t go anyway,” he said.

  “You can go to school,” Karin pointed out.

  “My mother wouldn’t let me,”he said. “Because the wedding’s at night. So that’s when I can go outside. When the sun’s down.” He reached into his pocket for a tube of Chap Stick, and ran it roughly over each lip. When he was done his lips glistened thickly, like glaze on a doughnut.

  “I bet your mother would let,” Karin said. “If you were going to a wedding.”

  Jonah shook his head. “My mother doesn’t let me.”

  She didn’t think Jonah was lying, but she also didn’t fully believe him. It seemed impossible that his mother would have such unfair rules. She wondered if maybe his mother was just really a terrible person, and when he went outside in the sun the only risk he ran was of sneezing too much, or of breaking into hives. Karin couldn’t imagine playing outside instead of dancing in a wedding hall that was real, with maybe Ms. Davidson telling her groom to hang on for one second please, and reaching for her, Karin, specifically and instead.

  Karin had never been to a wedding before, but she’d seen pictures. She’d saved her parents’ wedding album from one of the half-filled boxes piled in the basement, intended for charity or else the trash. Her mother acted surprised when she saw the wedding album, neatly centered on an extra pillow in Karin’s bed. “I didn’t know we still had that,” she said, but later she said what she meant was she didn’t mean for the album to end up in one of the basement boxes.

  Jonah rolled the dice. He moved his shoe three squares. “My mother doesn’t let me,” he said, again.

  “What happens if you go out in the sun?” she said.

  This was a question she was absolutely not allowed to ask him: Ms. Davidson had warned the class of this before his arrival. Karin waited for something terrible to happen, for an X, maybe, to appear magically next to her name on the behavior chart, forcing her to be sent home again on the kindergarten bus, full with answers to give a mother who wouldn’t ask.

  “I’ll die,” he said. Karin looked behind her: on the behavior chart, next to her name, were two X’s, same as before.

  “You’ll just drop dead?” she said. She rai
sed both eyebrows because she didn’t know how to raise only one.

  “I would probably suffer first,” he said.

  Karin considered this. She traced her metal horse along her teeth, like braces, sort-of. Outside, girls harmonized the wedding march: Here comes the bride.

  Jonah’s mother picked him up after school, guiding him first into an oxygen mask and then a mini-van with tinted windows. His mother didn’t look like him at all: from far away she even looked like Karin’s mother. Their hair was sort of the same.

  Jonah’s mother kept a hand on Jonah’s back until he was in the car. Then she quickly shut the door. She knocked on the window once before crossing over to the driver’s seat. Karin waved at Jonah. He didn’t wave back, maybe because he didn’t see her, or maybe because being forced to spend recess inside together didn’t make them friends.

  She walked to the back of the school bus, where she was allowed to sit, even though everyone else was an older kid. They let her, but only because of her sister. Karin wasn’t allowed to sit directly next to Amelia, but Amelia’s compromise—because sometimes Karin did start crying—was to put a knapsack between them. The bus driver didn’t really speak English, and for this everyone hated him. He made frequent threats about crashing the bus, but kids just yelled back, “Good.”

  Karin tapped her chest three times, because that was the way to keep bad things from happening.

  “Stop doing that,” Amelia said. “You always do that.”

  “I’m not doing anything,” Karin said. It was true: Right then, she wasn’t doing anything.

  Amelia tapped her own chest, but only twice. She didn’t know the code, and if it had been up to her to save the bus from crashing, everyone but Karin would right now be dead.

  “When you do that, you look like an idiot,” Amelia said.

  Karin strained to look out the window, but her sister’s fox fur coat was blocking. The coat was actually their mother’s, and it was much too long on Amelia, dragging over the floor so the bottom of the coat was matted and most often wet. Karin had a regular puffy ski jacket that made her look like a shiny snowman, and, at home, Amelia had one also, but she never wore it, and so Karin switched off wearing hers and Amelia’s, so her sister’s wouldn’t forget how to be worn.

  Karin’s mother didn’t care that Amelia had stolen her fox fur coat, even though, when she bought it, she’d said to Karin and Amelia, “This is it, girls,” smiling so hard her shoulders met her ears, her pantyhose-shiny heels lifting out of her shoes. The fox fur coat cost fifteen hundred dollars, which, the saleswoman said, was a steal.

  Karin leaned her cheek now against the coat, moving her head back and forth, so the fur swept her cheek like a soft-bristled brush. “Get off,” Amelia said.

  The school bus seats were ripped wide enough to hold small objects: someone’s pudding-streaked plastic spoon, an old orange peel, a detached zipper. Karin added the metal horse. She hadn’t known she was going to steal it until the exact last second, and then she did, stuffing it in her pocket as the class bounded in from recess, Lila with toilet paper hanging from the back of her skirt, unfairly, Karin noted: Lila had already been a bride four times, and some people, like her, had never been a bride even once.

  Sometimes Karin’s parents had date nights during the week, but because date nights were spontaneous, her parents didn’t warn them in advance. So tonight there was a babysitter, and then her parents came home. Her father went to his room without speaking to any of them. He was still wearing his coat and gloves. Her mother shimmied out her coat, which was long and black, like a dress. It had begun to snow outside, and tiny ice crystals dotted the collar.

  “He has a headache,” Karin’s mother said.

  Karin wrapped herself around her mother’s leg like a cat. “We love you,” she said. “You’re the best mother in the world.”

  Her mother patted Karin’s shoulders without looking at her.

  Karin thought that if she were a mother, she would feel so fortunate to have children who loved her, and she was afraid that when she did have children, they might not love her as much as she loved her mother.

  “Should I take a plate to Daddy?” Amelia asked. She had already arranged two ketchup-zigzagged leftover hotdogs on a plate, and was heading toward the stairs.

  Karin’s mother threaded her fingers together.

  Karin tapped her chest three times so Amelia would put down the plate and then sit at the table and tell a story about her day that would make everyone laugh.

  Amelia held the plate to her chest. She walked toward the stairs slowly, holding the plate stiffly in front of her. The hotdogs quivered.

  “She always has to be so good, doesn’t she?” Karin’s mother said. She sat at the table, and Karin sat next to her.

  “Leaping to do the right thing. She doesn’t know. Do you understand? She does not know.”

  Karin made a doughnut with her arms inside her sweater. Her mother touched Karin’s hands where they joined inside her sleeves. “He’s just—he’s a very small man.”

  Karin felt the way she did in school when Ms. Davidson acted like she’d said something smart or right, when she knew she really hadn’t.

  “There’s a new boy in my class,” she said. “He’s allergic to the sun.”

  Her mother tapped her fingers over her lips. “It was different, of course, when you both were small,” she said.

  But her mother was mixed up: in the pictures and home videos, her mother was the same as she always was; in the wedding album pictures she was different. In the wedding album, her mother’s hair was long, to the floor—almost really! And the camera didn’t make it so her eyes were red, because these were pictures it was people’s whole jobs to take.

  Amelia came down the stairs still holding the plate of hotdogs. She put it down on the table. She sat in front of the plate, picking at the dead skin on her big toe.

  Jonah wasn’t in school the next day, or the next. After a few days, it was as if he’d never existed at all. It became the day before Ms. Davidson’s wedding, and Karin was the only one who hadn’t forgotten about him. She wondered if the sun from the other kids’ faces had bled somehow onto his, and if this had made him die.

  Karin asked Lila if she thought Jonah had died from being in school, and Lila said Jonah was a gross boy, and why did she care, anyway. She pointed to the boys on the other side of the classroom.

  “Why don’t you just be a boy, if you like them so much,” she said.

  She turned away from Karin and dug into her knapsack for a plastic bag of cookies, and offered a cookie to the girl in front of Karin and to the girl behind her.

  Lila left the zipper open when she put the cookies back in her knapsack. When no one was looking, Karin reached into Lila’s knapsack and ferried the cookies safely into her own desk.

  During recess, the girls let Ms. Davidson be the bride so she could practice. Ms. Davidson acted more excited about the idea than anyone, and it made Karin sad for her. It was Karin’s turn that day to be the groom. Lila said she had a surprise for everyone, and went to the coat closet, and lifted out a garment bag with only the hanger showing. She unzipped it with careful tugs at the zipper. And then she pulled out the dress with a flourish, like the magician who had visited the school at the beginning of the year. It was the most beautiful dress Karin had ever seen. It was pink, with ruffles at the collar and hem and sleeves. The buttons were shaped like flowers.

  “It took forever to find,” Lila said. “My mother took me shopping every Sunday for a month, and then we found it, in the window, and they didn’t have my size, but then the lady took it off the mannequin, and that one fit.” She was breathless.

  “You’re going to upstage me,” Ms. Davidson said, and laughed with her head back.

  Karin felt as if she’d stumbled into the deep end of a pool when she’d meant for the intermediate. She hadn’t known she needed a dress, and she hadn’t asked her mother.

  “What if we didn’t get a dress
?” she said, but quietly, and no one heard her.

  She thought of her closet at home, but the only dresses she had were cast-offs from Amelia, which always looked wrong on her, as if they’d been donated by an anonymous charity, because, even though the clothes were from when Amelia was Karin’s age, Karin was still a different person.

  Karin’s mother did take them shopping sometimes; it wasn’t always hand-me-downs. Karin usually ended up with beautiful headbands that pinched the skin above her ears. “You’ll wear this forever,” her mother said of the headbands. And then they would shop for her, which was anyway more exciting. The last time they went shopping, her mother found a sequined evening gown that reached all the way to the bones on either side of her ankles. She wore it sometimes at home, but never when there were dishes in the sink.

  Ms. Davidson smiled now at Karin from the other end of the utility shed. “Hi there, groom,” she said, wiggling her fingers.

  Karin felt suddenly furious. Inside her coat pockets, she clenched her fists. “I’m not really a boy,” she said.

  Ms. Davidson stood still for a moment. She tilted her neck.

  “Of course you’re not a boy.”

  Karin was sent home on the kindergarten bus once the missing cookies were discovered. Everyone in the class knew she stole, because she wasn’t very good at it, and often confessed before anyone thought of accusing her. Ms. Davidson had leaned close to Karin, and for a moment, Karin wondered if her teacher was going to kiss her. “Karin, Karin,” Ms. Davidson said.

  Both her parents were home when the kindergarten bus dropped her off. They were sitting on the living room couch, her mother’s hand on her father’s shoulder. Karin dumped her knapsack down on the floor and they both turned around.

  “Where’s your sister?” Karin’s mother said.

  “I’m early,” Karin said. “I was sent home.” Her mother pressed the back of her hand to Karin’s forehead. “You feel warm,” she said.