Adults and Other Children

by Miriam Cohen

  Yael drew her hands together and then gigantically apart. “Pffff. It’s going to be cotton candy. And she’ll get her period. We’ll have to make sure she knows in advance that she’s not dying. And that those little pieces in it are perfectly normal. You know I used to think they were teeny-tiny globules of baby skin? Even though definitely I knew about sex—the period was post-Orthodox. But I thought maybe sperm could come up from the drains and get me in the bath. So I was always super relieved, and super guilty. Dead babies every month.”

  He just looked at her. It was like being with a mute. It was like bowling with bumpers. It was like punching someone who wouldn’t punch back.

  “Or we could put her in high school. She can have her first kiss in high school, and you can tell her boyfriend that you’ll knock his lights out if he even so much as lifts a finger to your baby girl. If he even so much as ruffles a hair on her head. We’ll catch her smoking pot and ground her for weeks. And then we’ll smoke the pot, and she’ll find us, and we’ll all have a good belly laugh about that.

  “Let’s send her to college. We deserve an empty nest, don’t you think, after all we’ve been through with our Wendy June? She can do a liberal arts degree and we can support her forever.”

  Yael guessed it was possible that she’d go on speaking forever. Maybe this would be their life now. She’d just talk and talk and talk and eventually she’d be her mother.

  “Should we just go ahead and have a child?” she said.

  Right away: “You’d want a child?”

  She hadn’t actually thought he’d answer. She’d thought she knew his hand, but he’d tricked her. When had they last had this conversation? Not since the earliest incarnation of the relationship, when they were trying each other on for size, back when she was doodling ironic hearts around his name, writing hers as Mrs. Yael Murphy. They’d had this conversation then, but back then they’d been laughing. A little you or me, could you just picture it?

  “We won’t name her Wendy June,” Sam said. He was speaking more quickly now. “Or him. It. We’ll give it a real name.”

  She didn’t say anything. Everything she had was wrinkled. Everything smelled. She’d only been gone a few days, but the clothing barely looked like anything she’d ever look twice at, let alone own.

  “Oh,” he said. “You were just saying.”

  “I wasn’t just saying,” she said.

  What she wanted to say—Wendy June is enough. Not the time warp Wendy June she’d summoned just now, and who lingered still, like the sound of a slap. The Wendy June they’d made up together. The Wendy June who had been an infant, but now was in first grade, and had to get her hair checked for lice. Their Wendy June, who, come Thanksgiving, hadn’t even been thankful for yams. They’d never do better than her. Wendy June was so much.

  FUN DAY

  Every year, there is one day when everyone loves the three sisters. Never mind the oldest’s going to therapy right next door to the school bus-stop, or the youngest’s penchant for feeding her lunch to stray animals every day (sometimes to a cat, sometimes to a dog), which must by now surely have translated into rabies. Or the overall oddness of the middle sister, who twists her thin arms strangely when she doesn’t know the answer to a question, and who has too many rows of pencils, all lined up exactly on her desk, point to point.

  This day is Fun Day.

  Their father, William, is CEO of a company (that sells pants? belts?), and Fun Day is like office picnics they have seen on TV—the way real farms are like the ones for ants. It makes them gloat. There is cotton candy, there are games wherein stuffed animals can be won, and there are sideshows.

  The oldest, Elizabeth, and the middle, Lucille, decide to try their luck at a game. “Try their luck” is a phrase belonging to their father. They know they will win. They always win on Fun Day. They can fail to squirt water into the clown’s mouth every time—every time! what are the odds of that?—and still, the man behind the counter will say, We have a winner! They are the daughters of the CEO, and so, on Fun Day, as they are not on any other day, they are royalty.

  Elizabeth has her eyes set on a giant bear that will not, of course, prove soft—these kinds of bears, she knows from experience, are always stuffed with what feels like newspaper. Lucille would like the enormous frog. There will be no need to fight. After they lose wildly, each will get the prize of her choosing, the screaming of other children rising up delightfully around them.

  But Sophie, who is the youngest, decides she would like to visit the sideshow. She visits the fortune-teller, because she wants to know the future. This is their last Fun Day, their mother, Anna, says, because it’s true: she’s dying. The chemo is a troop of good soldiers attacking the bad cancer, the doctor has said. The idea of soldiers marching through her mother’s body, attacking cells who are not soldiers, and who cannot fight back, horrifies Sophie. She likes better to think of it as medicine, a kind of viscous, cherry-flavored sludge.

  Sophie is curious to find out when, exactly, her mother will die. She would like to be prepared, with a face most right for mourning, which she practices at home in the bathroom mirror. The face is devastated, but dignified. She will hold her chin high and lower her eyes, so the eyelashes almost touch her cheekbones. She will bite, just lightly, her lower lip. Oh, the mourners will say. What a trooper. And the sleeves of her black dress will be just a bit too long, a reminder to all that she is now a daughter without a mother.

  The fortuneteller is stationed inside a tent that smells like lavender. There are curtains made of beads Sophie must part in order to get to her. The fortuneteller has no visitors, so, she tells Sophie, she may sit down right away. Sophie holds out her hand to shake, because she is practicing already the kind of motherless daughter she will be, which is a polite one. But the fortuneteller simply looks at Sophie’s hand, as though she has never seen one before.

  “I’m Sophie,” says Sophie. She lines up her heels so it’s like she’s a dancer while she waits.

  “Oh!” The fortuneteller sounds just like Sophie’s mother already out the door and just remembering she’s forgotten her wig. Her gums show when she smiles. “You can call me Madame Felicia.”

  “Do you have cards?” Sophie says. “Because I’m looking to find out about death.”

  Madame Felicia nods. She takes out a pack of cards and flips over four. She sets them down on her table one at a time. There is a willow tree with all its branches weeping, a sky colored in with sunset, an alligator sliding on a lily pad, also a two of spades Madame Felicia tells Sophie to never mind.

  Madame Felicia taps her fingernails on all the cards before stopping at the alligator. “There’s your death,” she says. “Are you headed to Florida? You’ve got to watch out over there. You wouldn’t believe the racket; they’re in the toilets.”

  Sophie bites the inside of her cheek. “Not really.”

  “It’ll probably just be the chemotherapy that does it, anyway,” Sophie offers. Madame Felicia blinks.

  “You’re supposed to cost money, but I get you for free,” Sophie says, and she flashes the card that says, yup, she’s her father’s daughter.

  She leaves the tent so quickly, she imagines she’s a blur. The curtain of beads is already waving closed behind her when Madame Felicia calls out, “Wait!”

  Sophie does wait. Elizabeth wouldn’t, but Sophie does.

  “We forgot about your palms,” Madame Felicia says.

  Sophie returns to the table and holds out her palms like a baffled cartoon character.

  Madame Felicia’s fingernails feel like one of Lucille’s pencils as they travel inside Sophie’s palms. “You have a nice, long lifeline,” she says. She drags a nail down the center of Sophie’s palm. “See?”

  She sounds the way mothers do on TV: There, there.

  Sophie finds Lucille and Elizabeth eating cloudy cones of cotton candy.

  “The duchess is back,” says Elizabeth. Because Sophie is the youngest, she, like any doll, belongs to
Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s full name for Sophie is The Duchess of Adorability, sometimes Duchee (pronounced Du-she) for a nickname. “Duchess, would you like some cotton candy? Do duchesses eat cotton candy?”

  “Duchesses eat corndogs,” Sophie says.

  “Corndogs are bad for braces,” says Lucille, who has braces. “With the cotton candy, it melts.”

  They flash their cards, and it’s corndogs for everyone, including Lucille, who often changes her mind. She’s right about the braces.

  They arrive at the Fun Day picnic sticky with sugar and salt and sweat. Their parents are on a blanket with one plate of watermelon and a second for the spit-out pits, slick as beetles. Their mother waves them over.

  “Girls,” she says, because it’s easier to lump them; the three names are always one too many. “Over here.”

  William, who does not often speak, glances up at the sun. One time, though, soon after Anna was diagnosed, he’d walked into the living room where they were watching a show about a woman who ran into her husband, even though he was dead. The reason she was able to run into him was his face had been transplanted onto a man who had no face. William stood in front of the set, as though he didn’t understand about television. “I know where to buy maxi-pads,” he’d said.

  “Are you girls having fun at Fun Day?” Anna asks now.

  “There’s an alligator in my future,” Sophie says.

  “There’s a frog in my present,” says Lucille, lifting the stuffed frog she’s been dragging around. There are bits of grass and dirt wading up to the frog’s anatomically impossible belly button, implied by an unraveling string.

  Anna offers William a Percocet, and when he declines, she shrugs, tossing it into her mouth with élan, no water necessary. The Percocet is not new, but when she takes them now, people’s eyes cloud and their foreheads crinkle, fans abruptly closed. She is so brave.

  Nothing has worked out the way she and William had imagined: their dream of a boy and a girl immediately disrupted by the emergence of Lucille, and even the compromise going bust, with Sophie. So, then the reluctant revision: three girls, who would dress alike and wear bows in their hair. Elizabeth had been the one to ruin it, pulling out her hair in clumps, and then of course came the therapy, even though no one went to therapy, and the cabinets filled more quickly than one might have imagined with tranquilizers. Even the dog didn’t work out, leaving droppings in carefully chosen corners, perpetually humping any available leg. His name was Pierre, in homage to the France where they would go to retire, cheerful and plump and not yet too old. Where they were to have gone.

  Lucille’s voice, made silky by the Percocet, has been threading all the while through Anna’s thoughts, and it is surprising to realize Lucille is still speaking about the carnival games.

  “We won a lot,” Lucille is saying.

  “We got a lot of prizes, she means,” Elizabeth corrects. “We were never even runner-ups.”

  “Maybe next Fun Day,” Anna says, and throws back her head, and laughs.

  They return to the hotel, which is very fancy, William wants them to know. He has said this already four times. They are meant to rest up for a while so they’ll be fresh for the fireworks. There is baby grand in the lobby, and Anna sits down on the bench. She and Elizabeth both know how to play the piano, though Elizabeth is, terribly, now better at it. Together, they play songs of Anna’s choosing: “The Sun Will Come out Tomorrow”; “I’m Still Here”; “Being Alive”; “I Whistle a Happy Tune.” Anna enjoys the inappropriateness of the songs. The sun sure will come out, I’ll certainly still be here, a funny, wonderful business isn’t it, being alive. And here I am, whistling a happy tune. Whoot whoot whoot.

  It’s a loop she says she would like to have playing at the funeral.

  It’s a loop she would like for Elizabeth to play. The other girls can’t play and are on their own to figure something out. Maybe Lucille, at least, will draw some kind of picture, make use of that odd pencil collection.

  It’s harder than it used to be for Anna to play; among the chemo’s many side effects—side effects! as though the effects were incidental!—is a numbness to the hands. But she actually will, she’ll go to her grave playing the piano. Surely, one pie-faced social worker at the hospital had said, Elizabeth’s playing is a solace. Isn’t it wonderful, how Anna will live on through her daughter? It will be, according to the social worker, like Anna’s spirit is speaking with Elizabeth every time she plays. “How about that?” she’d said to Anna. “Mom can keep on speaking,” as though Anna were a mother to her own self.

  There are getting to be more and more such social workers, each pouncing, in her own way, on Anna’s daughters. The social workers collectively believe the girls are exhibiting signs of grief, which, in this situation is perfectly natural. (It’s like a game everyone is playing, this avoiding of the word “cancer.” It’s like that stupid board game Lucille and Sophie love.) Well, the girls were peculiar before any of this happened.

  Of course, this isn’t the kind of thing you say out loud, if you’re dying. The dying are supposed to selfless and graceful as young nuns kneeling in prayer, gifting all who come to sit solemn vigils at their bedsides with a wise and far-reaching benevolence, and benediction. It isn’t that she doesn’t love the girls. It isn’t a question of love.

  But the social workers think, no, the girls are fantastic, with only one perfectly natural, and solvable problem. And the social workers hand out pamphlets and warm smiles like perfume samples. The pamphlets come with advice like, There is no one way to grieve, and, It is perfectly normal to feel angry, and, It is okay to feel sad, and also, Sometimes punching a pillow can help. Very, very much. The smiles come with odors of cheap chocolate or butterscotch sucking candy. The social workers are the last people on earth Anna would call upon if she were dying—though, whoops! she already is. She will not live on through Elizabeth’s playing. Anna will play with her now, and once she is dead, she’ll be dead. Her “spirit” will not emerge and retreat, stubborn and annoying as a cuckoo from a clock.

  As she plays, Anna’s fingers, sluggish as tired children, veer inward, creating the impression of oven mitts. “Are you sure I’m on the right key?” she asks Elizabeth, though they both know she is, of course, not even close. “You’re perfect,” says Elizabeth, because she and all the rest only lie and lie, and now, as Anna stops playing, not half-way through the song, they all stand up, clapping, calling out, Encore!

  At night, all of them say gosh how nice the fireworks look up there in the sky.

  The day after Fun Day is like the morning after a dream: startlingly regular. Sophie has been exiled from the hotel room; Elizabeth, claiming to be playing house, has named herself the mother, Lucille the father, and Sophie the teenager daughter. So go on a date, Sophie has been instructed. The castles have been deflated; the Ferris wheel is on its side. Some of the vendors have already disappeared, and the ones left have gates to cover their prizes. There seem to be more mosquitoes in the air, now that there is so much extra room.

  Sophie sits on the lawn where the fireworks used to be. There are some stray light-up bracelets and necklaces for which Sophie’s family had not needed, as everyone else had, to pay. But now, that that they are the daughters of the CEO means nothing. Fun Day, their last, is over.

  Sophie splits a blade of grass right down its center. The smell is earthy and sweet. They’ve already visited Anna’s plot, and there is grass like this in the cemetery, on which Sophie will maybe sit, and weep with gentle dews of tears. The epitaph is all set to read “Devoted wife and mother.” Many other tombstones have the same or a similar inscription. This is why William has picked it: he likes to get things right. Anna had wanted: “I may not be composing, but I sure am decomposing!”

  This idea, William had told the funeral director, was one caused by the cancer’s spreading from breast to bone, and, finally, to brain. But Anna is the same as she’s ever been, and the doctor has not mentioned anything about brains at al
l, except for the one time he tapped his own head and said, “Kishkas” as a modest declaration of the superior inner workings of his own brain. What he’d gotten right that time was the root of Anna’s fickle memory; it was the chemotherapy at work, that army. And how he must have gone through that day congratulating himself: Boy, if he didn’t have a terrific bedside manner!

  Sophie is now on the grass, closing her eyes but still seeing the muted kaleidoscope of sun beneath her eyelids. Without this, here’s death: stiff as a board. But her mother will not be also light as a feather; corpses are said to be heavy. And now Sophie feels a presence, a hovering body above her. So here she is, feeling and seeing and not dead.

  She opens her eyes, and there is Madame Felicia, but without the flowing dress and rippling necklaces, the bracelets extending up to her elbows, the knuckle-hugging rings. She looks like a person Sophie might pass on the street or see from a moving car. She is younger than Sophie’d realized, and, without the flowing dress, without the table between them, she sees Madame Felicia’s just pregnant enough not to be someone about whom Sophie’s mother would say, Well, she’s really gone and let herself go.

  Madame Felicia sits down next to Sophie, but Sophie doesn’t sit up. She stays lying down. “I was hoping I’d catch you,” says Madame Felicia. “Just after you left, I had a thought about your card.”

  “I was getting corndogs,” Sophie says. “I get them free.”

  “I realized I read the card backward. The alligator actually means the opposite of death. So, life.”

  Sophie narrows her eyes. What Madame Felicia’s saying is what her mother would call “a leap.” This is what she’d said when Sophie and her sisters all chipped in to buy her a mug that said, every word in a different color, Number One Mother!

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Sophie says. “There aren’t any alligators. We’re not going to Florida.”