Adults and Other Children

by Miriam Cohen

  Madame Felicia rubs her elbow. The skin there, Sophie sees, is wrinkled and dry. “Who’s getting the chemotherapy?” Madame Felicia says.

  Sophie doesn’t really want to think about it, but she can see the beginning of Madame Felicia’s breasts from where she is lying down. They are smushed together for being so big. Inside her bra must be silver dollar areolas, sprouting coarse black hairs around the rims, the breasts themselves streaked with veins, drooping, shriveled udders. This is how Sophie’s mother’s breasts looked, when she had breasts.

  Sophie stands up. “Is your husband a fortuneteller, too?”

  “I don’t have a husband,” Madame Felicia says.

  “So it’ll be just you and the baby. You should put the baby up for adoption.”

  Madame Felicia puts her hand on her stomach. The way she touches her stomach is as if it’s a bedpan—a clean one, but still—she’s been asked just a second to hold, and no one’s remembered to tell her where or when to put it down.

  “Sometimes people don’t like it when they’re adopted.”

  “Leave it on a church doorstep. A nun will find it. Nuns can’t even have babies, did you know that?”

  Now Madame Felicia laughs. “Believe me on this—you wouldn’t want a nun for a mother.”

  If Sophie’s mother were a nun, Sophie would be her only child. She would have been rescued from a doorstep where she’d been an abandoned orphan left to die. She would have been almost frozen to death, and when the nuns found her, they would have at first thought she was dead, but then they’d be wrong. And her mother would be married to God.

  But Sophie’s real mother hates nuns. “Get the hell out of here,” she said once to a nun who’d walked so quietly into the room, on shoes softer even than a nurse’s. Sophie’s mother said she’d be damned if she was going to pray. “Oh no,” said the nun. “Prayer is the way to salvation.” “Get the hell out,” her mother said. “Get her the hell out.” There was a bag of her mother’s pee that was so yellow it was almost brown, and when her mother yelled, she shook the bed and she shook the bag of pee.

  “Your fortunes don’t even make any sense,” Sophie tells Madame Felicia. “Your baby is going to starve to death.”

  “Well, do you have some money and an address?” Madame Felicia waits in a way that makes Sophie know she’s meant to laugh, but at something that’s not funny.

  “Money and an address for what?”

  “For what?” Sophie says again, because she’s all out of patience. She makes it so when she sighs there’s no breath left. “I’m a teenager out on a date, but the date is stupid, and now I’m going to go home.”

  Madame Felicia just sits there, pregnant.

  All across Sophie’s nose it’s like sunburn.

  At the funeral, Elizabeth plays “The Party’s Over” because she thinks the idea of life with her mother being a party will please and comfort the mourners, and maybe make some of them jealous. She is pretty wrong. So she stops that and begins the loop her mother had requested and the mourners look to her, at each other, and then the floor. They imagine they knew her mother.

  The casket is sitting right there.

  People pass by it as though it’s a couch on sale for the cost of nothing, savaged by moths. An aunt of some sort is holding tissues, an entire box. The funeral officiator stands. He is neither rabbi nor priest, and anyway, it doesn’t matter: He has confided that he switches suits to match the occasion. He says Anna lived a life too short, but that she was wonderful and devoted, a consummate mother and wife, maybe gone, but never forgotten. His speech is a song perfectly learned and executed, and he’s like a movie star up there: pausing, knitting his lips, ever so slightly bowing his head.

  He even has a specific story to recount, chosen like a specialty chocolate from a box colored gold. He has never met Anna. But he knows everything wonderful about her because he interviewed the four of them, asking questions that could only be answered the right way.

  He smiles sadly, a gentle shrug of the mouth. His eye contact is impossibly inclusive. He clears his throat and begins. He picks the one about Pierre to tell. (And here there is just a bit of laughter. How about that! A story about a dog at a funeral!)

  “The mischief-maker had gotten himself into some prescription medication and ended up needing to be rushed to the animal ER,” the officiator says. “For the evening Pierre spent at the hospital, the girls were understandably beside themselves. And Anna went right to her piano, gathering the girls to her side. She played ‘Not While I’m Around.’” (And here, the worry arises that he will sing, but no, he knows better.) He says the first line of lyrics like a sentence: “Nothing’s going to harm you, not while I’m around.”

  He looks exactly at everyone. “Anna may no longer be with us, but her gifts will continue to serve and to guide her family, and in this way she is not so far from this world as we might imagine.”

  The mother he describes is one who makes Sophie jealous, though the mother from the story belongs—belonged—to her. And everything the officiator said is absolutely true; they all sang around the piano, and laughed, and Sophie had even believed, almost, that her mother was right, and could keep Pierre safe, and then she actually had. But he skipped over the part about how Pierre got into the pills: Her mother had been fighting with her father, who’d told her she was the craziest woman he’d ever known, and she rushed to the medicine cabinet and threw a bottle of pills into the air. “I’ll show you crazy,” she’d said.

  The officiator nods now to the mourners, as though he is one of them: deeply, deeply sad. He stands aside to make room for Lucille, whose turn is next. She is a stringy puppet on the podium, smiling like rubber bands are pulling back her lips. Puffs of mosquito bites dot her legs. She’s so skinny, Anna used to pretend to fold her, like a shirt.

  Lucille delivers a poem that rhymes: “You are the first person I met/ you bet./ You always made good cake/which I did help bake./ You had cancer of the breast/which is not the best.”

  Sophie trades places with Lucille. She imagines she’s the officiator, and this is her job, and she is very fantastic at it. She clears her throat. She almost does a curtsey, but stops herself in time. It’s hard to remember, exactly, where it is they actually are. It feels easy to confuse it with the party that comes after a recital. She stands very still. She looks out at the pews, half-filled with aunts and uncles and grandparents and some friends who are her mother’s former lovers, but now her former accompanists from when her mother used to play the piano, from when she was so much better than Elizabeth. Sophie is still saying nothing. She is on stage, and here are all these people, watching her. They are here to see her. Imagine: It is her at a piano. She is making the music everyone is listening to. The man accompanying her is someone she might have married. She has been so many different people.

  An aunt hisses for Sophie to sit down, honey.

  She is herself again.

  “Oh, Duchee,” Elizabeth whispers once Sophie is back, having eulogized her mother not at all. “No one has a right to be so cute.”

  Lucille’s cheek is hot as fever against Sophie’s. Someone new is speaking, not their silent father, whose shoulders make him look small, and whose arms dangle at his sides. There are some tears, handkerchiefs like a sudden flock of doves. Their shoes make shadows on the floor, and all the feet look alone.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank my wonderful teachers, without whom this book would surely not exist. Thank you to Arthur Budick (1949-2011), who taught me how to read so beautifully and first showed me how I might go about making a life for myself in literature. Thank you to Marisa Schwartz, my first creative writing teacher, who helped me see that I might have something worth saying, in a way worth saying. And to my teachers at the Sarah Lawrence College MFA program: Victoria Redel, Mary La Chapelle, Josh Henkin, Nelly Reifler. Thank you, too, to the teachers whose classes I took outside of academia, at the Sackett Street Writers Workshop and Catapult: Aria Beth
Sloss, Nick Dybek, Caroline Zancan, Alex Mar, and Fatima Farheen Mirza. Thank you for treating my writing with such respect and care. And, of course, a gargantuan thank you to Josh Gaylord, who has been my teacher, colleague, mentor, reader, and—after I finally got a view of those clay feet—very good friend.

  Thank you to The Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing for giving me the time and space to work on this collection. Thank you to all the journals who took a chance on individual stories in the collection and first made me believe there could be readers for my work: The Black Warrior Review, StoryQuarterly, West Branch Wired, Cream City Review, The Florida Review, DIAGRAM, Carve Magazine, Cimarron Review, The Collagist, Bennington Review, Joyland, Image, and Witness.

  Thank you to Julia Kenny, who plucked my collection from the slush pile and helped me find its narrative shape—and for all the cheerleading and therapizing along the way. An enormous thank you to Robert Lasner, for bringing this book into the world.

  Thank you to my parents, for their endless support. And, too, for the terrific material. Thank you to my siblings, the sole survivors of our childhood. To my nieces and nephews: I’m so thrilled you exist. The eight of you have filled my life with so much more joy than I could ever have imagined possible. Maybe one day your parents will consider you old enough to read this book.