“No.”
“None of the statues in our house have pubic hair. But they are all naked.”
Mark was staring at me, looking at the way my bottom lip was too large for my top lip.
“Maybe your mother had them shaved.”
He rolled a cigarette in his hand and put it to his mouth. He pretended to eat it. I smiled.
“Don’t eat that,” I said.
Something incredible was about to happen and yet, neither of us could stomach the idea of it. We couldn’t even look at each other. I stared back at the party, which was either dying out or at its peak. It was hard to be sure. Adults always had a different idea of what a good time was. When my parents and I went to Disney World, we rode the teacups, spun around in a thousand circles until we couldn’t remember our names. I was exhilarated. I laughed until I peed a little. My father’s sunglasses flew off his head, Ray-Bans lost forever. “Let’s never do that again, huh?” my father said, and straightened out his shirt. My mother fussed over her bangs. My father squinted the rest of the day. At night, we went to Epcot and sampled breads, and both of them got a perverted satisfaction out of agreeing with each other—the Irish soda bread had the perfect ratio of raisin to dough, why go to France when their bread is here, and isn’t Emily being rude? I laid my body on a stone wall nearby, so bored I threatened to harden into rock, swim to Cuba, sell my body to Donald Duck, if he would even have me. They ignored this, continued nodding at the vendor.
Adults, I was learning, were not a people of dramatic gestures. When they approved of something, they gently nodded, and when they wanted something, they gently nodded, and when they were upset by something, they gently nodded and then shifted their body weight to indicate a significant change of attitude. Everything they wanted was within reach, or at least one nod away, so mostly, the adults stood upright, their arms stuck to their sides, like manikins unaware of the night dimming around them. They were getting blinder, more immobile every day, and I felt it was my duty to warn them, to shout through the trees with a megaphone: Do you adults see how old you are getting? My father was getting so old. Every day, I noticed new ways his body was failing us. Last night, he’d gotten a piece of chicken stuck in his esophagus at dinner. He put one finger in the air, which signified to my mother and me to wait, and then put one hand around the bottom of his throat. Then, he swallowed slowly. When the food passed, he said, “This happens from time to time.” When it wouldn’t pass, he went to the bathroom, where he forced himself to throw up. Either way, he continued eating, and I was heartbroken by the simplicity of it, my father’s body broken.
“You’re very herniated,” Mark said.
I forgot what I had planned to say. Mark reached out and touched my hair. I couldn’t believe it. The thought of reaching out to touch him felt as criminal as reaching out to trace the lines of a Picasso painting at the MoMa. But Mark seemed confident in his action, as though touching each other was becoming the right thing to do.
“You have knots,” he said, his fingers stuck at the end of my ponytail. The dried lemon juice was coarse in my hair.
“So?” I said. “All girls have knots.”
“So?”
“I’m just saying,” I said.
He leaned closer, took me in.
“You look a lot like Michael Bolton with that greasy ponytail.”
My stomach sank. Nobody ever knew how to talk about anything. It was all so disappointing. After my mother told me about the divorce that morning, I stormed upstairs, stood in the bathtub, and refused to bathe. Why bathe? I shaved my legs without soap or water and cut my knee. I stuck my nose to the coconut shampoo and tried to imagine my mother’s reaction if I stormed down to the kitchen and said, “Mother, are you sure you know what beach smells like? I don’t think you understand what kind of beach I go to.” But I didn’t because she would have said, “Since when do you call me ‘Mother’? That makes me feel so old.” I just did not understand her sometimes, though I had always tried, a project bigger than I realized at the time. I studied her face over her cereal bowl, her skin tight against her cheekbones, while my father’s sagged toward the milk like a man who was so so tired of everything, especially cereal made 100 percent out of fiber, a breakfast that made him “shit all the goddamned time,” he told my mother. “I’m a working man,” he said, holding up the box. “And I can’t be shitting between calls.”
My mother had laughed in his face. My mother was thirty-seven, thirteen years younger than my father, and she often used her youth as leverage to win arguments, something I didn’t realize was even possible since it was youth that was always my handicap. But my mother was always successful in her attack, walking around the house in her underwear to show my father how smooth her legs were; she was only thirty-seven and still happy in her skin. She had only about three visible varicose veins and they were on the backs of her knees. My father refused to look at her when they fought. He would sit down, stroke his chin, and look out a window like he couldn’t believe the world was ending in this particular way. My mother would stare at him across the room in disgust, squint her eyes as though she was counting his wrinkles. Every day she denied my father the peace he had hoped would come with age and in response my father always shouted some variation of, “You knew that when I married you, Gloria!”
You knew my pants would shrink! You knew I would move less, hum more, analyze important American revolutionaries at dinner!
“A pretty Michael Bolton,” Mark said.
“That’s still mean.”
Mark moved his head toward mine. As I leaned in, and felt only the air against my lips, I realized that I was accepting a kiss that was not being proposed. I opened my eyes. Mark was looking at something behind me.
“Who’s over there?” he asked.
I turned around to see two figures in the dark, holding each other.
“Let’s go find out,” I said.
We crept over to get a better view of the adults. We leaned against the tree and watched them kiss deeply.
“I bet it’s Mr. Bulwark and Mrs. Trenton,” I said. “She was leaning into his large ear earlier.”
“Nah, Mrs. Trenton’s a wolf.”
“Like, good wolf or bad wolf?”
“Bad wolf.”
“Is that like, a wolf you wouldn’t sleep with?”
“Shh. Get your camera.”
I got my camera, steadied it against my eye. I focused on the two adults, centering them. I pressed down on the button.
The flash illuminated my father’s face. But my father didn’t even notice, didn’t even budge. His arms were steady around Mrs. Resnick’s waist. He was burying his face in her neck. His mouth was on her throat, and the rest of her neck looked raw under the moonlight. Mark and I stood by our tree, watching my father’s mouth pull away from Mrs. Resnick’s neck while her skin remained so covered in him.
I was going to be sick.
A caterpillar crawled away from my hand like he was fleeing the scene. For one moment, I thought about picking it up, holding the caterpillar in my hand like a friend who needed to see the animals too but wasn’t tall enough. I thought about putting my hand on Mark’s back, pretending that was all I needed to keep me from falling over from the sight of our parents. But balance was what the tree was for and Mark probably would have looked at me and said, “Emily, then what is the tree for?” and I would have had to respond, “Oh,” or “Yeah,” or something equivalent as though I had never stopped to consider that things had another function separate from being all around us.
Mrs. Resnick laughed. Apparently, my father was being incredibly funny.
“Baby, shhh,” my father said. “You’re going to wake up the party.”
Mark turned away from the sight, but I kept staring. We stood quietly and then suddenly I remembered everything I wanted to say earlier. Uncle Vito hated carrots, especially the baby ones, and Mrs. Trenton didn’t think it was right for someone to hate baby anything. Alfred groped his wife’s
butt by the rutabaga dip and Mr. Hemley thought this was absolutely an inappropriate thing to do.
“I guess my father thinks your mother is very herniated,” I whispered.
“Shut up,” he said, quietly and in my ear. “Don’t make stupid jokes. Don’t make your voice all high-pitched like that, all curious and interested and stupid and shit.”
“Don’t tell me to shut up,” I said.
“Your father’s a shithead.”
“Your mother’s so old!”
Mrs. Resnick was thirty-nine, two years older than my mother.
“Your father’s a fuck face.”
“Shut up.”
He came closer. For a second, I still thought he might kiss me.
“A giant bloody cunt,” he whispered in my ear.
The word felt wrong coming out of his mouth, uncomfortable, like a new pair of jeans still stiff around your body. He was staring at me like he could kill me, while I felt certain that I loved him, that I would have sat back down on the log and pretended nothing had happened if he would; even in that moment when his cruelty was desperate and barbaric, clinging to my face, I would have asked him to reach out for me. But I stood there, so deeply openmouthed, a bird could have flown in.
“Do you know what he does for a living?” Mark asked.
“Of course I know what he does for a living,” I said. “He’s my father.”
Though I didn’t actually know what my father did for a living because every time I asked, he said, “I’m an investment banker,” and I’d say, “What’s that?” and he’d sit me down all serious, as though I was on the brink of learning something incomprehensible. With a hand on his knee, he’d say, “Well . . .”
I’d beg him to stop. “No more! No more! I can’t take any more!” I’d shout, and we’d laugh.
“He fucking steals money from companies,” Mark said. It felt typical for some reason that Mark would know my father better than I did. Sometimes I got the distinct feeling that everybody knew my father better than I did, even our mailman, whom he chatted with at the end of our driveway. “And everybody hates him. My father hates him. He said that nobody at the golf course liked to play with him because he tried to make bets with money that nobody had.”
“My father is a good golfer,” was all I thought to say.
“Your father is a bastard. I should kill him.”
“You can’t kill him,” I said. “He’s my father.”
“Fathers get killed all the time,” he said.
I could almost feel my mother looking around on the deck with an empty drink, sucking on the green olive, grimacing with bitterness but only because she had nothing else to do. My father was not dancing with her, not dipping her until the bobby pins fell from her bun and between the cracks of the Brazilian wood.
“I’m out of here,” Mark said.
“Oh my God,” Richard said, pointing at my father. Richard had followed us in the woods and stood between two oaks gaping at us. My father and Mrs. Resnick were still oblivious, huddled together, two bodies sharing a mouth. Mark pushed by Richard and left.
“Your dad’s in serious trouble,” Richard said to me, seeming somewhat pleased about this.
“Fuck you, Trenton,” I said, and ran after Mark. “I’m going to vomit,” I said to Mark when I caught up, the Polaroid developing in my hand.
“Don’t be such a child,” he said. “Vomiting would change nothing.”
When we got to my side yard, my lawn became his. I stopped and watched him go. He opened his front door and walked inside. He did not even say good night. He did not even turn around. I stood like this, in between our lawns, until I had to sit, until I started running my hands up and down my legs. Everything was moving too fast. The hair on my legs had grown back into stubble. The cut on my knee had crusted into a scab. It was already brown. I was already picking at it with a nail and the blood was already at my shoe. Dr. Trenton was already sober. Mrs. Bulwark’s eyes were already clumped in mascara like it was the next morning. Mrs. Hanley was asleep on the deck. The Polaroid in my hand was already fully formed, a picture of people who were already unidentifiable, my father and Mrs. Resnick, dark blurry figures among the trees as though they were a people before my time, their customs outdated, already myths.
My mother was at my back with her hand on my shoulder, telling me the bad news: some of the adults were tired; they were getting their purses and hats and into their cars, and even though their departure was penciled into the invitation from the start, I felt their absence in my gut like abandonment, a wide and expansive bullet through my stomach, carving a path for the wind.
“What do you have there?” my mother said, looking at the picture.
“See for yourself.” I handed it to her.
“Emily,” my mother said. “You were supposed to take pictures of the guests. Not the trees. We already know what our backyard looks like.”
“Then maybe you should have hired a professional,” I said. “For Christ’s sake, Mother, I am only a child!”
She flinched as though this was a terrible secret I had been keeping from her.
And everything was always intolerably like my mother said: your father’s birthday was such a fiscal success. Mr. Lipson got your father to invest in an expanding branch of Bubble, International. Which, you know, means good things for your father. I don’t want you thinking that just because we’re getting divorced we won’t benefit from his wealth. We will. And that still makes us a family, right? You don’t just stop being a family because of a stupid piece of paper. It’s not like today we are a family, and tomorrow, there is a piece of paper, and we’re not a family. That’s not how it works.
My mother sat down on the white chairs and sipped the last of her martini and sighed.
“Really,” she said. “I don’t know why Mrs. Resnick just doesn’t hire a gardener. That poor boy Mark. Did you see that look she gave me when I mentioned your father planted lilies, like I was rubbing it in, like I was trying to brag about how I have a husband who is concerned about the vegetative state of our yard? And her dress, I mean, right?”
Right. I understood. “It was a terrible dress,” I said. “Too wide on the shoulders. She looked like a really excited cardboard box. And can a cardboard box even be excited? She defies all logic. And her hair. It’s like she went to the hairdresser and said, ‘Francois! Make me look more like a gerbil than a gerbil!’”
My mother looked at me. “You’re funny,” she said. “I’m not very funny. How did you get so funny?”
“I used to watch a lot of television,” I said.
My mother did not laugh like people normally do when they discover someone who makes them laugh. Instead, she reached out and touched my arm and said gravely like it was the last time she would ever recognize the comedy of the situation, “Thank you for making me laugh.”
My mother picked up her drink. I watched her move through the crowd, her crowd, the crowd she built on a pad with a pen three months ago in our living room when she said, “Victor, how about a giant party?” And my father had said, “What’s the occasion?”
“Your turning fifty!” she said.
My father pointed to his bald head and explained what it meant to be fifty.
“Being fifty means you finally have enough money to throw a decent party for a change,” my mother said. “We’ll invite everybody and it’s perfect timing, we have the new deck. We’ll invite the neighbors and your coworkers and good cheer.”
“And what do we do if the cheer does not RSVP?” my father said. “What shall we do then, Gloria?” They laughed. I know I heard them laugh. I know this because I laughed too, and thought, This is exactly how I will talk to the people that I love when I get older.
I sat back on my chair and watched my mother keep her head up and smile, her hair tightly wound in a bun. She was so thin and restrained in her movement. She was sticking out her hand, saying thank you so much for attending our party, we’ll see you soon. It was like she always s
aid: there are better ways of saying good-bye than others. Don’t just stand there, with your mouth all agape, Emily, it’s unbecoming. Be an adult. There’s nothing more impressive than a child who is really an adult and vice versa. Stick out your hand, keep a firm grasp, no, no, not a limp noodle, Emily, not like that, do you want people to think you are just a noodle? Do you want them to say, “You throw a good party,” for a noodle? No. Stand tall, look people in the eye, and say, “Good-bye and thank you so much for attending our party.”
The Other Girls
3
At first, it was intuitive. You could spot an Unfuckable the same way you could identify a bird sitting outside a window. This was what the Other Girls told me as soon as we sat at our desks in the back of biology. One of them pointed a finger and proclaimed, “Unfuckable.” Debate followed. Consensus reached. Annie Lars, an Unfuckable indeed. It was an archaic system of justice; we passed judgment with only suspicions of Unfuckability, and all the while, our teacher Ms. Nailer stood in the front of the room trying to teach us how to be grateful for things we never knew we had to be grateful for.
“Eskimo women chewed on their husband’s shoes when they got back from hunting,” Ms. Nailer said between sips of her coffee. “Their teeth would wear down over time. I want you all to rub your teeth and feel grateful.”
We did as such.
These were the things we learned freshman year: Even Eskimo women (who did not like to be called Eskimo women) needed to get married in order to survive (one person couldn’t tend to the igloo and also hunt all day for the seals); it took fifteen days for a peeled banana enclosed in a jar to be fully infested by tiny maggots, and it took another fifteen days after that for all the maggots to consume the banana, and this whole affair was called decomposition (something that would happen to us one day, said Ms. Nailer). We learned that most records were not necessarily achievements: Janice’s ancestors were responsible for executing hundreds of “witches” in seventeenth-century Germany; Brittany Stone’s parents had been divorced and remarried three times; soda cans have nine teaspoons of sugar (which makes you fat); William Taft, heaviest president of all time, was so fat he couldn’t get out of his tub, which wasn’t supposed to be funny, Ms. Nailer said. It was wrong to make fun of fat people (Taft couldn’t help it), or the mentally challenged (extra chromosome), or the Unfuckables (they’ll never get fucked), or girls wearing their mothers’ gold jewelry (their mothers were usually dead), and we knew all of this, even though none of us could recognize the difference between “discreet” and “discrete,” Missouri or Mississippi, good people or bad people (but I was pretty positive reptile eggs had tough outer coverings and amphibian eggs lacked outer coverings, which was why they were laid in water, water that contained over nineteen species of box jellyfish, the most venomous animal in the world, a bite that nearly no one ever survived, unless you were smart and had on your panty hose).
The Adults Page 3