Janice and the Other Girls made it a game to chase after the young male teachers, especially the ones who played soccer with the freshman boys after school, boys who made me sick, who were suddenly unworthy and uneducated and followed us around the halls like they had nothing better to do than stare at our asses and write Cunts ’R’ Us on the girls’ bathroom door while they waited for their beards and bodies and brains to grow in. We popped bubblegum in our mouths on the sidelines of the football games that nobody actually cared about, where Janice would cheer for a boy, sometimes Peter Barnes or Ben Mulligan or even Richard, always as a joke, screaming, “Woo!” That was another thing: enthusiasm had to be fake. When you were caught genuinely excited over something, it was worse than getting caught with your pants down. An older couple in matching navy blue fleeces, parents, turned to look at Janice, a girl all crazy for a guy, and whispered to each other. I could tell they thought she was dumb. That was just something you could tell by looking at Janice. You looked at her and thought, That girl is probably dumb, but in reality, she was the only person in our geography class who knew that Mississippi was a Southern state, and Missouri was a Midwestern state. She knew that women were supposed to stick mints in their vaginas so they wouldn’t taste so much like vaginas, and bleaching the labia was important too. This was what she told me at two in the morning that August night I called her crying after I saw my father kissing Mrs. Resnick. Janice leaned her bike against the side of my house. “Want to try?”
I laughed. She put the hair behind my ears and said, “Now, don’t you feel better?”
“No,” I said. “Bleaching your vagina is sad, I think.”
“That’s why I brought this,” she said. She held up a container of yogurt.
“What’s that for?”
She grabbed my hand, and we walked toward the Resnicks’ house. She opened up the yogurt and took a spoon and started flinging the yogurt at their windows. “It’s all I could find,” she said, apologetic. “Try.”
I flung the yogurt at their window, and while this didn’t necessarily make me feel any better, it was nice to know that Janice really was my best friend, and when I asked her things like, “Do boys want our vaginas to taste like mouths?” she always knew the answer. She knew things nobody else did, just as I knew things nobody else did, like if Janice had to be a lesbian she’d do it with ABOB since ABOB was the manliest girl she could think of, or that Janice was five pounds under the normal weight for a five-foot-six girl, but that she still believed herself to be twenty pounds overweight, and whenever she thought she was getting fat she fasted and cleansed, stirred lemon and cayenne pepper and molasses into a tall glass of water and drank it all—her only meal for two days—then ground her teeth at night, wearing away the enamel, not to mention building up a fluid in her jaw that hurt when it got below freezing.
I knew that her dermatologist grabbed her breasts once to “look for skin cancer underneath.” I knew her father practiced witchcraft in the secrecy of their basement. I knew that she cried whenever Sneaker Pimps came on the radio because theirs was the song she masturbated to for the first time (wrapped a carrot in Saran Wrap and inserted it inside her), and while “6 Underground” was blasting in her room, her younger brother Ed fell down a flight of wooden stairs. He was knocked unconscious, and Janice had no idea, until her mother got home from the grocery store and flung open Janice’s door, finding her, carrot and all. She called her a “dumb shit,” a “filthy whore,” and I knew this was what Janice still believed about herself (though she would never tell the story in this way).
Before I introduced Janice to the Other Girls, I had always referred to them as just that: these other girls in my biology class who liked to swear excessively in casual conversation. At lunch, it was fuck green beans, fuck milk, fuck eating for the sake of eating, fuck everyone in line—“Would you?” one of the Other Girls asked Janice. “Would you fuck everyone in line?”
Janice laughed. She took to them immediately. There was nothing that anyone could ever say that would shock Janice (“Your brother will never walk again,” the doctor told them all), nothing that anyone could ever do to make her open her mouth in surprise. Janice had always been bolder and brighter than me—even her eye shadow seemed to scream as she walked down the halls—always discovering the world one second before I did, even drew me a map of my own vagina once so I could put in a tampon for the first time, and I was in the bathroom wide-eyed, saying, “Not the pee hole?” and she was arms crossed, on the toilet, saying, “Of course not the pee hole.”
Janice admired what she called the Other Girls’ “enterprising speech patterns,” while I feared them, and we both felt we had to resort to mockery in order to survive the day. Janice called me after school and said, “Hello, my fucking friend.”
I laughed.
“Let’s go to the fucking beach so I can wear my new fucking bikini,” she said. So we went to the beach nearly every day that September, and Janice wore her new fucking bikini that was purple and had white fucking flowers adorning the bottom.
“It’s still so fucking hot,” Janice said. We were sitting in the back of her mother’s car like professional passengers, French manicures on our toes, hemp bags across our chests. We were freshmen now. This meant no more pink, no more looking good on purpose, and no more laughing too hard. Half of our new friends starved themselves for religious reasons, though they never went to church and prayed only before a history test, and if we had religious thoughts, they were only worries that we would die while wearing our retainers and then have to wear them for the rest of eternity. “Isn’t it fucking fall?”
“Technically, not until the fucking autumnal equinox,” I said.
“Girls,” her mother scolded. We laughed, then apologized.
We didn’t let our mothers stay at the beach with us anymore because my god, we were grown women with breasts, and standing around in our bikinis was like standing around in our underwear, and we couldn’t act naturally at the beach, or anywhere really, with our mothers looking at our bodies.
Instead of staying, our mothers dropped us off with the same warning: “Don’t stick your head under!” and a newly added, “Don’t talk to any of the boys!” This was always Janice’s mother though, as my mother was at home watching The People’s Court. Her only warning before I left the house was, “Emily, don’t ever lend your cheating boyfriend your brand-new Pontiac.”
“Okay,” I said. “Noted.”
“Actually,” she said, “don’t ever buy a Pontiac new.”
This was supposed to be a sad joke, but I was impressed. My mother knows things about cars, I thought as I ran out the door.
“Aha!” Janice said, pointing her finger. “There they are.”
We sat down with the Other Girls. They were in striped bikinis. One of them was peeling the skin off an almond with her teeth. One of them had pubic hair coming out the side of her bottoms. One of them looked like a young Barbara Walters, which was Martha, chomping on a hot dog.
“God, Martha,” said one of them, her teeth grating at the almond.
“What?”
“You’re so fat in your intent sometimes.”
“Huh?”
“You’re like, not actually fat, but you desire all the things fat people desire, like hot dogs and ice cream,” she said. “So really, you’re, like, fat in intent.”
The Other Girls, of which there were six including Martha, were thin with arms that looked like needles. They could prick and deflate you with one word. They were the kinds of girls I desperately wanted to like; life would be so much easier if I just liked them, I thought.
One of them licking salt off a rice cracker asked, “Uh, what’s a tenor sax?”
I got up and walked to the edge of the beach. The water cooled my shins.
There were certain things I could see more clearly now. The Sound sat at the margin of the Atlantic to collect things. Nitrogen levels were on the rise. Mercury was being dumped, and the jellyfish were gr
owing like tumors in pockets along the shore, the clear ones that slipped into our baggy bathing suits and made us scream for no reason.
I could still hear the girls from their towels.
“This is how you know a guy is a liar,” one of them said. “He shrugs his shoulders a lot and creates an obstacle between you and his mouth.”
“Like a fence?” another one of them said, to which I heard Janice exclaim, “Wow, that’s so true actually. Mr. Basketball always puts a Coke can up to his mouth, especially after we’ve slept together.”
The Other Girls laughed. Mr. Baskette, a teacher at our school whom Janice started calling Mr. Basketball for fun, was the most Fuckable teacher at Webb High, determined by poll. He had an Irish nose, a classically Greek jawline, and so did Janice. Janice belonged with him, everyone decided, at least facially; “Your kids would have the best faces,” Brittany said. But he had eyes like mine, I thought as I submerged myself in the water. I could feel the fish mutating at my feet, the insecticides nesting between my toes. My hair spread out around me. The water flooded my ears until it felt like an invasion.
5
On Sundays, Richard and Mark chucked crab apples at each other across the street. From my window, I was able to see the objective of the game: they were trying to hurt each other.
Five years ago, Richard, Mark, and I would have been at the cold spring that ran through our woods, where Richard held one of my Barbies facedown in the water until I was positive it had drowned, until I said, “Richard! Stop!” and he looked at me and said, “Emily, it’s just plastic.” Richard was the boy who knew things like this, and I was the girl who didn’t realize that the things I chose to love were never meant to be seen in any real, human way. Mark, who always just wanted to get along, was in the background and said, “Why do you guys have to fight all the time? I don’t understand why you have to fight.”
Inside my house, nobody was home, except everybody, but it was easy to feel like those were one and the same. My mother was watching television. My father was in the basement. My father was on the verge of leaving us. He didn’t say it like this. In fact, nobody said it like this. We weren’t allowed to speak of his distance. It only upset my mother. We just watched him move slowly out of the house one box at a time, as though it were becoming a tiresome project to leave this life behind, an operation that required way too much packing tape. I was at the window, or outside on the driveway, or somewhere else entirely, and if anybody bothered to ask what I was learning in school, this was the answer I was preparing: a person can feel equally alone anywhere; you can be just as lonely in biology class holding a rabbit as you can standing next to a window in the middle of September as you can watching older people on television take each other’s clothes off.
My mother and I watched Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman at eight. Touched by an Angel at nine. Every Sunday we decided something different. We decided we probably wouldn’t watch Touched by an Angel if it didn’t come on right after Dr. Quinn, if they didn’t show a small preview before we had time to lose interest. We decided we liked eating grapefruit, but then my mother declared that the labor of eating it was too demanding for a snack. We decided the hot one on our favorite after-school soap opera was never going to find out that his brother, who was blind with a heart condition, was having sex with his lover and we decided that you could never justifiably get mad at someone who was sleeping with the blind, considering the woman who was doing so also had amnesia, and we decided we had enough energy to tolerate this tease of a story line. We decided it didn’t matter who made their beds when. This meant we were finally liberated.
“From what?” I asked my mother.
“From linens,” she said. I had never felt particularly oppressed by linens, so it made more sense to me when my mother added, “From rules, from intolerable mornings, and that includes linens.”
At some point, my mother would ask, “What’s new?”
“The right side of my face is smaller than the left,” I said, munching on a pretzel.
My mother laughed. “That’s ridiculous.”
“It’s true. We measured it in science class.”
“Who measured it?”
“Martha.”
“Well, Martha obviously doesn’t know how to measure correctly.”
“How would you know?” I asked. “You don’t even know Martha.”
“I’m your mother. I’ve stared at your face for fourteen years.”
“Well, that’s just sad,” I said.
Janice called. Over the phone, Janice and I laughed about all the things the Other Girls had said that week, and I welcomed the relief from my mother. “Brittany told Mr. Basketball that she was worried about him because he had such an amazing body,” Janice said, and when I laughed, she added, “I’d die without you.” I agreed, even though I knew I wasn’t the type of person who would die from grief. I was the kind of person who would sit with grief on the couch until grief died, who would watch reruns of game shows while grief guessed the price of a can of green beans. Seventy-nine cents! Grief was always right. Grief went to the supermarket a lot.
I hung up the phone.
“Shouldn’t you be somewhere?” I asked my mother accusingly.
“Like where?” my mother asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t.
“Let’s just watch the show, Emily,” my mother said.
When my father came up from the basement, my mother got up and made chicken fajitas. As she seasoned the chicken, she nonchalantly dropped comments about the plumber and the water that dripped from the upstairs shower into the basement, and didn’t that bother him? How could that not bother someone? This was what my mother needed to know.
My father got out the vodka from the liquor cabinet and when he caught me staring, he dropped in two ice cubes and looked at me like, Well, this is still my house, Emily, still my liquor, and then to distract me from his lingering presence, he asked, “What have you been learning in school?” By this point in the night, the kitchen had overheated from the chicken on the stove, my parents held crystal glasses of iced vodka between their fingers, and my milk was warm and forgotten in front of the television.
“Women are the inversion of male body parts,” I said, and when my mother stayed silent at the stove and didn’t argue, I added, “Men literally turned inside out.”
It was my father who protested and said, “That’s barbaric, Emily.”
“Ms. Nailer said so,” I said.
“I don’t care who said what,” my father said. “Don’t repeat things like that inside or outside of this house.” He gave me the stern look that reminded me he was my father, six feet tall, hands nearly the size of my head, and even though he was the one who slept with the neighbor, even though he needed to be punished somehow, denied his meals like a misbehaving Victorian child, the truth was, he owned this house. He had bought the vodka, the refrigerator, even the space between the doors was his, as he filled up the frame every night with his tall body, announcing, “I’m home!” His largeness always seemed so unfair to me—a man was born with all the power—so I picked up my father’s glass of vodka on the table, took too big of a gulp, and said, “My fucking friends are fucking sleeping over Friday,” proud and defiant. Both of my parents looked at me like I had thrown up all my carrots. It was moments like this when I couldn’t stand either of them, when I blushed and excused myself from the table and said, “Well, don’t you people see that I live here too?”
“Did you know that blow jobs are like when your brother used to shove ice pops really far down your throat and you wanted to gag?” one of the Other Girls said Friday night, leaving unwelcome kiss marks on my bedroom mirror.
“My brother never did that to me,” Janice said. “That’s really weird your brother did that to you.”
Janice and I looked at each other and laughed. Even though I was distinctly aware in which ways I was losing Janice during freshman year, I was always aware of the moments she chose
to stay with me.
We were eating marshmallows in my room and bad-mouthing our parents like they were nothing to us but drunk blond people.
“It’s so annoying when they look at you,” said Brittany, draped in her mother’s mauve nightgown, the breast cups large, lacy, and unfilled. The truth about Brittany Stone was that she got ugly at night; she popped her pimples and wore thick red glasses and her retainer was too large for her mouth. This was a great relief. “My mom was just looking at me the other day. And I was like, ‘What do you want, Linda?’”
The packing tape ripped loud from down the hall like crows crying out in an emergency. The Other Girls were sprawled out on my rug like sickly dogs that hadn’t eaten in days. The heaviest one claimed she hadn’t.
“Well, a corn on the cob,” Martha said. “Yesterday. My dad, like, seriously made me. He, like, shoved it down my throat, shouted out something about anorexia being an artificial disease of the rich, a product of too much time on my hands, and he wouldn’t tolerate it in his house, and I was like, ‘Dad! Don’t you see how Freudian this is?’ My dad’s stupid like that.”
“My dad is stupid too,” Janice said. Janice was a slobbery talker, saliva sometimes flying out of her mouth when she got too excited. “The first time I got my period I was in my bed and my dad came in and saw the blood all around me and said, ‘What the hell happened, Janice?’ I was like, ‘Dad, I’ve been murdered in my sleep.’ He was like, ‘You couldn’t have been murdered, you are talking.’ He’s always acting like a doctor. He’s like, ‘I am a doctor.’”
The Adults Page 5