“I didn’t know your dad was a doctor,” Brittany said.
“He’s not really,” Janice said. “He’s a natural pathologist. He thinks he can cure people with herbs and tapping on parts of their bodies and things and chanting in their faces. Like a witch. Like, he thinks he’s a witch.”
The refrigerator hummed downstairs. Outside, a metal trash can was knocked over. Martha pressed her ear up to the window screen and asked, “What was that?”
Martha was scared because someone on my street got robbed for the first time ever last week. Mrs. Bulwark stood outside her brown house and cried while waiting for the police to show up. My mother stood with her at the curb, going over which items had been taken. Television, she said. The microwave. The toaster oven.
“Or maybe not,” Mrs. Bulwark said. “Maybe I didn’t have a toaster oven? I can’t remember.”
When the police showed up, the adults were gathered on Mrs. Bulwark’s lawn, wiping their long bangs off their faces and adjusting their postures as if it was the first time they had to act human all day. I was in the front of the crowd fingering the blades of grass like I was the head of the search team and my curiosity was something professional, listening to my mother win over the affection of Mrs. Bulwark with gentle affirmation. “Of course you had a toaster oven, dear,” my mother said. “Everybody on the block has a toaster oven.”
Mrs. Trenton whispered to Mrs. Resnick next to me, “What a terrible brown house.”
The neighborhood had gotten really into pastel the last few years. It started when Alfred’s wife painted their whole house a soft pink during menopause. Looks Like Linen it was called. People raved. A magazine came, made the family hold up a rotisserie chicken, and then photographed it. A few months later, Mrs. Trenton’s house was Mint Leaf. Ours became Celery Powder. The Resnicks’ house turned Yellow Feather. Mark and Richard painted one side of the house black last year when his parents went to St. Thomas for a week. When they returned, Mrs. Resnick screamed so loud, our salt and pepper shakers rattled together.
“Lucy,” Mrs. Resnick said in a halfhearted attempt to scold.
I stared at Mrs. Resnick. My one and only skill at fourteen: yelling at people without actually yelling. From where I was standing, Mrs. Resnick looked heavier than she did at the party. The evil part of me was glad. There had to be some kind of punishment for what she had done and if it was only twenty pounds, so be it. I stared and stared and Mrs. Resnick never looked at me, not once, and I didn’t understand how she could stand there and not fall to her knees asking for everybody’s forgiveness.
“Maybe it’s the White Lady,” Janice said.
The White Lady was a ghost story that all the parents of Fairfield told their children. She was rumored to be a tall, thin, pale woman of average height who haunted the Holy Church, the oldest church in our town with a tiny graveyard in the back, for no apparent reason. Janice believed in the White Lady but only because she had nothing else to believe in. Her father was pagan and her mother was Jewish. She said it was either the White Lady or Janicism, which sounded too much like racism, so she doubted it would ever really catch on. But mostly it was because her father swore he saw the White Lady one night, and she worshipped her father. We all did really. Our fathers were the ones who were constantly leaving us, but they were also the men who would always love us, despite our broken conversation and frizzy hair and periods in our beds. Fathers were men who were just trying to understand, while mothers were women who were trying to change us, buying us pads instead of tampons, clarifying shampoos when all we wanted was moisturizing.
“Your father is a liar,” Brittany said to Janice. “That’s what it all boils down to.”
“All fathers are liars,” Janice said. “If you want to be a father, you have to be prepared to become a liar. Like, just the other day my dad told me that when I was seven he accidentally stepped on my hamster on the stairs. I wasn’t mad. Because, I mean, what was the hamster doing on the stairs? That’s what you’ve always got to ask yourself.”
This diffused the tension. We laughed, and I thought, Maybe I did like my new friends. It was nice to have people to talk to like this. And Janice was probably right. Fathers are liars, and the noise was probably a raccoon or something; I’d probably find all my garbage eaten in the morning. “That’s so boring though,” said Brittany, shifting her retainer. “I wish it was a killer. The White Lady. I’m bored.”
She took out her retainer and the saliva dripped on my rug like fishing line.
Everybody began to slowly fall asleep, but I couldn’t. Life moved in opposite directions at dawn and it was too unsettling to watch the world fight with itself, the sun and the moon awkwardly present at the same time, everything so disappointingly circular, like a dog trying to eat its own tail.
I got up to get a glass of water. Janice and the Other Girls were passed out on my white shag carpet, their mouths open like drunks, chapped at the corners. I crept over their bodies, passed my mother and father asleep in separate beds, and walked downstairs to the kitchen.
The kitchen was ambient and still at dawn, the light refracting through half-filled jars of sugar and dried fruits, making everything appear a little invisible, a little godly. I walked across the tile, compelled to pray for something. I was religious at the most unexpected of times, in the morning, when the world seemed empty and unused, and I tried to feel grateful for the peace, the cleaned spatulas. Someone always restarted our life at dawn and this was supposed to be comforting.
Chrome faucets, I would tell my clients when I was older, were the best for creating light. Everything in the kitchen could be a source of light, everything down to the spatula, your whole house illuminated from every angle, if that was the kind of life anyone was looking for.
I put my lips to the glass. The breeze through the window was new against my cheek.
The weather was turning and this should have made everything feel less full of possibility, but the morning air had taken on a cryptic chill, filled me with a giddy terror, similar to the way that mischief felt around Halloween, when egging the neighbor’s suddenly became the neighborly thing to do, toilet-papering streetlights was less a crime than it was a rite of passage.
I saw Mr. Resnick outside through the window, walking toward a rock between our lawns, the large one Mark and I used to pretend was a spaceship capable of transporting our brains to Venus. I hadn’t seen him in so long, I nearly pressed my nose to the windowpane. What was he doing outside his house so early in the morning? He wasn’t shaking in the way that he shook the last time I saw him. He was taking long smooth steps. He stood on top of the rock, paused for a moment, casually dressed in a polo shirt as though he was waiting to be convinced into a morning game of golf.
He had a long rope in his hands, which he threw over the branch on the tree beside him. Then, his knees began to wobble, and for a moment, he looked scared, like he was worried about falling off the rock and to the ground. I was about to run outside, when he grabbed the rope that was now hanging down from the branch and regained his balance.
It was a noose.
He put the rope around his neck, and that was when I saw his wrists were dripping with blood.
I want to say that I tried to scream, or wave my hands and get his attention, but all I managed to do was drop my glass. I turned to run and the pieces of broken glass etched into my heel. I flopped like an empty sack on the tile, and when I stood back up, Mr. Resnick was dead. His body was as still as a wind chime in a glass case, the earth so completely balanced that morning.
I didn’t move. Life came and went so fast. I was warned about this by my mother and father, who yelled when I ran down the stairs in slippery socks, or by my teachers, who kept us off the street during recess, and here it was—the end—dangling in front of me on a rope, Mr. Resnick, dead before the morning paper arrived.
I looked around for help.
There was broken glass over the floor. I waited for someone to yell at me, for my mothe
r to scream, “Emily, pick up this mess!”
But the kitchen was empty.
The broken glass was spread around me like a rug.
I was the only person in the world who knew Mr. Resnick was dead, and the only person who could see me was Mr. Resnick through the window, but his eyes were fixed, pointing in two different directions, making it appear as though he wasn’t there at all, or like there were so many interesting things to look at before you died, he couldn’t choose.
I ran for my father. The glass dug farther into my foot with each step. I was at my father’s bed, shouting something none of us can remember, and my mother told me later that it made all too much sense when she woke up to an empty house, following a child’s bloody footsteps over the oriental rug and out the door to find our poor neighbor hanging from a tree.
6
I would tell all my boyfriends that the most tragic part about the whole scene was Alfred, who ran out of his house in a red Starship Enterprise shirt that read, SHATNER FOREVER! on the front. Men would laugh and laugh at this, stroke my neck, my thighs, their beards tender like feathers between my legs. They would love me for the way nothing remained sacred in my presence, seek me out for this, kiss me down to the bone.
“I just don’t understand,” Mrs. Bulwark said in her workout suit, not ready to give up on the idea of a morning jog. The adults circled around her like concerned hawks. Mr. Resnick’s body had already been photographed, put in a bag, and taken away in an ambulance. “I just can’t believe they are putting him in a bag like that. Like he was some bad fruit at the grocery store.”
The police had sectioned off the Resnicks’ house with yellow tape, and all the morning joggers and dog walkers stood on my driveway to rubberneck. A beagle barked loud from the back of the crowd, pissed he couldn’t see.
“And he just mowed his lawn yesterday,” Mrs. Trenton said. “God, this is sad.”
“That wasn’t him,” Mrs. Bulwark said. “That was Mark.”
“Tom never mowed his lawn,” Alfred said.
“That’s a bad sign.”
“The sign of a deeper sense of apathy. A man who doesn’t care about his lawn probably doesn’t care about anything around him.”
Janice and the Other Girls had been picked up by their mothers, who hurried them into their vans with one arm, half-asleep. It wasn’t until Janice looked back at my house like the whole place was damned, the grass, the lamppost, the American flag, the potting soil against the garage, that I realized, yes, we were damned—I had suspected this two days earlier when I saw my father watering the drooping tiger lilies and asked, “Dad, why are you doing that? They’re nearly dead.”
“Why eat?” he said. “Why anything?”
My father had run outside and then back inside to reschedule a conference call, and I stared at the basement window knowing that he wasn’t returning because Mrs. Resnick was standing in front of her house now, my mother’s arms wrapped around her body like a sheath, and Mark was at their side, an unreachable figure, brown hair uncombed, his eyes wild and heated like an abused animal’s, ready to bare his claws and attack my father should he dare show his face again. Mrs. Resnick pulled away from the embrace, and that whole time I was talking to some policeman who stared at my mother’s nipples on display through her sheer nightgown.
The cop nodded some. “Right,” he said. “Looks like a suicide.”
“A suicide,” Mrs. Resnick said aloud to nobody, to everybody, to the mailbox.
The policeman led Mark and his mother to the cruiser. The car drove away and never turned on its sirens.
“He threw raw meat out the window once,” Mrs. Bulwark said.
“What?” Mrs. Trenton asked.
“He threw a leg of lamb out the window once. I saw him.”
“Why?”
“Probably to prove some kind of a point,” Alfred said.
“What kind of a point would that be?”
“A man can do anything he wants,” Alfred said.
“To think,” Mrs. Trenton said, and hung her head like nothing was possible anymore. “I had just promised myself that I would eliminate stress in my life.”
“Go put on some real clothes,” my mother said to me as she went inside to yell at my father. I heard my father’s office door slam open, the knob hitting against the wall. “Victor!” she yelled. A man has died in the yard was supposed to be her next line, but instead, she said, “It’s a Saturday.”
I sat on the stone stoop as the scene cleared, and everyone started to make their way back into their homes, dispersing in different directions like a compass made out of humans. They had lives too, which needed to start. They had to go inside, turn on their ceiling fans, call their distant relatives, and explain what happened to the poor Russian Jewish man down the street, the one who threw raw meat out the window, the one who was never happy anyway. They had to tweeze their eyebrows and wake up their children for Saturday soccer games, the girls’ teams named after flowers and the boys’ after cars (Richard had been on the Ferraris and Mark on the Volvos). They had to cut oranges into quadrants; turn off the cartoons; French-braid hair; brush teeth; think about socks, shin guards, and staying hydrated, Gatorade and brake fluid; and don’t kick the cat, don’t hang on the banister, pack the cooler with raisins and gluten-free crackers, edible ice packs, parkas in case the weather turned, and then explain to the kids in the backseat on the way to the field: the weather always turns; death finds us anyway.
There was a man still standing on my driveway. It was Mr. Basketball. He was looking around, with a beagle on the end of a leash. He was in mesh shorts and a T-shirt that said PEPSI. He walked over to me on the stoop. He looked anything but professional. Like a college student. The picture of a man I might hang on my wall, if I had done things like that as a teenager.
“Hi,” he said. His body was illuminated in front of me as he blocked the rising sun. We had never met before.
“Hi,” I said.
It was cold. October. I had run outside in my pajamas, white fleece pants, and my father’s I CLIMBED DIAMOND MOUNTAIN AND SURVIVED! T-shirt.
And then I remembered: the bottom of my foot was bleeding.
“Jesus,” Mr. Basketball said, picking up my bloody foot to see the tiny bits of glass wedged into the thick skin of my heel. In the light, the sole of my foot almost looked diamond studded. “Are you all right?” And he was the only person that morning to suggest I might not be all right.
He took my foot in his hand.
I nodded.
He pulled out a Swiss Army knife from his pocket. Without even asking, he began to carefully remove each piece of glass with the tip of the blade. When he pushed too hard, I shifted uncomfortably, and he was gentler the next time. From far away, I imagined it looked like a holy offering, like a painting of Jesus washing a woman’s feet.
“I like your dog,” I finally said. “What’s his name?”
“Her. Her name is Penelope. And she’s not mine. I’m watching her for a friend.”
“Hi, Penelope,” I said, and held out my hand to the dog.
“I was giving her a walk,” Mr. Basketball said. “I live two blocks down, off Crab Apple. And then I ran into this whole mess.”
My nipples were still cold through my shirt and on any normal occasion I would have thought of a reason to go inside and help my mother with breakfast. But I sat there, looking at him. It didn’t seem necessary to get embarrassed about being a woman in front of Mr. Basketball. It was as though that was exactly what he had wanted me to be from the start.
“Breathe,” he said, to signal that this wasn’t going to be a good one. He removed the last visible piece of glass. It cut my foot more as he removed it, and blood spotted the cement steps, but I didn’t cry. It was a relief to know that I was still a person, connected inside by a network of nerves and blood, and Mr. Basketball was here to observe that. Sometimes, I didn’t even notice I was alive until somebody else did, and what was weirder, more incomprehensible tha
n that?
I reached out and put my hand on Mr. Basketball’s arm like my mother would have. “Thank you,” I said.
He was an older person I hardly knew, a teacher at my school, a man, and I should never casually touch a man, Janice told me once, because a casual touch reminds a man of a less casual touch and so on. But everything seemed arbitrary all of a sudden. Right or wrong, things happened anyway. Suicide or no suicide, at eight A.M., Mrs. Bulwark would pull out of her driveway in her blue minivan, my mother would get in the shower, and the sky would open up. Alfred would walk to the end of his driveway and get his paper. The dogs would begin to bark, and it would sound like an act of charity, the animals filling the silence, starting the day when we failed to notice it had begun, the sun already tired above us.
7
Who knows what would have helped him, you know?” I said, suddenly the expert three days later in my mother’s bedroom preparing for Mr. Resnick’s funeral. My mother was drawing a thin black line across her lids, and somewhere else, Mr. Resnick’s eyelids were being sealed with glue, his lips tied with sutures.
I was fidgety, sleepless from the previous night when Janice and I had read from the “Embalming” section of the encyclopedia. I was overheated in long sleeves, laid out on my mother’s bed in a black polyester dress and my hands crossed over my chest like today was my burial. I told my mother I’d do her makeup. She looked at me like I asked to file the taxes, shifted in her brand-new off-the-shoulder chiffon dress, picking lint from the hem, and said, “No, thanks.”
Germicide-insecticide-olfactant rubbed inside his mouth with cotton swabs, Janice had read. Massage cream rubbed onto his face for softness.
“Don’t you think you’re a little dressed up?” I asked my mother.
“It’s a funeral,” she said. A burst of anger hummed between us. As though I had not been aware. As though I had not watched the man die. As though I could not feel the lanolin, carboxymethylcellulose, humectants, hydrolyzed proteins being injected into his arteries while the blood was drained from his heart.
The Adults Page 6