The Adults

by Alison Espach

  “Her name is Laura,” my father said. “We can all go see her if you like.”

  “No, thanks,” my mother said.

  “No, thanks,” I said, and followed her out of the room.

  My father moved out a week later. I hugged him at our front door and couldn’t bear to watch him leave with so much luggage. I closed my eyes and rubbed the poinsettias between my thumbs as I listened to his heels click the cement, the hush of the cab tires taking him away. When I opened my eyes, the street was silent, only the exhaust still suspended in the air.

  12

  Mr. Basketball stood green-collared and tall next to the projector, wrote Welcome to English on the board, and asked us to please settle down. It was January, a new semester of freshman year, and already Mr. Basketball was employing pedagogical methods Ms. Nailer had not. Janice walked into the room with her breasts sticking out in the air as if she got points for hitting things. She snapped her gum as she walked by Mr. Basketball’s pointy face and then quickly explained how she didn’t mean to; popping her gum was an accident that happened because she felt so comfortable all the time. She blushed so deeply, Mr. Basketball was forced to forgive her. “All right,” he said. “Please take a seat.” He smiled a bit and then made eye contact with me, as though he needed my permission to start class. I nodded.

  “I’m your English teacher,” Mr. Basketball said. “Can you all speak English?”

  Nobody spoke, nobody moved.

  “Apparently not,” he said.

  We laughed. Everyone was already in love with him. We stood in small circles every chance we got, just to talk about him.

  Mr. Basketball was so funny, he could split your spleen just by looking at it.

  Mr. Basketball was so smart, you got smarter just by looking at him.

  “No,” Janice said at lunch, correcting us. “You have to get to third with him.”

  My father was in Prague, discovering the joys of smoking cigars in public rooms. My mother was at home, discovering the joys of Arbor Mist and White Russians at noon. Since my father had left, she had watched enough movies starring Sally Field to know that having a dead husband was the preferred option. It was perfect because nothing was ever your fault, not even loneliness, and nobody would ever come up to you at the funeral and say, “Now, at which point do you think he stopped breathing?”

  My mother developed a heart murmur, or as I asked, “Maybe you always had one? Maybe the house is just quieter now?” Sometimes, when I walked by her in the kitchen, she put a finger to her lips and said, “Shh, Emily. Can you hear my heart? It’s not working properly.” Sometimes, I thought she looked too beautiful to be sitting at the counter all by herself, developing palpitations.

  “I’m busy, Mom,” I said.

  She eyed me as I moved across the kitchen.

  “You’re not busy,” she said. “I can see you. You’re just drinking lemonade.”

  That made me want to cry so hard, I can’t even explain it.

  Sometimes, my father called our house from Prague to say, “Dobrý den!” Sometimes he called just to say, “Where’s your mother?” My mother was always sitting at the kitchen counter, and she never wanted to talk to him, even though she always wanted to talk to him. “She’s not here,” I said, and when I hung up the phone, she stuck her hand in a box of Cocoa Puffs and said, “Did you know that your father hired the neighbor to assemble your tricycle when you were three?” My mother loved to revisit the fights she’d had with my father, as though this was a form of keeping him present. “And I said, ‘What, are you going to hire someone to love her as well?’ God. What a fool.”

  My father left us enough money in the divorce settlement so my mother would never have to attend another thing she didn’t want to attend. “A gift,” he said. But it felt like punishment. Some weeks, she didn’t even leave the house. She quit her volunteer job at the hospital. She spent the day running her fingers across photographs of us at Hershey Park, Disney World, St. John’s. She talked about memories she said she wasn’t sure she even had. She made meatloaf and threw it to the ground. She tried to learn the piano. She played the first three chords of “Row Row Row Your Boat” and then quit. She blew off bikini wax appointments, PTA meetings.

  She started taking antidepressants. Prozac at first. When I found the bottle and confronted her, she said, “It’s just for three months, Emily. It’s not permanent. It’s like, well, sometimes when you get older you forget how to be happy. You probably don’t understand this, but it happens. And these pills remind you how it feels to be happy. So then when you go off them, you know how to create the feeling on your own.”

  She spent her nights ordering cookbooks from other countries and cooking Mexican dinners with all the wrong proportions. She wanted a basil plant, a cilantro plant. She wanted to start growing things. This was a good sign. But she never grew any. She just squeezed lime juice into her wine and watched the meat burn. I began to choke on cayenne pepper and dry bread and roll up my jersey knit skirts so that three quarters of my legs were always exposed to the general public. I hung dice from my ears as jewelry, stopped washing my hair, and let the grease curl around my face like the Other Girls. I sat and stared at Mr. Basketball, let my eyes wander over his long torso that made him look like a fish, I thought, standing at the chalkboard writing Haikus.

  “We’re going to write some haikus,” Mr. Basketball said. “But first, let’s talk about images. Let’s come up with some images.”

  “What do you mean, images?” Janice asked. “Like, colors?”

  “There are such things as tired images,” he said. “And fresh images. Let’s examine what a fresh image is compared to a tired, hackneyed image.”

  He asked us to think of four basic emotions.

  “Disillusionment!” someone shouted from the back.

  “Simpler,” he said. “That’s more a state of being.”

  “Ennui!”

  “Funny,” he said. He wrote mad on the board. “What about mad? Can anyone think of an image that would illustrate anger? Raise your hands, please.”

  Janice raised her hand. “A gun pressed to an ear.”

  “Blood spots on a car.”

  “A man with his fingers bent backward.”

  “That’s violence,” he said. “You are confusing anger with violence.”

  He wrote clenched teeth on the board.

  Narrowed eyes.

  Popping veins.

  “This is how we’re going to start thinking this semester,” Mr. Basketball said. “In images.”

  We were ready to write the haikus. But we didn’t have enough construction paper. Mr. Basketball looked at me and asked if I would run down to the basement and get an extra stack. We were going to hang them on the wall as decoration. “Me?” I asked, pointing to myself, as if “me” wasn’t specific enough. “Yes,” he said. “You.”

  I hated going down to the basement. Teachers rarely sent students to the basement. It was frowned upon by most of the teachers since basements were dark, and terrible things happened to children in the dark, even if it was only in their imaginations. But people were lazy, and I was discovering that was exactly what high school teachers primarily were—people—so they would send us with an added, “Don’t tell anyone I sent you there,” which was the only reason I had ever considered telling someone. But I wouldn’t tell anyone that Mr. Basketball had sent me there. He was handsome and from Greenwich, Connecticut, and he picked glass out of my foot.

  I walked into the basement and breathed in the overgrowth of mold, stepped over stray wires, and ran my finger against splintered and unused furniture. I knew that when you walked into a basement you were agreeing to a whole new set of world rules. A bat could fly at your neck, your heart could stop for no reason, limbs could roll out from closets, rats could pop out from pipes, and you couldn’t be surprised about any of this.

  “Fuck.”

  Except another person—that was surprising.

  “Oh, it’s just y
ou,” Mark said.

  Mark was sitting on a crate behind a bunch of turned-over desks, smoking a cigarette. The hot ash lit up his face like a tiny prayer candle. His hair was growing past his ears. I heard that he had taken a fifty-dollar bet from Richard that he would never cut it again.

  “Hello,” I said.

  He didn’t speak. I walked toward the shelf closest to him. I began sorting through different kinds of paper. “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said.

  He watched me for a few minutes and then finally spoke.

  “You know what’s weird?” he asked.

  “What?”

  He flicked his ash to the ground. “My father killed himself on Cheesecock Lane.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “That’s like killing yourself on Jellotit Ave.”

  I was quiet. His stare was aggressive. “Hey, you don’t have to be all strange about it. What, like I can’t talk about it? It was something that happened. You saw the whole goddamned thing.”

  So I said, “Asscrack Circle.”

  “No,” he said. “You don’t get it. It couldn’t be Asscrack Circle. The first word has to be a soft food and the second word has to be slang for a private part.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was afraid to smile. “Puddingvagina Boulevard.”

  “That was just gross.”

  I blushed. I looked away, back at the shelf. I didn’t know what to say. He pulled out another cigarette.

  “My mom hates that I smoke,” he said. “She said it’s bad around the baby. Nothing’s good for the baby. And do you know what I say to that? Good. I say, fuck the baby. Long live the smoke.”

  “Smoking is pretty disgusting,” I said, not sure if I should ask questions about the baby.

  “Yeah, well my mom is pretty gay,” he said.

  He pulled me down onto the crate with him. He was acting reckless. Mark had grown a lot since we had last spoken. You’re so tall, I wanted to say, but I didn’t want to sound like my mother in a moment like this, where mothers were strictly unwelcome, not to mention gay.

  “You should get back to class,” he said. “The bell is going to ring soon. I can tell by the amount of footsteps.”

  “Yep,” I said. “Okay.” I grabbed the paper and left.

  This felt like progress.

  When I returned, the class was rioting. I had missed a great injustice.

  “When forty years shall besiege thy brow!” Mr. Basketball shouted. He threw up his hands like he couldn’t believe us, like he was mad. “Did you know that people used to memorize Homeric epics like the backs of their hands? Did you know that Thomas de Quincey had memorized Shakespearean sonnets by the time he was thirteen?”

  “Who is Thomas de Quincey?” they shouted. “What is a Homeric epic?”

  “All I am asking,” Mr. Basketball said, “is for you guys to memorize six lines of ‘The Waste Land.’ Pick any image that strikes you. You will have to recite it to the class.”

  “What’s an image?”

  “Shut up, Peter, you retarded retard,” someone shouted.

  “Hey,” Mr. Basketball said warningly.

  “Hello!” Janice said from the back, and laughed.

  At Janice’s house, her mother always stood by the oven waiting to take the pumpkin bread out. “Remember when you girls were little and you’d run home from school, fighting your way for the pumpkin bread?” her mother asked.

  “Mom,” Janice scolded. “Please do not harp on the things of yore.” That was Janice’s rule. The past was boring. That included funny things we said, things we used to feel, clothes we used to wear.

  We cut ourselves a slice and went upstairs.

  “Mr. Basketball and I haven’t boned since last Wednesday,” Janice said. “I think he’s embarrassed that his dick fell out of me when he turned me on my stomach and he couldn’t get it back in.”

  “Janice,” I said. “God.”

  “What?”

  “What if Mr. Basketball finds out you are saying this stuff about him?”

  “He knows it’s going to happen eventually. He knows what he is doing.”

  “Okay, Janice. You aren’t actually sleeping with Mr. Basketball.”

  “How would you know what I was actually doing?”

  We nibbled on our bread quietly until Janice became embarrassed by the silence. She continued telling me about the rest of her day. Mr. Basketball said that T. S. Eliot once compared women to menstrual blood. Alex Trimble pulled his pants down in gym and cried, “Oh, God! The Martians!” Joseph Kimball shot half a carrot out his nose. On purpose. He proclaimed it his one profitable talent. Was going to major in it at college. Richard accidentally killed Mr. Kraft’s classroom guinea pig Mickey by squeezing it too hard. Everyone called him Lenny. They shouted at him, “Stupid Lenny, you’re so nice and sweet but so big.” Since Mark and Richard had started snorting cocaine over Christmas break, Richard stopped going to English class and had no idea the joke was a reference to Of Mice and Men. He had no idea what was what anymore. He walked around the halls with Mark, kicking empty soda cans. He wore T-shirts with the faces of smashed cartoons and cracked skulls, and when people asked him about the burn running all the way up his arm and his chest, he told them to “eat vag.” Then he laughed. Richard thought everything about him was funny, even if he didn’t understand why anymore.

  Janice smiled the whole time she told me what happened in class, and I laughed hard, harder than I had in weeks, because what we didn’t know was that Richard would die four years later in a snowboarding accident, or that people would go to his funeral and nobody would cry, but instead laugh about the time he got so high he jumped off the roof of Stop and Shop, or that his virgin girlfriend in a fit of grief would scream out, “We never even had sex!” or that our new science teacher genuinely loved the guinea pig Mickey.

  Richard loved Mickey as well. I saw him standing by the cage while I was walking past the classroom one day, petting Mickey’s fur so softly, as though it was a body full of cotton, and he saw me too, held my gaze, and then said with unexpected honesty: “I’ve always kinda liked you.”

  “Oh,” Janice said, continuing. “Also. The Other Girls decided we should start calling you Shiny Forehead.”

  13

  My forehead was so shiny, my biology class had joked about using it as a light source all semester. Ms. Nailer was gone; she had not been fired, but rather “deselected” after the Annie incident. My half sister Laura had started eating solids, Richard had a crush on me, used to masturbate to my fifth-grade photo, and X was the substitute for the unknown number.

  “But how does adding X make it any less unknown?” I asked Ms. O’Malley, my algebra teacher, during extra help. Ms. O’Malley crossed her long, smooth legs and sighed.

  At home, my mother hadn’t changed clothes in four days.

  “The tiger lilies are dead,” my mother said after school on our porch, while she sipped wine in the cold. My mother was not wearing earrings. She was never wearing earrings anymore. She was always on the porch, always in a robe.

  “How many glasses is that?” I asked her.

  “Just two,” she said. My mother was the kind of woman who looked worse when she was relaxed.

  “Just two,” I repeated.

  “Look at all the dead vegetation,” she said.

  Everything was covered in snow and my mother seemed to blame my father for this, even though it was February, even though I was sure I loved him more than ever now that he was gone. Because how could you blame a man for dead flowers when he was the one who planted them in the first place? He was obsessed with keeping the tiger lilies alive while he lived here, always trying out new systems. Once, I came home from school and caught him pissing on all the plants, laughing. “To keep the deer away,” he said.

  It was impossible to hate a man who had planned all of your vacations, who drove us through the corn farms and the honeysuckle beaches of Bridgehampton, Long Island, toward the ocean and asked, �
�Emily, what crop is that?”

  “Beans! Potatoes! Ice cream!” I’d shout.

  “No. Corn! What flower is that?”

  “Honeydew!”

  “Close.”

  “Mildew.”

  “Farther.”

  “Honeyflower?”

  “Honeysuckle!”

  “How do you always remember that, Dad?”

  “I bet you there is nothing you know that I don’t know!” he said, turning the wheel.

  And there wasn’t. Not until I started studying Canadian geography at school and I asked him, “What’s the most northern province?” He shook his head and said, “Come on! That’s not a fair question.”

  At night in Long Island, my father took us for ice cream in Sag Harbor. We walked the quiet strip to the end of the dock and looked at the yachts. “Can you imagine?” my father asked us, and I was always too impressed by the size of the boats to notice that this was him wishing for a different life. He bought us mocha ice cream cones. All I knew about Sag Harbor ice cream was that it was the most goddamn expensive ice cream in the whole country but what the hell, we were on vacation, weren’t we? My father said that everything was too goddamned expensive if you thought about it long enough.

  “How goddamned expensive is each lick?” I asked, cone in hand. My mother and father laughed until they had to sit down.

  My father was always money conscious, and I thought it was because we didn’t have any money. As I got older, I realized my father was only money conscious because my mother wasn’t. Sometimes, my father would sit at the kitchen counter doing the bills and shout out, “We have zero dollars, people! Zero!” This was directed to my mother, who would roll her eyes and say to me, “Don’t listen to him.” Apparently, it was okay to have zero dollars. We seemed to get by. We had two fridges, a handful of white leather couches, four beds with memory foam, two electric eyelash curlers, and a blender that could puree a rake.

  “You kids don’t use any color in your poems,” Mr. Basketball said. “Let’s talk about how important color is. Let’s take a good look at these walls around us.”