The Adults

by Alison Espach

  “Turn left, Victor,” my mother said. “That’s our house, right there.” We pulled into the driveway. Laura was four, waddling around her driveway with a Welch’s grape juice container in her hands. Mrs. Resnick watched her from her stoop. Laura ran to my father. Laura had become a chatty child, a product of Mrs. Resnick constantly placing her in the care of the adults in our neighborhood. Laura learned to read at the Bulwarks’. She grew up watching Sesame Street at my mother’s. Took her first steps at the Trentons’. Alfred taught her how to check the oil in the car, how to know when the gutters were full. “Learn it while you’re young,” he said, “and the boys won’t be able to stay away.”

  My father got out of the car, twirled Laura in the air as though he knew her. I smiled, and even though I tried my best to understand it all, my heart broke a little.

  Nobody ever talked about what happened between Mr. Basketball and me, and this surprised me at first. Every day, I waited for the truth to come out. Every day, I waited for Mr. Basketball to be taken down the hallway in handcuffs. But every day, nothing. Every day, Mr. Basketball stood outside his classroom door, welcoming students inside. I supposed my criminal justice teacher was right; when one person witnessed a crime, there was an 80 percent chance he would report it, but if four people witnessed a crime, there was a 10 percent chance one of them would report it.

  Junior year at one of Martha’s elaborate birthday parties (Martha still on occasion wanted to be my friend and invited me to things even though nobody else did), Janice waved her beer in the air and asked me what happened with Mr. Basketball. She took a long sip and then demanded to know what it was about her that didn’t work exactly. Why couldn’t she just look like me, and if she did look like me, would that have been enough? Would Mr. Basketball have fucked her instead? Just tell me how many times, she said. Just tell her. Did he ask for her while he was with me, and if he did, what did it sound like when he said her name? Was it even possible to feel romantic with his dick so old and large, expanding like a drying sponge inside me?

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

  Janice took out her ponytail. She tousled her hair and prepared to walk away. “You were my best friend,” she said. “When I saw him on top of you, I said to myself, ‘Who is that man raping my best friend?’”

  19

  My mother made me go see Ron the psychiatrist one more time. I hated Ron, the way he stared at my mother when she dropped me off at the door. I hated how my mother wore a black dress with a shiny red plastic belt, like dropping me off at someone’s house was something to look sexy for, or how she let him take the check out of her hand so slowly that their index fingers touched and it became obvious she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring anymore. I hated the way he talked so flatly, “Emilywhydon’tyoucomein,” his words strung together like sterile white Christmas lights. When I sat in his chair and listened to him ask me about my life, it felt like sitting in my father’s luxury car that rode so smooth I vomited all over the leather seats. I was so horrified to have ruined his seats, I kept quiet and put my sweater over the mess. My father was in the front seat driving, saying over and over again, “Tell me the truth, Emily. Did you vomit on the seats?” And I would never admit it, shouting, “No, it wasn’t me!” and even when my father stopped the car to check the seats, even when he held me in his arms and said, “It’s okay, it’s not your fault you are sick,” I refused to claim the vomit as my own, because the way I saw it, it wasn’t the truth that solved our problems; the truth was always just the beginning of our problems.

  “There’s not much to talk about,” I told Ron.

  “Why do I feel like that’s not the truth?” he asked.

  The truth was a week after the Halloween in Spring, I sat in Mr. Basketball’s car in some corduroy skirt thing and purple strappy sandals that laced up my ankles. We drove to the valley, the low swooping forest between Fairfield and Westport where Janice and I went as younger girls to watch the older kids smoke weed and make out against trees. On the way there, I listened to Mr. Basketball talk about how inappropriate it was for us to touch. He was sorry, so sorry. He was twenty-four, he kept saying. I was fifteen.

  “When I was in college,” he said, “you were in fifth grade.”

  He looked straight ahead at the dirt road and said, “It’s just not a good idea.” He was regretful.

  I put his hand between my legs.

  “Stop it,” he said, but didn’t take his hand back.

  I pressed his fingers harder against me until he moved his fingers around my underwear and inside me.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Mr. Basketball said. “But I can’t stop thinking about this.”

  His hand was a tight fit. That was fine. Better that way. He took one finger inside me. I held tightly on to the door handle.

  “Don’t open it by accident,” he said, and locked it, and for one never-ending second, I felt like a child again, my excitement something to be feared, something he couldn’t control. I am not a child, I wanted to scream.

  Mr. Basketball put another finger inside me as if he heard me and I remember it feeling like a tampon but a little bit better. He rubbed them back and forth against me, his other hand on the wheel. He even put his blinker on at some point, even though there were no other cars. I heard the clicking of the blinker, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, a metronome. My eyes were wide open.

  “Relax,” Mr. Basketball said.

  “You relax,” I said.

  He filled me, slowly, with every finger, every turn, and I felt my legs spread. I am free, I thought, free and pressed against the world and hoping that everything I learned from my past as an optimistic child was true: a gentleman never asks for anything in return.

  The first few times Mr. Basketball and I had sex, we managed to do it without having to see each other naked. The first time we did it we were parked in his car in the valley. We climbed into the backseat. We didn’t even speak, except once when he said, “This may feel strange for the first few seconds.” He didn’t even fully take my pants off. He slipped them down to my thighs. I remember the constriction feeling the best. Then he pulled out. His penis was scary to me at first. His penis looked like an alien in my hands, growing with my help, and I found ways not to touch it, until he guided my hands up and down. He groaned when I moved it fast, closed his eyes and rested his head against the window, and I got less scared each time, accepting the power such a simple act offered me.

  And then once in the music storage room. It was cold. The room was small with thin gray carpet and I cried after in my bed thinking of how sad the violins looked alone in the corner. It was embarrassing to have sex in front of the wrong things, especially a violin, which was so dignified at every angle. I was sure Mr. Basketball felt this way too while I was bent over on the table. We were disgusting at that angle. He even went soft while he was inside me, and it felt like my fault, the violin’s fault.

  “It’s my fault,” Mr. Basketball said, pulling out of me. “Don’t you ever think this is your fault.”

  “I don’t,” I said. My insides burned. We didn’t speak for weeks. Freshman year ended. I stood up in front of the class and recited my verse of “The Waste Land.”

  “‘For you know only a heap of broken images,’” I said. “‘Where the sun beats, and the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, and the dry stone no sound of water.’”

  Mr. Basketball wrote things down on his clipboard.

  “‘Only there is shadow under this red rock, (come in under the shadow of this red rock), and I will show you something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Frisch weht der Wind. Der Heimat zu. Mein Irisch Kind, wo weilest du?’”

  Mr. Basketball corrected my pronunciation. A knife sent straight to my spleen.

  “How would you know?” I asked him, standing in front of the class. “You’r
e not even German.”

  Mr. Basketball clenched his jaw, like I was going to scream the truth to the entire classroom. Like I was that stupid.

  We were over. He ignored me in the hallways, didn’t return my glances. I saw him touch Ms. O’Malley’s arm in the lunchroom and then open the door for her as they walked out.

  But then we did it late one night at school on Lillian Biggs’s table at the back of the room. I wasn’t expecting it. I had returned to school to clean out my locker. My mother was in her car waiting for me in the parking lot. I walked by Mr. Basketball’s classroom and saw him taking down our haikus from the wall. He asked if I wanted to help.

  “Sure,” I said. I took a tack out of the board and after a few minutes, he came up behind me. His hands were warm on my hips. I wasn’t even ready for it. I was taking down the poems thinking of how little my mother knew about my life; how I was inside the school about to have sex with a man nearly twice my age and she was drumming her nails on the dashboard wondering if we should have asparagus for dinner. Mr. Basketball was pulling down my pants from the back. He was hard and I was dry and the sun was setting. I was reading the last line of Lillian’s haiku when he came into me, which wasn’t a haiku either: the wind whistles in winter and for who? It felt like newspapers being shoved inside me. I bled, even though it was our third time, and the blood collected in the balloon that Lillian had carved into the wood when she was bored. He looked at it, and then at me, apologizing for something, like for a second he thought he had killed me.

  20

  I was seventeen when my mother went on her first date: Ron the psychiatrist had asked her to go to an art gallery opening in Stamford. She danced around the kitchen all morning, hummed along with the gurgling coffeepot, told me how nice it would be to date a psychiatrist since a psychiatrist would already know what she needed. “He’s my psychiatrist,” I said. “Emily,” she said. “Be serious. You only went three times.” But when she came home from the date, she kissed me on the forehead and said, “Too weird.”

  After that, she went on dates nearly every night. The next guy was Seth. He worked for an advertising firm in Westport. He was balding. His feet were larger than my head. He said, “Nice to meet you,” and then asked me about my schoolwork like I was a seventeen-year-old on the brink of discovering a cancer gene. “It’s going very well, thank you,” I said.

  My mother hated him. I could tell by the way she was stiff at breakfast, polishing her nails, cucumbers for eyes all morning on the couch. And by the time he arrived, dressed head to toe in suede, she hunched her shoulders and threw on her fleece coat like she was already disappointed about the night she had.

  Then there was Max, and then Nate, and then Gary, who she met off a dating website my aunt Lee convinced her to join. “Gary is seventy percent my match,” my mother said to me, reading off the screen. “Sixteen percent my enemy.”

  I laughed.

  “Whatever that means,” my mother said. “We’re going to the opera. His idea.”

  When Gary arrived at our front door, he was incredibly handsome with a full mouth. Gary was also 90 percent blind from a car accident ten years earlier, something he hadn’t mentioned on his web profile.

  “Blind? How did you get here?” my mother asked.

  “Cab,” Gary said.

  “Come in,” she said. My mother took me in the kitchen. “Don’t pester him about being blind,” my mother said, pouring out salsa in a bowl. “He’s probably a very normal person, just like you and me. No wonder he wanted to go to the opera. If you are going to speak, ask him about the opera.”

  I didn’t know anything about the opera other than the fact that “opera” was the plural of “opus,” so said my vocab teacher Mrs. Miller, who kept holding me after class saying, “I’m worried about your vocab, Emily, you didn’t do all your vocab sheets.”

  We sat down for chips and salsa at our coffee table, and I said, “How do you feel about being blind, Gary?”

  My mother crunched loud on a chip.

  “Well, Emily, blindness isn’t really the problem you might think it is,” Gary said, picking up a chip. “It’s all the confusion that exists around the blindness that’s the shitter.”

  I licked some salt off my finger. What a perfect face.

  “With enough help, I barely notice.”

  Gary finished his chip, and I asked him about the last thing he ever saw: a road sign that said CAUTION DUCKS.

  “Gary, we’re going to be late,” my mother said, standing up and swinging her white spring jacket around her body.

  When she went on dates, I went on dates. Junior year, I had my first real boyfriend, Daniel Blank, who had been coming over to my house every other night for the past two weeks. Even though my mother wasn’t home, for some reason I didn’t want Daniel to know this; I didn’t want him to think that there was nothing we couldn’t do in the freedom of my unsupervised house. So when he asked if he could come over, I said, “Only if we take a vow of silence. My mom is sleeping upstairs.”

  Daniel arrived in a hoodie and corduroys, and we sat on two separate ends of the couch, and he wrote me a note on a piece of paper that said, Do we break our vows when we sneeze? These were the questions seventeen-year-olds asked, these were the questions we easily answered: yes, of course. Daniel was afraid to kiss me, so every night he left holding out his arms, saying, “Hug?” I hated Daniel against my breasts and I hated him a little more every time he came over. I guess the thing about regularly having sex with an older man was that when you tried to touch someone your own age, it felt like touching a child, Daniel’s smooth jaw like a baby’s bottom.

  After Daniel left, I slipped on the green dress with bulky pockets that I wore almost all throughout my junior year in high school and ran through the dark to Mr. Basketball’s. I passed Mark’s house and thought of Laura inside, two years old now, learning how to form “oh’s” and “ah’s” with her mouth.

  Mr. Basketball was having me over two, sometimes three, nights a week. I used the fire escape to get in.

  When I got inside, the bathwater was running.

  “What took you so long?” Mr. Basketball asked.

  “I have homework, you know,” I said.

  Mr. Basketball liked to watch me bathe. I rubbed the soap over my breasts and he watched from the doorway. “You are so beautiful,” he said. “I can’t stand it.” He stood by the toilet and dropped his pants. His penis hung large and twenty-six years old against his thigh. He lit a vanilla candle on his sink. He climbed in the warm soapy water, and I measured our waists with my eye. Mine was half the size of his. I laid my head against the back of the white tub. I put my hands around his waist and on his butt.

  “You have hair on your ass,” I said.

  “I know that,” he said. We laughed. I felt the coarse hairs with my fingertips.

  He put his mouth on me under the water. I liked him better this way. Clean. Sterile. There was nothing dangerous about a naked man in water. Even though he weighed one hundred and seventy pounds he felt as weightless as a bedsheet. There was nothing he could do to me in water that wouldn’t wash away. I held on to the sides of the bath with my hands, and his touch was different. He was an unpredictable fusion of body and water, and even with all the pressure on us, I could hardly feel him.

  The water rose as he moved up my torso with his head, some of it filling my ears so when he came up for air and spoke, his voice was muffled. “Bub bum boat on bib,” he said, pointing to his dick, which was now lying on top of my chest like a hot dog. I sat up out of the water.

  “What?” I asked.

  The candle flame throbbed behind us.

  “Rub some soap on it,” he said.

  I climbed out of the tub.

  “That’s barbaric,” I said.

  “What? The soap makes it more sensitive.”

  I rubbed my legs with the towel. “I’m dating someone,” I told him.

  “What?” he said. “Who?”

  I stood
there naked. The oil from the tub made the water bead down my chest.

  “Daniel Blank, right?” Mr. Basketball asked. “With the lip ring? I’ve seen you two together a lot lately.”

  “We’re almost in love.”

  “We call him Lip Ring Boy in the lunchroom,” Mr. Basketball said. “He’s nice. Apparently, not very good at chemistry.”

  He climbed out of the tub.

  “You’re a terrible teacher,” I said, and this made him pull me close and kiss me hard until my back hurt and his beard scraped my lips and my cheeks were wet from his hands. I was on his sink now, my legs separated by his hips.

  “Don’t do this to me,” Mr. Basketball said, holding the ends of my long wet brown hair. “Don’t date boys. Don’t date Daniel Blank.”

  “I like boys,” I said. “Boys don’t have hair on their asses.”

  “Don’t be cruel like this, Emily.”

  But I didn’t like boys. Boys never made sense to me. Their bones were too long for their skin, their acne-faces so red and wilting, they were too embarrassed to look you in the eye, too embarrassed not to look you in the eye, their mouse voices you could barely hear over the music, which was always blasting in my ear. Their breath was irregular and scentless, these boys were always overbrushing their teeth and overminting their mouths in cars, always playing music with no detectable melody, and no matter how long you listened, they never successfully communicated anything. I hated sitting in cars, and on couches, and hugging with closed fists. I liked beards and full calves and throaty, fire-crackling voices that crashed right into my throat, I liked men who tasted like something, who were a part of the world, who felt heavy on my chest, Mr. Basketball warm inside me.

  He put his hand on the back of my neck, and I held on to the towel rack. The screenless window was wide open at my head, and I waited for the air to fill my ears, the tiny mosquitoes to come sink their teeth into my cheeks, to suck out all the evil that was in my blood, and before I felt any of this kind of healing, Mr. Basketball whispered in my ear, “You are so good.” He kissed me on the mouth.