“Sure am.”
“I hate the way you cook.”
“And what way is that?”
“Like nobody ever taught you how.”
He said nobody ever did teach him how.
“You scratch the pan with a fork. You’re not supposed to do that.”
“Says who?”
“I’m leaving.”
“Don’t leave like that,” he said, and walked over to me. “Don’t leave complaining about my pans.”
“You don’t live right.”
I picked my jeans off the floor and stuck a leg in each hole. He walked over, pressed his stomach into my back, put his hands around my waist. “Don’t leave,” he said.
“You don’t have extra things like cheese,” I said. “You don’t have amenities. You don’t have soap that smells any good. You’re twenty-seven and you hate your job and you have nothing besides a sock in the utensil drawer.”
“You’re eighteen,” he said. “What do you have?”
“My whole life,” I said.
He moved his hands down my thighs, until I turned around and met him with my face. “Just eat the eggs,” he said.
He said that sometimes when he was alone in his bed, he worried he was becoming obsessed with me. Consumed in a way he felt too old for, too tired for. He said he’d draw the lines of my body with his finger at night. He used the white ceiling as a canvas. He slept next to someone else to feel independent of me, someone his age, someone who wore too many gold rings and went to the gym every day just to feel good, someone who understood exactly what he meant when he said, “I’m bored of Nietzsche, just so bored of him,” someone who posed questions in his head about the strangeness of feeling.
“Whose beagle is that?” I asked.
“A friend’s,” he said.
“You cannot sleep with other women,” I said. “That’s not fair to me.”
“I’ll stop sleeping with her when you can say my name properly,” he said.
“How can you sleep with someone else?”
“How can you keep calling me Mr. Basketball, like I’m some kind of a joke or something?”
“You are a joke!” I said, angry. “You’ve always been a joke. You were just supposed to be a joke.”
Janice and I had always dreamed of touching him since the moment we saw him walking down the hall freshman year. We laughed on the bus thinking about touching him, how crazy to have Mr. Basketball’s balls in our hands and his hands on our tiny bodies. “His butt is sooo amazing,” Janice said sometimes, but this was always supposed to be a joke because we didn’t even know what separated a good butt from a bad butt (“It’s all just butt,” I told Janice).
And when it was real, it wasn’t funny, when you touched someone, they were always with you. When his mouth was on mine, we held the same breath in the same moment, and when he was naked, his body was covered in tiny black hairs that stuck to my clothes even after I washed them. He had slowly become a part of me and when he was cruel, or cold, or acted like we couldn’t go on like this anymore, it felt like he was ripping my limbs off, one at a time. Janice had always understood this kind of pain, but I didn’t, not until now, listening to Mr. Basketball explain how easy it was to be with me one day and someone else the next. He would feel the woman’s curly hair against his chest, and he’d think about me. Her hair would itch like a wool carpet against his skin, and mine was smooth like silk, and that was when he knew: it was only in difference that we realized whom we loved.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you I love you I love you.”
I loved him so much I let him take off my shirt right there while the eggs were burning. I loved his sand hair, his accidental handsomeness. It was all too human and overwhelming. He touched me the same way every time, the neck down to the chest to the pubic bone. He made my shape seem so contrived, planned just the way he would want me, as though he charted and mapped me, a body so simple he had already memorized it. He held my hips with his two hands, centering me under him. This man could kill me, I thought, snap me in two if he so pleased. Hang me from the back porch to dry. And then his grasp would soften. His fingers would dance on my skin. He was so surprising in his features, a different person at every angle. He was sleeping with other women.
“Sometimes, randomly and unexpectedly, I don’t even know you,” I said, pushing him off me, backing away.
“Maybe you don’t,” he said, moving toward the stove, scraping the eggs with a fork. “Maybe I’m not myself. Maybe I’m reincarnated, an ancient Egyptian goat herder.”
“Impossible,” I said. “You’re too lazy.”
“Not impossible. There are so many reasons to believe in reincarnation. So many accounts, Emily, so many children who know other languages, never having been exposed to them before. Or people who can describe their old bodies down to the tiniest fatal wound that matches with the corpse they claim to have been in.”
“Okay, teacher,” I said. “Cut it out.”
“What would you want to come back as,” he said, scraping the burnt parts onto a dish as though that was suitable breakfast, “if you could come back?”
“A chair,” I said. “That couch. A crumb. You?”
“Be serious,” he said.
“Well, to be serious, I don’t think we come back.”
He took this personally. “You have to come back,” he said. “You are coming back.”
“I’m not,” I said, shrugging him off me. “I’m not coming back.”
He threw the dish in the sink, and I closed the door to his apartment quietly.
We didn’t speak for a week, and a few nights before I left Connecticut, my mother asked me to put on a nice dress because a man named Bill was coming over for dinner.
“Gross,” I said.
“Emily, please be nice,” she said. “Go take a shower, clean yourself up.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I have plans tonight.”
I woke up that morning panicking at the thought of never seeing Mr. Basketball again. I put on a nice dress and left my mother, who had begun to drip olive oil over a pan. Mr. Basketball was reading when I showed up, and he welcomed me with open arms. I lay down on his bed, and he kissed my bare shoulder. I rested my head on his chest and listened to his heart beat. We were both sorry.
The beagle was in the corner of the room, chewing on a string.
“Let’s go for a drive,” I said.
We started driving to Westport, the town over. He suggested maybe getting some frozen custard; there was this place he said, far outside of Fairfield, that was real good.
Everything was fine until Mr. Basketball ran a stoplight on Bullfrog Lane. The stoplight was so well placed in the middle of a four-way intersection it took you to any part of Fairfield you’d ever dream of going to. You could go north or south or east or west and either way, you could drive for ten minutes and you’d be in some other town in Connecticut that looked entirely the same, and there, you’d have to make another decision about whether to go north or south or east or west.
“Jonathan!” I shouted, gripping the door handle.
“That’s the first time you’ve ever called me Jonathan,” he said, ignoring the fact that he ran a stoplight. As soon as I said his name aloud, it felt good to call him Jonathan. Why hadn’t I before? “I thought I would like it,” he said.
“Jonathan, do you realize you ran a stoplight? You could have killed us.”
“Stop calling me that. It sounds so strange. Too strange.”
“You can’t just run stoplights and ignore me. That’s not what a relationship is.”
He looked over at me. Then he pulled over on the side of the road. The car was so silent, I could hear the brown tuft of hair slip out from behind his ear.
“A relationship?” he finally asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Tell me, Emily. How come your mother is still alive?”
“Huh?”
“Your mother. You told me when we first kissed that your mother was dying, three years ago.”
I looked out the window. “My mother wasn’t dying,” I said. “I lied. She was perfectly healthy. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that. In fact, I forgot I even said that.”
“So she wasn’t even dying?” he asked, and hit the steering wheel.
“Would you prefer it if she had been?”
He put his head against the wheel. “What the fuck have I done?”
“You ran a stoplight,” I said.
“What are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”
I cried as though crying were a reasonable substitute for making a decision.
“You’re a little girl,” he said. “Look at you, you’re crying.”
“Don’t diminish me,” I said, rubbing my eyes.
“You are a tiny girl who is in pain.”
“Shut up!” I yelled.
“Who are you, anyway? What are you doing in my life?”
Trees hung above the roof of the car and blocked the last of the day’s sun. Every moment, there was something new to want.
“Please don’t,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Emily,” he said. “This isn’t right.”
“What isn’t?”
“You are too young.”
“No,” I said, crying. “I love you.”
He dropped me off at a gas station. He drove away, and poof, just like that, he was gone. Mr. Basketball was here, and then he wasn’t. He was someone to me, and then he wasn’t. I looked at the aisles of Oreos and Clorox cleaner, pretending to shop, but window-shopping at a gas station minimart, I found out, was nearly impossible. I turned over packages of Pringles, waiting for my mother to pick me up, and I didn’t even cry as I saw his car turn left for the last time. That was the difference between children and adults.
“Children have a problem with that kind of stuff,” my mother said after I babysat for Laura and I told my mother that she cried when I tried to play peekaboo with her. “That’s what Ron said. Someone goes out of their sight and they believe that person to be gone forever. You cover your face, and Laura can’t imagine ever seeing you again. You were like that.”
At home, Bill was standing in the kitchen. My mother picked up the wine and loaf of anisette dough she had left in order to come get me.
“Hi, Emily,” Bill said. Bill wore pleated khakis and parted his almond hair down the middle.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Bill’s here.”
“Emily,” my mother scolded. The phone rang. I picked it up. It was Mrs. Resnick.
“Mrs. Resnick needs someone to watch Laura,” I said, grabbing my purse.
My mother held up her hands covered in dough. “We have a guest.”
“You have a guest,” I said. “I have to go see my sister.”
“You aren’t going to help me with the cookies?” she asked. “I can’t make these all on my own.”
“I don’t think Bill would like this victim psychology you are harboring,” I said, walking out the door. “Would you, Bill?”
“We’re going to eat like queens!” I said to Laura.
Laura clapped her hands. Laura was almost four. Old enough to talk, old enough to walk, and old enough to understand that queens did not eat gummy bears for dinner. I opened the food pantry. I was legally an adult now, eighteen and able to smoke and go to war and no longer able to be statutorily raped by men who were nineteen. I could have sex with anyone I pleased. I was proud of my body and I was wearing a thirty-dollar bra, so I lit the stove and pulled out everything from the cabinet that looked expensive. I fried Salisbury steak medallions in walnut oil, which I covered in quail eggs and tahini. Laura was mumbling parts of an Elvis song on the radio, braiding a chunk of her hair at the counter. I was surprised how I felt so much affection for Laura; she was the consequence of the terrible affair that ruined our lives, and yet, she was so small at the counter, so unaware of this fact, that all you wanted to do was possess her and be a part of her world. All she had to do was wrap her tiny fingers around my pinky and laugh when I picked her up and told her I was going to throw her in the trash. “Throw me in the trash again!” she shouted as I tickled her into the fold of the couch (“the trash”) and how glorious it was to Laura, this idea of being thrown away.
“Meat’s burning,” I said.
I turned down the temperature and looked around at how neat and clean the house was, how much of a home it still was, the chairs in nearly the same exact position they were during the funeral reception, their family photos still hanging above the fireplace. Everything was so familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, even their smiles behind the frames, and I couldn’t stand any of it.
I took out a bag of frozen shrimp and placed it on the counter. “Are those things animals?” Laura asked.
“Once upon a time,” I said.
“They don’t have any eyes,” Laura said.
I defrosted shrimp in the sink, steamed broccoli, microwaved a Trader Joe’s cheesecake and forgot about it, made a pesto sauce for the pasta that was burning in a pot, and when Laura went to bed, I unbraided her hair and kissed her on the forehead. “Are you my sister?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I am always your sister.”
“Good,” she said, and my heart was confused.
When a child goes to bed, a dark house begins to feel like a playground. I went downstairs and I opened up a bottle of Brane-Cantenac Red Bordeaux from France to celebrate my independence and poured some on the remaining steak and most of it in my mouth. There. We were even, I thought.
But, no, we still didn’t feel even. I went upstairs and rolled on Mrs. Resnick’s red and green plaid bedspread. Still plaid, how titillating, I said aloud, putting on her broken gold watch, how boring and unsexy and old.
In her bathroom, I smeared on her Red Salamander lipstick and pulled her lace knee socks to my thighs. I wrenched her lime green dress out of her closet, the one she wore to my father’s birthday party. The linen felt used and vintage on my body, old and sad and retired. I put on her black pumps. We had the same size feet by then, which both depressed and comforted me. I called Daniel, who came over and smoked pot with me on her bed, doobies, he still depressingly called them as he told me to breathe in deep and not open my mouth until I fully swallowed. After, I jumped up and down with the ceiling fan spinning a little too close to my head. Daniel pulled at my arm, and I crumbled on top of his body like that whole time I had been a sand statue. “What are you wearing?” he finally asked, tugging at the green linen, and then my underwear, discovering that I had been wet for hours. He licked my vagina a few times and then gestured toward his own crotch. Laura woke up in time to see us leaving the master bedroom and cried out, “Mom?”
“Not yet, honey,” I said, not quite ashamed.
Mrs. Resnick came home and walked through the door with a bunch of evening gowns draped over her arm and saw the empty bottle of wine on the table, the dirty burnt dishes in the sink, the melted cheesecake in her microwave, and me, costumed as an exaggerated, tired, whorish version of her. Without missing a beat, she stuck her hand in her wallet and pulled out forty bucks. “Here,” she said, and gave me the money, but wouldn’t look at me. “Thanks,” I grumbled, and left into the night, my insides wet with a boy’s saliva, my stomach spoiled with half-cooked meat and wine, my skin suffocated in another woman’s clothes, and Mrs. Resnick didn’t try to stop me, like she was glad to see herself go. I walked proudly across the lawn in a woman’s heels, trying to feel pleased with all of my recent decisions, but when I got to the rock between our lawns, I stood on top of it and felt ashamed.
I stood and I twirled. I jumped off the rock, and my heels sank into the ground, making me fall to the grass.
By the time I got to my front stoop, I wiped my mouth clean with my arm. As I walked into my house, I couldn’t help but notice how loud the heels cracked against
the tile and wonder how much she had paid for them, if Mrs. Resnick cried when she found my clothes sprinkled on her unmade bed.
“Do you love Bill?” I asked my mother, flinging open the door, throwing myself into the kitchen. She was rolling the last batch of anisette cookies.
“Emily!” my mother said, shocked at my appearance. She never finished her sentence.
“After I graduate college,” I said, calmly, picking up some dough like I just came home from a war and the only thing I needed to do was not talk about it, roll the dough in my hands, and perform simple and comforting tasks and remember the everyday, “I’m going to live with Dad in Prague.”
“What are you wearing, Emily?” my mother shrieked.
Bill walked into the kitchen with his sweater and glass of red wine. He laughed at my outfit. “You’re a hoot,” he said. It sounded like he spent the week thinking of how to address me.
My mother gestured for him not to mention the outfit any further.
“I’m moving to Prague,” I repeated. “As soon as I’m done with college.”
“Prague?” Bill asked. “Why would you want to go hang out with a bunch of Commies? Aren’t all the kids going to Latin America these days?”
“She’s not going to Prague,” my mother said. “She hasn’t even started college.”
I informed Bill that the architecture in Prague was amazing.
“Well,” Bill said, holding up his wineglass. “Here’s hoping they let you back in.”
We clinked glasses, and it sounded like a contract. Bill left the room and my mother and I continued to roll the last of the anisette cookies. We held the cold dough between our palms and my mother asked me to please please take off that outfit, and I got flour all over Mrs. Resnick’s dress and my mother demanded I tell her the truth about that man, and I asked my mother to tell me the truth about Bill. What was Bill really like? I asked. Oh, tall, she said. Brownish hair. Strong chin. Smooth skin. Loves all modes of transportation. And dogs. He really just loves dogs.
In Plain English
21
My father’s apartment in Prague was covered in filth. This was something his fiancée Ester noticed every night while we waited for my father to return from work. Ester usually made the announcement while we were in the common room, and the television was loud. On the news, they were broadcasting live footage of the clear sky, evidence that the thunderstorm had passed.
The Adults Page 17