The Adults

by Alison Espach

  “Alfred is dead,” I tell my mother. “Remember? Four years ago. He had a tumor in his pancreas.”

  “That’s right,” my mother says. “I forgot about that.”

  My mother looks at the picture of my father and smiles anyway.

  “Your father had a real sense of humor, Emily,” my mother says. “You know that, right?”

  “I know,” I say. “He was a funny man. Did Bill leave to get the beer?”

  “He did.”

  It’s like my mother says: Italians love and then Italians die and then Italians cry and then Italians drink half a bottle of sambuca and say stupid shit.

  I am by the eggplant when I see Mrs. Resnick and Mark and Laura show up. I am pretty sure I am the only one who notices the way my mother’s mouth quivers when she sticks out her hand to take the bottle of wine.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Mrs. Resnick says to my mother, holding out a bottle of red wine.

  I cannot decide if this is a vengeful, or sweet, or forgiving act. My father’s funeral reception has just begun.

  “Thank you,” my mother says. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Mr. Bulwark is beside me, explaining how the eggplant isn’t falling apart in his mouth like he wants it to. Ladies are on the patio arguing over whose lipstick is melting faster.

  “Dorothy, your lipstick is melting right off your face,” Mrs. Ewing says. “See, it’s dripping right onto your teeth.”

  “Yours is dripping down the side of your chin,” the other one points out, and they both laugh.

  Children I don’t know are tossing carrots back and forth under tables. Adora is passing out clear drinks. Mr. and Mrs. Trenton have come and left, quiet and always absent now that Richard has been dead for years. The wind is starting to pick up. It howls in my ear like it’s mad nobody is listening. I watch the two women stand by the gate entrance to our yard. Mrs. Resnick is wearing a black suit with a beaded collar. Her hair is gray. She has on bright red lipstick and thick black glasses that hide her eyes. My mother is wearing a black dress with a scoop neck. Her blond hair is not in her normal French twist. Her hair is not even blond anymore. I noticed the gray two years ago, when she stopped dying it, and cried all night until my throat scabbed. Her hair is half-up and curling around her face.

  “I used to curl my hair for your father,” my mother said, standing in front of the mirror earlier this morning. “Oh my, Emily, when your father and I first started dating, I would curl my hair for him every night. I’d sit up the night before we were to go out and roll fifty tiny pink rollers in my head. Then I’d go lie down and feel the pricks of the rollers dig into my scalp and I thought, This is what Jesus meant by sacrifice.”

  “Mom,” I said.

  “I’m just joking, Emily. Come on. Lighten up.”

  Mark stands between my mother and Mrs. Resnick, a six-foot-four man who is wide at the shoulders. Mark has dark brown hair that is parted to the left. He is in a black suit with a red striped tie. He is holding the card that has white lilies on the front. He is very sorry for everything.

  I watch my mother give Mark a hug. I walk over to them. I think of something better to say with every step I take.

  “Hello,” I say.

  “This is my daughter, Emily,” my mother says. “She’s all grown up now.”

  My mother started saying this after I turned twenty-three, as though my person before and after twenty-three was so different, nobody could tell it was the same person.

  I make eye contact with Mark and we shake hands.

  “Hello, Emily,” Mark says. His voice is deep. He is a different person now too. It is so obvious how we don’t even know each other.

  “Hi, Mark,” I say.

  “Emily is an interior designer,” my mother says. “She designed Woody Allen’s apartment.”

  “Oh really?” Mark says. “You decorated that?”

  “We try not to say ‘decorated,’” my mother says. “Emily thinks it’s offensive.”

  I shrug my shoulders. I am fourteen again.

  “What do you do?” I ask him.

  “He’s an engineer,” Mrs. Resnick says.

  “I’m an engineer,” Mark repeats.

  “That’s great,” my mother says. “Mr. Jackson was an engineer. Still is an engineer. Once an engineer, always an engineer? Is that what you engineers say?”

  My mother gets stupid around Mrs. Resnick.

  “We could,” Mark says to be polite. “We could start saying that, I suppose. I don’t see why not.”

  I smile.

  When Janice arrives, she pulls up quickly in a silver Infiniti. She steps out of the car in checkered black and white heels and with a baby on her arm. She hands the baby to the man on her right, who turns out to be her husband, Max, a forty-year-old vice president of People’s Bank. She runs up to me standing with Mark and Mrs. Resnick and my mother. She wraps her arms around me and when I do the same, she feels frail in my embrace, like a feather waiting for a strong wind to take her to the bar, which I assume is usually Max.

  “Let’s talk,” Janice says, and we sit down at a table.

  We are women who barely know each other, sitting at a beautiful table, and my father is fifteen miles away at the cemetery.

  “I’ll get you a drink,” I say.

  “Vodka and soda,” she says. “No lime.”

  At the bar, Mr. Lipson stops me. When the adults at my father’s reception stop me, they put one hand on my shoulder and then smile. “You know, I was just telling Stephen that you’ve got your father’s nose,” he says.

  “I do,” I say. “Long. Lumpy at the top.”

  Mr. Lipson laughs. “Careful,” he says. “I don’t think your father would like to hear anybody making fun of his nose. Even you, young lady.” Mr. Lipson puffs on his cigar and I shiver.

  “I can’t believe all this,” Janice says when I sit down. “I’m so sorry about your father, Emily.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “I didn’t know you got married.”

  “What else was I supposed to do?”

  My mother, Mrs. Resnick, and another woman I don’t recognize sit down with us.

  “I just eloped,” Janice said. “There was no huge wedding.”

  “You always wanted a huge wedding.”

  “I wanted Oprah at my wedding.”

  “I know. That’s weird.”

  “But we went on vacation and then just eloped. Just like that.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Handsome,” she says. “Charming. Snores. Yellowed teeth. But he’s old. So what can I expect really? He knows shit. Like during breakfast sometimes he’s just like, ‘Did you know that you have to grow rice on a completely flat piece of land?’”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Yeah. That’s what it’s like with him.”

  “How much older is he?”

  “Fifteen years older.”

  “That’s pretty old.”

  “I was afraid the baby would come out with Down syndrome. I mean, we’d love her anyway of course. But still. It’s not what you prefer for a child.”

  “I didn’t know you had a baby either,” I say. “You couldn’t just write these things in a postcard or something?”

  “I was scared you wouldn’t have come to see any of it,” Janice says. “I didn’t want to invite you and then not have you come. You know?”

  “Of course I would have come.”

  “You probably wouldn’t have come.”

  I might not have come.

  After a while, Janice says, “I wish you could have come when I had Betsy.”

  “So do I,” I say.

  “I needed you there for some perspective,” Janice says, and as soon as she says this, it suddenly makes sense as to why we had always been friends. “When Betsy came out, I remember thinking, Wow, everybody is crowded around my vagina right now. And then when she came out, everyone was like, wow, it’s a miracle. But really. For God’s sakes, was it reall
y a surprise? We had been planning this for nine months. And I kept hearing your voice in the back of my head, like, who knew the child came out of the vagina?”

  My mother and Mrs. Resnick, who are sitting quietly next to us, both flinch at the word “vagina.” Janice continues, saying that, at first, having a child was like babysitting. Except she never got to go home, and eating the food in the cabinet wasn’t exciting because it was hers and she paid for it.

  “And when Betsy finally said something for the first time I started to think that maybe she was a real human being, you know?” Janice says, sipping her drink with a straw, demonstrating habits she must have picked up from her daughter. “But then she would do something like spill her milk all the over the table and I would think, No, she couldn’t possibly be a real person. Sometimes she just seemed like this large object that came out of my uterus to spill things.”

  “It takes time,” Mrs. Resnick says.

  “It does take time,” my mother says.

  “Exactly,” Janice says. She says she has a few baby friends—other ladies with babies who sit around in the same floral room and talk about other ladies and their babies. They cured her.

  “My friend Beatrice would always say, it’s a new type of fun,” Janice says. “New fun is the kind of fun that happens when Betsy says she wants to be a zookeeper when she grows up because she wants to be with animals and we all laugh and have a big hoo-ha. Not to be confused with a nickname for a vagina. ‘Hoo-ha’ is how Betsy says ‘laugh.’”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” my mother says. “It’s sort of like when Emily couldn’t pronounce her k sounds so whenever she would chase after the neighborhood stray Emily would scream, ‘Titty!’ instead of ‘Kitty!’ and make me and Victor laugh.”

  Me and Victor. I have not heard my mother say that in years. It was always “your father,” “Emily’s father,” “my ex-husband.” Today, he is her Victor.

  “I love my girl,” Janice says. “I really do. Now, where’d Max take her?”

  39

  At the height of the reception, Mark helps me replace the empty vats of ziti. He picks up the empty dishes before they are blown away by the wind. When he is next to me, I feel the pressure to speak. But I don’t know what to say. My father is dead. Your father is dead. Alfred is dead. Mr. Finnegan moved to Naples, Florida. Mr. Bulwark has even larger ears now, and then someday, he will die, and he and his ears will be buried. Oh, I fucked Mr. Basketball. I live alone. I have houseplants. I forget to water them. My favorite candy is oh-trick-question I don’t have a favorite candy.

  Mark and I stand quietly by the bar until Mr. Bulwark approaches.

  “My wife,” Mr. Bulwark says. He puts three carrots on his plate. “She was a novelist, did you know that? She was such a smart woman, that one.”

  “She was,” Mark says. “I remember. She taught me how to play chess.”

  Mrs. Bulwark is also dead.

  We stand like this for the rest of the night, until our feet can’t take it anymore, until we sit down in the chairs and I open my mouth to say something and then I stop because I am afraid of who we both have become. Will our new selves like each other? Mark puts his hand on my back.

  “Once, you threatened to murder my father,” I say.

  “I did,” he says. “I’m very sorry for that.”

  A week later, my mother holds a tag sale, selling my father’s stuff from the attic. There is so much left over from his life I joke with my mother that our yard looks like the Waste Not, Want Not display at the MoMa. We try to sell his collections of Herman Melville, business dictionaries, and Tom Wolfe, but it turns out that the people in my neighborhood won’t want to read them. Someone buys his old electric razor that is ten years out of date. Some people buy his old college T-shirts. Some of them buy parts of his old Matchbox car collection. Then, they drive away in their Volvos and their Infinitis and their Mercedes and parts of my father become scattered all across town. Mrs. Resnick shows up late, right before the sun is about to set and we are about to close, as though showing up in the nick of time to collect the remains of my father is the art of their romance.

  “Is there anything left?” she asks, tears in her eyes. She moves the hair out of her mouth, yet she still does not look at me. I almost cover my mouth with my hand. I am screaming inside my head.

  My mother looks around.

  “Scarves,” my mother says. “There are some of his scarves left.”

  Must you take everything from us? I want to shout.

  “How much?” Mrs. Resnick says. She brings out a wad of singles, and her fingers are shaking. One of the dollars falls to the ground, and nobody ever bends over to pick it up.

  “Just take them,” my mother says. “They’re free.”

  Mrs. Resnick takes my father’s plaid scarves. Even though I thought I had forgiven everyone for everything, there is a child inside me that wants to rip them from her and scream, “Those are ours! Those are ours!”

  My mother says, “Okay, I’m going in to take a hot bath.” Mrs. Resnick leaves and as she says good-bye, I think, That woman has never properly looked me in the eye and I don’t know who is to blame for any of this.

  Then Mark arrives. He walks across his lawn, and I drop candlesticks carelessly in boxes, and my heart pauses, as though it is taking the time to fall in love all over again, even though it will feel impossible to love at this moment, even him. But it feels equally impossible not to believe that anybody walking toward me on the lawn is not on a mission to return something.

  He helps me put away the tables. We work silently. Things have to be categorized. Leftover socks. Golf tees. Old calculators. Empty binders. We sit in the garage and mark the boxes—Total Junk.

  Useful Stuff. Then Mark takes the marker and adds (Not Really Though).

  Mark pulls a silver necklace with a ruby in the middle out of my father’s brown safekeeping box. He starts to speak, then thinks better of himself. We are silent.

  “Is this your mother’s?” he asks.

  “No,” I say. “Is it your mother’s?”

  Mark never answers. He reaches out his hand and touches my hair. People are always touching my hair. Why are people always doing this?

  “Emily,” he says, “I am so sorry.”

  “No,” I say. “I am so sorry.”

  And then he leans close to my face.

  “No, you must understand, I am sorry.”

  “No, but I’m sorry.”

  We go upstairs to my room. We lay there and we rest like this every night for a month. Sometimes when we can’t sleep, we debate over which appliance in my house is making the most commotion. Or he makes me do conversions to the metric system until I fall asleep.

  “How many meters are in a mile?”

  “Oh, Jesus, I don’t know.”

  “One thousand six hundred and nine.”

  “How many miles are in a knot?”

  “I don’t know. Blah.”

  Then he says something like, “Well, it’s like you don’t even want to talk acreage.”

  And when I fall asleep, I dream that I am riding a bike, and the bike’s parts are falling off as I pedal. I don’t even notice. “What a magnificent sight!” someone shouts from behind me. Sometimes, this makes me wake up and cry. This person feels like the only thing missing from my life. Sometimes it feels like my father. And when I wake up in a panic, Mark is there. The problem is not the nightmare at all.

  “How could your mother have slept with my father?” I say.

  “How could your father have slept with my mother?” he says.

  “Your mother had such ugly hair,” I say.

  “Your father had a fat ass,” he says.

  And then we laugh like children and lay our heads back down on the pillow and forgive each other. Sometimes, it feels like we are always forgiving each other.

  “I slept with Mr. Basketball,” I say once during breakfast, when we are tired. “I dated Mr. Basketball on and off for nearly te
n years.”

  “You what?” he asks, but never drops his fork. Most of the time he isn’t even holding a fork. He is by the toaster, burning bread. It is exhausting in this way, but also honest. He slams the burnt bread down on my plate as though I lived my past only to hurt him, and burnt bread feels like an appropriate punishment for being someone he can’t recognize at the moment.

  I dream of Mr. Basketball some nights, on the side of I-90 that curves around the bend of a mountain. I dream of Jonathan, swimming in hotel pools. In my dream, he is waiting for something that never shows up, a car, a lizard, a book. I am always farther away.

  On the anniversary of Mr. Resnick’s suicide, Mark has too much to drink and confronts me. He asks me to recount his father’s suicide, step by step.

  I explain to Mark that my mouth was dry that night. I saw his father through the window, walking. That I hadn’t seen him in so long, I wanted to say hello. That even after he was dead, I still felt compelled to say hello, but I knew the only people who spoke to the dead were either insane or my aunt Lee.

  Mark politely asks me not to joke around.

  “Let me tell you how it happened for me,” he says.

  He tells me how he watched his father walk out the door that morning, hoping he would just keep walking down the street until he got lost. He was so tired of counting his pants and taking care of him, so tired of feeling bad for him, scared of him. “Did you know that I didn’t laugh for forty days after my father killed himself?” he asks me. “Did you know that I tried on every single one of his pants? There are seventy pairs.

  “One night, two months before he died, my father had a breakthrough. He walked all the way from the basement, into the kitchen, out the door, got the mail, and came back in. We all cheered, my parents laughed, even though now that I think about it, it was such a minor victory that it was almost more of a setback, really. They laughed, and my father walked over to her and kissed her right on the lips. We all thought this was a new beginning. That the new treatment was working. That my father would become a man again, he would go back to work, my mother would return to him. They made love that night. I know because I heard them.”