Girls of a Certain Age

by Maria Adelmann

  Let your stomach ache. Call this feeling a stomachache. Make up reasons why it has developed: you are sensitive to spicy food, you drink too much soda, there is a flu going around.

  When you hear phrases like high risk of death or capture, think instead of trite phrases about liberty, even if they come directly from pickup truck bumper stickers: FREEDOM ISN’T FREE, SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. You will soon be a cliché yourself, condensed into symbols. You will wear an American flag on your collar and a yellow ribbon on your breast and one, also, on the back of your car. You will say the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning, even the part about God, and you will put your hand on your heart. You will mean it. You will mean all of it.

  Memorize every part of him. Memorize the thick, toned bulk of his arms and legs, the muscular rises and falls of his abdomen, the territory you have known for years, have learned by heart but not, until now, by rote. Memorize the positions of his freckles, dots like soldiers staked out across the sand of a desert map. Memorize the curve of each fingernail, white splinters of nascent moons. Memorize the uncommon crinkle in the fleshy part of his ear, a perfect imperfection, a detail you have always believed your children would inherit.

  Do not crave the expanding bud of a crinkle-eared baby in your aching stomach, a flower that will not wilt for at least eighteen years.

  Confuse “marital” and “martial.” Go commando. Advance. Seize. Incite invasion.

  When you hear him whimpering quietly in the night, turned away from you, put your arm over him and feel for the wet of his eyelashes, the dampness of his cheeks. He has comforted you this way many times. He has always done this for you.

  In the dark blackness of rolling credits, wait for him to tell you that he doesn’t mind dying, he just doesn’t want you to hate him for choosing to go. He’ll say, over and over: If I die, it will be my own fault, and you’ll hate me. He’ll say: I just don’t want you to hate me.

  Tell him over and over that you could never hate him. Tell him so many times that you do not know what you’re saying, the words dropping like blanks from your soft, civilian tongue.

  He will get louder. He will wail like a dog, like a baby, like a ghost. He has cried only once before, at your wedding. He was crying because he loved you and when you walked down the aisle you were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. There is no use being modest about this. He is crying for essentially the same reason now.

  You have cried many times in your life. You cried when your parents were going to split up, and again when they got back together. You cried when your sister went to college and when your brother decided not to go. You have cried everywhere: in bathrooms, on roller coasters, in traffic jams, in the seats of movie theaters playing romantic comedies that received mediocre reviews. But you do not cry now.

  Get a second dog. Several things could happen to the first. For example, he could get run over by a car. For example, he could escape out the door when you’re carrying in the groceries. For example, he could get sick, you could drop him on his head, he could be stolen by a jealous neighbor.

  Do not read the news. Do not watch the news. Do not go to the New York Times, looking for statistics. Do not spend hours examining the faces of the dead.

  Do not try to decide what war this is, whose war this is. This is not part of the equation you are working on.

  Think about what he said in your first month together, his bare arms wrapped around you like vines. He said: I’m afraid I will wake and not know it’s you. He said: I’m afraid I will snap your neck. Even then, fatigued and in love, he was ready for war.

  Donate to, but do not look at, the man with one leg, staked out at a VA table set up like an ambush at the front of the grocery store.

  Do not try to cherish every moment. This will only ruin every moment. Know that there are things you will miss, lose, wish for longingly in the night, but do not think about what these things are, do not think about the ways in which you will not know him anymore.

  Go out together. Drink like a man, like a warrior, like a soldier on leave. You are strong, you are belligerent, you are tears, you are vomit, you are a rock, a rack, Iraq, a desert, dehydrated, desiccated, desolate. He will lead you home peacefully, wordlessly, as if you hadn’t spilled sauce on your shirt, broken your wineglass, stolen a pork chop for the dogs. He will hold you steady in a way that you cannot possibly hold yourself.

  When you go to bed that night, all tears and vomit and snot, he will wipe your face as if you could produce only pure water. He will soon do much more for people he loves much less. And at night, he will wake up alone, in not quite the body you have memorized, changed now by sun and sand, in a bed so small there is no empty space where you should be.

  Unattached

  I was out for a run, neck to ankle in pink and black spandex, and for a single, happy moment, I felt sleek as a scuba diver. Running was a new hobby I liked to blame on Dylan. When things end poorly, I write lists of lessons I have learned, changes to make, et cetera. Incidentally, I have a lot of lists, mini spiral steno pads full of them, stacked under the bed. After Dylan left, I’d resolved to run daily. I’d gotten the idea from googling something stupid, something like “relationship failure not connecting.” The goal was to feel every part of myself as the human/animal it’s supposed to be, as muscles and lungs, as feet on pavement, grounded, because I was having that problem again, connecting.

  And it was working, maybe, sometimes. In small spurts of letting go, the hot burn in my lungs would feel like fuel instead of fire, and I’d be off, springing down the stone-gray sidewalk, pretending the scenery was blurring by, a Monet of lime-green and yellow grass and brown brick town houses. And then it would be over, and I’d be tired again, my chest heaving, and I’d begin to worry about the things that can befall a person while running, while being outdoors, while being a woman: rape, murder, relentless ridicule that cuts to the bone.

  What did befall me, in the end, was none of these things.

  That day, the sky was awesome, like some high-saturation desktop background, bright and empty save for a single, cartoonish cloud. An exhilarating tingle hung in the air, like the shift in energy before a storm (negative ions, Dylan always said).

  I was making a list in my head that had nothing to do with self-improvement (milk, eggs, tuna, peanut butter) when the hairs on my arm stood straight up. My stomach dropped, that belly-flip feeling like when your car takes the crest of a hill at just the right speed, and as I tried to run, I realized my feet weren’t on the ground. I was floating (falling?) toward a tree whose branches had been, just moments before, directly and safely above my head. By some instinct I’m glad to know I have, I grabbed on to a branch while the rest of my body headed onward toward the sky in a sort of slo-mo somersault.

  Well, shit, I thought. There are lots of things you imagine you’ll do in a crisis, but there isn’t much you can do while hanging from a tree, legs shooting sneaker first into a pit of blue sky, looped shoelaces dangling in the direction of the sun. I felt like a piece of postmodern art, photoshopped somehow into this predicament.

  In theory, I was upside down, but no blood rushed to my head. I felt light and buoyant. It was as if gravity had not only reversed, but also weakened. I inched my hands along the branch, recalibrating my movements to contend with the extra float, and wrapped myself tight around the tree trunk like a cartoon bear. My head was pointing toward the grass of someone’s lawn.

  Around me, everything that had been unattached was either going or gone, ascending (falling?) toward the heavens like escaped helium balloons drifting casually away from the earth—ants and acorns, leaves and dirt, flowers and terra-cotta pots and lawn gnomes and lawn mowers and children’s toys, like a dirty blue and yellow plastic slide, the kind I remember playing on as a kid. A Wiffle ball clinked out of a gutter. A black hose rose like a charmed snake up the length of a house and hovered there. Cars that had been parked along the sidewalk or in driveways moments earlier were already hitting the stratosphere
. One disappeared into that fat cloud near the sun. I heard a whimper: was it me? But no, in the distance I caught sight of a family dog spinning through the sky.

  I felt nauseous because my brain kept flipping the picture, reinterpreting which way was up. When I saw the world as upside down, then the houses and trees were like stalactites hanging from the ceiling of earth above my head, and our little civilization was very small, just the tiniest inhabited layer in a world made up almost entirely of air.

  Soon the sky cleared, save the occasional flower that suddenly popped out of the dirt and drifted away, or a leaf, like the orange-brown one that detached from a branch just a foot from my head. I fought the urge to reach out and grab it. Instead I watched it fall away, kept watching it, straining my eyes until I lost it to the grain of vision. I listened for the dog, but it too had disappeared.

  By now, I’d shimmied down a little to sit on a branch, though I didn’t dare let go of the trunk. The air smelled of overturned earth. A golden midafternoon light, the kind only possible in late fall, shone through the brown and red leaves in my tree, making them look like the final standing shards of a shattered stained glass window. A serene dreaminess overwhelmed me, the sort of peace I imagined people felt when they had conceded to death.

  I thought about calling for help, but it didn’t seem appropriate. After all, I wasn’t the only one in a predicament. Besides, I’m not an inspired yeller. It’s one of my flaws, really, and the reason I quit karate in the fourth grade after getting only a yellow belt. It was the reason I only whispered “Whoopsie” one summer day when I fell sideways while wearing a wedge sandal and sprained my ankle, walking on the foot for a week before seeing a doctor, and why I felt embarrassed when my mom screamed in the middle of a Walgreens after learning her sister had gotten hit by a delivery truck while trying to cross the street in Midtown, and why I didn’t cry at the funeral or any of the days before or after, and why my own sister whispered in my ear in the middle of an echoing church, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  It’s strange how calm I am in a crisis, because I’m afraid of everything. I’m afraid of people: waiters, tech support, pizza delivery guys, coworkers, even the people I’m supposed to know. I’m also afraid of transportation: planes, subways, trains, buses, cars, elevators. Also, invisible things: carbon monoxide, those brain-eating amoebas found in lakes. I am farseeing, a chess player calculating all of fate’s possible moves. Expect the Unexpected! is my motto, but even in the many, detailed, and wild scenarios my brain has conjured, I never expected this.

  The breakup with Dylan? That I expected. I braced myself for it from the moment we met, and even so I let him nestle in, like a worm inching its way into the heart of a rotting apple. Symbiosis began to occur. He brought me half-price lunch from Bubba’s on Wednesday afternoons: a giant burger, well-done, plus two surprise sides of his choosing. He cleaned off my perpetually finger-printed glasses with a magic combination of his warm breath and whichever cotton T-shirt he was wearing. He was a member of a community woodshop, and he kept asking me what I wanted him to make me. “I don’t know?” I kept answering. “Whatever you want?”

  Dylan claimed that my rising intonation was a defense against commitment. “I don’t think so?” I said. “Maybe I just talk like this? Maybe our whole generation just talks like this?” What was I supposed to tell him? That he was right? That I actually liked my IKEA furniture? That I took comfort in its smooth, laminate look, in the pleasant feeling it gave me, a longing for some made-up version of Scandinavia? That one day we would break up and I wouldn’t want furniture that would remind me of him?

  In the end, he made me a corner shelf for my most impossible corner and a media cabinet that perfectly held my TV and peripherals. Just as I feared, they were so flawlessly tailored to my life that I could never get rid of them.

  In the night, Dylan looked like the outline of a person I might not know.

  “You asleep?” he would ask when he was almost out.

  “Definitely,” I’d answer.

  He’d kiss me, and I’d forget to kiss back.

  “Where are you?” he would ask.

  I was in one of a million places: I was the ghostly figure in the gray-dust aftermath of a subway bombing; I was the eviscerated human hanging from a shattered passenger-side window; I was a bodega shopper shot and losing blood next to a display of Cheetos.

  Where am I supposed to be? I would think, but I’d say, “Nowhere?”

  I wrote this on the list of things I’d learned: The answer is “here.” That’s always where you’re supposed to be.

  The temperature was dropping. Or maybe I was just cold because I wasn’t running anymore. I tried to stop thinking about Dylan. I tried to just be mindful, a skill I was learning from a meditation podcast. Or was trying to learn between advertisements for box subscriptions, where you get overpriced samples of snacks and clothes delivered directly to your door. I was supposed to think about what my body parts were feeling, but this usually led me into a panic, because I’d focus a lot on my teeth, which were always on the brink of decay. This time, though, I skipped the teeth entirely and went right to my hands, which were holding on to the tree so tightly that they were starting to ache. I gave each a rest in turn, shaking out one hand and then the other. The bark had left an imprint on my skin that I watched fade as I bent my fingers back and forth.

  A voice, suddenly, was calling out to me: “Excuse me! Hello!” I flung my head toward the town house—whoever was yelling, I was in their lawn.

  It was a woman with a white fluff of hair. She stood in the open doorway, two stories of house and a pointed roof and a blue sky pitched below her.

  Behind her, papers were scattered on her ceiling, which was now the floor, and a wooden table was legs up, like a dead bug. A bald man bounced into view, like an astronaut on the moon. He seemed to be enjoying himself. “Mass and distance!” I heard him shouting. “Mass and distance!”

  “Are you okay?” the woman called. I envied that she was able to sound concerned while yelling. Sometimes I had difficulty establishing appropriate volume and tone during conversations, especially with people I didn’t know. “Just be yourself,” Dylan had recommended. But what if I already was just being myself?

  Just be yourself? I had written on the list. Then I’d scribbled out the question mark. Later, when reviewing the list, I put it back in.

  “Fine, thanks,” I croaked back to the woman, too quietly, then louder and too aggressively: “Yes! Thanks!”

  “Would you like to come in?” the woman called.

  I made an awkward little laughing noise, because this seemed impossible, because I was sitting in a tree about twenty feet from this woman’s front door. I opened my mouth and closed it again, trying and failing to think of an appropriate response.

  “Hold on!” she shouted, and then she closed the door and disappeared. I waited in the tree, trying to be mindful about my body, except not my hands or my teeth.

  Just as I began to wonder if the woman had been a figment of my imagination, her door swung open and she reappeared, a thick hemp rope clutched in her fist. I had to wonder what sort of person just happened to have a length of rope on hand. Then I thought of what might befall me if I stayed outside: nightfall, hypothermia, starvation, floating into oblivion.

  Standing in that doorway, she seemed, somehow, poised over a precipice at the edge of the world, like a superhero or a character in a children’s book, like maybe if she tipped out of the doorway she would fly instead of fall.

  “I’m going to throw this to you!” she shouted. She announced everything as she did it, like a friendly nurse. She tried to lasso the rope out to me, but it just flailed around the entryway and doorframe. The man appeared again, grabbed it from her without a word, and flung the rope out like a fishing line, which worked surprisingly well. It snaked toward me and I caught it—one-handed!—and all three of us cheered as the rope bristled in my palm.

  “As an extra precaution
, my husband is also tying our end to the banister,” the woman said. I hoped he’d been a scout or a sailor or soldier or some other profession where you learn to tie knots.

  I triple-wrapped the rope around my waist before tying it because I am not a scout or a sailor or soldier, and recently I’d learned—from a YouTube video, no less—that I’d been tying my shoelaces wrong for years.

  Was I starting to feel a little heavier? As if to confirm this, the husband jumped with what appeared to be reduced bounce. “Best to do it now, perhaps,” said the woman. The man hustled up behind her to hold on to the rope. “We’re ready!” she shouted.

  I looked down into the blue abyss below, my heart racing. I felt like I was standing on top of a Looney Tunes high dive. How strong were these people? How heavy was I? How sturdy was this rope? How firm was my grip?

  “Go!” she shouted.

  I stopped thinking. I went. I slipped off the branch as if I were simply slipping into a hot tub, but instead I fell into the sky. I was like a tethered astronaut or a baby on an umbilical cord. The cool air rushed past my cheeks, the tree grew small below me, its leaves fluttering gently like hundreds of fingers waving goodbye.

  At my peak, dangling above the town houses, I had an unbelievable view. Streets ran toward the horizon in parallel lines, empty-looking neighborhoods set out between them in squares and rectangles. Pointed roofs in red, gray, and brown jutted from the ground like giant arrows pointing toward the sky.

  As the couple reeled me in, I bumped up against the tiny attic window, the brick facade, a second-story window where I saw a bed upside down on the ceiling, mattress on the floor, splayed quilt pinned below it. Then there I was, at the top of the doorframe, the woman looking at me from above, her face flushed red from exertion. I climbed inside the house and the woman stretched her hands out toward me like a mother about to embrace her wobbling toddler. I reached back the exact same way, and we shared a hug that felt weirdly natural.