Girls of a Certain Age

by Maria Adelmann

  That night, like every Friday night, I had dinner at my dad’s tiny apartment in Carlisle, which was just outside Concord. It was barely three rooms: a small kitchen attached to a bedroom attached to a bathroom. Instead of doors, the rooms were separated by hanging wooden beads. The place was neat and sparse: no wall decorations, few shelves, an air mattress for a bed. Extra items were kept in piles: cereal boxes here, gray custodial shirts there. He had found a round table on the street and this was where we spent most of our time, sitting in chairs that were missing bars at the back.

  My mom referred to the evenings at my father’s as the Weekly Styrofoam Dinners, since we always ordered takeout. After my first week of work, I sat with my legs curled beneath me and my elbows on the table, eating Chinese food from a black plastic box with a black plastic fork. My dad sat across from me, leaning forward to assess the contents of his box. “How’s work?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said, “the guy who runs the place is…” I paused. “He’s very nice.”

  “Too nice, you mean,” said my dad, poking through his meal.

  “Here,” I said, pointing with my fork to a shrimp in my dish. “Yeah, too nice, I guess.”

  “Maybe he wants in your pants.” My dad took the shrimp with his fork. He always believed one person was after what was in another person’s pants, probably a projection of his own wishes and, I guessed, the reason my parents had split up.

  “He’s over fifty,” I said.

  “A young girl like you? He’d love it. Watch out.”

  I arrived at my mom’s later that evening to find the spot where I usually sat at the kitchen table covered in college forms, pages and pages requiring the same exact information. One of the forms was a housing survey. I was supposed to specify if I was a night owl or an early bird. Everything on the survey was a kind of stupid metaphor like that, and I hadn’t filled it out yet.

  “What are these for?” I asked my mother, who was in the kitchen making her own dinner.

  “What are these for?” my mother repeated. “Maybe they’re for you to fill out before they’re due? What do you think?”

  “Well, you’re in a good mood,” I said, dropping my purse on the floor and heading into the family room to sit on the couch.

  “I hope you aren’t planning to go off gallivanting with Julie tonight, because you’ve got plans, honey.” Had she been like this when my brother, Frank, was leaving? I couldn’t remember.

  She walked into the family room, sat on the other side of the couch, and flipped on the news. I already didn’t want to hear it. It always started straightaway with the wars: this person captured, another person killed, trucks blowing up, buildings instantly in smithereens. No mention of Afghanistan—we’d already forgotten about that war but hadn’t yet remembered to mention we forgot.

  “Do you have to watch that?” I asked.

  “I need to know if my son is safe,” she said. Frank was in Afghanistan. I wanted to tell her that her son was my brother and the news wasn’t going to tell her if Frank was okay; all it was going to do was set her on edge and make her worry.

  “Have we heard from him?” I asked.

  “That email last week,” she said, waving me away. “I would’ve told you.”

  Frank had gone right from college to the Middle East and had barely returned since, going on new tours every chance he got. I guess he liked war, though it wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to shout from the rooftops in a city like this, even though Bostonians, of all people, were raised with almost a parental love for America, believing that we had been present for both the country’s conception and its birth. We loved the revolution, the Constitution, war, peace, and transcendentalism. Every April, Lexington and Concord shut down for Patriots’ Day, our own version of Independence Day, marking the first battle of the Revolutionary War with fireworks, barbecues, and beer. Neighbors who I’d only ever witnessed walking lazily down their driveways in button-downs and khakis on that day in April would march in the street carrying giant flags or fake rifles, wearing white wigs and fancy blue or red coats with golden buttons.

  But recently, the fireworks had not been as bright or as high or as many. This year, Patriots’ Day came just a month after fifty thousand people had gathered in the heart of the city waving poster boards and painted sheets, yelling, “Not one more day! Not one more dollar! Not one more death!” And “How many lives per gallon?” The equation made my stomach churn. I pictured whole lines of soldiers hugging their families goodbye and then, suddenly, in the very arms of a sister or a parent or a wife, each soldier would melt down into a black puddle shining at their feet.

  Women would stand behind me in grocery lines saying things like, “Who in his right mind would fight such a useless war?” and “I wouldn’t want my son dying over there for no reason.” For a while, I couldn’t step into a single crowded place without hearing something like that. They claimed to protest on my brother’s behalf, and in the next breath they essentially called him an idiot. Sometimes it made me wish I lived in some other city, the apathetic kind they always talked about on the news.

  I told him once that he shouldn’t have to go. “I don’t have to go,” he said. “We have a volunteer army.” I wanted to say that he hadn’t volunteered to be unable to afford college unless he joined the military, but it wasn’t the time to get into it. “I want to go,” he said. “What else am I supposed to do? Go home?” I guess it was one war or the other, but I thought the whole rule in the army was that you didn’t leave anybody behind. And Frank had no excuses. He had known what it was like on Evergreen Drive, where, when he’d left, I was stuck alone without him.

  When we were little, Frank would invite me into his room when our parents were arguing. Frank’s baby blue room was covered with car posters and dusty model airplanes. He’d play music from his lime-green boom box, showing me each tape’s case before playing it, pointing to the white sticker where he’d written the album name and artist in careful, black print. “If someone wants to know if these guys are cool, what do you say?” he’d ask. As it turned out, Frank only owned things that were “okay,” “cool,” or “very cool,” so I had three chances.

  “You’re an idiot,” he’d say when I got it wrong, and he’d turn back to the boom box and not look at me until I got it right, at which time he’d look back in my direction and smile, throwing two thumbs up right next to his ears. At those times there was not a sound that existed outside that room.

  Between tapes, we’d both shut up and listen. If there was silence, if the argument was over, our game was too, and he’d rub his hand hard into the top of my head. “Get out of here,” he’d say, pushing me out the door.

  He got all the looks: sandy hair, pink cheeks, a square jaw that I also inherited, though it looked strong and confident on him and out of place on me. Anyway, it was a face you could feel all right about being related to, a face you could end up missing if it wasn’t around for you to see it anymore.

  Julie visited me on lunch breaks to get a look at the other employees, like Ted. Ted was a graduate student in museum studies completing a practicum at the Wayside. His task, as far as I understood it, was to research the pre-1800s history of the property and write up text for a special installation.

  “Hey,” Julie would say to him whenever he passed, and he would smile in our direction.

  One day, not looking at me, zipping her thumb back and forth across a copy of The Scarlet Letter as if it were a flip-book, probably ruining that edge for good, she said, “You wouldn’t understand since you have, like, zero hormones, but I’m telling you FYI that Ted is cute, should you ever be quizzed on the subject.”

  “Duh,” I said. Julie mistook a lack of experience for a lack of interest. I’d only kissed one person—twice—and when I’d recapped with Julie later I’d said, “It was fine, I guess.” She’d laughed until she couldn’t breathe.

  Ted was thin but not lanky like most of the guys I knew from high school. He had dark brown eyes a
nd an easy confidence. But there was something else: it was as if his face had completely and definitively grown into his face, whereas ours still hadn’t quite decided what to be.

  Julie and I spent an inordinate amount of time guessing his age. Every time he said something like “When I was in college…,” our ears perked up. We cataloged the references he made to movies, important events, and previous jobs, but we avoided making such references ourselves. In his presence, we never talked about our impending college careers or our recent high school graduation, thinking he might like us more if he imagined we were older. Eventually, we pinned him between thirty-two and thirty-six, nixing thirty-seven mostly because it seemed too old. As Julie put it, “Practically forty? Just…no.”

  If Ted wasn’t there, Julie would settle for picking on Audrey. Audrey took James’s place at the Wayside twice a week. She was twenty-seven, but her mean-librarian demeanor made her seem older. For lunch, she ate pickles on Hawthorne’s front lawn, directly from a jar wrapped in a brown paper bag. She would hold the first pickle lightly between her thumb and forefinger, biting it with a delicate crack, but by the end the bites were ravenous, like she was a monkey chomping at a banana. Pickle juice flew everywhere, so that for the rest of the day she smelled of vinegar. One day, as I was watching her do this, she looked up at me and hissed, “No, I’m not pregnant. I’m trying to lose weight.”

  Audrey was top-heavy, with a large balloon of a chest and a wide stomach, twiggy legs, and curveless hips. In the end, though, she was about as not-skinny as I was not-skinny, which was not not-skinny enough to require a pickle-only diet.

  “She looks like a dog guarding the house,” whispered Julie one day, her forearms resting on the counter so that the silver bracelets she usually wore leaned sideways on the back of her hand. “Just like a dog, the way she eats pickles on the grass like that and snarls at me.”

  “Snarls at you?”

  “She obviously doesn’t like me,” said Julie. Julie had just gotten a French manicure, and her fingers suddenly seemed absurdly long and incredibly clean. “She’s so stuck up about her knowledge of Nathaniel Hawthorne and everything else. I bet she wants to go to grad school at Harvard.” She tried to say “Nathaniel Hawthorne” and “Harvard” with a British accent, which she felt to be a signifier of pretentiousness, but they came out more with long Boston As.

  Audrey didn’t quite snarl, but she certainly did scowl. She’d gone to Dartmouth and railed on her high school classmates who’d gone to Harvard and were never able to “experience leaving home.” But she was twenty-seven and worked at the Wayside, which was in Concord, which was about as close to not leaving home as Audrey could get. We had a lot of Harvard shirts at the Wayside, and Audrey looked at them with contempt. She fared better with those from Boston College, Emerson, or Tufts. I was planning to go to an even lesser known Boston college—not a place of intelligence or stupidity, just a place that offered some money, a resting ground before real life could take hold. And the Wayside? The Wayside was just a rest stop before a rest stop.

  “Sorry you got stuck at Wayside,” Julie said, scrunching her nose. “Orchard is really fun.” Come fall, Julie would be going to college in Manhattan, which was one reason why I’d wanted to work with her this summer.

  “James is going to let me do the tours soon,” I said, though I wasn’t entirely sure this was true.

  “He came on my tour on, like, Friday,” said Julie.

  “At Orchard?”

  “I didn’t tell you? I heard he visits all the Emerson and Thoreau spots too. He wants to be a writer—he’s trying to soak it all in. His smile is so annoying. Like, dude, get ahold of yourself. Life is not that exciting.”

  “It’s like he popped out of an after-school special,” I said.

  Julie laughed as Audrey appeared in the doorway. “Julie,” Audrey said in her pissed off way, “you better get back to Orchard.”

  “You have pickle juice on your skirt, Audrey,” said Julie.

  I wished Julie wouldn’t say things like that, only because Audrey then liked me less and treated me worse, and I had to try to make up for it. But it was true, the pickle juice had dripped into the white script of the A that rested in the bottom corner of her skirt, shading it green. Audrey loved The Scarlet Letter. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” she said once, “to be that kind of honorable outcast?” Her wardrobe suggested that when the initialed monogram paraphernalia was having a moment she had purchased all of the A-labeled apparel she could find.

  Audrey began organizing the already perfectly organized Hawthorne books on the shelf next to the cash register. “I mean, I like pickles too,” I said. Or anyway, I didn’t not like them.

  She grunted.

  “So,” I said. “You’re planning to stay in…the tourism field?”

  Audrey turned around. “I’m going into journalism,” she said. It was starting to feel like everyone around here was a writer or was trying to be one, as if greatness could rub off on people and onto things and back onto people again.

  “What’d you major in during college?” I asked.

  “Media studies,” said Audrey, who had returned to her organization of books after a pointed look at me. “I minored in English literature, which is only one reason why I work here.”

  “I don’t know what I’ll major in,” I said. “I’m mostly working here because Julie—”

  “Of course,” said Audrey.

  “Well, I needed a summer job, Audrey.”

  “Why didn’t you go work at the mall or something? Have you even read Hawthorne?”

  “In high school,” I said. I had. Sort of. I’d read Little Women upwards of five times as a kid, but I’d barely managed to get through The Scarlet Letter once in my sophomore year. All I could remember was that the first chapter was long and boring and about a door. When I’d started working—after I’d already read all of the captions and quotes on the displays and spent far too many hours tapping out “Hot Cross Buns” on the cash register keys—I’d picked up a copy of The Scarlet Letter. The first chapter was only two pages long. It was still boring, as far as I could tell, and it was still, more or less, about a door.

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” I said. “Is this what you did before college? Work here?”

  Audrey turned toward me again. “Look,” she said, almost nicely, “it’s not like I’ve been working here for my whole life. College is a big thing. You change. Watch it. You’ll see. You won’t want to work here next summer.”

  “Besides,” she added, “you’ll probably go into something like retail management.” She was at the books again, running a finger delicately across a long, even row of The Scarlet Letter.

  One morning I came upon James just as he was opening the visitors’ center. It was already humid, but James had a smile on his face and a song in his heart. “You’re whistling, this early?” I asked.

  He stopped whistling. “I’m at my favorite job,” he said.

  “Are you ever not happy?” I hadn’t eaten breakfast yet. My hair was frizzed out in the sun.

  “Sometimes, and even sadness gives us a larger view of life.” It was too much at this hour. I was glad I hadn’t eaten breakfast—nothing to puke up. He started whistling again, entered the visitors’ center, and began dusting Louisa May Alcott.

  “And,” he said without looking up, “you can do the first tour today.”

  “Really? But do you think I’m ready?” I was nervous.

  “Just one for today, and you can do more as the summer goes on.”

  I spent the morning cleaning Hawthorne down to his nostrils, tapping out quick versions of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on the cash register keys, realigning the spines of books, repeating facts over and over. The dates were the hardest to remember. “Nathaniel Hawthorne, born 1804,” I whispered. “Louisa May Alcott, 1832. Margaret Sidney, 1844.” At ten to noon, a family of four entered the visitors’ center.

  “Welcome to the Wayside!” I shouted, and they all ju
mped like I was one of the statues come to life. “Would you like a tour?” I asked. “I’m your tour guide, May.”

  “Um, yes,” the father mumbled. “A tour.”

  “It will begin in ten minutes,” I said, trying to quell my nerves. The little boy started throwing fake punches at Nathaniel Hawthorne’s creamy white leg, and the little girl tugged on her mother’s dress, asking when they were getting ice cream.

  I did about as well on my first tour as I should have expected. As we walked up the steep steps to the highest point in the house, the Sky Parlor, as Hawthorne had called it, the mother complained, “But none of this is even Hawthorne’s furniture?” James trailed behind us, watching how I fared.

  “Well, it’s Margaret Sidney’s stuff. She was the last one to live here,” I said yet again as we entered the room, dark because the shades were drawn to protect it from sun damage. “You can’t underestimate the popularity of the Five Little Peppers.” Truthfully, I’d never even heard of Margaret Sidney, the children’s author who’d lived at the Wayside after Hawthorne, until I’d become an employee. “But luckily, we’ve just arrived in a room containing Hawthorne’s actual writing desk,” I said.

  The woman was out of breath, wiping her brow with the neck of her shirt. The children were slumped, the little boy scuffing his feet along the floor. I faltered. What would James do now?

  I drew them to the velvet rope before the desk, stretching out my arm to the piece of wood jutting off a wall opposite a window.

  “Imagine him standing there!” I exclaimed. “Alone! His back to the world! To society! To everyone and everything he knew! Imagine him trying to come up with another great sentence for another astounding story.”