Girls of a Certain Age

by Maria Adelmann

Nobody was buying it. It was both too much and not enough. The woman’s eyes widened. “Well,” she said.

  “That’s not a desk!” shouted the boy.

  “I can’t even see it,” said the girl, who had barely looked up during the entire tour and who even now was looking at the floor.

  “This is a scam,” said the boy. “It’s just a piece of wood.”

  “Where’s his chair?” said the mother.

  “He wrote standing up,” I said. “With his back to the window.”

  The mother seemed tired at the thought, and I was tired of her. She should have been more impressed with Hawthorne’s work ethic. Louisa May Alcott too sacrificed physical comfort for her work, switching to her left hand when her right one was tired. Most people never loved their jobs that much. I certainly didn’t.

  “I want to touch it!” said the boy.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but we have to stay behind this rope.”

  “It’s awfully dark in here, isn’t it, Arthur?” said the woman to her husband. I had forgotten the husband was there—he hadn’t said a word during the entire tour.

  “Very, very quiet,” he said.

  “Dark, I said it was dark, Arthur,” she snapped. This reminded me, in a way, of my own parents. I waved them back toward the stairs.

  “Why is it so dark?” said the mother.

  “Well,” I said, one foot still in the Sky Parlor, the other hovering over the steps that would take us downstairs, “we have to keep the shades down, as sun exposure can ruin various items in the room, bleaching them of their…historical accuracy…”

  After the family departed, James sat me down in the visitors’ center. “Good, very good,” he said, “and there are just a few things I would change.” It took him nearly a half hour to go through them.

  During this, Ted walked in with his laid-back sway, as if he were entering his own living room. He flashed me a knowing smile as James talked. A thread of excitement zipped through me.

  “My thought is, let’s say, my goal when giving a tour,” said James, “is to offer the visitors a sense of the writers who lived here, especially Hawthorne. I want them to see his life so vividly that they feel, if just for a moment, as if they themselves could stand at that writing desk all day. That’s my goal. And when you give a tour, you should have your own goal too.”

  Would I ever give another tour, or would I be condemned to man the visitors’ center forever? Maybe James would tell Audrey how bad I was, and then Audrey wouldn’t let me give tours either. Audrey was an enthusiastic guide and even seemed to enjoy reciting historical facts to strangers. She was especially animated in the Sky Parlor, where I had failed so miserably. I had the sense that she felt more love for that writing desk than for any human being.

  As a child, I’d loved the little women as if they were alive. I’d read my favorite parts of the book over and over in my bed on Evergreen Drive. Maybe I’d wanted to work at the Orchard to connect with that old self and those old friends. Maybe if I were giving tours of the Orchard, they’d be as good as Audrey’s.

  The irony of living in a tourist town is that the residents themselves rarely visit the historical sites. That was not true of me. As a child, I visited them frequently with my dad. We’d go to Walden Pond or the Old North Bridge or one of the battlefields. We’d buy lunch and sit on the grass with sandwiches, imagining the fighting that had taken place on that very spot so long ago. Sometimes, even now, I would walk the trail at the Minute Man park or wander through the graveyard at Sleepy Hollow. I could spend days jumping through eras, never quite landing in the now until Julie shook me, saying, “College! College! We’re going to college!” By the end of August, she’d be in Manhattan and I’d be in Boston, but she had plans for the both of us. We’d visit each other every other month. We’d get fake IDs. We’d have wild adventures—“with boys!” Julie had added once with a wink, as if I were ten.

  It was the summer of the diner. Julie was my ride home from work, and we’d meet each day on Hawthorne’s front lawn and then drive far and wide in her blue Range Rover, doubling back on our favorite diners—the kitschier the better. We’d split a piece of cake and Julie would drink coffee while I drank Diet Coke.

  Eventually, our former classmates Marcus and Raman started joining us at the diners. Since Julie had her eye on Marcus, Raman and I sat together by default, folding our straw wrappers into squished accordions and then dropping water on them so they expanded like worms. On the other side of the table, Julie and Marcus flirted.

  One day I stepped out the door of the visitors’ center to meet Julie after work and found her talking with Ted on Hawthorne’s front lawn. My heart sank. Of course, I thought. She’d turned our diner trips into a dating opportunity, we were about to meet Marcus and Raman once again, and here she was flirting with Ted. Worse, he appeared to be flirting back. I could hear him talking about the beautiful sunsets at Walden Pond while Julie nodded sweetly. Her dark, silky hair fell over her shoulder and she brushed a piece of it behind her ear with a manicured finger.

  “Sounds cool,” she said. “I’d love to see it sometime.”

  The door to the visitors’ center was still in my hand, and I closed it with a purposeful click.

  “Hey, guys,” I called. “Julie, you ready for your date?”

  That night, post-diner, I entered my bedroom and knew by the sight of vacuum lines that my mom had been there. Now my messes were re-piled so that for a week anything I looked for would be impossible to find. My bed had been made, and on top of it sat a collection of items that I’d rather stayed lost, things that had fallen into the chasm between my bed and the wall—books from high school I’d forgotten to return, brochures from colleges I couldn’t afford, and Antigone, the book I was supposed to read as part of a college-wide “summer books” project. “I have to read this book, Anti-gone,” I’d made the mistake of saying to Audrey one day. She just shook her head, scowled, and walked away, leaving me to say it again to my mother, who corrected me with a similar shake of the head. After that, I’d put off reading the book and had almost forgotten about it. Being too stupid to pronounce Antigone made me feel like I was too stupid for the scholarship I’d gotten. I didn’t want to look at the book, so I stuffed it back under the bed.

  When Julie stopped by for lunch the following week, we didn’t end up talking about much. I thought maybe the week before she and Marcus had hooked up in the car during a long absence in which Raman and I, still in our booth at the diner, had rearranged our French fries into the shapes of animals, but I didn’t feel like asking her about it. For one, Ted was present, which made us both self-conscious about saying anything at all. I kept stealing glances at him—undetected, I hoped. He’d come in with a stubble beard that was very attractive.

  After Julie left, Ted walked over to the register, where I was stationed. I felt the top of my head as quickly and surreptitiously as I could, flattening out my frizz. He tapped his fingers on the counter, as if waiting for something.

  “Yes?” I asked, trying to keep it cool.

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The Alcotts lived here? But I thought they lived at the Orchard?” He acted for a moment as if he were really confused, and then broke into a grin. It was a question I answered daily, since the family had lived in both homes. “You did a tour today?” he asked. “How’d it go?”

  I shrugged. “Badly?” I said.

  “James give you more notes? He’s something else,” Ted said, shaking his head. “I’m sure you were beautiful.”

  I resisted the urge to smile.

  “You, uh, got another double date with Julie tonight?”

  “It’s more of a third-wheel situation,” I said.

  He brushed a finger against the tips of mine. My pulse quickened. “You painted your nails,” he said.

  “Bile green,” I said, surprised he had noticed. “To match the carpeting.”

  This got a big laugh, which thril
led me.

  “I’m thinking of going over to Walden tonight,” he said. “For the sunset.”

  My heart practically stopped. I half expected to see Julie pop out from around the corner, snickering. But Ted and I were alone. I looked down at the register, not sure what I was supposed to say. “Cool,” I chose finally.

  “Yeah? Well, you should come.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if I can,” I said. I mean, could I just go hang out with Ted?

  “You don’t know if you can watch the sunset?” His lips spread into a charming smile. “Well, it’s true, you aren’t supposed to stare directly at it.” He started writing his number on a stray receipt. “Seven thirty?” he said.

  “Marcus texted this afternoon,” Julie told me after work. “We’re hitting the diner.”

  We were standing outside the Wayside. I looked out across the road toward the parking lot instead of at her.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I have plans.”

  “You have plans?” Julie said. “I’ve known you for, what, a billion years? Have you ever made plans?”

  “Maybe I have my own secret life you don’t know about,” I said.

  The truth was, in our whole history together, she’d asked other people to hang out while I stood behind her like a scared younger sister, waiting for results. Besides, she was my ride. She knew everywhere I went.

  “Let’s just go,” said Julie.

  “Fine,” I relented, “but I have to be back here by seven thirty.” I’d asked Ted to pick me up at the Wayside. I didn’t want to deal with questions from my mom.

  “What for?”

  I paused. “I’m meeting Ted,” I said.

  “Ted?” she said. “You?”

  “Shush,” I said, looking around. “Don’t be so surprised.”

  “You won’t even make out with Raman!” she said, as if I should just automatically want to date the best friend of whoever she was interested in. “What the hell are you gonna do with Ted?”

  “Just watch the sunset,” I said.

  “Oh, I guess that’s his big line, then,” said Julie. She turned and marched off toward the parking lot, then called “Let’s go” from across the road.

  I walked slowly toward her with my arms crossed, like I was walking toward my mother.

  We met Marcus and Raman at the diner with the mint green plastic seats and the laminate countertops covered in pink and turquoise triangles. “Hey, babe,” Julie said to Marcus when we arrived, giving him a hug with one arm, her silver bracelets hanging coolly from her tiny wrist. “Been waiting long?”

  I slid into the booth next to Raman. Julie talked about the Orchard as if nothing had happened between us. I kept feeling my pocket for the receipt with Ted’s phone number on it, proof that he’d actually asked me out—though was it even a date? Maybe he just wanted to give me a lakeside pep talk. Maybe it was a mean trick.

  I stacked the jelly packets into towers, each tower a different flavor, and then built sugar-packet roads between them.

  “How adult of you,” said Julie, but Raman turned around and reached across the table behind us to gather apricot jellies, handing them to me with his long fingers.

  In the car, Julie and I were silent until I realized we were heading toward my house, not the Wayside. “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “He’s older than, like, Mr. Moreno,” Julie said. Mr. Moreno was our senior history teacher, married with two kids. “You don’t even know what you’re getting into.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. I felt dizzy with anger.

  “Look, you can do whatever you want,” she said, “but I won’t be any part of it.” As if she had spent a lifetime taking the high road.

  “You’re just jealous,” I said. “You thought he was going to ask you out.”

  “Dude,” Julie said, “just because I was flirting with him doesn’t mean I want to date him. Unlike you, I flirt sometimes.”

  I sat in the passenger seat seething. I felt like I was fourteen again, arguing with my mom in the car.

  I didn’t even have my own cell phone to call him and cancel. Of course Julie had one. She had everything first: a computer, the internet, her period, a car, a boyfriend.

  “Give me your cell so I can tell him I can’t go, at least,” I said. She reached into her purse without taking her eyes off the road and practically threw her phone at me. I felt dumb and defeated calling him in front of Julie, asking for a rain check.

  The visitors’ center was still locked. I leaned against the building, eating my bagel, and then decided to look for James. When I turned the corner at the back of the Wayside, I saw him atop a metal ladder stretched to the roof of the house, talking to a man who stood at its base.

  “No one seems to care about the maintenance of this house,” James told the man. His voice was as close to annoyed as I’d ever heard it.

  “We do, we do care about the maintenance of our historical houses very much. It’s just that we have not hired or paid you specifically to clean the gutters, so I ask you to please get down from there.”

  “If I don’t clean these gutters, who will?” asked James. He leaned precariously far from the ladder to pull off a piece of peeling paint with his fingers. “The government paint job has not fared too well, and it was done only three years ago!” He dropped the paint chip and watched it flutter down to the man’s feet.

  “Sir, it’s a liability issue. I’m really gonna need you to get down.”

  I waited for James to do his thing: big smile, popped eyes, impassioned lecture against those who let historic sites die: “This is the only National Historic Site to have housed three literary heroes!,” et cetera.

  But what he did was look at the sky. “I’m not sure how you’re going to get me down from here,” James said, “if I decide not to come down.”

  “Seriously?” said the man.

  James and the man were silent.

  “Look, sir,” the man said finally. “I don’t want to do this, but I can have you fired. Is that what you want? Will that get the house painted? Will that clean the gutters?”

  “So fire me,” said James.

  “Just come down,” said the man.

  James looked down at the man. He looked at the sky. He looked down again.

  Finally, he took a deep breath and began stepping down the ladder.

  When he got to the bottom, he shook the man’s hand. “I’m sure you can see that maintenance is a big issue here, and I know you’re just doing what you’ve got to do.”

  “Sorry, sir,” the man kept saying as he helped James put away the ladder.

  I ducked back around the corner of the house, embarrassed for James, who was so concerned about the dreary house of dead authors that most people have never read or even thought about.

  I waited for James at the door of the visitors’ center, pretending I hadn’t seen a thing. When he came to unlock it, his smile was as broad as it had always been, and he was whistling.

  It threw me off guard. But I said, “Are you always this happy?,” something I’d become accustomed to saying almost every morning.

  “No,” he said with a smile as he let us in.

  “I’m going out after dinner,” I told my dad as we ate leftover spaghetti from white Styrofoam boxes. “With friends.”

  “Can’t you go on your mother’s nights? She only has six of them,” he said.

  “It’s a Friday,” I said.

  “Did you get your room assignment for fall yet?”

  Jesus, I thought. Despite not speaking to each other, it sometimes seemed like my parents coordinated their questions so I had to say everything twice. “Not yet,” I said.

  “You should call them, make sure they have your registration stuff.”

  “Mm-hmm,” I said. I bit a meatball in half, the middle still cold.

  “Are the dorms coed?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “The bathrooms too?”

  “I don’t know.
”

  “Let’s hope they aren’t—guys are disgusting.”

  I nodded.

  “Let me know when you find out. I can call the school if it doesn’t come soon.”

  “I’m sure it’ll come soon,” I said, though I’d only just mailed the forms.

  My dad ate a piece of day-old garlic bread in nearly one bite. “So, has he tried something on you yet?”

  “What?”

  “You know, the man at work who is very nice.”

  “Oh come on,” I said. For a second I’d thought he’d meant Ted. “He wouldn’t do anything. He really is just very nice.”

  “You don’t know the power of a young woman on a man.” He paused, thinking. “Parmesan cheese!” he said. “I knew we forgot something.”

  I couldn’t get the image of James up on that ladder out of my head. James cared for the Wayside the way my father had once cared for the battlefields. We used to lie on our backs in the deep grassy field near the Old North Bridge, which arched its way elegantly over the calm Concord River, and we’d watch the white clouds float through the sky. Though this was where soldiers had bled and died, the place was peaceful, like the quiet eye of a storm. The first shot of the Revolutionary War had been fired here, one bullet I imagined flying slo-mo through the air, setting in motion events that had led America to now. Europe and Asia had sites that were thousands of years old, but this is what we had, this was our history. Funny that Frank almost never came with us, and now there he was, halfway across the globe on a sandy battlefield of his own. Had he really gone that far to get away from us?

  I thought about the place we used to live, my childhood home, a little rectangle set on a gentle green slope, with burnt-red siding and a gray shingled roof. It had long ago been bought, invaded, remodeled. I missed it. The Old North Bridge, those battlefields—they were as close as I could get now to going home.

  Ted picked me up at around seven.

  I’d changed into a blue dress.

  “This a date?” my father asked like it was a joke, but I could tell that he thought I looked nice. He waved at Ted from the window. “Is he going to come up?”