Girls of a Certain Age

by Maria Adelmann

  Some days were so hot and humid that being outside seemed to switch off my brain. The drives to work with Julie were quiet and sad. She stopped asking me to go out with Marcus and Raman. “That Ted thing is over anyway,” I said to her one day, and just getting it out of my throat felt like a defeat. After that, she started smiling at Ted again, flipping her hair back and forth in his presence, but she hardly said a word to me.

  Audrey was sitting on Hawthorne’s front lawn when I arrived at work one Friday morning. This was unusual. She was wearing a low-cut white shirt, a little loose on her now, with a red, scripted A in the corner. She kept taking something out of her pocket and rubbing her fingers below her eyes. It took me several glances to realize that she was just putting on makeup.

  When Audrey came into the visitors’ center I could see that she was wearing both mascara and eyeliner, thick and dark as if she were going to a nightclub. She had half-moons of makeup under both of her eyes, her foundation a shade too light. She took out her compact again and rubbed a finger under the bottom rim of both eyes until I blurted out “It’s fine!” for fear of it getting cakier.

  “You take the tours today,” she said, smacking her makeup container shut.

  During my tours I tried to work the magic that James had taught me, but my jokes fell flat. In a morning group of elderly women, only two advanced to the Sky Parlor, and by the time they got there, they were too tired to be interested. Around lunchtime a young girl on a small tour said loudly to her mother, “The other house was better.”

  In the late afternoon, a new tour gathered: a family of four, a senior couple, and a youngish professorial guy. Audrey hadn’t spoken to me since that morning, had simply sat in the register chair as if it were her throne, reading a novel and surveying the tourists. But now she jumped up. “I’m doing a tour,” she said.

  I followed behind the group. She toured with her usual ease, but I was uneasy. I led the guests down from the Sky Parlor and back to the visitors’ center. When I got downstairs, I realized Audrey was missing.

  “Is someone still up there?” I asked, though it wasn’t that unusual for an interested party to hang back with the guide, ask a few more questions after the tour was over.

  I rang up a few books, then sat back at the register, wondering what was going on with Audrey. Just as I got up to see if she was returning, I saw a man, the professorial guy, exiting the house, power walking toward the parking lot. I was running out to the front lawn to find out what was going on when I heard Audrey. “It’s free!” she was yelling. “It’s free! I promise, I won’t tell anyone!”

  I watched her run out the front door, her breasts and small gut bobbing up and down. It didn’t really hit me that she was naked until she stopped, suddenly, in the middle of the lawn. The guy was gone but she whispered anyway, “You can have me. Don’t you want me? Don’t you want me? Who wants me?” She sat down right there on the lawn, her head curled up to her knees, her entire body rocking back and forth, a giant sob bursting from her as sudden as a firework.

  “Audrey!” I yelled. I looked for something to cover her with, but there was nothing nearby. Where were her clothes? “Audrey,” I said. “What happened? Let’s get your clothes.” I put my arm in the nook of her elbow and made a motion like we should stand up, but she wouldn’t move. She didn’t push me away, she didn’t yell, she just kept sobbing, louder and louder.

  People had gathered, watching or staring or pointing or walking swiftly back to the parking lot. I let go of Audrey and stood right in front of her. “Hey, you,” I yelled to a woman who was staring, wide-eyed. “Go in the house and find her clothes.” The woman just stood there, looking around her. “Yeah, you!” I shouted. “Come on!”

  The woman returned with Audrey’s clothes, which, she said, had been inside one of the bedrooms, but they turned out to be useless because Audrey wouldn’t budge. Finally, I asked a bystander for a phone and called 911. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  “Wow!” said my dad as soon as he opened the door. “You’re a star! That story is everywhere!”

  The local news station had arrived on the scene soon after the ambulance, and I’d mumbled a few meaningless words in front of the camera.

  “Slow news day,” I said. Really, though—slow news day? We were fighting two wars. And what could the news ever know about Audrey? Audrey, who, I supposed, for years and years had carried around what she hadn’t done like a weight that had finally crushed her.

  “She just ran straight out of the house, no clothes?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Where is she now? Mental institution?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “What? You didn’t like her. That’s what you said, wasn’t it? That she was mean.”

  “That’s not the point,” I said.

  The phone rang and my dad answered it. “Hello?” he said. “Yeah, she’s here.” But he didn’t hand me the phone. “Sounds like the lady went off the deep end,” he said into the phone. “You must have a lot of red tape over there with the whole incident.” My dad nodded. “Yeah, okay, here she is.”

  “How are you?” asked James. He must have found the number in my emergency contacts.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “You did a good thing there.”

  “I don’t feel like I did much of anything.”

  “You did. You were there for her,” said James. “I wanted to let you know that I talked to Audrey’s parents. She’s going to spend the night at the hospital, then go home. She won’t be coming back, though. To the Wayside, I mean. If you’re willing, you and I can tag team and fill in for Audrey, keep the ship up and running.”

  I was happy he’d asked me, even though there was no one else to ask.

  “I’m glad you were there today,” he said. “Call me if you need anything, okay? I’ll let you get back to it.”

  As soon as I hung up the phone, my dad said, “He does seem very nice.”

  “He really is.”

  For a moment neither of us spoke. “Are you sure he doesn’t want to get in—I mean, you’re a woman now. Are you sure he isn’t after you or something?”

  “Dad, shut up.”

  The room fell silent. I looked down at my hands, the white crescents of my fingernails chewed nearly to nothing. I thought of Julie’s nails, how she let them grow, glossed them clear so that even in the diner’s dimness they each reflected a thin, white strip of light that floated back and forth across her nails as she moved her hands. How could you tell a girl from a woman? It wasn’t age, anyway.

  I couldn’t do this tonight—this small room, this small meal, these small boxes. Was there anyone left in this town besides James who I even remotely understood?

  “I forgot,” I said. “I have plans. I need to use the phone. It’s late.”

  In some other time, I would’ve called Julie. And in some other time before that, I would’ve knocked on Frank’s door, let him push me around a little.

  I called Ted.

  “May?” he asked, like he’d forgotten who I was.

  “May,” I said again. “I’m ready. To go out. Walden.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The sun’s already setting,” he said.

  “Just pick me up.”

  Before I left, my dad looked out the window from the sink where he was rinsing off a pile of plastic utensils. Ted had grown a new goatee that made him look older. “Which friend is that?” he asked, his thumb rubbing the dent of a spoon. “I don’t remember him.”

  As soon as I got in the car I told Ted, “We can sneak in, on the far side of the lake.” I’d never done it myself, but it was a well-known entry point among high schoolers when Walden closed after dark.

  “What do you suggest I do with the car?” Ted asked.

  “You don’t have to go,” I said. “You can drop me off at my mom’s.” But I didn’t feel like going back to my mom’s. I put my hand on his thigh. I didn’t look
at him. It’s funny, how quickly you learn what bargaining chips you have.

  “My mom’s house is nearby,” said Ted. “We can get bikes from there.” I hadn’t known his mom still lived around there.

  His mom’s house was a giant white rectangle with a red front door. Ted tapped a number into the keypad and the garage door hummed open. He rolled a bike toward me, one where the center bar faded from dark pink to purple. “My little sister’s,” he said.

  “You have a sister?”

  “Stepsister, actually,” he said. “At boarding school. Well, camp for the summer, or, really, some kind of course in New York. I forget the specifics.” He rolled out his own bike from behind a garbage can of sports balls.

  “How old is she?”

  “Fifteen? No, sixteen. Like your age.”

  My stomach dropped. He thought I was even younger than I actually was?

  Ted sped out in front of me, looking back to make sure I was keeping up. I rode in his wake, happy to be outside, helmetless, moving. My sweat cooled as the darkness came in. We left our bikes by the road and snuck quietly through the woods.

  By the time we were on the shore the sun had long disappeared below the horizon. Only the thinnest sliver of moon and the dots of stars lit our way. We stood close to each other, our hands clasped, walking slowly and silently across the sand. When we reached the water Ted bent down and felt it with his hand, then took off his shoes and put in his feet. I put my feet in too. The water was warm from the hot day, warmer than the air.

  “Let’s go in,” he said. Before I could answer, he had let go of my hand and begun taking off his clothes. I squinted in the dark. He was not one of the hairless creatures I’d been friends with in high school, though I had never seen them naked.

  He had a trace of a six-pack. A thin trail of dark hair led down from his navel. I felt like I wasn’t so much here on this beach but watching a movie. It was Julie who should have been with a man who looked like this, who should have been with a man at all. Or Audrey—maybe she should have had this.

  “Come on,” said Ted.

  “I am,” I said, though I hadn’t moved. Sixteen? I kept thinking. What did it matter? It was practically true. Why did I care if he was taking advantage of my age? Maybe I was double-crossing him, getting something I wanted too.

  I waited until he got in, and then I took off my clothes with as little ceremony as possible and got into the water, where the reflected moon reminded me of Julie’s fingernails.

  Ted swam perfect freestyle back and forth, and I doggie-paddled in place until he came up behind me, feeling my wet back with his hands, and bringing them further, cupping my breasts. He whispered in my ear, “The shore?”

  I nodded in the dark. Maybe pretending that you knew what you were doing and actually knowing what you were doing were almost the same thing.

  I lay on my back, the sand sticking to everything wet, which was all of me. He fished around in his pile of clothes to get to his pants pocket.

  “Relax,” he said as I closed my eyes, “this is the fun part,” and he didn’t say much else after that.

  How quickly the things you hear so much about are over, and how little you need to be a part of them.

  We lay there for a minute. The sand itched, had invaded every crevice of my body. I shivered. Ted’s breathing was heavy, but mine was shallow. I tried to listen to my own breath, just so that my heart would beat slower.

  He rolled away from me. “Let’s rinse off,” he said.

  He jumped right in, but I got up slowly. All of the blood in my head rushed down to my feet. I felt dizzy. I squinted toward the ground below me. Even in the night I could see the dark spot in the sand.

  Did all rites of passage include blood? Men and women went to war and spilled blood, and teenage girls spilled their own blood just like this. It seemed stupid. Still, I wished for a moment that I could keep it, some proof in case I didn’t believe myself in the morning.

  Earlier that year, during all of those rallies protesting the newest war, I had seen a college student with punky pink hair and a nose ring carrying a sign written in different-colored Sharpies, peace signs in the Os: FIGHTING FOR PEACE IS LIKE FUCKING FOR VIRGINITY, it said. Behind her stood a slew of others, holding signs made from ripped cardboard boxes, saying MAKE LOVE NOT WAR. They chanted it, over and over, as if the two were opposites, as if one prevented the other. But sometimes making love was like heading into battle, and maybe for my brother heading into battle was like making love.

  “Come on,” Ted called into the darkness.

  I rubbed the spot away with my foot and dashed into the water. Despite how warm it was, my teeth clicked together in a shiver that I couldn’t seem to stop.

  I awoke the next morning scratching sand out of my ear, and I thought of my brother, who, on his first tour of Afghanistan, had written home, “It’s hot and sandy as hell. I don’t own anything without sand in it.” I wished he were here right now, not just so I could be sure he was safe or so I could meet his fiancée, but so he could attend a Styrofoam Dinner, could look out the window from my father’s place and say, “Hey, how old is that guy?,” because he would know the right questions to ask.

  Once, when Frank was in high school, he pinned me against the wall of our house. I had been hanging out with a girl two years my senior who had been caught smoking cigarettes behind his school, among other things.

  “You stop hanging out with that girl,” he’d said to me.

  “Why?” I said, struggling to get out of his grip. He already had muscles like the Hulk.

  “She does all kinds of stupid shit,” he said.

  “Let go of me!” I said, making a new attempt to get free. “I’ll yell,” I said.

  He put a preemptive hand over my mouth, I spit into it, and he promptly wiped my own spit across my face. “Listen, you stop hanging out with her or I’ll tell Mom and Dad.”

  “They won’t care.”

  “If they don’t care, I’ll find some other way to make your life miserable.”

  “It’s not fair,” I said. “You can’t control me.”

  “Listen,” he said, letting me go. “The truth is, you’re cooler than she is. So just shut up, get over it, and do this one thing for me.” The funny part is, I was relieved. I had an excuse. Maybe part of me wanted to be the kind of person who smoked cigarettes behind the high school, but it turned out that I didn’t actually want to smoke cigarettes behind the high school.

  I thought Ted might call on Saturday, but he didn’t. On Sunday morning, I called Julie and asked if we could all go out for brunch, the four of us, like we used to. I didn’t even feel like I was giving in. I was just tired of being alone. We went to the diner that Julie and I didn’t like, the one Ted had taken me to. “Marcus likes to go here,” said Julie. “He says it’s fancier.” She’d forgotten the whole point of going to the diners in the first place.

  “So,” Julie had said in the car. “Audrey must have been insane all along. I knew she was kind of crazy, but this just proved it. It’s too perfect.”

  “You could probably stop making fun of her, Julie.”

  “Jesus Christ, May. You’ve had a stick up your ass all summer. What happened to you?”

  Our table was spectacularly white, like milk. I kept putting my finger in my ear and finding sand. A few grains spilled onto the white table, standing out like little periods on a blank sheet of paper.

  “Are you all right?” Raman asked after I’d torn apart several packets of sugar, first dumping the sugar into the coffee I’d ordered, and then shredding the paper.

  “Fine,” I said. “Tired.”

  The coffee was terrible, but I downed the whole thing anyway. “See?” said Julie. “It’s not so bad.”

  It was so bad. What was bad was that life was all about waiting for adult things to get less bad. Children were smart: they just liked things that were already good, like swing sets and cereals with marshmallows and candy shaped like bears.

 
A group walked in, sat a few booths behind us, and started laughing and talking. They looked eons older than us.

  I kept looking back at them. I could picture Ted among them, maybe with his arm around the pretty one with the shiny brown hair.

  “Really, are you all right?” Raman asked again.

  Julie was stirring her coffee with a little red straw. She’d drunk only half of it, not even. Raman was onto his second Sprite. “Maybe it’s the coffee,” said Julie. “May’s not used to drinking coffee.”

  “I’m used to more than you think I’m used to,” I snarled, in far too Audreyish a fashion.

  I went home and I went to bed. I stayed in my room until that evening, when the phone rang. Since my mother was out for groceries, I had to go into the kitchen in my underwear to answer it. Maybe it was Ted.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Heyyy,” said a faraway voice that I recognized immediately.

  “Frank!” I yelled. “Frank, you should come home!”

  “Home, man? I’m getting hitched.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve heard. So crazy. Congrats!”

  “You’re gonna love Shelley,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I replied, putting on my tour voice. “I can’t wait—we all can’t wait.” All? As if in his absence we had become some kind of family unit. “We want to see you and her and, you know, have you shove wedding cake in each other’s mouths.”

  “I’m sure you’d love that,” said Frank. “Is Mom there?”

  “No, she’s getting groceries. She’s gonna be pissed she missed you.”

  “Shelley’s calling card has been fucking up and she’s been using mine to call her family, so there’s, like, no minutes left. So I have to go pretty soon anyway.”