Girls of a Certain Age

by Maria Adelmann

  “Man,” I said, but I didn’t know what to say next.

  “Are you all ready for school?”

  “Eh.”

  “You’re gonna love it,” he said. “You’re gonna be fine. What are you doing all summer? Hanging with Julie?”

  “Kind of,” I said. “She’s being annoying.”

  “Well, Julie was always kind of a fucktard,” he said. “What’s the place you’re working at again?”

  “The Wayside.”

  “That fucking place,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. What could you say in a two-minute phone call?

  “Look, I should go. Tell Mom I’ll call her soon.”

  “All right,” I said. “Love you.”

  And I knew my mom was right. He’d gone to the Middle East to get away from us, and he was finally returning now only because he’d be returning with a new wife, and with her he’d find a new family, a new home.

  When I finally returned to the Wayside after the weekend, for the first time since Audrey’s incident, I felt somehow like I hadn’t been there for an eternity. Everything should have changed, but it hadn’t. The plaster statues had not stopped smiling, they had not stopped being in the middle of the actions they had always been in the middle of and always would be in the middle of, and even the books had not stopped being stacked as neatly as Audrey had left them. The paint had not stopped peeling, the furniture had not escaped from any rooms, and the visitors had not stopped coming. In fact, there were more of them. I answered questions concerning Audrey as calmly and tactfully as I thought she would have herself.

  “You’re doing a great job with the tours,” James said as I swept random spots on the floor whether they were dirty or not. “How are you doing?”

  “Everything is just different now, even though nothing has changed,” I admitted. I pushed the frizzy hair up at the nape of my neck. I swear there was still sand in my hair, or maybe I was imagining it.

  “Things are different,” said James. He sat down in front of the register. “Seeing someone you know get so out of touch with reality like that, that had to be a shock.”

  I wanted to tell him about Ted, tell him I had just done it to get it done with, to be Julie, to not be Audrey, to find out if that was the difference between the last piece of my life and the next, but that I didn’t find out anything. Sometimes the only difference between doing something and not doing something was what you could claim later.

  “Audrey and I didn’t even get along,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s still allowed to affect you.”

  “I don’t even think she ever touched Hawthorne’s writing desk.”

  “Few people have,” said James. He stood up and put his hand gently, kindly, on my shoulder and then took it away.

  A little later, Ted arrived. “Hey,” was all he said, nodding toward me.

  “Hey,” I replied without smiling.

  When James was off leading a tour, Ted and I spoke.

  “All right,” he said. “You mad or something?”

  “Should I be?” I said.

  “Look,” he said. “To be honest, I didn’t really feel like you were into it that much.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “We’re finished anyway.”

  “We weren’t even—I mean, it works differently when you’re older, you know?” He had finally played the age card.

  “Okay,” I said. I didn’t want to be with him, yet every word out of my mouth felt like a concession.

  “And you called me,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “All right,” he said.

  I restocked books with a kind of vengeance. “Thank you for coming,” I said tersely to our guests, throwing down their purchases. I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to get out of suburbia and Boston and Massachusetts and the summer and the heat and my teens.

  But I couldn’t leave any of it, no matter what I did. Even on the last tour block of the day, any hope of closing early was foiled by some tourists on their final literary stop of the afternoon, a young woman and her father. I assumed she went to Brown, since that’s what her T-shirt said. James’s broad smile stretched across his face. I was reminded of those first days when I thought the smile might snap off and take on a life of its own. “You two are lucky,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “A private tour! As you probably know, this is the home of—”

  “Oh, she knows,” said the father.

  “Ah,” said James, who put his hands to his temples and closed his eyes for a moment as if she were a little kid. “You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Or I want to be.”

  “Don’t let her fool you,” said the father. “She’s very talented.”

  “Thank you, Dad,” she said.

  For a moment I felt like this was the same girl—the eight-year-old writer—who had walked in that first week of the summer. I felt like I’d been working at the Wayside for so long that she’d already grown up.

  “Do you have a favorite Hawthorne work?” asked James.

  “Well, there’s always ‘Young Goodman Brown,’” she said.

  “Excellent choice!” said James. I’d been with him enough this summer that I could read the different permutations of his happiness, and finding a fellow reader and writer was its own category of joy.

  They began their private tour, and I stayed behind in the visitors’ center, doing nothing. Waiting. After forty-five minutes they should have been back. I was getting antsy and, after the incident with Audrey, a little nervous. I put up the AWAY sign and walked into the house. I heard them upstairs, up upstairs, in the Sky Parlor. I tiptoed up, hoping to hear the tour’s final monologue, which would mean everything was fine and we could all go home soon.

  From halfway up the stairs I heard James say, “Oh heck!” A pause. “No one’s here. Just for you, for you the writer and reader, to encourage you to write because it’s a hard job and an important job, because of that, we’ll open the shades. Just for a minute. Just so you can see.” My heart stopped. I could hear the plastic rolling upward. I didn’t dare move.

  “Beautiful,” said the father.

  “You see how he wrote at the desk? With his back to the window?” And then I heard it, the clink of metal, the sound of a hook coming out of its loop, a velvet rope being taken down.

  “I’m not supposed to do this,” he said, “but you’ve traveled a distance. Go ahead, stand in front of it.”

  My breathing was heavy. I tried to stay quiet. I thought I would cry.

  “What’s the matter?” I heard him say. For a moment I thought he was speaking to me, but he didn’t even know I was there.

  “Aren’t you going to touch it?” I could hear his smile.

  “Can I?”

  Maybe he let one person touch it each summer, chose the person who would benefit most, who would receive the magic he believed was in it and then would use that magic. I could imagine her touching it, standing behind the unhooked rope, the light on her back, feeling like a writer with a world of possibilities open to her because she knew exactly what she wanted and everyone believed she would get it. I thought of Audrey and her journalism, the doors that had closed on her for reasons I couldn’t understand. And I thought of myself, aimed at no door in particular, making decisions that now seemed random, standing on the steps of a home where three great writers had walked and kissed and talked and cried, and me there now, crying for the first time that summer.

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” James asked when we were both back in the visitors’ center closing up.

  “Uh-huh,” was all I could muster.

  “Are you thinking of Audrey?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said again, and I was. I was thinking of how much she wanted to be an adulteress like Hester Prynne, a heroic outcast, and how much she wanted to be a broadcast journalist, and how mean she was most of the time, and how messily she ate her pickles, which was probably why no one
wanted her to broadcast the news. I thought of how she deserved to touch the desk more than I did and how I deserved it more than that woman who had traipsed through last minute like that. How my father thought James wanted me in the way that Audrey wanted someone, anyone. How James wasn’t like that at all, but how I wished that he wanted me in some way, any way. How I had gotten what Audrey had wanted, but in the end maybe it wasn’t even what she’d really wanted. Right then I wanted to live in the ugliness of the dying Wayside the way I sometimes thought I could sleep forever near the Old North Bridge. I wanted to make a home there, and I didn’t know why.

  “I think I’ll be a writer,” I said.

  “It’s a hard life. You have time. You can do anything,” said James, smiling, dusting the shoulder of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

  But he didn’t believe me, and I never touched it.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to everyone who made this book possible, including my agent, Jenni Ferrari-Adler, at Union Literary and my editor, Jean Garnett, at Little, Brown. Much gratitude also to Carina Guiterman for acquiring the book and Lauren Harms and Patrick Cullum for creating my dream cover. Thanks also to Sally Wofford-Girand, Karen Landry, Nell Beram, Jayne Yaffe Kemp, Abby Reilly, Reagan Arthur, Bruce Nichols, Jeffrey Gantz, and the entire team at Little, Brown.

  I’m also grateful to the editors and staff at the literary magazines where many of these stories were first published, some in earlier or different forms: Alaska Quarterly Review, Bare Fiction, Carolina Quarterly, Epoch, Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Southeast Review, and the Threepenny Review.

  The University of Virginia MFA provided funding and time essential to an early writer, in addition to a talented crew of peers who read early versions of many of these stories and made them better: Colleen Hubbard, Greg Jackson, Kidda Johnson, Caitlin Kindervatter-Clark, Jenna Krumminga, Lulu Miller, Stephanie Milner, Alexis Schaitkin, Greg Seib, Dave Serafino, Joe Sills, and Matthew Silva. Thanks also to those special teachers from grade school to grad school who challenged me, endured me, and let me imagine I could become a writer.

  Finally, but not lastly, I’m lucky to have a vast and loving support system. I’m grateful to Derek Denman for helping me to turn my Fake Fake World into my Real Real World, for meeting me where I am and then pushing me forward; Amanda Barrett for her rare and generous friendship, for being the kind of friend who helps you pack and then falls asleep making pom-poms with you; Joe and Sarah Adelmann for their magic combo of tough love and loving support; my extended family—music-video performers and receivers of handmade gifts—who encouraged my creativity early and fell victim to it often; and my parents, Karin Hansen and Richard Adelmann, who raised me, taught me, and believed in me first.

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  Author’s Note

  The title “None of These Will Bring Disaster” is borrowed from the Elizabeth Bishop poem “One Art.” The story was inspired by Deborah Eisenberg’s “Days,” which can be found in The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. Stories from Lorrie Moore’s collection Self-Help influenced the structure of “How to Wait” and “Elegy.” Indeed, the first line of “Elegy” is a nod to the first line of “How to Talk to Your Mother,” which also runs backward through time.

  About the Author

  Maria Adelmann’s work has been published by Tin House, n+1, the Threepenny Review, Indiana Review, Epoch, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and other publications. She has received fellowships from Cornell University and the University of Virginia, where she earned her BA and MFA, respectively. Adelmann has had quite a few jobs (visual merchandiser, writing instructor, hotel reviewer) in quite a few cities (New York, Baltimore, Copenhagen) and once on a ship. She enjoys learning new crafts and letting personal projects take over her life. You can visit her online at mariaink.com or on Twitter and Instagram @ink176.