The Adults (18 page)

“That’s me,” he said, and touched the red ball at the tip of his nose.

“That’s you?” I asked. “That’s all there is?”

He didn’t answer. He took a sip out of his cup and I could feel the vermouth burn through me. So I said, “I can’t believe you are all drunk.”

“We’re not drunk,” he said.

“You’re a teacher. Don’t you
realize
that?”

“I don’t think this is an appropriate conversation.”

“I’m just saying. If you take back my F, I won’t go tell Dr. Killigan that all the faculty is drunk.”

Mr. Basketball sighed. “It is not a negotiation. I don’t negotiate with my students.”

Student? I was just a student? Mr. Basketball walked away from me, out of the cafeteria.

In my last dream of Mr. Basketball, he was standing at the chalkboard writing out lines of “The Waste Land,” the ones I had been memorizing all semester.
There is shadow under this red rock.
My hair was matted to my desk in the front. (
Come in under the shadow of this red rock.
) Nobody in class laughed, and this surprised me, even though nobody had made a joke. All of a sudden, the other students were gone. Mr. Basketball was at my ear, saying, “Let’s listen to dead men not rhyme!” He put on a sombrero and then flicked the end of my cigarette. The ash collected in a tiny pile on my desk. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust!” he said. Then, from the back of the class, my mother laughed. “My mother is dying,” I said to him. He walked over to my mother, put my cigarette in her mouth. “Stop it!” I screamed at him. “She’s dying!” They both looked at me as though I was guilty of something. “Stop killing us with those turtle shells,” they both said in unison. He introduced himself to my mother. “Hi, I’m Jonathan,” he said, and they shook hands.

I followed him down the hall. “Are you sleeping with Ms. O’Malley? Are you sleeping with Janice?”

He stopped. He walked back to me, took my arm. He pulled me into a classroom. He pointed his finger at me. He yelled. Something was wrong. Men, they pointed their fingers at me like they were scolding, and I just wanted to touch them.

“I don’t want to yell, Emily,” he said. “You’re a sweet girl, who is perhaps a bit confused at the moment. But it is inappropriate to bribe your teachers or ask them questions like that!”

I took off my kitten mask and twirled around the room to prove how little he could affect me. “Well, if you are dating Ms. O’Malley,” I said, “I just thought you should know that she slept with Socrates.”

Mr. Basketball opened his mouth. He was going to let me have it. Then, he burst out laughing like a drunk. He laughed and he laughed and he laughed.

“That’s just what I’ve heard,” I said, and laughed with him.

It felt so good to laugh with him again that I started crying. That is when I whispered to Mr. Basketball, “My mother is dying.”

I repeated this because even though it wasn’t true, it felt true. It felt like she was gone, and wasn’t that the same thing?

“Emily,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He sat down next to me on the desk and looked at me like he knew exactly what I meant.

“My mother is dying,” I said.

We looked at the chalkboard and then back at each other and then out the window.

“Do you know how I know you are drunk?” I asked. “If you weren’t drunk, you would smell the liquor on my breath.”

Mr. Basketball leaned in and put his mouth close to mine. “Smart girl,” he said.

He hovered close to me for a moment, looking into my eyes. He seemed afraid of something and this was nice, because I was too, and it was mostly him. My psychology teacher had explained that this kind of terror was perfectly normal. In fact, you weren’t healthy unless you feared something violently. “There is so much to be afraid of,” she said.

Mr. Basketball was just a boy, I told myself. Only twenty-four. He wasn’t like Mr. Heller or Mr. Foster, who both had hairs growing out of their ears. He was smooth, with a trimmed beard. Nothing to be scared about. He put his hand on my thigh and kissed me. I pulled away just to look, to make certain this was happening to me, to make sure it was his tongue in my mouth, and I said, “I can’t believe you are doing this,” as in, I can’t believe this is finally happening to me.

“Would you like for me to stop?” he asked, to which I said, “No,” and let him pull me closer to him. He grabbed the back of my neck like I was in a dream, at the opera, falling out of my seat toward something dramatic and incomprehensible. I wanted him closer. I wanted him to put his hands everywhere. How could I ever have tolerated being alone? There was nothing better than this warmth. He pushed my legs apart and pulled me toward him. He put his hand on my chest and pushed my body down so my back was against the table. He dragged his hand down my stomach. This is movement, I thought, this is two people against each other, this is the violence of attraction snapping a nerve in my heart. We didn’t even hear the door open.

“Oh my fucking God!” one of the girls screamed.

“Oh my fucking God!” another one shouted. “This is amazing!”

“Mr. Basketball,” Martha said, “this is a Hug-Free Zone!” and fell to the ground laughing.

Mr. Basketball jumped away from me. “Are you girls drunk?” he asked. “Come here,” he said to all of them. They approached, giddy smiles spilling from their faces. “Now, look. You don’t tell anyone what you saw here, and I don’t tell anyone that you’re drunk. We’re both happy. Got it?”

“Yes, Mr. Basketball,” said the country of France, her baguette limp at her side.

The slutty banana threw up vermouth and licorice. They scattered. Behind them was Janice, pale and faint as a haunting, in a sweatshirt.

“Janice!” I said.

“Emily,” she said.

I wanted to cry out to her. I wanted to wipe the lipstick off my mouth and hold her to my chest and sob until she felt how sorry I was, but she was gone. She had run out the door.

I ran after her, next to her. She didn’t look at me. Maybe she was running from me? I didn’t know. I didn’t try to speak. There was no point. Janice would never forgive me; even if she did forgive me and called me the next day, she would never look at me the same way she had since we both dressed up as bowling pins for Halloween in the third grade and she pointed at me across Mrs. Dagny’s room and shouted, “Hey, that’s me!”

We congregated in the Cunts R Us bathroom with the Other Girls. The one who hadn’t eaten since Saturday sat on the ground and wanted to know how Mr. Basketball tasted: like sugar like honey like aren’t those the same exact thing? Brittany, who had always secretly hated me, said she couldn’t fucking believe any of it, not even the honey part. Another one looked at Janice and said, “You’re such a liar! She was doing Mr. Basketball the whole time!”

The one who had six straight shots of vermouth slid down the wall and passed out on the floor. “Martha!” we shouted. “Are you okay?” We ran to tell Ms. O’Malley there was an emergency in the girls’ bathroom. Because there really was. One giant emergency. One of us held Ms. O’Malley’s hand as we pulled her through the crowd of students I hardly recognized, arctic animals in miniskirts, Cool and Not Cool, human thongs, science teachers with signs that read
FAILED ASTRONAUT
, Fuckables masquerading as Unfuckables and vice versa. Fringe members of the Jew Crew came as priests and the president of the Ebony Club came dressed as Tony Blair. We pulled Ms. O’Malley out of the cafeteria, to the bathroom where toilet paper was standing outside the door as a joke. “Need me?” he asked.

“Not at the moment,” Ms. O’Malley said. Sometimes, I loved Ms. O’Malley. Sometimes, she reminded me of what our mothers should have been. Corny, lovely, her silk shirt extended all the way to her neck. She held our hands tight as if she didn’t even care how little we knew then about being good people.

“What’s the emergency?” she asked in her smooth British accent.

We pushed Ms. O’Malley hard through the bathroom door, as if she were stumbling upon a carnival, lit up and spinning and sick to the stomach with thrill.

An ambulance was sent for Martha, who would eventually be fine, who would never drink that much vermouth again. She would become president of the Spanish Club and get into the University of Rochester, where she would lose her virginity to a thirty-year-old from Cork, Ireland.

Ms. O’Malley took us to the principal’s office. We sat down in front of Dr. Killigan. One of the girls told Dr. Killigan that she had a brother who was very retarded, even though she didn’t. “
Martha’s
brother is retarded!” one of us cried.

“But my mother is
dying
!” screamed Brittany. Breast cancer. “
My mother is dying!
” she screamed again, and cried so hard I was afraid she was going to throw up her liver. Dr. Killigan nodded his head. Jotted down a pardon for her on a piece of paper. She got up and left for the school psychiatrist’s office. I bit my nail down to the skin and thought of all the dying people I knew. But I knew only dead people. George Washington. T. S. Eliot. Mr. Resnick.

“I don’t know anyone who is dying,” I said. “And. That. Just. Fucking. Figures.”

“Emily, do not swear in this office,” Dr. Killigan told me.

“Fine,” I said. “Fine.” I won’t swear and I won’t lie. I won’t touch older men. I won’t roll my skirts up to my thighs. I’ll wear stockings made of sheep wool, stockings so thick even my nostrils will sweat. And when I wake up sad about my nightmares, I won’t cry. I will put on my best dress and my highest of heels. I will get back into bed and try to wake up all over again, spread my arms wide and shout, “Good morning, everybody!” I will feel like I’m shouting, but nobody will hear. I will grab my backpack and see my mother on her bed in a silk nightgown. She won’t be under the covers and this will convince me that she’s dead. I will check her heartbeat with two fingers. “Alive,” I will say to myself.

“Dr. Killigan,” I said, and I wanted to stop but I was blanking out on other things to say. “You can’t get mad if I tell you this.”

“Tell me what?” he asked. He leaned closer. He scratched his mustache.

But I couldn’t move my mouth to say what I thought he should know: Mr. Basketball touched me. He touched me and it hit me to the core and he is my favorite thing. He spread my legs with his thick arms and laid his body on top of mine and it scared me, but only in the really good way, when the pressure was too much and the terror was what kept you alive until the very end.

“Nothing,” I said.

“And you?” Dr. Killigan asked Janice.

“Nothing,” Janice said.

Dr. Killigan suspended us for a week.

To comfort my mother, I started watching a lot of reruns of
Family Matters, Full House
, and
The Cosby Show
to prove to my mother that a return to family sitcoms was a return to good habits, a return to myself. My mother looked at me during commercials, and instead of telling me I was her angel, she poured out all the liquor that was in our cabinet. She held my hand and asked me to promise that I wouldn’t ever be like that again.

“I won’t,” I told her. “I won’t ever be like that again.”

“Good,” she said. “Now, let’s watch the movie.” She cradled me in her arms. She rubbed my head. She cried and hummed the opening song to
Sabrina
. She held out a pack of cigarettes.

“I’m not going to smoke,” I told her.

“Neither am I,” she said. “Let’s just pretend.”

We put the cigarettes to our lips and watched a movie about a girl who cut her hair short and became happy. We dwelled on how severely the movie departed from logic. Normally, girls cut their hair short and then cried for two to three days. We pulled the unlit sticks from our mouths and laughed like there were haircuts we were too sensible for, and when I put my head on my pillow later that night, my mother didn’t tell me to say my prayers, but rather, she said, “Thank you, Emily. Thank you for being my daughter.” She turned off the light.

Dr. Killigan swore the drinking incident would go on our record, but it never showed up. The idea of a stained record was enough to make Janice cry right there in her chair, even though senior year, Janice and I applied to the same universities and she was the one who got into the Ivy League–reject schools. I was relieved by this forced separation. I applied to art programs in New York, Los Angeles, and got rejected from all of them except for the Rhode Island School of Design, which was two hours away in Providence.

When we graduated, Janice and I were on two different sides of the auditorium. We were under orders to wear white dresses, white flats, white robes. We were instructed not to throw our caps in celebration. Very dangerous. And under no circumstances was being naked allowed. Smiling, photographs, cheer: welcome.

“Can we hug?” a boy asked.

“Not until you’ve graduated,” Dr. Killigan said.

At the graduation ceremony, the valedictorian preached about living on an island made entirely out of recyclables, while I sat next to girls I never talked to before. We walked. I kept my cap on my head. I watched my mother and father fan themselves with the programs. They were in a room together for the first time since he left and this felt sadder than anything. Mark was in upstate New York with his aunt, graduating from a different high school. Mark got caught with marijuana sophomore year and his mother thought it was best he got a fresh start away from Fairfield. Alex Trimble scratched his crotch. Brittany Stone painted her breasts red and then flashed everybody when she walked. Richard tripped on a wire and face-planted on the ground and everybody laughed, even though Richard cut his face and bled throughout the rest of the ceremony. Mr. Basketball sat with his legs crossed like a choirboy and clapped when I received my diploma.

On the way home, my mother and father chatted politely in the car like strangers, updating each other on their new lives. Prague was nice. So was Fairfield. “So few trees,” my father said.

“A lovely daughter you have,” my mother said about Laura, but my father thought she meant me. He talked about my accomplishments as a young being: taught herself to read and play the piano, rode a two-wheeler bike when she was three. “So creative,” he said. At one point, my father looked at my mother and said, “You look beautiful, Gloria.”