The Adults (22 page)

“That’s the first time you’ve ever called me Jonathan,” he said, ignoring the fact that he ran a stoplight. As soon as I said his name aloud, it felt good to call him Jonathan. Why hadn’t I before? “I thought I would like it,” he said.

“Jonathan, do you realize you ran a stoplight? You could have killed us.”

“Stop calling me that. It sounds so strange. Too strange.”

“You can’t just run stoplights and ignore me. That’s not what a relationship is.”

He looked over at me. Then he pulled over on the side of the road. The car was so silent, I could hear the brown tuft of hair slip out from behind his ear.

“A relationship?” he finally asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Tell me, Emily. How come your mother is still alive?”

“Huh?”

“Your mother. You told me when we first kissed that your mother was dying, three years ago.”

I looked out the window. “My mother wasn’t dying,” I said. “I lied. She was perfectly healthy. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said that. In fact, I forgot I even said that.”

“So she wasn’t even dying?” he asked, and hit the steering wheel.

“Would you prefer it if she had been?”

He put his head against the wheel. “What the fuck have I done?”

“You ran a stoplight,” I said.

“What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know.”

I cried as though crying were a reasonable substitute for making a decision.

“You’re a little girl,” he said. “Look at you, you’re crying.”

“Don’t diminish me,” I said, rubbing my eyes.

“You are a tiny girl who is in pain.”

“Shut up!” I yelled.

“Who are you, anyway? What are you doing in my life?”

Trees hung above the roof of the car and blocked the last of the day’s sun. Every moment, there was something new to want.

“Please don’t,” I said.

“I’m sorry, Emily,” he said. “This isn’t right.”

“What isn’t?”

“You are too young.”

“No,” I said, crying. “I love you.”

He dropped me off at a gas station. He drove away, and poof, just like that, he was gone. Mr. Basketball was here, and then he wasn’t. He was someone to me, and then he wasn’t. I looked at the aisles of Oreos and Clorox cleaner, pretending to shop, but window-shopping at a gas station minimart, I found out, was nearly impossible. I turned over packages of Pringles, waiting for my mother to pick me up, and I didn’t even cry as I saw his car turn left for the last time. That was the difference between children and adults.

“Children have a problem with that kind of stuff,” my mother said after I babysat for Laura and I told my mother that she cried when I tried to play peekaboo with her. “That’s what Ron said. Someone goes out of their sight and they believe that person to be gone forever. You cover your face, and Laura can’t imagine ever seeing you again. You were like that.”

At home, Bill was standing in the kitchen. My mother picked up the wine and loaf of anisette dough she had left in order to come get me.

“Hi, Emily,” Bill said. Bill wore pleated khakis and parted his almond hair down the middle.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Bill’s here.”

“Emily,” my mother scolded. The phone rang. I picked it up. It was Mrs. Resnick.

“Mrs. Resnick needs someone to watch Laura,” I said, grabbing my purse.

My mother held up her hands covered in dough. “We have a guest.”

“You have a guest,” I said. “I have to go see my sister.”

“You aren’t going to help me with the cookies?” she asked. “I can’t make these all on my own.”

“I don’t think Bill would like this victim psychology you are harboring,” I said, walking out the door. “Would you, Bill?”

“We’re going to eat like queens!” I said to Laura.

Laura clapped her hands. Laura was almost four. Old enough to talk, old enough to walk, and old enough to understand that queens did not eat gummy bears for dinner. I opened the food pantry. I was legally an adult now, eighteen and able to smoke and go to war and no longer able to be statutorily raped by men who were nineteen. I could have sex with anyone I pleased. I was proud of my body and I was wearing a thirty-dollar bra, so I lit the stove and pulled out everything from the cabinet that looked expensive. I fried Salisbury steak medallions in walnut oil, which I covered in quail eggs and tahini. Laura was mumbling parts of an Elvis song on the radio, braiding a chunk of her hair at the counter. I was surprised how I felt so much affection for Laura; she was the consequence of the terrible affair that ruined our lives, and yet, she was so small at the counter, so unaware of this fact, that all you wanted to do was possess her and be a part of her world. All she had to do was wrap her tiny fingers around my pinky and laugh when I picked her up and told her I was going to throw her in the trash. “Throw me in the trash again!” she shouted as I tickled her into the fold of the couch (“the trash”) and how glorious it was to Laura, this idea of being thrown away.

“Meat’s burning,” I said.

I turned down the temperature and looked around at how neat and clean the house was, how much of a home it still was, the chairs in nearly the same exact position they were during the funeral reception, their family photos still hanging above the fireplace. Everything was so familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, even their smiles behind the frames, and I couldn’t stand any of it.

I took out a bag of frozen shrimp and placed it on the counter. “Are those things animals?” Laura asked.

“Once upon a time,” I said.

“They don’t have any eyes,” Laura said.

I defrosted shrimp in the sink, steamed broccoli, microwaved a Trader Joe’s cheesecake and forgot about it, made a pesto sauce for the pasta that was burning in a pot, and when Laura went to bed, I unbraided her hair and kissed her on the forehead. “Are you my sister?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I am always your sister.”

“Good,” she said, and my heart was confused.

When a child goes to bed, a dark house begins to feel like a playground. I went downstairs and I opened up a bottle of Brane-Cantenac Red Bordeaux from France to celebrate my independence and poured some on the remaining steak and most of it in my mouth. There. We were even, I thought.

But, no, we still didn’t feel even. I went upstairs and rolled on Mrs. Resnick’s red and green plaid bedspread. Still plaid, how titillating, I said aloud, putting on her broken gold watch, how boring and unsexy and old.

In her bathroom, I smeared on her Red Salamander lipstick and pulled her lace knee socks to my thighs. I wrenched her lime green dress out of her closet, the one she wore to my father’s birthday party. The linen felt used and vintage on my body, old and sad and retired. I put on her black pumps. We had the same size feet by then, which both depressed and comforted me. I called Daniel, who came over and smoked pot with me on her bed,
doobies
, he still depressingly called them as he told me to breathe in deep and not open my mouth until I fully swallowed. After, I jumped up and down with the ceiling fan spinning a little too close to my head. Daniel pulled at my arm, and I crumbled on top of his body like that whole time I had been a sand statue. “What are you wearing?” he finally asked, tugging at the green linen, and then my underwear, discovering that I had been wet for hours. He licked my vagina a few times and then gestured toward his own crotch. Laura woke up in time to see us leaving the master bedroom and cried out, “Mom?”

“Not yet, honey,” I said, not quite ashamed.

Mrs. Resnick came home and walked through the door with a bunch of evening gowns draped over her arm and saw the empty bottle of wine on the table, the dirty burnt dishes in the sink, the melted cheesecake in her microwave, and me, costumed as an exaggerated, tired, whorish version of her. Without missing a beat, she stuck her hand in her wallet and pulled out forty bucks. “Here,” she said, and gave me the money, but wouldn’t look at me. “Thanks,” I grumbled, and left into the night, my insides wet with a boy’s saliva, my stomach spoiled with half-cooked meat and wine, my skin suffocated in another woman’s clothes, and Mrs. Resnick didn’t try to stop me, like she was glad to see herself go. I walked proudly across the lawn in a woman’s heels, trying to feel pleased with all of my recent decisions, but when I got to the rock between our lawns, I stood on top of it and felt ashamed.

I stood and I twirled. I jumped off the rock, and my heels sank into the ground, making me fall to the grass.

By the time I got to my front stoop, I wiped my mouth clean with my arm. As I walked into my house, I couldn’t help but notice how loud the heels cracked against the tile and wonder how much she had paid for them, if Mrs. Resnick cried when she found my clothes sprinkled on her unmade bed.

“Do you
love
Bill?” I asked my mother, flinging open the door, throwing myself into the kitchen. She was rolling the last batch of anisette cookies.

“Emily!” my mother said, shocked at my appearance. She never finished her sentence.

“After I graduate college,” I said, calmly, picking up some dough like I just came home from a war and the only thing I needed to do was not talk about it, roll the dough in my hands, and perform simple and comforting tasks and remember
the everyday
, “I’m going to live with Dad in Prague.”

“What are you wearing, Emily?” my mother shrieked.

Bill walked into the kitchen with his sweater and glass of red wine. He laughed at my outfit. “You’re a hoot,” he said. It sounded like he spent the week thinking of how to address me.

My mother gestured for him not to mention the outfit any further.

“I’m moving to Prague,” I repeated. “As soon as I’m done with college.”

“Prague?” Bill asked. “Why would you want to go hang out with a bunch of Commies? Aren’t all the kids going to Latin America these days?”

“She’s not going to Prague,” my mother said. “She hasn’t even started college.”

I informed Bill that the architecture in Prague was amazing.

“Well,” Bill said, holding up his wineglass. “Here’s hoping they let you back in.”

We clinked glasses, and it sounded like a contract. Bill left the room and my mother and I continued to roll the last of the anisette cookies. We held the cold dough between our palms and my mother asked me to please please take off that outfit, and I got flour all over Mrs. Resnick’s dress and my mother demanded I tell her the truth about that man, and I asked my mother to tell me the truth about Bill. What was Bill
really
like? I asked. Oh, tall, she said. Brownish hair. Strong chin. Smooth skin. Loves all modes of transportation. And dogs. He really just loves dogs.

M
y father’s apartment in Prague was covered in filth. This was something his fiancée Ester noticed every night while we waited for my father to return from work. Ester usually made the announcement while we were in the common room, and the television was loud. On the news, they were broadcasting live footage of the clear sky, evidence that the thunderstorm had passed.

“This apartment is covered in
špínu
and smells like dog,” Ester said, looking at the dog hair on the windowsill. But Ester believed perfumes disturbed the natural scents that brought people together, so she didn’t ever try to fight the smell, just held her nose and looked accusingly at Laura, who rolled a ball to her dog on the floor.

My father bought a dog for Laura, a cocker spaniel she named Raisinet. “That’s French, right?” Laura asked.

Laura spent the summers in Prague with my father, but this time she was staying for the year, one solid year for her to learn how to speak Czech and go back to third grade bilingual. She was happy here in Prague. “It looks just like Disney World,” she had said once. But my father told me before I came, she was a little lonely. He caught her singing a song to the bedposts. He thought a pet would be good for her. “It helps you more than you know to cultivate a life,” he told me as he took the puppy out of the cage for the first time. I wanted him to elaborate, but neither of us knew what to say after he said things like that, and the dog began barking loud.

“Ruffski!” Laura shouted at the dog, which barked back at her, and she clapped her hands. Laura stood up, did a successful pirouette, and fell on the floor. Laura was eight. I was twenty-two. She was dancing in the living room, twirling her blue skirt, explaining how sad it was that “fish didn’t know about elephants.”

“You mean to tell me that’s a fact?” I asked Laura.

“Laura,” Ester said, holding a large painting in her hands, “what is that even supposed to mean?”

Two birds with sharp beaks sat on the edge of the screenless windows, worms jammed in their mouths, like really patient vampires waiting for an invitation to use the formal china.

“They don’t know about each other!” Laura said. “One is in the sea forever, and the other has to be on land forever.”

“That’s why there are zoos,” I told Laura. “The fish and elephants see each other there.”

Laura stood up. “The zoo is dead!” she shouted.

“Dead” was the word Laura sometimes substituted for “closed.”

Last year, the Prague Zoo had drowned in the one-hundred-year flood, along with a rhinoceros and an elephant. The flood had touched nearly everything in the city.

“Emily,” Ester said, struggling with the painting. She placed it on the floor. “I need your help.”

Ester was in front of the French doors guarding the balcony. She was red haired and beautiful with large threatening blue eyes, and stood still only with purpose. She was always and suddenly in a rush to notice everything—Laura wasn’t wearing underwear today, my father had been coughing up a sick green storm all morning, I was getting home too late at night (what was I doing? What could I possibly have been doing?) and so was my father. “Where does he go?” she asked. I shrugged, as if I already understood the larger truth. “This is what it’s like with him,” I said. And that whole time, Ester’s feather earrings hung as still as the red hair around them, like peacocks stashed in a maple tree.