The Adults (25 page)

“That’s strange,” I said.

“It’s not strange,” Ester said. “It’s just how it is. Her son died seven years ago in a car accident. She’s very upset that she can’t remember what it sounded like in the car. If it was a
bam!
Or a
smack!
Or a
crash!
The chaos makes sense to these people.”

Ester got too drunk. Ester told me that she thought her first husband was a closet homosexual because he didn’t fondle her breasts with the determination to really get to know them, and he cried once after they watched
Sleepless in Seattle
. She figured that since she didn’t, she might be a lesbian. Ester said she was sick with the idea that her husband even watched the movie with her in the first place.

“But then I met your father,” she said.

“My father cried once while watching
The Wizard of Oz
,” I said. “When Judy Garland sings ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow.’ It was the same song that they played at my grandmother’s funeral.”

“I see.”

“So do you think my father’s gay?” I asked. “Because he cried over his dead mother?”

“Emily,” Ester said, “of course I don’t think your father is gay. That song has a beautiful range. It would be nearly impossible not to cry while one’s emotions are enhanced by the death of a loved one.”

“Then why did you think your first husband was gay?”

“Because I caught him fucking another man in our bed.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Very intuitive of me,” she said. “I stood over the two of them and said, ‘Robert, I am starting to get the feeling that you are gay.’”

“You did not say that,” I said.

I was right. She said she threw a pot, then cried for ten hours.

We were quiet for a moment. Then we burst out into laughter. Ester ran into the other room, holding her stomach, trying not to pee in her pants, saying, “I threw a fucking pot!”

Laura ran out on the balcony, her hair flipped upward from the pillow, saying, “Raisinet! Raisinet!”

Laura hurried us to the bottom of the stairs, where Raisinet was having another seizure. Laura was crying and knelt down next to the dog.

“I don’t think I love him anymore,” Laura said, like that was the tragedy of the situation, and not Raisinet, drooling from the corners of his mouth, or Ester, who was still trying to smother her giggles behind me.

To be honest, sometimes I did hate Laura a little bit. I hated her when it was late at night and she cried while we were finally having a good time, or when her voice cracked with emotion over her apple-sauce that she refused to eat if there were lumps. I hated her when she left a ring of milk on the kitchen counter and when she got her brown hairs stuck in the toothpaste on the sink. I hated her when my father was on the phone, and also throwing out the garbage, and also putting on his shoes, and she would look at him as though he was the maid and say, “Dad, hand me that marker,” and I would look at her and say, “Can’t you see he is busy?” but really what I wanted to say was,
Can’t you see that he is my
father?
Can’t you see that we have the same exact nose, that we share a vocabulary? Can’t you see that
we have a history you will never understand?
She tugged on Raisinet’s fur like he was a doll and not a living thing that was suffering and she left my bobby pins in the shapes of crosses all along the coffee table. She spit on her palms when her hands were dry, and she blew out candles before the night was over and got scared in the dark. She’d look over at me from across the room like I wasn’t enough protection and say, “Where is my dad?” and I would have to correct her and say, “Where is
our
dad, Laura.” I hated her when she looked at Raisinet and then at me, and said, “I don’t love him anymore,” and I wanted to scream at her, even though she was just a child. Even though I did love her, and sometimes at night, she would draw a little mouth on her hand and sing me the Cheeseburger Song, or sit on my lap and ask me if I had ever heard of sex before, and I would laugh and tell her that of course I had. Even through all of this, sometimes I wanted to lift up her chin and say, “Don’t you see that is your dog?” Don’t you see how we didn’t want to have to love you, Laura? Don’t you see how you have to love things forever anyway, no matter if it shakes, or drools, or barks in the middle of the night, or throws up food, or dies, because even in death, he is still your dog? You picked him out of a group and said, that is my dog, and the dog you picked shakes and drools and barks in the middle of the night, but you named him. And for that reason you should never want to give him up, you should always be grateful since your dog is one of the few things in life that you actually can choose as your own.

“He’s a
boy
,” she said. “I didn’t know it was a
boy
when I chose him. I should have asked.”

I took her teary little face in my hands.

“You should always always ask for what you want, Laura,” I said.

I wasted too much of my life not asking for what I wanted. I didn’t even know how to pray properly. When we were at St. Vitus Cathedral, after we had purchased our prayers, we each got a candle to light. I had never been much for prayer because most of the time I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to expect for myself. What did we have the right to expect? I took a match to my candle. I lit the wick, and we stood in a circle around the candle display and watched our prayers burn into tiny stubs, drowning in the white wax, and I thought of what I wanted, what I had always wanted those four years in college I spent undressing to the entire soundtrack of
Moulin Rouge
after theater parties, kissing various boys with spotty beards and dirty fingernails, half-naked architects who wouldn’t shut up about Frank Lloyd Wright or the weird thing they just found on their penis, boys who ate pizza with joints hanging out their mouths, boys who held me and licked me like I was covered in wounds as they played Portishead and asked me questions late into the night, like would I rather have to kill my whole family or the whole state of Ohio, and I said, “Does the state of Ohio know I murdered them?” and they looked at me and said, “That’s four million people, Emily, that’s genocide,” and I hated them, these boys with uncombed hair and too-short ties who didn’t understand that it was all just a game.

Mr. Basketball. Jonathan.

This was why all those women sat on those stools in our high school auditorium and shook their fingers and said, girls, don’t let them touch you, girls, don’t let them hold you, because even if you hated them, even if their proximity made your heart pound in fear, when they were gone and you were alone, you could hardly feel your pulse.

I lit my candle and I prayed.

A man walked by and my candle was blown out by the wind. I took a picture of it, with Laura’s face behind the candle. On the way home, I took pictures of things I didn’t think anybody would ever want to remember, like the underside of a black bench in the middle of the city where the word “rain” was written in Wite-Out. A half-eaten sandwich thrown on the street. A sign that read food store. An old man who got his foot stuck in a revolving door and didn’t even notice until someone pointed it out to him. Until I put down my camera and said, “Mister, your foot,” but he flinched like I was about to mug him since he didn’t know any English, and I was coming closer to him, and I wanted to say,
Why are we always so scared of everything, why am I so scared of the watermarks on the buildings, or the silence on the night trams, or to sit down with my father and have a proper conversation?
but the man was gone, grumbled something in French and walked in the door.

Why could we never speak? Why could I never ask for what I wanted?

I got my photo album from my bedroom. It was full of all the images I never wanted to remember but carried around with me so I’d never forget. “A poem is a record of change,” Mr. Basketball said once, and this felt true to me; I was a record of change, and this photo album was a record of change. My father and Mrs. Resnick in the woods at his birthday party, Mr. Basketball’s red gym shorts, my mother on the couch holding a martini. I put the picture of the bench with the word “rain” in an envelope and sent it to Mr. Basketball. I didn’t know why exactly, or if he even had the same address, or if I was just sending something out there to the universe, but it seemed to me that he was the only person who would understand exactly what I saw in all of this.
Image
, was all I wrote. Then I signed my full name: Emily Marie Vidal.

My father and I didn’t get to spend that much time alone together, except when he took me out to dinner on Wednesdays, and when he ordered Shiraz, he always said, ‘Let’s celebrate,’ like Happy Wednesday, Daughter, hope it was better than Tuesday, though I hope your Tuesday was great too, and I never asked what people clapped about during the middle of the week and he never held out his glass to toast anything. We just liked to say things: “Hi, Father,” I said with a grin. “I’m your daughter Emily and we just like to say things.”

He laughed. Sometimes I loved my father more than anything.

“What can you do with linguini?” my father asked me when our meals arrived. This was a game we used to play to pass the time when I was little. What can you do with a
blank
? What can you do with a stone? Step on it, put it on your desk, stick it in your pants and try to drown. What can I do with your mother? he’d sometimes asked. Put her in the closet, I’d say, take her to the moon, make her a ham sandwich, draw her a picture of the Grand Canyon.

“Spell your name with it,” I said.

“Make a statue out of it.”

“Feed it to the dog.”

“Tie it all together and use it like a string.”

“Wear it like a wig.”

My father touched the top of his head. He was severely balding. He was balding in the front, the hair left around his head fitting like a horseshoe. “I’m getting old,” he said. He sighed.

“You’re not old,” I said. “At least not old in the way that Betty Ford is old.”

“I’m old,” he said. “I’m old in the way that my back hurts as soon as I open my eyes in the morning. I’m old.”

W
inter approached. Jonathan was in the living room of his suite at the Crowne Plaza about to drop his pants in front of the zebra statue. It had been four years since I had seen him and he was so comfortable unbuttoning his jeans in front of me that I was forced to look past him and think about the way the zebra’s mane covered its face entirely, except for the right eye, which was peeking through the hair and emphasized like red lipstick on a child. I was reduced to obvious body language.

“I’ve got to shower,” Jonathan said. “It was a long flight.”

I told him there was soap and shampoo in the bathroom. He walked to the door in his boxers and exclaimed, “Ah yes, soap and shampoo in the bathroom.” I sat on the couch and listened to him sing soft melodies through the shower door and felt a bit calmer. This is my hotel, I told myself, and that voice is only Jonathan’s. Jonathan was staying at my hotel. I got him a slight discount, but he said he would have stayed there anyway since the law firm was paying for his trip.
I’m looking forward to being surrounded by you
, he had written before he came.

It wasn’t until Jonathan showed up in Prague that I realized I hadn’t really known anyone in Prague. I knew my father and Laura and Ester and Krištof and a few of my European classmates who had all left over winter break to go to the Swiss Alps, where someone always had an available cabin, or to Milan, where somebody’s grandmother was always dying.

I felt lonely in Prague, but not quite sad. In October, the snow started falling and I welcomed it on the tip of my nose. There was something about being in a foreign country that validated and glorified your own sense of isolation. My loneliness felt epic, and the Romanesque buildings all around me only affirmed this.

And then Mr. Basketball wrote to me. Jonathan, as Mr. Basketball described himself in his letters, was a lawyer in Manhattan now but still lived in his Fairfield condo. He had sent me a picture of a courtroom, a man in a suit wildly flailing his arms in front of the judge, who was yawning without covering his mouth.
Ennui
, he had written on the back.

I wrote him explaining that I was a not-yet-certified interior designer. That I was living in Prague, indefinitely. That living in Prague sometimes felt like a way to remind myself it was impossible to be happy anywhere. There was too much pressure to be spontaneous and in the moment and eating and touching and enjoying everything every second.

He didn’t write back.

So I had Krušovices all month long with men in jungle-green blazers, thin ties, and ankle pants, men who mostly spoke Czech so our conversations sounded a little bit like, “Well-hello-how-are-you-do-you-cook-yes-but-only-with-easy-to-pronounce-vegetable-names.”

I ate dumplings and cabbage and felt constricted. In the morning, I drank Algerian coffee for the first time and I liked how drinking it required all of your attention in order to keep the coffee grinds settled on the bottom of the cup. I liked how walking around in Prague required your attention; you put your head down, and then before you knew it, you were completely lost. You were at the crest of the river, the end of a road, and above you, the sky was overwhelmingly fresh looking.

You felt the same way in Connecticut
, Jonathan finally wrote back.
Don’t you remember?

Who are these people who go to Europe to find themselves?
I wrote.
I’ve never felt more like my unself. People should really say, I’m going to Europe to find out who I’m not.

I read
The Trial
and felt ashamed about my lack of appreciation for everything that came before me, so I followed Kafka’s footsteps around the city and tried to memorize inscriptions under different statues and smile at old people. I fed the ducks that congregated at the bottom of the Vltava and sometimes I liked to pretend that we were all at a business meeting discussing fourth-quarter revenue. “Quack,” one of the ducks inevitably said. “I disagree entirely,” I said, and shook my head. I thought of my mother walking through Fairfield, trying on wedding gowns that were no longer too expensive for her. I imagined her feeling lonely in a pleated bodice. I went to talks given at my father’s university by Arnošt Lustig. I cried over other people’s pain. About boys who died in the Holocaust as virgins, and boys who didn’t. I bought scarves for two hundred crowns because they were pretty and soft around my neck.