The Adults (38 page)

Laura sniffed her coffee suspiciously. “I’ll hold on to it,” Mrs. Resnick said, taking the coffee from Laura.

We sat this way for hours, all four of us, shifting our feet to the solemn songs of machines, to nurses and doctors guessing which part of my father was next in line for shutdown. His lung. His leg. His brain. When I began to cry, Laura began to cry, so I stood up straight and regained composure.

“Your father once told me that fencing was a winter sport,” I said to Laura about Mr. Resnick. “Your father once told me the only word in the English language with no vowels is ‘gym,’” I said to Laura about my father.

“That’s not a word,” my mother said. “Because the actual word is ‘gymnasium.’ And that has more than one vowel. I don’t know why your father never understood that.”

“He only understood what he wanted to understand,” Mrs. Resnick said.

My mother dropped her mouth to speak and I tensed. “Will you be all right?” my mother asked Laura, and I relaxed. “I worry for you.”

“I think so,” Laura said, and tucked the hair behind her ears.

“How is Mark doing?” I asked Mrs. Resnick.

“He’s well,” she said. “He lives in Norwalk. He’s an engineer now. Very happy.”

I wondered what Mrs. Resnick and Mark and Laura talked about when they got together, if they could look each other in the face, if they ever even got together. I wondered if Mark’s empty bedroom was making a good storage room, if nightfall was the most appropriate time to be erased, if the body shut down painlessly in the dark, limb by limb, finger by finger, toe by toe, nail by nail, your life more like a faraway dream with every passing moment, the people standing above you merely shadows blocking the light. I wondered at what point during your death you could look down at your own body in the noose and think, What is this thing? I wondered if dying hurt more at dawn, when everything was green and crisp and beginning and you were ending, you were tired, you were unsure of what was worse—the things you understood or the things you didn’t. Would Mr. Resnick have felt worse or better knowing that I was watching him die? Would Mr. Basketball think of me on his deathbed? I wondered and all four of us sat in our blue chairs and wondered. We held hands and ate muffins like children who couldn’t feel their stomachs and when my mother dropped her muffin, she bent over and sobbed into her lap for the first time in years and I knew she loved my father. I knew she could feel him leaving her, and that it hurt just as much, if not more, than the first time he left, even if this time he was still down the hall in his silk robe.

W
hen Jonathan picked me up later that night he had a hard time looking at me.

“You okay?” he asked, driving the car.

“Yeah,” I said. My father was a cold slab. My father was a ghost.

Jonathan told me that it felt like a Kafka short story at the hospital.

“Everybody kept going into the dark room to see the person that I couldn’t see,” Jonathan said. “Then everybody came out of the dark room crying.”

I wanted to smack him in the face. A large acidic pocket of air rose in my chest, but I kept my mouth shut. “Don’t get on the highway,” I said. “Let’s go to your place. It’s so much closer than your father’s.”

“We can’t,” Jonathan said. “I’m sorry.”

We turned onto Seeley Road, the street of my old high school. Webb High. A taupe and asymmetrical castle built in the seventies.

“Jonathan! Stop,” I said. “Let’s stop here.”

“For what?”

“I want to see the school. I haven’t been inside since I graduated.”

“It’s late,” he said. “School is locked.”

“Not the theater door,” I said. “They keep that side door open all the time. I used it whenever I needed to come back to school and get a book.”

We parked on the side of the school and walked through the door to the theater. We walked past the auditorium, where Jonathan had kissed me behind the curtain once. We walked past the music room, and the cafeteria, and ended up in the front hallway of the school where there was a big red sign that said
DRESS CODE.

NO muscle shirts, NO wearing of pants below the waistline, NO shirts bearing midriff, shoulders must be covered at all times, NO tube tops, NO see-through shirts, NO bandannas or hoods unless they are worn for religious or medical reasons, NO T-shirts that promote racial slurs or gender slurs, NO student shall intentionally expose undergarments, at risk of suspension and/or restructuring of garment. Shoes must be worn at all times.

“Girls started wearing thongs on the outsides of their jeans after you graduated,” Jonathan said.

“I suppose it was inevitable,” I said.

The front hallway was still packed with the same old trophies and some new ones: Yale Physics Olympics, First Place; National Financial Literary Conference Leaders 08. In the cafeteria, there were no more vending machines. Only big Gatorade bottles that dispensed water underneath a sign that said H
OW ACIDIC IS
YOUR
BODY?

I walked quickly to find my old locker. On the way, I passed a large white sign that said
THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF A WARNING SIGN
, and underneath there was a picture of a genderless child smoking marijuana, a genderless child with his/her head on his/her book, a genderless child drinking from a beer bottle, a genderless child mouthing “F**K!”

I walked faster down the hallway and I could hear Jonathan losing pace behind me, shouting, slow down, Emily, but I couldn’t; I was feeling like my wild, destructive self. Slow down, Emily, slow down, he kept saying, as the white walls blurred past me, and I wanted his voice to go away. I wanted him smaller and smaller. I wanted to feel what life would have been like without him, if he had never walked the dog and found me on the stoop that day. I passed wall graffiti on the right that said
JENNY CLIMP CLAMPS HER CLIT
underneath a banner that read:
HEY, GREAT THINKERS: IS THERE A GOD? WHAT IS MOST REAL? THE MOLECULES THAT MAKE UP THE AIR, OR THE FEELINGS YOU HAVE INSIDE YOU?

“Jesus,” I said. I stood still at my old locker and caught my breath.

My locker was covered in a giant sticker that said
VOLDEMORT IS REPUBLICAN
. I leaned against the metal. Jonathan caught up to me. “I’m starving,” I suddenly realized. Grief made me feel ten years old, crying and panting and barely thinking, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, my stomach ached.

“Here’s home ec,” Jonathan said, pointing to the classroom.

We walked inside the classroom where I had spent two years sewing an oversized stuffed camel. The home-ec room still had four full kitchens, one in each corner of the room, two refrigerators.

“Aha!” Jonathan said, a little giddy, finding a ready-to-make package of cinnamon rolls in the fridge. “Sit.”

He pulled out a tiny yellow plastic chair for me.

“I’ll make you some rolls,” he said. “But first, we need some music. What’s your father’s favorite CD?”

“Jimmy Buffett,” I said. “His earlier work,” my father always added, as if he was talking about Picasso’s Blue Period.

“Shockingly, there’s no Jimmy Buffett,” he said at the boom box on the windowsill, picking up CDs. But I couldn’t have had a life without him, I thought; he was so good, standing there in the pretend kitchen, trying to cheer me up. “But there’s Beethoven or Wagner or Spanish II.”

He put in Wagner and while he took the dough out of the cardboard he made up words to the music just to watch me laugh. I laughed and I laughed and I laughed. Sometimes it was easier to laugh when you were sad. Everything felt more extreme. More romantic.

“I love you,” I said from my chair across the room. And when he didn’t say anything, the room felt as big as the ocean. Like I was drowning, in his car again, when I was eighteen and he accused me of my mother
not
dying.

The oven buzzer went off, and I flinched. “I know your wife is dead,” I said. “You’ve been lying to me.”

He had expected this, he said. “Let’s just eat.”

We sat on the tiny little yellow chairs and ate at the flat round table. I sat there wondering why I catered to Jonathan’s guilt.
Suck it up
, I wanted to scream,
we’re all shitheads
. But my stomach ached, and the rolls were warm, and the icing was slipping off the sides.

When I was full, I said, “Why couldn’t you just tell me? Why are you lying?”

“Let’s get out of here,” he said, dumping the tray in the trash.

His tone bothered me. His tone implied that we were not really sitting there, surrounded by a stove, a table, and a refrigerator, like this whole time we were only playing in a poorly furnished movie about ourselves, and in this movie Jonathan always stole the last line.

“Take me to your house,” I said. “Show me how you lived with her.”

“No,” he said.

I walked out of the room and down the hall. I walked and walked and I wasn’t quite sure where I was headed, but I passed more signs:
JOIN THE DISTRIBUTIVE EDUCATION CLUB OF AMERICA (DECA) AND GO TO CALIFORNIA! CHOICES HAVE CONSEQUENCES
. I could hear Jonathan’s footsteps behind me.

“Here’s your old classroom,” I said, standing in front of the door.

B27.

The room was almost exactly the same, and that was what I had been hoping for, that was why I had come—to remember something. The slate tiles and the gray walls and the chairs in rows. The windows with no blinds. Everything sterile, the air disinfected. This wasn’t romance.

“This is where you sat, remember?” I said. I sat down at the teacher’s desk. I opened the drawer and pulled out a piece of paper. “Mr. Browsdowski. American Perspectives College Prep.”

“This is where you sat,” he said. Third row, fourth seat from the window.

Or maybe his tone bothered me because of the way he always used our intimacy as a way to distance himself. Like, let’s get the fuck out of here, like, let’s always start over, every second, let’s start over and then relive the same life, it’s easy and painless, like everything we’ve been doing for the last ten years actually had nothing to do with us.

“It’s weird to see you on that side of the classroom,” I said.

“Vice versa,” he said.

“What was your English teacher like?” I asked.

“No man is an island!” he said, standing up. “Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind!

“And like this,” he said. He put his hand over his heart. “How did Nathanael West die, class? How?”

Silence.

“Wrong!” he said. “On the way to Fitzgerald’s funeral!

“And Oscar Wilde. Gay! Did you know that! Imprisoned for homosexuality!”

I was quiet. Jonathan sat back down and put his head in his hands. “That’s what he was like.”

“And what were you like?” I asked.

He put his head down on the desk. “Like this,” he said, his voice muffled.

“And what was she like?”

“Smart,” he said, his head still down on the desk. “Too smart.”

“And how did she die?”

“I don’t know.”

He nervously started tapping his feet.

“You don’t know?” I asked. “What kind of answer is that?”

“I mean, I’m not sure really.”

We sat there in silence until I said, “Well, was it sudden?”

“Yes,” he said. “Very sudden. But it felt slow. It felt like it took years.”

He stood up. He sat on the floor between my knees.

“Do you miss her?” I asked. He rubbed my knees with his hands. He had touched me so many times, and it never felt repetitive.

“Most of the time,” he said.

He unbuttoned my shirt slowly like we were going to make love. The buttons were pearls. The shirt was nearly see-through. In the dark, I was a skin suit lined with pearls. In the dark Jonathan looked expansive. As though he should take care of everything. He looked like a person who would take care of everyone he loved when he was older. He would put thermometers in his wife’s mouth and he would make jokes about not being able to climb the stairs.

I undressed him.

I sat on top of the desk and pressed against him. We stayed like this, with our faces close together, until he became as solid as a color. At night, up close, we were solid like colors, but at dawn, we were edges and corners and had an unpredictable way of interacting with the light, and as we sat there naked, the sun rose through the classroom window, and I thought, My father can’t feel his fingers.

“How can you
not
know how your wife died?” I asked him. “It’s such a definitive thing.”

And silence was such an imperceptible failure so early in the morning. For the first half of my life, I had mistaken the silence in our house for comfort. After Mr. Resnick died, we barely talked for three days until my father took out a pan and said, “I’m making you ladies eggs!”

“Scrambled, please,” I said.

“Don’t you think ‘quack’ is the most appropriate sound a duck could make?” my father asked, cracking the eggs into a bowl. “There is no better sound a duck could make.”

“Balooga,” I said. “Hypotenuse.”

My father poured olive oil into the pan.

“Butter, Victor, you use
butter
for eggs,” my mother said, and I only saw my mother’s eyes narrowed now, and I only noticed my father’s silence throughout the rest of the meal now. I only realized that he was making eggs to apologize to us. He washed out the pan and used butter and silently apologized. And during breakfast, my mother pushed the eggs aside and ate only her toast.

“In the delivery room,” Jonathan said. “Is that what you want to hear? She just bled and bled and bled until she wasn’t alive anymore.”

Jonathan leaned back to watch as I picked my bra off the floor. It didn’t feel right to be naked while he talked about his dead wife. None of it felt right: Jonathan stood up and pulled at his hair, his eyes suddenly red rimmed. This is what a crazy person looks like, I thought. This was a crazy man, crying. This was a man doubling over, holding his stomach, asking for me.

“I didn’t want the baby,” he said. “And I didn’t want to be married. And that’s exactly what I got.”