The Adults (39 page)

I was quiet.

“I just can’t believe it,” he shouted. “It’s all so fucking weird!”

Despite his unreasonableness, I knew exactly what he meant.

“I love you,” I said. “I love you I love you I love you.”

I said it and I suddenly felt rid of something. Free in my chest. He looked at me.

“
Mám tě rád
,” he said.

I love you, in Czech.

“Say it in English,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Why don’t you ever say it in English?”

Mám tě rád, loveski
, who cared?

“It makes me feel different to hear it in English,” I said.

“Don’t you get that this is all very complicated?”

He waited for me to agree.

“Don’t you get that I was never supposed to touch you? Don’t you know that?”

But if he was right, if he wasn’t supposed to touch me, and I admitted that, then it meant my whole life was wrong. It meant he had changed who I was supposed to be, and whoever I was, sitting on his desk, was wrong.

“You are always leaving me,” I said. “You’re leaving me right now, I can feel it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You were just so young.”

“I was young,” I said.

“In the basement,” he said. “I remember. Only seeing your eyes. You have old eyes. And on your stoop, you were sitting there so sad in that stupid T-shirt, your hair was a mess and your foot was bleeding and you didn’t even cry. That’s what I remember most about you.”

“You are talking like I am dead,” I said.

“I feel as though I have killed you.”

I laid my back on the desk. I closed my eyes. I heard his footsteps. I imagined throwing up and just by imagining it I could already feel the lesions lining my throat. I felt him leaving my body. My father always said that we see things not as they happen but one nanosecond after they happen, so by the time I saw Jonathan put on his shoes, he could have already been gone.

And what’s even harder to understand, my father said, drawing me a map of the solar system on his napkin, is that if I were 186 trillion miles away from Earth, I’d see things a trillion seconds after they happened. “And what if you were even farther away than that?” I had asked. He had said that if he were peering at Earth through a telescope from even farther away than that, he might still see us, sitting around our kitchen table, making the sandwiches, your mother making the coffee, and me at the table, me not combing my hair, me at the mirror with my hands over my eyes.

I heard Jonathan say good-bye, good-bye, as in, I won’t be seeing you anymore, and then, “Look at me, Emily,” but I couldn’t look. “Good-bye,” I said. I heard the classroom door close and I felt short of breath, but I stood up, and thought of my mother, taking me away from her mother’s funeral, in my urine-soaked dress, with my hands over my eyes. Even when you can’t see yourself, my mother said in my ear, you are still yourself, and even when you can’t see your father, he is still your father, just because you can’t see someone, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t someone, and what a relief! my mother had cried, taking the hands away from my eyes, what a relief.

F
or your father to die properly, we need three hundred and fifty slices of cheddar cheese, it was his favorite—do you remember that, Emily? How he used to slice too many pieces of cheese and eat them with a steak knife in front of the television? I’d say, Victor! You’re eating cheese with a steak knife! Why would a human being do that? And he’d look at me and be like, it feels better this way—I can’t explain it, Gloria. We need to clean the toilets and dust the curtains and put out framed pictures of your father looking his best. We need platters of cavatelli and broccoli and if Alfred walks by his picture and says, what in God’s name is on Victor’s head, we need to explain: he just thought that hat was funny.

“Alfred is dead,” I tell my mother. “Remember? Four years ago. He had a tumor in his pancreas.”

“That’s right,” my mother says. “I forgot about that.”

My mother looks at the picture of my father and smiles anyway.

“Your father had a real sense of humor, Emily,” my mother says. “You know that, right?”

“I know,” I say. “He was a funny man. Did Bill leave to get the beer?”

“He did.”

It’s like my mother says: Italians love and then Italians die and then Italians cry and then Italians drink half a bottle of sambuca and say stupid shit.

I am by the eggplant when I see Mrs. Resnick and Mark and Laura show up. I am pretty sure I am the only one who notices the way my mother’s mouth quivers when she sticks out her hand to take the bottle of wine.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Mrs. Resnick says to my mother, holding out a bottle of red wine.

I cannot decide if this is a vengeful, or sweet, or forgiving act. My father’s funeral reception has just begun.

“Thank you,” my mother says. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Mr. Bulwark is beside me, explaining how the eggplant isn’t falling apart in his mouth like he wants it to. Ladies are on the patio arguing over whose lipstick is melting faster.

“Dorothy, your lipstick is melting right off your face,” Mrs. Ewing says. “See, it’s dripping right onto your teeth.”

“Yours is dripping down the side of your
chin
,” the other one points out, and they both laugh.

Children I don’t know are tossing carrots back and forth under tables. Adora is passing out clear drinks. Mr. and Mrs. Trenton have come and left, quiet and always absent now that Richard has been dead for years. The wind is starting to pick up. It howls in my ear like it’s mad nobody is listening. I watch the two women stand by the gate entrance to our yard. Mrs. Resnick is wearing a black suit with a beaded collar. Her hair is gray. She has on bright red lipstick and thick black glasses that hide her eyes. My mother is wearing a black dress with a scoop neck. Her blond hair is not in her normal French twist. Her hair is not even blond anymore. I noticed the gray two years ago, when she stopped dying it, and cried all night until my throat scabbed. Her hair is half-up and curling around her face.

“I used to curl my hair for your father,” my mother said, standing in front of the mirror earlier this morning. “Oh my, Emily, when your father and I first started dating, I would curl my hair for him every night. I’d sit up the night before we were to go out and roll fifty tiny pink rollers in my head. Then I’d go lie down and feel the pricks of the rollers dig into my scalp and I thought, This is what Jesus meant by sacrifice.”

“
Mom
,” I said.

“I’m just joking, Emily. Come on. Lighten up.”

Mark stands between my mother and Mrs. Resnick, a six-foot-four man who is wide at the shoulders. Mark has dark brown hair that is parted to the left. He is in a black suit with a red striped tie. He is holding the card that has white lilies on the front. He is very sorry for everything.

I watch my mother give Mark a hug. I walk over to them. I think of something better to say with every step I take.

“Hello,” I say.

“This is my daughter, Emily,” my mother says. “She’s all grown up now.”

My mother started saying this after I turned twenty-three, as though my person before and after twenty-three was so different, nobody could tell it was the same person.

I make eye contact with Mark and we shake hands.

“Hello, Emily,” Mark says. His voice is deep. He is a different person now too. It is so obvious how we don’t even know each other.

“Hi, Mark,” I say.

“Emily is an interior designer,” my mother says. “She designed Woody Allen’s apartment.”

“Oh really?” Mark says. “You decorated that?”

“We try not to say ‘decorated,’” my mother says. “Emily thinks it’s offensive.”

I shrug my shoulders. I am fourteen again.

“What do you do?” I ask him.

“He’s an engineer,” Mrs. Resnick says.

“I’m an engineer,” Mark repeats.

“That’s great,” my mother says. “Mr. Jackson was an engineer. Still is an engineer. Once an engineer, always an engineer? Is that what you engineers say?”

My mother gets stupid around Mrs. Resnick.

“We could,” Mark says to be polite. “We could start saying that, I suppose. I don’t see why not.”

I smile.

When Janice arrives, she pulls up quickly in a silver Infiniti. She steps out of the car in checkered black and white heels and with a baby on her arm. She hands the baby to the man on her right, who turns out to be her husband, Max, a forty-year-old vice president of People’s Bank. She runs up to me standing with Mark and Mrs. Resnick and my mother. She wraps her arms around me and when I do the same, she feels frail in my embrace, like a feather waiting for a strong wind to take her to the bar, which I assume is usually Max.

“Let’s talk,” Janice says, and we sit down at a table.

We are women who barely know each other, sitting at a beautiful table, and my father is fifteen miles away at the cemetery.

“I’ll get you a drink,” I say.

“Vodka and soda,” she says. “No lime.”

At the bar, Mr. Lipson stops me. When the adults at my father’s reception stop me, they put one hand on my shoulder and then smile. “You know, I was just telling Stephen that you’ve got your father’s nose,” he says.

“I do,” I say. “Long. Lumpy at the top.”

Mr. Lipson laughs. “Careful,” he says. “I don’t think your father would like to hear anybody making fun of his nose. Even you, young lady.” Mr. Lipson puffs on his cigar and I shiver.

“I can’t believe all this,” Janice says when I sit down. “I’m so sorry about your father, Emily.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I didn’t know you got married.”

“What else was I supposed to do?”

My mother, Mrs. Resnick, and another woman I don’t recognize sit down with us.

“I just eloped,” Janice said. “There was no huge wedding.”

“You always wanted a huge wedding.”

“I wanted Oprah at my wedding.”

“I know. That’s weird.”

“But we went on vacation and then just eloped. Just like that.”

“What’s he like?”

“Handsome,” she says. “Charming. Snores. Yellowed teeth. But he’s old. So what can I expect really? He knows shit. Like during breakfast sometimes he’s just like, ‘Did you know that you have to grow rice on a completely flat piece of land?’”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Yeah. That’s what it’s like with him.”

“How much older is he?”

“Fifteen years older.”

“That’s pretty old.”

“I was afraid the baby would come out with Down syndrome. I mean, we’d love her anyway of course. But still. It’s not what you prefer for a child.”

“I didn’t know you had a baby either,” I say. “You couldn’t just write these things in a postcard or something?”

“I was scared you wouldn’t have come to see any of it,” Janice says. “I didn’t want to invite you and then not have you come. You know?”

“Of course I would have come.”

“You probably wouldn’t have come.”

I might not have come.

After a while, Janice says, “I wish you could have come when I had Betsy.”

“So do I,” I say.

“I needed you there for some perspective,” Janice says, and as soon as she says this, it suddenly makes sense as to why we had always been friends. “When Betsy came out, I remember thinking, Wow, everybody is crowded around my vagina right now. And then when she came out, everyone was like, wow, it’s a miracle. But really. For God’s sakes, was it really a surprise? We had been planning this for nine months. And I kept hearing your voice in the back of my head, like, who
knew
the child came out of the
vagina
?”

My mother and Mrs. Resnick, who are sitting quietly next to us, both flinch at the word “vagina.” Janice continues, saying that, at first, having a child was like babysitting. Except she never got to go home, and eating the food in the cabinet wasn’t exciting because it was hers and she paid for it.

“And when Betsy finally said something for the first time I started to think that maybe she
was
a real human being, you know?” Janice says, sipping her drink with a straw, demonstrating habits she must have picked up from her daughter. “But then she would do something like spill her milk all the over the table and I would think, No, she couldn’t possibly be a real person. Sometimes she just seemed like this large object that came out of my uterus to spill things.”

“It takes time,” Mrs. Resnick says.

“It
does
take time,” my mother says.

“Exactly,” Janice says. She says she has a few baby friends—other ladies with babies who sit around in the same floral room and talk about other ladies and their babies. They cured her.

“My friend Beatrice would always say, it’s a new type of fun,” Janice says. “New fun is the kind of fun that happens when Betsy says she wants to be a zookeeper when she grows up because she wants to be with animals and we all laugh and have a big hoo-ha. Not to be confused with a nickname for a vagina. ‘Hoo-ha’ is how Betsy says ‘laugh.’”

“I know exactly what you mean,” my mother says. “It’s sort of like when Emily couldn’t pronounce her
k
sounds so whenever she would chase after the neighborhood stray Emily would scream, ‘Titty!’ instead of ‘Kitty!’ and make me and Victor laugh.”

Me and Victor. I have not heard my mother say that in years. It was always “your father,” “Emily’s father,” “my ex-husband.” Today, he is her Victor.

“I love my girl,” Janice says. “I really do. Now, where’d Max take her?”

A
t the height of the reception, Mark helps me replace the empty vats of ziti. He picks up the empty dishes before they are blown away by the wind. When he is next to me, I feel the pressure to speak. But I don’t know what to say. My father is dead. Your father is dead. Alfred is dead. Mr. Finnegan moved to Naples, Florida. Mr. Bulwark has even larger ears now, and then someday, he will die, and he and his ears will be buried. Oh, I fucked Mr. Basketball. I live alone. I have houseplants. I forget to water them. My favorite candy is oh-trick-question I don’t have a favorite candy.