The Adults (16 page)

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

I started breathing heavier. My chest felt tight, my fingertips tingling.

“I dropped my glass,” I finally said. “I’m sorry. I dropped my glass and it broke all around me.”

At first Mark didn’t answer; then he turned away from me and said, “Just leave.”

He put Laura in front of the mirror in an attempt to get her to stop crying. Laura’s face was red and loud and I felt a sudden gush of love for her. I remembered the night of her birth, I had felt her arrival like a bursting capillary in my heart, I could hear her breathing from across the street, and when I looked at Mark in the dark room, holding his, our, sister, I started to see him through her eyes, this sullen teen, this boy with long ratty hair who waited a couple seconds to watch before he yelled at his best friend to get off my body, this boy who would never love either of us the way he was supposed to. And there was Richard by the window, who had spent his life not knowing whether to rip my throat out or fuck me, Richard who ran his hands through his dark hair and sat down on the bed and sighed. Richard who took a long swig of vodka out of the bottle and said, “Your mother is next, you know. My mother says she looks like a ghost around town now. The White Lady. Like we’re going to find her hanging from an electrical wire or something, any day now.”

And there was me, not understanding why they let me leave like that, screaming, “Fuck you both!” and Laura gently making the soft coos of what could someday sound like my name.

We had crab legs for my birthday dinner. I loved my mother again, for opening the cookbook and putting on her
THIS IS NO ORDINARY HOUSEWIFE
apron and singing loud to the Frankie Valli CD that Janice put in the stereo. My mother had come home from the store just like this: “I got crab legs for your birthday!” She smiled, and then we dropped them into the boiling pot. They hit the water with a
plop-plip-plop-plop
.

Then while trying to crack them open at the table with our fingers, one of the crab legs slipped out of my mother’s hand and sliced the tip of her thumb. With the blood dripping down her finger and onto the plate of crab, she looked at me and said, “I’m sorry.” Before she even moved to stop the bleeding, I thought, She is not even trying to stop the bleeding. She was just sitting there, bleeding.

“Don’t be sorry,” I said. “I’ll get a washcloth.”

We continued the rest of the dinner in peace. There was a pleasant consistency to birthdays, the way we got reminded of our favorite things, as though it was an annual checkup to see what you grew out of that particular year. Favorite meal (Alaskan king crab), favorite cake (boxed), favorite dishware (ours). I got socks, underwear, a sweater, and a book called
The Best Book of Your Life
, “a collection of very interesting pictures for children.”

“This book is for chill-dren,” I said, emphasizing the space between syllables, which is what, at the time, I thought a French accent was. I was still a little too drunk to hide it.

My mother said nothing. Janice scraped icing off her fork and giggled.

“Chill-dren,” Janice said, following my lead, “are ze worst. Don’t zoo agwee?”

We laughed hard. My mother drank some wine. It started raining outside. Janice looked out the window and said, “It’s raining like five bitches out there.”

My mother didn’t even scold her.

“Which is a lot of rain,” Janice added.

“Are you
alive
?” I said accusingly to my mother. She ignored me.

Later, Janice whispered, “What’s wrong with your mom?”

After dinner was over, my mother went to take a hot bath, the dishwasher stopped running, and the silence became disenchanting. Frankie Valli was just an asshole who got uncomfortable when little girls cried. Janice was a basket case who lied about sleeping with older men. My mother was a naked woman in the bathtub.

I knocked on the bathroom door. “Mom?” I asked through the wood.

No answer.

“Mom?” I asked again, opening the bathroom door. In the tub, my mother’s eyes were closed. There were tears down her face. Broken glass bobbed in the water like ice cubes.

The bathwater was red.

“
Mom!
” I screamed. I tugged on her arm, checked for slit wrists.

“Oh, hell,” my mother said, startled, opening her eyes. “What are you
doing
?”

“Did you slit your wrists or something?” I screamed.

“No, Emily Marie,” she said. “I accidentally broke my wineglass in the tub and I’m a little drunk.”

She laughed wildly to prove this was so. She took a drag of her cigarette hanging over the tub. She had been smoking on and off ever since my father left and she gave up volunteering at the hospital. My mother talked like this was a good thing: too many children walking into a hospital, saying hello with their sweet and sad faces and never coming back. After a while, she said, you start believing children were never meant to be anything but children.

“You aren’t going to get up?” I asked. “You’re going to sit here in the wine? Is that even sanitary?”

“Emily, please, you’re being loud.”

“And you’re smoking! Inside the house. This house. I redesigned this place for you!”

“Honey, I’ve always been a smoker,” she said, and splashed some water on her face.

“No, you weren’t,” I said. “Not always. Did you come out of the womb with a cigarette in your mouth?”

“Don’t be like that, Emily.”

“When you get sick and die, don’t come crying to me,” I told her.

“When I’m dead, I won’t be crying to anyone. I’ll be dead.”

“Good!” I said. I stuck my hand in the tub to drain her filthy bath. “Good. Just smoke and hurry up and die already so we can get on with our lives!”

My mother didn’t even drop her cigarette. She stood up, pale and nude and wet. My mother. The White Lady. I ripped the cigarette from her hand and threw it on the ground, hoping the shower curtain would catch fire and burn this whole neighborhood down. It wasn’t like anybody would be surprised. Emily the Arsonist. Emily the Murderer. Emily the Cunt. Burned Richard and her whole house down. But who cared what people said? I was done with people. I was tired and angry and fed up with people. I couldn’t even sleep anymore, not with the nightmares, not while imagining all the ways my mother might kill herself, at two in the morning, awake with the owls, wondering if she would do it by pills, if she would swallow all the Drano, where I would find her, who I would call first, what I might say.

“Did you even hear me?” I screamed in her face.

She pulled back her wet hand, and at first I couldn’t believe it. My mother was going to hit me. No, she would never hit me. But then she did. She smacked me hard across the cheek, and the saddest part about it was that it felt good. It was my mother’s touch, something I hadn’t felt in so long.

“I am your mother,” she said. “And don’t you ever talk to me like that again.”

I put my hand to my cheek. Janice was quiet behind me in the doorway. Wet and in the bathtub, my mother looked holy, like somebody else’s mother, like a biblical figure. There was a sudden rush of heat to my head and my mother brushed the wet bangs off her forehead, and for one quick moment, she was my mother again, and I felt calm. Her nudity was familiar. I remembered when I was no more than three and forced to shower with her, I would be at her knees looking up, asking how her breasts were any different from clouds. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve yet said to me,” she had said.

W
ould you be able to drive me home?” I asked Mr. Basketball after school the next day. “Richard has been calling me Emily the Cunt on the bus.”

“Oh,” he said, his feet still up on his desk, seemingly not affected by my mother’s Planet Red lipstick on my mouth. “Of course, of course.”

He picked up his briefcase, and we walked silently to the car. When we got inside, I couldn’t help but search for signs of Janice on the seats. Long brown hairs, or strawberry ChapSticks, a striped sock, a portable comb, a bobby pin, a piece of chewed gum, a corner of her notebook paper, anything. But all I saw was . . .

“What?” Mr. Basketball asked.

A hamburger wrapper. A sweaty wristband.

“Your car is a mess,” I said.

“Two sides to every stone,” he said.

“I’m not saying it’s surprising,” I said, and he laughed, started the engine. The engine was too loud.

“Your poems are getting better,” he said, driving out of the parking lot. “They’ve taken on a sort of dream logic that’s really interesting.”

“I have a wildly active prefrontal cortex,” I said.

I had been waking up screaming. In the nightmare, I was never sure where we were driving, but it was somehow important to get there. Mr. Resnick was sitting next to me in the backseat of the car, dead. But his hair was alive, growing in fact, and I remember knowing for certain that all the hair was going to strangle me by the time I woke up. I kept forgetting he was dead, asking him, “How’s work going?” My parents were in the car too, talking about an electrician with a pedophilia charge. This made everybody laugh for some reason. Except for Mr. Resnick. He was swaying back and forth, and so I asked my father, “Why isn’t he speaking? Don’t you think he should be speaking?”

“Everybody is different,” my father said, and the dream ended.

I told my mother this and she was concerned. She ordered tests. Thousands of my father’s dollars later: “Her prefrontal cortex is wildly active during sleep. It’s like she’s drunk. No inhibitions, too much emotion.”

“Me too,” Mr. Basketball said. Mr. Basketball turned down my street. I did not tell him to turn. He remembered where I lived. “My parents made me go through a lot of sleep tests as a kid. That’s what happens when you grow up in Greenwich.”

He said he had CAT scans after falling on grass, allergy shots because he sneezed at his grandmother’s house once. Later, Mr. Basketball would tell me that his parents paid ninety thousand dollars to store his umbilical cord in a hospital somewhere. It would protect him in case he ever got MS.

“I have dreams that make me feel like I’m awake,” I said. “Or drunk. And awake.”

“Horrible dreams,” he said. “Cinematic all-night conquests that make no sense.”

“Like last night, I was standing under the St. Louis arch. It was on fire, impossibly, and I was responsible for putting it out. But I couldn’t because someone was holding my hand and I couldn’t let go.”

“You know what this means, right?” Mr. Basketball was looking straight ahead, serious about the road. “We’re too smart. Smart people can’t turn their brains off.”

“If we were so smart, shouldn’t we find a way?”

“Why would we want to?” he asked. “We’re smart enough to know that, in the end, that’s not really what we want. Self-awareness is a gift, really. You’ll be happy for it one day.”

“When I’m a better person, maybe.”

“When you can control it, sweetheart,” he said.

We laughed. I wasn’t sure why. I looked out at the road and watched all the familiar areas pass by me. In Mr. Basketball’s car, everything looked smaller and more manageable. I stuck my hand out the window, ready to press myself against the world.

*   *   *

The next day, I didn’t even have to ask. “If you don’t feel comfortable riding the bus, I don’t mind giving you a ride again,” Mr. Basketball said. “We live so close.”

I agreed.

“Last night,” I said, while we were halfway to my house, driving through the town, “an orange giant picked me up by my overalls and threw me over a stone wall.”

“Last night,” Mr. Basketball said, “I had to play soccer with books for feet. And then all my teeth fell out.”

“The stone wall, turns out, was bordering the edge of the universe. I fell into the sky, which wasn’t really the sky, since it was the space outside of whatever is the universe.”

“They call that hyperspace,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “I was thrown into it.”

“Your dreams are pathetically transparent.”

“Should I be embarrassed? I’m
so
embarrassed.”

He laughed. I stuck my hand out the window. The air was soft. Spring was coming.

“You should,” he said. “You feel alone. Pushed out of the world, expelled by some godlike figure.”

“And you. Chained to your academics, too stressed to function in real life. Aging.”

I swallowed.

“The overalls,” Mr. Basketball said, not skipping a beat. “That’s what doesn’t make sense to me. The overalls. Very unlike you.”

Did he know me?

“Infantile state?” I asked. “Clothes worn by people who aren’t usually me?”

“Oh, yes yes,” he said. “I can see that now.”

I smiled.

“See, you are smart,” he said.

*   *   *

The next day after school, Mr. Basketball had a cupcake waiting for me on his desk. He was leaning back in his chair, reading the
Fairfield Times
:
TORN FLAG TOO HIGH TO REMOVE
. He had on khakis and his plaid shirt was unbuttoned to show off a T-shirt with a wagon and a warning:
I HAVE DIED OF DYSENTERY
.

“It’s a little late,” he said. “But happy birthday.”

“Thank you,” I said. Even though the cupcake was for me, I felt awkward touching it, as though it still shouldn’t belong to me. Because why would he get me a cupcake? Did he buy the cupcake for me? Did he leave school at some point to get me a cupcake, think about what flavor I might like best, and then pay money for it?

“How old are you, Emily?” he asked.

“Fifteen.”

Ms. O’Malley popped her head in the door. “Johannes,” she said. Her clothes always looked so soft and muted and British. Her long curly hair was like a yellow mane around her face. “Faculty meeting.”

“Your name is Johannes?” I asked when she left.

“It is.”

“Why would your parents name you Johannes?”

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Did they not want you to have any sort of childhood?” I asked. “Who sees a baby and feels okay calling it Johannes?”

He laughed. “They wanted me to be a lawyer or something like that.”