The Adults (14 page)

“But maybe school is only boring because the walls are gray. Maybe if the walls were red, things would be different.”

“Okay!” I shouted after school, barging into the living room. “Let’s redesign the house!”

“Huh?” she asked.

I turned on a brown, dull lamp. “Get up, get up! We’re going to change this place!”

“What? Why?”

I looked around at the room. Nobody had ever really cleaned up properly after my mother tore down the curtains and threw the books to the floor.

“You can change your attitude just by changing the colors that surround you,” I said.

Surprisingly, she agreed. She was ready for a change, too. Like she realized that we needed this, and this was one small thing we could do. We signed up for one of those community interior design classes offered by the town at night. “What do you want to feel like when you are home?” the instructor asked us during the first class. My mother shrugged. “Like I’m not home,” she joked in my ear.

“Foreign,” I translated. “Norwegian!”

“Your homework,” the teacher said, “is to find out what that looks like.”

There were so many ways to live just one life, I found out. I spent my nights researching and drawing models of what our house would look like if we lived in Italy and kept “slow hallways,” or in France with checkerboard floors. And when I thought of Mr. Resnick’s broken neck, I thought of the most neutral thing I could and said, “koi fish koi fish koi fish.” When I fell asleep, I had nightmares about old men Tasering me in elevators for no reason at all. Richard lifting up my skirt, putting his middle finger inside me. Mr. Resnick on a canoe, looking for a pen. Bleeding out his toe. “That’s where the blood goes, Emily,” he said to me in my dream. I woke up in a cold sweat and for a moment, I thought his blood was all over me.

All day long, I sweated. I sweated so bad, I cut out washcloths and safety-pinned them under the armpits of my shirts. Every few days or so, my mother would approach and say, “Please, Emily, wash your hair.”

“It’s shinier this way,” I said. When I looked in the mirror, it was. I was glad to see the grease coating my hair.

My mother and I stopped going to the design class two weeks in, but I continued my plans to redesign the house. I asked my mother for her credit card and went to local furniture stores after school. I bought bright red curtains, gold lamps with braided tassels. I stored my father’s paintings of random rivers and empty docks in the basement, and hung pictures of koi fish over the television, gingersnap roses over the couch.

My mother looked around at the new decoration and made the soft face she always made when she said, “Darling, you are my angel. Did you know that?”

Her voice lifted at the end of the sentence in an attempt to make it sound like the responsibility was something to be happy about, but by the time my mother’s words reached my ears across the new room, being her angel merely sounded like another chore around the house, a game we had to play where my mother got to be god and I got to be the celestial attendant. Like cleaning the toilet bowl. Like wiping down the shower after I used it.

My mother believed that everybody had their own personal angel who inspired them to do really undesirable things: taking out the garbage in the middle of a snowstorm when you could only find your open-toed heels. My father’s angel was Mr. Lipson (an accountant who apparently spared him jail time). My mother said my angel was Ralph Lauren, who was the only designer she could think of who made sweaters with proper shoulder lines.

“And I’m your angel?” I asked. “That doesn’t seem fair somehow.”

“That’s just how it works,” she had said.

In reality, it wasn’t all that difficult being my mother’s angel. Her needs were tangible and immediate. I got the Belvedere, the heating pad. I buttered the bread, shelved the
Home and Garden
. I hung the curtains, dusted them once a week. I didn’t mind. Movement felt productive. But when my mother lay on the new couch for too long and asked questions like, how could a husband get up from the kitchen counter and leave her sitting in the middle of her own conversation, the new couch began to look just like the old couch and I became selfish and fourteen again, more concerned about the state of my hair than the state of my mother, and I said, “Are you sure it happened exactly like that?”

When my mother wanted to know what a woman had to do to make a man fall in love with her again, what a woman did to be completely different without changing a thing, I tried to convince her of how unqualified I was to be an angel. I had lungs and blood cells and undeveloped opinions on floral patterns. My mother’s eyes fluttered shut like she could barely believe the consistency of heartbreak.

When I was younger, my mother used to turn off my light and pull the covers to my chin. I put on my pajamas and wished for stupid things. She rubbed my head and sat at the edge of my bed, telling me to say my prayers. I told her I just said them in my head. She told me I had to say them out loud. “Why?” I asked. Why couldn’t he just read my thoughts if he was so all-knowing? “Your prayers take on more urgency if God hears them directly,” she said. She said there was a whole bunch of people out there just thinking, and did I just want to be one in a bunch?

“Can he hear me over my fan?” I asked.

“Oh no,” she said, laughing. “I didn’t mean it like that. Don’t make it
that
complicated.”

But that year, my mother slid into her bedroom each night without saying a word. The only sounds from her room were the pills rattling out of the bottle. Her lights never turned off. “I just can’t sleep,” she sometimes said, getting into my bed at night, cold like a fish. “Help me sleep. Why can’t I sleep?”

I was expected to know. “I don’t know,” I said. Maybe she should try
not
sleeping. Maybe she needed a job. Maybe she needed a hobby. Maybe she needed to read a book.

“But I can’t focus,” she said. I called my father. He said maybe she needed to go outside. Maybe she needed to go get a coffee. Did she try yoga? Did she try not eating meat? Did she try only eating meat? Maybe she didn’t need to eat so much meat. Maybe she didn’t need to get out of bed as much. Maybe she should try sleeping. Try the hobby thing again. Try painting. Eat meat.

But I told him that she couldn’t try painting because her hands weren’t steady anymore and she couldn’t get a job because she hadn’t had a real job in years. She couldn’t go outside because it was too cold and she got coffee yesterday and she does yoga but stretching her muscles didn’t make the bad thoughts go away.

“What bad thoughts?” he asked.

“I think she wants to kill herself,” I said.

“No,” he said. “She won’t kill herself. When she tells me that, I say, go ahead! Let’s see you do it. And she won’t.”

M
y father sent me a birthday card from Prague.
Happy Bastille Day!
I thought my father’s jokes about pretending not to care for me were a lot funnier when he was down the hall, shouting, “Just kidding! I care for you!”

At lunch, one of the Other Girls said, “Hey, Shiny Forehead, isn’t it your birthday?”

I refused to answer.

“Guys!” cried the one who caked herself in so much foundation, bits sometimes fell off into her yogurt. “Shiny Forehead’s parents fucked fifteen years and nine months ago!”

I opened my mouth to argue, to defend something, until I realized there was nothing to defend. It was true. My parents fucked fifteen years and nine months ago. Should I have been embarrassed about that?

In English, Mr. Basketball got everyone to sing “Happy Birthday” for me in unison. Janice sang the soprano harmony and pissed everyone off.

“In addition to memorizing lines from ‘The Waste Land,’” Mr. Basketball said, “you all have to write a paper. On the origin of poetry.”

“What do you mean, origin?”

“Like, the beginning of time?”

“When poetry began,” Mr. Basketball said. “How poetry has shifted through time.”

The students informed him that was, like, four billion years ago.

“Try to limit the scope of your paper to a particular topic,” Mr. Basketball said. “For example, free verse and its beginnings. When did free verse become popular? When did it start? These are the questions you should be asking yourself while writing this paper.”

Lillian Biggs said she thought we were supposed to be answering questions while writing our papers. She said she thought that was the whole point of writing a paper.

“School is stupid.”

“So fucking stupid.”

“This is all so stupid.”

“The next person who swears, to the principal’s office,” Mr. Basketball said.

“Tampon!” someone cried from the back. “That’s not a swear.”

Mr. Basketball sighed. I looked out the window, watched the sun slip behind a tree, and convinced myself that the world was ending.

Dr. Killigan knocked on the door and walked in with a student I didn’t recognize.

“We have a visiting student today,” Dr. Killigan said. “Do you mind if she looks in on your class?”

Mr. Basketball looked around for an empty seat. The class was full, so full in fact that Lillian Biggs had to sit on top of a table in the back of the room.

“Emily,” Mr. Basketball said, “will you run to the basement and grab another chair?”

I had become Mr. Basketball’s errands girl. I didn’t mind. Every time Mr. Basketball sent me to the basement, it felt like an affirmation of his love for me, an I-trust-you-with-big-things gesture. Like when my father would unload the car after our trips to Long Island and he’d call to my mother and ask her to hold something for him. My father needed the help of another person and my mother had agreed to be just that until death did them part, even if she failed and dropped the laundry basket on the ground.

I got to walk the halls when other students didn’t. I went to the art studio and ran my finger over other people’s dried paint. I peered into classrooms that weren’t mine. I learned that everyone was equally bored at all times. This was comforting. I went to the courtyard and saw Marianne Stein and Nick Ross making out. Their tongues crossed. I went to the bathroom and picked at my hair, applied lipstick. “I can’t believe I am you,” I said to myself in the mirror. “I am you.” Sometimes, I practiced my lines from “The Waste Land.” “You cannot say, or guess, for you know only a heap of broken images.”

I rubbed the lipstick off as soon as another girl came in. Sometimes there were girls already in the bathroom when I arrived, and I had to pretend to use the bathroom. I stood in the stall, flushed unnecessarily, and walked out without washing my hands because what was the point if you didn’t even take your pants off, and I heard the girls in front of the mirror say, “Ew, she doesn’t even wash her hands. Don’t touch her or you’ll probably die.”

“I didn’t actually mean my mom was gay,” Mark said in the basement after a long period of silence. I was searching for a stack of chairs. There was an edge to his voice, something alien about him. “She’s not
gay
gay. But you know what I mean.”

“I didn’t think you meant she was actually gay,” I said.

“You gave me a funny look when I said it.”

“Did I?”

“If my mom was gay, then that means your father is a transsexual.”

“That’s not necessarily true,” I said, hoping to put an end to the conversation.

“I’m just joking. You don’t know how to take a joke anymore?” I couldn’t open my mouth without breathing in the entire basement, the dust, the dead moths stuck to the dirty windows, the mold painted on books.

“
Joke
,” he said. But we couldn’t laugh or look at each other, not even in the dim basement light that made everything look and feel and taste like a stale performance of someone’s past.

Richard appeared out of a dark corner in the basement, licking the top of a vodka bottle.

“Did you know that Socrates could drink a shot of vodka every hour and still perform basic tasks?” he asked. Richard stepped fully into the light from the half window and revealed a wide and sloppy grin on his face. “It’s twelve thirty.” He took a shot. He counted to three with his fingers. “One. Two. Three. Basic task.”

I just stared at him.

“Do you want some?” he asked.

“I came down here for a chair, actually,” I said.

“That’s too bad,” Richard said. “These chairs are ours.”

“They aren’t yours.”

“The thing is, Emily, we spend three-quarters of the school day down here. And possession is nine-tenths of the law. You do the math.”

Mark broke into a crazed laughter. “That makes no fucking sense, dickhead.”

I walked toward the chairs, which were stacked in neat piles behind Richard.

“Oh, no, no!” Richard said, stepping in the way and blocking Mark completely from my view.

“Move,” I said.

“Shake my hand,” Richard said. He stuck out his hand.

“Why?” I asked.

“Basic task.”

I shook his hand.

“Say you’re sorry now,” Richard said, his grip tightening around my hand.

“For
what
?” I asked.

“For
what
?” he mimicked. He stuck my hand under his shirt. I felt the scar from his burn all over his chest. Mark was still laughing, not even paying attention. “For this,” he said. “Feel it. It covers my entire chest, you bitch.”

“
Richard
,” I said. “Let go of my hand!”

“Feel it.”

“No,” I said, kicking him away. “It was your own stupid fault!”

He pushed me against the wall. I pushed him back. He cupped his hand around my throat.

“Don’t be
stupid
, Emily,” he said. “Do you know what I could do to you?”

“I’m not scared,” I said. “You’re pathetic!”

He laughed. His hair fell in front of his eyes. The basement door swung open.

“Hey,” Mr. Basketball shouted, the light flooding the room. Richard released his grip. “Emily, class is over! Where are you?”

Mr. Basketball walked closer until he could see us, and then Richard and Mark ran up the stairs and out the door.