The Adults (3 page)

“Mrs. Hanley is going to spend the night testing the predictability of vodka,” I said. “It’s an experiment.”

“Just this morning, Mr. Smith said he was considering his mortality,” Mark said, and we couldn’t bear it. We fell into giggles. “He said it just like this. ‘Ladies! This morning! When I was considering my mortality!’”

It was the first time I laughed all day.

“Your father and I are getting a divorce,” my mother had shouted at my back that morning as I went upstairs to bathe for the party. My mother believed there were certain ways of delivering bad news that were better than others, that bad news felt better when it came at you fast, from behind, like a bullet. That way, there was a chance it could exit before you even felt it inside you. I turned around to see her in yellow control-top underwear that was pushing her love handles farther up her torso. It got so hot there in Fairfield, Connecticut, during the summer my mother said there was nothing more suitable to wear besides your underwear. Plus, she had added, being pantless was only a phase.

“Gloria, can’t you put on some pants?” my father had asked walking through the kitchen. “You’re running around like a goddamned Viking.”

Turning fifty had put my father in a mood.

“Vikings wore pants, Victor,” my mother said.

“Vikings did not wear pants. That was the whole point of being a Viking, Gloria.”

“This is how I relax,” she said.

“By taking off your clothes?”

That was my father’s way of calling her a whore.

I picked off the top of a blueberry muffin sitting on the counter. I waited for my mother to yell at me, to say Emily, are you that narcissistic to think you are the only one in the house who enjoys the tops of muffins, for Christ’s sake, nobody likes the bottom, we only eat it out of obligation to the rest of the muffin! But she didn’t.

“Anyway, you can see why your father and I are getting a divorce,” she said again.

“You told her?” my father asked. The vein in his forehead had emerged.

My history teacher Mrs. Farbes had told us in class last year that in the early Arab world when a man wanted to divorce his wife, all he had to do was stand up straight and say, “I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you!”

“That’s stupid,” Richard Trenton said at the time, and I agreed. “That solves nothing.”

“It was enough to make it real,” Mrs. Farbes said. She said it was important for the man to hear out loud what he was doing to the woman.

“Your mother and I are no longer going to live together,” my father said. “We’re no longer going to be married.”

When I was younger, my father told me you had to hear something seven times before you internalized it. “What do you mean, internalize?” I had asked.

“Bring it inward,” he said, pointing to his stomach.

“Like all the way to your liver?”

“Doesn’t have to be the liver. Could be the spleen. Maybe even the kidney,” he said, and I had mistaken the point of this conversation to be that the kidney was a lesser kind of organ.

But when my father came home a few weeks ago and told my mother that he was being offered a position in the Prague office, that he would move after the New Year, that it was a great opportunity, I said, “Can you feel it in your liver?” and he looked at me and said, “Huh?”

“The thing is, Emily, we’re getting a divorce,” my mother said.

I mashed a piece of the muffin between my fingers, rolled it into a ball. My mother leaned against the counter, wrote
SWISS CHARD
on the list and said, “Anyway, Emily. Your father and I have been thinking,” and then stopped. I waited. I rolled the ball of muffin and I waited and after my mother said, “That you should really take a multivitamin,” my father threw up his hands in disgust, and I was positive I had no family at all, certain it was not my mother but the solar wind that carried me into this universe.

It was ten when Dr. Trenton cornered me and Mark in the side lawn and blamed everything on the vodka. Dr. Trenton blamed most things on the vodka. His son was rude (his wife got drunk off Belvedere in her sixth month), and his wife was rude (drinking a martini right now), and he even ate caviar earlier (he only did that when he was drunk).

Dr. Trenton sneezed. It was wildly messy. He excused himself to get a tissue. Mark and I stood side by side and watched adults smoke cigarettes and lean against my house. Mark drew a correlation between someone’s age and the messiness of their sneeze. I laughed. I wondered how Mark always said exactly what I wanted to say.

“At an exponential rate,” he said.

“That’s something to look forward to,” I said.

“I’m going to be a smoker soon,” he said. “I love the smell. Don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, trying to show him how many cigarette smokers I knew: my mother, my grandmother, my great-grandmother. Generations of women in my family had regularly been inhaling smoke like it was better than air.

“Mr. Jackson ate fifteen wontons,” I said. “I saw the whole tragedy myself.”

“Mrs. Miller has a herniated back,” Mark said.

“What a weird word.”

“‘Herniated.’”

“Can you imagine what it’d sound like if people used the word ‘herniated’ instead of ‘beautiful’?” I asked.

“The herniated princess,” Mark said.

“Hello, this is my herniated wife.”

“You’re so herniated.”

“Oh, why, thank you, I get it from my mother.”

I heard my mother call for me, asking me to pass out pieces of the cake, which ended up looking more like Bill Clinton than my father. I saw Richard Trenton coming out of his house across the street, headed toward the party. I wanted nothing to do with either of them. “Let’s get out of here,” I said, before Mark could get stolen away by Richard. Mark and I ran into the woods behind my house. The trees were tall and thin and webbed. The twigs cracked under our feet with an unsteady beat.

Before I knew it, Mark was ahead of me.

“Alfred thinks I’m cuter than a bug’s ear,” I said behind him.

“Have you ever even seen a bug’s ear?”

“No.”

“I have. They aren’t very cute.”

And everything truly was like my mother said: of course men think they know everything, but you know, Victor doesn’t even realize how much of his happiness is based off the fact that he has such a lovely living environment, one I created for him. With Italian vases and miniature ivory elephants sitting on his desk. It’s like he thinks they’re just for pretend or something, like they came with the house and so did we, like a man is always entitled to be around beautiful things! It’s like he doesn’t realize an elephant was murdered for him, the tusks ripped from the mouth, carved into a string of tinier elephants, it’s like he doesn’t realize I bought them at a store where they were shipped in a box from somewhere very far away, like Italy! It’s like men don’t even realize how far away that is!

I wondered what Mark realized. Did he realize what I had done to prepare for this moment? I practiced articulating my
t
’s, a letter my mother said I didn’t emphasize enough in conversation. I put lemon juice in my hair, which according to my mother was the equivalent of rubbing my head against the frying pan after breakfast. “I’ll do that too,” I had warned her. I stood in front of the mirror, dripping with lemon, reciting, “Button, mutton, glutton.”

I wondered if Mark could see me like I saw him, a body in the dark, a distinct member of the opposite sex.

“The penis,” my health teacher Mr. Heller had said last year, “is an organ of the mammals and the reptiles.” With no shame, he drew a human penis on the board. It looked like a long carrot wearing shoes. “I have kidney stones,” Mr. Heller said, “and I can’t pass them. So when that happens,” he said as he moved his finger across the diagram of the urethra toward the stomach, “they put a rod up your urethra to break them up.”

“That’s the problem with these things,” he said, “these
penes
, plural.”

The boys groaned. Ernest Bingley grabbed his crotch. Janice was intrigued. “Wouldn’t you die from that?” she asked, determined to love him forever.

“No,” he said. And he was right. He didn’t die. He limped for a week, while everyone made fun of him behind his back. “Mr. Heller is gay,” Richard said in the lunchroom. “So gay he put a rod up his own dick.”

I had watched Mark squirm in his seat. I watched Mark every day really, whether he realized it or not. He was always next door, pulling weeds in his yard and stuffing them into black plastic garbage cans. His father had a bad back. That was what my mother said at least.

“It explains a lot,” she said, and opened her mouth wider for rigatoni.

It was why we hadn’t seen Mr. Resnick in years, or why sweat soaked Mark’s neck instead of his father’s while Mark trimmed the hedges. Mr. Resnick had been outside only once this year. It was last winter, and the yard was full of snow. I saw him standing on the sidewalk with a shovel. He was wobbling like he was going to fall over. He couldn’t quite grip the shovel, and it hung lazily in his hands like a spoon, and then just as the shovel fell to the ground so did Mr. Resnick. Mark ran out the front door, saying, “Dad! What are you doing outside!” Mark helped his father stand up and led him back into the house as though nothing had happened, as though his father had dropped the mail.

My mother said his bad back was why Mrs. Resnick was always around town toting shopping bags by herself. It was why Mr. Resnick never took out the recycling bin and why there was never the sound of four feet and a basketball in their driveway. It was why they were all so unhappy. My mother said the constant silence around their house made everybody in the Resnick family seem older than they were.

I agreed. Mark was fourteen going on twenty. I knew this better than anyone. I tracked his growth daily. His arms were thicker by the month. His legs became logs instead of sticks. He had cut the sleeves off most of his shirts, started to read books by Tom Wolfe, books his father read,
Lonesome Dove, Ulysses
. Mark was entering the world in a way I was not, strong and informed, armed with a vocabulary and questions—did I know that James Joyce wrote the word “cunt” in his novel? Did I know that in Japan poisonous fish was a delicacy? Did I know that if I rubbed chili peppers on his balls the pain could actually kill him?

“Did you know I have BO?” Mark asked one hot day, sniffing his armpit.

There were so many amazing new developments.

His hands were opening jars for me weekly. I watched with fascination, or maybe it was frustration, not sure my weakness was good or bad. Either way, I was slowly devoting myself to him, adopting his speech patterns, dropping the
g
’s off all my gerunds, devising ways in which Mark might have to touch me even though every time he brushed against me, I felt my whole body empty, all of the heat leaving my body for his. By August, I was nearly empty inside, and I began to understand what my father meant when he whispered quietly and harshly to my mother in the stairwell when they both thought I was out, “Gloria, I have lost myself in this marriage.”

Mark took my hand. “Let’s sit here,” he said with some enthusiasm, like he was picking out a home for us.

I took a stick and drew lines in the dirt. Around Mark, I acted aimless. There was no reason why I looked up at the trees, or scratched my knee, or cleared my throat, or stood up and put my hair behind my ears when I offered to comb his leg hair for five dollars a minute.

“
Joke
,” I added.

“Do you know what I realized today?” Mark asked.

“No.”

“None of the statues in our house have pubic hair. But they are all naked.”

Mark was staring at me, looking at the way my bottom lip was too large for my top lip.

“Maybe your mother had them shaved.”

He rolled a cigarette in his hand and put it to his mouth. He pretended to eat it. I smiled.

“Don’t eat that,” I said.

Something incredible was about to happen and yet, neither of us could stomach the idea of it. We couldn’t even look at each other. I stared back at the party, which was either dying out or at its peak. It was hard to be sure. Adults always had a different idea of what a good time was. When my parents and I went to Disney World, we rode the teacups, spun around in a thousand circles until we couldn’t remember our names. I was exhilarated. I laughed until I peed a little. My father’s sunglasses flew off his head, Ray-Bans lost forever. “Let’s never do that again, huh?” my father said, and straightened out his shirt. My mother fussed over her bangs. My father squinted the rest of the day. At night, we went to Epcot and sampled breads, and both of them got a perverted satisfaction out of agreeing with each other—the Irish soda bread had the perfect ratio of raisin to dough, why go to France when their bread is here, and isn’t Emily being rude? I laid my body on a stone wall nearby, so bored I threatened to harden into rock, swim to Cuba, sell my body to Donald Duck, if he would even have me. They ignored this, continued nodding at the vendor.

Adults, I was learning, were not a people of dramatic gestures. When they approved of something, they gently nodded, and when they wanted something, they gently nodded, and when they were upset by something, they gently nodded and then shifted their body weight to indicate a significant change of attitude. Everything they wanted was within reach, or at least one nod away, so mostly, the adults stood upright, their arms stuck to their sides, like manikins unaware of the night dimming around them. They were getting blinder, more immobile every day, and I felt it was my duty to warn them, to shout through the trees with a megaphone:
Do you adults see how old you are getting?
My father was getting so old. Every day, I noticed new ways his body was failing us. Last night, he’d gotten a piece of chicken stuck in his esophagus at dinner. He put one finger in the air, which signified to my mother and me to wait, and then put one hand around the bottom of his throat. Then, he swallowed slowly. When the food passed, he said, “This happens from time to time.” When it wouldn’t pass, he went to the bathroom, where he forced himself to throw up. Either way, he continued eating, and I was heartbroken by the simplicity of it, my father’s body broken.