The Adults

I turned around to see two figures in the dark, holding each other.

"Let"s go find out," I said.

We crept over to get a better view of the adults. We leaned against the tree and watched them kiss deeply.

"I bet it"s Mr. Bulwark and Mrs. Trenton," I said. "She was leaning into his large ear earlier."

"Nah, Mrs. Trenton"s a wolf."

"Like, good wolf or bad wolf?"

"Bad wolf."

"Is that like, a wolf you wouldn"t sleep with?"

"Shh. Get your camera."

I got my camera, steadied it against my eye. I focused on the two adults, centering them. I pressed down on the b.u.t.ton.

The flash illuminated my father"s face. But my father didn"t even notice, didn"t even budge. His arms were steady around Mrs. Resnick"s waist. He was burying his face in her neck. His mouth was on her throat, and the rest of her neck looked raw under the moonlight. Mark and I stood by our tree, watching my father"s mouth pull away from Mrs. Resnick"s neck while her skin remained so covered in him.

I was going to be sick.

A caterpillar crawled away from my hand like he was fleeing the scene. For one moment, I thought about picking it up, holding the caterpillar in my hand like a friend who needed to see the animals too but wasn"t tall enough. I thought about putting my hand on Mark"s back, pretending that was all I needed to keep me from falling over from the sight of our parents. But balance was what the tree was for and Mark probably would have looked at me and said, "Emily, then what is the tree for?" and I would have had to respond, "Oh," or "Yeah," or something equivalent as though I had never stopped to consider that things had another function separate from being all around us.

Mrs. Resnick laughed. Apparently, my father was being incredibly funny.

"Baby, shhh," my father said. "You"re going to wake up the party."

Mark turned away from the sight, but I kept staring. We stood quietly and then suddenly I remembered everything I wanted to say earlier. Uncle Vito hated carrots, especially the baby ones, and Mrs. Trenton didn"t think it was right for someone to hate baby anything. Alfred groped his wife"s b.u.t.t by the rutabaga dip and Mr. Hemley thought this was absolutely an inappropriate thing to do.

"I guess my father thinks your mother is very herniated," I whispered.

"Shut up," he said, quietly and in my ear. "Don"t make stupid jokes. Don"t make your voice all high-pitched like that, all curious and interested and stupid and s.h.i.t."

"Don"t tell me to shut up," I said.

"Your father"s a s.h.i.thead."

"Your mother"s so old!"

Mrs. Resnick was thirty-nine, two years older than my mother.

"Your father"s a f.u.c.k face."

"Shut up."

He came closer. For a second, I still thought he might kiss me.

"A giant b.l.o.o.d.y c.u.n.t," he whispered in my ear.

The word felt wrong coming out of his mouth, uncomfortable, like a new pair of jeans still stiff around your body. He was staring at me like he could kill me, while I felt certain that I loved him, that I would have sat back down on the log and pretended nothing had happened if he would; even in that moment when his cruelty was desperate and barbaric, clinging to my face, I would have asked him to reach out for me. But I stood there, so deeply openmouthed, a bird could have flown in.

"Do you know what he does for a living?" Mark asked.

"Of course I know what he does for a living," I said. "He"s my father."

Though I didn"t actually know what my father did for a living because every time I asked, he said, "I"m an investment banker," and I"d say, "What"s that?" and he"d sit me down all serious, as though I was on the brink of learning something incomprehensible. With a hand on his knee, he"d say, "Well . . ."

I"d beg him to stop. "No more! No more! I can"t take any more!" I"d shout, and we"d laugh.

"He f.u.c.king steals money from companies," Mark said. It felt typical for some reason that Mark would know my father better than I did. Sometimes I got the distinct feeling that everybody knew my father better than I did, even our mailman, whom he chatted with at the end of our driveway. "And everybody hates him. My father hates him. He said that n.o.body at the golf course liked to play with him because he tried to make bets with money that n.o.body had."

"My father is a good golfer," was all I thought to say.

"Your father is a b.a.s.t.a.r.d. I should kill him."

"You can"t kill him," I said. "He"s my father."

"Fathers get killed all the time," he said.

I could almost feel my mother looking around on the deck with an empty drink, sucking on the green olive, grimacing with bitterness but only because she had nothing else to do. My father was not dancing with her, not dipping her until the bobby pins fell from her bun and between the cracks of the Brazilian wood.

"I"m out of here," Mark said.

"Oh my G.o.d," Richard said, pointing at my father. Richard had followed us in the woods and stood between two oaks gaping at us. My father and Mrs. Resnick were still oblivious, huddled together, two bodies sharing a mouth. Mark pushed by Richard and left.

"Your dad"s in serious trouble," Richard said to me, seeming somewhat pleased about this.

"f.u.c.k you, Trenton," I said, and ran after Mark. "I"m going to vomit," I said to Mark when I caught up, the Polaroid developing in my hand.

"Don"t be such a child," he said. "Vomiting would change nothing."

When we got to my side yard, my lawn became his. I stopped and watched him go. He opened his front door and walked inside. He did not even say good night. He did not even turn around. I stood like this, in between our lawns, until I had to sit, until I started running my hands up and down my legs. Everything was moving too fast. The hair on my legs had grown back into stubble. The cut on my knee had crusted into a scab. It was already brown. I was already picking at it with a nail and the blood was already at my shoe. Dr. Trenton was already sober. Mrs. Bulwark"s eyes were already clumped in mascara like it was the next morning. Mrs. Hanley was asleep on the deck. The Polaroid in my hand was already fully formed, a picture of people who were already unidentifiable, my father and Mrs. Resnick, dark blurry figures among the trees as though they were a people before my time, their customs outdated, already myths.

My mother was at my back with her hand on my shoulder, telling me the bad news: some of the adults were tired; they were getting their purses and hats and into their cars, and even though their departure was penciled into the invitation from the start, I felt their absence in my gut like abandonment, a wide and expansive bullet through my stomach, carving a path for the wind.

"What do you have there?" my mother said, looking at the picture.

"See for yourself." I handed it to her.

"Emily," my mother said. "You were supposed to take pictures of the guests. Not the trees. We already know what our backyard looks like."

"Then maybe you should have hired a professional," I said. "For Christ"s sake, Mother, I am only a child!"

She flinched as though this was a terrible secret I had been keeping from her.

And everything was always intolerably like my mother said: your father"s birthday was such a fiscal success. Mr. Lipson got your father to invest in an expanding branch of Bubble, International. Which, you know, means good things for your father. I don"t want you thinking that just because we"re getting divorced we won"t benefit from his wealth. We will. And that still makes us a family, right? You don"t just stop being a family because of a stupid piece of paper. It"s not like today we are a family, and tomorrow, there is a piece of paper, and we"re not a family. That"s not how it works.

My mother sat down on the white chairs and sipped the last of her martini and sighed.

"Really," she said. "I don"t know why Mrs. Resnick just doesn"t hire a gardener. That poor boy Mark. Did you see that look she gave me when I mentioned your father planted lilies, like I was rubbing it in, like I was trying to brag about how I have a husband who is concerned about the vegetative state of our yard? And her dress, I mean, right?"

Right. I understood. "It was a terrible dress," I said. "Too wide on the shoulders. She looked like a really excited cardboard box. And can a cardboard box even be excited? She defies all logic. And her hair. It"s like she went to the hairdresser and said, "Francois! Make me look more like a gerbil than a gerbil!""

My mother looked at me. "You"re funny," she said. "I"m not very funny. How did you get so funny?"

"I used to watch a lot of television," I said.

My mother did not laugh like people normally do when they discover someone who makes them laugh. Instead, she reached out and touched my arm and said gravely like it was the last time she would ever recognize the comedy of the situation, "Thank you for making me laugh."

My mother picked up her drink. I watched her move through the crowd, her crowd, the crowd she built on a pad with a pen three months ago in our living room when she said, "Victor, how about a giant party?" And my father had said, "What"s the occasion?"

"Your turning fifty!" she said.

My father pointed to his bald head and explained what it meant to be fifty.

"Being fifty means you finally have enough money to throw a decent party for a change," my mother said. "We"ll invite everybody and it"s perfect timing, we have the new deck. We"ll invite the neighbors and your coworkers and good cheer."

"And what do we do if the cheer does not RSVP?" my father said. "What shall we do then, Gloria?" They laughed. I know I heard them laugh. I know this because I laughed too, and thought, This is exactly how I will talk to the people that I love when I get older.

I sat back on my chair and watched my mother keep her head up and smile, her hair tightly wound in a bun. She was so thin and restrained in her movement. She was sticking out her hand, saying thank you so much for attending our party, we"ll see you soon. It was like she always said: there are better ways of saying good-bye than others. Don"t just stand there, with your mouth all agape, Emily, it"s unbecoming. Be an adult. There"s nothing more impressive than a child who is really an adult and vice versa. Stick out your hand, keep a firm grasp, no, no, not a limp noodle, Emily, not like that, do you want people to think you are just a noodle? Do you want them to say, "You throw a good party," for a noodle? No. Stand tall, look people in the eye, and say, "Good-bye and thank you so much for attending our party."

The Other Girls

3.

At first, it was intuitive. You could spot an Unf.u.c.kable the same way you could identify a bird sitting outside a window. This was what the Other Girls told me as soon as we sat at our desks in the back of biology. One of them pointed a finger and proclaimed, "Unf.u.c.kable." Debate followed. Consensus reached. Annie Lars, an Unf.u.c.kable indeed. It was an archaic system of justice; we pa.s.sed judgment with only suspicions of Unf.u.c.kability, and all the while, our teacher Ms. Nailer stood in the front of the room trying to teach us how to be grateful for things we never knew we had to be grateful for.

"Eskimo women chewed on their husband"s shoes when they got back from hunting," Ms. Nailer said between sips of her coffee. "Their teeth would wear down over time. I want you all to rub your teeth and feel grateful."

We did as such.

These were the things we learned freshman year: Even Eskimo women (who did not like to be called Eskimo women) needed to get married in order to survive (one person couldn"t tend to the igloo and also hunt all day for the seals); it took fifteen days for a peeled banana enclosed in a jar to be fully infested by tiny maggots, and it took another fifteen days after that for all the maggots to consume the banana, and this whole affair was called decomposition (something that would happen to us one day, said Ms. Nailer). We learned that most records were not necessarily achievements: Janice"s ancestors were responsible for executing hundreds of "witches" in seventeenth-century Germany; Brittany Stone"s parents had been divorced and remarried three times; soda cans have nine teaspoons of sugar (which makes you fat); William Taft, heaviest president of all time, was so fat he couldn"t get out of his tub, which wasn"t supposed to be funny, Ms. Nailer said. It was wrong to make fun of fat people (Taft couldn"t help it), or the mentally challenged (extra chromosome), or the Unf.u.c.kables (they"ll never get f.u.c.ked), or girls wearing their mothers" gold jewelry (their mothers were usually dead), and we knew all of this, even though none of us could recognize the difference between "discreet" and "discrete," Missouri or Mississippi, good people or bad people (but I was pretty positive reptile eggs had tough outer coverings and amphibian eggs lacked outer coverings, which was why they were laid in water, water that contained over nineteen species of box jellyfish, the most venomous animal in the world, a bite that nearly no one ever survived, unless you were smart and had on your panty hose).

Ms. Nailer pushed up her yellow Dior gla.s.ses. The Other Girls were cross-legged behind their desks, whispering hurtful things about everyone sitting in front of them.

"Annie"s nose is so large, she descended from a rare line of prehistoric bird."

"Annie the Bird"s ears stick out so bad, from the back, she actually looks more like a bear than a bird."

"Annie the Bird or Bear hasn"t shaved since the Cambrian Period."

"Annie the Bird or Bear is so tall, she can f.u.c.k all the teachers standing up," Richard Trenton said, chiming in from across the room.

At Webb High you were either f.u.c.kable or Unf.u.c.kable. Anything else you might have been was secondary. There were so many students, nearly two thousand, it was very possible, if not guaranteed, you would know only 50 percent of your graduating cla.s.s. The only way to survive was to organize everybody into categories, so every five people could be treated as one, four hundred as two. That way, you felt like you knew everybody without actually having to.

Ms. Nailer made us put unpeeled bananas in jars so we could draw pictures of decay in our notebooks for a whole semester. We had to observe the banana turning to mush, and then draw every new maggot that hatched. We had to open the jar every week and describe the scent. Nasty, I wrote on my lab sheet. Even nastier, I wrote a week later.

Annie the Bird or Bear was Richard"s lab partner and she was standing tall and proud, holding their banana jar level with her ma.s.sive b.r.e.a.s.t.s, confident that Richard was not someone who could ever hurt her, even though I figured he was the only person who would. She took pride in her new high school ident.i.ty the way a superhero uses their defining mutation as a source of power. She made boys bleed in the parking lot. She scared away lunch tables just by sitting down at them, the students scattering like sparrows. She embraced her solitude and used it as a form of freedom. She spread her lunch out on the whole table like she was happy about all the room, made animal sounds down the hallway, bird calls, bear cries, lion roars. Mostly everybody thought this was hilarious; they fell against their lockers, crippled by laughter that spread like a disease as Annie the Bird or Bear walked by, neighing like a dying, vengeful creature.

I could hardly watch. But, of course, I did.

It was September of freshman year, when the earth began to tilt away from the sun, the flowers still upright, the shrubs on their last breath, the bees slowing in flight, making dizzy, drunken loops in the air like parade planes. EVERYTHING IS CHANGING, Ms. Nailer wrote on the board in all caps and drew an arrow pointing to the outside. Her observations, while not mind-blowing, were at least correct. Caterpillars were lined up on my driveway like remains of a drive-by shooting, and when I added their souls to our dinnertime prayer, my mother said, "Emily, enough about the caterpillars." My mother and father started to maximize the efficiency of our dinnertime appeals to G.o.d as though prayer was a science of exclusion. We no longer prayed for a successful town apple festival like we normally did at the start of fall; or for Ms. O"Malley, my thirty-year-old algebra teacher who needed a new heart pump, because she got one; or for my father"s gums to quit receding, because it stopped being funny.

My father was still living with us until he moved to Prague after New Year"s Eve, but if you weren"t listening hard, you wouldn"t even notice. Every night, my father kicked his shoes off and they hit hard against the wall, the bed squeaked as he slid under the sheets across the hall from my mother, and if I was tired enough, I mistook the creaks of his bed for the cracks of his bones. I had nightmares of his skeleton breaking at the joints, and I woke to his spoon clacking against his six A.M. cereal bowl. From my bed, I could hear him put the coffee grinds in the trash can, the bowl in the sink like any good father, and for a moment that was what he sounded like-any good father who cleared his throat and walked out the door to go to work.

But he couldn"t just leave like that, like any good father. One morning before school I jumped out of bed to say, "I saw you, Dad," to stand wounded and victimized in front of the door until we both remembered everything: my father and Mrs. Resnick with their mouths pressed together; my father and my mother both teary-eyed and pink-faced on the porch in August, blowing their noses and then laughing deep sorrowful laughs, and me listening from my bedroom wanting to shout, It"s not funny!; my father and mother ten years ago at the kitchen counter, my mother spreading stone-ground mustard on wheat bread, my father singing with the bread knife to his lips, me in baggy green jeans shouting, "Make me a turkey sandwich, please!" and my father tapping me on the head, saying, "Poof! You"re a turkey sandwich!"

I ran down the stairs, but by the time I walked into the kitchen, my father was out the door. I looked at the clean table and the orange bowl in the sink and my throat went dry. He was gone. Not even a crumb left on the floor. And when my father was gone, sometimes he didn"t come back for days. Sometimes he went on business trips to California. Sometimes he went to Europe. Sometimes he just went places and I didn"t know where, and I wouldn"t even know he was away on a trip until I woke up at eight in the morning fully rested.

My father"s blazer was hanging on the back of one of the chairs. I grabbed the jacket and ran out the front door as fast as I could. "Dad!" I shouted, but his black car was already at the end of the street. I ran after the car, waved my hands, screaming his name, but he didn"t hear me, and I wondered afterward if I even shouted it at all.

My mother stood in the frame of the wide-open door with a gla.s.s of orange juice waiting for me to return.

"What?" I said, mortified.

"Emily," my mother said, frowning. "Why don"t you stop worrying about your father, okay?"

I threw the jacket back on the kitchen chair, but it slid and fell to the tile. I had no idea what she meant, but she put her hand on my head and said, "Good girl."

"If Annie the Bird or Bear was an amoeba," Richard said to a bunch of the Other Girls, "I bet she wouldn"t even reproduce with herself as.e.xually, she"s that ugly."

"Richard!" Ms. Nailer yelled, finally hearing us, or finally recognizing us, turning away from the chalkboard to look at Richard, and then Annie, and then Richard again. Her white bra was visible through her shirt. She spilled her coffee on the desk, stepped backward, got chalk on her a.s.s, and then laughed like it was an accomplishment that something finally touched her a.s.s. She wasn"t a disciplinarian by nature. Ms. Nailer"s presence in the room offered no more protection than a fruit fly; she just buzzed from one shoulder to the next. Her interests were elsewhere, and she always reminded us that she was only a high school biology teacher as a last resort. She had been in the seventh year of her Ph.D. in body history when her funding ran out.

"This is high school, kids," Ms. Nailer said, wiping the coffee off her desk with her hand.

I stood hopeful with my banana, waiting for Ms. Nailer to slap us across the faces if that was what it took to put an end to all this misery, to save us from the horrors of each other, from Richard. Richard was constantly taunting Annie the Bird or Bear, created a comic strip of her nose doing absurd things every day, like "ABOB"s Nose Goes to the Grocery Store" or "ABOB"s Nose Goes to the Doctor," and pa.s.sed them around the room. Everybody unfolded the paper, smiled, said nothing when he did this.

Ms. Nailer put her hands on her hips and smiled too, as though our cruelty was playful, a game we used to get closer to her.

"You can"t go around making statements like that until you properly understand what you are saying," Ms. Nailer said. She was a skinny but doughy woman, like someone had ripped the muscles out of her body. "Richard, your comment implies that beauty is some objective thing, when really beauty is an evolving process of natural selection."

The cla.s.s was silent.

"What does "ugly" even mean? Can anyone define ugliness? Or beauty, for that matter?" she asked.

Ernest Bingley tried his hardest. "Beauty is the unconscious pleasure of looking at something artistic," he said.

"Let me teach you all a lesson," she said. "And this is going to be the most important lesson of your lives."

We groaned. It was too early in the morning to understand such things.