The Adults Part 33

I make eye contact with Mark and we shake hands.

"h.e.l.lo, 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 a.s.sume 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 s.h.i.t. 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 v.a.g.i.n.a right now. And then when she came out, everyone was like, wow, it's a miracle. But really. For G.o.d'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 v.a.g.i.n.a?"

My mother and Mrs. Resnick, who are sitting quietly next to us, both flinch at the word "v.a.g.i.n.a." 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 v.a.g.i.n.a. '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 p.r.o.nounce her k sounds so whenever she would chase after the neighborhood stray Emily would scream, 't.i.tty!' 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?"

39.

At 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 f.u.c.ked 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.

Mark and I stand quietly by the bar until Mr. Bulwark approaches.

"My wife," Mr. Bulwark says. He puts three carrots on his plate. "She was a novelist, did you know that? She was such a smart woman, that one."

"She was," Mark says. "I remember. She taught me how to play chess."

Mrs. Bulwark is also dead.

We stand like this for the rest of the night, until our feet can't take it anymore, until we sit down in the chairs and I open my mouth to say something and then I stop because I am afraid of who we both have become. Will our new selves like each other? Mark puts his hand on my back.

"Once, you threatened to murder my father," I say.

"I did," he says. "I'm very sorry for that."

A week later, my mother holds a tag sale, selling my father's stuff from the attic. There is so much left over from his life I joke with my mother that our yard looks like the Waste Not, Want Not display at the MoMa. We try to sell his collections of Herman Melville, business dictionaries, and Tom Wolfe, but it turns out that the people in my neighborhood won't want to read them. Someone buys his old electric razor that is ten years out of date. Some people buy his old college T-shirts. Some of them buy parts of his old Matchbox car collection. Then, they drive away in their Volvos and their Infinitis and their Mercedes and parts of my father become scattered all across town. Mrs. Resnick shows up late, right before the sun is about to set and we are about to close, as though showing up in the nick of time to collect the remains of my father is the art of their romance.

"Is there anything left?" she asks, tears in her eyes. She moves the hair out of her mouth, yet she still does not look at me. I almost cover my mouth with my hand. I am screaming inside my head.

My mother looks around.

"Scarves," my mother says. "There are some of his scarves left."

Must you take everything from us? I want to shout.

"How much?" Mrs. Resnick says. She brings out a wad of singles, and her fingers are shaking. One of the dollars falls to the ground, and n.o.body ever bends over to pick it up.

"Just take them," my mother says. "They're free."

Mrs. Resnick takes my father's plaid scarves. Even though I thought I had forgiven everyone for everything, there is a child inside me that wants to rip them from her and scream, "Those are ours! Those are ours!"

My mother says, "Okay, I'm going in to take a hot bath." Mrs. Resnick leaves and as she says good-bye, I think, That woman has never properly looked me in the eye and I don't know who is to blame for any of this.

Then Mark arrives. He walks across his lawn, and I drop candlesticks carelessly in boxes, and my heart pauses, as though it is taking the time to fall in love all over again, even though it will feel impossible to love at this moment, even him. But it feels equally impossible not to believe that anybody walking toward me on the lawn is not on a mission to return something.

He helps me put away the tables. We work silently. Things have to be categorized. Leftover socks. Golf tees. Old calculators. Empty binders. We sit in the garage and mark the boxes-Total Junk.

Useful Stuff. Then Mark takes the marker and adds (Not Really Though).

Mark pulls a silver necklace with a ruby in the middle out of my father's brown safekeeping box. He starts to speak, then thinks better of himself. We are silent.

"Is this your mother's?" he asks.

"No," I say. "Is it your mother's?"

Mark never answers. He reaches out his hand and touches my hair. People are always touching my hair. Why are people always doing this?

"Emily," he says, "I am so sorry."

"No," I say. "I am so sorry."

And then he leans close to my face.

"No, you must understand, I am sorry."

"No, but I'm sorry."

We go upstairs to my room. We lay there and we rest like this every night for a month. Sometimes when we can't sleep, we debate over which appliance in my house is making the most commotion. Or he makes me do conversions to the metric system until I fall asleep.

"How many meters are in a mile?"

"Oh, Jesus, I don't know."

"One thousand six hundred and nine."

"How many miles are in a knot?"

"I don't know. Blah."

Then he says something like, "Well, it's like you don't even want to talk acreage."

And when I fall asleep, I dream that I am riding a bike, and the bike's parts are falling off as I pedal. I don't even notice. "What a magnificent sight!" someone shouts from behind me. Sometimes, this makes me wake up and cry. This person feels like the only thing missing from my life. Sometimes it feels like my father. And when I wake up in a panic, Mark is there. The problem is not the nightmare at all.

"How could your mother have slept with my father?" I say.

"How could your father have slept with my mother?" he says.

"Your mother had such ugly hair," I say.