The Adults Part 11

"Cheers," Richard said.

"Salud," I said, something I heard my father say once.

"To G.o.d in the highest!" Mark said.

"Hey, your parents have a computer too," Richard said. It was 1997, and some people in the neighborhood just got their first computers. For about thirty minutes, the novelty of the computer and vodka made us all friends again. Mark sat at his mother's desk. Richard and I were on the bed thinking of weird things for the computer to say, and Mark typed the phrases on the keyboard, pressing Speak Text.

"Make it say, 'I ate my f.u.c.king parrot.'"

"Make it say, 'I ate my f.u.c.king blasphemous parrot.'"

And we laughed, and typed in more things, and then laughed, and typed in more things, and I was rolling on the bed, getting dizzy from all of the vodka, which was new and corrosive to my stomach, and Mrs. Resnick's picture frames swirling in my head. My head hurt. I couldn't tell if the ceiling fan was on or not. Richard was against the headboard watching me, holding on to the heels of Mrs. Resnick's shoes.

"Make it say, 'I ate my Mom,'" Richard said.

I closed my eyes, dizzy. I listened to Richard laugh a little, his breath audible, wafting air out his mouth. Mark typed on the keys. The computer spoke and stopped our hearts: "Muh dad is f.u.c.k-een dayed."

"Muh dad is f.u.c.k-een dayed."

"Muh dad is f.u.c.k-een dayed."

Richard tickled my feet. I was drunk for the first time in my life, and I felt like a semisolid, like I was melting, or just about to harden, and I worried that Richard's fingerprints would make permanent indents on my ankles, the way I had pressed my thumb into a rose petal at Mr. Resnick's burial so that my fingerprint would fall with the rose and accompany him underground forever. I kicked at Richard's face.

"Don't touch my feet!" I shouted at Richard, and ripped my legs away from him, accidentally kicking over the vodka bottle on the nightstand. It broke and the vodka spilled out the cracks. Mark, who was at the computer, looked at the broken gla.s.s and then at me.

"Pick that up!" Mark screamed.

"Jesus," I exclaimed, reaching over the edge of the bed.

I remember Mark walking over to Laura angrily and me calling out for him and Richard s.h.i.+rtless above me. I remember thinking, why hadn't I seen this coming? This was always coming. Richard had always been coming for me. Following me. Pulling my hair and poking my armpit and hovering above me. Richard's skin was smooth and hairless in the abdomen, but his chest looked like it was covered in asiago cheese. "Just touch it," he kept saying, above me.

"Where's Mark?" I asked, looking around the room. Laura was screaming behind me, louder with every second. It sounded like her throat was cracking down the middle. I worried Mark loved me less every second. I worried that Richard would never get off of me and that somehow I deserved all of this. Richard widely smiled and I was scared. "Get off!" I yelled at him, and he pushed me back down on the bed. I lifted up my knee into his crotch hard.

"You torched my skin," Richard said. "Feel it."

Richard lifted up my s.h.i.+rt and lowered himself until our chests pressed together. He moved up and down on me, and I could feel the smooth parts, and then the textured parts. The scar felt like a zipper against my b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"Feel it," he said, and took my hand to his lower chest. "This part."

I spit on his face. "I'd rather die." It was somewhat true.

"Then maybe you will." Richard took out his lighter from his pocket. "Maybe I'm just going to light you on fire, c.u.n.t, see how you like it." Richard opened my mouth with his finger.

I bit his finger hard.

"Dang!" he said, pulling his finger out.

He started kissing me. Richard's mouth was heavy on mine, and it was hard to breathe. I put my hand at his throat, and he was ripping at my s.h.i.+rt, his hand cupped around my breast, his saliva acidic and thick.

"What the h.e.l.l?" Mark said when he stood over us with Laura quiet in his arms. He stood there for a moment and watched Richard jump off me.

"What the h.e.l.l were you doing?" Mark asked.

Standing there in the dark of Mrs. Resnick's room, I looked around at my childhood friends, and Laura sitting in Mark's arms, and that was my question exactly: what the h.e.l.l were we doing? We weren't children anymore. Laura was the child. She was the one sitting in Mark's arms, asking something large and permanent of us. And I was fifteen, drunk and underneath a boy for the first time in my life, and nothing was as I wished it to be. I was drinking vodka while my half sister cried, and the thought never occurred to me that I would have to do more for this girl than just be her neighbor. Before she was born, I imagined Laura as this thing in the corner of our lives that we'd rather not mention, but no; she was alive and breathing. She needed bottles and shoelaces and pumpkins with her name cut out in bubble letters, she would wobble down the need-to-be-gated stairs, she would need moments upon moments of everybody's happiness, happiness that sometimes didn't wake up before she did. She was crying and the sodium chloride down her face was real.

Mark was waiting for an answer. "What were you doing?" he said to me. "You like Richard?"

"No!" I shouted. "He forced himself on me. Why didn't you try to help me?"

Mark looked angry.

"Why didn't I try to help you?" Mark shouted back. "Why didn't you try to help my father!"

"What?" I asked, confused.

"You just stood there! How could you just stand there while he was killing himself?"

"I couldn't do anything! He was too far away!"

"How long were you watching?"

"I don't know," I said. "I don't know!"

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

"I dropped my gla.s.s," I finally said. "I'm sorry. I dropped my gla.s.s 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 f.u.c.k 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, "f.u.c.k 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 ap.r.o.n 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 s.p.a.ce 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 b.i.t.c.hes 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 a.s.shole 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 gla.s.s bobbed in the water like ice cubes.

The bathwater was red.

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

"Oh, h.e.l.l," 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 winegla.s.s 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 h.e.l.lo 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 c.u.n.t. 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s were any different from clouds. "That's the nicest thing you've yet said to me," she had said.

16.

Would you be able to drive me home?" I asked Mr. Basketball after school the next day. "Richard has been calling me Emily the c.u.n.t 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 gra.s.s, 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."