The Adults Part 8

"You can die from anything, really," my mother said. "You can die from eating too many apricots."

They were officially divorced. Relief jingled in the air.

"Too much vitamin A," my father said. "Makes sense."

"How many apricots?" I said, afraid that the World's Most Pathetic Death could happen to me.

"Some inhuman amount," my mother said.

"Blowfish," my father said. "Now, they have poison sacks. Tons of people die every year in Asia from eating blowfish."

"Or get paralyzed!" I added. "They're called fugu zombies. Sometimes, people think they're dead, and they get buried alive."

n.o.body even flinched. We were taking comfort in the ways death could find us, beating it to the punch.

When the clock struck twelve, my father put down his brandy Alexander. We clanked my mother's new pans together, jumped up and down. My mother stared at the television, which was turning into virtual confetti, and put her hand over her mouth, as though she understood exactly what would be lost if she cried out, "Do you two know how much those pans cost?" She would have been accusing us of not understanding the value of things. So she was quiet, even though we all felt something drain out of us during the celebration. And then the phone rang.

"What?" my father shouted into the phone.

Mrs. Resnick was in labor. "This is two months too soon," my father said. He was worried, but I couldn't tell what exactly about. He had the same look on his face when the dishwasher leaked water all over the floor. My father kissed me on the forehead. "I'll see you in the morning," he said, grabbing his coat. I sipped on my apple cider and thought that if I didn't know my family at all, it would have been nice to see my father at the coat rack and my mother sad to see him go.

I woke at six in the morning to a cold frost covering our lawn and my father making a loud noise in the living room. He was sitting on the couch, with his hands on his knees. My father's face was always wrinkled, regardless of whether he was laughing or crying, and on a morning like this, it was hard to tell what he was doing.

I did not touch him or ask him any questions. I just stood at the window.

"Things will be different now," my father said, wiping his tears.

"Things have been different for a long time now," I said.

I put my nose to the window and everything outside looked so vacant, even the icicles, Ms. Nailer had told us once, were made primarily of nothing. The weather was the circulation of invisible forces, colliding over and over and over again, throwing dead leaves against the sides of our house like a stoning.

"I love you, Emily," my father said. "That's one thing that won't ever change."

My mother walked into the room with a bag of soaps, and my father suddenly clammed up and said, "Well I don't suppose anyone cares, but it's a girl."

My mother put the soaps down on the table.

"Her name is Laura," my father said. "We can all go see her if you like."

"No, thanks," my mother said.

"No, thanks," I said, and followed her out of the room.

My father moved out a week later. I hugged him at our front door and couldn't bear to watch him leave with so much luggage. I closed my eyes and rubbed the poinsettias between my thumbs as I listened to his heels click the cement, the hush of the cab tires taking him away. When I opened my eyes, the street was silent, only the exhaust still suspended in the air.

12.

Mr. Basketball stood green-collared and tall next to the projector, wrote Welcome to English on the board, and asked us to please settle down. It was January, a new semester of freshman year, and already Mr. Basketball was employing pedagogical methods Ms. Nailer had not. Janice walked into the room with her b.r.e.a.s.t.s sticking out in the air as if she got points for hitting things. She snapped her gum as she walked by Mr. Basketball's pointy face and then quickly explained how she didn't mean to; popping her gum was an accident that happened because she felt so comfortable all the time. She blushed so deeply, Mr. Basketball was forced to forgive her. "All right," he said. "Please take a seat." He smiled a bit and then made eye contact with me, as though he needed my permission to start cla.s.s. I nodded.

"I'm your English teacher," Mr. Basketball said. "Can you all speak English?"

n.o.body spoke, n.o.body moved.

"Apparently not," he said.

We laughed. Everyone was already in love with him. We stood in small circles every chance we got, just to talk about him.

Mr. Basketball was so funny, he could split your spleen just by looking at it.

Mr. Basketball was so smart, you got smarter just by looking at him.

"No," Janice said at lunch, correcting us. "You have to get to third with him."

My father was in Prague, discovering the joys of smoking cigars in public rooms. My mother was at home, discovering the joys of Arbor Mist and White Russians at noon. Since my father had left, she had watched enough movies starring Sally Field to know that having a dead husband was the preferred option. It was perfect because nothing was ever your fault, not even loneliness, and n.o.body would ever come up to you at the funeral and say, "Now, at which point do you think he stopped breathing?"

My mother developed a heart murmur, or as I asked, "Maybe you always had one? Maybe the house is just quieter now?" Sometimes, when I walked by her in the kitchen, she put a finger to her lips and said, "Shh, Emily. Can you hear my heart? It's not working properly." Sometimes, I thought she looked too beautiful to be sitting at the counter all by herself, developing palpitations.

"I'm busy, Mom," I said.

She eyed me as I moved across the kitchen.

"You're not busy," she said. "I can see you. You're just drinking lemonade."

That made me want to cry so hard, I can't even explain it.

Sometimes, my father called our house from Prague to say, "Dobr den!" Sometimes he called just to say, "Where's your mother?" My mother was always sitting at the kitchen counter, and she never wanted to talk to him, even though she always wanted to talk to him. "She's not here," I said, and when I hung up the phone, she stuck her hand in a box of Cocoa Puffs and said, "Did you know that your father hired the neighbor to a.s.semble your tricycle when you were three?" My mother loved to revisit the fights she'd had with my father, as though this was a form of keeping him present. "And I said, 'What, are you going to hire someone to love her as well?' G.o.d. What a fool."

My father left us enough money in the divorce settlement so my mother would never have to attend another thing she didn't want to attend. "A gift," he said. But it felt like punishment. Some weeks, she didn't even leave the house. She quit her volunteer job at the hospital. She spent the day running her fingers across photographs of us at Hershey Park, Disney World, St. John's. She talked about memories she said she wasn't sure she even had. She made meatloaf and threw it to the ground. She tried to learn the piano. She played the first three chords of "Row Row Row Your Boat" and then quit. She blew off bikini wax appointments, PTA meetings.

She started taking antidepressants. Prozac at first. When I found the bottle and confronted her, she said, "It's just for three months, Emily. It's not permanent. It's like, well, sometimes when you get older you forget how to be happy. You probably don't understand this, but it happens. And these pills remind you how it feels to be happy. So then when you go off them, you know how to create the feeling on your own."

She spent her nights ordering cookbooks from other countries and cooking Mexican dinners with all the wrong proportions. She wanted a basil plant, a cilantro plant. She wanted to start growing things. This was a good sign. But she never grew any. She just squeezed lime juice into her wine and watched the meat burn. I began to choke on cayenne pepper and dry bread and roll up my jersey knit skirts so that three quarters of my legs were always exposed to the general public. I hung dice from my ears as jewelry, stopped was.h.i.+ng my hair, and let the grease curl around my face like the Other Girls. I sat and stared at Mr. Basketball, let my eyes wander over his long torso that made him look like a fish, I thought, standing at the chalkboard writing Haikus.

"We're going to write some haikus," Mr. Basketball said. "But first, let's talk about images. Let's come up with some images."

"What do you mean, images?" Janice asked. "Like, colors?"

"There are such things as tired images," he said. "And fresh images. Let's examine what a fresh image is compared to a tired, hackneyed image."

He asked us to think of four basic emotions.

"Disillusionment!" someone shouted from the back.

"Simpler," he said. "That's more a state of being."

"Ennui!"

"Funny," he said. He wrote mad on the board. "What about mad? Can anyone think of an image that would ill.u.s.trate anger? Raise your hands, please."

Janice raised her hand. "A gun pressed to an ear."

"Blood spots on a car."

"A man with his fingers bent backward."

"That's violence," he said. "You are confusing anger with violence."

He wrote clenched teeth on the board.

Narrowed eyes.

Popping veins.

"This is how we're going to start thinking this semester," Mr. Basketball said. "In images."

We were ready to write the haikus. But we didn't have enough construction paper. Mr. Basketball looked at me and asked if I would run down to the bas.e.m.e.nt and get an extra stack. We were going to hang them on the wall as decoration. "Me?" I asked, pointing to myself, as if "me" wasn't specific enough. "Yes," he said. "You."

I hated going down to the bas.e.m.e.nt. Teachers rarely sent students to the bas.e.m.e.nt. It was frowned upon by most of the teachers since bas.e.m.e.nts were dark, and terrible things happened to children in the dark, even if it was only in their imaginations. But people were lazy, and I was discovering that was exactly what high school teachers primarily were-people-so they would send us with an added, "Don't tell anyone I sent you there," which was the only reason I had ever considered telling someone. But I wouldn't tell anyone that Mr. Basketball had sent me there. He was handsome and from Greenwich, Connecticut, and he picked gla.s.s out of my foot.

I walked into the bas.e.m.e.nt and breathed in the overgrowth of mold, stepped over stray wires, and ran my finger against splintered and unused furniture. I knew that when you walked into a bas.e.m.e.nt you were agreeing to a whole new set of world rules. A bat could fly at your neck, your heart could stop for no reason, limbs could roll out from closets, rats could pop out from pipes, and you couldn't be surprised about any of this.

"f.u.c.k."

Except another person-that was surprising.

"Oh, it's just you," Mark said.

Mark was sitting on a crate behind a bunch of turned-over desks, smoking a cigarette. The hot ash lit up his face like a tiny prayer candle. His hair was growing past his ears. I heard that he had taken a fifty-dollar bet from Richard that he would never cut it again.

"h.e.l.lo," I said.

He didn't speak. I walked toward the shelf closest to him. I began sorting through different kinds of paper. "Hi," he said.

"Hi," I said.

He watched me for a few minutes and then finally spoke.

"You know what's weird?" he asked.

"What?"

He flicked his ash to the ground. "My father killed himself on Cheesec.o.c.k Lane."

"I know," I said.

"That's like killing yourself on Jellot.i.t Ave."

I was quiet. His stare was aggressive. "Hey, you don't have to be all strange about it. What, like I can't talk about it? It was something that happened. You saw the whole G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing."

So I said, "a.s.scrack Circle."

"No," he said. "You don't get it. It couldn't be a.s.scrack Circle. The first word has to be a soft food and the second word has to be slang for a private part."

"Okay," I said. I was afraid to smile. "Puddingv.a.g.i.n.a Boulevard."

"That was just gross."

I blushed. I looked away, back at the shelf. I didn't know what to say. He pulled out another cigarette.

"My mom hates that I smoke," he said. "She said it's bad around the baby. Nothing's good for the baby. And do you know what I say to that? Good. I say, f.u.c.k the baby. Long live the smoke."

"Smoking is pretty disgusting," I said, not sure if I should ask questions about the baby.

"Yeah, well my mom is pretty gay," he said.

He pulled me down onto the crate with him. He was acting reckless. Mark had grown a lot since we had last spoken. You're so tall, I wanted to say, but I didn't want to sound like my mother in a moment like this, where mothers were strictly unwelcome, not to mention gay.

"You should get back to cla.s.s," he said. "The bell is going to ring soon. I can tell by the amount of footsteps."

"Yep," I said. "Okay." I grabbed the paper and left.

This felt like progress.

When I returned, the cla.s.s was rioting. I had missed a great injustice.

"When forty years shall besiege thy brow!" Mr. Basketball shouted. He threw up his hands like he couldn't believe us, like he was mad. "Did you know that people used to memorize Homeric epics like the backs of their hands? Did you know that Thomas de Quincey had memorized Shakespearean sonnets by the time he was thirteen?"

"Who is Thomas de Quincey?" they shouted. "What is a Homeric epic?"

"All I am asking," Mr. Basketball said, "is for you guys to memorize six lines of 'The Waste Land.' Pick any image that strikes you. You will have to recite it to the cla.s.s."

"What's an image?"

"Shut up, Peter, you r.e.t.a.r.ded r.e.t.a.r.d," someone shouted.

"Hey," Mr. Basketball said warningly.

"h.e.l.lo!" Janice said from the back, and laughed.

At Janice's house, her mother always stood by the oven waiting to take the pumpkin bread out. "Remember when you girls were little and you'd run home from school, fighting your way for the pumpkin bread?" her mother asked.

"Mom," Janice scolded. "Please do not harp on the things of yore." That was Janice's rule. The past was boring. That included funny things we said, things we used to feel, clothes we used to wear.