Hardly Children

by Laura Adamczyk

  She turns. A shameful heat opens in her stomach so fast it’s like she’s wet her pants. The sun is bright around her sister, the upward slope of her small, tanned nose, her brown hair hanging at her shoulders, but she looks like someone different. The middle’s heart beats big inside her throat.

  I wasn’t doing anything, she says.

  Yeah, right. That’s gross.

  It’s not gross, the middle says, but there’s no conviction in her. She cannot feel good about a thing she doesn’t have a name for.

  It’s time to go, her sister says.

  Back on the highway, the middle starts crying. Silently at first, but her heavy breathing gives her away.

  Are you crying? The father leans over to look at the middle. He does a triple take between her and the road. She turns away from him, and her shoulders start to shake.

  No, no, no, what’s wrong? No, it’s okay.

  What? Really? The oldest looks at her, leaning in. Are you kidding me? She sighs and looks out the window.

  The middle hangs her head, trying to make it so that neither her father nor her sister can see her face. What’s the matter, the youngest asks. The father fumbles with the tape deck.

  Hey, c’mon, he says.

  Everybody’s attention gets her going harder and louder.

  Oh, jeez, says the oldest.

  I miss Mama too, the youngest says, putting a small hand on her shoulder, and it is like when the middle is sad at home and their border collie noses her cheek. Her face crinkles, and the youngest starts up too. I wanna go home, the youngest says.

  C’mon, don’t you start now, the father says, hitting play on the stereo. The music comes blasting out in the middle of the song. He turns it up louder than before, and the two cry harder.

  Hey, hey, the father says, motioning with his hand, a bigger version of the dance they did earlier. The youngest moves deeper into the crying until it gets away from her. The father turns off the music, and the middle stops abruptly, wiping her face with the back of her hand. She swallows and the father reaches over to mess her hair.

  * * *

  THE DRIVE GOES on and on. Flat, open, dull. An anxious, geared-up lull. Time crackles and breaks once they enter the park, as soon as they see the brown official sign announcing its name in white, carved-out letters. The father tells the girls to hop out. One on either side of the sign and one at the bottom. The middle and youngest put their arms around it, as though it is a fifth family member. They collect these photographs the same way people buy magnets or badges or tiny spoons with the park seal stamped on them. They don’t have the money for these trinkets, and though the girls secretly, separately, desire them, they have come to view them with disdain, as a frivolity they don’t want anyway.

  They follow the park road up the mountain, one side in shadow, sunlight pushing through fat clouds on the other. The campground is on the north rim of the canyon—dry pines, shadow and sun, pale dirt. A handful of colorful tents dot the spare forest. The girls don’t see any other children, just middle-aged couples scattered among the dozen spots—men with gray beards, women wearing bandanas over their long hair. They make a slow circle around the sites then take a spot on the edge. The father backs the trailer into the thin slice of tar pavement, then clips the pay stub onto the signpost, claiming the spot as their own. Some people have wooden plaques with their names in burned-out letters hanging from their trailers. THE JOHNSONS. THE WARNERS. These are the same people who put potted geraniums outside their trailer doors, the same who roll out a carpet of fake grass beneath their striped awnings. A home away from home. The middle sister never saw her parents kiss or hug—nothing like it—and now there are only listless waves from cars or front porches, flat-toned telephone conversations in which the mother tells the father that the girls shouldn’t eat so much candy. When she is twenty-five, the middle, alone in an art museum in Toronto, an otherwise unremarkable, unmemorable museum—a large, modern thing—will walk through a curving hallway into a white, open room, completely empty but for a man and a woman on the floor kissing. Their bodies longways on the blond, lacquered wood. The man will be on top of the woman, the two of them rubbing against each other with a slow, deliberate intensity. She will think their passion is a performance, some unmarked exhibit. Even so, a heat will swell in her stomach and her face will grow red, suspended in the eroticism of no possible relief or release. Stopped, standing in place, she will resume her slow walk at the edge of the room, so as not to appear taken, affected, anything. She will keep the couple in her periphery. The woman, blonde like her, her jeans tight around her ass, the man’s hands at her waist. Nothing will stop them; they will give no sign they know she is there. The middle will carry the memory of the couple for years but won’t tell anyone, won’t remember anything else about the museum or the pair except the careful distance she kept between herself and them.

  * * *

  THE FIRST STEP INSIDE the camper shows everything shifted, disrupted and wrong, as a house recently burgled. A cabinet door open, a box of cereal on the floor. They put it in order. They take the cardboard box of newspaper off the floor, place it out next to the fire pit. The middle and the youngest unroll their sleeping bags on the bunks by the door.

  What are we going to do after this? the middle asks. Are we going to have a fire tonight?

  Of course we will, the oldest says.

  They drive to the visitors’ center. They wander through an exhibit on railways, another on how glaciers formed the canyon thousands of years before. They see the area’s animals, stuffed and behind glass. A chipmunk clutching a branch. A mountain lion hunched on a high slab of rock. They read about what they eat, their prey and predators, where humans might see them. They play a game matching the animal to its tracks and droppings. The plaque reads, They’re all you’ll ever see of some species.

  Returning to the site, the father climbs onto the trailer’s bottom bunk to take a nap. It is the hot, quiet slump in the day, and the cars and trucks are missing from the other sites. The oldest reads at the picnic table, and the middle and youngest hang together in the hammock.

  When are we going home? the youngest asks.

  We just got here, the oldest says, not taking her eyes off her book.

  Two weeks, the middle says. Like last summer.

  I want to talk to Mama.

  You can’t talk to Mom, the oldest says.

  Why not?

  The pay phone is all the way down at the entrance. It’s too far.

  I want to talk to her.

  We can tomorrow, the middle says.

  The youngest wedges herself out of the hammock. The middle watches her walk to the trailer and step up onto its metal step.

  What are you doing, the oldest asks.

  I want to see if Dad will take me.

  He’s sleeping.

  I want to talk to Mama, she says more insistently.

  You’ll hurt Dad’s feelings, the oldest says.

  The youngest crosses her arms and sighs, stamping over to the fire ring and huffing down onto a fat log. Her face crumples and her chest heaves.

  Hey, c’mon, the middle says. Don’t cry.

  You guys are such babies, the oldest says.

  The youngest puts her thumb in her mouth, her brow knitted, angry and concentrating. She wraps her other arm around her stomach. She closes her eyes, and her mouth starts going, her face softening. Her mother did so much to get her to stop last year. At night, she duct-taped socks over her hands. She rubbed fishing lure gel on her thumbs, but they would find her in the morning with the socks torn off, the gel smeared around her mouth like melted ice cream. The mother kept socking her hands, and the youngest kept ripping them off. Stubborn, stubborn, then she stopped cold, and it seemed like that was that. Around this time, the youngest started bringing her toy vacuum cleaner into the bed to sleep with her. Nearly the length of her body, a white, smooth plastic, its base a clear dome inside of which whir tiny Styrofoam balls when it’s pushed. She call
s it by the neighbor boy’s name, a boy with a head of tight blond curls whom they see out at the beach club the mother’s family belongs to. Her sisters tease her whenever they see him, draw out the syllables of his name in a long Oooo. At night, she lays an arm and a leg around the toy, and the mother, worried about the youngest’s teeth, lets her keep it in her bed, as though it were nothing more than a stuffed animal.

  The youngest’s cheeks hollow and fill, making small sucking noises.

  Stop it, the oldest says.

  The youngest’s eyes stay closed.

  Hey. The middle says her name.

  Stop it, that’s gross, the oldest says again.

  Just let her, the middle says. Seconds ago she was tempted to get up and pull her sister’s thumb out of her mouth herself, but she feels her allegiance turn sharply on its heel.

  You used to, she says.

  Yeah, well, I stopped because it’s gross.

  It’s not gross, the middle says, standing up, her arms stiff at her sides.

  No, it is gross. It’s disgusting and she shouldn’t do it.

  You’re a cunt, the middle says, her eyes quaking.

  You don’t even know what that word means, says the oldest.

  Yeah, I do.

  Oh, yeah, what?

  It’s someone who’s mean and slutty.

  Like that the oldest is up and on her, pushing her into the hammock, leaning over and punching her skinny arms. The middle puts her arms over her face and kicks out with her legs. The youngest sister stands and wails, her eyes closed, arms loose at her sides.

  The middle rears back and kicks her older sister in the chest—a bony, dull thump—and she falls into the dirt. Her face is a mix of pain and anger, reared up, then—just as fast—restrained and put away. The middle stands up and moves away from her, the oldest says, I hate you, the youngest wails, and the father throws open the door of the camper, screaming, What the hell is going on goddamnit, shut up.

  * * *

  THEY WIND DOWN to the park entrance and find a pay phone, each of the girls taking a turn. The youngest sniffles, says she wants to go home, can’t the mother come and get her, and then she goes silent, listening. She nods and nods, bucks up, and gives the phone to her sister. The middle says, She started it, says, She’s so mean, I never want to be like her, and the oldest cries, finally, silently, turning herself into the brick exterior of the liquor store. There is the liquor store, a gas station, and a closed antique shop on this stretch of road, and nothing else. A grassy field behind a barbed-wire fence and beyond that the mountains they came here to see. Be good, the mother says to each of them, not be good for your father, just, Be good. The oldest and middle are made to apologize to each other before the father takes the phone, his voice a tight whisper.

  They drive to the grocery store. The father’s is a summer birthday, and in the fluorescent lights of the aisles, the girls go off on their own, find a boxed cake mix and the accompanying ingredients. The oldest reads the list, leading them to the right sections. When the middle skips ahead and returns with a carton of eggs, the oldest says, Good job. They slide it all onto the back of the checkout conveyer belt, the father pretending not to see and then paying for everything. When they return to the site, he starts a fire and reads the local paper at the picnic table. Inside the trailer, the girls mix the cake’s ingredients, bake it in the tiny stove, following the directions adjusted for elevation. They poke their heads out the door at him and giggle, and the middle has that feeling again. Of the joy filling up and overflowing, of wanting it and so bad but knowing it as something that will peak then float away. It makes her giggles come up fast and nervous, edging out beyond her control.

  The cake turns out funny—overcooked in some spots, wet in others. Still they cover it in unctuous frosting, pour on sprinkles, and push in blue-and-white-striped candles, and when they emerge from the trailer, candles lit, the father acts surprised. He says, My little munchkins. There must be a moment, the middle will think later—candles lit, the evening sun cutting sharp through the trees—when he feels he is alone. The father’s house is not a home. It’s the place where he lives. A squat house filled with itchy furniture and cigarette smoke. The girls will not remember the cake like he will, the undeniable adult feeling of getting older. The father wrinkles his nose, says, Daddy’s a geezer, and groans and goofs like an old man.

  After cake, he says, Spread my ashes here. This place apart from the rest of the park, as quiet as a vacuum. He’s not even sick yet. Won’t be for another ten years, but he’ll say it when they get home too. Spread my ashes at the canyon. A refrain, just like everything he says is a refrain. Spread my ashes, and I saw the Who in a barn in Frankfurt, Illinois, and There’s Hitchcock, There he is, on one of those endless weekend afternoons watching movies at his house, a trick the girls think is particular to him, just as they think every joke is his original own. Hitchcock stepping onto a train, Hitchcock winding a clock. Spread my ashes here, he says, and they will years later. They’ll let some go at the edge of the canyon and some down at its river and some they will put into a campfire in the Rockies and some the middle sister will put into her mouth—a lick of her finger, a dip, and another lick when her sisters aren’t looking. The act will feel performative, purely symbolic, but she won’t know what else to do. Wanting her actions to mean something more than what she can give to them. Somewhere inside her grief, she will ask herself what is the worst thing she would have done to reverse his sickness, to have provided some momentary relief. She will have heard stories of what mothers have done to soothe their colicky sons, and in her mind’s eye she will see herself bent over him in his hospital bed. She will feel at once alone in her imagined sacrifice but also closer to her father than she will when she’s actually with him. The same way she will imagine a scene in which she and her sisters are kidnapped by a group of faceless men—a dark basement, a locked door—and she will say, Me. Whatever you’re going to do to them, only me.

  In the evening, they go into their separate spaces. The father into the woods. The girls into the cool, echoey bathroom. They walk to and from the site together, flashlights bouncing along the small, curving path. There are more stars there than at home, the sky messy with them, and the girls are in awe. Whispering in the dark, the middle feels a silent fear they won’t find their way back, but just moments later they see their father at the picnic table in front of the fire. The girls go to bed and he stays up. Some hours later, the middle sister wakes. On the foldout bed next to the oven, the oldest sister is lost inside a mess of blankets, her face barely perceptible within her dark swirl of hair. Hateful and tender, the middle stands above her and a thought, perfectly formed, sprouts within her: It is easier to love you like this. She pulls back the drapes over the window in the door and pads out in socked feet. The father is smoking a cigarette and in his exhale says, Hey, little lady. She sits across from him on a log, and they stare into the fire, the light reflecting off his glasses so that his eyes cannot be seen. She wants to crawl into his lap or sit beside him, lean into his torso, but she feels shy with him now. Their talk is spare and quiet, minutes or hours passing, until he lets the red fire dim and smoke.

  BLACK BOX

  DAD WANTED TO SHOW US his infinity box. It was Christmas and my sister, Carla, her husband, and my man and I were in the suburbs at my cousin’s. I had poured myself one glass of wine after another while my uncle told me where to buy the cheapest gas. I no longer drove. By the time Dad mentioned the mysterious box, I had dipped into a drunkenness that felt shut up and deeply personal.

  Come over to the house, Dad said. It’ll take five minutes.

  Nothing with Dad took five minutes. He was susceptible to obsession, frequently infused with urgency for a project that had taken him over. It didn’t end until he’d roped in someone else.

  In the bathroom Carla and I stood before its brightly lit mirror. She was in an advanced state of pregnancy. Everything looked the same—her sleek blonde hair, rosy che
eks, pert nose—except for her belly. It appeared constructed, like one of those grassy burial mounds downstate. When we’d first arrived, my aunt, a retired accountant who cut her own hair in a blunt schoolmarm, had placed her hands on Carla’s stomach, and with eyes closed like a fortune-teller, nodded and said, A new beginning.

  We should get back home, I said. You know how he gets.

  I’d grown anxious and wanted to dissolve into a more familiar state.

  I know, Carla said. I’m pretty tired.

  She rubbed her stomach, the very thing she promised she wouldn’t do. She’d paid an enterprising doula an outrageous sum for homemade anti-stress pregnancy tea, the tint and odor of rotten eggplant, and had been ostentatiously chugging it throughout dinner. I’d helped her to a glug of Chianti every time I got myself a glass, deepening the tea’s dark color. She either didn’t notice or pretended not to, but after pie, she sighed and said, I feel so much more relaxed.

  I’m pretty tired too, I said, stroking my gut.

  But we can’t not go, she said.

  Carla and I lived in the same city a little over an hour away. Later she and her husband, Tom, would watch the latest Top Chef and go to bed, while I suggested to Jay that the two of us find a bar full of Christmas rejects to play pool with. Dad would end the night eating chips and dozing in front of a PBS murder mystery. We knew a version of this had become his reality this past year—and to me it sounded like a kind of bliss, an isolation you could really sink your teeth into—and yet. And yet he must have had his own feelings about it.