One of the most terrifying moments in any young adult’s life is the moment when your friends’ parents and your old teachers start casually asking you to address them as “Randy” and “Gretchen” as though this weren’t a HORRIBLE ANATHEMA THAT would bring on THE END OF WORLDS.
The odd thing is that nobody stops you. I can rent a car. I can vote and walk into an office and—doesn’t anyone notice that I am secretly twelve?
We have business cards?
Who do they think we are, adults?
Oh God.
Adulthood always felt like something we were sneaking into together.
Can’t everyone see that, as far as these things go, I am a series of cats standing on one another’s shoulders inside a big coat? If you could just sit in your apartment all day being a bunch of cats, it would not be so bad. But you have to go outside and pass among people. And you never feel that you are doing a very convincing job. You get back indoors and peel off the coat, gasping with relief. “Whew,” you say. “Fooled them again.”
It always feels like a near thing, though. It’s the same furtive, panicked feeling I always get when somebody asks me for directions. I am a competent human being getting through my day and navigating my city just fine until the second someone asks me for directions. That is when I lose all spatial sense and everything I say becomes a horrible lie.
“How would I get to the Cathedral?” someone asks.
“Uh,” I say. I glance around in the desperate hope that they were really asking someone else. (There is never anyone else.) “There’s no Cathedral here,” I suggest. “They tore it down a while ago.”
“The Washington National Cathedral?”
“Oh,” I say, feeling increasingly hopeless. “Well, uh, just keep going left until you can’t go left any longer? It’s at—Massachusetts Avenue and Jujamcyn.” The instant these words leave my mouth I know they are wrong. Jujamcyn was a theater company where I once delivered a package in the summer of 2008. I have no idea how this name came into my mind at all.
“Thanks,” they say. They give me a hopeful, uncertain look like a dog about to go on a car ride. (“You wouldn’t steer me wrong, good buddy!”) I look back sadly with a sort of pained expression. (“I’m unworthy of your trust and where you’re going they may attempt to neuter you.”)
The one reassuring thing about moments like this is that I know I am not alone. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve lived in a place or how well you know it. Direction panic strikes just the same. My father, on the phone, once confidently told visiting friends that we lived “on Estabrook Road,” even though he’d grown up in the house and not only was it not on Estabrook Road, but as we listened to him hang up the phone we were not sure that Estabrook Road was in fact a road that existed. We thought he might have just made it up out of thin air. This is the kind of thing you do when giving directions. You panic. You blurt out anything.
Joan was not embarrassed about this.
“You’re looking for the Cathedral?” she’d say when tourists asked her for directions directly in front of the cathedral in question. “Oh, that’s miles down the road. You have to turn on Wisconsin and cut over to Kalorama. Hurry or it’ll close!” The tourists would dart away, and she would shrug. “What? They should know better than to ask me.”
That’s how I feel about adulthood.
I’ve always had the dim sense that I missed orientation.
I’ve always thought someone would notice. At some point—last night, say, around ten, when I was sitting outside Safeway on a bench by myself eating an entire take-out pizza straight out of the box—someone would tap me on the shoulder and gently whisper, “You missed orientation, didn’t you?”
I would nod, my eyes filling with tears of gratitude.
And then the next day I would have to show up at a chilly conference room in a convention center (coffee would be provided). Among the group would be the guy I’d seen clipping his toenails on the subway and the woman I encountered in the same subway station turning slowly around in a circle looking bewildered and alarmed, before getting on the train, then jumping off again at the last minute, then standing there as several trains came and went, looking like a deer in headlights whose cell phone had just died.
A panel of patient-looking people in business attire would tell us how everything is done. How to iron. How to want to iron. How to respond to important e-mails promptly instead of saying to yourself, “That e-mail seems important, and I need to think up a good response” and then letting three years go by.
Human beings have been doing all these things for so long, someone must know how we’ve managed.
Then they’d send a guy to check on you every few months—“Hey, Alexandra, we noticed you’ve eaten ‘dinner’ at 7-Eleven three times this week—at three in the morning. Is everything okay? Do you need a refresher?” Periodically they’d offer special classes on things like Parenting Like a Normal Human and Not Finding Poop Funny After Age Eleven.
There had to be orientation sometime, surely.
We went to a lot of assemblies together, the gang. Assemblies about how to avoid drugs and assemblies about how Melanie’s dad had gone to the Amazon and had some very trippy experiences and assemblies about work-life balance and assemblies about friendship.
But no one ever stood up in front of us and said, “At one point—maybe not now, but soon, and for the rest of your life—people will start mistaking you for an actual adult. Nothing you say will dissuade them. You will have to live out your days surrounded by people who assume you know what you are doing. They won’t just ask you for directions. They’ll let you rent cars, own land and property, and represent them in courts of law!”
That’s the advantage of having friends who remember you from Before, as a spindly twelve-year-old who never cursed and always wore vests. The gang who taught you how to put on eye makeup, who talked you through your first crushes on real and fictional humans. They know what a lie this is.
Not that you aren’t just as good at being an adult as everyone else.
That life doesn’t come with an instruction manual is hardly news. Nothing comes with an instruction manual anymore. But usually you can look up what to do online.
This works so well for electronics that I have been trying to apply it to life.
“Is it okay to eat this ham I just found?” I type into Google. I’m not sure why I think Google will know what ham I’m talking about, but this has never stopped me.
And thanks to that lovely Autofill feature, I know there are plenty of people with even more basic concerns, like “is it okay to cry?” There’s a guy earnestly Googling “can my cat get mad at me” and another guy frantically Googling “can my cat get high.”
Clearly we have no idea what we’re doing.
The Internet is great when it comes to putting everyone’s soft mortifying underbelly within easy reach. It is a mirror where we see what we want, and what we want is gross and porny and covered in bacon and needs to take a shower. It runs on id. What makes it tick is the stuff we really want, not the stuff we say we want or want to look like we want. Puppies running into walls. Quizzes. Weird niche porn. Mortified admissions under pseudonyms. One of the most popular Reddit posts of all time is entitled “What’s your secret that could literally ruin your life if it came out?” And it’s got more than forty-five thousand comments. Ah, the Internet, home of the rueful admission.
Except when it’s not.
Yes, it has its dressy side. That’s Facebook. Facebook is where your friends proudly display all the accomplishments and milestones they are too polite to inflict on you in actual life. In actual life if someone did any of the things that they do on Facebook, you’d disembowel them within minutes.
With new parents, this can’t be helped. They would do this anyway. It’s in their nature. I think we recently defrosted the frozen remains of a caveman
from 64,000 BCE who was gored from behind while showing another caveman a rudimentary stick figure drawing he had made of his toddler enjoying a carrot. This is just what parenting does to you. It’s the other things. Even people you know are lovable, thoughtful, and self-effacing in actual life turn into perpetual promotion machines on social media. Great meal. Hot car. Awesome vacation. New necklace. New baby. New job. New house.
You stare at all the photos of New Houses and New Babies and Artfully Crafted Salads and Friends Hanging Out Without You Doing Something Tasteful.
And you can’t tell that a few seconds after they sat there looking like something out of Norman Rockwell their cute children shoved sticky fingers into those impeccable red velvet cupcakes and cried under their perfect sunhats until their faces were splotchy and red. You suspect as much. But you don’t KNOW.
Everyone sees this competent-looking thing walking around, but that is just the tip of the iceberg, while for the purposes of this metaphor under the iceberg is not more ice but instead a crowd of really nervous penguins frantically trying to hold the ice in place and feeling that they aren’t quite up to the task.
• • •
The times you feel this most acutely are the times when you look most like you know what you’re doing. Like graduations. Like weddings.
Like most milestones, weddings are days of frantic scrambling around asking what’s going on and where Cathy is and where you’re supposed to stand. Only one person ever knows the correct answer to those things, and that person is never there when you are trying to find out. Instead, other people cheerfully volunteer answers that are wrong. “I think Cathy disappeared behind the barn,” the lady doing everyone’s makeup says. “She said not to bother her. Also you should definitely stand in a semicircle behind the groom.”
You’d think by now we would realize what’s going on. But accustomed as we are to the idea that we personally are cats in raincoats, it is always hard to believe this of others, even if the others in question are trying to apply false lashes to you while visibly intoxicated. “She must know something I don’t,” you think.
But then it looks beautiful, and for a few moments, it is. Those decorative gift boxes that a moment ago you were scrambling to fold fit perfectly with the tablecloths. You figure out where to stand just in time.
And every so often, not too often, but just enough, we wind up together again. It’s a bachelorette party, or Hannah’s just been through a breakup, or Margo’s graduating. And everyone piles onto a bed or a couch or into a car (the Black Pearl is gone, but the Purple Eggplant survives) and heaves a sigh of relief. Here we are. In this together. We’ve managed to sneak by this far. I guess they’re letting us slide.
Acknowledgments
If you’re in this thing at all, it is because I love you. If you are not, it is for the same reason.
There we go, Mom! Wasn’t that bad, was it?
Thank you to Fred and everyone at the Post for being almost comically understanding and terrific throughout this process. Thank you, Tracy, for being a swell and patient editor, and Anna for being a rad agent and human.
Thanks to all the businesses where I crouched or ate while typing this, including: Baked & Wired, Starbucks, 7-Eleven, Barnes & Noble, Chinatown Coffee, Soho Tea and Coffee.
Warmest, most carminative thanks to my folks, my grandparents, the great states of Indiana and Wisconsin, the Food Brigade, team trivia, team Pudding, BMI, the Love Nest, Team J-Golds, the Pun Community, my wonderful neighbors, Dagmar, Jesus (not that one, the other one), Jesus (you), Jesus (Luke Skywalker), Actual Real-Life Carl, Poop, the Sensorium, Curtis Lemuel, Passengers Housman and Jackson, Jesus (P. G. Wodehouse), Marcel, that lady on the bus once who would not stop talking to me about her idea for a TV show, Reuben, “Carl,” Jesus (that guy on the Internet who said the mean thing), Oscar, Grover, and the woman who let me onto the dog agility course, for believing in me.
And Madeleine, always.
* His hair never looked that good, to be completely honest. You know who had good hair? Custer.
* Sexy aliens with weird head-tentacle things.
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