Such a Fun Age

by Kiley Reid

  Alix couldn’t tell if she was happier or if she just cared less. She had definitely gained weight on top of the baby weight. She wrote much less than she had in New York and she slept much more than when Briar was born. But at 10:45 p.m. on a Saturday night in September, eggshells smashed against the front window of her home and brought her out of a deep sleep. The sound didn’t register right away, but when Alix heard, “Racist piece of shit!” it was like she came online. She reached out and touched her husband. Alix and Peter rushed to the top of the stairs and watched egg yolks break and splatter against their front window. Just as Peter said, “I told you,” two large eggs broke the barrier. Splintered glass, eggshells, and a long string of yolk and mucus flew into the Chamberlain house. The sound and surprise made Alix’s chest seize. She breathed again when she heard boyish laughter, sneakers running away, and someone saying, “Oh shit! Go, go!”

  Catherine cried out and Briar said, “Mama?”

  Peter said, “I’m calling the police,” and then, “Fuck. I told you this would happen.”

  That morning, Peter’s co-anchor Laney Thacker had introduced a segment on the creative ways students were asking their dates to a dance: a sweet homecoming tradition at Beacon Smith High School. Peter echoed her enthusiasm with, “Misty is on campus for the romance right now.” Clips of students were shown with Misty’s voice narrating. Teachers were interviewed, students were filmed next to huge balloon displays, and the volume at a pep rally turned to screams as a freckled girl was led to the half-court line. A football-jerseyed junior appeared with a box of pizza. He opened it to reveal words inscribed on the box’s lid: I know this is cheesy, but homecoming? Pepperonis were positioned as a giant question mark below.

  The segment ended with a five-foot-tall student with a flattop of thick hair above a white mask marching toward a group of girls. He set down a boom box and pressed Play. His masked friends helped clear the space for a dance to begin, and the girl in question covered her mouth as her friends took out their phones. After spinning on their heads and doing intricate shapes and patterns with their fingers, the group ended by revealing a white flag with Homecoming? written in Sharpie. The black teen in front removed his mask and held out a rose.

  Over the cheers of the girl’s acceptance, Misty turned the camera back to Peter in the studio.

  “Whoa!” Peter said.

  “That was very impressive,” Laney agreed. “I was definitely never asked to a dance like that.”

  “Well.” Peter shook his head. His teeth showed as he winced at the camera and said, “Let’s hope that last one asked her father first. Thanks for joining us on WNFT and we’ll see you tomorrow morning on Philadelphia Action News.”

  The backlash was immediate.

  In the comment section underneath the video—which was now available online—criticisms and questions popped up in between praise.

  Ummm, why would the black guy need to ask her dad, but the white guys don’t?

  That’s a bit sexist. Is this the 18th century?

  WTF? Why would he even say that?

  Alix was working at a coffee shop, which had turned into a smoothie, mimosa, and participating in the group text with her girlfriends in Manhattan. She told Peter that it was one high school, that it wasn’t that terrible, and that no one would even remember it. (In a weak champagne buzz, Alix caught herself thinking, If it didn’t happen in New York, honestly who cares?) But Peter was mortified. “It just came out,” he said. “I don’t even know why I . . . it just came out.” Alix assured him that it really wasn’t that bad.

  And suddenly it was. After the crash, Alix took her youngest daughter from her crib with such speed that Catherine practically bounced out of her arms, but Alix’s world moved underwater. What if Peter got fired? Peter had gone straight to the producers of the show to apologize for his fumble, and they’d chalked it up to something between “things happen” and “you’re still the new guy.” But what if the students were so angry that it made them reconsider? Once again, Alix peeked out over the stairwell and saw flecks of glass strewn across the tile floor and stuck in ooze. Would the Clinton campaign find out about this, and would they think her husband was sexist? Or even worse, racist? How did she even get here? And how was she this fat right now? Whose house was this anyway?

  Peter carried Briar, who secured both her hands to her ears. “I don’t like that noise,” she said. “I don’t . . . I don’t like it loud, Mama.”

  “Shh shh shh,” Alix said to Briar for maybe the hundredth time that week. She turned to Peter and said, “I’m gonna try Emira.” Peter nodded with his phone to his ear.

  And when Emira arrived fifteen minutes later in a tiny faux-leather skirt and strappy heels that she walked remarkably well in, Alix handed Briar’s little wrist toward her thinking, Wait a second, who is this person? Oh God . . . does she know what Peter said? All at once, it was somehow much worse to think of Emira knowing what Peter had said, rather than the hopeful first female president of the United States.

  As Peter gave two policemen a statement, Alix scooped up the glass with a hand towel in the glaring light from the chandelier. In between long, sad strokes, she told herself to wake the fuck up. To write this book. To live in Philadelphia. To get to know Emira Tucker.

  Three

  There’s a town in Maryland called Sewell Bridge, where 6.5 percent of the population (5,850 people) are hearing impaired. This is the town where Emira Tucker was born. Emira had perfect hearing, the same as her parents and younger siblings, but the Tucker family had a proclivity toward craftsmanship that was so dogged that it leaned into religious territory, and Sewell Bridge served this philosophy well. The Tucker family worked with their hands.

  Mr. Tucker owned a bee store with a long rooftop where the buzzing beehives were often kept. Despite hiring several deaf employees over the years, he didn’t waste any time training his fingers to do anything that wasn’t related to bees. Mrs. Tucker bound books in a shaded screened room attached to the front of the Tucker home. She made baby albums, wedding books, and Holy Bible restorations, and her worktable was consistently covered in leather swatches, needles, bone folders, and closures.

  Twenty-one-year-old Alfie Tucker won second place in the National Latte Art Competition in 2013. He was invited to serve as an apprentice at a roasterie in Austin, Texas, where he trained other baristas, wearing an apron made by his mother. And nineteen-year-old Justyne Tucker sewed. She had an active Etsy shop where she took orders for Halloween costumes and flower girl attire. Upon graduating from high school, Justyne was hired by a community college to create the costumes for upcoming productions of Our Town and Once on This Island.

  Because the interests of her family members had come so naturally to them, and because university seemed like an acceptable place to wait for her hands to find themselves, Emira became the first person in her family to attend a four-year college. It was Temple University where she met Zara (in line to take her student ID photo), where she got drunk for the first time (she threw up into the side pocket of her purse), and where she purchased her first weave from the funds she saved working in the library in between classes (long and black and wavy and big).

  Emira tried to make her hands find formal sign language at Temple, but it was surprisingly difficult to unlearn the conversational slang she grew up with back in Sewell Bridge. Emira also tried transcription, which seemed like a career path and narrative that made sense. In her senior year, Emira typed lecture notes for two deaf students for thirteen dollars per class. This was more or less the reason she ended her five years at Temple with a major in English. Emira didn’t mind reading or writing papers, but this was also mostly the problem. Emira didn’t love doing anything, but she didn’t terribly mind doing anything either.

  After graduation, Emira went home for the summer and desperately missed Philadelphia. She returned with a stern suggestion from her father: to find something and
to stick with it. So Emira enrolled in transcription school, and she absolutely hated it. She wasn’t allowed to cross her legs. Memorizing medical terminology was insufferable. And when a key on her steno machine broke, instead of fixing it (which would have cost hundreds of dollars), Emira gave it up completely and applied to a part-time job she found on Craigslist. In a small office on the sixth floor of a high-rise building, in a large cubicled room labeled Green Party Philadelphia, a white woman in a T-shirt and jeans named Beverly asked Emira if she could really type 125 words per minute. “I can,” Emira said, “as long as you don’t mind if I cross my legs.” In a tiny corner with squishy headphones, on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 12 to 5 p.m., Emira transcribed text from speeches and meetings. When things got slow, Beverly asked her to cover the phones.

  Temple University had been kind to keep Emira as an on-call transcriber for the two years following her graduation, but they wanted to keep entry-level employment open to current students, and gave her fair warning that she’d have to move on by summer. Emira hadn’t told her parents about her departure from transcription school. She wanted to be able to replace it with something, rather than a passionless negative space. In a quiet panic, Emira changed her availability on SitterTown.com to Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and two days later, she met Alix Chamberlain.

  Briar was a welcome break from Emira’s constant concern of what to do with her hands and the rest of her life. Briar asked questions like, “Why can’t I smell that?” or, “Where is that squirrel’s mama?” or, “How come we don’t know that lady?” Once, after Briar tried zucchini for the first time, Emira stood in front of her high chair and asked the toddler if she liked it. Briar chewed with her mouth open and looked all over the room as she articulated her response. “Mira? How, how . . . because—how do you know when you like it? Who says when you like it?” Emira was fairly certain that the caregiver-approved answer was something like, You’ll figure it out, or, It’ll make sense when you’re older. But Emira wiped the toddler’s chin and said, “That’s a really good question. We should ask your mom.” She honestly meant it. Emira wished that someone would tell her what she liked doing best. The number of things she could ask her own mother were shrinking at an alarming rate.

  Emira hadn’t told her parents that she was babysitting and typing for a living, which meant she couldn’t tell them about the night at Market Depot. Not that they would have any insights she hadn’t heard before, but it would have been nice to safely share her frustrations. In the fourth grade, a white classmate had marched to Emira’s lunch table and asked her if she was a coon (upon hearing this, her mother had promptly picked up the phone while asking Emira, “What’s his name?”). Emira was once followed by sales associates in Brooks Brothers while she shopped for a Father’s Day gift (her mother had said, “They ain’t got nothin’ better to do?”). And once, after a bikini wax was completed, Emira was told that because she had “ethnic texture,” the total came to forty dollars instead of the advertised thirty-five (to this, Emira’s mother had responded, “Back up, you got what waxed?”). It would have been nice to talk to her parents about the night at Market Depot because it was honestly the biggest thing to happen to Emira in a while, and it involved her favorite little person. Emira knew that she should have been mostly disturbed by the blatant bigotry of the altercation. But more than the racial bias, the night at Market Depot came back to her with a nauseating surge and a resounding declaration that hissed, You don’t have a real job.

  This wouldn’t have happened if you had a real fucking job, Emira told herself on the train ride home, her legs and arms crossed on top of each other. You wouldn’t leave a party to babysit. You’d have your own health insurance. You wouldn’t be paid in cash. You’d be a real fucking person. Taking care of Briar was Emira’s favorite position so far, but Briar would someday go to school, Mrs. Chamberlain didn’t seem to want Catherine out of her sight, and even if she did, part-time babysitting could never provide health insurance. By the end of 2015, Emira would be forced off her parents’ health coverage. She was almost twenty-six years old.

  Sometimes, when she was particularly broke, Emira convinced herself that if she had a real job, a nine-to-five position with benefits and decent pay, then the rest of her life would start to resemble adulthood as well. She’d do things like make her bed in the morning, and she’d learn to start liking coffee. She wouldn’t sit on the floor in her bedroom, discovering new music and creating playlists until three a.m., only to put herself to bed and think, Why do you do this to yourself? She’d try out a new dating app, and she’d have more interesting interests to write about: activities other than hanging out with Zara, watching old music videos, painting her nails, and eating the same dinner at least four nights a week (a Crock-Pot meal consisting of shredded chicken, salsa, and cheese). If Emira had a real job, she’d look at her wardrobe full of clothes from Strawberry and Forever 21 and decide it was past time for an upgrade.

  Emira constantly tried to convince herself that she could find another child, a little girl with nice parents who needed her full-time. They’d keep her on the books and she could say she paid taxes. They’d take her on vacations and consider her part of the family. But when Emira saw other children, anyone who wasn’t Briar Chamberlain, she felt viscerally disgusted. They had nothing interesting to say, their eyes had dead, creepy stares, and they were modest in a way that seemed weirdly rehearsed (Emira often watched Briar approach other toddlers on swings and slides, and they’d turn away from her, saying, “No, I’m shy”). Other children were easy audiences who loved receiving stickers and hand stamps, whereas Briar was always at the edge of a tiny existential crisis.

  Underneath her constant chatter, Briar was messy and panicky and thoughtful, constantly struggling with demons of propriety. She liked things that had mint smells. She didn’t like loud noises. And she didn’t consider hugging a legitimate form of affection unless she could lay her ear against a welcoming shoulder. Most of their evenings ended with Emira paging through a magazine while Briar played in the bathtub. Briar sat with her toes in her hands, her face a civil war of emotions, singing songs and trying to whistle. She’d have private conversations with herself, and Emira often heard her explain to the voices in her head, “No, Mira is my friend. She’s my special friend.”

  Emira knew she had to find a new job.

  Four

  The next morning, instead of setting Briar in front of a children’s program about colorful fish and animals in the ocean, Alix strapped her children into the double jogging stroller. There was so much more room to run in Philadelphia. She didn’t have to jog in place at stoplights to keep her heart rate up, and she didn’t have to make it to the highway to see more than one hundred steps ahead. Just after mile three, which felt more like the twenty-sixth, both of her children had been rocked back to sleep. Alix stopped in a coffee shop, asked for a latte, and took it to a bench outside.

  I need a conference call immediately, she texted. No death or sickness but very urgent.

  Alix had said the names Rachel, Jodi, and Tamra so many times that there was no other way to say it. She hadn’t texted her group of girlfriends this way since her move—most of their recent conversations concerned other women they knew, product advice, articles and books they were reading, and complaints about their husbands—so seconds after this text was sent, it was met back with two Are you okay? texts and one Tamra, can you start it?

  Jodi was a children’s casting director who had two redheaded children—ages four and one—who often appeared as crying extras on TV shows and movies. Rachel, proudly Jewish and Japanese, managed a firm that designed book covers while she tried to get her son to be not-so-good at soccer, because who the hell knew it was so intense? He was only five years old. And Tamra was the principal of a private school in Manhattan. Twice a year, the four women gorged on the wine, cheese, and hummus packages sent by parents trying to boost their children’s admission applicatio
ns or keep their problem child enrolled. Tamra had two girls with inch-long dark afros, a two-and-a-half-year-old and a fully literate four-year-old who spoke beginner French. Tamra’s children referred to her as Memmy.

  With her knees spread wide on the bench and cold sweat at her temples, Alix told them everything.

  Rachel gasped and said, “What?!”

  In an overly enunciated tone, Tamra said, “They wouldn’t let her leave?”

  Jodi said, “All of this happened in one day?”

  “Jesus Christ, that would never happen in New York,” Rachel said. “Hudson, get that out of your mouth! Sorry, we’re at soccer.”

  Alix’s heart sped up to the same sickening point as it had the night before, when Peter returned without Emira and said, “Okay, everyone’s fine,” before he explained. Alix couldn’t help but ask what sounded like uselessly generic questions as soon as they left her lips. Was she crying? Was she mad? Did she seem really upset? If Alix had been asked about Emira and her mental state for all the Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in the last three months, she wouldn’t have had an answer. Most days, Alix practically threw Briar into Emira’s arms on her way out the door, calling over her shoulder that Briar hadn’t eaten lunch or hadn’t really pooped. The Tuesdays and Thursdays without Emira included swimming lessons at the Y, where Briar swam so hard and desperately that she ended up taking three-hour naps. These naps were followed by a movie on Netflix, and by the ending credits, Dada was walking through the front door. This pattern had sustained Alix so well that she had no idea if her babysitter was the type of person to cry, sue, or do nothing at all.

  Tamra clicked her tongue. “You gotta call that girl right now.”

  “I’m Googling Peter’s clip,” Jodi said. “Okay, five hundred views . . . that’s not awful.”