Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here

by Anna Breslaw

  She shut the door in my face. I was flabbergasted. I knocked again, more insistently, and I heard her agitated footsteps slamming on the hardwood as she came back to the door. She swung it wide open so hard that the breeze blew my hair back.

  Ruth was—is—what an old-fashioned novel would call a “handsome woman,” almost six feet tall with thick gray-streaked hair piled on top of her head. She wore a crisp white short-sleeved shirt buttoned up all the way to the top, with the sleeves rolled like James Dean, and thick wool trousers. She didn’t look like anyone else in town. In other words, she looked cool as hell.

  “You Dawn Epstein’s kid?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  “I’ve seen her at Superfresh. Where’s your dad at?”

  “New York,” I said, then for some reason felt compelled to add, “New wife.”

  Ruth looked at me for a minute, slouching in the doorway and sucking in her cheeks thoughtfully, her body language uncannily similar to the burnout kids at my school who hung out near the Stop sign just outside the school zone. Then she glanced conspiratorially around, even though it was just us in front of her empty house.

  “You go to MHS?”

  “Alas and alack, I do.”

  “Do you know where I could find some pot?”

  My eyebrows shot up before I could control them.

  “Pot like pot? Like marijuana?”

  “No, pot like for tea. It’s hard to get your hands on ceramic cookware,” she deadpanned, looking exasperated. “Yeah. You know. Ganj. Whatever you’re calling it now.”

  “I missed the last teen-slang standardization meeting, but I think we’re calling it weed. You don’t, like, have a person?”

  “I think he graduated. I’ll tell you, being retired and running out of your stash is kinda like having a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich without the peanut butter. Or the jelly. Just two dry pieces of bread.”

  Gamely attempting to roll with this, I agreed faintly, “That sounds like . . . not a good sandwich.”

  “Don’t look so shocked. Getting high is just about the only good thing about being my age. Which is seventy-one, by the way. If there’s some kind of crone age requirement for your project.”

  “That’s a great age for my report, and you’re not a crone,” I told her firmly, trying and failing to feel out where all this was going.

  She gasped like I insulted her. “Don’t say that! I love being a crone.

  “I don’t know who came up with the stupid idea that we appreciate the little things, like domestic chores or sitting and watching the sun set like it’s a goddamn Bourne movie. And you can use that in your report, by the way—if you help me out and track down a new dealer.”

  “Um, I don’t think I know anybody.”

  She snorted derisively, reaching up to adjust the cockeyed tumble of gray hair looped up in a claw clip.

  “What are you, sixteen?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “In this town? Every other kid in your class probably has a hookup.”

  “I don’t really—”

  “Those are my terms, lady. Take it or leave it.”

  We sized each other up for a minute. She tilted her head up high, like she was challenging me. For a second I felt like Al Pacino in that scene in The Godfather where he shoots all those guys in that restaurant and then flees to Sicily and marries that girl who doesn’t speak his language but has really nice breasts and then she gets blown up in a car.

  Finally, I relented. “You’re on.”

  Things I am extraordinarily good at locating: public restrooms, novels about hedonism and angst at exclusive private schools, quickly canceled cult TV shows, and free bagels. Controlled substances are not, and will never be, one of those things. Even picking up antibiotics for an ear infection at CVS makes me feel vaguely shifty and hyper-self-conscious, like a minor character on The Wire.

  Fortunately, Ruth was right: Weed was as ubiquitous at school as folded brown-bag textbook covers with Drake lyrics scrawled on them. I located a hookup almost immediately when I sidled up to Mark Petruniak during Phys Ed and awkwardly said something like, “Hey, do you, like, I know you smoke, but do you happen to deal? I mean deal weed. Not, like, ‘with issues.’”

  To my relief, Mark laughed.

  “Yeah, dude,” he said super-nonchalantly, his eyelids drooping, and I caught a whiff that verified his honesty. “Hey, I didn’t know you smoked.”

  “Well, sometimes,” I lied modestly, basking in taking a well-liked guy from school by surprise. “You know. Not a lot.”

  (I smoked weed one time. It was at one of Ashley’s parties. I freaked out, locked myself in the bathroom, and sobbed uncontrollably until Dylan Dinerstein drunkenly climbed in through the window to pee.)

  After Phys Ed, I handed Mark a fifty, and he gave me a small plastic bag with some green stuff in it that could totally have been Astroturf and I wouldn’t have known.

  “Good shit,” I said, as if I had a Ph.D. in Discerning Shit Quality.

  “You should come to over my house and smoke sometime,” Mark said casually.

  “Yeah, definitely,” I lied.

  In retrospect, I felt fortunate that a number of small miracles had transpired: I managed to purchase marijuana without asking Mark what exact unit of measurement was in a dime bag, without getting arrested, and without being so nervous about potentially being arrested that I Maria Full of Grace-ed it home in my vagina.

  I stopped by Ruth’s house after school, just as the sun was setting, incredibly jittery from playing Pokémon with narcotics at school and hoping this stupid report would be worth all the anxiety.

  She answered the door in the middle of my second knock.

  “Yup.”

  “Hi. I got the thing. The stuff. You know.” Beat. Nothing. “The stuff.”

  “Oh, right.” A light clicked on behind her eyes. She looked mildly impressed but quashed it immediately. “Great, come on in.”

  The foyer was warm and cluttered in an eclectic, lived-in way. Best of all, there were books everywhere, mostly very old ones, lined up on one single long shelf that looped around the room endlessly, like literature dominoes. I glanced a little closer and saw that a lot of them were feminist theory—some I recognized from my own late-night smart-girl Googles, but others I didn’t know.

  “Dworkin is a loony tune.” Ruth pulled one book down from the shelf. “You ever read her?”

  I looked down at the book. Intercourse, read its stark cover. Nothing you’d find between He’s Just Not That Into You and Eat Pray Love on Dawn’s bookshelf. I shook my head.

  “She makes reality TV look like The Partridge Family,” Ruth said admiringly and handed the book to me. “Here. Keep it. I’ve read it.”

  “You haven’t read, like, all of these, have you?”

  “Yep.”

  “Whoa.”

  “Yeah, well. Thirty-four years teaching women’s studies, you crack a book or two. Not that there’s ever any right answer to this stuff.” She shook her head with sort of a bemused smile. “It’s amazing how the more you read, the less you know.”

  “I totally get what you mean,” I said instantly. A second later, I realized I actually did. It was the first time I ever felt understood by a grown-up.

  I tucked the book in my backpack, feeling a little bit like I’d just found the coolest informal library ever.

  Ruth plucked the dime bag from my hand and brushed past me, heading into the kitchen, all Formica and peeling wallpaper. I followed behind. She lifted the lid of a porcelain sugar jar and placed the new plastic bag of weed inside it. She opened a junk drawer, pulled out some rolling papers, and started making a joint. Or a blunt. I’m still unclear on the difference, maybe the latter just isn’t as polite at parties.

  “You wanna start this Old Crone Report, then?” Ruth asked through g
ritted teeth, clenching the joint between them.

  I nodded and took out my notebook.

  “Okay.” She breathed in, held it, frozen, then exhaled. A plume of smoke rose and twisted in front of us like a belly dancer. “You should know I’m not gonna give you any Tuesdays with Morrie bullshit.”

  I wrote that down.

  “Life isn’t a beautiful gift to treasure every moment of. It’s shitty and unfair, and I’m not gonna give you any ‘wisdom’ on how to gracefully come to terms with life or death or anything.”

  I nodded.

  She exhaled, visibly relaxed—her forehead wasn’t tensed up anymore like it had been when I first knocked on her door—and shrugged.

  “I could use a hand with the garden. If you want to come by a few days a week and help me out, you can pick my brain about when dinosaurs roamed Earth. How does that sound?”

  “Yeah! Great.”

  “Good. Starting now. Can you show me how to do an emoji?”

  She handed me a cracked iPhone with no case. She’d been texting with someone called “K.,” flirtatiously bordering on straight-up smut.

  I showed her how to access the emoji keyboard and handed it back. She vacillated between the wink face and the kiss-blowing face, then looked at me.

  “Hello? Make yourself useful.”

  “Kiss, I think. Wink emoji is a little bit ‘recently divorced dad.’ Also,” I said, “you spell twerk with an e.”

  She revised and hit Send, and I was glad to see the ghost of a smile on her face at my response.

  “You want some bourbon?”

  “I’m fifteen.”

  “What’s your point?”

  After one faded flower teacup full of bourbon, I was drunk. Ruth drank triple that and seemed totally fine, considering she was asking me what books I was reading in English class, whereas I was trying to focus my vision while wondering who I could possibly persuade via text to take my make-out virginity.

  “What are you reading?”

  “The Turn of the Screw.”

  “Good one. Classic. Sexual repression, ghosts—what’s your teacher’s name?”

  “Mr. Radford.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Uh, young.” I thought. “Enthusiastic.”

  “You should do him!” She said it with the same tone of wholesome encouragement you’d use to say You should do yoga! or You should visit Lake Placid!

  “What?!”

  “Don’t look at me like that. Every great writer has ‘turned the screw’ with a professor. Obviously it would be better if his balls hung a little lower, if he was older, more established, but . . .” She shrugged.

  “Jesus Christ. Ew. Also, I’m not a—don’t call me that.”

  “A what? A writer?”

  I nodded.

  “Why not?”

  “It feels weird.”

  “It’s supposed to feel weird. If it didn’t, that would be a problem.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “You want some more bourbon?”

  Later that month, I finished my social studies assignment, which was honest to a fault (I got a B- and a Please see me after class, with “please” underlined thrice), but I stuck around to help with the garden, and Ruth and I have been friends ever since.

  “You’re really wasting your energy worrying about this,” Ave informs me as she highlights some boring crap in her calc textbook. “Guys are like H&M tops to Ashley. Next week he’ll be in the Goodwill bin, and my parents will yell at her for insisting she’d wear it forever and being so wasteful with their money.”

  I shake my head, gritting my teeth as I yank out the stubborn weeds congesting Ruth’s zinnias. “It’s because he’s special and she knows it.”

  Ave makes a noise.

  “Um, yes?”

  “All I’m saying is, Ashley has horrible taste,” Avery tentatively begins as I sweat all over Ruth’s tea roses. “I mean, Kevin Rice? Hello?”

  Ruth furrows her brow. “Who’s Kevin Rice?”

  “A tool,” Ave and I say simultaneously.

  “No. This is a tool.” Ruth holds up her spade. “I don’t know how either of you expect to get into good colleges if you can communicate only in street.”

  “Sorry, in street?” I say, aghast. “Tell me, then—what is the appropriate word?”

  “Asshole,” Ruth incants sagely and turns back to her petunias.

  “Scarlett, maybe Ashley liking him is an indication that he sucks.”

  “Inconceivable.”

  “You only quote The Princess Bride when you’re afraid I’m right.”

  “You’re dismissed. The real question is, why would he even like her? Aside from looking like a Hollister model and getting perfect grades”—I wilt a little but continue—“her whole personality is put on.”

  Ruth shrugs, relighting the last of her J. “Sure. It’s usually a phase. Girls figure out what boys want, they do it for a while, then they stop. Trust me, I used to see it every year when I was teaching.”

  “If she knows what boys want, I wish she’d tell me,” Ave mumbles under her breath, then trills sardonically, “As my parents would say, we’ve both been ‘blessed with our own gifts’! Here’s mine”—she points to her head—“and here’s hers.” She pantomimes big boobs, then instantly looks guilty and stops talking. That’s what happens whenever she rags on Ashley to me.

  “I don’t know.” I sigh. “She’s not entirely devoid of person-ality. She just fakes being all awkward and shy and nerdy. Maybe it’s just what guys want now. Fake-awkward. She pretends to not know what she’s doing when she’s doing it.”

  Avery reluctantly nods.

  “But that’s what I mean,” says Ruth. “You’re genuine. There’s no artifice in you.”

  “Often to your own detriment, bro,” mumbles Ave. I glare at her. She looks away innocently.

  “You’re not the way you are and you don’t talk the way you talk because you think that’s what other people want from you.” Ruth shrugs. “It’s better. If you keep acting a certain way just because guys—or anyone—want you to, you’ll regret it.”

  “It’s like she’s intentionally trying to make things—oh my GOD.” I drop my rake, struck with a massive realization.

  “Are you okay?” Ave asks, alarmed.

  “I’m Anne Hathaway and she’s Jennifer Lawrence!" I exclaim.

  They both look at me like I’m insane.

  “No, hear me out. Anne Hathaway is a celebrity. But she’s a real person—like, nerdy and loud and enthusiastic and excited about stuff, and people think she’s abrasive and they hate her.

  “Whereas Jennifer Lawrence is, like . . . Anne Hathaway 2.0. I mean, she’s the new and improved version. Her PR team COULD make her come off totally perfect. But she’s designed precisely to seem like she’s been programmed with similar ‘real person’ bugs—but in a super-appealing way, nothing too weird or unrelatable or abrasive. She sort of just seems to not give a shit. And everyone loves her because she’s such a ‘normal person,’ even though she’s not. You know?” I proclaim triumphantly. “Well, other than me.”

  There is a long pause.

  Avery rolls her eyes and says, “You are just, like . . . an endless font of bullshit sometimes.”

  “Do those girls go to school with you?” Ruth asks, confused.

  I’m about to reply when my phone signals I’ve received a text. I reach into the back of my shitty gardening jeans and pull it out. It’s from Dawn, and it says: Emergency. Come home right now.

  Chapter 6

  AS I RUN UP THE STAIRS OF OUR HOUSING COMPLEX TWO BY two, a gaggle of eleven-year-old boys start snapping those little dollar-store firecrackers in the parking lot. I flail. They laugh. Mission accomplished.

  We’re not poor, but after people at
school—people whose families have refrigerators with water dispensers and ice makers built into them, or in-ground pools, or houses with an upstairs and a downstairs—started bitching about how the “middle class” is ignored by financial aid packages, I concluded that we are lower-lower middle class. Springsteen class, if you will, although I failed my written driver’s test and therefore have avoided the highway jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive.

  I stick my keys in the door and slam hard against it—it’s always jamming. This time it gives way easily, and I stumble inside. Dawn’s sprawled on the sofa still wearing her baby-blue house-keeping uniform. Bridget Jones’s Diary is on in the background.

  “What is it?” I’m gasping from the running.

  She looks at me and starts sobbing words. All I can make out phonetically is something like, “I JUST, MRAAAAAA.”

  “Whoa, hey, holy shit.” I drop my backpack on the floor and rush over to the sofa. She slides to the very end to make room for me, pushing herself with just her feet the way a kid would, her upper body remaining limp. A half-empty value pack of Twizzlers is tossed on the coffee table, the packaging ripped nearly in half. This is a bad sign, as Twizzlers are her sad food.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, alarmed.

  She continues to cry and shakes her head.

  “Can you . . . try to tell me?”

  These crying jags are frequent enough that I’ve developed an efficient strategy: half Gilmore Girls, half Jeopardy! I’ll take Is It a Guy? for five hundred.

  “Is it a guy?” I ask.

  She nods, her face scrunching up and her eyes squeezing closed. It usually is, although occasionally it’s a work thing, and, in one particularly scary white wine–fueled instance, an “I should have been a better mother” thing. This I could deal with.

  “I thought we agreed to save emergency texts for actual dismemberment,” I joke. She just looks at me. Her makeup has dripped down her face.

  On our tiny TV, Bridget Jones bemoans how fat she is. In the two years since my dad left, I have watched a countless number of these movies with Dawn, but I will never get over how fucked up they are. I wrinkle my nose.