Girls of a Certain Age

by Maria Adelmann

  “Who is the man in the relationship?” my father likes to ask.

  “Relationship?” I say. “No one,” I say, but it’s not true. There are men at every turn.

  Sometimes Grace closes her eyes, her pale neck extended across a pillow, half of her mouth in a paralyzed smile, and she looks as delicate and beautiful as a swan. I sweep my hair like a feather duster across Grace’s stomach. I nuzzle my face in the valley of her small breasts. I feel the bumps of bone beneath her collar, little sand ridges at low tide. Does it count when you get what you want but you have to share?

  I have a rare meeting in Manhattan, so I plan a lunch with Darren and Grace. I sometimes forget what Manhattan is like in daylight, all of those black, pointy heels and women made of elbows and knees.

  I find Grace asleep in her blue cubicle with her head on her desk. She’s wearing a black sleeveless baby doll dress even though it’s below freezing. Grace’s limbs seem almost fake, as if the dress is mostly there to cover up plastic, rotating joints.

  “Grace?” I say.

  Grace lifts her head and looks up at me, dazed from sleep. “What are you doing here?” she asks.

  “Lunch,” I remind her.

  “I’m not that hungry,” she says.

  On Grace’s monitor, a Google-searched image of a beautiful woman in a white sports bra and black spandex shorts. “Look at the abs on that chick,” says Grace. “You could punch her right in the stomach.”

  “You know,” I say, “you’ve always looked good to me.” I reach out to tuck a loose hair behind her ear, but she flinches before I get there.

  “Don’t,” she says, her eyes darting around.

  I wake up in the middle of the night, and Grace is not in bed. I think I hear her in the kitchen, and I’m relieved she might be eating. I tiptoe to the bedroom door without turning on the light, opening it a crack to listen.

  “It’s like a little bramble patch,” I hear her say. “It’s like sticking your tongue in a little wet, mossy cave.” I want to turn away, but my feet feel pasted to the floor. “I guess the part that’s different is the emptiness, like a ring without a finger or two puzzle pieces that just won’t fit. There’s no hope of ever being fulfilled.” My stomach turns, a hot acid travels up my throat and into my mouth, and I swallow it back down. I don’t know how I know, but I know: she is talking to my father. It takes a moment for me to realize that he probably thinks he’s talking to me.

  I should go out there and break some chairs. I should smash one over Grace’s head. I should be mad enough to wake the neighbors. But I feel more heart-sunk than angry. My mouth tastes sour. It’s the same betrayal again and again: Grace has never wanted me without wanting something else on the other side of me.

  I feel my own desolation acutely, as if she has already left, as if I have already watched from the second-story window as her possessions trail out in reverse order of their arrival: the throng of chairs, the peeling table, the cherry bed, the pink-sheeted mattress, her small body. My bed, the kitchen, the closet: empty again. Equilibrium is impossible, I think. You’re either bursting at the seams or desolate.

  I picture my father sitting in the dark at the head of the dining room table, the phone to his ear. It’s a long mahogany table with four chairs lined up on one side, part of his half of the furniture. He is looking out through the doorway into the vast, black emptiness of the foyer, the living room. He’ll never get new furniture—where would it fit? The floors are already filled with sun-bleached stains, bright as crime scene tape, marking off each thing that is missing.

  The Replacements

  I watched from behind the screen door’s dirty frame as Jay hauled the body up the dusty driveway toward the house, sweating and wailing as he did, his face red to match his bloody hands. The dog looked giant and heavy in Jay’s thin, muscled arms. “Flower,” Jay whispered, nuzzling up close to Flower’s furry brow so that blood streaked Jay’s nose. “And you, Leanne,” he added without looking at me. “You.”

  “He ran into the pickup,” I repeated quietly. “He ran right into me.”

  Jay pushed the screen door open hard with his heavy brown boot, sending it screeching and convulsing into the dented wall as I jumped out of the way. He walked to the threshold between the kitchen and family room and kneeled down like a man in prayer, placing Flower so that half of him lay on the linoleum floor and the other half on the thinly worn carpet. “Look!” Jay snarled. “Look what you did!” They lay there together like a pair of lovers, Jay’s head nestled between Flower’s shoulders, below his flattened head.

  I slunk down into the spring-dead gray couch so Jay couldn’t see me over the back. I was shaking, my heart knocking in my chest. A terrible, electric energy pulsed through me, adrenaline mixed with exhaustion, a strange sweet-and-sour sensation, like insomnia or nostalgia or a ghost-shiver on a hot day.

  Jay stood up. His gray-black reflection widened and distorted in the old tube TV as he approached. The blood rushed out of my face, and I pressed my body hard into the back of the couch. In the TV I could see his wild teary eyes. He extended his tongue lizard-like to lick his dry lips.

  “You never wanted him, not ever!” Jay shouted, standing in front of me now, pointing one arm violently toward Flower as the other one scratched at his neck, streaking it in pink lines. Veins jutted from his outstretched arm. His face was crazy with sweat and tears. The blood across his nose had dried into a red-brown streak. For weeks now, when he became angry, I would imagine something awful happening to him, the vein in his arm suddenly popping, the blood spurting from his body.

  “Look!” he yelled, his arm pointing over and over again. “Look at him!”

  I didn’t move, not until I saw that look on his face, a cruel grimace, like a cartoon villain gathering energy from the atmosphere so lightning bolts could shoot out of his fingertips, and I curled over into myself automatically as I saw Jay’s leg winding back…

  “He’s not the man I married,” women always say, but that wasn’t the problem. It was more that while I hadn’t meant to end up with Jay, I hadn’t meant not to either. It’s just what happens when you fall in love with someone in high school, someone rugged and brooding with dark hair and grease-stained hands and parents as absent as yours, someone who stays after school to help you with your bio homework, who spends an hour perfecting your father’s jerky handwriting so you can get out of having a tire-tug face-off with Haley Nowak in fourth period gym class, whose voice in your ear is a warm tickle that says things you’ve never heard before, not from anyone, and whose stinging slap feels like love too, in a way, warm and passionate, and for a while the balance between good and bad is weighted in your favor.

  Recently, I’d found stuck under the fridge, among beer can tabs and dust bunnies, an old photo of Jay and me, a candid one from prom not a half decade before. In the picture, Jay is handsome, wearing the crown he had just been voted into and a white button-down with sleeves rolled to the elbows. He is lifting me up slightly, like a prize, my feet an inch off the ground, the fabric of my shiny red dress bright and glistening where his fingers grab around my waist. As I looked at the photo on my sweaty haunches in the kitchen, my bare feet sticky on the floor, the broom handle still shoved halfway under the fridge and the dustpan in my hand, I understood, for the first time, my own expression in the photo. My eyes are wide with shock—not that Jay had won, but that the person who had won was the same person who had chosen me.

  But what had I chosen? Looking at that picture was like staring at myself from across a canyon. Back then, I thought the future expanded out around me in every direction. I thought the choice could be mine and mine again. But the ground had cracked at my feet, and it was the strangest feeling now, to look across the abyss, having arrived on some other side without ever having picked a direction at all.

  Jay’s steel-toe boot blew into my shin. A sharp pain echoed out through my leg like a crack spreading across ice, and I jerked my head to the ceiling in a silent howl, my
leg jumping into my own cradling hands.

  “Look,” Jay said through gritted teeth, clawing into my forearm with his blood-dried fingers, dragging me to Flower, my aching leg dragging behind me, dead weight.

  “Do you see?” he whined as we stood over him. “Do you see what you’ve done?”

  I saw. I had already seen. I could see Flower’s cracked skull through the broken skin on the top of his head, dirty white between smears of red-brown blood.

  He let go of me, stepped over Flower, and stomped to the fridge. The places on my arm where his fingers had been were round and white, tiny faces staring up at me in terror. My throbbing leg felt like some separate being, a creature I was telepathically connected to and wanted to console.

  Jay guzzled down the last tallboy in the fridge. My stomach growled as the sweating silver can glinted in the white-hot midmorning light like a piece of jewelry. When he finished, he threw the can clattering into the sink and then readied his hand on the screen door’s thin black handle, head bowed. He stood there for a minute and then slowly raised his head, turning it toward me snakelike on his long, pink neck, eyes narrowed into slits. I knew he was just like Flower, that he could smell fear.

  He looked me up and down slowly, his face bewildered and disfigured by disgust. Then his face went flat, and he seemed too exhausted to come up with anything original. “You’re getting fat as fuck anyway,” he said lamely, which was true, though Jay didn’t know a thing about it, and he left, the screen door hitting the frame violently and echoing behind him.

  I moved toward it automatically, flipping the steel-hook latch into its eye, and then watched the light flash in and out of the new dent in the old blue pickup truck as Jay zoomed in reverse out the driveway and then shot backward into the street, crunched into forward gear, and hurtled off high speed into the horizon.

  I collapsed back on the couch and inspected my shin. The skin had risen like dough into the bruised shape of a baby mouse. There was no ice in the freezer, and nothing else for that matter. The fridge was even emptier than when I’d left this morning to get the milk. I kept the door open for a minute, closing my eyes as if facing a breeze, until the fridge’s hum turned into a buzz and then quieted completely.

  I slammed the door. I felt hollow with hunger. I stalked the kitchen for something to eat: empty cupboards, crumbs at the bottoms of empty bags. I found a bright red can of warm Coke. The hot fizz stung as it snapped down my throat. In the heat, the green and yellow floral paper that lined the cupboards was peeling off at the corners. Maybe I was peeling off at the corners too. My stomach somersaulted and growled. Flies circled around Flower’s bloody head.

  The first time I saw Flower, his head was sticking out the passenger window of the blue truck, his pointy tongue swinging out behind him. He had been named Flower at the pound, and Jay thought it was funny so he never changed it. To Jay I had always said, “If it came to Flower or me, I know who you’d choose.” He chose Flower when he didn’t ask me to go to the pound with him, didn’t ask if I wanted a dog in the first place. He chose Flower when he spent the money we didn’t have on shots, name-brand food, plastic toys that would be ripped to pieces, strewn around the house, and then eaten by the vacuum cleaner that would break because of it. He chose Flower every time the dog parted his black lips into a freakish, snarling smile that revealed his sharp, bone-white teeth, teeth that first bit me on the arm one cold winter morning when I bent down to refill his water bowl.

  “Part pit bull, part German shepherd,” Jay had said as if I should have known better. “These dogs can smell fear. These dogs eat babies.” This was what he said as the blood spread out across the paper towel I held over my arm, the bite deep and stinging. What does fear have to do with eating babies? I wondered, but it was a fact pair I’d heard him repeat proudly ever since, as if these were the only two facts about pit bull–German shepherd mixes, or as if Flower were his son, as if Jay had taught him these very skills.

  I often tiptoed around the house hoping not to be bitten, hoping just to blend in with the walls, but then either Jay’s or Flower’s eyes would meet mine suddenly, shining little spotlights surprised to find something living in the dark. I’d wait quietly, holding my breath, hoping they’d move on.

  My stomach rumbled. “Okay,” I said, looking down at it. “Okay.”

  I tested my bad leg, leaning all of my body weight into it, letting the hard-bone ache expand up into my thigh and down into my toes until I was sure I could bear to walk on it for a distance. Then I slipped on my pink plastic flip-flops and limped down the dusty driveway toward the Pancake Palace.

  I was a regular at the Palace, and for that they made me feel like a queen, always smiling broadly from behind their pink and blue aprons, adding extra bacon and sausage to my plate, bringing me coffee before I even asked for it, in a beige jug with raised lines like soft-serve ice cream. Jay never joined me at the Pancake Palace because he didn’t like breakfast foods. They had other kinds of foods, but I’d never mentioned it.

  The sun was a white-hot fireball. My shoulders sizzled. Sweat seemed to boil out of me, dripping down my face and stinging my eyes. Along the horizon, low gray clouds taunted, but I wasn’t counting on anything. It hadn’t rained in weeks and the grass everywhere had grown brittle and beige, the petals of flowers wilting.

  What good was summer anyway? The past spring had been deep green and mild, and every day after work I’d walk through the bright woods down to the pond a half mile or so behind the house to watch a row of baby geese stream into and out of the water. Their eyes were smooth and shiny as black pearls and when their yellow-brown feathers caught in the afternoon light, they seemed illuminated like saints in old paintings. I followed the geese around and around the pond. Once, when I got too close, the mother stretched her elegant, black neck toward me, and a thick muscle of bright pink tongue pointed out from her hard beak in a breathy hiss. I had never seen a goose’s tongue before. It was fierce and prehistoric-looking, outlined in sharp sawtooth barbs. I admired her, making herself ugly to protect what she loved.

  But I stopped going after that. I was afraid Flower might pick up my scent, nab one of the goslings. Jay would probably encourage him.

  The sun had ticked past midday by the time I pushed open the door to the Pancake Palace, a wave of AC washing over me followed by the sweet scents of bacon and maple syrup. I was exhausted and aching. As my eyes adjusted to the dim interior lights I felt a kind of vertigo, and suddenly I was so sick with hunger I thought I might throw up.

  My favorite waiter, Freddy, rushed over to greet me. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Oh my God, your leg!” He put his hand to his mouth, and then thought quickly to remove it. “What happened?”

  “You just can’t imagine,” I said.

  He led me past the rows of pink and blue vinyl booths to my regular seat in the far corner, glancing back at me frequently, as if to be sure I hadn’t collapsed. The walls were hand-painted with little vignettes from fairy tales: Little Miss Muffet eating grits under the menacing glare of a spider, Hansel and Gretel standing before a house made of sausage and eggs, the dark shadow of a pointed hat in the window, their childish faces distorted with giant eyes and teeth as square as Post-it notes.

  I fell into the seat, then slid on my sweat into the corner and leaned my head against the wall. Right away, Freddy brought me ice water and coffee and three pieces of sausage and a foam take-out container full of ice for my leg. I gulped the ice water down, holding the straw out of the way with my finger, and then I was into the sausage. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m starving.”

  Freddy stood over me smiling. “I hoped you’d come by soon,” he said. “I wanted to tell you: this is my last week. I’m moving, to New York.” He said it like an apology. My heart got heavy, and I opened my menu in front of my face even though I knew what I wanted. When people from here went to New York, they came back in a week or never at all. I thought of always having Sandra B or Sandra S or Erin waiting on me.r />
  I forced a smile. “I should’ve saved up for a big tip,” I said. “You moving up there by yourself?”

  “Just me. My retriever is staying here, with my mom.”

  “I bet you’ll miss her,” I said, though I didn’t know if I meant the dog or the mom. I examined Freddy’s face from behind my menu. It was cartoonishly round, pale and smooth, but with an angular nose that didn’t match the rest of him. “It’s the right thing, to leave her,” I said. “A dog shouldn’t live cooped up in a tiny apartment like that.”

  Pretty soon Freddy was setting plates before me: scrambled eggs, hash browns, pancakes, bacon, sausage, all of them shining with grease. The Ultra Big Breakfast. As I ate, I watched Freddy talking to Sandra—I couldn’t remember which one or make out her name tag. He touched her gently on the shoulder, and I wondered if they’d been together, if she wanted him to go or stay.

  I ate everything. I even poured blueberry syrup on my last piece of toast. I felt huge and full, as if I could roll back home. After a while, Freddy came over with a little tent of a check, and I knew that as soon as he put it down, the only thing left to do would be to pay and go home. Before I could think, I was grabbing Freddy’s arm and talking like a woman possessed. “I can give you another kind of tip,” I said, and I raised my eyebrows slightly, half to be sure he understood and half in shock at my own boldness.