Girls of a Certain Age

by Maria Adelmann

  But I didn’t elaborate because I knew where compliments could lead, and it wasn’t a place I wanted Wendy to go, not with me, at least. I clasped my hands together like my mother used to tell me to do when I was little, when I couldn’t seem to prevent myself from getting into trouble.

  When I picture my mom, I picture her above me, a shadow, hovering or holding me, scolding or comforting me after I’d done something wrong. A golden cross always rested on the flat plain above her breasts. That cross often swung above my head like a pendulum as my mother leaned over me, or was clutched in my fist, the tall point rising between my fingers, warm from her chest and surprisingly sturdy for something so thin.

  My mother, so kind and patient, and still I had discarded everything she had ever given me, my name and the lessons she had taught me, how to sew and sift flour, how to braid my own hair and say the Lord’s Prayer: And lead us not into temptation…

  I was buzzed on tequila, standing outside a bar off College Ave that had once let me in with a fake ID identifying me as a race I am not with a color hair I don’t have. It was newly dark and a little cool, and I was smashing a cigarette under the toe of my sneaker, feeling smugly proud of myself—that I’d more or less shown restraint: a few shots of tequila, one cigarette, still relatively early, time to go home—when Wendy walked by, looking down at something in her hands, not noticing me, the skirt of her dress flowing along below her purple backpack like flowers in the wind.

  “Hey,” I yelled. She stopped, turned, waved, walked back to me. The moon was as round as a quarter, and under it Wendy’s curls glistened. “Your hair looks nice,” I said. She smiled down at the ground as I moved my foot forward to cover the cigarette. “You at the library?” I asked. “Until now?”

  “Flash cards,” she said, holding up a stack of colored index cards. I squinted in hopes of making out that bubbly handwriting I liked so much, but all I could see was a blur. I counted in my head how much I’d drunk, little shot glasses floating over a fence like sheep: one, two, three, et cetera—it was hard to say, but it seemed like they’d all caught up with me.

  “What are they for?” I asked.

  “Our class,” she said. I stared at her dumbly, and her face went serious. “For the test tomorrow. I told you.”

  “Shit,” I said before I could stop myself. I tried to remember whether or not we’d reviewed the syllabus together that week. “Can we go through them?”

  “Now?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, and you could say I didn’t know what I was doing, but I am often both stupider and not as stupid as I seem.

  Wendy looked down at her flash cards and then up at me, as if she had to choose between us. I tried to stand steady. “All right,” she said. “All right, yes. I live right over here.”

  She lived a few blocks from the bar. We walked up a dark stairwell where peeling paint revealed layers of rejected colors all the way down to fifties mint green. The wooden stairs were creaky, like some animal was under there moaning in pain every time we took a step.

  “Why doesn’t someone get these stairs fixed?” I asked.

  “They’re just creaky,” said Wendy. But this wasn’t the kind of place Wendy was supposed to be living in, with stairs you could probably fall through into an apartment below, some drug dealer’s lair for all anyone knew.

  Her apartment, a studio, was much nicer than the stairway, and I knocked on the wall as if from this action I could decipher something about structural soundness. A rickety-looking round table was covered in opened textbooks, stray papers, a mess of pens, a plate covered in crumbs and deflated grapes. Her beige linoleum kitchen was stacked with precarious towers of dirty plates, bowls, and mugs. Several posters, including van Gogh’s sunflowers, were tacked right into the wall with red and blue pushpins.

  The main event of the room, though, was perfectly organized and, I thought, the best representation of Wendy herself: a futon folded out into a bed with a multicolored floral comforter and two matching pillows, a collection of stuffed animals nestled between and in front of them, arranged by height, with the smallest, not more than five inches high, sitting at the very front. They were all staring off into space with hard black plastic eyes and soft threaded smiles.

  I sat on the floor across from Wendy, running my finger up and around the knots in the wood, trying not to look at her. But even from that position I could still see her knees tucked under her, white and smooth, the snowy peaks of two mountains. I watched her delicate fingers pick a word from the tall rainbow of flash cards, listened to her soft voice as she read aloud. The cards were all about how a baby attaches to its mother, how that’s some kind of template for the future, like if you don’t give a shit if your mother leaves you alone in a playroom when you’re two you’re fucked for life, and you’ll never give a shit when anyone leaves you in the future. As if life could be boiled down to one variable.

  I didn’t want to look up at Wendy’s face because I knew what that would come to, and even as I didn’t look at her face, I knew that I was simply delaying the inevitable. I knew a lot of things about the future. I knew that I should leave, for example, but I also knew that I wouldn’t, not unless Wendy asked me to, and in a way I hoped she would.

  “Hey, you okay?” Wendy asked, tapping me on the knee.

  I looked up at her and nodded. Her curls, her pink cheeks, her pink lips: a porcelain doll. Something flashed through my mind, something my mom had always said, that I was like a bull in a china shop. Don’t touch now, baby, echoed through my head.

  But I always did.

  I swirled my pointer finger down the length of one of Wendy’s curls. She put her fingers around her flash cards, realigning them. I saw her lips turn up in a little smile that she wanted to keep to herself. I put my finger under her chin. She was warm, pulsing with energy, like a child or a star, but she didn’t move. I kissed her. “I shouldn’t do this,” I said, but my hand was already working through the buttons in the rosebush of her dress. My hand was shaking. “You shouldn’t let me do this.” Her chest was blinding white. I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see. It was like undressing a doll. I was vibrating, my whole body. She put her hands under my shirt, spreading her fingers out over my bare back and down my sides like a waterfall. I kissed her neck. She was right there, under my tongue: Wendy.

  Wendy led me to the bed. It unnerved me a little, how naturally she did this. I took off my clothes, even though I was feeling self-conscious, which was weird, because I’d done this a million times, even with girls who were kind of gross, girls with missing front teeth and meth problems and BO. She pushed all of the stuffed animals off the bed in one giant sweep, then lay on her back. With the stuffed animals all sprawled across the floor, the whole place was a disaster.

  I started kissing her, working my way down, but nothing felt right, nothing felt natural. The stuffed animals that had landed faceup—teddy bears and monkeys and a goddamn pink caterpillar—were all staring at me. Their mouths were spread into thin, knowing smiles, like they had been taught the facts of life a long time ago. They had eyes like the Mona Lisa.

  I wanted to leave. I heard Wendy saying, “Hey, hey,” in a voice like a mother patting her crying baby on the back. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. I figured one of us better finish fast, so I abandoned the task of getting Wendy off and just went at it for my own pleasure.

  When I was done, I peeled my sweaty body off her and began collecting my clothes from the floor. I couldn’t look at her. “I have to go,” I said, jamming my arm through the hole of my T-shirt and flipping it over my head. The radiators were making violent, hammering sounds now, like the moaning creature under the stairs had clambered up through the pipes and was trying to get in. It had gotten hot, so hot it was hard to breathe. “Sorry,” I added.

  Wendy looked down over the edge of the bed, and I was afraid of the expression I’d see when she turned back toward me: dimpleless cheeks, jutting lip, eyebrows bent up in sorrow, all because I was an a
sshole.

  But when Wendy turned back toward me, her face was dimpleless, yes, but not pained either, not even stoically expressionless. It was just a face completing a task, which had been to grab her underwear from over the side of the bed and slither back into them. She was composed, but not overly or showily. It was like she had expected me to be awful, and she didn’t even care.

  I slipped my sneakers on without untying them, the backs bent under my heels. “I have to go,” I said again, dumbly.

  “One sec,” she said, and she pulled at the sheet from under the wrinkled comforter, to untuck it from the bottom of the bed, then stood up and wrapped herself in it, and for the first time, in the dim light of the messy room, she could have been any other girl on campus and it made my fucking heart want to crawl into some safer location.

  She followed me as I shuffled to the door in my sneakers. “Test at nine, remember?” she said, as if we were just parting ways at the lecture hall.

  As soon as she closed the door, I sprinted down the moaning stairs, my toes clawing into the fronts of my sneakers so they wouldn’t come off. I started walking up the dark sidewalk, chilly because I hadn’t brought a jacket. I fished around in my jeans pockets for some pharmaceuticals. That would have been another good reason to have brought my jacket: more pockets. I took whatever I found without even looking, chewing the stuff, letting the bitter taste spread out across my tongue.

  I stopped back at the bar, where I’d begun the night hours before, and had a few shots. I felt far-off again, the way I liked it, myself once removed, like I was controlling a character in a first-person video game. The bar was a dive, all dark wood lacquered in years of beer spills, so the tables and seats were always sticky, and it seemed like no one was ever in there but regulars until it was late, and then wasted college kids came in, like this gaggle of girls in blue-sequined shirts piling in, probably from some themed party. Even in the low light of the bar, their shirts sparkled across the walls like disco balls. Two of the girls were a couple, one of them with big eyes and jet-black hair, the other plain and stiff. They made out in the corner while some townie at the bar cheered them on.

  A little later, Big Eyes sidled up next to me to order a beer, and I wrapped my hands around her waist and flung her out into the open space of the bar and started dancing and she giggled and said, “What are you even doing?” I put my cheek to her cheek, the way they dance in old movies, and maybe I tried to kiss her. Then I left.

  As soon as I stepped back out into the night, the door hardly out of my hand, I felt a hard tap on my shoulder, and almost by the time I turned around, or at least by the time my vision caught up with the turn, I had already been punched in the eye, a knuckle-cracking whammy followed by a tirade I didn’t try to decipher and probably couldn’t have because I was too fucked up. My vision tunneled into a pinpoint of black and then expanded out again.

  I stumbled backward against the brick wall and then sank down to sit on the sidewalk. The upper-left quadrant of my face ached with heat. I seemed to have been holding my breath, and I let it out all in one puff.

  The gaggle of girls gathered in a shimmering blue cloud to try to talk down Big Eyes’s girlfriend, who wanted to punch me again. I tried to wink at Big Eyes, but my left eye wouldn’t open. Out here in the dark, her eyes were less big. In fact, her whole face seemed different, uglier. People never really were who you wished them to be, were they?

  The girls floated down the sidewalk together, glancing back at me with pitying half smiles. For a while, I could still hear their voices echoing into the night, and then it was silent save the low buzz of buildings. I lay down on the cold sidewalk and closed the eye that still worked, smiling to myself. I’d never been punched in the face before, believe it or not. It felt good, it felt like justice.

  The Wayside

  “It’s not just the words, it’s the attitude: the excitement you bring to the house and the people who lived here. You have to start animated and you have to keep that energy going the whole way through. For example—” He paused for a moment, his finger on his lips, and then put on his tour guide face: eyes wide, mouth stretched into an impossible smile. “Welcome to the Wayside. I’m your tour guide, James.” I thought the smile might pop off his face. “The tour should take approximately one half hour, and I’ll be available to answer any questions you have up to a half hour after the tour is over.”

  He paused and relaxed, still smiling. “Sort of like that,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve got it, May. You catch on fast.”

  “Yeah, you keep saying I’ve got it, but you haven’t let me do a tour yet,” I said, brushing my hair back with my hand for the millionth time that day. It was the summer between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college, a humid New England summer that made my hair puff out so that I was constantly pinning or brushing it back despite the low success rate of such tactics.

  “You’re almost ready,” he said, “and I think you only need a few more tours before we give you a run.”

  “But,” I said, “I can do it after that?”

  We had a war going on between “and”s and “but”s, or, at least, I had a war going on between “and”s and “but”s. James believed “but” was a negative word that subtracted positive meaning from the first part of the sentence, and therefore he rarely used it. He would say things like, “You’re doing a great job entering data into the computer and when you file my papers I can’t seem to find them.”

  To counter his irrational elimination of “but,” I used it as frequently as possible in places where it was completely unnecessary: “I really like oranges,” I’d say during lunch break, “but I really like apples.” I’d never dared to play such a game with my teachers, and maybe I only had the courage to play it now because I knew he wouldn’t get angry—his smile rarely disappeared, as if a parenthesis had been tattooed below his nose.

  This was the first time I’d been employed as anything besides a babysitter, and I was unprepared for such thorough and personal training. By the end of my first week, I felt as if I’d been at the Wayside for half the summer. I arrived at work each morning preemptively exhausted to find James smiling absurdly, eager to start. His mouth was frog-like: broad and slightly protruding, his lips long, thin, and pink. I wondered which came first, his smile or the shape of his mouth. He was lean and clean-shaven, wore thin silver-rimmed spectacles that nearly matched his silvering hair. I imagined that each morning, after sit-ups and egg whites, he stood barefoot on a white-tiled bathroom floor, shaving carefully, a pile of lather falling into an impossibly white sink.

  What I’d really wanted was a job at the Orchard, the historic site next door, where Louisa May Alcott had written Little Women and also where my best friend, Julie, worked. The Wayside and the Orchard couldn’t have been more different. The Wayside seemed charming from the outside: a creamy house with green shutters, a wraparound porch, and an extra room that jutted from the roof alongside three pink chimneys. The Orchard was just a big box with long dark brown siding in the typical old–New England fashion.

  But inside, the Orchard was bright and cheery, as if the little women could come tumbling down the stairs at any moment. The Wayside, on the other hand, was so dreary inside it looked like a set for a murder mystery. It was cold, even in the summer, with bile green carpets and drawn shades that made every day seem overcast and dull. The Wayside’s star was Nathaniel Hawthorne, though it had also housed two other notable writers—children’s author Margaret Sidney and Louisa May Alcott herself. Famous people had been all over the property, and it was briefly a stop on the Underground Railroad.

  On my first Friday at work, James and I waited around to see if anyone would arrive at the visitors’ center for the final tour of the week. Or he waited for another tour, and I waited for the end of the day. The visitors’ center was a small building located thirty feet from the Wayside. Here books were sold, tours began, and life-size plaster statues of each author stood silently before displ
ays of old pictures and famous quotes.

  James finished sweeping, leaned his broom against the wall, and then sat in a chair beside me. “What are your aspirations?” he asked. I almost laughed.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Writing?” he asked, nodding toward the plaster authors.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Not writing.” I sensed disappointment, though it’s hard to say why since he was wearing his usual smile.

  “You can do anything at your age,” he said, “and I still believe I can do anything at mine. It’s all a matter of enough time, and you have yet to worry about that.”

  But I did, in a way, have to worry about that. I was seventeen—not exactly a child, but not quite an adult. The summer felt like a strange no-man’s-land, and I was trying my best not to consider the before and after that so conspicuously surrounded me.

  Just then, a girl and her mother entered the visitors’ center. “Well, hello!” James said, jumping up as I mustered what I could of a smile.

  James stared at the girl for a moment. She was carrying a notebook and pen. He closed his eyes and hummed. The girl watched to see what would happen next. The mother smiled. James opened his eyes, his smile rubber-banding tight across his face. “It just came to me,” he said. “I have this feeling…this feeling that you must be…you must be a writer!” He paused. “Am I right?”

  The girl giggled and looked at her mother, who motioned for her to respond. “I am a writer,” said the girl. “And and and”—she again looked up at her mother, who encouraged her to go on—“and! I’ve wrote a story and it was in the…in the newspaper!” She said “newspaper” in a whisper, as if it were a secret. James shook his head in amazement. “Wow!” he said. “And how old are you?”

  “Eight years old!” the girl shouted, and I felt a pang of regret for already being too old to be a child prodigy.

  “Well, we’ll need to give you a very special tour of the Wayside,” said James. It took a very special person to give a special tour of the Wayside—it took a very special person to make the Wayside interesting at all, especially with the cheery Orchard mocking us from next door.