Adults and Other Children by Miriam Cohen

Author:Miriam Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IG Publishing
Published: 2019-02-15T16:00:00+00:00

LITTLE HIPPO

The academics’ children are all bizarre. Reading already at four, siblings who say, the one to the other, “Let’s do teamwork,” and clean up without being asked. They are all dressed in colors that don’t match. Elizabeth has moved to town only recently, with her son, Philip, and her husband, Andrew. Philip, her little puppet, immediately doesn’t fit in. They are right now at potluck, where the food is five-cheese macaroni and cheese, asparagus fresh from the Farmer’s Market. Stews of all sorts. Philip is standing before a family’s pet dog (a rescue; a mixed breed). He has pulled down his pants. “I have a tail, too,” he says, his button penis on delighted display.

“Philip,” Elizabeth says, but she can’t keep the laughter from her voice.

Andrew is very disappointed in her, he says, when they’re back home. He’s the academic. They’re living here because of him. She should try harder, he says. She could at least give it a chance. He thinks the people here are quite nice, actually.

Elizabeth’s title, while they are here, is “spouse.”

It’s not as though she does nothing with her time, though. She plays the piano. She reads books. She has Philip.

“Come on,” she says. “It was funny.”

“It was embarrassing,” he says. “Those people are my colleagues.”

“Not all of them are your colleagues,” Elizabeth says. “Some of them are spouses.”

“Terrific,” Andrew says. “That’s just great. Okay?”

“You used to think I was funny,” she says. “You used to think Philip was funny.”

“Well, that’s not baiting me at all.”

He thinks he’s being baited? Now Elizabeth can’t help herself.

“I guess it really is true,” she says, savoring the cliché she’s about to lob, “that a leopard never changes—”

“His diaper,” Philip finishes.

And Andrew does laugh. They both laugh. They’re so ridiculous. What are they doing, fighting? They’re on an adventure, the three of them. They’re in the middle of nowhere; isn’t it romantic.

Elizabeth joins a sewing class. There are only two other people in the class, both women, but the teacher is a man. He has long, elegant hands. Piano hands. Elizabeth asks him if he also knows how to play.

“To play?” he says.

“No, an instrument.” Elizabeth plays an imaginary piano and is so embarrassed. She hates it when she acts like this.

“Does a needle count as an instrument?” he says. His smile curls up like an old-fashioned mustache.

She just, she says. She didn’t mean.

He puts his hand on her shoulder, and it stays there, heavy as cement. She doesn’t need to be so worried, he says.

It’s just sewing, he says.

Their task, this first day, is to get to know each other. They sit in a tiny, awkward half-circle. The woman to Elizabeth’s right is a nun; the woman to her left has brought her infant in a snuggly. The baby is a little girl, with paper eyelids and small lips that make a heart. The nun’s name is Sister Josephine. The woman with the baby is Margret. The baby is Violet.

“How old?” Elizabeth asks.

“Sixty-seven, if I am a day,” says Sister Josephine.

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