Girls of a Certain Age by Maria Adelmann

Author:Maria Adelmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

The temperature was dropping. Or maybe I was just cold because I wasn’t running anymore. I tried to stop thinking about Dylan. I tried to just be mindful, a skill I was learning from a meditation podcast. Or was trying to learn between advertisements for box subscriptions, where you get overpriced samples of snacks and clothes delivered directly to your door. I was supposed to think about what my body parts were feeling, but this usually led me into a panic, because I’d focus a lot on my teeth, which were always on the brink of decay. This time, though, I skipped the teeth entirely and went right to my hands, which were holding on to the tree so tightly that they were starting to ache. I gave each a rest in turn, shaking out one hand and then the other. The bark had left an imprint on my skin that I watched fade as I bent my fingers back and forth.

A voice, suddenly, was calling out to me: “Excuse me! Hello!” I flung my head toward the town house—whoever was yelling, I was in their lawn.

It was a woman with a white fluff of hair. She stood in the open doorway, two stories of house and a pointed roof and a blue sky pitched below her.

Behind her, papers were scattered on her ceiling, which was now the floor, and a wooden table was legs up, like a dead bug. A bald man bounced into view, like an astronaut on the moon. He seemed to be enjoying himself. “Mass and distance!” I heard him shouting. “Mass and distance!”

“Are you okay?” the woman called. I envied that she was able to sound concerned while yelling. Sometimes I had difficulty establishing appropriate volume and tone during conversations, especially with people I didn’t know. “Just be yourself,” Dylan had recommended. But what if I already was just being myself?

Just be yourself? I had written on the list. Then I’d scribbled out the question mark. Later, when reviewing the list, I put it back in.

“Fine, thanks,” I croaked back to the woman, too quietly, then louder and too aggressively: “Yes! Thanks!”

“Would you like to come in?” the woman called.

I made an awkward little laughing noise, because this seemed impossible, because I was sitting in a tree about twenty feet from this woman’s front door. I opened my mouth and closed it again, trying and failing to think of an appropriate response.

“Hold on!” she shouted, and then she closed the door and disappeared. I waited in the tree, trying to be mindful about my body, except not my hands or my teeth.

Just as I began to wonder if the woman had been a figment of my imagination, her door swung open and she reappeared, a thick hemp rope clutched in her fist. I had to wonder what sort of person just happened to have a length of rope on hand. Then I thought of what might befall me if I stayed outside: nightfall, hypothermia, starvation, floating into oblivion.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.