Hardly Children by Laura Adamczyk

Author:Laura Adamczyk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

III.

OR, BEFORE GOING OUT, he receives a letter. We see him returning from work, retrieving an envelope from the small, rust-colored box just outside his front door. The envelope is plain and white but asserts its presence for not being a bill—no tiny cellophane window to peek through—and for the name on the front: the man’s own. There is a return address from a Spanish-sounding name of a town in California. It is the only mail this day—the envelope thick and soft, many pages—and he takes it in the house with him, opening it alongside a bottle of beer at his small kitchen table.

The sheets of paper within have been folded into thirds. Dear James, the first page begins. A thick black ink, a decent pen. Looking back to the return address, the man wonders who knows him in California, anywhere near California. The letter instructs James to copy—either by typewriter or by hand—the letter and its accompanying pages, a text written by the letter’s previous recipients, and then to add his own paragraph at the end. He’s to do this three times and send each letter to a different person within three days. The letter’s author—in a boxy, forward-leaning handwriting, neither masculine nor feminine, neither script nor print—goes on to detail the fates of previous recipients who did not follow the instructions. A woman in Ohio was strangled by her husband of fifteen years, he having accused her of cheating. A boy, a teenager, took his dog for a walk in the forest preserve a mile from his house; the collie returned two days later without him. Car wrecks on long stretches of night highway without another vehicle for miles; allergic reactions; sudden, previously unknown medical maladies; amnesia. The man has never been a member of a team, has always been wary of groupthink and anything that involves a number of people doing the same thing at the same time: school choir, church, disco. More something his superstitious wife would be into. He flips to the next page. Above a solid block of text, in the same pen as the first page, hangs the title: An Old Story. In some versions, he keeps reading.

In the movie version, the wife is a crone, a controlling, uncaring woman whom we want to not only see left but also shamed, made to realize the ways she’s failed. If only she had been kinder, the man’s car wouldn’t have broken down. The wife’s hair is stringy and limp, her eyes the insensate gray of the drugged. She barely lifts her gaze from the boxy television as the man leaves the house, goes back to watching a made-for-TV movie, a woman with long, glossy hair found dead, bent and angular, in an alley. It makes it easier, in this same version, for the man sitting in the theater—after having sat for too long, after having given the woman too much time to walk away from the small, old theater—to finally rise, rush up the dark aisle through the lobby’s soft, buttery light, and out into the now-damp chill of evening.

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