The Adults by Alison Espach

Author:Alison Espach [Espach, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-01-31T22:00:00+00:00

* * *

Daniel confessed to me late one night on my couch that he wanted to get to third with me, that he’s been afraid to unbutton my pants out of fear of how I might react. He was sweaty and red and breathless, like this was a confession he had been holding in all summer long. “You make me feel like I can’t or something,” he said. “Well you can’t,” I said.

I discovered jean shorts that summer. “Daisy Dukes,” my mother called them.

Mr. Basketball and I were better during the summers. The sun made us feel like better people. Before I entered my senior year, Mr. Basketball and I slept together on a real bed nearly every day. Mr. Basketball started to ask me if I would call him Jonathan. I was almost eighteen. “No,” I said. We were in his apartment. We lay on his bed and spent too long next to each other, amazed at how normal touching each other felt out of school. We were just like any two people: we laughed and we slept and we loved each other and when we got hungry, our stomachs growled.

“That’s our stomachs saying hello to each other,” Mr. Basketball said.

“I can’t understand what they are saying,” I said.

“They speak Spanish.”

“I didn’t know my stomach was fluent.”

“Oh, they’re just saying hello. No need to be fluent for that.”

But then high school started again and in the hallways, Mr. Basketball would look at me like I was any of the other students, like I was Janice or Martha or Lillian Biggs, and I would go into the bathroom and cry until it hurt.

People graduated, dyed the underside of their hair pink, cut the legs off their jeans, screamed out windows of cars, drank and drank and drank until Marcy Livingstone got pregnant and made everyone feel guilty for it. I sat on my driveway at home, sober and anxious, waiting for Mr. Basketball to bring me to his apartment.

My mother kept a watchful eye. She found me in a skirt on the stoop and bent down to look at me. “Why are you dressed like that?”

“Dressed like what?” I asked.

“Like that,” she said.

“This doesn’t even go above my knees,” I told her.

“It’s not how short it is. It’s how tight it is. Do you want everyone to see the outline of your crotch?”

“Maybe.”

“Since when do you wear skirts?” she asked, and this did not make me angry as much as it saddened me. I was wearing skirts and this made my mother sad because where could she wear her skirt to? That was what she was asking me, and we both knew that she would never ask it like that and I would never answer her the right way.

My mother sat down next to me and lit a cigarette. “A woman wears skirts when she needs to look pretty. I know this, Emily,” she said.

I could not look at her face. I heard the sound of her cigarette leaving her mouth and felt the trail of smoke reach my nose.

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