Girls of a Certain Age Read online

  When she placed her hands on my shoulders, I realized I was shaking. She straightened her arms and looked at my face in a grandmotherly way, or maybe I was just getting that vibe from the mothy-menthol smell of the house. “There,” she said gently. Like saying, “You’re safe.” Her skin was mottled and wrinkly and her cheeks had a jowly droop, but her eyes looked friendly. Of course, you never knew.

  The woman introduced herself as Rosa. Her husband was Harry.

  “I’m Kesha,” I said even though that’s not my name.

  In the center of the room, a ceiling fan whirred in a circle-blur of brown, and the metal chain pull kept getting swept up over and over again in the blades, clicking in and out and getting stuck again. The pale bulbs in the fan’s tulip-shaped frosted glass shades tilted up from the ground like stage lights, and I made the mistake of looking directly at a bulb, so that even when I looked away, a dark cutout in the shape of a bulb punctured my vision.

  Hanging on the wall—some upside down, some perfectly rotated on their nails—were framed diplomas, a half dozen white porcelain crosses, family photos from the seventies featuring younger versions of Rosa and Harry as well as three smiling kids who, photo by photo, kept growing up. Green shaggy wall-to-wall carpeting, spiked and matted in different spots, was affixed above us. It made me feel as if we were huddled in a mossy cave. Outside, the grass looked like a low, carpeted sky.

  “Would you like something to drink, Kesha?” Rosa asked.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s a good idea to stay hydrated,” Rosa suggested.

  “What the girl needs is a whiskey,” said Harry.

  “Anything is fine,” I offered.

  “Why don’t we get comfortable?” Rosa said after she’d gathered the drinks. “No use waiting around to see what rusts.”

  I helped flip over some furniture. Rosa sat on the dark red velvety couch and I on a mustard-colored love seat that was surprisingly cozy despite the sunken seat. The drinks—OJ for the gals, whiskey for Harry—were served in fancy highball glasses with gold trim, remarkably unchipped after the flip.

  Harry was still up and trying to bounce. He didn’t go very far. Gravity seemed to have settled into its new orientation with its standard Earthly pull. “Perhaps you arrived in the nick of time,” said Rosa. Harry looked like a kid whose balloon had floated away. He slumped down next to Rosa.

  “So, what do we think happened here?” asked Rosa, looking out the window.

  I shrugged at the same time Harry shouted, “This is impossible! If gravity has reversed, then the weight of the air alone…! The oxygen! As the distance between objects decreases, or rather increases…What I mean is, you have to consider the mass…” He was stumbling over his words, angry at himself for not being able to articulate what he couldn’t remember.

  “It does seem impossible,” Rosa agreed. “He used to be a physics professor, you know,” she said to me.

  “Cool beans,” I said. Cool beans?

  I glanced back at the photos on the wall, featuring Harry when he was a physics professor with hair. I could already tell who’d gotten the raw end of this deal.

  “Neat highball glasses,” I added, too loudly, to fill the silence.

  “These were wedding gifts nearly fifty years ago, if you can believe it,” Rosa said. I didn’t hear a trace of regret in her voice.

  For some reason, I made the sign of the cross. “Impressive,” I said.

  I was impressed. Even fifty months of dating was unfathomable to me. How long did it take to settle into the idea that a person was going to stay, and then move on to worrying about something else, like when they were going to die—or worse, go crazy?

  Were long relationships really like an old pair of shoes, as people said? I thought of them as more like old anti-slip shower mats: bright and clean at the beginning but with mildew growing beneath ever since suctioning in place on day one. By the time you saw the mildew creeping up on top, the bottom was already infested beyond repair. You had to either tear out the mat and get used to slipping or keep it and get used to a lifetime of ignoring what was obviously disgusting.

  “Why don’t we play a game?” suggested Rosa. “What do you like?”

  “The one with the words,” said Harry. This was not, I guessed, Harry’s most strategic choice.

  “Scrabble,” said Rosa.

  “That’s right,” said Harry.

  “I love Scrabble,” said Rosa.

  When we opened the Scrabble box, all the letters were already flipped over to the blank side. “Well, that’s something,” Rosa said.

  Dylan and I had played Scrabble once. I’d won by a lot, but otherwise it hadn’t ended well. Dylan hadn’t wanted to play in the first place because he thought the game would be uneven, that I had a much better vocabulary than he did and thus was sure to win. I told him my vocabulary wasn’t all that good. “In fact,” I’d said, “it’s so bad that I can’t even think of a word better than ‘bad’ to describe it.”

  “Don’t just let me win,” said Dylan. I didn’t, but when the game was over, Dylan was angry. “I guess you were wrong about your vocabulary,” he said.

  “Well, the game is about math, really,” I replied.

  “You told me you were terrible at that too!”

  “It’s all just luck,” I said finally, and I felt like I was trying to get out of several lies I hadn’t even meant to tell.

  “You’re impossible,” he said. I was turning him into someone who clenched his teeth.

  “But I’m so flexible?” I answered.

  “You trying not to create problems,” he said angrily, “is creating problems.” He stood up. “You’re like a puppet,” he said. “You puppet yourself around, like you’re your own marionette, like you’re a ventriloquist.” He’d run out of puppets to call me. “What are you trying to avoid?” he asked. “Everything, actually,” he answered. “You’re trying to avoid everything.”

  He walked out of the room, and I saw that Dylan was right, that in the very process of trying to stop the spread of mildew, I was always spreading it faster.

  Scrabble with Rosa and Harry was more successful than it had been with Dylan. Not only was I winning, but neither Rosa nor Harry seemed to mind.

  When it was Harry’s turn, Rosa would mull over his letters with him. “Oh, how lucky,” she might say, “you have an ED.” Or “Two Es always pair well.” Or, pointing at the board, “Well, perhaps I shouldn’t have left that triple open for you to nab.”

  “Okay, okay,” he would say eventually, waving her away, “I’ve got it!” He’d put the word down, beaming, as if it had been his idea all along. But he knew. “Bravo!” Rosa would say, and Harry would put his hand on her knee, thanking her.

  As we played, the late afternoon light shone through the two naked windows as if from a glowing sea. I felt a certain kind of coziness seep into me. I was reminded of snow days when I was young, when a storm had taken out the power and we were giddy with the crisis, gathering flashlights and candles and fleece blankets. After that, all we could do was wait. My mother, sister, and I would lie on the carpet by the light of the sliding glass doors and play Monopoly, watching the snow fall. If I looked out the window just right, I could get the sensation that the snow was static, that it was me who was moving, as if I were in a spaceship shooting through stars.

  In those moments, nothing else mattered, not the petty details of existence, like homework and the dishes, and not the bigger ones either, like my parents’ impending divorce and whether or not I would manage to do anything worthwhile with my time on the overheating planet. How safe I’d always felt, nestled in the soft aftermath of catastrophe, protected, finally, from the terror and exhaustion of anticipating disaster.

  Was this why Rosa was happy? Misfortune had already arrived: the person she’d chosen to spend her life with was losing his mind. Or maybe she was just someone who moved forward no matter the conditions, as if life were a train constantly being reroute
d, as if she never expected to arrive anywhere in particular, as if she just appeared places and thought, Ah, what do we do here?

  I was about to place my next word when the Scrabble letters began to float off the board. I felt a strange tingle, a certain lightness, and once again I was not on the ground.

  We descended from the ceiling to the floor without incident, the furniture and tables bumping back into the ground, the photographs rotating on their nails. The Scrabble letters fell too, all around us, and I hoped they would land in some configuration that would offer a clue about how to proceed, some secret key I needed to add to my list so that I could do everything better next time. But they just scattered around the room. There was no way to put the board back together as it had been.

  I should’ve been relieved that things were returning to normal, but instead my heart felt tight, as if a small animal had balled up in my chest. Harry, on the other hand, was enthusiastic. He pulled himself up off the ground and shot his fist into the air. “Yes!” he shouted.

  We watched from the window as a gentle rain of objects returned to earth: cars and cats, flowers and toys. Across the street, a car landed in the driveway as if it had been parked there all along. Then the sky was clear, save for a dramatic fluorescent cloud, a deep pinky-orange, trimmed in a murky shadow.

  I felt heavy, heavier than when I’d started out, but Rosa was moving at the usual rate, picking up tiles from the shaggy green carpet and tossing them into the cardboard box. “Stay as long as you need, Kesha,” Rosa said.

  But I didn’t stay—it was getting dark, anyway. I left the house without looking back, sprinting by the time I passed the mailbox. I was starting to worry that this would happen again, that I’d float away, that I wouldn’t be able to come back down.

  The Lunatic Report

  The truth is, when I started as a Junior Volunteer, I wanted someone rolled out of the hospital dead. I didn’t wish anyone dead, but if someone did die, I wanted to be there to see it like on television, where everyone rushes for the metal paddles and yells, “Clear!” Something less dramatic, even, would have sufficed: a quiet breath, a long, last beep. But instead of metal paddles and long beeps I refilled glove boxes and folded blankets, made beds with hospital corners, and poured water into cups for old men who winked long winks and asked if I had a boyfriend.

  Sometimes I walked past the mental health wing, down the stairs, and into the basement, a labyrinth where the hospital’s pristine whiteness had been worn to gray. The medical records were in corridor D, where the hallways were stacked with forms. Exposed tube lights let off an unearthly glow, casting sharp, unattractive shadows under the eyes and noses of the people who worked down there—troglodytes, I called them.

  I spent hours in the basement each week, organizing emergency room intake forms, placing them, for reasons never revealed to me, in reverse-numerical order. I chose this boring task because of the Lunatic Report. This was the name I’d given the pile of intake forms marked MENTAL HEALTH, which I’d separate out to read at the end of my shift.

  Technically, I wasn’t allowed to read the confidential forms, but even more technically, I, like all Junior Volunteers, wasn’t allowed in the mental health wing. This had been a big disappointment—one not revealed to me until after twenty hours of volunteer training. I thought of the Lunatic Report as a kind of consolation prize.

  Reading the report was a thrill, like when you drive through a neighborhood at night, and the windows of some houses are bright, curtains opened, and you can make out the families inside, doing what families do, like sit around at the dinner table passing the peas.

  Among the binge drinkers and bulimics were the true stars of the report: a woman who heard voices like radio static, a man who claimed to be a vampire after being bitten by a flying squirrel.

  The hospital took care of Thursdays and Fridays, but there were still three other afternoons to get through. Mondays and Wednesdays, I played intramural soccer—I wasn’t any good, and I spent most of the scrimmages rubbing at the sprayed-on white lines in the grass with the toe of my sneaker. Tuesday was a problem, and after failing to become an upstanding member of the play’s crew or the yearbook, I joined the Write Stuff, the only remaining option, and one I’d originally nixed because of its name, which had been voted democratically into existence by the group itself.

  The Write Stuff had five members, all girls: a semi-goth chronicling the life of a centaur named Elzebar and four others who wrote about their crushes and who melded together in my mind like a soup. The group’s adviser was the home ec teacher, Ms. Barnes.

  The premise of the club was simple. Every other week, we wrote a story and read it aloud to the group. That was it. We sat on stools at a long table among the seventies dark orange and avocado green kitchens in the home ec room, eating pretzels and drinking Diet Coke out of the unbreakable home ec dishware.

  I put off writing my first story until the night before it was due. I sat at the wood table in my room, which I used for a desk, staring at an empty legal pad until the lines began to blur and pulse. I felt a rush of respect for the girls in my group, even if their stories sucked. Outside my window, a single star shone in the sky like a stray piece of glitter. Maybe it was a planet. After a while there was nothing else to look at, and I put my pen to paper and began to write.

  I started my story with something I’d read in the Lunatic Report: an anorexic woman tried to kill herself by taking a bottle of aspirin because, she said, she was angry at her boyfriend for trying to “fatten her up.” In my version, the boyfriend sends the anorexic woman flowers in the hospital—or so he thinks. It is, in fact, an Edible Arrangement. The instant the woman sees it, she jumps out the window.

  When I looked up from reading this story, my club mates were looking down at their notebooks, pretending to be interested in something they’d written there. Finally the semi-goth looked up at me with her charcoal-encircled eyes and said, “That was weird.”

  After group, Ms. Barnes pulled me aside. She was youngish and always wore dresses with puffed sleeves that I imagined she sewed herself, but then I saw one in a Delia’s catalog. I braced myself for the sort of finger wagging that had resulted in me ditching the play crew and the yearbook staff. But what she said was, “You know, you should consider applying for honors English next year.”

  “Why?” I asked. Maybe, because she was a home ec teacher, she didn’t understand who qualified for honors English.

  “Well, I’m not saying you’re Shakespeare,” she said, “but there is something kind of clever happening.”

  Regardless of her qualifications, it put me in a good mood. That afternoon, I arrived home on the late bus, dropped the mail on the counter, snatched a snack pudding from the fridge, and took the steps two at a time to the guest room.

  “Dad? You up?” I asked, peeking in. The room was dark, lights off and shades drawn. My father was facing away from the door, sheets crumpled around his waist. The white sheets matched his white undershirt, and for the moment it took my eyes to adjust, he seemed to be just limbs and a head. The room smelled like dirty gym clothes.

  “Headache again?” I asked, flipping on the overhead light and taking a spoonful of pudding.

  “Ouch,” he said, putting his elbow over his eyes so I could see the yellow armpit stain on his undershirt. “And still, not again.”

  “Hmm?”

  “You mean that I still have a headache, not that I have a headache again,” he said. “Turn it off, please.” He’d had a headache for weeks, ever since they downsized at the construction company where he’d worked for over a decade. He lay down in the guest room the day he had been laid off, and he hadn’t really gotten up since. Sometimes I’d bring him food—scrambled eggs, eggs over easy, eggs in the hole, whatever we’d learned to make in home ec.

  I flipped off the overhead light and clicked on the little wrought iron lamp next to the bed, which had a stained glass shade that splayed dark blue and green and purple across the wall, l
ike some forbidding seascape. I had once occupied this room, and the walls were still pink, accented with a border of stenciled brown bunnies and pink hearts.

  “Maybe you could, like, get up and take a walk,” I suggested. “Do a little karate or something?” I threw a few fake punches into the air, gripping the spoon in my fist.

  “Well, you seem happy,” he said. He rolled toward me, and a triangle of purple hit his eye. His brown hair was matted completely to one side of his head, forming a half Mohawk. My dad’s wide-set eyes reminded me of dots on the back of a butterfly’s wings. Sometimes, when his eyes went blank, it seemed as if they might fly off his face, leaving just two smooth patches of skin behind.

  The most surprising result of my father’s time in bed was his beard. I had never seen him with one, but now the bottom half of his face was covered in an uneven mess of wiry brownish-red hair speckled with gray, which made him seem a decade older than he had been not a month before.

  I sat on the edge of my father’s bed, the way he used to sit on the edge of mine when he came home from work late at night, smelling of sweat and sawdust. “You’ve got a genius-child on your hands,” I said. “Just thought you should know.”

  “Oh yeah?” The corners of his mouth bent up in a strained almost-smile. I took the opportunity and attempted to force the rest of my pudding snack on him, but he pushed it back to me.

  “Teacher thinks I should try for honors English next year,” I said.

  “You’re not in it this year?”

  “Of course I am,” I said—because why not? “It’s just, she thinks I’m so brilliant that I should be in it every year.”

  “That’s great,” he said. “How’d you get to be so impressive?”