The Adults Read Online Free PDF Page B

it was the next morning. Mrs. Hanley was asleep on the deck. The Polaroid in my hand was already fully formed, a picture of people who were already unidentifiable, my father and Mrs. Resnick, dark blurry figures among the trees as though they were a people before my time, their customs outdated, already myths.
    My mother was at my back with her hand on my shoulder, telling me the bad news: some of the adults were tired; they were getting their purses and hats and into their cars, and even though their departure was penciled into the invitation from the start, I felt their absence in my gut like abandonment, a wide and expansive bullet through my stomach, carving a path for the wind.
    “What do you have there?” my mother said, looking at the picture.
    “See for yourself.” I handed it to her.
    “Emily,” my mother said. “You were supposed to take pictures of the guests. Not the trees. We already know what our backyard looks like.”
    “Then maybe you should have hired a professional,” I said. “For Christ’s sake, Mother, I am only a child!”
    She flinched as though this was a terrible secret I had been keeping from her.
    And everything was always intolerably like my mother said: your father’s birthday was such a fiscal success. Mr. Lipson got your father to invest in an expanding branch of Bubble, International. Which, you know, means good things for your father. I don’t want you thinking that just because we’re getting divorced we won’t benefit from his wealth. We will. And that still makes us a family, right? You don’t just stop being a family because of a stupid piece of paper. It’s not like today we are a family, and tomorrow, there is a piece of paper, and we’re not a family. That’s not how it works.
    My mother sat down on the white chairs and sipped the last of her martini and sighed.
    “Really,” she said. “I don’t know why Mrs. Resnick just doesn’t hire a gardener. That poor boy Mark. Did you see that look she gave me when I mentioned your father planted lilies, like I was rubbing it in, like I was trying to brag about how I have a husband who is concerned about the vegetative state of our yard? And her dress, I mean, right ?”
    Right. I understood. “It was a terrible dress,” I said. “Too wide on the shoulders. She looked like a really excited cardboard box. And can a cardboard box even be excited? She defies all logic. And her hair. It’s like she went to the hairdresser and said, ‘Francois! Make me look more like a gerbil than a gerbil!’”
    My mother looked at me. “You’re funny,” she said. “I’m not very funny. How did you get so funny?”
    “I used to watch a lot of television,” I said.
    My mother did not laugh like people normally do when they discover someone who makes them laugh. Instead, she reached out and touched my arm and said gravely like it was the last time she would ever recognize the comedy of the situation, “Thank you for making me laugh.”
    My mother picked up her drink. I watched her move through the crowd, her crowd, the crowd she built on a pad with a pen three months ago in our living room when she said, “Victor, how about a giant party?” And my father had said, “What’s the occasion?”
    “Your turning fifty!” she said.
    My father pointed to his bald head and explained what it meant to be fifty.
    “Being fifty means you finally have enough money to throw a decent party for a change,” my mother said. “We’ll invite everybody and it’s perfect timing, we have the new deck. We’ll invite the neighbors and your coworkers and good cheer.”
    “And what do we do if the cheer does not RSVP?” my father said. “What shall we do then, Gloria?” They laughed. I know I heard them laugh. I know this because I laughed too, and thought, This is exactly how I will talk to the people that I love when I get older.
    I sat back on my chair and watched my mother keep her head up and smile, her hair tightly wound in a bun. She