News from the Adult World

News From the Adult World originally appeared in The Southampton Review, Winter/Spring 2022

The post went out on the town’s Mother Hen: Info and Issues Facebook group at 8:35 pm on the last Sunday in January.  Missing child alert.  My daughter, Maya, went for a short bike ride at 3:00 pm and has not been heard from since.  She was wearing a black winter coat and a burgundy bike helmet. Carrying a snowflake-patterned backpack and riding her purple bike.  If you have seen her or heard anything, please be in touch.

Christine Liu did not use Facebook very often, but she did not have to tell this small New England community, despite the fact that she and her daughter had only been members of the community for less than six months, that Maya was African American and that she was in sixth grade and an erratic child whose mix of sobriety and recklessness was pronounced.  Who among the other parents at the one elementary school in this college town could forget last fall’s field trip when Evan Price’s biologist father had pointed out the underground bee’s nest, and Maya had immediately stomped on it with her sandaled foot, or the time a month later when she had ridden her bike to the neighboring town, ten miles north, across state lines, on a busy, two-lane road, and then ridden it back.  Maya would’ve told anyone who’d asked that she preferred to do things like that, identify a fear and then walk right into it to see what would happen.  And no one thought of either mother or daughter without recalling the accusations of racism that Christine had leveled against two of the town’s longest-serving police officers less than a month after her arrival.  This would neither have surprised nor displeased Christine, given how strongly she believed in both the obstacles she was up against and the fierceness with which she was capable of meeting them. 

Consent

Consent originally appeared in Ploughshares, Summer 2020

Snow Yu was not a bad mother; she was an overwhelmed mother.  How could she not be overwhelmed by the size of her love for her daughter?  It was a fierce and awesome thing.  Unprecedented, as far as her own life was concerned.  It seemed impossible that her heart had expanded as it had without Bing having done anything.  It seemed an impossible responsibility to care for a person without whom you could not live.  The distinction between bad and overwhelmed was a tightrope that Snow had found herself trying to walk since her daughter’s birth five years before, although of course if she were a bit more self-aware, she would’ve had to admit that the categories were not necessarily mutually exclusive.  So when the pounding came on her apartment door, she knew without knowing that whatever had happened, she was likely to be responsible.

Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When

Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When originally appeared in Tin House Issue 48 Summer 2011

People who don’t know better envy Zizi.  She has a cool nickname and some guy who seems to pay the bills in a pinch.  She dresses East Village extreme (shredded leggings, careless boots, layers and layers); her bangs are Mamie Eisenhower, her complexion is Louise Brooks, her jewelry is vintage.  She’s twenty-something.  Her body is Japanese teen, but dark chocolate and single-malt scotch are an everyday thing.  It’s unclear how she makes a living.  She has circles under her eyes, but the dabbling in heroin was over years ago. She’s an only child, and knows everyone, but not even her guy has seen her cry.  Her father lives in a faraway country and is vaguely famous, but no one can ever remember for what.  Her mother is kind and easy to deceive.  Her apartment is throw-back tenement with exposed brick walls and a bathtub in the kitchen.  He bought it for her.  It’s directly below the one he shared with his wife.  For convenience, he said at the time.  Why be getting to, when I could just be getting, he said, smiling at his own bad joke, spreading her legs, the sounds of his wife walking above them, doing the ironing, or the dishes, or whatever it was that wives did, making Zizi flush with heat.

Now, four years after he installed Zizi in the apartment and a month after his death, the sounds of his wife, her name is Mabel, make Zizi freeze and flatten like a cat alert to danger.  Now the sounds mean complicated feelings that at any moment Mabel might want to come downstairs and share.  To be fair, other than the day the towers went down (the guy he was having breakfast with was the last man on the last elevator that made it down, and Zizi has spent way too much time imagining how that all shook out), Mabel has shown only occasional interest in Zizi.  This is fine with Zizi, since people who do know better know that she’s not the kind of person it’s useful to rely on.  She’ll say yes, and then end up meaning no.  The level of her intent and self-consciousness about this trait was for a while a topic of discussion amongst her acquaintances.  Now it’s just something they keep in mind as they make their plans, the way they do with their vegan friends or the ones who can’t drive.

There Be Monsters

There Be Monsters originally appeared in Tin House Issue 42 Winter 2009

However many years ago, Natalie and her husband used to amuse each other with the dealbreaker conversation.  Over dinner or drinks, they would list the dealbreakers of a first date—NRA membership, pro-life bumper stickers, gold chains, cologne—then move on to the dealbreakers of a twenty-year life together: abuse, adultery, other kinds of extremity.  The secular Jewish investment banker with a wife and three kids who announces he’s going to become a rabbi: that woman got to jump ship.

Now Natalie thinks of the things that deserved to be dealbreakers, but that you let slip while you waited for further evidence, extenuating circumstances, explanations worthy of forgiveness.  And that now, twenty years down the road, are off–limits, unfair game.  You took them off the table yourself.  They sequestered themselves in their own little room, emerging for purposes of mockery and torment.

Natalie makes herself unexpectedly grim thinking about this in the car on the way home from dinner at the new Brazilian place.  She’s driving.  Her husband of twenty years rides beside her studying the darkened margins of the road with a toad’s interest.  When she’s at her grimmest, she thinks of him as a toad.  When she’s not, she looks at him and remembers what she fell in love with.