Someones Uncle

A Story

Alison Espach

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London

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Scribner A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Copyright 2011 by Alison Espach All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. First Scribner ebook edition September 2011 SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc. used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work. For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or business@simonandschuster.com. The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-1-4516-7221-3

ncle Jack is not my uncle, but he tells me I should call him such. I dont feel comfortable referring to anyone who is not my uncle as uncle, but Uncle Jack insists and holds out

a glass of wine that he fermented in his own basement. Two different kinds, all made in the same oak, he has told us a million times this afternoon. There are tricks, he says, to getting American wood to taste like French. We are staying with Uncle Jack for two weeks, all four of us. My husband, Stephen, and Lillian and her husband, Kenneth. After my father died, Lillian, being the good friend that she was, said, I have an uncle in Germany. I never had an uncle anywhere interesting, but I always had friends who had an uncle in Lake George, an uncle in the Hamptons. There are uncles everywhere, if you look hard enough. I have an uncle in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, and an uncle in Hartford, Connecticut, and neither of them invites me to visit. I dont know if this is their fault or mine. We are drinking on wine barrels in Uncle Jacks basement underneath Kln when he suggests that we go to the belfry of the cathedral, the second tallest one in Europe. He swirls his wine in his glass, catches me looking at the streaks, and explains them. Legs, Uncle Jack says. Its how you know its a good wine. Better yet, a good woman, Stephen says. We laugh. We have been laughing nonstop all week, on Uncle Jacks boat, on his veranda, eating tiny sausages off toothpicks. Im not sure if its because of the wine or if we have become funnier over here in Germany, but I am starting to feel laughed out. I can feel a sort of

sadness creeping up my body like a fungus. I look down at my legs and think of how Uncle Jack told me they were wide at the knees, like an athletes. I told him I wasnt an athlete, but he insisted that I was. Oh, Uncle Jack, Lillian says. Lillian is the kind of girl who flirts with her uncle, but only because she doesnt know how else to behave. She flirts with me, most of the time. Im sure when her children grow up, shell flirt with them, too. She left the kids back in the U.S. with her mother, who laughs off her brother as the eternal bachelor, like Uncle Jacks being alone is a joke he is playing on us all. As I understand it, Uncle Jack was married to a Frenchwoman for one year in his thirties. He dated a woman from North Carolina for seven. He didnt ask her to marry him, and so she asked him, and he said no. Then long stretches of skill building. He bought a boat and learned how to sail it. Bought wood and carved out guitars. He planted French tulips around his house, so many that it felt as if I were vacationing in one of my dreams. We put our glasses down and head toward the top of the city. How stupid we are, thinking that climbing a cathedral five hundred feet high will be an easy thing, something we dont even realize we are doing, like smoking a cigarette on the way from the caf to the pub.

A priest greets us at the front doors wearing robes and a money canteen around his neck. Ill wait at the bottom, Lillian says, which means her husband is also staying at the bottom. Lillian is my best friend, if thirty-year-olds can have best friends. She moves only in order to get closer to the fan, to get away from a mosquito.

The rest of us look up at the cathedral to assess our journey, but we cant see the top. It is so high and the sun is shielding the most impressive parts of it. The only conclusion I can make about the structure is that it is never ending, that we can climb it right into the sun. Theres really no elevator? I say. It was built in the thirteenth century, dear, Uncle Jack says. Oh, I say, and laugh. Right. The air is thick in the stairwell. There are very few windows, and when we climb by one, I peer out to see the steeples and the rooftops and the river and the bridge and the hats on everybodys head below us. The farther away we get from the street, the more I see how secretly organized everything is. The streets are relentlessly parallel and perpendicular, designed by an architect who must have been very educated. It becomes clear to me, looking through the tiny window, how accomplished some people are in this world. The cathedral is empty today, and Uncle Jack says this is because it is off-hours for tourists, when most Americans are either napping or eating or having sex in their hotel rooms. Uncle Jack seems to know more about Americans than most Americans do, though he hasnt spent any time there since the seventies. Anyway, Stephen says, and because I have spent five years listening to Stephen talk in bed, I am the only one who knows how long he can hold on to a conversation. The one he is about to rehash died yesterday while we left Uncle Jacks study for the restaurant. Writers these days are obsessed with Hitler, Stephen continues. I can feel him behind me, trying to shoot the words over my head to Uncle Jack, because sometimes Im not enough to validate a conversation for Stephen. Uncle Jack has a whole bookshelf in his study devoted to Hitler, and by our third

bottle of wine, Stephen kept calling it a shrine. This, I suspect, was what originally killed the conversation. Every writer is out there trying to put a new spin on Hitler, Stephen says. A fresh take on Hitler! Hitler as a Youth. Hitler and His Mother. Hitler and Prom Night. Hitler is so evil that his evil is no longer surprising to us and the only thing earth-shattering about him anymore was his capacity to sometimes be human. Stephen is a writer. He does freelance mostly, articles he is too ashamed to attach his name to. Ten Ways to Nourish Your Yucca. How to Throw a Bengali Wedding. We get it, we get it, I say, because Uncle Jack doesnt respond, and even though I am annoyed, I also feel sick when other men dont take Stephen seriously. The idea that Hitler too went to the bathroom. Hitler too sometimes had to take a shit. We continue climbing. My heels click. The walls are covered in graffiti of people who made it this far up. JK and MJ. Peter and Lisa. I wonder when they came. If they are dead already. What they are doing this very second. I imagine all the people who came and left without leaving a mark, the soft pads on the feet of thirteenth-century bell ringers rushing to the top. At this point I hear Stephen breathing heavily behind me. You okay? I ask. I am that fat American, Stephen says. He bends over. I know it. In that movie, whatever its called, when the fat American tourist dies climbing to the belfry. Gets stuck in the walls. Thats what I feel like.

Stephen isnt fat. Not at all. Probably why he is so comfortable calling himself fat. I, on the other hand, do not make jokes about being fat just in case I really am. But he watches too much Simpsons and drinks too much Coors Light and his blood doesnt circulate well. Uncle Jack looks at his watch like Stephen is making him late for an important meeting at the belfry. He has not cared much for Stephen ever since he accidentally broke a Riesling in the kitchen. Were halfway to the top, Uncle Jack says. I peer up the skinnier stairwell we are about to enter. There is enough space between the walls for only one person, so once you enter, you cant turn around and leave the way you came. You have to finish. Its a one-way stairwell, I say. Stairway to hell, Stephen says. More like walking up to the point of a pin, Uncle Jack says. Exactly, Stephen says. Impossible. I quit. Stephen kisses me on the cheek. Uncle Jack takes the first step into the dark and looks back at me. We continue, yes?

When Uncle Jack took off his bathing suit at the beach the day prior, Lillian barely noticed and asked for a Diet Coke, as if her uncles penis was something she saw all the time, like there are photos of Uncle Jacks penis in her family albums at home. Stephen ran his fingers through the sand, not yet comfortable with naked Jack. Uncle Jack, with his cock pointing east, and not an ounce of body fat, looked over at me in my yellow bikini and just stared, like he had the rights of a doctor, observing the way my limbs connected at the joints, and I was the one who felt naked.

It is a penis, he said. I laughed a little. It is. It felt like an invitation to stare, so I did. Uncle Jacks penis was larger than I expected. For a man who keeps orchids on his porch and drinks prosecco daily, I had pictured something smaller, thinner, a fine silk ribbon dangling between his legs. But it was thick, and the hairs around it were coarse. He did not shave like Stephen does during heat waves. On a German beach, Uncle Jack said, pointing to a sign of beach rules, written in German, by the kielbasa stand. You can take all your clothes off and hold your cock in your hand, but you cant ride your bike. You cant not recycle. Ha! He continued staring at me and I didnt know whether to cry or laugh. It was stupid to come here. Stupid to run away from our lives in the U.S. Stupid to think that there is always somewhere better to go. Because here I am, headed toward the tip of the largest cathedral in Germanymeaning I am stuck in a one-way stairwell with a man whose penis is exactly six inches long. A man I have been calling uncle for one week but who is as familiar to me as a stone in the ocean. That is what we become up here. A handful of stones scooped up, together in the palm, for just a moment.

It is just our footsteps and the echo of our footsteps, and then sometimes my breath. I realize Uncle Jack isnt breathing hard. He must do sports, cross-train, ski in the Alps. When he looks back at me, he has the facial expression of someone who is sitting down or sleeping. As a child, I always suspected that aunts and uncles werent real things, like ornaments decorating the nuclear family, put out for holidays. All week long I had been tempted to pinch his cheeks to see if he was constructed out of paper or plastic.

Its a relief to be alone, he says. To be quiet. I disagree. The silence is terrifying. I spend most of the silence wondering when it will end. The graffiti is sparser the higher we go. Jan and K. Bub and Bib. People who have gotten in their cars and moved on with their lives. People who were here etching initials into the stone while I was someone very far away, holding my fathers hand. Sometimes I get this distinct feeling that I am always too late for everything. All of those people have come, touched the bell, and left. They are years ahead of me, doing who knows what, not to mention Lillian, who is already at the bottom, on her third child. Her first already has a checking account. All I have done in my adult life is watch my father die, and that hardly feels like an accomplishment. Climbing this cathedral, I think, is one of the first things I have really done since. Do you have kids? Uncle Jack asks. No. I didnt think so. He turns around and looks at me. I am almost the same build as Lillian, except with the hips shaved off. Why not? I ask. Not having kids sometimes feels like not having hair. Like Im walking into the grocery store bald, and all these women have all these kids just growing out of their pores. I cant help but feel like they are bragging. Well, for one, you dont talk about them, he says. I laugh. I am always doing this, waiting for someone richer, smarter, or better-looking to reveal some terrible truth about me. No kids. When my father was dying, he called me and Stephen asking when we were going to start having children. He said, Time is running out, and he meant for him, not me. I was only

twenty-nine. My father had exactly one year left. Just enough time to meet his first grandchild before he died. That wasnt why we started trying. Or maybe it was. Maybe you always need a reason to start trying, and impending death certainly seemed like a valid one at the time. But all of the pregnancy tests were negative, so at some point during the year, we got a dog. A dachshund. I got so unhealthily attached to the dog that I would sign Christmas presents From the dog, and Lillian and Kenneth would laugh and go, Hey look, the dog got me a watch, or Howd the dog know I love green? Wed take the dog to the park and sit on blankets. And it was nice because when the dog was around, it gave me and Stephen a break from each other. The dog was an object of focus, a thing outside of us, a nonhuman to break up the monotony of all the humanity. And when we left the house for long periods, wed play Mozart on the stereo system, like that made the dog smarter or something. Like if he listened to enough classical music, someday he might speak and put on shoes and run outside and audition for Euripides. And Stephen would be snide about it, say, The dog is not a child; hes just a dog. Is it crazy to admit that the dog might have been hurt by this? Its embarrassing, Stephen said. Dogs dont give people presents for Christmas. People do. And we are acting like we dont understand the reality of the situation. But I didnt see why we couldnt play music for it anyway and why the dog couldnt just curl up in a ball and listen to it and everyone could celebrate our dog like it was a thing that was alive.

I am thinking now that I should have not worn this pair of underwear to climb an infinite cathedral. Its from a six-pack I bought at the pharmacy, and the fabric is the thick, heavy kind that gathers sweat. The kind a child might wear. You can dance, kick, and run, and it will never budge out of place. Lillian would never wear underwear like this. She only wears lace, pink or black. Maybe that is why she has three children and I have none. Maybe wearing beautiful underwear is a kind of invitation, proving you are ready to be a woman. There hasnt been a window to peer out of for a while, and I start getting scared that this will never end, that somehow, without realizing it, I have died and entered an eternal purgatory. Climbing stairs seems like an appropriate penance, as it is something I tried to avoid my whole adult life by living in first-floor apartments. If only I were an athlete like Uncle Jack insists I am, I could climb and climb and climb so high that my father would reach out his young, smooth hand and save me. Okay, I say. I need a break. Sit, he says. There are some men who cant help but treat you like a pet. Uncle Jack sits down on the stairs, and I hear his knees crack. Sit. Bark, I say. We cannot look at each other. He is sitting a step behind me, a knee at each of my ears. Yelp. What am I, a fucking dog? Where did that mouth come from? he asks. Your father wouldnt approve. I normally dont curse, but there is something about Uncle Jack that makes me feel like I can do anything. Like I could drown a puppy right in front of his face and he wouldnt question it. Im thirty, I say. And my fathers dead.

Ah, he says. It is wet and dark in the stairwell and our voices echo like we are in a cave. I feel far away from Kenneth and Lillian and Stephen. If Stephen didnt drink so much, Im sure he would still be up here. If he didnt drink so much, he would be capable of doing a lot more. But if he didnt drink so much, he probably never would have come with me on this trip. He probably would have stayed home to write that novel hes always talking about, the one where people spontaneously die, or the one where people are born with no noses. I can never remember. They have no nose, he said to me. And its, like, normal.

On the way to the cathedral, Uncle Jack told Lillian to pull over on the side of the highway to pee. Dont get arrested, Stephen said. Uncle Jack was a rich man with opinions on tomato sauces and I was getting the feeling that that was what Stephen and I needed to start having. I wanted Stephen to return from the store with a fifty-dollar bottle of wine and know exactly what country it came from. More importantly, dont get poison ivy on your dick, Lillian said. Uncle Jack slammed the door loudly. He disappeared behind the bushes, and for a moment, I hoped he would never come back. He was mad because Lillian almost ran over the cat that morning, and his anger was lighting the air on fire. Lillian had insisted on driving. Said she knew right from left. Said she didnt mean to almost run over the cat. Why dont you ask the cat why he likes to sit under the car? Lillian asked us. She said that people have cats only because they are starved for affection. Its not good for you to have a cat, Uncle Jack, she said. What are you so starved for anyway?

In the stairwell, Uncle Jack tells me that sometimes he thinks Lillian is more like the cat than the cat is. Every day, she wakes up, wanders into the kitchen, and drinks milk out of the carton. She wanders into the living room and stands there, not doing anything. Then, for no reason anyone can detect, she walks into another room, where she stands for a while. Then she takes a nap. She wasnt always like that, I say. Women change, Uncle Jack says. For no reason at all, it seems. So do men, I say. I know. Men become assholes. Women become crazy. Because men are assholes. Because women are crazy, he says. Everything is circular. Up and up and up and up and up and up. There is no end in sight, and Stephen tried to warn me about this. We dont need children, he said, and he was only trying to comfort me. He said, your parents had you and then you have children and then they have children who will have children who will have children who will have children who will have children who will have children. Look at the city, I say. We have come across a window, and I put my nose to it. The walls are cool to the touch. Its a better view from below, he says. You cant see anything from up here, not really. You cant see faces, or smiles, or eyes. All you can see is the infrastructure. Its depressing, isnt it?

When he puts it like that. I squint out the tiny window. I can see a man with a hat, I say. What color is it? Blue, I say. Or gray. Uncle Jack puts his hands on my hips as he stands behind me. It is not entirely a surprise, and I do not shift away. Ever since I arrived, I knew this was headed for me the same way I know when a thunderstorm is approaching. When there is a tickle in my ear, and the air gets a little thicker, I might take an umbrella with me just in case. Can you see your boyfriend? he asks. My husband, I say, and I feel Uncle Jacks breath against my neck as he laughs, because to Uncle Jack, there is no difference between the two. I look in the crowd for Stephens red shirt. And no. Uncle Jack takes the lead, and I get the feeling he knows exactly where we are going. He has been here before. Even though there is only one direction in which to head, Im not sure which way to move. Uncle Jack traces the caulk between stone blocks with his finger as we ascend. Do you think MK and JL are still in love? I ask. All these names are beginning to depress me. The sadness is creeping. There are too many, each name more redundant than the last. It reminds me of standing at my fathers tombstone, seeing his name inscribed in stone, and then driving away, seeing the graveyard from a distance. From afar, it was just a hill, blotched with white squares, and for the first time in my life, my father didnt seem to be anywhere at all.

Its possible, he says. We stop again to examine the scratches of people who meant something to each other, at this very spot in the cathedral. But doubtful. I think this is sad. Uncle Jack thinks its liberating. You dont have to be who you are now, forever, he says. This is the main difference between us. I am trying to hold on to scraps of something, whereas Uncle Jack is shedding himself proudly, with every step upward, at every boat dock, every restaurant; there are traces of Uncle Jack everywhere. Uncle Jack takes my hand. What your boyfriend doesnt understand, Uncle Jack says, moving his hands to my waist, is that the moments when Hitler wasnt doing the most awful thing possible are the most interesting. Everything is one giant conversation. His hands are callused from the steel guitar. I feel them leave tiny white marks above my hips. Even Hitler, Uncle Jack says, held a woman the way she wanted to be held. It is the first time I have touched Uncle Jack. I wonder if it is possible to ever really touch Uncle Jack. He is so smooth and tan, he is impossible to stick to, like a well-oiled pan. I fight the urge to inscribe my initials on his arm. His fingers are wet, raw, and older than the rest of his body, like they have been dipped in the bathtub for hours, and when I look up at him, conversation is strained, different, worrisome. We are so close. The only way to stand side by side on the same step is to be this close. I feel the stones through the back of my shirt. I can smell the wine on his breath. It is almost disgusting the way some people can suddenly, out of nowhere, consume you. I cannot move. I am surprised, too surprised. This is my problem. When I dont hate someone as much as I thought I did, I assume I love them. When someone is not as

horrible as I have decided they are, I feel like I need them, but I shouldnt. How many times this week did Stephen go around telling us that Hitler loved his dog. Hitler loved his dog, and probably his mother, too! The stairwell becomes smaller and smaller as he leans in. With my back against the stone, Uncle Jack unzips his fly. His penis looks familiar and different at the same time, like an old friend in new clothes. It should be easy when you wear a dress. He pushes the elastic to the side but has trouble because it is so tight around my thigh. It is travel underwear, a durable pair. Iron shackles, Uncle Jack says, and those are the last words I remember him speaking to me on the entire trip. But he gets it in. He is an accomplished man, with three houses, a Jacuzzi, and a boat. Up here, in the cathedral, I feel like we suddenly own the entire city. We are so high, I feel the pressure to make every breath count. I can feel my body shape to his, or his body shape to mine, and doesnt this make you angry, Uncle Jack? This is what I want to ask. For one second, my body feels just like his body, but when we pull apart, we are alone inside ourselves again. And we have no choice but to keep on climbing. There are stairs, and then more stairs, and at the top, we do not carve our names. I look down at the city and see Lillian and Kenneth and Stephen. They are as individual as colorsblue, yellow, redand we wave.

Turn the page for the first chapter of THE ADULTS by Alison Espach

hey arrived in bulk, in Black Tie Preferred, in one large clump behind our wooden fence, peering over each others shoulders and into our backyard like people at the zoo who wanted a better view of the animals. My fathers fiftieth birthday party had just begun. Its true that I was expecting something. I was fourteen, my hair still sticky with lemon from the beach, my lips maroon and pulpy and full like a womans, red and smothered like a giant wound, my mother said earlier that day. She disapproved of the getup, of my yellow fitand-flare dress that cradled my hips and pointed my breasts due north, but I didnt care; I disapproved of this party, this whole at-home affair that would mark the last of its kind. The women walked through the gate in black and blue and gray and brown pumps, the party already proving unsuccessful at the grass level. The men wore sharp dark ties like swords and said predictable things like, Hello. Welcome to our lawn, I said back, with a goofy grin, and none of them looked me in the eye because it was rude or something. I was too yellow, too embarrassing for everyone involved, and I inched closer to Mark Resnick, my neighbor, my maybe-one-day-boyfriend. I stood up straighter and overemphasized my consonants. There were certain ways you had to position and prepare your body for high school, and I was slowly catching on, but not fast enough. Every day, it seemed, I had to say good-bye to some part of myself; like last week at the beach, my best friend, Janice, in her new shoestring bikini, had looked down at my Adidas one-piece and said, Emily, you dont need a

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one-piece anymore. This isnt a sporting event. But it sort of was. You could win or lose at anything when you were fourteen, and Janice was keeping track of this. First person to say cunt in two different languages (Richard Trenton, girls bathroom, cunnus, kunta), an achievement that Ernest Bingley decried as invalid since Old Norse doesnt count as a language! (Ernest Bingley, first person ever to cry while reading a poem aloud in English class, Dulce et Decorum Est). There were other competitions as well, competitions that had only losers, like whos got the fattest ass (Annie Lars), the most cartoonish face (Kenneth Bentley), the most pubes (Janice Nicks). As a child, I shaved the hair off my Barbies to feel prettier, Janice had confessed earlier that morning at the beach. She sighed and wiped her brow as though it was the August heat that made her too honest, but Connecticut heat was disappointingly civil. So were our confessions. Thats nothing, I said. As a child, I thought my breasts were tumors. I whispered, afraid the adults could hear us. Janice wasnt impressed. Okay, as a child, I sat out in the sun and waited for my blood to evaporate, I said. I admitted that, sometimes, I still believed blood could vanish like boiling water or a puddle in the middle of summer. But Janice was already halfway into her next confession, admitting that last night, she touched herself and thought of our middle school teacher Mr. Heller despite everything, even his mustache. Which we cant blame him for, Janice said. I thought of Mr. Hellers hands and then waited, and then nothing. No orgasm. Whatd you expect? I said, shoving a peanut in my mouth. Hes so old. At the beach, the adults always sat ten feet behind our towels. We carefully measured the distance in footsteps. My mother and her friends wore floppy straw hats and reclined in chairs patterned with Rod Stewarts face and neon ice cream cones and shouted, Dont stick your head under! as Janice and I ran to the waters edge to cool our feet. My mother said sticking your head in the Long Island Sound was like dipping your head in a bowl of cancer, to which I said, You shouldnt say cancer so casually like that. A woman who volunteered

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with my mother at Stamford Hospital, the only woman there who had not gotten a nose job from my neighbor Dr. Trenton, held her nose whenever she said Long Island Sound or sewage, as if there was no difference between the two things. But the more everybody talked about the contamination, the less I could see it; the farther I buried my body in the water, the more the adults seemed to be wrong about everything. It was water, more and more like water every time I tested it with my tongue.

Our backyard was so full of tiger lilies, nearly every guest at the party got their own patch to stand near. Mark ran his hands over the orange flower heads, while my mother opened her arms to greet his mother, Mrs. Resnick. My mother and Mrs. Resnick had not spoken in months for no other reason than they were neighbors who did not realize they had not spoken in months. Italians hug, my mother said. Were Russian Jewish, Mrs. Resnick said. Oh, thats dear, my mother said, and looked at me. Say hello, Emily. Hello, I said. It was unknown how long it had been since they borrowed an egg from each other, but it didnt even matter because my mother noticed how tall Mark had become.Very tall, my mother said. Yes, isnt he tall? Mrs. Resnick asked. How tall are you, Mark? my mother asked. Everybody suspected he was taller than he used to be, but shorter than our town councilwoman, Mrs. Trenton, who was so tall she looked like King Kong in a belted pink party dress observing a mushroom garlic cream tart for the first time. She was so tall it only made sense she was granted a position of authority in our town, my mother said once. And Mark was a little bit shorter than that, in a very small, unnoticeable way. Most of the adults stood at the bar. Some reported flying in from Prague, Geneva, Moscow, and couldnt believe the absurdity of international travelit took so long to get from here to there, especially

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when all you were doing over the Atlantic was worrying about blood clots, feeling everything clumping and slowing and coming to an end. Some needed to use the bathroom. Some couldnt believe how the roads were so wide here in Connecticut and, honestly, what did we need all that space for? Its presumptuous, said Mrs. Resnick. She took a sip of her martini while a horsefly flew out of her armpit. So much space and nothing to do but take care of it. I looked around at the vastness of my yard. It was the size of two pools, and yet, we didnt even have one. My mother had joked all summer long that if my father wanted to turn fifty, he would have to do the damn thing outside on the grass. We had all laughed around the dinner table, and with a knife in my fist, I shouted out, Like the dog! If we had one... , my father said, correcting me. Its the nineties, my mother added. Backyards in Connecticut are just starting to come back in style. But soon, it turned out it wasnt a joke at all, and at any given moment my mother could be caught with a straight face saying things like, Well need to get your father a tent in case of rain, and after I hung up on Timmys Tent Rental, she started saying things like, Well need three hundred and fifty forks, and my father and I started exchanging secret glances, and when my mother saw him scribble THATS A loT oF FoRKS to me on a Post-it, she started looking at us blankly, like my father was the fridge and I was the microwave, saying, Well need a theme. Man, aging dramatically! I shouted at them across the marble kitchen counter. And a cake designed to look like an investment banker. She wrote it down on a list, her quick cursive more legible than my print. No! A map of Europe! I said. And everybody has to eat their own country! No, Emily, my mother said. Thats not right either. Everybody was invited. Was Alfred available? Alfred was our neighbor who always gave the comical speech about my fathers deep-seated character flaws at every social event that was primarily devoted to my father, which was every event my mother attended.

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Like how he questions my choice of hat at seven thirty in the morning, my mother said, as though my father wasnt there pouring himself some cereal. Its just that the brim is so notably wide, he says. Well, thats the point, victor! Or how he called the Prague office with a mouthful of Cocoa Puffs every morning and my mother said, Victor, youre a millionaire, thats gross, and my father chomped louder, said, its puffed rice. He just doesnt get it, my mother said. He walks out to the car every morning and comes back in asking me how is it that a car can get so dirty! At some point, they always turned to me, the third party. Emily, would you explain to your father? my mother asked. Well, Jesus, Victor! We drive it! I shouted. I never considered the possibility that we werent joking.

Isnt Emily so beautiful? my mother asked Mrs. Resnick, twisting her gold tennis bracelet around her wrist. My mother asked this question everywhere we went. The grocery store. The mall. The dentist. Nobody had yet disagreed, though the opinion of the dentist was still pending. Dont you think that if the dentist really thinks I am beautiful he can notice it on his own? I had asked my mother once, fed up with the prompt. Dont you think pointing it out to the dentist just points out how not beautiful I must be? Its just a point of emphasis, my mother had said. It has nothing to do with you, Emily. Just a way into conversation. Adults need things like that, my father sometimes added. But Mrs. Resnick hesitated, while Mark scratched a freckle on his arm like a scratch-n-sniff. Mother, I said, and rolled my eyes so Mrs. Resnick and Mark understood that I too thought this question was unacceptable. Mrs. Resnick had a bad habit of never looking at me, so she tried to size up my entire existence using only her peripheral vision. Medium height. Dirty blondish brownish hair. Scraggly, mousy, darling little thing that apparently had no access to an iron or a bathtub. Hours before the party, my mother tugged at her panty hose, wiped

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her fingers across my cheeks, and said, Go take a bath. Youll come out smelling like the beach. This was strange, since I just got home from the beach. And I never knew why smelling like the beach was always considered a good thing, especially when the closest beach was the Long Island Sound, and I wasnt even allowed to stick my head under. I dont want to take a bath, I said. I dont like baths. Everybody likes baths, my mother said. I did not like baths. I understood the warm water felt nice against my skin, but after five minutes of sitting in the tub, it became painfully apparent that there wasnt much to do in there. I would pass the time by shaving every inch of my skin, including my elbows, and reciting jingles I heard on the televisionStanleyyy Steemmmmer, and Coca-Cola Classic, youre the one! When I would be older, one of my boyfriends would work as a flavor scientist for 7Up and would be addicted to bathing with me, his body on mine nearly every night, spilling water and secrets about the beverage industry, explaining that New Coke was an elaborate marketing scheme, designed to taste bad, predicted to fail, so they could reintroduce Coke as Coca-Cola Classic and make everyone want it more. It worked, he would say, filling my belly button with water as I sang. Look at you, giving them free advertising in the tub. Ive thought about it, I had told my mother in the kitchen, and I dont want to smell like the beach. Id much rather smell like something else, like a wildflower or a nest of honeybees. Emily, my mother had said. I dont even know what that is supposed to mean. I had explained that Mark, who was a junior lifeguard at Fairfield Beach, had found a box of dead kittens floating at the edge of the shore when he combed the sand before his shift was over. Mark said they were the saddest things he had ever seen, floating by a broken buoy, curled up like they were sleeping. But they werent sleeping, he had whispered in my ear. I mean, they were dead. I explained to my mother that smelling like the beach meant smelling like a place where tiny animals could not survive, where cardboard boxes contained not presents but sad corpses of beautiful things that were now impossible to love. My mother sighed and blended the garlic.

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Yes, very beautiful, Mrs. Resnick finally said, and this settled all of us into a strange sort of ease. Mrs. Resnick straightened out the hem of her lime green dress, and my mother pointed out that my father had recently planted tiger lilies in our backyard. Did they go with the neighborhood dcor? This neighborhood has a very specific floral nature, my mother said. Mark and his mother nodded. They already knew this. Well, you kids be good, my mother said, and stuck her fingers to my lips in a not very covert attempt to remove the Revlon. And take some pictures, please. That morning my mother had shoved a Polaroid camera in my face and said, We need a party photographer! It could be you! like it was a career move she might make me interview for. I snapped a picture of the two women walking away from us, our mothers, mine tall and alive in a coral party dress that was cut low enough to suggest breasts, and Mrs. Resnick walking next to her, rounder at the hips, in a lime green fabric with pearl embroidery so high on her chest it suggested that once upon a time, in a faraway land, there were these breasts. The skirt was cut at the calf, making her ankles look fatter than they should have. Cankles, Mark said in my ear. Calves and ankles that are the same width. My mother picked up two empty beer bottles and a dish of shrimp tails off the ground before making a full waltz back into the center of the party, Mrs. Resnick wiped her glasses clean with a napkin, and I thought, Those poor adults. Doomed to a life of filth, finding it everywhere they went. At the beach, the only thing my mother could see was the empty Fanta bottles, sandwich wrappers, Popsicle sticks littering the sea, and when the sun set over the water, Janices mother said it looked just like when she sorted through the garbage can with a flashlight after Janice threw out her retainer. My mother and Janices mother shared a big laugh and quickly grew hot in their chairs, dried out from Saltines and peanut butter and talking. They walked to the water but never went in, moving away from the waves like the mess was nothing

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but an accidental oil spill that would turn their toes black. Janice and I sat on the wet sand and rubbed the water up and down our newly shaved shins, while our mothers looked on, nervous about the way we were already abusing our bodies. They held up sunscreen bottles, rubbed cream on our noses. We fussed, squirmed, accused them of horrible crimes, threatened to wipe it all off in the water, stare straight into the sun until our corneas burned and our flesh flaked off, until we had taken in the worst of the Sound with our mouths. They sighed, tugged at our faces, threatened to bring us home, to end our lives right there! But I was never scared. I knew our lives were just beginning and that their lives were ending, and how strange it seems to me now that this was a form of leverage.

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Also by Alison Espach

THE ADULTS
A Novel
An irresistible chronicle of a modern young womans struggle to grow up in a world where an adult and a child can so dangerously be mistaken for the exact same thing.

A razor-sharp debut novel . . . a wry, devastatingly funny coming-of-age tale.

Marie Claire

A fierce, tender adolescent narrative.

The New York Times Book Review
Visit www.alisonespach.com