fiction
The Adults by
It cost ten thousand dollars to take your life in Connecticut, which didn’t surprise me considering Connecticut was the most expensive state to do anything in. Mrs. Trenton announced the total to everybody at the coat rack. She sounded like a bad advertisement. “Ten thousand dollars,” she said. “What a waste . . . you could rent a flat on the Seine with that kind of money… go to Budapest for a month…” The rest of the adults were stabbing cheese cubes with toothpicks. It seemed wrong to eat and talk about death, like something my mother would have advised against, similar to eating and running or eating and going to the bathroom or eating and being mean, but there she was by the cheese platter, offering cheddar to a curlyhaired man. It was obvious the man wanted to f--k her. Even more obvious that she didn’t mind. The whole performance made me sick, gave me the same feeling I got when Janice brought in tiny tuna sandwiches after she gave a forty-fiveminute presentation on the Holocaust last year, complete with photos of corpses and a short slide show of the mass graves at Terezin and then held up a platter and said, “Who wants sandwiches?” Mr. Resnick’s value suddenly seemed measurable by everybody’s grief, which didn’t seem to be much at all. The adults hardly looked changed, their hair still the same color it was two days ago, as they picked the stems off the strawberries before they ate them. They sat down in red leather recliners, crossed their legs, but most of them never took off their fall coats, perhaps not fully convinced by the warmth of the house or the idea of a suicide in the neighborhood, this neighborhood, where it was officially recorded that in September of ’94 there were more tulips than people. I caught my mother bragging about this to our cousin Rex at the town pool once, to which he said, “The parties you must have…”
104
WESTONMAGAZINEGROUP.COM
Alison EspAch
My father shook hands with some whitehaired ladies who flittered around the cocktail tables like overdressed children, nodding their heads, and my father nodded back as if to say, Yes, it’s hard—very hard. Very hard to never see a man you never saw. They were like kids at the playground, trying to decide whom to play with, and was the conversation worth the fuss? Adults were constantly auditioning, but for what? For the next conversation, for the next conversation, for the next conversation? They touched each other on their sides as they passed, or sometimes pressed a hand to the small of a back to signal they were still in love, still alive, chock full of organs. Everybody wore black, except for the bright blue scarf wrapped so high around Mrs. Bulwark’s neck, she looked like a character from Dr. Seuss if a character from Dr. Seuss ever went to a funeral. I was walking away from one of Mark’s third or fourth cousins, who was trailing behind and informing me how strange Mr. Resnick’s suicide was considering summer suicides generally preferred to go naked. “It’s October,” I said back. I ran my hands against the smooth maroon walls, seeking out a crack, searching for Mark, listening to everybody. The girl hung at the curly-haired man’s knees in a plaid jumper and exclaimed, “This is sooo boring, Dad.” “Go talk to someone,” the curly-haired man said. “Talking is boring,” the girl said. “All you people do is talk.” “If you’re looking for more than that in life, Melissa, you’re going to be disappointed. That’s what we do. We stand around and we talk.” “Hell,” my mother interjected, with a drunk finger pointing in the air, “we might go to a movie sometime, but you know what we do
after it? We sit around and talk about it.” “Exactly,” the curly-haired man said. They both sipped on their drinks. “It’s the permanence that makes the dead beautiful,” the curly-haired man said at some point, as though my mother had asked, which I knew she didn’t since the only possible question that would have preceded such an answer was, What do you think makes the dead so beautiful? “I wrote my dissertation on it,” the man said, continuing. I had always hated curly-haired men. Sometimes, they looked too much like children who didn’t brush their hair in the morning. “Well, it’s certainly up for debate,” my mother said, playing with his daughter’s long ponytail, and I could tell even from across the room that was the hair, the daughter, she had always wanted: golden, tame, quiet at her hips. My hair was darkening from a dirty blond to an ashy brown like my father’s, and my mother was so disappointed. Last year, she announced that the “sun had left it,” and my father picked up a chunk as he walked by, rubbed his bald spot, and said, “Why is my hair growing out of your head?” My father stood in the hallway with Alfred and a few other tall men I didn’t know. Tall men always seemed to have such purpose, with their heads next to the cabinets and hands in their pockets, so tidy and neat and civilized these men were, even their hands had storage units when they weren’t needed in the conversation. Nothing these men did could be carelessly executed; removing a fallen olive from the floor was an event they seemed to have written into their calendar weeks ago. Their laughter was impossibly loud and soft at the same time, the kind of laughter that could kill you if you weren’t a part of it. Every boom and hush made my heart quake and seemed to kill Mr. Resnick even more, buried him farther into the ground. When they