The Adults by Alison Espach Page B

girl who didn’t realize that the things I chose to love were never meant to be seen in any real, human way. Mark, who always just wanted to get along, was in the background and said, “Why do you guys have to fight all the time? I don’t understand why you have to fight.”
    Inside my house, nobody was home, except everybody, but it was easy to feel like those were one and the same. My mother was watching television. My father was in the basement. My father was on the verge of leaving us. He didn’t say it like this. In fact, nobody said it like this. We weren’t allowed to speak of his distance. It only upset my mother. We just watched him move slowly out of the house one box at a time, as though it were becoming a tiresome project to leave this life behind, an operation that required way too much packing tape. I was at the window, or outside on the driveway, or somewhere else entirely, and if anybody bothered to ask what I was learning in school, this was the answer I was preparing: a person can feel equally alone anywhere; you can be just as lonely in biology class holding a rabbit as you can standing next to a window in the middle of September as you can watching older people on television take each other’s clothes off.
    My mother and I watched Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman at eight. Touched by an Angel at nine. Every Sunday we decided something different. We decided we probably wouldn’t watch Touched by an Angel if it didn’t come on right after Dr. Quinn , if they didn’t show a small preview before we had time to lose interest. We decided we liked eating grapefruit, but then my mother declared that the labor of eating it was too demanding for a snack. We decided the hot one on our favorite after-school soap opera was never going to find out that his brother, who was blind with a heart condition, was having sex with his lover and we decided that you could never justifiably get mad at someone who was sleeping with the blind, considering the woman who was doing so also had amnesia, and we decided we had enough energy to tolerate this tease of a story line. We decided it didn’t matter who made their beds when. This meant we were finally liberated.
    “From what?” I asked my mother.
    “From linens,” she said. I had never felt particularly oppressed by linens, so it made more sense to me when my mother added, “From rules, from intolerable mornings, and that includes linens.”
    At some point, my mother would ask, “What’s new?”
    “The right side of my face is smaller than the left,” I said, munching on a pretzel.
    My mother laughed. “That’s ridiculous.”
    “It’s true. We measured it in science class.”
    “Who measured it?”
    “Martha.”
    “Well, Martha obviously doesn’t know how to measure correctly.”
    “How would you know?” I asked. “You don’t even know Martha.”
    “I’m your mother. I’ve stared at your face for fourteen years.”
    “Well, that’s just sad,” I said.
    Janice called. Over the phone, Janice and I laughed about all the things the Other Girls had said that week, and I welcomed the relief from my mother. “Brittany told Mr. Basketball that she was worried about him because he had such an amazing body,” Janice said, and when I laughed, she added, “I’d die without you.” I agreed, even though I knew I wasn’t the type of person who would die from grief. I was the kind of person who would sit with grief on the couch until grief died, who would watch reruns of game shows while grief guessed the price of a can of green beans. Seventy-nine cents! Grief was always right. Grief went to the supermarket a lot.
    I hung up the phone.
    “Shouldn’t you be somewhere?” I asked my mother accusingly.
    “Like where?” my mother asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said, and I didn’t.
    “Let’s just watch the show, Emily,” my mother said.
    When my father came up from the basement, my mother got up and made chicken fajitas. As she seasoned the chicken, she