Laura Adamczyk - Hardly Children

Well, you know what that’s from.

It’s disgusting.

She gives him a sardonic, distanced smile. Sometimes she meets up with a woman from work, for drinks or dinner, or treats herself to a movie, but every couple of months she goes out on a bender. She winds up drinking too much and yelling at someone or blacking out and not remembering a thing. She used to call Adam the next day crying, embarrassed and depressed. She’d say things like, I’ve just been having such a hard time lately, My life is a mess. She rarely went into detail. He imagines her sitting alone in the apartment, drinking a bottle of wine and falling asleep. Cutting herself. He sees an alternate, fuller story to the one she gives. A smile creeps onto her face.

Where’d you stay last night?

SANDY ARRIVES HALFWAY THROUGHthe final night. Her pace is slow and intentional. He would recognize her on the other side of a wall, Adam thinks. She gives him a discreet, hip-high wave when she first looks up, then continues her circle around the room’s perimeter. She finds Alex almost immediately. They shake hands and stand awkwardly apart—Sandy’s body erect yet contained, Alex hunched and folded in.

He has liked being a part of Alex’s design, but probably not as much as she has enjoyed having him there. An attractive man strung up for her vision, her pleasure. Next week, she’ll take the pieces down one at a time and have them delivered to her loft, but it won’t be as easy to fit them back in as it was to take them out.

As in weeks past, Adam’s initial pain from the cables changes into a pressurized weightlessness. The sound below downshifts to an abstract hum. Adam sees his body as hairless, slowly moving away from him. He thinks of an exhibit in which a man gets smaller and smaller. Except it’s a man and then a young man and then a boy. Somewhere there is a man and a woman, together or separate, blocks or miles away from Adam’s father’s house in Fort Wayne. People who might think of Adam, a nameless man and woman just as Adam is nameless to them. A man, maybe only a woman, who said, I will not be tied to another. I will commit to no life, not even my own. Adam was just out of school when he started at the graphic design firm. He did good work, went out every night. He’d joke with his coworkers and call all the girls sluts and the guys lame and dickless. Years this way, feeling as though he were skating above people—small people—dropping down like a seabird to pierce a fish, having a good time until the girl he was into told him that he was an asshole and a punk, that no one thought he was funny or clever or talented. She’d delivered to him a controlled, angry monologue. He started going out less and less, and when he did, he’d talk slowly out of the side of his mouth. Then he lost his job and moved in with Sandy. He thinks about it sometimes, how he used to be a completely different person.

The crowd thins and vanishes. The lights reflect off the blond-wood floor in fuzzed circles. Adam can hear the mechanical echo of the lift from a far corner of the gallery. It inches into view, with Guy behind its tiny black wheel. After tonight he will have to find something to do with himself, maybe pick up some freelance work. He should find a job like Guy’s. An occupation that means nothing more than what it shows itself to be. A driver, a housepainter, a clerk. He should move heavy objects from one place to another, wear a uniform. Alex and Sandy stand just below Adam, their voices shooting up before dropping back down to the close talk of conspirators. They step out of the way as Guy parks the lift before them. Sandy tilts her head down toward Alex, who is whispering something into her ear. Their sharp laughter rises to meet him, cracking like a firework before dissolving into an echoey silence. Then, as if they planned it all along, as if sisters who’ve spent their lives finishing each other’s sentences, they call up to him: Time to come down.

DANNY IS UPSTAIRSin her father’s house throwing herself around. She falls on the gray-white futon, rolls, and gets up, breathless. Her shirt’s off. Her breasts are nubs. The room, halved by stairs, holds a twin bed covered in an afghan on one side, the dirty futon on the other. The wood beams of the sloped roof are bare, and cobwebs palm their corners. Last weekend Danny saw a movie where a couple was fighting; then they kissed. They kept kissing and were still angry. Danny is fighting with a boy-man. Then she is the boy-man, shirtless, straight jeans at her hips. Next she’s a cowboy wrestling a calf; then she is herself again, surprised and violated by the boy.

Her father is downstairs, her sisters and stepmother and stepbrothers too. On the weekends, they form a loose, shifting mass. Each sits or lies or sleeps away from the other, spread out like jacks. The wood-burning stove heats the living room too hot, though upstairs Danny can feel the wind, thin and cold, coming through the walls. She is panting, working herself into a feeling. She smells her own sweat and a new, deeper fetor, that salty, sour smell of the school locker room, where last week a pair of girls said she should start wearing a bra—two girls, one tall and rail-thin with bug eyes, and the other with blonde, fluffy bangs and breasts that she presses out with an arch in her back. You need to wear a bra, the blonde one said, just like that.

When Danny finishes, she puts on her shirt and goes downstairs. In the parlor beside the living room stands a wooden bar, hulking and lacquered, and across from it the black stove. All day it smells of woodsmoke. Danny’s mother told her and her sisters that their father was an idiot for the stove, that all it does is make the rest of a house colder and angry that it doesn’t get the same heat as the other rooms but that it’ll get sick of the hot rooms eventually too. Danny’s mother had said this in the kitchen, clicking her fingernails on the countertop in dumb Morse code.

But he can do whatever he wants, she said. He can do whatever he wants, and we can do whatever we want—right, ladies? she said, raising a glass of pink drink to the three of them. Danny’s younger sister had used both hands to put her sippy cup into the air. Danny is thirsty; it is so warm near the stove. She walks into the living room, where on the television a white-blonde-haired girl is whispering into the ear of an old man in striped pajamas. Lying in a bed, he makes his face big, his eyes wide; he is shocked or pretending to be shocked over what the girl is telling him. Danny cannot hear what she says, the girl’s lips curling slyly as she whispers; the words don’t matter as much as her sneaking mouth. Her nonsense sibilants tickle Danny’s ears, running down her neck and back, and now the man is playfully reprimanding the white-haired girl, talking to her like a teacher making an example. Then the girl is skipping down a sunny sidewalk in a mass of other girls, arms linked, their faces stretched out in rubbery laughter.

Danny’s father and stepmother are on the couch, but Danny cannot see them. They’re grayed out, smudged, as when a woman takes her top off on TV. Her father smokes all day, and the smoke drapes a curtain around him, the air heavy as velvet. Under the blast of television girls, Danny says she’s hungry, and then there is money in her hand, and she and her sisters and stepbrothers are running across the road to the twenty-four-hour gas station, where they buy sour gummy slugs and deep-fried hot dog buns and burst jelly donuts. They return and divide everything up in the hot space behind the bar, where there are no bottles, only paper and pens and old magazines and jars of change, from which the sisters have fished out the silver-colored coins. They eat, kneeling, and when the youngest starts to cry, Danny’s older sister gives her more sour slugs, and she shoves them into her wet mouth by the fistful. From the television, Danny hears a girl or woman curse, spitting the words out breathlessly, as though she’d just finished running.