Laura Adamczyk - Hardly Children

He bent down low and started dribbling, and she crouched down there with him. He passed the ball off to the big guy in the headband, who backed himself toward the hoop. His soft backside bounced off the tall man’s bony pelvis, once, twice, three times. The tall man had the feeling, because of the physical similarities and differences between them, that this pushing back and forth, one against the other, could go on indefinitely, that neither of them would ever grind the other down. He could smell the sweat of the big guy and the sweat of himself, but mostly it was cut grass and flowers hanging their heads in the heat, and some other wet scent that he could not name as either earth or flesh. The big guy, getting nowhere, tossed the ball back out to the wisecracker, but the woman jumped for it, her hand tipping the ball to half court. She and the wisecracker scrambled and fell upon the ball, the concrete of the court peeling skin from their elbows and knees. They pushed and pulled with the ball between their hands, she finally wrenching it free and, from the ground, throwing it out to no one in particular. The tall man jumped forward to receive it and, turning, seeing an opening in the lane, charged ahead past his friends, whom he loved, but who were not as fast as he was. He dug down low and, springing up into the air, stretched out his body as long as he could against that sea of pale, loose arms. There was a strain and pulse in him, his arms circling and jerking, which made it seem like he wanted to go in several directions at once but couldn’t decide which. He took the ball in both hands, drifted up to the basket, and, pushing the ball through the hoop, hung on to the rim for what seemed like a very long time.

He came down hard, so hard that pins and tingles jetted up from his feet through his legs, and the muscles in his jaw and ears clenched tight. And yet he felt joy, such big joy in him, as a single, beautiful line pointing in any one confident direction, that he wanted to cry out in gratitude for being given what he’d been given, for doing what he’d done, which he knew, despite the adrenaline and life coursing through his body, would never be repeated.

Fuck yeah, he breathed. Fuck. He watched the ball roll off into the grass behind the hoop, where it came to a slow but certain stop. He turned in order to find the others, to open his body up to them, but his friends, their arms and mouths slack, were facing half court. There the woman and the wisecracker were still down on the ground, fighting over something. The tall man took a step forward.

Straining against each other’s skin, their sweaty arms grappling, torsos squirming, the two of them wrestled each other’s sticky shirts over their heads, before shoving their faces together.

Holy crap, headband said.

It’s about time, said the bald one.

The tall man stood behind the rest of them. The pins and tingles returned, moving around with so much ecstasy in his limbs that he couldn’t make them do what he wanted them to, which was get him so much closer. He wanted to get as close as he could, to see if the energy there might pass into him, that they might all share it, but he stayed back, watching his friends watch their friends do what they needed to do. The man on the ground scrunched his face into the woman’s neck. The woman on the ground pursed her lips and exhaled, as though in pain, as though blowing out a candle. The sound the two of them were making reached their friends’ ears before the breeze disappeared it in the brown leaves swirling in the open court, while the sun, noiselessly tucking itself into the horizon, put a sharp golden light on all their beautiful bodies.

I’M IN THE SHOWER TRYINGto shape a piece of my hair on the wall into an M. My hair’s long, but it won’t hold the letter’s turns. It looks more like a snake essing toward the end of the stall, where it might eventually flatline or curl into something unrecognizable. I used to do this with Emily when we were younger. I’d put my hair on the tile when she was going in after me, and later she would come into my room with a towel around her head and say, I love Eric Barnes too, or, You’re not fat, picking up the conversation as though I’d spoken aloud. We’d sit on my bed, pulling threads from the seams of my quilt, and I’d tell her what I wasn’t able to before. But those talks only lasted a few seasons at best, and there have been so many seasons since then.

SORRY, EM , I’m trying to spell out, because I know she’s feeling down, but it looks more like SORRIES, and I think about just scrapping the whole thing. I want my meaning to be clear.

Part of the problem is that this is my sister’s house. She wants me to act a certain way in it. Wash the dishes after I’ve cooked, keep my feet off the coffee table. Emily is younger than I am, but at some point she seemed to pass me by. Getting degrees, getting married. Our older sister, Joan, is more or less out of the picture, and I guess Emily felt like she had to fill the gap with regards to leadership and adult progress. But it doesn’t bother me. I kind of like being taken care of.

The other part is that Emily’s husband, Will, used to live in this house. That is, until six months ago, when he caught her having an emotional affair with the manager of a La Quinta a few towns over. She’s the manager of a La Quinta here, and the two of them met at some regional what-have-you conference. At least that’s what our cousin Stacy told me. Stacy is no stranger to gossip, so if she knows something, then it’s safe to say that everyone else knows it or will know it very soon. Needless to say, it was disappointing to hear this kind of thing secondhand.

Anyway, Will ended things and took half their stuff with him to some resort town in Arizona, a place where they probably still have a few real quintas hanging about, so now Emily needs me. That’s what Stacy said. She was the one who suggested I move in, help out around the house. Provide moral support. I’ve decided I’m more of a seen-and-not-heard moral supporter, like someone bidding on a silent auction. Emily doesn’t talk about Will, and I don’t like to mention sore subjects if I can avoid them.

If I had to put a name on it, I’d say Emily just seems distracted. That is, she concentrates very intensely on things that aren’t Will. She moves around the house with a focus so acute as to eliminate the thought of anything but the task before her. She scrubs the kitchen backsplash until the enamel starts to wear; she eats apples like she’s punishing them for ever having existed. The socks I leave on the living room floor get her very focused indeed. And she’s always on the phone with work. Our parents left us a nice amount of money when they died, which made employment, how shall I say, optional . So it still surprises me when she leaves the house in the afternoons wearing a blazer and chunky black shoes, or when I hear her talking about a “perfect sell,” which I first heard as perfect cell —C-E-L-L—as though all the hotel rooms were cells, like in a prison. How odd, I thought. Those manager types sure are cold! But a perfect sell—S-E-L-L—is when all the rooms (or cells) are full. That’s her goal every night, filling the rooms up with people.

Ours is a shitty college town, and I can’t imagine anyone coming in on a Tuesday to check out the pool hall on Main or the bowling alley across from the twenty-four-hour laundromat, let alone enough people to fill an eighty-four-room La Quinta every night. But somehow she does it. She cares very intensely about certain things, which also seems to be part of the problem. She cares so much, and it sets her up for some real disappointment. I, on the other hand, take pleasure in life’s smallest details. For example, I’m really proud of some other things I accomplished in the bathroom this morning. So proud that I was thinking of leaving some evidence behind for Emily, but her sense of humor has been off as of late, and I’m trying to be sensitive.