Laura Adamczyk - Hardly Children

After showering, I go for a walk. It’s only eleven, but already the heat is serious, so I stay in the shade and move as slowly as I can without stalling out. I like to make my time outside the house last.

I turn onto the street behind the grade school and a squirrel bursts out from a pile of cut grass. Motherfucker, I hiss, my body tensing with reflex. The squirrel immediately scurries off like it just grabbed my wallet. Come back, little squirrely, I say, but the damn thing has already disappeared. This town is filled with squirrels. They were imported some hundred years ago from England, and now the town is overrun. I can’t drive to get a gallon of milk without hitting one, almost hitting one, or seeing the poor, bloody result of someone else having hit one. Their bodies lie out flat in the road, their gray, puffy tails quivering in the breeze like a flag casting a warning.

The library’s automatic doors open before me like welcoming arms. I love it here—the return slot with its tiny rubber conveyer belt, the weekend book sale, the take-no-prisoners air-conditioning. And the librarians, whose sole civic duty seems to be to act nice to me. They know my name and ask me how my day is going, what is new in my life. I tell them, Oh, fine, Oh, nothing. And then I do my loop around the whole place. New music, new movies. I go upstairs to the magazine racks, ascending the wide blond steps. The light comes in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and I step into it, enjoying the feeling of being in a place of beauty and importance. I check all the new issue covers—glistening pictures of cakes and shiny, famous faces and cartoons of animals in business suits. The weeklies, the monthlies, it all helps me mark the time. Like going to work, like it’s all something the town needs me to keep an eye on.

Sometimes I’ll chat up the young man at circulation. The library has automatic checkout stations, but I figure he must get bored just standing behind the desk waiting for someone’s card to mess up. That and I like looking at his face. Everything about him is angular yet soft—his linen shirt is tucked into his khaki pants and his brown hair falls over his eyes. Refined, but not too refined, like someone who attended prep school on scholarship. I’d put him around my age, but sometimes he scolds me for keeping a particular book or movie too long, and it makes him seem older. I like it when he tsk-tsks me.

Hey, Claire, he says.

Hi, Thomas.

He shifts my stack of books across the counter and gets to rubbing them over the magnetic plate.

How are you all doing? I ask. Super busy?

Well, the summers always are, but we handle it all right. He smiles and then shifts his gaze to his computer screen.

I’m not really doing too much these days, I continue. Well, my sister—I’m taking care of my sister.

Oh, dear, is she all right? The concern in his voice takes me aback.

Oh, yeah, she’s okay. Just a little psychic malady. Nothing a little sun and St.-John’s-wort won’t fix. It keeps me busy, but I have some free time too.

I then hint to him how good I am at organizing other people’s stuff and how it might be fun to work at the li brary myself, since I’m here so often, and, no, I don’t actually have a library degree, but I do own a couple of different pairs of glasses, several pairs of dark-colored tights, and slip-on shoes that don’t make a whole lot of noise when I walk in them. So, you know.

You’re too funny, Claire, he says, shaking his head. He slides the stack of books back to me over the counter. Which do you think you’ll read first?

I sigh and pick up the titles one at a time.

Well, Charlotte’s Web is always a good one. I like the drawings. And Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is pretty cool. I like imagining their little outfits. And Old Yeller always brings the house down …

I’m noticing a theme here, he says.

What? Animals? I look down at the names.

Yes, and, well … Maybe you’d like some of the books upstairs too.

Upstairs?

You know, Virginia Woolf. Oscar Wilde. I bet you’d like Dorothy Parker.

I purse my lips. I’ve heard some of those names, of course. I went to college—for a couple of years—but they don’t feel like anything I need.

Maybe when I’m finished here, I say, and I square my stack and give it a pat.

EMILY, LET’S GOto Sal’s.

Emily turns a page of her book.

Emily, Sal’s, I repeat.

Today is her day off, and we’ve had a very civilized, quiet morning of reading and drinking iced coffee in the living room. I’m so restless I want to peel my skin off and wear it as a housecoat.

Emily, Sal’s.

That place is gross, she replies.

Come on, you need some more stuff around here.

I think I can do better than the Salvation Army. She doesn’t look up from her book.

Not better deals. Not better deals.

I can afford new things, she says.

But you might find a real find there. Find a find .

Find a find? I feel like I need a shower after coming back from that place.

Then we could go swimming at your work. After.

Gross.

Please, please, Em. (I’m good at begging, I know. It’s a talent and I like doing it.) Come on, why not?

I don’t feel like it, so why should I?

You know who you sound like, don’t you?

Finally she looks up from her book. She gives me her sweet death eyes—angry but also amused by my brashness, like, Ooh, someone wants to get hurt, do they?

Fine, she says, her smile slow and controlled. I’ll get my purse. You drive.

I KIND OF LIKEto say estranged . We’re estranged. Our estranged older sister. The word feels luxurious, filled with mystery, as though we have a crazy woman up in the attic giggling maniacally and setting fires, a woman trying desperately to kill us. What I wouldn’t give to have spent time in an orphanage!

The problem with Joan was there was never a standard deviation; there was no room for error. You either gave her exactly what she wanted or it was No, no, no. You’re doing it wrong. We don’t like to admit the ways we’re becoming like her. You know who you sound like, don’t you? It’s our greatest insult, but we use it sparingly to maintain its pungency. We discovered rather early on that bitch meant less and less the more you said it.

Three years ago. The morning after Christmas. The four of us crammed around Will and Em’s apartment kitchen table. Red and green and blue lights framed the archway into the living room. We’d just finished our coffee and pecan pie breakfast when Joan carefully pushed her plate aside, cleared her throat, and said, So . (She had such a way with beginnings!)

So. She said it was nearing the one-year anniversary of our parents’ death, and she wanted us to mark the time by putting their remains into the wind. We need to scatter them, she said, like it was a word we didn’t know. She lived two whole time zones away, a coastal extreme, but thought we should meet where our parents had lived the last year of their lives, which would mean a plane ride into the desert for Em and me. The plane our parents had been in returned to the earth soon after leaving it. But the distance was enough. Having us get into any flying machine seemed like Asking For It. We could drive, but Emily would have to reschedule her dress fitting and work wedding shower. She turned to Will for backup, but he’d slid into the living room to play his new single-shooter video game, a pair of headphones over his ears.

Can’t we do it another time? I asked. Does it have to be the exact anniversary? I didn’t say so, but I also had plans. A group of kids from downtown had recently taken a shine to me, and they were gearing up for a rager of a Groundhog Day party. I didn’t want to miss it. I liked how they had no jobs and never talked about their pasts or asked too many personal questions.