All Adults Here(53)
AND YOUR DAD USED TO BE SUPER HOT, WTF
“Oh, god!” August said. “This is, like, bad, even for them! This is the kind of note someone gives you on your prison lunch tray right before they stab you with a pointy toothbrush!”
Cecelia let her head fall into her hands.
“What exactly happened, anyway?” They hadn’t talked about the details, just the really broad strokes, because the details didn’t make sense, and it was easier to keep things neat with new friends.
On the tiny rectangular screen in front of them, Elizabeth Taylor was getting older in three-minute increments. Someone had taken the trouble to put the whole three-hour movie on YouTube, and they were watching, skipping every few minutes so they could get through as much as they could in forty-five minutes. Cecelia just wanted to see everything at once, to know how things would turn out. Everything took too long—school, her parents’ fights, puberty, summer camp, the line at the bagel store on weekday mornings. Cecelia wanted the Hollywood version of her own life—fast-forward, with wrinkles made out of papier-maché. It was too hard to wait and see.
When Cecelia was small, and her mother was dancing more than she was teaching, Juliette was often away in the evenings at bedtime. Nicky was always around, his job being more or less make-believe, and her dad would fill the tub with bubbles and tell her stories about mermaids until her eyelids began to flutter closed. She didn’t object, because it was nice to have time with her father, too, but Cecelia remembered the day she finally understood: Her mother was gone because her mother was somewhere else. She hadn’t just evaporated for the night, she had gone somewhere else, to do things with other people. It was heartbreaking. Her father didn’t understand why Cecelia would cry so much, because she couldn’t quite explain—it had to do with the unfairness of being a child in a family of adults, of being left out, of being left behind. Juliette was always there in the morning, but in the morning, Cecelia would be tired, and still clutching on to her anger like a security blanket. No kid wanted their parent to belong to the outside world, not really. No one wanted an independent mother. Those nights when she was small, Cecelia had often put herself to sleep by saying, fast-forward, fast-forward, fast-forward, because the sooner she went to sleep, the sooner she would wake up, the sooner time would pass. She didn’t want to get older, she just wanted to be on the other side of whatever it was. Whatever her mother was doing, she wanted it to be over.
“I told you. My friend Katherine,” she said, “she got me in trouble for getting her in trouble, basically. She met a guy who turned out to be something else. Like, a grown-up. And I told because I didn’t want her to get murdered, and then she accused me of bullying her, even though I wasn’t. And now she’s still getting me in trouble, which was the whole reason my parents wanted me to come here, so that it would just be over, erased, as if life works that way. Why do I know that and they don’t? It’s like, guys, the internet exists. The internet doesn’t care what zip code you’re in. There is literally no escape. Maybe Antarctica.”
August shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“I’m going to do the Parade Crew.” Cecelia folded the note back up and put it into her backpack. She didn’t want to throw it away and have the librarian find it and start the whole thing all over again.
“Okay,” August said. “I’ll do it with you.”
“Really? Thank you. You are a good friend. Thank you,” Cecelia said. She crossed her ankles and watched Elizabeth Taylor lean against a doorframe. She looked like she wanted to push the opposite button. Rewind. Wash it all off and start again. Maybe someday Cecelia would want that, too, but not today.
Chapter 24
Hot Time in the City
After they put Cecelia on the train, Nicky had taken a cab to JFK, where he was scheduled to fly to Albuquerque, with a layover in Dallas, but as soon as he walked through security, Nicky knew he couldn’t go. He turned around, pulling his small wheeled suitcase behind him, and went to the back of the taxi line. Being apart from Cecelia was strange enough; he didn’t want to be apart from Juliette too. The two of them walked around the apartment in circles for days, dueling somnambulists, avoiding conversation but happy for the companionship. Finally Nicky did what he always did when he felt terrible—he went to the Russian baths on Tenth Street and tried to sweat it all out. When he was in Taos, Nicky liked to drive out to the banks of the Rio Grande, where there were natural hot springs, small, stone-lined pools of hot water; but there was no calming river in New York City, no empty, quiet space, and so instead Nicky took the train into Manhattan and walked to the East Village and traded his street clothes for a pair of one-size-fits-all shorts and a shvitz.
He’d first come to the baths during college, in between when he shot The Life and Times of Jake George and when the movie was released eight months later. It was Jerry Pustilnik’s idea, the actor who played his father in the movie, who had played the father to half a dozen other teenage heartthrobs, as well as scores of police detectives, and criminals of several denominations, due to his mirthful belly and round cheeks, which could look either stern or menacing. Jerry went to the baths every week he was in the city, and he told young Nicky that it was a life-changing experience, and so they made a date to go. Nicky brought his bathing suit in his backpack, not knowing what to expect, but before long they were surrounded by Russian Jews with bellies that made Jerry’s look petite. In one of the saunas, Jerry paid a guy ten dollars to smack his back with giant oak leaves and then they ate pickles and borscht, Jerry’s skin now electric red, and Nicky was sure that Jerry had been right. The purposeful discomfort—in a community setting, no less!—had a numbing effect on the mind, because all you could think about was how every drop of water in your body was trying to come out.