Such a Fun Age(25)
If Kelley had ever met Emira’s mother, she would have said something along the lines of, “That boy likes to talk.” Kelley definitely did that thing where he asked her questions with the intention of explaining his own answer afterward. But he did plenty of listening on his own, and Emira didn’t mind. Kelley was silly in a way that wasn’t loud or obnoxious. He once initiated a game of guessing what people were listening to on their headphones as they walked by. Another time, after passing two crying babies, he’d looked at Emira and said, “Breakups are the worst, am I right?” And once, as they were leaving a basketball game behind a small child singing “The Song That Never Ends,” Kelley whispered in Emira’s ear, “I will give you seventy-five dollars to take your Coke and dump it on that kid’s head. But you have to do it right now.”
Emira settled in across from him, removed Shaunie’s jacket, and took him in. “I would have been very on time . . .” she said. “But my boss has been really into asking me questions and wanting to talk.”
Kelley looked back down to the menu and used the candlelight to see. “Is she afraid you’re gonna sue her for sending you to the whitest grocery store in Philadelphia?”
“I have no idea. Oh! But wait!” Emira reached behind her seat and into her bag that hung off the side. She retrieved the recorked bottle of wine that Mrs. Chamberlain had set near her charging phone. “She did give me this, though.”
Kelley pulled out his phone and used the light to read the label. “Your boss just gave this to you?”
“She asked if I wanted some and then she was like, ‘Take it.’”
“This looks extremely expensive,” Kelley said. “Do you mind if I look it up?”
“No, go ahead.” Emira reached for a chip and dipped it into salsa. “She didn’t even buy it. She writes wine companies and tells them that she has an event coming up and then they just send her shit.”
“Seriously?” Kelley’s face lit up with the brightness from his phone. “What does she do again?”
“She’s a writer,” Emira said. And because she had recently Googled Mrs. Chamberlain and saw pictures of her with college-aged students, Emira added, “And maybe a teacher? I don’t know. She’s writing a history book that’s coming out next year.”
“Holy shit.” Kelley looked at Emira and squinted. “This is a fifty-eight-dollar bottle of Riesling.”
Emira said, “Damn,” but she wasn’t surprised. Mrs. Chamberlain had expensive tastes that she never openly acknowledged. Instead, she enjoyed telling Emira about the bargains she acquired. She’d divulge the exact price of a rug that was a “steal,” or she’d say she “felt good” about finding a cheap flight for Christmas. Emira couldn’t help but wonder why Mrs. Chamberlain couldn’t feel good paying full price for things when she could obviously afford it. Emira often looked up the cost of things that came from Mrs. Chamberlain’s home, suggestions, and lifestyle. In every one of her purses was a tube of mascara called Juice Beauty, which came in at twenty-two dollars each. She’d once stayed at a hotel in Boston that Emira discovered was three hundred sixty-eight dollars a night, on weekdays. And one day, when Emira explained that she’d bought Briar new shorts after she sat in mud, Mrs. Chamberlain dug into her wallet with an urgent apology: “Let me pay you for the shorts. Will thirty dollars cover it?” Emira had bought the packet of shorts at Walgreens, and they were $10.99 for two. When Emira relayed this interaction to Zara, Zara was beside herself that Emira didn’t accept the surplus. “The fuck is wrong with you?” she’d said. “You tell her, ‘Yes. The shorts cost thirty dollars exactly. You are very welcome, good-bye.’”
“Well.” Kelley handed the bottle of wine back across the table. “I brought beers because I thought that we were honest, working-class people, but if I’d known you were trying to seduce me . . .”
“Right. Uh-huh.” Emira smiled around the chip in her mouth. This was another thing that she’d decided she would let Kelley get away with: considering himself working class. Kelley worked at one of those fancy offices where everyone sat in the same huge room with plush headphones on and there was unlimited cereal and La Croix. But instead of reminding him of this, and the fact that he lived above a CrossFit in Fishtown, she said, “Not gonna lie. It’s the best wine I’ve ever had.”
They ended up drinking the beers because Gloria’s had a rule that you couldn’t drink anything that was already opened. Emira slipped it back into her bag, and Kelley said, “We’ll work on that later.”
They talked about their days, but underneath it all, Emira kept thinking, If you don’t fuck me tonight I’m gonna be livid. It seemed—and this was just her opinion that was backed by Zara’s confirmation—that Kelley was still slightly hung up on their age difference. In the same way that white women were often overly accommodating to her when she found herself in specific white spaces (dental offices, Oscar parties in which she was the only black attendant, every Tuesday and Thursday at the Green Party office), Kelley was overcompensating for the implications of their age difference by taking Emira to places that were completely unsexy, and ending the night kissing the space next to her ear. Emira had been surprised by how rhythmic and chemical their first night together had been—this, in her opinion, usually took time—but after two dates of “Have you ever been to Europe?” and “What would you do if you won the lottery?” she was ready to go back to his place. On his couch, that first night, Emira hadn’t thought of Briar, or her impending health insurance problem. Or even the fact that her rent would be going up by ninety dollars as soon as the new year began.