Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here(10)

“Oh, right, because before this, it absolutely looked like you guys were heading for homecoming court,” deadpans Avery without looking up from her calc book.

“Shut your face, Wheezy.”

Ruth clears her throat. “Well, I think”—she waits for both of us to give her due attention and respect—“I think it went better than you could’ve possibly imagined.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Would you say it was ‘unforgettable’?”

“No, because I’d like to forget it as quickly as possible.”

“That wasn’t my question.”

“Actually, it was. You just have Alzheimer’s.”

Ruth doubles over and laughs so hard that the joint almost falls out of her mouth. She holds up her hand, signaling for us to give her a second to catch her breath. Sometimes I forget how old she is—I don’t like to think about it. To be honest, these “being adjacent to mortality” moments are a bummer. I know it’s strange to be friends with a seventy-three-year-old, but like most unlikely friendships, ours has kind of an origin story.



Back in freshman year social studies, I had to interview a senior citizen. All my grandparents had already shuffled off this mortal coil, and I didn’t want to hit up the Melville Retirement Community because nursing homes creep me out. They’re like drive-throughs for death.

The old lady across the highway, in the dilapidated house with the beautiful garden, seemed like the most convenient option. I didn’t know her at all, but Dawn and everyone else on Leshin Lane seemed to think she was nuts—not just old lady nuts but ageless, mentally imbalanced, “she was like this when she was twenty” nuts.

I knocked on her door at around four thirty in the afternoon, figuring old people didn’t go to bed until at least five. No response. I knocked again.

A voice, sounding surprisingly like a sprightly fifty-year-old’s, snapped, “I’m not interested!”

“Um, I’m not selling anything.”

She cracked the door just enough that the chain on the latch was taut. All I could see was a sliver of her face. “Go on, then.”

Talking in that way you do when you know you have to sell somebody on your pitch in the next five seconds, I rushed: “I’m Scarlett Epstein your neighbor I have to do a project for school about studying American history on a personal level and I was wondering if you might have the time to—”

She shut the door in my face. I was flabbergasted. I knocked again, more insistently, and I heard her agitated footsteps slamming on the hardwood as she came back to the door. She swung it wide open so hard that the breeze blew my hair back.

Ruth was—is—what an old-fashioned novel would call a “handsome woman,” almost six feet tall with thick gray-streaked hair piled on top of her head. She wore a crisp white short-sleeved shirt buttoned up all the way to the top, with the sleeves rolled like James Dean, and thick wool trousers. She didn’t look like anyone else in town. In other words, she looked cool as hell.

“You Dawn Epstein’s kid?”

“Um, yeah.”

“I’ve seen her at Superfresh. Where’s your dad at?”

“New York,” I said, then for some reason felt compelled to add, “New wife.”

Ruth looked at me for a minute, slouching in the doorway and sucking in her cheeks thoughtfully, her body language uncannily similar to the burnout kids at my school who hung out near the Stop sign just outside the school zone. Then she glanced conspiratorially around, even though it was just us in front of her empty house.

“You go to MHS?”

“Alas and alack, I do.”

“Do you know where I could find some pot?”

My eyebrows shot up before I could control them.

“Pot like pot? Like marijuana?”

“No, pot like for tea. It’s hard to get your hands on ceramic cookware,” she deadpanned, looking exasperated. “Yeah. You know. Ganj. Whatever you’re calling it now.”

“I missed the last teen-slang standardization meeting, but I think we’re calling it weed. You don’t, like, have a person?”

“I think he graduated. I’ll tell you, being retired and running out of your stash is kinda like having a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich without the peanut butter. Or the jelly. Just two dry pieces of bread.”

Gamely attempting to roll with this, I agreed faintly, “That sounds like . . . not a good sandwich.”

“Don’t look so shocked. Getting high is just about the only good thing about being my age. Which is seventy-one, by the way. If there’s some kind of crone age requirement for your project.”

“That’s a great age for my report, and you’re not a crone,” I told her firmly, trying and failing to feel out where all this was going.

She gasped like I insulted her. “Don’t say that! I love being a crone.

“I don’t know who came up with the stupid idea that we appreciate the little things, like domestic chores or sitting and watching the sun set like it’s a goddamn Bourne movie. And you can use that in your report, by the way—if you help me out and track down a new dealer.”

“Um, I don’t think I know anybody.”

She snorted derisively, reaching up to adjust the cockeyed tumble of gray hair looped up in a claw clip.