“Exactly,” Emily had said. “What she said.”
“I can’t help it if you two are adorable,” he yelled. “Grandmother and granddaughter. Two generations!”
“What a sap,” said Edie.
They barely made it to the track, and now they were barely making it around the track, the required mile, required by Emily’s mother, who had lately been determined to save Edie’s life.
“Have you noticed your father is going bald?” said Edie.
“It’s weird, right?” said Emily.
It had happened suddenly, her father’s hair loss; one day he was good-looking, with a full head of hair, younger than all the other dads at his school, sprightly and in love with her mother, and Emily had felt safe in her own home and in the world around her.
And then all these things happened at once: Her grandmother was diagnosed with diabetes and a whole bunch of other little things that went along with it, then her grandfather left her grandmother so that he could date weird women he met on the Internet (she had heard her father tell her mother), and her mother freaked the eff out. Holy crap, she had never seen her so crazy in her entire life, and her mom was already definitely an obsessive type, her hair, the house, the furniture, the carpeting, the lawn, Emily’s hair, Josh’s hair, their grades, their b’nai mitzvah, everyone else’s hair, and on and on, everything had to be perfect. She swore if her mother could adjust the color of the sky to match her own eyes, she would, just so it could be just right.
In the middle of all this, Emily found herself surprisingly full of this really intense but deeply satisfying hate. She was a hater all of a sudden. She had negative things to say about her twin brother Josh (dopey, a pushover, sometimes even wimpy), her girlfriends at school (talked about boys so much, too much, weren’t there other things to talk about? Like music or television or movies or books or crazy grandparents, anything but boys), and her homework (a waste of time, boring, repetitive, and fifty other words that all equaled one big snooze).
And don’t even get her started on her mother, the intensity of Emily’s emotions in opposition to her mother’s very being were so strong that it had propelled her, late at night, out her window one week before, across the roof, and over to the tall, Colonial-style pillars that guarded the front porch, which she attempted to cling to and slide down, immediately flopping out onto the front driveway, slamming her head on the ground, and breaking her left arm neatly, in fact, so neatly that it inspired her doctor to say, “You got lucky,” which made her laugh, and also her parents, too, because of course no one in that room felt lucky.
It was not even that surprising when her father started to go bald, entire chunks of hair disappearing every day, as if an evil hair troll snuck into his bedroom every night while he slept and whisked it off his head and into the night. Here was another thing that was happening to someone she knew and loved. Here was another thing that was wrong with the world. Add it to the list of Things That Suck, an actual, brand-new list that existed in a journal that she kept in her locker at school, seemingly the only place safe in the universe from her mother or the cleaning woman, Galenka, who had been tending to their house for so long that she felt perfectly entitled to invade every part of Emily’s room, which was fine when she’d been five, but not when she was nearly thirteen.
“Mortality”—that was a word she had learned recently, something that had been discussed in Hebrew school. She had heard it before, she knew what it meant, but it had never applied before. Life in the biblical world was so fragile. Everyone was afraid of death at any moment. Everything was so epic, there was so much potential for disaster, storms, floods, pestilence. Diabetes (now also on the Things That Suck list) felt biblical. So did baldness. Never before had Emily realized that the world was so heavy, as heavy as her grandmother’s flesh heaving next to her on the high-school track, so heavy that she could feel it balancing on her neck and back. She believed that her brother did not feel the same weight as her. She pitied him for his blindness, and she envied him for his freedom, and if she had known just a few months before, during more innocent times, that she would feel that way for the rest of her life, not just about Josh but about a lot of people in the world, which is to say (in a polite way) conflicted, she would have treasured those unaware, nonjudgmental, preadolescent moments more thoroughly. (Oh, to be eleven again!) Because once you know, once you really know how the world works, you can’t unknow it.
And now Emily was starting to know.