How to Be an Adult: An Education

As a twenty-one-year old college student, I’m well aware that I’m still living in a bubble of parental care and structured life, even though I’m encouraged to act independently and take on responsibilities of my own. Still, once I graduate (in two and a half years) I will need to deal with a monster scarier than in any horror story you can imagine: the infamous Real World. I sometimes wonder if I’ll be able to handle it. I’ve decided that there should be a specific school that teaches how to be an adult. Here are the courses I imagine:

-How to Manage Your Money 101 (a required course for the following electives: How to Be Frugal Without Being Stingy; The Bare Essentials: What Are They?; How to Take a Vacation Without Regretting it Forever; and the ever-popular How to Pay Off Your Student Loans.)

-Being Single (a required course for the following electives: How to Know When It’s Time to Break Up; How to Dump Your Partner with Kindness, Courtesy, and Minimal Ego-Damage; How to Survive Rejection; Bars, Beaches and Bowling Alleys: Meeting People; The Online Dating Scene: Going Digital)

-Tax Returns and Living Alone: Life Skills (a required course for the following electives: Leaving Home: Tragedy or Jubilation?; A Corner of One’s Own: Living with Roommates; How to Pay Taxes Without Tears; I Rented an Apartment: Now What?; Health Insurance: Step by Step; Robbers and Rapists and Muggers, Oh My – Getting Past First-Time-Out-of-the-Nest-Paranoia)

Break’s Over

People are already returning to my school today. My flight leaves tomorrow night. I should get to bed so I can wake up early and pack.
It’s with mixed feelings that I’m leaving. In many ways, I’m glad to go back. There are good things waiting for me back at school, in all avenues of life. But there are good things here, too. I guess this is kind of the best possible problem to have, right? Leaving one happy place for another happy place isn’t really something I feel comfortable complaining about.

Becalmed

A ship sails in the darkness. Only three people are aboard. The captain stands on the deck, watching the stars’ reflection in the calm waters that lie beyond the ripples that the ships rocking movement is creating. She sends an arm out, wishing she could touch them – the reflections, not the stars. The stars are too far away. They’re intangible and require faith. The little specks on the water, however, are as real to the captain as the silver streaks that she sees during the day and knows to be fish.

Her first mate lies stretched out in her cabin below. It is not her watch yet. The captain will wake her when she’s needed, she has no doubt about that. But she cannot sleep, even though it’s almost impossible, making a ship work smoothly with only a captain to guide her and a half-mad, broken-down sailor to aid her. She worries about the following day and wonders whether the winds will finally rise and help them. She’s heard horror stories before about becalmed ships, but she never thought that it would be so incredibly frightening to be on one. The absence of any certainty is eating away at her: she knows not when the winds will rise, she knows not when she will see land again, she knows not whether she will live to touch her loved ones again. There is enough food to last a while, but the water has begun to seem a lot less plentiful than it had a week ago when the winds disappeared.

The lone sailor, a simpleton to begin with and driven almost out of her wits by the plague that destroyed the rest of the once large crew, rocks back and forth in her hammock in the large, empty room that she shared, until two weeks ago, with many others. The ropes creak comfortingly and she hums their notes as she swings, trying to lull herself into comfort. She has had no joy beyond the wooden planks of this ship; it is the one and only place she has ever found camaraderie. It’s almost all gone now, and she clings to the memories of what she had and tries to forget the sight of her fellow sailors in their death throes.

The wind doesn’t pick up. There is no hope yet for the three aboard the ship. But all three are human, and so they cannot help hoping anyway.

Gate Crashing

If he hadn’t blacked out, he would’ve remembered the swagger with which he entered the house. Of course, he was the only one who would’ve thought it was a swagger; everyone else saw what could only be described as a stumbling kind of weaving between the wall on one side and the crush of people waiting to get their coats on the other. He would’ve – if he could’ve – remembered the way he’d begun to laugh at the expressions on everyone’s faces. As if they’d never seen him before! As if he hadn’t been dandled on the laps of half and had his hair ruffled or his cheek pinched by the other half!

If he had been able to remember anything in the morning, he would’ve been embarrassed by the way he’d attempted to sing. It had been that kind of night, when everything seems like it should be a musical. So he’d decided to burst into song, and he’d sung, or more probably screeched with a cracking voice, about how he was a big boy now, with pubic hair and deodorant and the ability to get illegally inebriated (he’d been very proud of how he hadn’t stumbled over the word “inebriated,” but he might’ve been less cocky if someone had told him that it had sounded like “in-a-bread,” as if he was trying to describe what a sandwich was).

If he hadn’t woken up with a splitting headache and a mouth that tasted like a tar-pit, he might have even realized that someone had tucked him into bed, gotten him out of his vomit-soaked clothes, and closed the curtains of his east-facing windows. He might have realized that it must mean that no matter what scene was going to greet him downstairs, someone cared enough to make him comfortable through the suffering caused by his own idiotic behavior.

But he’d blacked out, and he remembered nothing. So he spent the rest of the day sulking over the grounding and making up stories to tell his friends about the wild things he’d probably done during the night he couldn’t recall.

Being Grace

Counting down from ten never worked for Grace. If anything, it only exacerbated her temper and focused it, creating a keener point to her already sharp tongue, so that when she opened her mouth and spoke, the words that emerged were more painful, more disdainful, and more disrespectful. When she reacted without thinking, she’d usually stumble around with inadequate phrases that blunted the fierce criticism; she kept more employees this way.
Grace was not, to say the least, graceful. Besides her forge-heat temper, she was also frequently rude – not on purpose, but because the niceties of polite small talk and banter seemed like a waste of time and she hadn’t the patience for them. She was also leery of letting others do any work for her and preferred counting on herself. She despised debts of any sort and had difficulty thanking those who helped her. Those who loved her, though, accepted this in her, and learned to become deaf to her tactless observations and blind to her sometimes embarrassing behavior.
She ran a small business, which was unfortunate for it forced her to hire others and trust them with at least a certain amount of responsibility. She always had the uncomfortable feeling that she was turning into a cliche mega-boss-lady, a woman universally feared for her tight bun and neatness. At the same time, she hated the thought that people would look at her and think “Oh, she’s really all mushy inside.”
It was hard for her, being Grace. She often wondered whether there was anything she could do about it.

Thin Disguise

The old building was cold, its concrete walls never absorbing the day’s sunlight. A small heater that sat in the middle of the room, its metal bars glowing a fiery, hellish red but spreading little enough heat beyond the foot or two of air right around it. The owner of the little room sat huddled by it, shirtless, with a sweatshirt draped over his back. The warmth on his chest almost felt as if there was another body there, pressed close to his.

He knew he should be working, spewing word after word onto the blank screen, crafting some sort of pseudo-intelligent babble that his dissertation adviser would eat up. A disturbing image of turds wrapped inside scones came to his mind; it seemed oddly fitting, though nauseatingly easy to imagine. He put his fingers up to the heater and marveled, as if he were four again, at the way the light shone right through his fingers, making the nails shine with the blood moving under it. The thought of blood always made him begin to hear his pulse knocking through his ears.

Her pulse had always been discernible in her stomach, right where his hand rested when they slept, curled up, their two pairs of cold feet trying to soothe each other in vain. That had been a long time ago. There had been others in his bed since, but they either didn’t spend the night or didn’t fit into the curve of his body quite as well. Besides, they’d all wanted to be the small spoon, and he often needed to be hugged himself, comforted in sleep by the presence of someone at his back. It was one of his only child-like traits. Otherwise, he was often too grown-up, he was told. Even in college, he’d never been as free as he should have been, as easy in himself.

The balcony door blew open and a sharp wind stung him. Getting up, his sweatshirt dropped to the floor, and he felt assaulted as he stepped over the heater, into the harsh breeze. He had to fight to close the door.

Rick’s Tracks

Rick had always been short, round and bespectacled. He started wearing glasses when he was two years old; he looked like a little owl in the photos on his mother’s mantelpiece. By the time he was six, his father began worrying about his rotund qualities and tried to get him interested in sports of all kinds. Rick took every kind of class that was offered at the community center, from karate to swimming, but he always ended up crying and, somehow or other, with broken glasses. His mother grew tired of buying him new glasses and refused to sign him up for any more classes. Instead, his father tried to get him involved in the peewee teams at his elementary school, but that didn’t’ work either. Rick was always gently taken off any team he was on when he was found, elbows on knees, staring at a caterpillar rather than paying any attention at all to the game.

It was no use. Rick simply wouldn’t become the son that his parents had thought they would have. But unlike many unlucky little boys and girls, Rick had parents who loved him and learned to accept him. Rick himself was a cheerful and dreamy child and never seemed to quite realize that his parents had been disappointed in him for a time. He grew up happily, finding friends among the other quieter kids, entertaining himself with adventure books and building blocks, and pleasing his parents with his good report cards.

Of course, little children grow up, even if they read Peter Pan over and over again. Rick stood by the train tracks nervously, fiddling with a ragged piece of tissue between his fingers and dabbing his nose absentmindedly every few seconds and thought back on his life. The bad things, he decided, must have begun around middle school.

Talking to a Chair

“Mommy-Mommy-Mommy-Mommy-Mommy!” The shouts got steadily louder, accompanied by what seemed like an elephant pounding along the second floor hallway and down the stairs. It was amazing that a six-year-old could make quite so much noise.

Greer took a deep breath, trying to keep her temper. The kitchen table was littered with receipts and she felt as if they were all ganging up on her, trying deliberately to bamboozle her into making another calculation mistake and needing to start all over again.

“Mommy!” Rebecca stood in the doorway, hands on her hips. “Didn’t you hear me?”

“I think they heard you in China.” Greer sighed and took off her reading glasses. They made her head ache. “What is it?”

“If you heard me, why didn’t you answer?” Becca shifted her weight to one leg and tapped the other foot. Greer fought down a laugh; it was a gesture her daughter must have picked up from her, and it looked precociously adorable. But Becca hated being laughed at and saw herself as a very grown-up little girl. Greer remembered, vaguely, that she too hadn’t liked the feeling of being just a kid and therefore unworthy of being taken seriously.

“Because I’m working on taxes and I need to concentrate. If you needed me, I knew you’d come down here and talk to me like a civilized person instead of shouting all over the house. And I was right, wasn’t I?”

Rebecca dropped the pose and took the chair opposite her mother. “I dreamed about Daddy.”

“Oh, Becca… Was it a nice dream?”

“No. But Daddy was in it. So it wasn’t only bad.”

“Was Daddy nice?”

“Yes. He hugged me.”

Greer played with a pen, needing something in her hands to stop her from reaching out to Becca, because she didn’t like being touched unless she initiated it. The therapist said that children could develop these kinds of aversions, and Greer knew she needed to respect her daughter’s boundaries, but it was so hard, sometimes, not to be able to hug her whenever she wanted and smell her usually messy hair and remember how once there had been another smell beside it that belonged to the body hugging the girl from the other side and making a Becca-sandwich.

“Can I help?” Becca asked, picking up a long, half rolled grocery receipt and pulling it tightly around her finger.

“Thanks, but no. Why don’t you bring your spelling book in here, though?”

“Okay.”

Greer didn’t believe in heaven, so she looked at the chair that he’d sat in during dinner every night and spoke to it instead of looking up. “I hope you can see her. She’s only six and she wants to help me do my taxes. I really hope you can see her right now. You’d love her more than ever.”

Stuck

I haven’t been writing very well lately. I feel kind of stuck. I think it’s mostly because I’ve been writing last thing before going to bed, when I’m tired and am just itching to get under the covers. Methinks I need a change of writing routine – or, rather, to go back to some kind of writing routine at all, which I’ve shamefully neglected since getting home for winter break.

Then again, I’m on vacation after all. I should cut myself some slack. But even so, it’s not fun, feeling stuck.

Slightly Ignorant

Ilana Masad Writes

writing