The Adults

My mother had joked all summer long that if my father wanted to turn fifty, he would have to do the damn thing outside on the grass. We had all laughed around the dinner table, and with a knife in my fist, I shouted out, "Like the dog!"
"If we had one . . . ," my father said, correcting me.

"They arrived in bulk, in Black Tie Preferred, in one large clump behind our wooden fence, peering over each other's shoulders and into our backyard like people at the zoo who wanted a better view of the animals.

My father's fiftieth birthday party had begun.

It's true that I was expecting something. I was just fourteen, my hair still sticky with lemon from the beach, my lips maroon and pulpy and full like a woman's, red and smothered like "a giant wound," my mother said earlier that day. She disapproved of my getup...but I didn't care; I disapproved of this party, this whole at-home affair that would mark the last of its kind.

The women walked through the gate in black and blue and gray and brown pumps, the party already proving unsuccessful at the grass level. The men wore sharp dark ties like swords and said predictable things like, 'Hello.'

'Welcome to our lawn,' I said back, with a goofy grin, and none of them looked me in the eye because it was rude or something."

"An ambulance was sent for Martha, who would eventually be fine, who would never drink that much vermouth again. She would become the president of the Spanish Club and get into the University of Rochester, where she would lose her virginity to a thirty-year-old from Cork, Ireland."