The Adult
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Synopsis
An addictively gripping queer coming-of-age story about an all-consuming, insidious love affair between a college freshman and a mysterious older woman, from an unforgettable new voice in fiction.
Eighteen-year-old Natalie has just arrived at her first year of university in Toronto, leaving her remote, forested hometown for the big, impersonal city. Everyone she encounters seems to know exactly who they are. She reads advice listicles and watches videos online and thinks about how to fit in, how to really become someone, whoever that might be.
And then she meets Nora, an older woman who takes an unexpected interest in her, and is drawn unstoppably into Nora’s orbit. She begins spending more and more of her time off campus at Nora’s perfect, tidy home. Natalie lies to her floormates about her absence, inventing a fake off-campus boyfriend, and carefully protects this sacred, adult relationship. This only deepens her obsession, even as she realizes Nora is hiding something. As the secrets multiply and the intensity of the romance threatens to overwhelm her, Natalie realizes that the new, adult identity she had imagined for herself is far from the one she’s actually growing into.
Propelled by atmospheric, electric prose, The Adult is about sex, yearning, poetry, and trying to find yourself in the expectations of others—and ultimately finding parts of yourself despite that. For readers of Michelle Hart and Alyssa Songsiridej, Bronwyn Fischer is an immensely talented new writer to watch.
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Print pages: 352
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The Adult
Bronwyn Fischer
On the drive, the car window hadn’t been shut all the way. The wind had buffeted as we drove, killed all conversation. My mother, a few times, looked over her shoulder at me. Arm pressing against the back of my father’s seat so that she could crane her neck to see. I wanted her to ask if I would be all right. I wanted her to turn to my father, say, “Are we really going to leave her?”—the beginning of a tearful conversation. But the next time my mother turned, she met my eyes and she mouthed, That’s making a lot of noise, and I realized, she hadn’t been looking back at me, but at the sound of the wind rushing by.
I felt like I’d had a terrible day even though I hadn’t. The day had been long, not terrible. But, being alone, everything I thought was true, so I thought, What a terrible day, and I sat in my room.
My suitcase was still open. Before they’d left, my parents had made the bed for me. I thought of them pulling the sheets up, patting the duvet. I’d noticed the wrinkles on their hands as they smoothed out the sheets. Tight gold rings around their fingers, were they old? I’d wanted to lie down and have them make the bed over me as though I were a child. But I’d stayed standing. Watching unhelpfully as they worked.
It didn’t take long before everything was made, unpacked. My parents had looked around the dorm room and then they’d looked at me. The walls around us were white and bare, absolute possibility. When I met their eyes, I felt like promising them something, but what to promise eluded me, and with the bed already pressed so flat, my father said, “Okay, we should leave.”
In the afternoon there were a lot of introductions. We stood in circles all over campus. We found a landmark, played a get-to-know-you game. The grass had been wet and soft, like washed hair. At four o’clock we stood under the arch of an old tower and our guide, a girl a few years older, said, “At some point you’ll hear the carillon.” We nodded. “That’s fifty-one bronze bells.” I looked at all the heavy stones that had been placed, one onto the other, to reach the height of the tower. “It’s pretty cool,” the guide said. I accidentally met her eyes. She smiled at me assuredly, and I suddenly wished that she would take me aside and tell me that I should stick with her. That we should hang out. But before I could smile back, or consider another more compelling expression, she and the rest of the group had started to walk away.
Near the dorms, we played another game. As instructed, I said my name and then a hobby, and then two truths and a lie. Everyone guessed the lie correctly, and I wondered how I could be transparent already. It had been a bright day. We wore matching red shirts that said Frosh. They smelled like vinegar and by evening the printing had already started to peel, making some of us rosh and F osh.
We ate in a big group, arranged by dorm floor. We kept talking and talking. I watched the girl across from me chew, while the girl beside her asked, “Where did you go to high school?”
A slipstream of questions and answers. Was it Ashley who had gone to Oakwood? Was it Fiona sitting across from me, and was it rude to ask, and how often was it rude to ask, if that was in fact her name?
I wanted something unequivocal to bond us. But all together, our voices chattered and choired, indistinct. I wished that one of our voices would catch. I thought a couple good, hard words could maybe start a fire. That was all we needed. Smoke underneath us, the table crackling—at first, we would all be slow to react, but then we would get going. Nothing to blow the fire out with, we would have to use our breaths. As we stood over the table, smoke would billow to the high ceiling of the dining hall, and the flames would go out. We would all be red-faced and tired, so bonded and accomplished that we would probably be able to leave school without degrees. Our one meal, life-long—
“Do you guys want to go out?”
It was a warm night. Everyone’s makeup was darker than their skin. Our shoes sounded wet against the ground. We moved off-campus toward a bar.
Inside, we sat at a table near the wall. A girl named Clara raised an arm over her head to get our attention. She wore a strapless shirt and I felt like I’d looked at her armpit for too long, and that she noticed. She told us to make sure we knew our birthdays if we were using fakes. She was already nineteen.
“Do you have a fake?” I shook my head at the girl beside me, who showed me an ID that belonged to her cousin but that she thought would work because their eyes were similar. She thought their differently styled hair would actually play to her advantage, because changing your haircut could really affect the look of your face. She went ahead of me and didn’t have any problems. I had an underage wristband put around my wrist.
Everyone ordered beers because no one wanted to order what their mothers ordered, and we’d seen men order beer. The girl who looked like her cousin poured some of hers into an empty water glass and I drank from it. The tabletop was sticky. On the walls there were string lights and bicycle parts. It looked as though someone’s garage had been turned into an art installation.
“You said you’re from up north?”
“Yeah, you said you had two sisters?”
“Where up north are you from?”
“Are you close with your sisters?”
“What do your parents do?”
The girl across from me had a tattoo. A snake coming down her arm. I thought if I ever got a tattoo, it would be of a husband telling his wife that he wanted to move from their nice house to live in the wilderness. And then on the opposite arm I’d get his wife, her eyes held in the longest blink.
I said, “My parents own a lodge—”
It was actually called Lakeside Inn and Resort. But I thought calling it a resort would give the wrong impression. I could have said inn, but I thought lodge sounded more wooden. My parents had renamed it Lakeside Inn and Resort when they bought it. Before, it had been called Timothy’s Lodgings. The place was a cluster of five cabins. There was a main house with a front desk and a dining room, and there was an outdoor firepit where people cooked packs of hot dogs, and just-caught fish.
If you were to enter our town from the left side, coming north to south, you would find one grocery store, one restaurant, and four churches. The day before I left, one of the church marquees said, If you got arrested for being a Christian would there be enough evidence to prove it? I’d heard my dad say once that the only thing the town could really support was people praying for money, and the room had laughed. I thought of repeating this to the girl on my left, Annie.
“That’s cool,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s on Lake Temagami.”
Annie shook her head. “I haven’t heard of it.”
“It’s really small,” I said. “Not the lake, but the town.”
She gave me a small laugh and looked down at the table. I couldn’t tell if she was laughing because I was embarrassing myself or if she was laughing because we were at a bar and drinking and we didn’t know each other.
We all swapped beers. We were deciding what we should like. I was tempted to say that I liked the one that was dark brown, the one the bartender had said was hoppy. But it wouldn’t be true, and I thought everyone would be able to tell.
The girl with that tattoo rubbed her hand against her knee and said, “I think I like the dark one.”
We all looked at her. She shifted in her chair and then drank another sip. As everyone went on talking, I watched her eyes slip from the conversation to her glass. And for a moment I felt steady, right to have said nothing.
On the way home from the bar, the group separated. A few girls went to a second bar and some went to a frat house. For the rest of us, the way back to the dorm seemed long.
“You know, just because we’re going back to the dorm doesn’t mean we have to go to sleep,” Clara said.
When we got up to our floor, I left the group quietly and sat back in my room. I felt like a remnant. The pressure of eyes looking at me had been lifted, but my throat was hot from drinking and when I went over to the window, I could still see the soft bends of my parents’ backs as they walked away.
I could hear talking through a vent. Laughter intermittently. I felt stupid for leaving myself out. I sat on my bed. I watched a video called “crunchy chicken cooked in the middle of the forest (NO TALKING).” The man builds a fire, runs his hand through a nearby stream, pets a cat that’s been following him. Then he brings out his heavy cast iron pan, shows us his salt and oil. The only sounds are of the stream, the fire, and the chicken crackling. When the chicken is almost brown, the man crouches and starts cutting basil on the flat of a tree stump. He cuts with a slow, smug rhythm that seems self-aware, and suddenly the natural calm of the brown forest floor and of the moss and weeds that surround the firepit feels inflicted. I stopped the video. And then I noticed that the dorm had gotten quiet.
I stepped out of my room. I wanted to go outside to the trees beyond the window, they reminded me of Temagami. I wondered if standing among them would make me feel sad or happy about leaving. If I felt happy, then it was simple. It would mean that I didn’t have to worry, and that the choice to come to school was justified, already good for me. If I felt sad, well, it wouldn’t mean the opposite, necessarily. I decided to expect to feel sad. And then I also decided that neither feeling should mean very much at this stage.
Annie was sitting in the common room. She held a book open against her chest. She was wearing a little toque that made her look cold. It occurred to me that if I asked her to come outside with me, we might have the kind of moment that makes people friends. We might both stare at the trees, unusually gray, unable to think of a color brighter. Our steps would be louder than usual on the sidewalk, and for a moment we would mistake ourselves as the only two people alive and this would bring a sudden gladness. It would vanish every question we had about our possible futures, and we would become suddenly strong, and purposeful.
Annie smiled. “Are you going back out?” she asked.
“Yeah, I think so,” I said. A finality that made her nod politely. I opened my mouth as though the space between roof of mouth and tongue might give more conversation, but because I said nothing, Annie just looked at me, and I had to whistle until the elevator arrived.
Down by the trees, the black sky seemed more distant without stars. Behind the dipping branches, the city was easy to see. The light from high windows made burrows of white and yellow through the night. I tried to look into the blackest row of trees. A place where they had been planted narrowly together, a thicket where the needles of their branches overlapped. But between each tree, there was a space where the darkness fell away, not like Temagami. I could look and look but the darkness would never look back at me. I waited a minute for realization. For the assurance of some resounding feeling, but all I could think was that the trees here did not make a real woods, although, with the sound of the street nearby, people’s voices and cars, there was the same sense of unknown company.
I got lost on the way to my first class because my dot on the map kept swiveling. I was late and the lecture hall was full. I stood looking through the small window in the door. The professor was all the way down at the bottom of the amphitheater. There were rows of people flipping their laptops open.
“Excuse me.”
I moved to the side and a guy behind me pulled the door out of his way. When it closed, it made a loud sound, which a few people turned to look at, and suddenly I felt the impossibility of going in after him. I watched the guy find a seat, shuffling by people into the middle of a row. I imagined myself, legs bumping against all the desks. Trying to crouch out of the way, but unable to become small enough to cause no inconvenience.
I looked down at my shoes. I thought of my parents who had bought me my shoes, and who had bought me all the shoes I’d ever had in my life. And I wondered if it would disappoint them if I didn’t go in and sit down. Or, if it was exactly the thing they expected I would do. Spend a few weeks in the city before coming home. Return to the lodge, no smarter, but smartened up. My mother had said, Sometimes you have to go away for a while to find a new appreciation for—
I could go back. Look after the cabins, strip the beds, and then make them. Bring plates of eggs around the dining room, talk about whether or not the biggest fish bite in the early morning, or in the evening, in the last dregs of light.
I didn’t get any braver thinking these thoughts. I would lie when my parents asked me how my first day had gone. Pretend that I hadn’t just stared at the door, pretend that I’d gone inside.
I walked back to my dorm room, the sun on the back of my head. I passed a hot dog stand and a noodle shop, and both smelled red and yellow. I tried to look into some of the faces I was passing to see if they looked worried, to see if any of them were also wondering if they’d gotten everything all wrong. But everyone seemed all right. They were talking to the person beside them, or they were walking at a meaningful clip, listening to something.
In the dorm, Clara hung a small whiteboard on the back of her door. When I walked past her, she was deciding what to write. She looked over her shoulder and called to my back, “Natalie, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, and tried to smile nicely.
“Want to come inside?”
Clara sat on her bed. I sat on the chair by her desk. She had a purple duvet, and a black-and-white map on her wall. Her blond bangs looked like a tuft of fur.
“So, Natalie. Who gave you that name?”
“I don’t know, I think my mom chose it.”
“You mean, you’ve never asked?”
I shook my head. She looked at me as though I also might never have looked at myself in the mirror.
“My grandmother named me after her sister who died in an accident when she was little.”
“Oh—”
“That’s why it might sound old-fashioned.”
I was sure that my name didn’t have a story. I knew no one had died for me to have it.
“We should exchange schedules so that we know when we’re both off class.”
“I’m supposed to be in class right now,” I said.
She smiled at me. “You’re kind of cool, Natalie.”
I looked down at my legs but couldn’t stop myself from smiling too. Which proved my uncoolness to myself and I thought, probably to Clara as well.
“Sarah said you were quiet, but I don’t think so. You’re not quiet, are you?”
I couldn’t imagine Sarah, but I said, “Sarah said that?”
Clara smiled again. She had the kind of blond hair that would fade easily into white. She would be the kind of old woman that people still found beautiful.
“Yeah,” Clara said. “But don’t pay any attention to her.”
She asked me if I wanted to go to the dining hall with her. We lined up outside. Clara spoke quickly to me, and the girls in front of us, about what kind of meal plan she had. And then she told us excitedly about the pasta station. She said, “I’ll probably eat pasta every single night.”
The pasta station had the biggest crowd around it. Clara went over, but then met me near the toasters, bowl empty.
“It looked very soft,” she said. “And I honestly can’t stand when my pasta is soft.”
I agreed with her. She started putting pieces of lettuce into her bowl. I took two apples from a basket of fruit, and six packets of peanut butter, and then we walked to the end of a nearly full table and sat across from each other.
“Is that all you’re having?” she asked. Her voice sounded slightly impressed.
“I’m not that hungry,” I said.
“I guess six peanut butters is kind of a lot.”
I nodded, but she kept her eyes on me. She didn’t eat the tomatoes in her salad. She left the big quarter slices on the side of her bowl.
That night, the heat of September ended so abruptly that there was talk of snow. Clara walked ahead out of the dining hall, said, “Are you kidding me?”
We stood in the grass. I looked at the ground, which was brown and hard. In Temagami the leaves had already turned autumn colors. There were people from the city who planned vacations just to see the change. They would spend hours not hunting, or fishing, but sitting on the cabins’ small wooden porches. Cameras in laps, they became very deliberate about breathing in, leaning their heads back. Above them, branches converged over each other, and the leaves made such a dense print that you felt like you were wearing it. I always felt the urge to laugh at them, but then, as time went on, felt sad instead that I wasn’t similarly awed.
At first the snow was only slight, almost still rain. But then the gray of the sky fluttered white and it was snow that started to fall.
“Has this ever happened before?”
“I’m sure it has—”
We stood without coats, lifting our faces, holding our elbows. It was quiet for a few minutes, the moment gathering itself. I imagined our voices years later straining to recall this day in late September. Middle-aged and thinking back through the chill in our clothes. The memory more vivid and bearing than reality had been.
Clara left to speak to a boy she recognized from her philosophy class. I sat on a bench just beside the grass. My eyes were already starting to get restless. Like standing in front of a good view, you either have to build your house there or turn away.
“Isn’t it cold?”
I looked over. A boy sat down, his shoulder against my shoulder.
“Yeah, it’s a bit cold.” I smiled at him.
He said he was Sam and I said I was Natalie, and then we asked the only questions we could ask. He was from Mississauga, and we were both in a class called Material Religion.
I looked at his chest. He wore a brown sweatshirt that matched his eyes and hair. He had rough cheeks, where acne had once been. “Can you believe it’s snowing?” he asked.
“No, I can’t.”
He said, “It must be called something. Everyone out like this.”
Faces turned up still, I thought, If we look for too long, we’ll join together and become a single cell. The kind that can’t think or speak or behave.
It seemed quiet even though people were speaking all around us. The cold air flattened the echo of our voices into an even tone. The ground was now white. Water leaking out of a pipe onto the sidewalk was slick, difficult to walk on. Sam leaned back against the bench, air in his cheeks. I looked at him, and I wondered why he’d sat down next to me. And then I looked across the way and I saw Clara leaning into one hip, the boy from philosophy smiling at her.
Sam smiled too when I looked over at him. And I decided to say, “You know, people are going to have sex tonight.”
His eyes creased quickly, as though I’d said something worrying, and then he laughed a breath of cold, visible air. “What?”
“Yeah,” I said. As though I knew. As though the line hadn’t taken all of my confidence.
“Why?” Sam asked. “Because of the snow?”
It still fell slowly, floating.
“Is it like the apocalypse? Is it like, people have sex before the world ends?”
I said, “I’m not sure.”
I imagined bodies heaping together, exactly the same as the snow. In the morning, a small plow burning a thin fume into the air would clear a path toward the dining hall even though it would’ve melted by the afternoon.
Sam shook his head at me, as though I were somehow unbelievable. And I wondered why certain people sit next to each other at certain times.
A few moments passed. He asked me what other classes I was taking. I started making a list. Intro to Psychology, a seminar in poetry—
“Ohh, you’ll have Jones, then.”
“For poetry? I think so—”
“Have you heard the rumor about her?”
I said I hadn’t.
He said, “They say she slept with a student last year.”
“Really?” I felt my head tilt. “Is that true?”
Sam laughed. “I don’t know.” But then he said, “She’s still teaching, so there must not have been actual proof. These things only get serious if you’re caught, or if you make a complaint.” He gave a silly smile, which made me think of a spool of yarn, a sheep. “And if it was me, I wouldn’t complain.”
I opened my mouth but then closed it, not knowing what to say. I hadn’t met Jones so I couldn’t tell him whether or not I would complain.
Sam looked down at his knees. “Do you want to go inside?”
He pushed his han. . .
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