The Lauras Read online

  For a few minutes I tried to match up the stories she’d told me to the notes without much success, copied the path in rough ballpoint on the inside cover of an Agatha Christie Ma had already read, then refolded the map along its creases and stashed it back with the money.

  She was gone five more hours. Every time I considered pulling the map back out for a second look my brain conjured the sound of her engine, her footsteps rattling the loose metal staircase, her key in the door. I could have copied out the entire map and all of her annotations in the time she was gone, but instead I caved to my nerves and read one of the paperbacks from our stash.

  When she finally reappeared I was so absorbed in the book that I heard neither her engine nor her footsteps on the staircase. The door smacked to the length of the security chain, and I had to skitter up to let her in. She tossed first her keys, then a grey brick that it took me a few moments to realize was a new cellphone, onto the little table under the wide front window, then fell back onto the bed, starfished, and moaned, “Goddamn, it is hot out there.”

  “You got a new phone,” I observed.

  “Had to—you need a phone number to put on the job applications. Got an offer to work at a sports bar, and another bar, though I’m not sure if I’m going to take one or both.” She took a breath. “And I registered you for school.”

  “What?”

  “You start eighth grade in a few weeks. I managed to get you out of phys ed. You’re welcome.”

  She tossed me a sheaf of papers: Spanish was mandatory. Oh, joy. Then I realized what else was in the sheaf: my social security card and birth certificate.

  “Hey, Dad’s name isn’t on my birth certificate,” I said.

  “Nope,” she said.

  “Is this fake, or has it always been like that?”

  “Funny story,” she began. “We had a blowout fight when I was simply enormous with you, and I walked out. Drove around town all night long trying to stop being angry, and around breakfast time the next day realized what I was feeling wasn’t hunger cramps. Went to the hospital. When they asked me if I wanted to call anyone to sit with me I told them there wasn’t anyone to call. Sixteen hours later they handed me you, and dangit if I still didn’t want to kill your father. And that is why his name isn’t on that birth certificate.”

  “Are you making that up?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t just that I was angry with him,” she conceded. “I couldn’t see myself living out of my car with you only a few hours old, but I figured that one day I’d want to leave again, and if I did I wouldn’t be leaving you behind. And if your dad wasn’t on your birth certificate, then he couldn’t really stop me from taking you with me. After I got home I told him what I’d done, told him he could get it changed, get his name put on if he wanted, and he said he was going to. But you know, fourteen years and he never once got around to it.”

  I put the papers on the table, weighted down with her keys. I wanted her to be making it up, but it sounded like something she would do; it also sounded like something my father would do, or rather fail to.

  “So, is this home for now?” I asked.

  “Home?” She looked pointedly around the room. The air-conditioning unit kept the room clammy and made it smell, the wallpaper was water-stained in one corner up near the ceiling, the blankets were scratchy, and even after hours in the car with no relief the bathroom had given me serious pause. “Nah. Home’s a long way away still. But we’ll get there.”

  CHAPTER IV

  The first couple of weeks in Florida I thought I would go out of my skin. I was on my own for long stretches of time, the same as I’d been in West Virginia, except now whenever I stepped outside our door, instead of being in the cool, silent woods I was in a loud, reeking city, and I couldn’t stand it. I’d forgotten how to be around other people. So just before sunrise and just after sunset I went down to the beach, scudded my feet in the sand and breathed in the fresher air and wished for the day that we’d get on the road again, get on with the loose-end gathering that Ma seemed so set on so that we could get back home.

  After the day we arrived—most of which she spent asleep, trying to recover from the drive—I barely saw her. She took both jobs, and took every shift of both jobs they would give her, so that when she wasn’t working she was sleeping or showering or just getting ready to split, and half the time she was in and conscious I was out; I’d never lived so close to the ocean, and I didn’t plan on wasting it.

  The day before school started she surprised me with new clothes—jeans and a plain black T-shirt—and a new backpack with the pencils and notebooks and calculator and things they expected you to drag along. I’d been hoping that she’d lost track of the days, forgotten about school.

  She eyed me up as I looked at the clothes, then said, “You should probably put on some deodorant tomorrow morning as well—you’ve started stinking like an adult.”

  “I do not!”

  “Trust me, kid, you do. And you need to either commit to using a comb on the regular, or you need a haircut.”

  I opted for the haircut, sat outside on the second step down and let her snip out the matted tails that I hadn’t realized had become more or less permanent due to the daily application of saltwater, pare it back so that it hung just to the bony knob where my neck met my shoulders. I wouldn’t let her go any shorter than that; my hair grows more out than down and is curly enough that if it’s cut too short I look like a dandelion until it grows back.

  Now that she mentioned it, I noticed the smell—I spent enough time in the ocean that it wasn’t a constant funk, but after a few hours in the sun I usually started smelling something like onions and sour that I hadn’t realized was me. And I’d started sprouting hair, not a bunch yet but little isolated ones almost the same shade as my skin so you could barely see them, popping up in my armpits and groin and on my legs and even one or two in the bumpy halos around my nipples, like they’d gotten lost on their way to my eyebrows and stopped to ask for directions. And my nose had gotten longer, the Roman bump at the bridge that I’d gotten from Ma grown bigger. I was not particularly happy about any of this.

  I had hoped that, even with haircut and new clothes, Ma would forget about school by the time I had to leave for it, but when I got back from my beach walk the next morning she was waiting with breakfast and a determined look that said I was going even if she had to carry me there over her shoulder. I was still scared enough by her—or not scared, really, but whatever it is that makes kids do what their parents tell them—that she didn’t have to resort to this.

  Whether it was my unremarkableness or their apathy, I didn’t seem to register on anyone’s radar, teacher or student. No one called me out for being new, or gave me a hard time about my loose, plain clothes, or tried to trap me into admitting whether I was a boy or a girl. I suppose I was forgettable, came across still as whichever gender a person expected to see, and I was thankful for it even as I worried that this was the last year I’d be able to skate by so easily, that eventually someone would make an issue of my careful androgyny and I’d have to choose my side in the war, make up my mind as to where my allegiance lay, whether I identified more with my mother or my father. Because in my mind that’s what they were asking: do you want to grow up to be like your mom or your dad, Alex? And I still wanted to know why I couldn’t be both, why it was an either/or situation.

  Though I was grateful for this indifference, it also stung; that was new. I had always been perfectly happy on the fringe, occupied with my own fantasies, with books and one-person imagination games and just a little bit contemptuous maybe of the sort of person that took too much notice of the people around them. But something had punctured the smooth wall of my inner world, infected me. I noticed it for the first time on the day we’d turned up in Florida and I’d sat on the beach and watched those teenagers; once I was surrounded by other people my age I couldn’t deny it anymore. My peers had become unexpectedly tantalizing.

  They seemed pe
rfect and delicious in a way I hadn’t known they could, and I wanted to touch them and taste them and smell them; I didn’t have to pick a gender alliance to know that I was attracted to all of them. I glanced at arms and legs and the backs of necks, the way they walked and how their lips moved when they spoke and all the little unconscious gestures. I limited myself to glances, fearful of how I might give myself away were I to take a full look. I couldn’t imagine that anyone else was having these cravings, these urges. And I didn’t have friends who could disabuse me of my misconception.

  After school I trudged slowly through the sadder part of town back to the apartment, locked and chained the door behind me in case one of the neighbors realized I was alone and decided to help themselves to our stuff, ate an apple, glanced at my homework, considered going down to the beach. Then, with boredom and frustration prickling under my skin, I climbed under the stiff blanket on the too-firm bed and slipped my hands into my clothes. There was no one to see but it felt like the cheap prints on the walls, the water stain in the ceiling, the blank eye of the television were all watching my every action. I closed my eyes and let my hands drift down to my thighs, looking for the tingle that had shamed me on the beach, trying to set it free but untutored as to how. I thought about the people I couldn’t stop looking at, imagined the feeling of their hands on my skin and my hands on theirs, stripping each other slowly naked like we were in a bad made-for-TV movie—and was overcome by the unlikeliness of this ever happening, my own unloveability. The tingle fled, and I gave up.

  Ma met her third Laura when she was fifteen and living in a group home in south-eastern Pennsylvania, the kind of place where a dozen kids that weren’t cute anymore were watched close enough that no one got pregnant or seriously hurt, not so close that life was boring. My uncle was still cute; he had been sent elsewhere.

  This Laura had sleepy eyes and brown hair that never grew past her jaw because she cut it instead of cutting her skin when life got bad. She had narrow hips and small breasts and was exactly four feet ten and three-quarter inches tall. She wore kids’ shoes that velcroed closed and secondhand everything in impractical colors. She didn’t understand my mother’s putty-green ranger boots. They came from different philosophies.

  Laura made prison hooch and bathtub gin, secured the permission of the house mother to bake brownies for Valentine’s Day and successfully spiked one of the three pans with Purple Kush, took my mother on the wrong bus back from school and got lost on the edge of the county, found sticks of opium in the watch pocket of her jeans and shared them liberally, found a way up to the roof so they could smoke cigarettes after lights out. And Laura was charmed—she never got caught. She was more careful than she let on, but the staff thought that she could do no wrong. And for a tripped-out, magic chapter of her life my mother was carried in her wake.

  Their friendship was an accident, Ma said. They both arrived at the same time, were assigned beds next to each other, and while they were stowing their stuff in the girls’ dorm Laura had told her that they’d be going dealer hunting that afternoon, because every town had a dealer if you knew where to look. And Ma could have said no but instead she went along with it. They asked for permission to go shopping for tampons, not the kind that were kept on hand but a special kind of high-absorbency biodegradable hippy tampon because the normal scented ones made Laura break out in a rash so that she couldn’t sit, and Ma needed to go with her for safety and solidarity. They found the tampons, but only after trekking to a stretch of rocky beach by the river to light up bitter-smelling buds in the company of the guy named Keith who had sold them. Ma didn’t say much. She wasn’t at an age where she did say much, even when the weed starting getting to her.

  I’m pretty sure Ma didn’t realize that she loved Laura until the night they played strip poker. There was gin in Dixie cups, and a little plastic camping lantern so they could see, and two beds pushed together and a deck of dog-eared, faded cards mixed from three partial packs. Six or so of them crowded onto the dead mattresses, with the anorexic light of the toy lantern filling the crater that their thin weight made, barely bright enough to make out the suits. And off came socks and belts and cottony layers as the drink burned into them brighter than the lantern light, and discarded clothing carpeted the floor around the bed until they all sat in their panties and bras—long legged, long bodied, short and gangly, knobs of hips and spine jutting out or smoothed over, olive and milk and oak and cherry-wood colored skin, heavy breasted or boyish. A cabal of young women, smooth and crouching, perfect in the half-light. And then my mother was out of clothes: what to give next? So she bet a kiss, and someone squeaked. Quietly, they didn’t want to get caught. A kiss, and my mother lost.

  Their mouths were thin, or soft. She remembers them: toothy, full of biting; one girl with lips like an overripe plum; too wet; shrinking and hesitant. But Laura’s mouth sent electricity over her skin: firm and warm and tasting deep purple. A perfect kiss, or, rather, the kiss perfectly suited to my mother’s taste, because everyone craves a different perfect.

  They went to bed soon after. Revision: they fell asleep like puppies in a warm, naked, tipsy heap on the two beds, and even though my mother’s kiss had led to the slow exploration of all of their mouths, of the strange intimacy that is kissing, in the morning it had mostly been forgotten. Except by my mother, who woke to dreams of Laura’s mouth, that purple kiss.

  She angled for one, asked for one, hoped that each time they drank together afterwards it would magically all happen again, but the second kiss was a kiss goodbye. Her parents had gotten their life straightened out enough for her to go back with them, at least for a while. She was bundling socks into her backpack when Laura came into the dorm, pulled her down so as to reach, and gave her a second kiss, longer this time, then left the room without a word.

  Maybe it would have ended differently, if they had been older, had met three or four decades later in human history. But they were fifteen years old and it was 1979, and they had a first kiss and they had a last kiss and in between got lost and got high and talked about their sex dreams and pretended they couldn’t hear when each other’s beds creaked with the rhythm of longing in the night. Maybe there was romance, in another reality.

  The time I didn’t spend on the beach I spent in the apartment, clammy with the air conditioning, sometimes watching the flickering TV but more often combing through our secondhand books looking for dirty bits, reading the dirty bits over and over, and then climbing under the blanket on our bed so as to feel hidden while I thought up dirty bits of my own and fumblingly explored my body. I’m still not sure if it was more due to hormones or to boredom, but even the black-and-white diagrams in the medical encyclopedia we’d somewhere acquired got me excited. As that failed to satisfy I shed layers, until I found myself one afternoon in the middle of the floor, the cheap carpet rough under my back, naked and trying to touch my entire body with one hand while the other worked away at its Sisyphean task. I had become an absolute pervert, and it tortured me. I was the only being on earth so obsessed and controlled by such strange and strangely satisfying cravings. I decided I was going to hell if I didn’t stop. Then I found the superintendent’s collection of dirty magazines, and decided that I’d better make going to hell worthwhile, because I would never be able to excise the obsession.

  As the months passed my wanting grew more intense, more confused. I was bored, and I was lonely, and nothing seemed to hold the power to captivate me anymore. The things that had kept my attention so well just the year before had become as riveting as my baby toys, so that I found myself pausing mid-action, preoccupied by the kids at school, by the teenagers at the beach, images of them conjured by my mind’s eye to dance across the world in front of me.

  God knows how I paid attention long enough to learn anything that year.

  I hung on like death to the knowledge that we wouldn’t be staying there forever. This was just a season, a gathering of resources before our next big push. Ma couldn’t have
left home for this: a one-room squat where we could hear our neighbors hitting and fucking each other through the walls, where all the food came in a can or smelled like grease because we didn’t have a real kitchen, where Ma came home at odd hours and collapsed on the bed in an insensate haze, her feet bruised from standing.

  She smelled of other people’s cigarettes, of stale beer, of lipstick, exhausted from too much of the fake friendliness she had to slather on to earn her tips. Sometimes, when she came home in the morning and hugged me as I went out the door to school, she smelled of what I assumed to be Man: a baritone sweat that wasn’t hers, a spiciness to cover it, a clean, flat, mineral scent I tried not to interrogate. She didn’t say that she was seeing someone; she didn’t say she was spending the nights that she didn’t work in some other bed. I didn’t know, and I knew, and I didn’t want to know. She worked hard; she barely slept while we were in Florida, slowly gathering in the wrinkled tips that would eventually, hopefully, be enough to get us out of there. And no matter what she was doing, I figured I couldn’t hold it against her: I was a person and she was a person, and we both tried to kill that bastard, time, in similar desperate ways.

  We were poor enough for me to get free lunches—and free breakfasts, if I got my ass to school early enough. I didn’t think much at the time about how Ma fixed it all; I took it for granted still that she’d keep the machine of daily life running. I was grateful for the breakfasts, but free lunch meant that I could no longer give up eating and squirrel away the money for something I needed more. But I had light fingers, and rich kids aren’t careful. I stole what I needed a dollar at a time, small amounts that people could have dropped or miscounted. When I had enough—a little over $220, which took me from the second week of school, when I had the idea, until the first week of March to get my hands on—I wrote a note to the principal that I was getting some bad teeth taken out, signed Ma’s name and dropped it at the office, then bought a bus ticket to Alabama.