“You! I want you! I want you to come back home,” Laura wept. She was shuddering with sobs and retching. There was no doubting her sincerity. At Christmas I moved back home and began attending day classes. My father’s gratitude and Laura’s subsequent blooming were enough, I thought, to make up for the dorm and campus life that I forswore. I made a number of new friends anyway. I dated a good bit. I joined a sorority. And my grades undoubtedly benefited. I made Phi Beta Kappa, and basked in the modest glow of a number of minor achievements and awards. At my graduation, my father’s proud smile and Laura’s shining eyes gave me a salt lump in my throat and a tickle in my nose.
My graduation picture shows a tall, arresting, stooped man with thick brown hair just beginning to go gray at the temples; a tall, slightly stooped young woman in a cap and gown who looks ridiculously like him, down to the unruly shock of curly ash-brown hair and the tilted nose and sharp cheekbones; and a young girl of such vivid, blinding beauty that you cannot look away from her. She might be a budding movie actress graciously posing with tourists. Her presence captures the camera and eclipses the other two. I noticed anew that spring Saturday how eyes followed her, in her new mini that showed a great deal of white leg at the bottom and a precocious swell of white breasts at the top.
I also noticed that she was aware on every inch of her of the eyes. I remember feeling a small frisson of dread. Despite the calming presence of Matilda, there had been enough transgressions, tears, conferences with teachers, trips to smooth things over in her principal’s office, promises. Always, Laura insisted that she had been wronged and misunderstood; always the contrition was heartfelt and her fear of reproach real. And always I was the one who went, who apologized, who smoothed, who promised. I did not need trouble of a sexual nature from her, but on that day I knew, as portentously as if I had read it in sheeps’ entrails, that I was going to get it.
That night, after he had taken us to dinner in a new, baroquely awful French restaurant to celebrate and Laura had gone, reluctantly, to bed, my father told me he was getting married again. I sat still and looked at him, feeling a sort of percussion against my face as if there had been a silent explosion in the room. My mind was empty and ringing with it.
“I didn’t know you knew anybody,” I said stupidly.
“A nice woman,” he said, looking away. “Her name is Andrea. I call her Andy. She’s a widow. She lives in Pascagoula and she has a great big sailboat. She and her husband used to go all over the world in it. You and Laura will have a good time on that boat.”
I was silent, staring at him. I could think of nothing to say. A boat? All of us, him and Laura and me, on a huge boat with a woman from Pascagoula called Andy? I had never known my father to call me by any sort of nickname, nor Laura, either. Not even Mother. I had never known him to evince the slightest interest in boats or the sea. When we vacationed, we usually went to Highlands, North Carolina, where he played golf and bridge with other lawyers. I could find no picture of us as a merry, seagoing family in my mind.
“But who will run it?” I said. “Can you? Have you learned to run a boat?”
He smiled. “She has a captain who looks after it and does the actual sailing and a crew to help him. We won’t have to do anything but lie back and get suntans and eat great food and sleep with the waves rocking us. Forget the world for weeks at a time. You could get used to that, couldn’t you?”
I felt my face redden at the thought of my father and this Andy woman, in a bed rocked by the waves. In my mind she was massive and blond, and very tanned, and walked in a rolling swagger.
“When did you…I mean, I never knew you even were…you know, seeing someone,” I said, feeling the sofa rock under me as if I were already riding waves.
“Well, for some time now,” he said. “She has a little place here and one in New Orleans, too. Say, you all will really like that. It’s in the Quarter. I guess I thought you knew. Laura does.”
“Laura does?”
Nothing seemed to connect, to fit together, to make any sense.
“I told her a while back,” he said a shade too casually. “I was sure she would have told you by now.”
“I wish you’d felt you could tell me, too,” I said thickly around the tears that were pooling in my throat. “I thought you told me everything—”
“I told her because I had to talk to her about something else, and I want to tell you about that now; see what you think,” he said. “You were in the middle of your thesis when it came up. I didn’t want to bother you then. This all depends on you, Merritt. If you’re uncomfortable with it in any way, at all, we’ll make other arrangements.”
“Uncomfortable with what? You mean you wouldn’t get married if I didn’t want you to? I’d never interfere in that, Papa, if it’s what you really want—”
“No, no. We’re definitely getting married. Too late to back out now.” He laughed, and then coughed and went on. “Here’s the thing. Andy has never had children of her own, and while she’s really looking forward to getting to know you two, she feels…we feel…that she needs a little time to get used to me and my strange ways before she takes on Laura. Laura isn’t the easiest…well, you know. We thought we might take a long honeymoon cruise, maybe down around South America, maybe even as far as the Galapagos. Take our time, just bum around…and I thought it might be fun for both of you if Laura came with you to Atlanta for a year or two. I’m prepared to pay her way, of course, and she’s already accepted at Westminster. It’s the best private school up there. I had a couple of friends in the Georgia Bar Association look into it; their kids go there, too. They pulled some strings. She’s already accepted, and I’ve made all the arrangements. She starts this summer because she needs to get up to speed with the rest of her class. I know it sounds like a big responsibility, but they’ve got a bus that picks students up and drops them off, and there’s a program for students who need to stay until six or so. I’ll give her a clothes and living allowance as well as her tuition, of course. All you need to do is keep an eye on her in the evening and on weekends. You know you can handle her; you always could. And of course she’ll make friends and be out of your hair a lot of the time, and she’s surely old enough to stay by herself occasionally when you want to go out. And you will, because you’re going to knock ’em dead in Atlanta. She isn’t going to be any trouble. I’ve already talked to her about it.”
“No trouble,” I whispered. “Papa, that’s all she knows how to be. In a new city, a big one, with all those new kids and…I don’t know, the drugs and the rock concerts, and the hippies and the war protests and civil rights…she’ll be like a bomb with the fuse lit. I can’t work and run around bailing Laura out all the time; it’s going to be different up there. I’ll be trying to get a career going—”
“And fighting off the guys. I know,” he said jocularly. But he would not look at me.
“She promised,” he said. “I told her all that, and she swore on her mother’s Bible that she would do everything her teachers and you told her to do, and not make any trouble at all. I believe her. She knows I’ll have her out of there and in Saint Ida’s before she can blink if she makes one misstep. And I will. That’s a promise. But of course, if you really think it’s too much—”
Saint Ida’s. A New Orleans convent school so thoroughly and murderously cloistered that not even fathers and brothers were allowed to go further in than the beautiful old courtyard. Academically first rate, socially beyond reproach, culturally luminous in matters pertaining to the late Renaissance and backward from that. The nuns of Saint Ida’s had no truck with Rousseau and his kindred romantic sauvages, nor with much that followed them. The sixth and seventh decades of the twentieth century simply did not exist. Little outside the thick, high walls did. I had known three girls at LSU who had gone there; two were said to be lovers and the other dropped out pregnant during her first year. Stories of suicides and breakdowns among its alumni made the rounds regularly. Laura would not last a month there.
“It’s not too much,” I said in a low voice, looking down at my new rope-soled wedgies. “I wouldn’t want her at Saint Ida’s.”
“Neither would I, really, but she’s as good as there the instant she causes you any trouble,” my father said.
“Private school must be awfully expensive in Atlanta,” I said, only then feeling the heat and anger. “Are you sure you can afford it?”
He flushed.
“I can handle it,” he said. “Don’t you worry about that.”
“I won’t, then,” I said, and thought with a small curl of malice that I knew just how he could afford it. Cap’n Andy, or whatever he called her, obviously had truly big bucks, and counted them well spent if they kept a troublesome adolescent out of her venue. I would, I thought, be harboring a remittance sister.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked Laura later, when I had gone upstairs and found her crouching at the top of the stairs, listening.
“I didn’t want you to worry,” she said, looking up at me through her thick gold lashes.
“Bullshit,” I said, forgetting my resolution not to use sorority language in front of her. “That’s just what you want me to do. C’mon. Why didn’t you tell me?”
She was silent. The skin at the base of her nostrils whitened. Finally she said, “I was afraid if you had time to think about it you wouldn’t let me come to Atlanta with you, and I’d have to go live with him and her. I know she doesn’t want me, but I was afraid he’d have to take me if you didn’t, or put me in some boarding school. If I had to go to Saint Ida’s I’d jump out the highest window there. If I had to go on that stupid boat with her I’d drown myself. I really would, you know.”
I didn’t know, not really, but I did know that Laura had long been half in love with easeful death, a line she espoused after I read Ode to a Nightingale to her when she was six. I thought that the darkness of death called out to a corresponding darkness in her, without her understanding its import in the least. I have always been afraid that the part of Laura that dances with self-destruction might one day win. That, knowing nothing of halfway measures, she might well jump onto broken old paving stones or into the warm, deep Gulf.
“Well, you don’t have to jump because I said you could come, as you well know, since you’ve been listening,” I said. “What about it, Pie? Do you think you can hold it in the road so I can have a job and live like a grownup? I really will have to call Papa if you can’t. This is the real world now.”
“I can,” she said fervently. “I will. I’ll grow up fast. I’ll be so grownup and responsible you won’t believe it’s me. You can get to be president of the world and I’ll be a great actress. Westminster has a super drama department. They win stuff all the time. They’ll be auditioning in September for Li’l Abner. I’m going to be in that play, Merritt. The brochure says eighth grade and up is eligible.”
I had to smile at her, even though I did not for a moment believe she would be capable of keeping her promise about responsibility. But I did believe that she would try. And her ardor was infectious; it always was. And there was something else. Much later, a continent away, she would fling it at me: “It wasn’t all give! You got your kicks for years through me! You lived a life through me you never could have had on your own!” Her words stung, but even in my anger I had to admit there was truth in them. During the years with Laura I soared to heights and sank to depths that I would never have reached on my own. It was as powerful a glue as the protective instinct she called out in me, and my love for her when she was at her best. I’ve always thought that if we had been nearer in age I couldn’t have stayed close to her, but there was never any filial competitiveness between Laura and me. On my side it was all parent; on hers, all child.
“So who’re you going to be? Daisy Mae, no doubt,” I said, ruffling her silky hair.
“Uh-uh. Moonbeam McSwine. She gets to show off everything she’s got. And you’ve got to admit I’ve got plenty.”
She pulled her Peter Max T-shirt tight over her breasts and hips. She was right. In the last year she had bloomed physically into the woman she would be, and that woman lacked nothing. I felt again the unease I had felt when I looked at her earlier that day, at graduation. It wasn’t, after all, a child I would be tending in Atlanta.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” I said. “There’s not going to be any funny stuff about sex. The first time there is I’m calling Papa. I might put up with the other stuff more than once, but the first strike is out when it comes to sex. I’m going to have to be at work late a lot of the time, and I’ll be going out with my own friends, and you’re going to be on your honor. I need to know I can trust you not to go wild with boys.”
“Are you a virgin, Merritt?” she said sweetly, crinkling her eyes at me.
“What I am is twenty-two years old,” I said coldly, angry to the core of me. The backseat of the pot-smogged Chevrolet and the damp, hot hands of the man whose name I had nearly forgotten floated into my mind and were gone again. “It’s none of your business whether I am or not. I know how to handle myself. Nothing you’ve ever done has shown me you can do that.”
“Bet you’re on the pill,” she singsonged. “Bet you’re not taking any chances on getting PG. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to get some for me? Then you wouldn’t have to worry about me getting knocked up.”
I was up and halfway down the stairs toward the living room, where my father still sat in front of the TV, before I heard her first shriek of fright. It was so desperate that I stopped and turned around to look at her. She clung rigidly to the banister, and her face and knuckles and lips were bleached white.
“I won’t ever say anything like that again,” she whispered.
“You won’t if you’re coming with me,” I said grimly.
She dropped her head onto her chest and let the curtain of hair hide her eyes. But I saw the silver snail’s tracks of tears on her chin anyway. I reached over and wiped them away with the tips of my fingers.
“Why do you do that?” I said gently. “Why do you always push things with me?”
She flipped the hair off her face and looked squarely at me. There was nothing childish in the topaz eyes.
“I have to know I can’t run you off,” she said. “I have to know you’ll stay with me no matter what I do. I have to know you won’t leave me.”
“You must know that by now. The only exception is the sex business. I will send you away over that if I have to. But you must know that I’ll stay with you otherwise. Haven’t I always?”
After a silence she said, “Are you on the pill?”
“Laura—”
“I need to know,” she said fiercely. “I need to know you won’t get pregnant and have some awful baby you’ll have to take care of!”
“I’m not on the pill and I’m not going to get pregnant,” I said in annoyance. “But if I did, I wouldn’t stop taking care of you. You could help me take care of the baby—”
“No! No baby.”
“That’s what I just said,” I said, and led her back to bed and tucked her in. She was asleep before I closed her door. But it was dawn before I finally slept.
She was as good as her word, or almost. Through most of the sprawl and scrabble of the seventies, Laura lived with me in the pretty little carriage house I found behind a big brick Buckhead estate and managed, with more success than not, to stay out of harm’s way. She never did get into the creamy little clique of sorority girls at Westminster whose fathers were the cadet corps of the city’s leadership; she went to few of the house parties and debutante balls at the Piedmont Driving Club or the Cherokee Club, and she did no volunteer work for hospitals and hotlines. She wore no starched shirtwaists and wrap skirts and kilts, either, and her grades were just enough to keep her in school. But she grew fully into the voluptuous beauty that her preteens had portended, and she had many suitors from the big houses on Habersham and West Wesley Roads. She ignored them and became thick with a small clique of taci
turn, bearded, bell-bottomed, pot-smoking renegades, the ones on art and theater and dance scholarships, the ones who hung out in the burgeoning Virginia-Highlands and Little Five Points sections after school, talking endlessly about creativity and their stake in it, about their art, about their work. I was never quite sure what most of them worked at, but work they did. Or at least, they did not seem to play. They were the most detached, uncommunicative group of young people I ever saw, except among themselves. They might have existed in any decade; in any decade they would have been the ones who painted the flats and fiddled with the lights and drowned themselves in booming, jittering music, their ears stoppered with plugs and their faces empty and inward. They acted and rehearsed and danced and plucked or tooted at instruments; they stayed late and alone in stark, white-lit painting and sculpture laboratories, on empty stages. In my time we would have called them beats, LSU being a good ten years behind the rest of the country in its argot. I think they called themselves freaks. The decade washed over them carrying the flotsam and jetsam of revolt: Kent State and terrorists and protests and pornography and drugs and gas shortages and streakers and Richard Nixon’s disgrace and fall and disco and Roots and NOW. And they scarcely noticed. They worked. I did not know whether to be glad or sorry.
Laura did indeed make the cast of L’il Abner, and everything else that Westminster mounted on its sleek new proscenium thrust stage. She was electric on a stage. She was beautiful and more than that; she was compelling far past her years. She had an eccentric, focused talent that would have been notable in one ten years older. She went about with the pack of darkling young who were her constant companions, her family, and, I suspected, her safety net. If she had a boyfriend I never knew it. If the group had sex, casual or otherwise, among themselves, I never knew that either. When Laura wasn’t in a play she was in rehearsals, writing scripts and screenplays, at the movies with the group, or talking about all of it in one coffee shop or basement rec room or black-painted, spotlit bedroom or another. I might have wished a more balanced life for her, better grades, more college and matrimonial prospects, but in truth, I was mainly relieved that she was happy in her amniotic bubble of obsession, and thankful that she felt safe there. I knew she did feel safe. Laura safe was Laura grooving on an even keel. I seldom went over to Westminster for anything but a conference on her grades or to see her perform.
Fault Lines Page 3
