“She should go on to a good drama school,” one of her advisors told me when she was a sophomore. “She has a real gift. I think she could be one of the ones who makes it on TV or Broadway. Maybe even movies. Providing she’s tough enough to stick out the lean times, of course, and that’s something neither I nor she can know yet. What’s your feeling about that?”
“I don’t know either,” I said. “I expect if she had some support, some help, somebody with her all the time, she could stick it.”
“This she’d have to do alone,” he said. “And she’d have to do it in New York or L.A. She can’t get what she needs here. She’s talking about the Actor’s Workshop in New York. I think she could get in. Could you and her father swing that, do you think?”
“We could swing the money,” I said slowly, thinking of the never-ceasing largesse of Cap’n Andy that kept Laura off her boat and out of her salt-blond hair. “I don’t know about her going away by herself, though. She’s never been alone—”
“Could you handle New York by yourself if you went to Actor’s Workshop?” I asked her toward the end of her junior year. “I mean, with just a roommate? You know I can’t pick up and leave the agency and go with you.”
“Sure I could,” she said. “I could come home whenever I wanted to. You could come up. Would you let me go, that’s the question.”
“You’ll be eighteen then,” I said. “It will be your decision, not mine. If you think you can handle it, it’s entirely your business.”
She frowned. “But I want you to tell me it’s all right to go.”
“I can’t tell you that,” I said. “You need to know that inside yourself.”
“No, you tell me,” she said stubbornly.
“I’m your sister, Laura, not your mother,” I said crisply. It seemed to me, suddenly, that we both needed to hear me say that.
“Well, I know that,” Laura said, and flung away trailing the fringes of her tattered blue jeans over her bare feet. But at the door she stopped and looked back at me. There were fine white rings around her eyes; I had not seen them there for a long time. I would, I knew, do a lot of thinking about New York. I hoped she would, too.
In the end, it was academic, because my father died the next winter. He had a heart attack somewhere at sea off Baja, California, and was dead by the time the rescue helicopter came scissoring in. I was shocked and stricken, but somehow dimly, as if he had existed on another plane than Laura and me, and perhaps by then he did. A death unseen, I have learned, is a death unrealized. I watched my mother die, touched her new coldness. It is not she who comes to trouble, tentatively, my dreams, to seek validation. It is, even now, my father.
Laura was cool and flip, whether protectively or not I could not tell.
“Yo, ho ho,” she said. “We’ll get enough money for Actor’s Workshop, won’t we?”
We didn’t. He left the Baton Rouge house and his meager estate to Cap’n Andy, and she promptly sold the house, withdrew her support to Laura, and bought a bigger boat. By the time her lawyers got around to telling us that we were essentially on our own, she was casting her net in the rich waters off Sardinia. I found it was hardly difficult at all to bury the pain of that, but Laura was frantic.
“What am I going to do?” she sobbed. “My grades aren’t good enough for a scholarship. Can you send me? Do you make enough?”
“I just can’t, Pie,” I said, in anguish at her pain, but somehow relieved, too. The thought of Laura in New York alone had been a stone in my heart for a long time. “I could probably send you to Georgia, or Georgia State, but I’m not making the kind of money for anything else. I don’t even know if I can swing the next two years at Westminster.”
“Then get another job,” she shouted, her face suddenly contorted with rage and grief. “Work nights! Borrow it! Or I’ll run away, I swear I will; I’ll go to New York or Hollywood on my own! Bootsie Cohn is going after graduation; I’ll go with her! I’ll be a hooker if I have to! I hate him! I hate her! I hate you!”
Her words were a knife in my heart, but I was angry with her, too. I loved her and the need to protect her ran deep, but I had had her in the fullest sense of the word since her babyhood, and I was suddenly weary of the roller coaster that was life with Laura.
“Then by all means hit the road,” I said coldly. “Maybe you could send me a buck or two along the way. You could probably pay me back for what I’ve spent on you in twenty or thirty years.”
She slammed out of the house, and did not come home for three days. After learning from Westminster that she had been in school all three days, and calling around until I reached the mother of the emaciated redhead to whose house she had gone, I did not try to contact her further. She’ll come home when her clothes get dirty, I thought. She’ll come home when she needs some money. I went to work, came home, cooked my dinners, and settled down with my checkbook and records to see how we were going to be able to live. I will at least have some peace and privacy for a little while, I thought. But I did not enjoy it. Her absence clamored in the house. Even gone, Laura pulled at me like the moon the tide. She still does.
She did come home, eventually, but that was the real beginning of her long, careening odyssey away from me. She was either sullen or rebellious, spent more and more time with her flock of gifted starlings, and began to get into trouble. She skipped school, flew into rages when she was there, smoked cigarettes in the restrooms and on the grounds, smelled of a sweeter, slyer smoke when she finally came in. The conferences concerning her behavior began. I was soon averaging one a week. Luckily, my boss was a laid-back ex-flower child who did not care when his staff got their work done, so long as they did. I did a lot of mine at home, at night, trying not to watch the clock as I waited for my sister to come home, trying to think that things would soon right themselves. I suppose I always knew that I was a timid disciplinarian, that I feared her pain more than her capacity for self-destruction. I had always been able to redeem Laura with love.
The night she came in frankly drunk, with magenta suck marks on her neck and shoulders and her now-blond hair in her eyes and her skirt conspicuously backward, I lowered the boom on her. My heart quailed, but I hardened it.
“Maybe I can’t pay for Saint Ida’s,” I said, “but I can manage one or two boarding schools you would like a whole lot less. There’s one in the mountains where you work in the kitchen and the pigsty to help pay your tuition. I don’t think it’s got a proscenium thrust to its name. Stop this crap or you’re up there, I promise you. I called them today. And if you don’t think I mean it, try me. I told you I wasn’t going to put up with any slutty stuff, and that includes drinking.”
I hoped she would mistake the tremor in my voice for anger.
“You can’t make me,” she slurred. “You’re not my fucking mother.”
“No? I fucking well thought I was, the way you’ve been behaving,” I threw back at her furiously. “Decide now, toots, I’m not going to tell you again.”
“How’re you gonna stop me?” she said truculently, but I thought I saw hesitation on her face. Even like this, slack-faced and with her mouth pulped and smeared, she was still one of the prettiest things I had ever seen. Fear and anger and love warred inside me.
“I’m going to stop paying your tuition at Westminster,” I said. “And you can kiss your allowance good-bye. I’m going to tell the mothers of all your little playmates not to let you in their houses. And I’m going to call the cops the first night you aren’t in this house. You’re underage, and they’ll pick you up within the hour. I don’t think you’d like juvie any more than you would Saint Ida’s or Lottie Brewster Academy.”
She stared at me for a long time, and then dropped her eyes and ran, stumbling, to her room and slammed her door. She did not do it again.
For a long time after that she seemed fairly content, if never quite the winged thing she had been. She finished Westminster with barely passing grades and a string of triumphs on the stage, and started at
Georgia State, with resignation if little enthusiasm, in the fall of her eighteenth year. There was a good, if not remarkable, drama department there, and considerable lagniappe in the person of a charismatic young professor who eventually directed her in some truly luminous, innovative plays. Her awesome focus kicked back in and her strange, canted gift throve. She won raves in the local newspapers and more when the troupe toured around the South. She was invited to try out for several local professional productions and the cast of one national touring company, and garnered high praise there, too. She had, apparently, no time for anything but the theater; for that entire first year I do not think she went out with a young man. I praised her, went to all her performances, stayed up to have cocoa and cookies with her when she came late from rehearsals and performances. Often we would talk and laugh until nearly dawn. My own work did not seem to suffer, nor did hers. I was, after all, still only twenty-eight, and she was eighteen. The gap between us seemed far smaller than it had when she was a child. She had, as she had once promised, grown up fast. For the first time I felt that the bond between us was more that of best friends, of true sisters, than that of parent and child. My own star was rising steadily at my agency, with a creative directorship in view, and I had several pleasant, if not flammable, relationships with attractive young men. And I had my sustaining friendship with Crisscross. She had her theater and her future. Things were, for a time, really good between us. Looking back, I can see that it was the best time by far.
And then I met Pom Fowler, and it was as if the year of peace and affection had never been. From the beginning, she hated him. She had not liked most of my other men friends, but there had been none of the spitting animosity that Pom called out. More than that, he seemed somehow to actually frighten her.
“He looks like that stupid little asshole on the top of wedding cakes,” she said scornfully, her voice shaking. “He’s ugly and stupid and he smells like a hospital, and goes on and on about the poor people till you want to barf. Shit, why can’t he pay that kind of attention to you? To us? We’re poor, too! He doesn’t even act like I’m in the room. And those snotty-nosed little brats…how can you oooh and ahhh over them like that? They’re horrible children! They hate you, anybody could see that.”
I knew that she had grasped the seriousness of Pom’s and my relationship, even though I was careful to downplay it and he, having been warned, tried his best to do so, too. He succeeded only in seeming to ignore her; even I could see that. Only the two little boys made much over Laura, and they could not keep away from her. Something in her face and manner drew them like magnets. They were at her heels constantly when Pom brought them over. But she was so sharp with them that he did not do it often. We stayed mostly at his house, where she would not go. She did not tell me why until nearly a year after she met Pom.
“You think I get a big thrill out of watching those brats act like you’re going to poison them and waiting for you and him to go upstairs to hump and leave me with them?” she hissed then, on a day when I had asked her, once again, to spend Sunday with us and the boys at the house in Garden Hills.
“You’re being terribly unfair,” I said to her. “They’re just little boys who’ve lost their mother, and now they’re afraid they’re going to lose their father, too. They’re much better about me than they were. You can see that. It’s going to be fine eventually, I promise. Why can’t you see that Pom likes you and wants to be friends?”
“Wrong! He doesn’t want to be my friend, he wants me to be gone! He doesn’t give a shit about anything but getting you to take care of his precious little house apes so he can go make millions healing the fucking sick! But he’s too big a coward to tell me to butt out himself; he wants you to do it. You think I can’t tell, but I can.”
She was so upset that there was a choking whistling sound in her chest, and her white face was splotched with red welts. I put my arms around her and drew her down on the sofa beside me so I could look into her face.
“He doesn’t have a cowardly bone in his body,” I said. “He’s the bravest man I’ve ever known and the best. He’s been beaten and hosed in the civil rights marches; he was in Africa in the Peace Corps. He’s spent the last two years working eighteen hours a day in a clinic that treats people for free, down in the worst of the housing projects where all the rioting is, and the drugs and the crime and everything. He wants to spend his life doing that; he’s going to establish his own free clinic when he can. He doesn’t care anything about money; he’ll probably never have a dime to call his own. And he doesn’t want you to butt out. He wants you to butt in. He wants you to come and live with us for as long as you like…if we should get married, that is.”
She stared at me for a long time, and then she said, softly and bitterly, “If you do that you will never see me again. If you move in there and play wifey to that man and mother to those retarded kids, I’ll be gone before you’ve unpacked your suitcases. If you’d rather take care of another bitch’s little bastards than your own sister, go right ahead and see how long I hang around here.”
I looked at her in shock and incredulity. Her jealousy and terror were so complete and devouring that I could not seem to breathe the air in which they reverberated. I don’t know, now, why I was so utterly dumbfounded by her words, but I was.
Finally I whispered, “What has gotten into you? You’re nineteen years old! You’re a junior in college, with a wonderful career ahead of you; you’ve been planning to go to New York when you graduate for a long time now. You don’t need me to take care of you any longer. For goodness sake, Laura! You’re my sister, not my child. You don’t need me!”
“You promised,” she said, the tears beginning.
Pom and I were married in the little Mikell Chapel of Saint Philip’s Cathedral the following June, with only his parents and brother and sister-in-law and the boys and Crisscross present. Laura was not there. She had left a week before to go with the vulpine, redheaded Bootsie Cohn to California where, she said, Bootsie had been promised a part in a movie being shot in the Sonoma wine country. The second unit director, who was Bootsie’s boyfriend, had promised he could get Laura a job in the production company.
“Give my regards to Dr. Kildare and tell him to go fuck himself,” the note that I found on the kitchen table the next morning said. “Tell him not to worry, he won’t see me again. Neither will you. I’m taking your Mastercard. Maybe I’ll even pay you back one day, but don’t hold your breath.”
It was signed Laura Louise Mason.
And, except for a very few times when she came through town on some theater movie business or another, I did not touch the sweet white flesh of my sister Laura again for a long, long time, though I sometimes glimpsed a bit of it, briefly, on film.
There was never a day between that one and this that I have not missed her.
On the hot afternoon in the early summer of 1995, when I went down through the parched grass to the Chattahoochee River behind our house to set the latest Rattus ratti free, I still missed her as sharply as ever. I could almost see the child she had been skipping ahead of me on the path in the heat shimmer; I could almost see the angry, beautiful nineteen-year-old she had been when she left.
“I miss my girls,” I whispered to the big black rats I was bearing to freedom in the wire trap. “I miss Laura. I miss Glynn.”
My sister. My daughter. My sister, Laura, my daughter, Glynn, the thought of whom still, after sixteen years, gave me a small, fresh shock of joy and surprise. My daughter, my good, good girl…
The rats, who had been quiet, looked at me with their whiskered Chinese faces and black, glinting little eyes, and began again to scrabble and squeak in their prison.
“Chill out,” I said, shaking the cages slightly. “You’re almost home free.”
2
Pom was obsessed with the rats. The first thing he did when he got up in the morning and came home at night was to check for bodies. When the first poison failed to give satisfaction, the ext
erminators brought out different traps, matte black and high-tech, and placed them about, baited with poisoned birdseed. Birdseed was, they said knowingly, the rat chow of choice. Ours were not interested, but Mommee was: The first night the traps were set out we heard a muffled thump and a howl and found Mommee shrieking in the upstairs hall, her hand stuck in one of the traps. After that we set them out of sight, but the rats did not bite. Instead they gnawed electrical cords and burrowed through two inches of carpet and flooring to get into a closet where I had stored and forgotten a waxed wheel of cheddar from Vermont. We found their neat little oblong droppings in different places every morning. The few who did take the bait inevitably died, reeking, in the walls.
The rats came, the exterminators said, from the river and the grass and weeds around it. Another big development was going up just upstream from us, and when the trees were felled and the ground cleared the rats came downstream looking for more hospitable housing. Pom had suffered the squadrons of invading raccoons with fairly good grace, because they had not yet managed to get into the house, but the rats maddened him.
“Somebody damned well should have told us about that development before we closed on this house,” he raged. “But oh, no; everybody swore that all the rest of the river land belonged to a little old lady who would never sell. I wouldn’t have bought this house if I’d thought we were going to be covered up with subdivisions and rats.”
Fault Lines Page 4
