Laura & Emma

by Kate Greathead

  “Oh, no. I didn’t mean to imply that.” Now Stephanie’s cheeks were also red. “Emma’s a great kid, a spunky gal. You’ve done a wonderful job with her.”

  “You don’t need to say that,” Laura said.

  “I mean it. I think you’re a very good mom.”

  “Thank you. So are you.”

  Stephanie brushed Melba toast crumbs off her lap. “I love Nick Jr. to death,” she said, “but I’m not good at the day-to-day things. Making sure his lunch is ready, taking him to appointments and playdates, keeping track of everything. I wish I were more like you in that area. You’re so in control of everything.”

  “Well, thank you,” Laura repeated, though this time it sounded less complimentary.

  “That’s why I wanted your advice on this situation we’re dealing with.” Stephanie looked down and wriggled the tab of her can of Diet Coke until it broke off. “This awful decision we have to make.”

  “You’re pregnant,” Laura said, suddenly realizing.

  “We just found out,” Stephanie answered. “It was an accident.”

  They were quiet. Now the sounds of the city seemed amplified: the honking of a horn, the trilling of birds, a low-flying helicopter passing overhead.

  “It took a long time to get where we are right now, things are good, and when I think about another baby . . .” Stephanie’s shoulders collapsed as she covered her face with her hands. “I just can’t. I can’t go through with it.”

  “You don’t have to.” Laura reached out to tap the top of Stephanie’s manicured hand, but Stephanie pulled it away.

  “I never thought of myself as the type of person who would . . .”

  “Lots of women have them,” Laura said.

  “Not where I come from.”

  “I’m sure they do,” said Laura gently. “They just don’t talk about it.”

  “Have you ever had one?” Stephanie asked, raising her eyebrows in a hopeful way.

  Laura shook her head. “How does Nicholas feel about it?”

  “He says he wants me to make the decision, but I can tell he doesn’t want me to keep it. He’s scared of what would happen if we had to go through what we went through the first time.” She paused. “Nicholas doesn’t like it when I’m upset. He really can’t handle it. I’ve never told anyone this, because I don’t want them to think bad of Nicholas, but when I cry”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“instead of comforting me, he gets mad.”

  “Oh, dear,” Laura said, ashamed of her brother. “I’m sorry about that.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Stephanie said. “I figure it’s just one of those things. Like how you were saying about Emma being who she is. It’s the way he is.”

  “He wasn’t always like that,” Laura said. “When he was little, I mean,” she added, worried that Stephanie might think she was accusing her of being responsible for the change.

  Stephanie delicately pinched two fingers over her nostrils and sneezed twice, a dainty ptchoo-ptchoo.

  “I can’t go through with it,” she said.

  Laura wasn’t sure if she meant the abortion or the pregnancy.

  “Does that make me a horrible person?”

  “No,” Laura said firmly. “Absolutely not.”

  “This sounds silly,” she said. “But I can’t bring myself to tell my ob-gyn.”

  “I can give you the name of mine. He’s very good.”

  “Does he definitely . . . do this?” Stephanie asked.

  “Yes.” Laura shielded her eyes from the sun. “I believe so.”

  AS LAURA FLIPPED THROUGH THE morning paper, she came across some disconcerting news. An asteroid was passing by the earth that day. A collision was not expected, nor had it been ruled out. In the words of one scientist: “As advanced as our technology is, we can never truly predict what will happen. This could be it.”

  But it wasn’t. The asteroid cruised right on by and continued on its merry sweet way through the universe. And so their lives continued, much as they had before, and in what felt like the blink of an eye, Emma was suddenly no longer quite a child, but not yet a teenager. A preteen adolescent, Laura supposed it was called.

  SIXTH GRADE MEANT GRADUATING FROM the Winthrop tunic to the Winthrop kilt. Many parents fretted about the attention their daughters’ new uniform might trigger from men on the street. Laura wasn’t worried; Emma still had a childish roundness about her and her legs were nothing to look at. Changes were imminent, however, and following Margaret’s instructions, Laura purchased a copy of a puberty instruction manual called It’s Perfectly Normal and left it on Emma’s desk for her to discover upon coming home from school.

  The book quickly vanished from the desk but did not reappear on a shelf or any of the obvious places. A few weeks later she walked in on Emma reading it on the floor of her bedroom. Emma snapped the book shut and sent it sliding across the rug, where it disappeared beneath the curtain of her bed skirt. “What do you want?” she demanded.

  “I’m sorry.” Laura blushed. “I forgot to knock.”

  “What do you want?” Emma repeated.

  “I was going to ask you something . . . but now I forget. In the meantime, do you have any questions about anything?” Laura pointed beneath Emma’s bed.

  “No.” Emma buried her face in another book, this one for school. “Please get out.”

  “Okay. But I did come in here for a reason. I guess I’ll come back when it comes to me.”

  As Laura returned to her pile of paperwork in the kitchen, Emma’s bedroom door creaked open.

  “Actually, I do have a question,” Emma called from down the hall. “How old were you when you got your period?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, things happen very late in our family, you’ve got years!” Laura smiled reassuringly.

  “What age were you?” Emma barked back.

  “Fifteen or sixteen. And I don’t think Nicholas started shaving until he was twenty-three or -four.”

  Satisfied, Emma shut the door.

  The exchange reminded Laura of another conversation she was supposed to have with Emma. She could wait until dinner, but the dread of it made her eager to get it over with. This time she knocked on Emma’s door first.

  “Don’t come in yet,” Emma shouted. “Wait one second.”

  When she entered, Emma was sitting at her desk, legs crossed, pen poised above a blank notepad.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you,” Laura began, taking a seat on Emma’s bed, “that I tried dope in college one time with Margaret. Do you know what that is?”

  “Yes, Mom,” Emma said. “No one calls it that anymore. It’s called pot.”

  “We were in our dorm room and there was a siren outside and we thought it was the government coming for us, and we were petrified. Then we started feeling silly. We dragged a mattress into the elevator and went up and down. Then I got hungrier than I’d ever been in my life. The only food in our room was a Sara Lee devil’s food chocolate cake. I ate the whole thing. By myself.”

  Emma scratched her elbow. She looked confused and embarrassed.

  Laura felt the same. “I never gave you the drug talk,” she explained. “Parents are supposed to talk to their kids about drugs.”

  “But I thought you hate Sara Lee.”

  “I know. It’s disgusting, but when you smoke dope something happens in your brain that makes everything delicious.”

  “So the lesson is, dope is great,” Emma said. “And I should try it.”

  “Oh, no, that’s not what I’m supposed to tell you!”

  They both found this very funny and laughed.

  “Yeah, that’s definitely not what you’re supposed to tell me. Also, now I know Margaret is a liar. She told Charlotte she’d never even smoked a cigarette.”

  This made them laugh again. Laura felt a sudden premonition of Emma as an adult and how their relationship might evolve into more of a friendship. When the laughter stopped she felt shy, like they were two people who’d just met.<
br />
  “In all seriousness, liquor is what you have to look out for,” she told Emma. “The trouble is, it makes you feel great, and you want to keep the feeling going, and so you keep sipping, and the next thing you know, you’ve crossed a line.”

  Laura cringed, thinking of all the foolish things she’d almost said and done under the influence of wine—like that time in the restaurant she’d nearly played footsie with that widower who turned out to be a cad.

  “Do you have any questions about anything?”

  Emma shook her head.

  “Okay, well, I guess I’ll see you later,” Laura said, her hand on the door. “Want me to leave it open?”

  “No, that’s okay,” Emma responded.

  “I THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING to the homeless shelter,” Emma said as Laura swooshed by in a floor-length dress.

  “I am. Tonight is their art show. What do you think?” The hem of the skirt grazed the walls of the hallway as she twirled.

  “Fancy. You don’t even get that dressed up for events at the Library.”

  Laura considered this. “These women work very hard every year to put this exhibition of their work together, and only a few people show up. Maybe you’re right, though, this dress is a little much. I wore it in Suzie’s wedding—can you tell it’s a bridesmaid’s dress?”

  “No. You should definitely wear it. You look pretty and the women will like it.”

  The phone rang. Emma ran to get it. It was mostly for her these days.

  “It’s Margaret!” she shouted from the kitchen.

  “I’ll take it in the bedroom!” Laura shouted back.

  “Lordy lord, what a day,” Margaret responded to Laura’s hello. “Trip’s going to call Miss Gardner tomorrow. I’m too emotional to handle it. You spend fourteen thousand dollars—”

  “Handle what?”

  “You mean Emma didn’t tell you?”

  “I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

  “That awful teacher!” She had to be referring to Mr. Vincent, a new language arts teacher who was unpopular with the girls. “He called her the B-word.”

  “Brat?”

  “No, Laura, bitch. At the tender age of twelve—such an ugly, misogynistic slur.”

  “Out of the blue?”

  “Yes! In front of the whole class! He lost his notes or something and he took it out on Charlotte. He called her a bitch. Can you believe it? Fourteen grand a year sending your daughter to an all-girls school to protect her from this sort of thing, only to have it thrown in her face!”

  “Well, it could’ve been worse.” It was the best Laura could think of to say. “At least it wasn’t cunt.”

  “What’s a cunt?” Emma asked when Laura got off the phone.

  “Did you listen to my phone call with Margaret?”

  “I had to, Mom, I needed to hear what she was saying. She’s totally overreacting! Why is Trip calling Miss Gardner? It would be ridiculous if Mr. Vincent got fired. First of all, he called everyone a bitch, not just Charlotte. Second of all—”

  “Everyone in the whole class?” Laura winced. “Even sweet little Scarlet Wang?”

  Emma rolled her eyes. “Mom, don’t worry. It wasn’t like how Margaret explained it to you. He was stressed because it’s the week Miss Gardner randomly comes into classes to grade the teachers. All week he’s been especially stuttery, so before class starts he writes out the entire lesson on the chalkboard, so if the problem gets really bad, he can just point to whatever he’s trying to teach us. Today he realized he forgot to make us copies of our assignment, so he told Scarlet Wang to be in charge while he went to the teachers’ lounge. Ten minutes later he came back, and Charlotte had erased everything he’d written on the board. He didn’t say anything but you could tell he was pissed. His face just turned bright red and he wrote everything on the board all over again.”

  Emma shook her head remorsefully.

  “He was still writing everything on the board when Miss Gardner came in. He didn’t hear the door open or notice her, he just kept on writing. I felt really bad, because aren’t teachers supposed to interact with students?”

  Laura put her face in her hands.

  “After five or ten minutes he was still writing on the board,” Emma continued, “and Miss Gardner got up and left. This time he heard the door and turned around. We told him it was Miss Gardner. That she’d been there and left. He smiled and made a face like very funny. Then he looked at Scarlet Wang and she veriated this was true.”

  “Validated,” Laura said. “Or verified.”

  “Same difference. Anyway, so after he finds out it was Miss Gardner, he walks over to the board and pretends to bang his head against it. And Charlotte goes, ‘Somebody needs to take a chill pill.’ And that’s when he says it. ‘Bitches.’ ”

  “What’s a ‘chill pill’?”

  “It’s an expression. It means you’re acting like a spaz.”

  “And then what?”

  “And everyone laughed except me. Because it stopped being funny to me. It was like when Tonya Harding’s shoelace broke at the Olympics right before she was about to go on. I felt bad for him, Mom—I really did.”

  Emma’s forehead creased with emotion. She wiggled a loose cuticle on her thumb then ripped it off. “To tell you the truth,” she said, sucking the blood off her finger, “I don’t blame him for saying the word, because that’s what we were acting like.”

  * * *

  EMMA WAS TROUBLED TO ARRIVE at school the next day and discover that Mr. Vincent, who was also her homeroom teacher, was absent. Mrs. Greg, the permanent sub, delivered that morning’s announcements and escorted her class to Prayers. They filed into the auditorium in the customary two-by-two procession.

  Emma hadn’t memorized that week’s Bible verses, so as the recitation began she mouthed the word watermelon over and over again. Next came the Lord’s Prayer, which she knew by heart. After this, Miss Gardner walked to the podium and read a story about a flock of geese who all stopped flying when one of the birds was shot by a hunter and fell to the ground. The bird didn’t die, and the whole flock waited around for it to recover before resuming their journey north. When she was done, Miss Gardner asked the room what the lesson was, and, as usual, the only hands that went up were in the front, where the younger grades sat.

  When Emma heard Miss Gardner call on Isabelle, she thought it must have been another Isabelle—there were a few—but, looking up, Emma saw it was the Isabelle in first grade, who had stopped coming to school after being diagnosed with leukemia earlier that year. She was back! Isabelle wore a headband with a bow on it, as it appeared that she was completely bald. However, as Mrs. Hudson played the opening chords to “Amazing Grace” and Isabelle turned to face the scroll with the words on it, her scalp caught the light, and Emma could see that her hair was growing in. Not a lot, just wisps, like a dandelion gone to seed.

  They were still stuck in February but the light that filtered through the windows had a yolky glow. Spring was coming. Soon there would be blossoms on the trees, and Isabelle, who was not going to die after all, would have enough hair to tuck behind her ears. To the tune of “Amazing Grace,” Emma contemplated the miracle of these things, and she was overwhelmed with a feeling of goodness, and the blissful serenity that accompanies seeing the world through the simplicity of this lens. As the singing continued, the feeling intensified, and then, like a bolt of lightning, it suddenly occurred to Emma what really mattered in life. It wasn’t about cool versus uncool, pretty versus ugly, funny versus boring, or even happy versus sad, but goodness—goodness versus everything else that might not seem bad, but wasn’t good, either. To do good things, to be a good person: this was all that really counted.

  With a sudden clarity that felt holy, Emma considered her own life through this prism. She had done some things that were not good. She’d known this, and yet she’d done them anyway, because up to this moment she’d wanted to be like naughty Jo in Little Women. But now, she realized,
she actually wanted to be like Jo’s saintly sister, Beth—and maybe she was already more like Beth than she’d thought.

  “Are you crying?” Charlotte whispered.

  Emma let her face speak for itself as she continued to sing. That this was her favorite of all the hymns in the rotating roster they sang in Prayers was no coincidence. “Amazing Grace,” Isabelle’s hair growing back, her complicity in Mr. Vincent’s unexplained absence—all of these things felt predestined, to deliver her right now to this place inside of her. A place within that she’d always known was there, but had never consciously lingered.

  “Amazing Grace” ended; Emma’s tears dried and the goose bumps subsided. But the feeling of goodness, and the newfound belief that she was, at her core, an exceptionally good person—these sentiments remained. For the rest of the day she carried it around. It felt like a huge secret, like she’d just found out she’d won an award and couldn’t tell anyone. But she didn’t care, because there was no vanity in goodness.

  * * *

  EMBOLDENED BY HER NEW CONVICTIONS, Emma cut herself off from Charlotte, and in doing so, Claire, Eleanor C., Leslie, and Ashley, who Emma now realized hadn’t been her friends, but followers of Charlotte, whom everybody wanted to be around because she made things fun. “The clique” or “the posse,” Emma learned they were called by the rest of their classmates, the social proletariat—of which she was now a member.

  Sitting for the first time at a different table in the lunchroom, it depressed Emma how preoccupied her new circle was with her old one. It seemed half the conversation was about “the posse.” In a transparent attempt to mask their sense of inferiority, they spoke of Charlotte and company in strictly hostile terms. Even more pathetic was that their actual interactions with members of the clique were shamelessly obsequious.

  Charlotte was quick to replace Emma with Leslie as her best friend and sat next to her when the class didn’t have assigned seating. One day Leslie emerged from the bathroom with the back of her skirt tucked into the waist of her underpants. It was recess, and Emma was one of about a dozen witnesses who’d been sitting in the locker cove—the only one who hadn’t leapt up and chased her down the hall in a frantic scramble to heroically alert her before she could embarrass herself. Emma watched Leslie wave them off with a smile and continue on her exposed-pink-butt-cheek way.