The Lauras

by Sara Taylor

  “You worried about Annie?” I asked.

  “Some, though I’m starting to think on our worries just now. Namely, how we have places to get, and reduced resources to expend getting to those places.” She dug her packet from the pocket of her shirt, pulled another cigarette halfway out, then thought better of it and put them back.

  “What do we have to do still?”

  “We don’t have to do anything. We could settle in right here and call it home until someone with a badge makes us move on.”

  I wasn’t in the mood for her literalness.

  “We’ll be able to get moving sooner if I’m working, too,” I said.

  “Sorry, kid, you’ve got to go to school.”

  “But I hate school.”

  “Tough. You don’t have too many years left of it. You can go be a bum or whatever you want to be once you’ve served your time. For now you’re still the kid and I’m still the adult and you go to school and I work.”

  “That’s not what you said to Annie.”

  “She has plans, for one. And she’s older than you, two. And she’s finished with high school already, three. Now quit fighting with me and get your ass in the car. We have places to be.”

  She sure did take her time getting us there, though. We rolled slowly back into town, ate granola bars in the front seat while loitering in public parking, then went into the diner from the night before for more fifty-cent coffee. Didn’t matter if we were almost out of money, coffee was a necessity. Somewhere along the way I’d started drinking it, too, so I was pretty glad that she’d decided to cut back on cigarettes first when the purse strings started to tighten. We only had the one cup each, but we sat nursing it for nearly an hour, until it got to be a reasonable time of the morning. Then Ma pulled out her cellphone and dialed the brother’s phone number.

  If it had been quiet in the diner I could have heard the voice bleeding through from the other end, but because of the diner clatter all I got was Ma’s end—polite but brief with the brother, then some warmer with Annie—she was nervous, I guessed, that she shouldn’t have left her friend’s daughter out of her sight, had done exactly the wrong thing and she would never be able to forgive herself. She nodded a lot as Annie told her about whatever there was to talk about after twelve hours of being away from us.

  “We’re moving on to Nevada later today. We won’t be right close by, but we’ll still be close enough. And if things don’t work out with your brother, or with school, find me and we’ll figure something out, you hear? OK. I miss having you along. Alex’s right here, want me to say hi?”

  I was grateful that she didn’t just hand me the phone, the way my father would have done.

  “OK. Keep at it—things have to look up from here. Good. OK. I’ll talk to you later, baby. Keep your chin up.”

  That got me with a pang of jealousy. But then she mashed the off button and it was just the two of us again. She pocketed the phone and tipped back the last cold swallow of coffee, then looked at the cup for a bit.

  “We can afford just one more, I think.”

  “Are we going to Vegas?” I asked.

  “Vegas?”

  “We need money, and we don’t have a bunch of time.”

  “Kid, selling our organs would be a better bet for quick cash than Vegas. We’re going to Reno, maybe, and on the way in or out the road might go through Vegas, but there will be no gambling. Real life isn’t anything like the movies. You’re not old enough to get in, anyway.”

  I put on a show of sulking, but inside I was happy: she was all mine again.

  We took two and a half days to get to Reno, stopping and starting, napping on the side of the road, taking it not so seriously for a bit. And once a day Ma made the call, chitchatted some, then asked the question: “Alex’s right here, want me to say hi?” She always hung up satisfied, or as satisfied as she could be in the situation, which might have been better. She would have been happier, probably, if we could have stayed with Annie, or had her come with us, but one way or another neither option was affordable for anyone concerned.

  When we got to Reno we slept in the car—under the shadows of scorched mountains that were like where I had been and not like where I had been—until we found a two-room apartment that wasn’t too much of a horrifying mess, with rent that we could afford. The work was thinner on the ground here, but Ma found a job mixing drinks, a nighttime job, so she would be there when I went to school and when I got back.

  I woke up when she shuffled in, just around dawn, and she made me bacon before going to sleep—there was only one bed, but we traded it off back and forth. She wore low-cut shirts again, and smelled of cigarettes that other people had smoked and spilled drinks, beer and spirits and the sticky sweetness of the mixers. But this time I didn’t catch the scent on her of another person—she may have been more careful, but probably she was too tired.

  Three weeks after moving into the apartment I was bunged back into school, and at first it seemed like it might be better than I had remembered. I knew how to fade into the background, pretend like I belonged there, or at least had been hanging around for so long that no one could begrudge my existence. And I could concentrate more, now, felt less like I was crawling in my skin, less tortured by the presence of other people my age, by the possibilities of the flesh left unfulfilled. I no longer felt like I would kill to have sex with absolutely anyone.

  I still hadn’t managed to do that, had neither figured out the mechanics of the task in more than roughest theory nor met anyone that I could invite to figure them out with me, but living someplace stationary and having the comfort of my own company once again made me less despondent about that. The first night in the apartment, the moment Ma locked the door behind her, me on the inside watching the little color TV that came with the place, her on the outside in tight bartender’s blacks, I got naked. Not right there; I went to the bathroom and locked the door. I’d gotten shy with myself again, felt like I had to hide it from the no one spying on me from nowhere. But I hadn’t forgotten what to do. And had my body ever missed my hands. It was the reunion of the century.

  My mother told stories rarely, if at all, before we left home; my dad told stories all the time. He told them slowly, did a lot of scene dressing, so you expected it to end with fireworks, or at least sparklers, but they never had real endings. Which is true to life, I guess, since it’s so rare that reality rustles up a satisfying narrative shape, the edges rounded off and the ends tied up. It’s rare that you get finality to things, the way we like our books and movies to end. Life so often goes flabby and peters out at the finish point instead of clicking satisfyingly, like the sound of a box being shut. That’s why we read, and watch, and listen, because we want that click and life never hands it over. You can go the regulation eighty-odd years without getting one neat chapter break, forget about a “The End.” It just goes on and on, like snail slime.

  But back to Dad.

  One of the stories that he liked to tell was of the first time he saw a car that had a television. He was in school like every other kid on a day like every other day, when he got called to the office. His grandfather and older brother—two years ahead, in the fifth grade—were waiting for him there, and his grandfather was signing them out to take them to the dentist with a wink at my dad, because no dentist’s appointment had been made and they all three knew it. Instead, there were hamburgers and milkshakes and a drive into D.C., which was a rare treat.

  It was crowded—they stopped on a side street, doors locked and windows up, watching the press of people, shouting and waving, marching, chanting—and then a gold Oldsmobile glided past, and my father caught the flicker of the tiny television built into the gap between the two front seats so that the people in the back seat could watch it. And that was my father’s clearest memory of the 1968 D.C. Race Riots, of King’s assassination, of the issues of import that shaped the world of his childhood.

  I was annoyed when I first heard it that the story had no end,
and seemingly no point, and I demanded of him a better story to make up for it.

  With benefit of hindsight, I realize that the point was that his perspective was the wrong one. I was looking at the wrong end of things, not realizing that what he was trying to tell me was that we aren’t always the heroes of our own stories.

  Reno was like Florida without the water: same routine, same sense of waiting for the other goddamned shoe to drop. I tried to fly under the radar, but now that we were older—it was my first year in high school, and it immediately made me miss the relative innocence, the insulation, of middle school—there were questions. Not from the teachers—my memory blots them out cleanly, they were so unimportant—but from the other students. We were at the age of transformation; everyone else seemed to be in the process of morphing neatly, if spottily, from child into either man or woman, and so my own refusal to pledge allegiance became suddenly noticeable, something that everyone around me seemed to think they deserved to have an opinion about.

  And so came the questions.

  “What are you?”

  “My mom was born in Sicily, but we don’t know where my dad—”

  “Not like that, I mean what are you?”

  “My grandparents used to take me with them to an Episcopal church—”

  “I mean sex.”

  “I imagine I’d like it if I ever get the chance—”

  “Quit fucking with me. Are you a guy or a girl?”

  If the questioner had gotten that far they were either looking about as uncomfortable as I felt, or getting pissed off, depending on the person, so I usually closed with, “In case you’re confusing ‘sex’ with ‘gender’—I don’t have one.”

  It was unnerving at first, to be confronted like that; then I started to enjoy winding them up. They were assholes for thinking that it was any of their business in the first place, and why did it matter whether I was evolving into man, woman, or an entirely different species? Knowing someone’s sex doesn’t tell you anything. About that person, anyway. I suppose the need to know, how knowing changes the way you behave towards them, the assumptions you make about who they are and how they live, tells an awful lot about you.

  It’s bothered me for as long as I can remember, the way the human compulsion to classify stands at odds with my feeling of falling outside the available categories. When I was a child at home it mattered less: my father was Man, my mother was Woman, I was myself. But when I went out into the world, or even to my grandparents’ house, everyone seemed determined to put me into a box that I had no business being in, expected me to think and act and want in ways that were consistent with a label with which I could not identify.

  When I was seven my mother had to come get me from school because I had run away from my teacher rather than line up like I’d been told. On our drive home I explained it was because the teacher had told us to divide up, boys in one line and girls in the other, and I just couldn’t make myself get in the wrong line one more time, that there wasn’t a right line for me to get into.

  She looked at me in the rearview mirror, swinging my legs in my booster seat and waiting for her to start yelling at me, and I remember feeling as though she could see inside my brain, as if she were seeing me properly for the first time.

  “If that’s how you feel, then that’s how you feel,” she said. “Let me know if you change your mind.”

  I suppose she’d spent too much of her life being pushed into being what she wasn’t, and doing what she didn’t want to do, to have it in her to do the same to me, but she still asked whenever the topic came up if I’d changed my mind yet. It wasn’t until I was almost a teenager that she took me at my word. And in the end, the joke’s on that teacher: I still haven’t joined either of the lines that she tried to put me in.

  Of course, there was one area where sex was an issue. In Florida I had gotten out of gym and so avoided locker rooms, made sure to only ask for the bathroom pass in the middle of the class period so that no one would see that I alternated between the boys’ and girls’ rooms. But now that we were all expected to be settling into our adult bodies—and since the school wouldn’t let Ma opt me out of gym—that wasn’t so easy to do.

  I’d gotten permission to use the single-stall handicapped bathroom off the teachers’ lounge for getting changed; most of the teachers knew me on sight from my passing through and were pleasant. And there was only so much harassing other students could do between classes. So all was good in my queer little world until a group decided that, if they couldn’t get me to cop to what variety of crotch giblets I was keeping in my pants, the next best thing would be to catch me naked. At first I wasn’t sure if that was really what they were after, or if they were all locking on to what they saw as a good target for extracurricular pummeling, but either way I didn’t like it.

  I was half expecting the first fight when it came. I just wasn’t expecting it to be started by a girl. Maybe I should have started it myself, chose the biggest, ugliest motherfucker there and knocked his face in, established myself as top of the heap as early as possible, like we were in prison. I wanted to be a badass, but I knew that I wasn’t.

  First fight: walking down the hall, squeeze past a group of girls, feel hands on my head and shoulder, then the hands bounce my face off the metal of a locker door and I feel my nose crunch. Turn around. She’s my height, her hands coming up for my face, but I’m quicker: knee drives up into her kidneys, sweep her feet out from under her and I fall on top of her. Her head makes a dull sound as it hits. Then a teacher is pulling us up, and I don’t continue it even though I want to and I know she’s hurting, even though she’s not showing it. My face is bleeding everywhere.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, we tripped, I’m so sorry, are you all right?”

  She takes my lead, and we both play it beautifully, get ourselves out of suspension, detention, whatever they do to kids that try to beat the suit out of each other in the hallway. I miss the next class because I’m sitting in the nurse’s office even after the nose stops, because I can’t calm down: I don’t feel things, I don’t cry, I didn’t know that I was angry. But I was. I hadn’t been afraid when I felt my nose crack, I’d been enraged. And now I wanted a reason to keep swinging, because getting that girl on the ground had felt better than anything I could imagine. Every face for the rest of the day was an invitation, begging me to hit it, to knock it clean off, to show it just what I thought of the world.

  When I got home that afternoon Ma took one look at me and pointed to the door.

  “Out. You’ve got a chip on your shoulder about something and you’re getting out there and running it off. I don’t care what he said she said, I want your ass pounding the pavement for an hour. When you’ve calmed down you can come back and tell me about it.”

  I didn’t want to—I wanted a fight—but she still had her mother voice, so I went. When I told her about the nose and the locker she didn’t have much to say at first.

  “Don’t kill anyone, OK, kid? I didn’t want you to have to deal with this, but it would be pretty silly to think that ‘want’ would stop it from happening. Next time, you might want to try taking a fall; give the principal and everyone reason to get involved, and they’ll have to defend your ass. Or, if it happens, make sure it’s the last time. Might get suspended, but everyone will know not to mess with you. I can’t advise either way. I always took the ‘end it’ approach, but we didn’t get in much trouble for fighting back then.”

  The second fight was a guy, and he was just a bit bigger than me, and it was outside of school, just after, on the walk home. It was a clean invitation: he started with insults and then socked me in the gut. He was big, but he wasn’t very good at bullying: there are off-the-shelf slurs for every group on the planet, but he didn’t know what to shout at me, so most of it missed the mark, and just made me confused. He should have won, but he expected me to be scared; he didn’t know about the anger. It was hot, it made my head fizz, got me so high that I didn’t feel pain,
just the crushing desire to make him cry. Which he did, when I got him on the ground and rubbed his face against the sidewalk like I was grating cheese for spaghetti. I let him go and he tried again, and I got him down again. I wasn’t sure I could trust him to let me be when I let him up the second time, so I reached back and whaled away at his ass like he was a disobedient kid. The humiliation might have been a bad idea, but he let me walk away afterwards, high on the victory even if I was the worse for it. When the bruises colored up Ma wanted to call the school, but I wouldn’t let her; it had happened outside of school hours, off school property, and I hoped that it was the end of things. I had faked being a hardass twice, it should be enough to get them to leave me alone.

  It was maybe a week after the second fight that I was late getting moving for gym. It was mostly because we’d be playing volleyball; I have the hand-eye coordination of a squashed slug, and I hoped that if I slipped in late, with my excuse that I’d had to go farther than everyone else to get changed, I’d be allowed to sit out at least the first game. I’d lingered in the class before finishing up my notes, taken my time getting my athletic clothes out of my locker, and when I got to the teachers’ lounge it was already empty. It struck me as odd, when I opened the door, that the bathroom light was off, but I figured someone had been trying to save energy. When I reached to switch it on and a hand grabbed my arm I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  It took all three of them to get me into the bathroom, their hands on my wrists and in my hair and clawing at my clothes, the four of us fighting silently except for angry, bitten-off whispers that “You jumped too fucking early, Chad; we’d have got it inside easy if you’d just fucking waited!” I don’t know why I didn’t scream, why I saved my mouth for biting. The scare of being grabbed from the dark had gotten my adrenaline going, and I wasn’t thinking. But they were, and they got me off balance and into the little room; then they closed the door and locked it.