She stood to refill our coffee mugs. “It’s sweet, isn’t it?”
“Sweet? Are you joking?”
Something occurred to me: her roommate was gone, she was wearing this sexy lingerie, but still Alec had come home in the middle of the night. “Why isn’t he here?”
“Oh, he wanted to stay,” she said. “But sometimes I have to send him home, you know? I think it’s better for us if we don’t spend every single second together.”
“What do you think it will be like in Paris?”
“Alec understands me, Dr. Pete. He knows I can’t be around other people all the time. Sometimes I just need my space. Alec gets it. He understands.”
“Laura, if you told Alec to dress up in a clown costume and climb the Empire State Building, he’d pretend to understand. That’s how infatuated twenty-one-year-olds behave.”
“I think he deserves more credit than that,” she said.
“You do, huh?”
She sat back down again with our mugs, then reached to a drawer behind her for her cigarettes, her lighter, and her ashtray. “Sure,” she said. “My question is, why don’t you?”
It was galling to be told how little credit I was giving my son, but still I was impressed with my own fortitude, my ability to sit in that lovely, sun-filled kitchen with Laura Stern in her underwear and not get loopy with rage. Her voice was grumbly in the morning, even before her first cigarette of the day, but as she lit up and blew smoke in my eyes, I was still thinking as clearly as I ever had.
“Look,” I said. “I have enormous respect for my son. I think he’s a terrific person, a talented person, a kind and generous person. If I thought less of him, I wouldn’t be quite so bothered by his desire to run off to Paris with you. Perhaps you can understand that.”
“Have you ever even been to Paris?”
“Does it matter?” In fact I had been there once, on a vacation ten years ago, part of a four-stop European tour. We’d spent the whole time shopping for an umbrella except for one day at the Louvre, which I’d surprised myself by enjoying. I remembered the big painting of Napoleon crowning himself in front of a disgruntled Pope. I remembered Elaine getting lost in the rooms full of tiny Greek figurines.
And then I remembered Laura in the Museum of Modern Art, and the curvy black wings of the bassinet.
“I think it matters,” she said. She took a deep drag of her cigarette. “I think every experience matters. There’s no one way to live a life, Dr. Pete. There are just a million different possibilities.”
“Forgive me for disagreeing,” I said. “There are only the possibilities you make for yourself, and if you make stupid decisions when you’re young, you’re cutting off those possibilities, one by one. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and that goes for plans about your future as much as it does for anything else.”
“Right is right and wrong is wrong?”
“Almost always,” I said, the “almost” a defense against sounding inflexible.
“I guess I just don’t understand what wrong decision you’re talking about. The decision to go to Paris with me? Is that really cutting off all his future possibilities?”
“His decision not to finish college, Laura. His decision to run off after a pipe dream, a woman he barely knows. A country he’s never been to.”
“Alec and I know each other, Dr. Pete.”
“I want my son to have every opportunity,” I said. “Surely you can understand—”
“There is no one right way to live a life,” she said.
“Laura—” I cut myself off, startled to find I wanted a cigarette of my own.
“Look, I get that you want what’s best for Alec, and I get that you think college is the best thing possible, but the truth is, lots of people are very successful without four-year degrees, and lots of people travel the world when they’re young, and it’s not like we’re talking about Alec going to darkest Nigeria or something with a total stranger. It’s Paris, Dr. Pete. With me. And I know what I’m doing. And he’s allowed to make his own choices, whether you think those choices are right or wrong.”
She stubbed out her cigarette, unpinned her hair, let it fall loose and wavy over her shoulders. Then she pinned it up again, carefully, into a knot on top of her head. She was breathing sharply through her mouth. She got mad the same way Iris did, in long, ranting passages and heavy breathing. I didn’t say a word.
“Dr. Pete, Alec doesn’t want to disappoint you. But he also can’t disappoint himself. He’s not going to Paris because he wants to be with me. He’s going to Paris because he wants to be himself.”
For Christ’s sake. I sighed and shook a cigarette out of Laura’s pack, cancer be damned. “Do you mind?” She shook her head. I hadn’t smoked a cigarette in thirty years or more, and the gesture put me in mind of my psychiatric rotation all those years ago, when even medical students smoked happily.
“Laura, we seem to be at an impasse,” I said, inhaling. I had forgotten how wonderful that first inhale can be. The bronchi in your lungs expand, your blood vessels constrict, the nicotine reaches the brain within ten seconds. Euphoria, especially if you’re not used to it.
“We do?”
“What I mean is that although it’s interesting, this conversation really isn’t going anywhere. I came here to ask you to let Alec loose. To let him live the best life he can. If you care about him, surely you’ll do that.”
She stood to look out the window, at the cooing pigeon, which had been joined by a comrade. She shook her head a little. The cigarette smoke plumed around her head and out the window, toward the birds. “If I care about him,” she said, turning around, tapping on her cigarette, a melodramatic flourish. I took another drag on my own smoke. Her thin limbs glowed in the sunlight behind her. It seemed suddenly that I’d already been here longer than I’d planned.
“Why don’t you put on some clothes, Laura.”
“I’m perfectly comfortable.”
“It would be easier to have this conversation, I think, if you were dressed.” It was incredible to me that my son had ever had access to this woman.
“You’re the one who barged in here, Dr. Pete. You are not an invited guest, and I was perfectly comfortable before you arrived, so—”
“It would be easier, though, if you—”
“What are you really doing here, Dr. Pete?”
I smoked my cigarette to the filter. She remained standing. The kitchen was filling with our smoke, and I wondered what the beauty-sleep roommate would think of that. It was ten fifteen already; Elaine was long up, and she’d probably already tried my cell phone and heard it ringing in my study. She was probably worried about me.
I stubbed out my cigarette. After a moment’s hesitation, I lit another one. My brain was buzzing.
“You want to slay the scary dragon who’s threatening your son?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I don’t think I am.” She sat back down finally. “And I wish you had the balls to come out and say it. You don’t think I’m good enough for him. You hold my past against me.”
“Laura”—I didn’t like her referring to my balls—“that has nothing to do with—”
“You think that something that happened to me when I was seventeen years old has tarnished me forever and that you can’t let your son near me for fear of what I’ll do—”
“Something that happened to you?”
“Yes—”
“You take no responsibility for what happened? You think it happened to you?”
“So you do want to talk about it, then.”
Oh, for God’s sake. “Look, Laura, this isn’t about you. This is about my son, and what’s best for him, and if you would just—”
“If I would just?”
“Let him go—”
“You can’t forgive what happened to me when I was a kid. You want me to suffer for it, even now.”
“Cut it out.”
“Fine,” she said. And then we were both q
uiet again, and I listened to the click of the metal clock above the window. The room was cool—the kitchen breeze was keeping things temperate—but still I was starting to sweat and feel a little nauseated. All that nicotine and coffee, and the aftereffects of the Old Lantern’s western. And the fact that this conversation was simply pointless but that I had nowhere else to go, nowhere else to be. If Laura couldn’t help me, nobody could. I stood, poured some tap water into my empty coffee mug, and drank it down quickly, standing at the sink. I did it again.
“If you wanted, you could have asked me for a glass of water.”
“This is fine,” I said.
“It is?” She arched her voice, her eyebrow.
“It’s fine,” I said.
“I wish you’d just be honest with me, Dr. Pete. If you’re going to interrupt my morning, drink my coffee, the least you could do is honor me with a little honesty.”
I sighed, felt the breeze from the window against my neck. “This tap water is just fine, Laura. That’s the God’s honest truth.”
“I was sixteen,” she said. “My period was late.”
“I told you, that’s not what I’m here to talk about.”
“I prayed every day that it would come, even after five, six, seven weeks had passed. My body started changing. I was putting on weight, so I started wearing bigger shirts. I volunteered more in gym class — I thought exercise might help. I started running in the mornings before anyone woke up. “
“Laura, this is not what I’m here for.”
“I had horrible cramping. I was always nauseous. Always tired. I pretended to have some kind of gastrointestinal something, my dad prescribed me drugs. I took all of them, too many of them, but nothing happened.”
“I said this is not what I came here for.” I didn’t want to go through all this again, I honestly didn’t. I just wanted her to leave Alec alone.
“Do you know what it’s like to be an outcast in your own home, Dr. Pete? Do you have any idea what it was like for me after everything happened? My own mother unable to look at me? And when I dared to go out on the street—people staring, whispering, laughing at me? Yelling at me? They called me the baby killer. Neighbors, people I thought were friends. It got to the point where I basically couldn’t leave the house. People called up my parents, left the most horrible things on their answering machine. Someone mailed a bloody knife to the house. Someone else mailed a decomposing kitten. They had to change their number again and again, but people kept finding out. People kept condemning them, like it was their fault. People pointed at me on the street and yelled that I was a baby killer, without having any idea what happened or why it happened or …”
I remembered that time, that moment, the way I, too, engaged in whispers in parking lots, synagogue functions, steak house dinners. The way I wasn’t there for my old friend Joe. We’d never talked about any of this. He’d never told me about the things in the mail.
“It’s the hardest thing to escape from, being lonely.”
I looked at her.
“You want to know what I need from your son? I just need him to be near me,” she said. “It’s the hardest thing to escape from, being lonely, but Alec saves me from that.”
“That’s not his job,” I said. “You need to let him go.”
“I can’t.”
Afternoons, I would leave the ramshackle beach house in Rehoboth and watch the old men dig for clams. Usually I went alone, but sometimes my son, five, six, seven, came with me, bent down in the sand, and raked through it with his fingers. Occasionally he’d come up with clams of his own, immature and bubbling in his hands, tiny, the size of babies’ thumbnails. He’d show them to me, palms up in front of his nose. Come here, Dad. Check this out. What do you think those are? Baby clams, they’re just babies. What should we do with them? Put them back and let them grow. That’s right.
I missed that kid; I missed my son.
“Nobody’s ever wanted to take care of me the way Alec does,” Laura said.
And then 1991: the Soviet Union fell, and there was no more good versus evil. There was no more compass. Or maybe I lost my compass later. Maybe the magnet went screwy right in that kitchen above a yoga studio; I don’t know.
“Why can’t you just leave him be?”
“The thing about it is that with Alec, I’m never lonely,” she said. “He loves me completely. He keeps me safe.”
“Safe,” I muttered hoarsely. Did that word mean to her what it meant to me?
“Did it ever bother you that nobody wanted to know how I ended up pregnant? There wasn’t even a peep about finding out who the father was?”
“As far as I remember, Laura, there was a lot of consternation. People wanted to know, your father wanted to know—”
“My father knew” she said. “He was the only one who did know. I told him finally when I couldn’t stand him begging anymore.”
“He didn’t know, I asked him—”
“Trust me,” she said. “He knew. Or rather, he knew I didn’t know. Which was of course much worse.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Laura, did something happen to you back then?” It was like a lightbulb. She was a teenager. She said it herself: she was lonely. She was always alone. Maybe even in the John F. Kennedy Gardens, reading a book, finding some peace late at night in a public place—
“Did something happen? A lot of things happened, Dr. Pete.”
“I mean—”
“What happened was that I used to go to the Grand Union late at night and let the public school boys who worked there have sex with me right next to the Dumpster,” she said. “Sometimes the smell of rotting food still reminds me of sex.”
I blinked.
“I said—”
“I heard what you said.” Well, this was just wonderful. And what was the point of telling me this, exactly? What was the point of filling me in on this sordid bit of history? She was trying to shock me, trying to let me know I shouldn’t mess with her. Fine. I didn’t want to mess with her. I just wanted my son to go back to school, get a life, not end up on some godforsaken island making cowrie-shell jewelry.
“When I got pregnant, I knew I had to get rid of it, but I didn’t know how. Isn’t that ridiculous? I knew anything you wanted about the Brontë sisters but I had no idea how to get an abortion. I didn’t drive, I didn’t know where an abortion clinic was, and I knew that if I told my parents, they’d find out what I was doing when I said I was at the library. And I couldn’t do that to them.”
“So instead you—but why would you do that?” I was still stuck on where we’d just been. I thought about Joe dropping her off at the library. I thought about him going back two hours later to pick her up. Acne-scarred Laura. Face-in-a-book Laura. Her father thinking, My teenage daughter at the library, poor girl, no social life—well, at least she’s safe. “Why would you go to the Grand Union and do that?”
“I told you, I was lonely. Alienated youth, high school outcast looking for affection, a little attention from the opposite sex, whatever. And I liked having sex.”
“Laura, no sixteen-year-old girl goes behind the Grand Union to have sex because she likes it.”
She dismissed me, shook her head. “You probably don’t remember what I was like back then, but I was …” She started again. “Back then, every day was torture, Dr. Pete.” She lit another cigarette. “I would do whatever I could to hide, not go to school, but of course eventually I’d have to go. I had no friends. Zero. I was tortured from the sixth grade on. Every day. It got worse as I got older.”
“But I still don’t understand why you would—” “Sixth, seventh grade, they called me Yeti. They called me fire-crotch, and for the longest time I didn’t even know what that meant. When I was in the eighth grade, they passed around a hate petition that the whole school had signed: I hate Laura Stern. They gave it to me in homeroom.” She took a breath. “In high school they started leaving tampons in my locker, sometimes covered in ketchup, sometimes real blood. Some fro
zen fish once, in a Baggie with dead leaves. They called me fishybush. If I had to go to the bathroom during school, they’d follow me in and stand in the stalls over me and watch me. I stopped going to the bathroom. They’d take my clothing from my gym locker. I stopped going to gym.”
So kids were cruel. I knew kids could be cruel. “Is this supposed to be some sort of justification, Laura?”
“Justification?” She gave me a look, sadness and disdain. “They would follow me home. They threw used condoms at my bedroom window.”
“Why didn’t you tell your parents?”
“What could they have done about it?”
“Told somebody? Transferred you?”
“Where, to the public school? Are you kidding? Besides, if I told them, it would have broken their hearts. I wasn’t about to do that to them.”
“Your parents would have protected you.”
“Nobody could have protected me.”
Her explanation made no sense at all. Getting a little roughed up in high school gave her the right to do what she’d done? “So instead you went to the Grand Union—”
“Jesus, I don’t know why I’m bothering to explain this.” She stood up with such force that her chair rocked backward, but she didn’t stop talking. “The boys were nice to me there, that’s all. I liked going there. They were nice. It didn’t start out as sex—it was just, I don’t know, it was just a weird kind of companionship at first. Friendship. I was a loser, they were losers, it was almost like we had a little club.” She ran a hand through her hair. “And then I got pregnant, and I panicked.”
“But surely you knew you could see a doctor.”
“What doctor? Who? My father? For him to find out? The whole world to find out?”
“The whole world wouldn’t have—”
“I didn’t have the courage to inject myself with bleach, do any of the things I’d read about in books. So I beat myself. On my belly. Beating myself with my fists, running into corners. I threw myself down the stairs a couple of times. Whatever I could to miscarry.”
“Laura, you don’t have to tell me this.”
A Friend of the Family Page 25