chapter six
On the 4th of November, 2008, Mal joined the neighbors as they poured into the streets to celebrate Barack Obama’s victory. Laurie hid in her room and cried. Prop 8 had passed in California, declaring the only valid marriage between a man and a woman. She hadn’t even known she’d held out hope for a different kind of life.
Still, the election brought with it a heart-seizing, infectious joy that felt as precarious as driving along Highway 1, which she and Mal did every weekend.
“Do you have your travel bag?” Mal asked, as if she wasn’t the one who always forgot something.
“Since you made us brush our teeth out with body wash I’ve always kept one ready.”
If heartbreak made Laurie mope by the television with a bowl of candy, it made Mal restless and insatiable. They drove down to Big Sur blasting Blue ?yster Cult, singing along— Home on the highway, Home isn’t my way, Home I’ll never be —in rented Zipcars that they always brought back smelling of the ocean.
“I want to get warm ,” Mal said, driving them to Esalen, where she argued about the nature of the universe and theory of mind with naked hippies in stinking, sulfurous hot springs under a starry sky. But each time they got home, San Francisco’s bone- chilling fog enveloped them like a specter, and they climbed the creaking stairs with heavy, leaden feet.
In no time, the year ended. The inauguration they’d waited for arrived, but January felt like an ending rather than a beginning, as if the party was over and it was now time to get to work. The stock and housing market had crashed, and in 2009 the adrenaline was jittering out of the collective American system, and everyone had to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives. Laurie’s eldest brother Micah was in jail again, Jack’s house was in foreclosure, and her mother was hunting for a new husband at the age of fifty-two.
“You never come home,” said a sister-in-law who’d forgotten her existence for three years.
“Laurie’s too good for us,” Jack said in the background. “She couldn’t wait to leave.”
He wasn’t wrong. The summer they’d all lived together, in a dilapidated house on the outskirts of Lansing, her mother taught her how to hide the markers of her upbringing— nuclear, not nucular, Could you, not wouldja —and how to dye the Ralph Lauren dresses they got from the thrift store to hide the stains.
“Worn luxury is better than new trash,” her mother said, turning her nose up at T.J. Maxx. “People think poverty is contagious. Worse, the standards you accept in your clothes are the standards you accept in men.”
Meanwhile, Jack came home holding a dead possum in one hand and a baseball bat in the other.
“Found this guy near the chicken coop,” he said proudly. “Smashed ’is head in.”
She and Jack both worked at Cornell University’s Robert Purcell diner. Jack did the dishes, emptying trays of wasted food into Oscar, the large compost incinerator. Laurie’s nails started to fray after three weeks of sorting wet silverware.
“You should wear gel nail polish,” said Ian, the guy who shared her shift. “Shellac is, like, the only thing in the world that can handle the dish room.”
Ian was a student, not a townie, but poor, and so he worked at the diner to pay back student loans. He was the first openly gay person she’d known, and his bright fuchsia nails were a welcome touch of beauty amidst all the slop and grease. Eventually the burly dish room staff stopped giving him shit about wearing eyeliner and Laurie stopped holding her breath waiting for something terrible to happen. Even Jack grudgingly started to respect Ian when he crawled underneath the stalled dish belt to restart it.
One night, Ian pulled away the last of the chocolate pie when it failed to maintain temp and got yelled at by a lacrosse player for being a Nazi. Then it was Jack who scared off the lacrosse player and comforted Ian. And on November 7, 2000, Laurie stumbled behind Jack in her frayed denim jeans that smelled of stale eggs, watching the students glued to CNN on the hanging television, and Ian came up and threw an arm around both their shoulders and said, “Fuck ’em all. As if either Bush or Gore has ever washed their own dishes, am I right?”
Jack grunted, and they went outside for a break.
“They’re all crooks,” Jack conceded. “Out for themselves.”
“I mean, so am I,” Ian said. “That’s why I’m not going to stick around here. As soon as I graduate, I’m headed to San Francisco.”
“Are they all like you out there?” Jack asked.
“God, I hope so,” Ian said, laughing.
Laurie was already lost to her family then, although Jack wouldn’t know it for a while. Ian had given her something she hadn’t imagined possible, a future filled with pretty men who wouldn’t hurt her and nail polish that wouldn’t betray her, both waiting across the country, in San Francisco. Someday.
And in March 2009, just when she’d finally given into the allure of Barack Obama, had started once more to feel the hope that she’d suffocated for eight years, she was laid off.
· · ·
Of course Mal knew, but Laurie didn’t want to talk about it, so Mal simply brought home a tub of Bi-Rite’s salted caramel ice-cream and let her wallow by the TV. Laurie wondered what it would take for Mal to offer the kind of affection she’d come to expect from growing up on family-friendly TV shows—what would merit a hug? Then again, who knew if Mal had grown up on the same shows, or if she’d watched them in stupefaction wondering at the human species. Some of the treats Mal brought home reminded her of a cat bringing home dead birds.
During the day, when Mal was away, Laurie got hooked on Breaking Bad ; all her frustrations found voice in Walt White’s desperate bid for transformation.
Those days, under the billboards that spoke of cloud computing and middleware, brawls broke out in dive bars and empty auto-shops. Lifetimes were spent on the highways leading to Silicon Valley, on 280 and 85 and 101, and the worn grooves in the carpool lane were the only kind of graffiti anyone had time to make anymore. So, yeah: Walt White was everyone.
She found work waitressing, but couldn’t get enough hours to qualify for health insurance. One day, she was heading out just as Dolores came in to clean, and it was just as embarrassing as getting in that Lyft to be driven around by her former coworker, only the other way around. She couldn’t get out fast enough.
That weekend, in an attempt at making peace with her family, Mal invited her mother, sister and brother over for dinner. They’d talked on the phone a bit over the last year, but this was the first time they’d see each other in person since Mal’s break with them in Tahoe.
“Are you sure you want me around?” Laurie asked. “If it’s a family thing, I could wait in Ritual until you’re done.”
“You’re not leaving me alone with them. Besides, if you’re here, there’s a chance they’ll behave. Or at least leave early.”
Mal took them around the city in the afternoon, and then brought them over around six. Two women and one man appeared with her, all of them clearly surprised to see Laurie on the landing.
“I’m Mal’s roommate.”
“Hi,” said one of the women. “I’m Aditi.”
Mal’s sister was shorter than her, petite and dainty where Mal was tall and muscular. Her brother, Ashwin, was gray-haired and balding at thirty-five, and their mother was tall and thin, with deep lines of worry and sadness etched into her skin.
They sat down to dinner and Mal’s mother asked, “So what is it you do, Laurie?”
Panic bubbled up in her chest, and Mal shot her a look of concern.
“There’s no need to interview her, Mom.”
“I was asking a simple question. Being polite.”
“I’m a waitress,” Laurie said.
Confusion clouded Mal’s mother’s face, while her sister and brother exchanged glances Laurie thought were laden with disappointment.Mal had warned her about this, how they looked down on her for only having a Bachelor’s degree and never bothering to get her MBA.
“So you’re still in school then?”
“Mom!”
“I’m just asking, what it is she plans to do ? For her career, I mean.”
“Laurie’s an artist,” Mal said, “and a musician.”
Something about that silenced the group, as if she’d just announced that Laurie was an emu rather than a person.
Mal brought out the dinner she’d cooked.
“I’m impressed you still have time to cook,”Aditi said. “If it wasn’t for our maid, I’d starve.”
“Well, she doesn’t have to take care of kids, as we do,” Ashwin said. “And most of tech is cushy compared to banking.”
“Poor Ashwin had to sleep in the office many nights,” Mal’s mother said to Laurie. “For the first ten years of his job, we never saw him. They squeeze every last drop out of you.”
“It’s an investment. You work hard for ten years, and you’re set for the rest of your life,” Ashwin said. He curled his fingers daintily around the rice in his plate, little finger rising apart. “But of course, if you can’t discipline yourself now, you’ll be working into your seventies because you won’t have enough put away to buy a house, never mind retire.”
“At least I’ll go into my seventies with all my hair,” Mal said, glaring.
“Where did you go to school, Laurie?” Aditi asked.
So, it would be frying pan to fire.
“Grayson Academy,” she said, thinking they weren’t likely to know it was a high school.
“I don’t know that one,” Mal’s mother said.
“Must be an art school,” Aditi said.
Dinner went on with no further dangers for her, although the barbs came fast and sharp for Mal. Did Laurie know she’d been accepted to Stanford where she could have stayed at home, but chose to go all the way east to Cornell, disappointing everyone? If only Mal had gone into finance, she’d have a house by now, like all the others in her class. How lonely Mal must be in San Francisco, without children to pass the time.
After dinner, Laurie excused herself to her room, but couldn’t concentrate on her painting, not when she could hear them arguing in the living room.
“I no longer pray that you get married,” Mal’s mother said. “I pray that you’re happy. We just want to understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Just talk to us openly and let us know what’s going on with you,” Ashwin said, “otherwise we can’t solve this problem.”
“Which problem?”
Laurie marveled at how Mal’s tone never rose up in anger, but remained calm even as her questions slowly dismantled her family’s delusions. She had to smile. In the early days, she’d worried for Mal at work, when she asked seemingly stupid questions with perfect sincerity. But after the fourth time she brought a pointless meeting to an abrupt, productive end by revealing some false assumption or questioning some hyperbolic claim, Mal became known as the velvet knife—her patient, persistent questions always cut through to the heart of things.
“Mal, this is no life,” Aditi said, sounding impatient. “You’re not a child, to be living with roommates . At this rate, you’ll be forty-five and alone, with nothing to show for yourself but a couple of cats.”
“Is that a problem? If I find someone that makes me happy I won’t push them away. But I don’t care to be married, and I don’t want kids.”
“Your grandmother would die of shock. The only reason she’s still holding on at ninety-one is to see your kids,” said her mother.
Laurie hugged her chest hard, feeling as if someone had kicked her in the ribs.
“Yeah, that’s no pressure at all,” Mal said. “Look, this isn’t a conversation I’m interested in having. Can we talk about something else?”
“How can we?” Ashwin asked. “This is your future !”
“It’s also my present ,” Mal said. “You’ve been planning this conversation all day. When we were on the Golden Gate Bridge, your mind wasn’t there. You couldn’t enjoy it. You couldn’t watch the sunset. All you wanted to do was get it over with so we could have this—this intervention.”
“You can’t stay distracted from everything that matters in life with fun ,” Ashwin said, spitting out the last word.
Even through the door, his tone felt hot to the touch.
Mal only chuckled.
“There’s little else that matters,” she said. Then, her voice suddenly became icy, dangerous in the way that left grown men stuttering in her wake at work. “I’m not the container for other people’s regrets or ambitions.”
Later, after they left, Laurie was still tense, waiting for an explosion that hadn’t happened. Mal knocked on her door.
“I take it you heard all that.”
“Thin walls.”
“Are you okay?”
“Me? Mal, that was…”
She shrugged. “Want to watch some TV?”
“Vampire Diaries?”
Mal sighed. “Hot people don’t make up for bad writing.”
“This is why your writing career is stuck,” Laurie said, gathering her blanket. “You’re trying to be sincere and literary, when really all anyone wants you to do is write about hot people being stupid.”
For a second Mal didn’t answer. Laurie whirled around to face her, afraid that she’d hurt her, afraid that after this evening’s attacks she wouldn’t have known she was joking.
To her surprise Mal was laughing so hard she made no sound, bent over double and clutching her stomach.
It made her own gut somersault with joy.
Oh, she was in trouble .
· · ·
Mal’s family might have intended to make her rethink her choices, but they only succeeded in making Laurie question hers. The friends she made waitressing all had the same story to tell—they were taking whatever jobs they could to make the rent, but any talk of savings would either start political arguments or drunken commiseration. Laurie didn’t have energy for the former or money for the latter, so she kept quiet, paying her share of the rent without letting on that she had to dive into her reserves for groceries.
Although Mal offered, Laurie wasn’t going to let her pay, not when she was spinning out of control. Mal might not have cried over that terrible dinner, and she never complained about the endless calls from her mother (who did cry, and loudly, all the time), but she went out dancing three nights a week and came home with bleeding feet, too drunk to notice the stains she left on the stairs. She signed up for Krav Maga, for parkour, for a course in urban escape and evasion that left taser burns on her arms.
In November, Mal went away to San Diego for a week, as did most senior execs at the Unicorn, for a leadership training seminar. When she came back, she sat on the couch for hours, seeing and saying nothing, until Laurie started to worry.
“It’s nothing,” Mal said when asked, then hesitated. “Actually, would you mind taking a look at something?”
She showed her a recording she’d made, surreptitiously, with her phone. A clean-cut man in his forties appeared in front of a large conference room, standing beside Vic, who looked at him with giddy adoration.
Laurie swallowed down the wave of fury at seeing Vic—after everything she’d done for him, he’d laid her off via a form email and deactivated her badge so he wouldn’t have to face her.
“That’s Keith, someone Vic hired to—” Mal made air-quotes—“lead the team to greater value and throughput, through self-awareness and accountability.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“As far as I can tell, it involves recognizing my deep-set need to rebel against authority as a ‘shifter strategy’ about which I need to be honest with my assigned coach in our daily phone call.”
Laurie sat down heavily. “Mal, that’s a cult.”
Mal smiled. “Yes, it is. I knew as soon as they made us promise not to talk to anyone about what we learned in the session. And then—” She continued the video.
The man, Keith, wore a suit over a simple white t-shirt, and projected an air of calm, easy authority. “You’re all highly successful, type A people who’ve made it here by employing certain strategies. I’m here to tell you those won’t get you any further. We’re here to break you down and build you back up, more authentic and whole. Maybe you were bullied. Maybe your parents and friends don’t really understand the work you do. How hard it is. How important. Your wounds hold you back, make you compete with each other to prove yourself. But here—here you’ve already arrived. You’ve already won, and the earth is yours to inherit.”
Mal turned off the video. “You know when they said The meek shall inherit the earth , I hardly thought they were talking about inheriting all the drama that comes with having a bunch of fiber optic cables run beneath the sea.”
“Mal…”
“I know.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I ought to quit, but—”
But then nobody would be able to pay the rent. It hadn’t occurred to her that Mal could be as trapped as she was.
She screwed up her courage to ask Mal the question that had been on her mind for months. “Why do you never talk to me about your writing?”
“Because you don’t want me to.”
“Why would you think that?”
“You get this look on your face, like when I showed you the rejection letter.”
Laurie took a breath. “I was being petty. I thought we were… close , but that was something you’d shared with Kas, and never with me.”
“Oh.” Mal’s face went through a series of emotions, from confusion to guilt to something else Laurie couldn’t quite place. She’d never heard her apologize for anything, but she got the sense from the way Mal’s fingers twitched on the sofa that she wanted to.
“I thought—” Laurie inhaled deeply. If she didn’t get it out now, it would fester. “I thought you didn’t think I’d understand because I didn’t… I’m not…”
“You’re an idiot,” Mal said, rolling her eyes. “You gave me a full whiteboard diagram of our system architecture to onboard me onto the team when even the tech lead couldn’t—why would I ever doubt your intelligence?”
From anyone else she’d have called it last-minute flattery. She relaxed beside Mal, their fingers close enough to share warmth but not touching.
“Kas and I met in a writing class,” Mal said, drawing her knees up to her chest. “I think, maybe, I liked the idea of us more than the reality. Two writers, breaking past the borders imposed upon us, determined to write about something other than mangoes or arranged marriage. I wanted us to collaborate on a novel. Two intertwined perspectives, achieving synthesis.”
Laurie frowned. It sounded beautiful, but not… romantic. “He didn’t want to?”
“No,” Mal said, scratching absently at the fluff on the sofa. “I suppose I understand. Every writer wants to leave their own mark on the world. I don’t blame him.”
“I thought you were in love with him.”
“I was,” Mal said easily, oblivious to the audible crack in Laurie’s heart. “Just not in the ordinary way. I don’t feel things the same way as other people. But the way he writes, it whittles my insides. Leaves me feeling less…”
“Untranslatable?” Laurie asked, remembering her own language from Tahoe.
“Yes,” Mal said. “I don’t want the same things as other people. I could care less about a husband or a house. I don’t know how to explain it, but I loved him without wanting the ordinary things from him. He wanted all of them from me, though, and I couldn’t stand it.”
“So you couldn’t be in a relationship with him and still write?” Laurie asked. Mal peered at her, as if she’d somehow said something very strange. It unnerved her, and she felt the need to ramble on. “I just mean, when we go on our weekend trips, you’re able to write, so maybe you and he could have worked something out?”
“Huh,” Mal said, as if something had just clicked into place. She stretched out and her foot started twirling again, a sure sign wheels were turning in her head.
“What is it?”
Mal smiled, a lopsided downward smile that made Laurie ache with its beauty. “Nothing. I just realized… if I felt him to be an intrusion, I could never have kids.”
“I don’t want kids either,” Laurie confessed. “I’ve spent so much of my life struggling to take care of myself, I couldn’t really take care of anyone else. And so many men want me to be their mother.”
“So no more narcissistic parasites?” Mal asked, raising an eyebrow.
Laurie started laughing. “Speaking of parasites,” she said, and turned on Vampire Diaries.