chapter seven
Laurie was in the middle of her shift waitressing at Caliente, when her coworker Ariel stepped up beside her and said, “I’m going to walk right behind you, okay? You’re bleeding.”
Her hands shook on the tray, but she held it and her smile steady and walked back to the kitchen to drop it off. Ariel followed her right up to the bathroom and waited outside.
“Kitchen apron, please?” Laurie said, staring at the blood on her jeans in surprise.
She fastened the black apron around her waist and tried not to think about it until the end of her shift. She’d just switched to a new birth control regimen and a little out-of-schedule spotting was to be expected.
It got worse. A week later, she was too dizzy to finish the shift, and had to run down to Walgreens for a Midol and a heavy pad.
“I’m saving up to get myself one of those,” Ariel said, glancing at her groin,“but you’re not marketing it very well.”
“Maybe yours will come with a warranty,” Laurie said weakly, to hide her worry. She couldn’t afford to take a day off work to see a doctor.
“Are we out of sync?” Mal asked one day, coming out of the bathroom.
Her directness made Laurie wince. She’d tried so hard to bury the pad in the trash with wads of toilet paper, but the smell was strong.
“Yes, I’m on a new pill,” she said.
Mal went into her room.
With a rush of pain came anger too, that Mal hadn’t pressed further. They were out of sync in other ways too.
Recently, Mal had been… vacant. It was probably something she herself hadn’t noticed, and her cold, unbroken efficiency made Laurie wonder if she was losing her mind.
A few weeks later, she caught Mal standing in the kitchen with an empty wine-glass in her hand and a lost look in her eyes.
“Mal?”
“Sorry, I spaced out. I wanted—” She stood on her tiptoes to reach with her fingertips for the wine bottle she kept in the rack on the top shelf. It was a beautiful, graceful movement, but it also lifted her skirt high enough to show freshly scraped up knees.
“What happened to your legs?”
Mal looked down at herself. “Oh, I’ve been biking a lot more. Training for a century ride. I lost my concentration and fell the other day.” She pulled up her sleeve and showed far worse scrapes on her arms, one of them starting to fill with yellow pus. “It’s not as bad as it looks. I forgot about it.”
Laurie’s gut cramped hard, nausea warring with concern. She brought out antiseptic ointment and sterilized a pair of tweezers.
“Sit.”
“You’re cute when you’re bossy.” Mal sat down on the couch with her wine.
Laurie dragged up a chair and turned on a lamp to see more clearly. In the yellow light, Mal’s long curls reminded her of a lion’s mane.
“Hold still,” she said, reaching with the tweezers to pick out pieces of asphalt.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” Mal said. “I’ve fallen plenty. Eventually the asphalt falls out.”
“But if you take care of this properly, it won’t scar.”
Mal gave her a strange look.
“What?”
“Why do you care so much?”
Laurie didn’t answer, afraid Mal would discover something she wasn’t ready to admit, even to herself. She turned away to throw the debris into the trash. That night, she couldn’t sleep, and by morning, she had a headache but woke up at the creaking of the hardwood floors.
She left the room to see Mal in bike gear.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, sensing Mal’s frustration.
“Period. It’s not a problem on short rides, but a pad will shred to tatters on a longer ride, not to mention there’s nothing in bike shorts to stick a pad to.”
“Why not just use a tampon?”
For a long time Mal said nothing. Then she muttered, “I don’t know how to insert a tampon.”
Laurie blinked, uncertain how to process this information. Instinct warned her not to laugh. She went into the bathroom and showed Mal one of her own. Stripped it of its packaging and explained. “Once this part goes in, you just push—” She demonstrated how the cotton came loose from plastic. “Not rocket science, but it does feel like a miniature missile launch.”
Mal’s nose twitched. “What if—?”
Laurie waited.
“What if it goes in too deep and doesn’t come out? Or if the thread snaps when I pull?”
She’d never known Mal to be unsure. Then she remembered how she’d had to learn this in the bathroom of a state park, with her mother explaining toxic shock while she stared at the dirty floor marked with wet, gray-brown footprints. How Mom had said, “I don’t care how expensive they are. This isn’t where you get cheap.”
Laurie hadn’t understood why she was telling her that until the house in Lansing, when Mom refused to replace a fifty-cent dish sponge for six months.
“There’s nowhere for it to go,” she reassured Mal. “I’ll wait while you practice.”
Mal went into the bathroom, and soon Laurie heard cursing.
“I broke it,” Mal said.
“Open the door. How did you break a tampon?”
When the door opened Laurie caught sight of the plastic snapped in half and wrapped up in tissue. Her fingers rose to her lips. “Oh, honey . Be gentle.” She gave Mal another tampon and showed her again.
“I hate these things,” Mal said. Then she looked up. “Why do you look so pale?”
“Period,” Laurie said, echoing her.
Mal grinned. “I guess we’re in sync again.”
Once she was gone, Laurie went into her room and leaned against the door, sliding down to the ground as she remembered how long it had been since Mal had asked her if they were out of sync. Her arms and legs trembled. Apparently she’d been bleeding, off and on, for the last twenty-five days.
She went to the doctor alone, glad she’d spent fifteen hours comparing Aetna, Cigna and Blue Shield against fifteen other insurance providers when the Unicorn first laid her off. Still, the only thing she could think about as she gave her insurance information was, If it’s cancer, I’ll be broke.
The gynecologist was supremely unhelpful, telling her fibroids were common in women her age, especially if they hadn’t had children, before setting her back several hundred dollars for a biopsy and an ultrasound.
Great. Her parts were throwing a tantrum because she wasn’t using them for their accepted purpose. And since a hysterectomy wasn’t considered medically necessary, her choices were to wait it out or go for something called a UFE, which meant unidentified plastic sand flying around in her uterus.
She spent the rest of the day in bed, staring at the ceiling.
Mal came in to check on her. “Are you coming down with something?”
She shrugged.
“Well, I got you some sushi. Want to watch TV?”
Laurie did, but couldn’t bring herself to get up. When she groaned, Mal came over to her bedside. Before she realized what Mal was doing, she’d reached one arm around Laurie’s shoulders and another under her blanketed knees.
“You can’t—I’m too heavy.”
“You’re the same size as my niece and nowhere near as wriggly.”
Laurie stared in disbelief at the slowly approaching door, even as her arms locked behind Mal’s neck. All she’d wished for was a hug. Now she was being princess-carried, blanket and all. The door was already open, but Mal toed it wide to let them through. Laurie held her breath until Mal deposited her on the couch. She was shocked by the unexpected gentleness from those strong arms. She couldn’t pay attention to the TV after that, not when her skin burned from the remembered touch.
Some historical fantasy full of soft colors and French castles made her forget, for a while, the world of fibroids and health insurance claims and words like myomectomy and embolization .She fell asleep on the couch but woke up in her bed. She allowed herself two hot tears for not being awake to remember being carried back there.
A week later, the biopsy ruled out cancer, and Laurie cried until her lips bled from dehydration.
“You’re definitely coming down with something,” Mal said.
“Fibroids,” she admitted, the relief over it not being cancer overwhelming any lingering shame.
“Oh, yeah I had one of those last year,” Mal said. “It was hell on the way out.”
She hadn’t known.
“It was on a business trip to New York. I just pretended I was hungover.”
“You kept working?”
Mal scoffed. “Can you imagine telling a room of guys who already ask if you’re on the rag when you express the slightest emotion that you can’t work on a critical deadline because of cramps?”
In that moment, two things became clear. First, Mal wasn’t incapable of emotion. She’d just made a habit of hiding her feelings to survive her ridiculous world. Second, Laurie would get through this; she wasn’t the first woman in the history of the world to deal with an overambitious blood clot.
· · ·
She got a new job—well, the same admin job she’d had before—this time at the Darling. They were expanding, hiring so fast that people worked in the hallways, hunched cross-legged over laptops on the floors because there weren’t enough desks. In the bathrooms were recruiting posters. Know someone who’d be great for the team? We need fresh blood!
Did they know how strange it was to be asking for fresh blood in the ladies’ toilets? Probably not. It would be a few years before they’d notice such things. In 2010, women were called guys and didn’t think anything of it, and the boys wore glitter and called each other girls, and seemed to like it.
Sophia had left the Darling, but Nick was back (idealism with the Obama campaign had not lasted against the frustration of government bureaucracy), and one day he asked Laurie, “I’m looking to date someone but only on weekends. Is that all right with you?”
At first she thought he was asking her general opinion on the subject, then realized he was actually asking her out, except in his head he’d already asked, and she’d already accepted. Something about that was both endearing and annoying, so she said yes before she remembered he’d dated Sophia and didn’t know she had too. It rankled like an inherited debt—had Sophia ever truly acknowledged her, she wouldn’t now feel she had to couple her own coming out with revealing what Sophia must have intended to keep secret.
She told Ariel about it, during one of their weekend burrito outings. Although she wasn’t waitressing with her at Caliente anymore, she needed normal friends who weren’t always going off to Burning Man or Maker Faire or Edwardian balls or blowing their thousand-dollar cash bonuses on truffle-and-champagne pasta and Paso Robles. Part of belonging was finding those you trusted to judge you when you deserved it.
“You don’t think it’s weird I dated his ex?”
“Of course it’s weird,” Ariel said. “But it’s nowhere near the weirdest thing I’ve heard or even done.”
That… didn’t actually help her calibrate. Ariel might be her normal friend, but she had border-brown skin and waist-length hair the color of strawberries, and a tongue sharper than the Japanese knives she collected. And when she wasn’t waitressing, she taught classes in BDSM at the Armory; Laurie had met her once coming off a night shift, and she sat in the coffee shop with her whip and paddle, serene to the point of disdain, a Venus in a leather corset and feather boa.
She’d had the same reaction then that she’d once had to Sophia—here was a woman who existed all the way, unapologetic and unashamed and colorful as the flowers and sunsets Laurie loved to paint. Shame always came first, but Ariel broke past it with a simple request—“Can you teach me how to invoice clients?”
Helping others, Laurie could do. Now they were friends.
“I don’t know how others do it,” Laurie said. “Pretend the past is another life, like it didn’t even happen.”
Ariel raised an eyebrow. Oh. That would’ve sounded pretty silly to someone who had just buried her past flyover-state self along with her deadname.
Laurie changed tack. “I’ve told you about Mal, right? That she hasn’t so much as mentioned her ex Kas in months?”
“See, now that’s weirder,” Ariel said, poking a finger in her face. “The way you keep turning the subject to Mal.”
Ariel was right. There were insurance claims to file, and a decision to be made about the increasingly unbearable pain from the fibroid that seemed to still be growing to the size of a grapefruit rather than shrinking away.
So yes, it was weird that the thing that bothered her the most was the strange way Mal was acting. Laurie was waiting for the other shoe to drop, and in the meantime, they had strained conversations about all the wrong things.
“Have you spoken to HR yet?” Mal asked her.
“Pain isn’t a disability,” she said. “And fibroids are an acute, not a chronic condition.”
“Was that HR’s assessment or yours?”
“I don’t need medical leave.”
“No, you need a long-term accommodation. Reduced working hours.”
Laurie flinched. “It doesn’t feel fair to make the same salary for less work.”
“That’s bullshit. It’s the law.”
One Tuesday night, Mal came home late, face flushed with happiness and inebriation.
“Laurie, you’ll never guess,” she called out from the bottom of the stairs.
“What?”
“I quit,” Mal said, giggling. “The IPO, the waiting, it’s all over.”
For a moment, Laurie was certain she’d fallen down the stairs, the shock was so physical. Then, before she could react, Mal bounded upstairs, her long curly hair bouncing as if suddenly weightless.
“ Laurieeeee .” Mal picked her up and swung her around the living room in a circle. “I’m freeeeee .”
Laurie laughed, unable to keep Mal’s joy from affecting her, even while she reeled, What will you do now? Where will you go?
Mal was pacing, but it was a hyper, excited, skipping step with which she floated around the house, finding a champagne flute and filling it. She lost the filled glass on the way to the bathroom—“I left work early and had a round of drinks already to say goodbye, but I need to pee so badly”—filled a new glass before remembering, handed it to Laurie and then took it away, grabbed Laurie by the waist and pulled her close. “Oh, Laurie. We can do anything. We could go to the symphony every fucking day. Do you want a piano? I’ll buy you a piano.”
“Mal!” But her misgivings fell away under such wild, relentless joy.
Yes , her body sang. Yes to anything, a thousand times.
“I’m s-serious,” Mal slurred, capering madly across the hardwood floor to find the errant champagne glass. “What would you like? Ask me anything.”
Laurie brushed away a stray lock of curly hair from Mal’s face. “I’m turning thirty this year,” she said. “I don’t want to spend it alone.”
“Sure,” Mal said. “Do you need me to disappear so you and… Nick, isn’t it? You can have the place to yourselves.”
“No, no boys. I want to go away with you. We could go to some fancy hotel? One with a pool. Maybe Tahoe? LA?”
“Hawaii? Fiji?”
“Hawaii,” Laurie agreed, thinking they’d spend the summer planning so they could go around November.
They had tickets in an hour. They’d leave in five weeks. When Mal set her mind to something, no force on this earth could stop her.
· · ·
Until then, Laurie filed insurance claims.
“Fibroid still bothering you?” Mal asked.
“Have you never filed insurance claims?” she snapped out. Her back hurt.
“No,” Mal said. “My job took care of that. Huh. I guess I need to apply for health insurance now.”
Of course Mal had never filed health insurance claims. Her body spat out fibroids like they were chewed up tobacco. The woman was training for a century ride, and carried the whole damn bike on her shoulder up and down the stairs and through the BART station gate.
Getting out of bed was getting harder. Laurie fought a war of attrition with her fibroid, trying to choose between getting the UFE and waiting for the coarse plastic sand to shrivel the damn things, or spending several thousand dollars on a hysterectomy. In her delirious state she had conversations with Ariel in her head. Offered up her uterus at a discount, except Ariel had already bought one from Best Buy for less.
The more Laurie withdrew from social life, the more obsessed Nick became. She made delicate excuses not to see him, but he dragged her to fancy restaurants and plied her with Swarovski. One Saturday morning, he called to ask if she wanted to drive to Napa. Too exhausted to care how it came across, she said simply, “Can’t. Cramps.”
She dragged herself to the bathroom, leaning against the wall when her vision blurred. The tile was so cool and inviting. She curled up on the floor, back to the wall, head near the toilet bowl. She was sweating from the pain, body shaking with it, and she could feel the clot worming its way through the tiny tunnel. Her body was gnawing at it, forcing it out, each contraction forcing her to clutch the bathmat in agony while sparks flew behind her eyelids.
“Laurie?” Mal’s voice was tremulous. So frightened and far away.
A warm, wet towel made its way to Laurie’s lower back, shifting her pelvis into a more comfortable position. An icepack landed on her forehead. She clutched the bathmat feverishly and waited.
“Drink this,” Mal said, lifting her neck so a little bit of orange-flavored water could make its way down her throat. “Electrolytes.”
The thing inside Laurie moved. One day, she was going to name this fucker.
“I’m all right now.” She ushered Mal out of the bathroom, pulled down her underwear and sat on the toilet. There was a give, and then a slow, slick and satisfying slide. Something landed with a splash.
Laurie exhaled in relief. Then another cramp followed, sharper and more intense than any so far. It was crippling, and she wasn’t braced for it. She screamed in agony and passed out.
· · ·
She woke up in the hospital. Mal yanked the curtain aside, looking murderous.
“They won’t tell me anything,” she said. “I’m not family.”
It turned out there was more than one cyst—of course, with Laurie’s luck, there would be—and while one had shrunk the other had grown, and would she consider—
“Yes,” she said immediately. “Hysterectomy. Take it all out.”
Mal whirled around, stunned.
“The other option,” the doctor said delicately, “is less permanent.”
“You’ll never have children,” Mal said.
God, she loved how direct Mal was. It was such a comfort, when everything else seemed uncertain and complicated.
“And I’ll never have another period either.”
Once the doctor was gone, she pinched Mal’s skirt to get her to come closer.
“How did I get here?”
“Ambulance.”
“How much did it cost?”
“Jesus, shut up. I should’ve seen it. I’m so, so sorry.”
“You’re here now. Can you find my phone and text Nick?”
“I already did,” Mal said. “He’s sent flowers.”
But he hadn’t come. It was a weekday. Laurie was more surprised by her lack of disappointment.
Mal sat down heavily in an uncomfortable-looking plastic chair by the side of her bed. For a single, strange moment, Laurie was reminded of her brother Jack, who really only wanted the kind of problem he could hit with a shovel. Mal wasn’t much different, although her choice of shovel was usually a credit card.
“Hey Mal?”
She snapped to guilty attention.
“Can I have some ice-cream?”
Laurie had the feeling Mal needed work to stay sane, and that she’d rather take care of someone than face whatever demons she’d been running from when she quit her job. The quantity of salted caramel ice-cream she brought over from Bi-Rite told Laurie she was right.
Suddenly her heart started pounding.
“What is it?” Mal asked.
“Hawaii,” she said. “We were supposed to go next weekend, but now I’ll be in surgery, and it’ll probably be a month before I can get on a plane.” A lump formed in her throat, as the Tahoe trip with Adam loomed in her memory.
“Oh,” Mal said, relaxing into her chair. “Is that all? I’ll move the bookings, or cancel them if you prefer.”
I love you , Laurie thought, and then panicked so hard she had a coughing fit.
Fuck. I’m in love with you.
· · ·
In Hilo, a cruise-ship deposited its load in front of them; two dozen retirees stormed the tiny restaurant where they sat. The men wore Polynesian shirts and dresses, and the women wore complimentary orchids pinned on their extra-large t-shirts. Laurie glanced self-consciously at her own arms and shoulders. They’d probably never turn into leathery, lobster-colored saddlebags, but artificial knees might be just ten years away.
“You’re quiet,” Mal said.
Laurie shrugged. She wasn’t the one keeping secrets. There was something Mal wasn’t telling her, something more to the sudden financial windfall that had allowed her to quit the Unicorn without having another job lined up.
Or maybe she was trying to pick a fight to diffuse the sudden and inconvenient feelings she’d just discovered. Living the romcom life, tropes and all.
“I hate cruise ships,” Mal said. “If you’re done eating, let’s get out of here.”
“There’s a black sand beach, about twenty miles down.”
Mal pulled over behind a long line of cars, grabbed her sunscreen and camera and headed out, and Laurie followed. Mal was solicitous as they headed down the rocky passageway to the hidden black-sand enclave. It had been two months since the surgery but Mal still treated her as if she were made of glass. Not that she was going to complain.
The beach was nestled in the elbow of a cliff, and the smell of marijuana and incense overpowered the ocean spray. Two men were beatboxing, and around them a cabal of women danced naked. Other naked men and women sprinted into the waves and fell back laughing into each other’s arms. Laurie paused. The surgical scar was well-hidden by her bikini, but these people’s nudity called up her body’s recent failings.
“You going to swim?” Mal asked.
“It’s cold.”
A young nude woman with small, upturned breasts walked out of the sea with flecks of black sand between her legs. She lay down on her back, one knee raised, drawing her fingers elaborately through the sand near her thighs, and then lazily flicked off the sand, one particle at a time. Laurie couldn’t take her eyes off her long, perfect legs, the tanned glow of her skin, the inviting dark sand between her legs.
It had been nearly two years since she’d felt the lick of arousal, so she almost didn’t recognize it underneath her envy. She stared at her own thighs, on which cellulite formed a gentle honeycomb. Thirty was when you knew your skin was never really going to clear up, when you discovered there was such a thing as back fat.
The naked woman on the beach turned onto her stomach, legs parted to allow the sea foam to tease her. Flecks of dark sand slid off her with each wave’s caress. With difficulty, Laurie tore her eyes away and looked for Mal, who was climbing the rocks of the far cliff, trying to reach an impossible vantage point. Naturally.
Mal reached the crag and waved, and Laurie waved back. On the way down she was caught off guard by a wave and fell about ten feet into the sand. It must have hurt, but she simply got up and walked back.
“Are you hurt?’
“Just a scrape. It was so much fun though, you should’ve come.”
Mal always said these things thoughtlessly. You should’ve come , as if there was no place she could go that Laurie couldn’t follow. As if the only thing holding her back was a lack of interest.
“Those women were beautiful,” she said in the car as they drove away. “Especially the brunette with the tattoos on her ankles.”
“Curly hair, lying on the sand next to your rock?”
“She was like a pixie.”
“You’re cuter,” Mal said.
“My breasts don’t stand up.”
“They’re bigger.”
“Okay,” she said, to end the conversation. In the rearview mirror, her ears were lava-red.
At Hawaii Paradise Park, where they’d be staying, the night was so loud that the sound of the car locking was drowned out by the trilling of coqui frogs.
The next day was foggy. Rain peppered the windshield. Mal turned off the radio with an annoyed click when five stations in a row played pop music or Christian rock. The car hissed solitarily along the wet, sinuous road. The leaves of the palms and sedge were large with yellow blades for tips, at once suggestive and predatory. The climbing fern were green with copper blades, the fiddleheads larger than a fist.
“I believe the fiddleheads are called uluhe ,” Mal said. “The shorter fern is the ama’u . It’s unique to Hawaii. The red fronds are used as dye.”
Laurie smiled to herself. She’d just expressed a wish yesterday to know their names.Of course Mal had taken on a research project.
It was too wet for hikers, so they were the only ones on the Halema’uma’u trail. The tropical rain-forest yielded abruptly to a desolate, lunar landscape of jagged lava rock. Less than a mile away, the active crater sent up an enormous plume. Thin, yellowish-white trails of sulfur led to deep fissures from which hot steam rose. The birds of the forest could no longer be heard.
She’d chosen Hawaii imagining beaches and pineapples, and now they were walking on a crater, a bare mile from a thrashing lava pit. Did anything define America so much as false advertising? How many people came to Northern California lured by its many false promises—warm weather, sandy beaches, flexible working hours? Maybe they were all hustlers, and the only way to fall in love with America was to exploit it.
“Cold?”
“I’m fine,” she lied, savagely glad Mal had noticed her involuntary shivering.
“I’m starving. Let’s head back.”
After lunch they headed to Ka Lae, the southernmost point of the United States. Several bouncy miles down a barely-paved road they found the dregs of industrialization, some broken and rusted pipes, balls of barbed wire, and cliffs formed by benches of lava crashing into the ocean.
“This is it?” Mal asked. “I’d expected a National Park, a beach, something. Instead we have some detritus, Port-a-potties, and a dude selling junk out of his SUV.”
“This is America, baby,” Laurie said. “There’s always someone trying to make a buck.”
Mal threw her head back and laughed, that deep, rumbling sound Laurie had only heard once in the mountains of Tahoe.
Her belly warmed to hear it. I did that .
Then, as Mal walked toward the edge of the cliff, she hung back, the warning stuck in her throat. She saw the wooden plank that jutted out over the cliff at the same time Mal did.
“Mal, no,” she called out preemptively.
She turned around, the grin reaching her ears. “Mal, yes .”
“You aren’t seriously going to jump off a cliff of lava into the Pacific ocean.”
“Hold the camera. You’d better take pictures.”
Within seconds, she’d taken a gleeful and glorious leap, landing with a loud splash into the deep blue below. Laurie lay down on the ground and looked over the edge with held breath to seek her out when she surfaced, heart pounding against the rock beneath her chest.
Mal surfaced, waved and climbed up the ladder, but it wasn’t until they were back on asphalt that Laurie could breathe.They got in the car and headed up north again, to spend the night in a resort cottage by the beach.
“I got you something,” Laurie confessed, once they were settled into the cottage and unpacked.
“Why am I getting the gifts? Also, I didn’t get you anything.”
“You got me this whole trip. ” Laurie brought out the bike shorts she’d bought.
“Thank you.”
“Look inside.”
Inside the shorts, she’d sewn a lining using the material from sanitary pads.
“It’s not reusable, but probably good for a century ride.”
Mal didn’t say anything. It made her nervous.
“You get it? You took care of my lady parts, I’m trying to take care of yours?” Still no answer. “Mal, what is it?”
“I remember the day I told you about this. You weren’t well. Even back then, and I didn’t notice.”
“I wasn’t ready for you to.”
A beat. Finally Mal said, with what could almost pass for nervousness, “I got you something too. But before I give it to you, there’s a secret. Something I haven’t told anyone.”
Laurie’s stomach sank with dread.
“No, don’t worry, it’s nothing like that. It’s just a bit embarrassing. You remember how you said my writing career was stuck because all people really wanted to read about was hot people being stupid?”
“That was a joke.”
“You weren’t wrong.” Mal inhaled deeply. “I’ve been writing romance. Under a pen-name. I self-published on a whim, and… well, it turns out there are a lot of people who want to read the stuff. Who knew they’d pay for it? It’s not much, but… your advice more than paid for this vacation.”
If Not much could pay for flights and a luxury resort, Laurie wondered what Mal’s idea of expensive was. So far she hadn’t discovered it.
She asked if she could read it and Mal said no without hesitating.
“It’s crap. But I did want to share something else I wrote.” Mal handed her a notebook, one she’d seen her carry on all their road trips along the coast to jot down ideas and journal her thoughts. “I’ve copied out the notes if I decide to do something about them, but I wanted you to have the original.”
Mal kept her face turned away from her as she readied for bed, as if worried about what Laurie might think. As if there was a single thought in her mind beyond, You’re trusting me with your drafts .
She read the entire notebook that very night, then returned to one particular passage:
I want to live my life in baroque—moving, always moving, driving miles in an almost ravenous conquest of expanse, discovering indescribable ecstasies that exhaust every sense and thought. Such perfect moments are accompanied by a shattering so complete I’m left only with a burning, consuming faith in my capacity for happiness. Can’t chug along, complacent and numb, chasing after sunk costs and shadows, not when L won’t let me lie.
She mouthed the last sentence silently, her fingers clutching the sheets.
The next day, they rolled down to breakfast at a table overlooking the ocean. Mal ordered champagne and coffee without even thinking about it, as if there was no question this was how one ought to live out any day, not just birthdays.
“Are you working on anything new?” Laurie asked.
“I’ve got two ideas, not sure which one I like more. The first is about two guys who are roommates in college, who end up getting drunk and kissing in Mexico on Spring Break. Everything gets super awkward until they get their act together in time for a climax of cathartic sex.”
Mal had clearly meant to make her laugh, but Laurie winced, recognizing the inspiration immediately.
Her face fell. “You don’t like it.”
“I’m still mad at myself for never seeing it. Cam and Will.”
Laurie went to get a second round of food from the buffet before the breakfast closed. She wondered if her foolishness might now be laid bare to the world through Mal’s words. It was why she’d never painted anyone but Sophia. Landscapes were easier—loving them said nothing about her.
She came back with a Belgian waffle with ice-cream and asked, “What’s the other idea?”
“It’s based on my sister before she got married. I guess you don’t know how we grew up. My dad liked us to be independent, free thinkers. But it meant that when we went back to India for the summers, we didn’t fit in at all .”
Mal had never talked about her father before.
“Everything was a debate at the dinner table. We couldn’t just like The Lion King . We had to provide commentary on the portrayal of unsustainable consumption in Scar’s destruction of the Pridelands. One summer, my sister met someone.” Mal’s eyes drifted to the ocean. “I was very young, and I didn’t understand what I saw. I never knew his name. To me, he was only the Coconut Man, who came to cut the branches sometimes. Just one of the many servants and cooks and chauffeurs. Until Aditi made him visible.”
Her world was so strange to Laurie, and yet she couldn’t help but understand. She was no main character, but she knew all too well what it meant to be plucked out of obscurity by one. Made visible.
“Anyway,” Mal continued, “after I saw them together, after I understood , he was unforgettable. Beautiful. A panther with a machete over whom my sister exerted complete command with only a look or a word.”
“Your sister doesn’t seem like the type,” Laurie said carefully.
“She was different then. We all were, before…” She took a long sip of her champagne, and Laurie understood. Before our father died . “She was kind of an activist. She’d been reading a lot of Arundhati Roy, and she wanted to shatter caste and gender taboos. I think the guy scratched her twin itches for adolescent rebellion and Maoist revolution.”
“So you’d write about your sister and this guy?”
“What does it say that when I imagine her happy, she’d be divorced from her current husband or having a torrid affair with the Coconut Man while her kids are off at Kumon?”
“Probably that you’re still angry about how they treated you when you were living with them.”
“I forgot you knew about that.” She looked out at the ocean. “Let’s go surf.”
Laurie didn’t want to surf, as she was still shaky after her surgery, but she convinced Mal to go ahead. She was driven to draw, especially when Mal walked out of the waves looking like Pele, the volcanic goddess herself, shining and dark-eyed, as if she could contain all of the earth’s fury. Her hair had grown long with unemployment, and it hung wet and curly on her shoulders, with tiny drops of water trembling from the tips before slipping down to disappear between her breasts.
Laurie passed her a bottle of water when she came ashore. Mal shook her head, but she held her arm out insistently until Mal drank.
“So bossy.” Mal’s lips twitched with amusement.
“You know it,” Laurie said, and held out the sunscreen next.
Mal groaned, but took it.
“If you can see, there’s UV,” she said sweetly. When she’d first met Mal, the woman had been operating under the illusion that her darker skin required no care.
“You made me look strong,” Mal said upon seeing the sketch she’d made of her. “Like an Amazon warrior.”
“You do know that’s how you look, right?”
“I know. My mom always said I had the shoulders of a man.”
Laurie was the one without a uterus and Mal was the one who felt unfeminine.
“Well, mothers do that—pass on their fear and pain as our inheritance.”
“That’s… wise.”
“I’d love to be more spontaneous,” Laurie said. “But I also can’t silence her voice in my head telling me to pick a Roth IRA over romance.”
“Laurie,” Mal said incredulously, “you’re the most spontaneous, present person I know. You see everything, every ugly painting in hotels and hallways, every flicker of emotion on anyone’s face. Everyone else is a stale, artificial neon light vying for scraps of attention, but you’re a fire that could consume them if they dared to look away.”
Her mouth opened and closed. She wanted to laugh it off, but then there was L won’t let me lie . Maybe Mal wouldn’t let her laugh this off either.
She needed Mal to look away, to do something , because her palms burned and her face was on fire and she was going to cry.
“You’re like an affogato,” Mal said. “Vanilla at first glance, but bitter, strong and dark coffee deep down.”
Laurie fell off the ledge laughing. It was only hours later, after they’d played in the waves and lounged by the pool, when they stumbled home giggling after far too many pi?a coladas, that she realized she was supposed to have been on a call with Nick, but had forgotten about him entirely.
Guilt trickled down her spine like ice-water at his Worried about you, hope everything’s okay! Happy birthday! Love you!
Her fingers stilled on the phone keyboard.
“Hey, Mal?”
“Yeah?” came a voice from the bathroom.
“How do you know when love is real?”
Mal was silent for a long time. She emerged, brushing tangles out of her hair. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “I don’t know that I’ve ever felt it. Sometimes I want to believe it’s real, but that’s not good enough. I want to be forced to believe. To feel so much that there’s no room for doubt.”
Baroque , she’d written.
Laurie thought of Sophia, dreaming of dragging her Manolo Blahniks through the mud. Of Ian, who had come to San Francisco with nothing but the clothes on his back, just for the possibility of finding the love that dared not speak its name in right-wing America. Of Kerouac and Cassady, who loved each other so much they set fire to an entire generation.
“You want rapture,” she said, “experience that can withstand the onslaught of language.”
“Yes,” Mal said, eyes wide with wonder. “I don’t want to choose to stay. I want it to be unthinkable to leave.”
Their eyes met. And held. Laurie swallowed.
And looked away.
Sorry, lost track of the timezone difference. Love you too, she typed to Nick.
Nearly five times she tried to add an exclamation point, and failed.