chapter nine
Their acquired teenager slotted so tidily into their lives that when Mal said, “I think we ought to let your mom at least know where you are, don’t you?” Laurie counted the days in her head and was surprised that they added up to more than two weeks.
“She knows I’m alive and safe,” Tara said, scowling. “If she can’t respect my boundaries, I won’t live with her. I’m headed off to college in a month anyway. You of all people ought to understand.”
Mal threw Laurie a hesitant look.
“Unless I’m in your way,” Tara said, catching the glance.
“You’re not an inconvenience,” Laurie said firmly.
She really wasn’t. Tara slept on an air-mattress in the living room, but unless Laurie woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, she’d never know the girl was there. She cleared up after herself, even removing her toothbrush into Mal’s room each morning and washing every dish immediately after she used it.
Laurie wanted to tell her about living with her mother and two brothers in the back of a car, during those uncomfortable years when they thought farts were the funniest thing ever and she was just getting her period. But she didn’t. Maybe it was the easy way Tara called herself possibly queer, definitely questioning , using words Laurie had never had at that age, and now that they were available to her, felt by turns too unwieldy or volatile to use, at least in talking about herself. Or maybe it was the way Tara’s mood could pendulum-swing in an instant between self-righteousness— If you don’t pay Dolores enough for benefits, you shouldn’t keep a maid —to self-recrimination— You shouldn’t listen to an entitled princess with a trust fund .
That summer of 2011, something was brewing in the American consciousness that Laurie didn’t understand, not then. Most people in California couldn’t point to Yemen on a map, but they felt more solidarity with the disenfranchised there, with the revolutionaries in Egypt and Oman and Syria, than they did with their red-state neighbors. Over there, people had overthrown their oppressive rulers, demanded a better, freer world even if it meant civil war, and they’d done it with the technology built right here in Silicon Valley. At home, Twitter was used to navel-gaze and humble-brag about sex lives, while the rest of the world was using it for Democracy and Discourse, leaving them behind.
Maybe that was why Laurie finally sought out Ariel, and joined the tattooed and pierced ranks of Bridges she didn’t anymore. There were protests on the doorsteps of executives’ mansions, stones thrown through windows of the leather-seated buses that plumbed through the East Bay. She stopped introducing herself as an admin when one of Ariel’s friends called her a corporate parasite. It was no use telling them that she had bunions on her toes from forcing them into shoes too small for them for years. Just as it was no use arguing with Tara that she shouldn’t have shared Mal’s secrets with her as if they were a matter of common knowledge.
“Shall we ask Auntie Mal if she cares that I told you?” Tara demanded, chin jutting out defiantly. “You’re projecting internalized homophobia and personal hangups. Honestly, the two of you are ridiculous. You could start a wildfire with all the pining.”
“Mal doesn’t pine.”
She looked interested. “But you do?”
“I’ve got a date,” Laurie said, and left the house.
She was off-balance. The ground was shifting underneath her feet in ways she couldn’t predict. In the past this meant preparing for disaster—for a night-time escape from an alcoholic father, for a lie or a layoff to leave her staring at the rubble of her life. She sensed it in the way the women at Ariel’s mixer turned their noses up at the scrawled Bisexual on her name tag, the way they smiled only with one side of their mouths when she mentioned she was currently dating a man. It left her wondering what would have happened if she’d stayed on the East Coast, with the old families and crumbling bedrock that had disavowed her. Or, more appropriately, that had renounced her mother as soon as her choices threatened them with upheaval.
California had history too, but it was cataclysmic, transformation after transformation changing the landscape beyond recognition. And yet, everyone accepted the weekly shifts of the tech industry and the San Andreas fault as a matter of course, they went to Napa and Healdsburg for wine that tasted like blackberries and black pepper and the ash of burning wind, and despite the Republican legislation that barred their way with the same frequency as the mudslides on the Pacific Coastal Highway, they held on to impossible ideals, like marriage, or labor rights, or bookstores.
Laurie loved California, but she didn’t know how much longer she’d survive it.
· · ·
In August, Mal invited her to come along to Ithaca, to drop Tara off for her freshman year at Cornell—though invited was hardly the word for what she actually did, which was to look up from her laptop and ask Laurie perfunctorily if she was buying two plane tickets or three.
Tara snickered in the corner.
Laurie glared.
“What? I’m playing Farmville.”
“What about your parents?” Laurie asked, feeling petty, small, and tired. “They’ll want to be the ones to see you off.”
“That’s a good idea,” Mal said to her niece. “There’s no need to start off your new life on bad terms, especially when there’s precious little they can do to you now. Maybe they’ll even pack up your stuff, so you have more than three sets of clothes. I can invite them here the night before we leave.”
“Fine,” Tara said, her face scrunched in an epic pout.
As they shopped and packed for Tara and prepared for the dinner, Laurie was hit by a sense of déjà vu. The last time she’d gone to the East Coast was for Christmas, when her mother was still married to Jim, her second husband. He’d picked her up from the bus-station in the leather-seated Odyssey he’d just bought, happy to show off the seat-warming feature.Laurie didn’t know what he wanted her acknowledgement for more: the car, the marriage, or picking her up from the station.
“I’ve made your favorite,” Mom said. “Chicken parm.”
“Mom, I told you, I’m vegetarian now.” She was dating Cam at the time, and had altered her tastes to suit his.
“I know! That’s why there’s no meat.”
“Chicken is meat, mom.”
“You shouldn’t have to be vegetarian when you’re on vacation,” Mom said, turning away to hide her hurt.
On Christmas Eve, more people showed up, Jim’s divorced brother and his two shy boys who stared at Laurie as if she were an exotic animal, despite her shapeless sweats.
“Can’t you wear something nicer?” Mom asked.
“I don’t like people looking at me.”
“I want you to play something for us. So if you won’t dress for me, do it for Brahms.”
Laurie stomped off, dragooned into the role of the sophisticated city-girl who elevated Mom’s social standing. She knew the score, knew Mom wanted to make Jim feel awe at having snagged someone like her, so he’d never smell the financial desperation that had been behind her agreeing to marry him.
She played the piano, even if the keys felt sodden with lake-effect snow, even though the audience of men—her two brothers, Jim and his brother, and the two shy boys—yawned through it.
“Good,” Mom said, her disappointment soaking into that single syllable. She could make that word sound like such an insult, to convey the kind of solid, dependable and monetized mediocrity of a Starbucks or a Chrysler. Laurie had never left America, hadn’t wandered through Vienna as she had, or walked through the Louvre, hadn’t understood the way she strained towards transcendence and fell, each time, like Icarus with burnt wings.
Ashamed, Laurie disappeared into the study, while Mom went into the kitchen to finish cooking. She spotted a photograph there, of a much younger Jim, standing beside a woman in a sailboat. The woman was broad-shouldered, with tanned skin and large breasts that spilled luxuriously out of a skin-color bikini and denim shorts.
“That’s my late wife, Eleanor,” Jim said, startling her by entering the study. “Has your mom told you about her?”
She shook her head.
“You know, you kids, you wade into the water holding your hearts up high and dry. You get splashed and run screaming. That’s not loving.”
It infuriated her, that he was telling her this with her mother in the next room. But there was no point starting an argument when she was going to be trapped with them for the next three days, when Jim was going to give Micah a referral so he could get a job despite his prison record. So she just watched, helpless, as the men walked away from the table, leaving her and her mother to clean up. As, later, the men took up all the chairs, and Mom sat on the floor by Jim’s knee and started to knit, functional and silent as a prosthesis.
· · ·
The night before Tara left for college, Aditi and her husband Mahesh arrived just before seven, and their recriminations arrived shortly after.
“You should have told me Tara was here” quickly became “But how can I expect you to understand a mother’s anxiety?”
And the knives weren’t just out for Mal. “Tara, you’re making Laurie and Mal take off from work?”
“She’s not making us do anything,” Mal said.
“No, she’s shown she’s perfectly capable alone, hasn’t she?” Aditi said, one eyebrow up.
“I’m right here, Mom.”
“Fine then, be on your own. It’s not as if everythingyour father has done was to secure your freedom. So you can go to any school you want without worrying about paying for it.”
Laurie felt too tense to eat. She too wanted to snap at Tara for being ungrateful, with her old acceptance to Carleton aching like a bumped bruise. But she said nothing, seated at the dinner table, an outsider in her own home.
Mahesh inquired after Mal’s work at the Darling, neatly loading his plate one item at a time.
“Same as always.” There was an edge to Mal’s voice. Why became clear a moment later.
“You’ve been there nearly a year? Shouldn’t you have been promoted by now?”
Laurie deployed herself to the kitchen to get a glass of water.
“People who can’t deal with the working hours shouldn’t be in tech,” Mahesh was saying when she came back. “You can’t expect to live some European lifestyle and still be paid Silicon Valley wages.”
“Entitlement,” Aditi added, nodding. “That’s the thing. They all expect to get rich doing nothing. Retire early. What’s that thing you told me about?”
“Instagram,” Mahesh said.
“Right. A woman at my job left to post photos of herself doing yoga. She writes quasi-spiritual things, talks about chakras and butchers Sanskrit recitations and offers her services as a life coach. Who’d want to be coached by someone like that?”
“Just because you had to work eighty-hour weeks doesn’t mean everyone else needs to suffer,” Tara said.
“It’s about integrity,” Aditi said. “We owe it to ourselves and to those who came before to fulfill our potential.” Her eyes fell on Mal with open disdain. “To do our best, not fritter away our gifts.”
“And when is this debt paid?” Mal asked. “When we’ve made enough money? Climbed enough corporate ladders? Or had enough children to silence others’ expectations?”
“To act on selfish desires when you know the pain they’ll cause others is the height of irresponsibility,” Aditi said.
The two sisters glared at each other, clearly having a conversation about something else entirely.
“What’s this really about?” Mahesh asked, seeming to come to the same conclusion.
“Nothing,” both sisters said at the same time, and turned back to their meals.
Eventually, when neither Aditi nor Mahesh made a move to leave, Tara walked over to the door, picked up their shoes, and brought them back to the hall.
“I need to sleep before my flight tomorrow.”
“This—this isn’t right,” Aditi said, tears filling her eyes. “I don’t know what ideas Mal’s been filling your head with, but—”
“Go home, mom,” Tara said, but kindly. “I’ll call you as soon as the plane lands.”
Laurie went into her room to give them some privacy. She heard the sound of feet going down the stairs. The air-mattress inflating in the hall. Dishes clinking in the kitchen.
Mal knocked on her door. Came in looking pensive, her curls tumbling out of a lazy knot at the base of her neck. “Thanks for staying through dinner,” she said. “I know it can’t have been comfortable, but without you as a buffer it would have been a much worse disaster.”
“Any time.”
“You don’t have to come to Ithaca if you don’t want to. It’s a lot to ask, and I just realized I didn’t really. Ask.”
“I haven’t seen my mom in ages, so I can get out of your hair if necessary.”
“Actually you’re the only person in the world I can stand sometimes.”
Mal sometimes said these things—big, heavy, lifetime-memory things—as if they were entirely obvious. A few days ago she’d bailed on a fancy dinner with her colleagues to have pizza with Laurie instead, because the group of Stanford and MIT graduates was “too dull to be trapped with for a five-course conversation.”
Laurie didn’t want to seem nosy, asking about the rift between Mal and her family. But she got the sense Mal wanted her to ask, even needed to talk to her about it—something about how control and neglect were two sides of the same coin. Maybe they were stunted in similar ways.
“It’s strange,” she said, “how our lives seem to be twisted funhouse mirrors of each other. We’re both the youngest of three, who’ve lost our fathers. Our siblings—”
“—were more like parents, and they resent us because they had to grow up too fast,” Mal said, nodding. “The weight of it. I see it on them. It’s what keeps my anger in check, that they’ve had to work harder.”
Laurie got up and walked to her window sill, where she kept the crystals and rocks she’d collected over the years in California. From Haight-Ashbury’s patchouli-scented shops with their little old white ladies in dreadlocks; from Esalen’s sulfurous springs; from Bolinas, where they’d stopped on that road trip with Tara. She loved the agates most of all, their blossoms of lilac and turquoise saying that you could still be delicate even when you were strong.
“Salvador Dali loved agates,” she said, picking up her favorite. “They look fanciful and free, but they’re formed by unrelenting pressure.” She pressed it into Mal’s palm, closed her fingers around it. “It takes strength to hold on to joy when the world would rather see you broken and unhappy.”
“Laurie…”
“Goodnight, Mal,” she said, and closed the door. She didn’t want to hear Mal refuse the gift.
You gave a millionaire a rock sounded in her ear so loudly she almost missed the way Mal said “Goodnight,” softly, after her.