Karin Slaughter - Pieces of Her

Her professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design had seemed like a good connection. She had dazzled him with her passion for the arts, or at least that’s what he’d claimed. That they were in bed when he’d said this only mattered to Andy after the fact. When she’d broken off the affair, the man had taken as a threat her idle chatter about wanting to focus on her career. Before Andy knew what was happening, before she could explain to her professor that she wasn’t trying to leverage his gross inappropriateness into career advancement, he had pulled some strings to get her a job as an assistant to the assistant scenery designer in an off-Broadway show.

Off-Broadway!

Just down the street from on Broadway!

Andy was two semesters away from earning her degree in technical theater arts. She had packed her suitcase and barely did more than toss a wave over her shoulder as she headed to the airport.

Two months later, the show had closed under crushingly bad reviews.

Everyone on the crew had quickly found other jobs, joined other shows, except for Andy, who had settled into a real New York life. She was a waitress, a dog walker, a sign painter, a telephone debt collector, a delivery person, a fax machine monitor, a sandwich maker, a non-unionized copier paper feeder, and finally, the loser bitch who had left a half-eaten Filet-O-Fish in the fridge and one month’s rent on the counter and run off to Buttfuck, Georgia, or wherever the hell it was that she was from.

Really, all Andy had brought home with her was one tiny shred of dignity, and now she was going to waste it on her mother.

She looked up from the eggs.

“Mom.” She had to clear her throat before she could get out the confession. “I love you for saying that, but it’s not your fault. You’re right that I wanted to come home to see you. But I stayed for other reasons.”

Laura frowned. “What other reasons? You loved New York.”

She had hated New York.

“You were doing so well up there.”

She had been drowning.

“That boy you were seeing was so into you.”

And every other vagina in his building.

“You had so many friends.”

She had not heard from one of them since she’d left.

“Well.” Laura sighed. The list of encouragements had been short if not probing. As usual, she had read Andy like a book. “Baby, you’ve always wanted to be somebody different. Someone special. I mean in the sense of someone with a gift, an unusual talent. Of course you’re special to me and Dad.”

Andy’s eyes strained to roll up in her head. “Thanks.”

“You are talented. You’re smart. You’re better than smart. You’re clever .”

Andy ran her hands up and down her face as if she could erase herself from this conversation. She knew she was talented and smart. The problem was that in New York, everyone else had been talented and smart, too. Even the guy working the counter at the bodega was funnier, quicker, more clever than she was.

Laura insisted, “There’s nothing wrong with being normal. Normal people have very meaningful lives. Look at me. It’s not selling out to enjoy yourself.”

Andy said, “I’m thirty-one years old, I haven’t gone on a real date in three years, I have sixty-three thousand dollars in student debt for a degree I never finished and I live in a one-room apartment over my mother’s garage.” Air strained through Andy’s nose as she tried to breathe. Verbalizing the long list had put a tight band around her chest. “The question isn’t what else can I do. It’s what else am I going to fuck up?”

“You’re not fucking up.”

“Mom—”

“You’ve fallen into the habit of feeling low. You can get used to anything, especially bad things. But the only direction now is up. You can’t fall off the floor.”

“Have you ever heard of basements?”

“Basements have floors, too.”

“That’s the ground.”

“But ground is just another word for floor .”

“Ground is like, six feet under.”

“Why do you always have to be so morbid?”

Andy felt a sudden irritation honing her tongue into a razor. She swallowed it back down. They couldn’t argue about curfew or make-up or tight jeans anymore, so these were the fights that she now had with her mother: That basements had floors. The proper direction from which toilet paper should come off the roll. Whether forks should be placed in the dishwasher tines up or tines down. If a grocery cart was called a cart or a buggy. That Laura was pronouncing it wrong when she called the cat “Mr. Perkins” because his name was actually Mr. Purrkins.

Laura said, “I was working with a patient the other day, and the strangest thing happened.”

The cliffhanger-change-of-subject was one of their well-worn paths to truce.

“So strange,” Laura baited.

Andy hesitated, then nodded for her to continue.

“He presented with Broca’s Aphasia. Some right-side paralysis.” Laura was a licensed speech pathologist living in a coastal retirement community. The majority of her patients had experienced some form of debilitating stroke. “He was an IT guy in his previous life, but I guess that doesn’t matter.”

“What happened that was strange?” Andy asked, doing her part.

Laura smiled. “He was telling me about his grandson’s wedding, and I have no idea what he was trying to say, but it came out as ‘blue suede shoes.’ And I had this flash in my head, this sort of memory, to back when Elvis died.”

“Elvis Presley?”

She nodded. “This was ’77, so I would’ve been fourteen years old, more Rod Stewart than Elvis. But anyway. There were these very conservative, beehived ladies at our church, and they were bawling their eyes out that he was gone.”

Andy grinned the way you grin when you know you’re missing something.

Laura gave her the same grin back. Chemo brain, even this far out from her last treatment. She had forgotten the point of her story. “It’s just a funny thing I remembered.”

“I guess the beehive ladies were kind of hypocritical?” Andy tried to jog her memory. “I mean, Elvis was really sexy, right?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Laura patted her hand. “I’m so grateful for you. The strength you gave me while I was sick. The closeness we still have. I cherish that. It’s a gift.” Her mother’s voice started to quiver. “But I’m better now. And I want you to live your life. I want you to be happy, or, failing that, I want you to find peace with yourself. And I don’t think you can do it here, baby. As much as I want to make it easier for you, I know that it’ll never take unless you do it all on your own.”

Andy looked up at the ceiling. She looked out at the empty mall. She finally looked back at her mother.

Laura had tears in her eyes. She shook her head as if in awe. “You’re magnificent. Do you know that?”

Andy forced out a laugh.

“You are magnificent because you are so uniquely you.” Laura pressed her hand to her heart. “You are talented, and you are beautiful, and you’ll find your way, my love, and it will be the right way, no matter what, because it’s the path that you set out for yourself.”

Andy felt a lump in her throat. Her eyes started to water. There was a stillness around them. She could hear the sound of her own blood swooshing through her veins.

“Well.” Laura laughed, another well-worn tactic for lightening an emotional moment. “Gordon thinks I should give you a deadline to move out.”

Gordon. Andy’s father. He was a trusts and estates lawyer. His entire life was deadlines.

Laura said, “But I’m not going to give you a deadline, or an ultimatum.”