Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

Choosing a life for yourself, that was the joke. She had chosen Jimmy Dexter, yes, but only after the state had chosen to yank her scholarship because the governor had chosen to cut educational funding; she had chosen the charming guitar player with the lopsided smile, yes, the one who kept her up all night declaiming Vonnegut and debating Vietnam and allowing her, through a haze of smoke and pseudointellectual acid rants on the doors of perception, to pretend she was still in college — but she had chosen that Jimmy, not the one who couldn’t understand why he wasn’t to play his guitar while the baby slept or why the changing table wasn’t an appropriate surface for rolling joints. They’d fallen in love because they both desperately wanted the same thing: Better lives. Bigger lives. It never occurred to her that it should matter how they expected to get there. She believed in work; he believed in hope. Here was the biggest joke: It turned out this wasn’t wanting the same thing at all.

They’d hollowed each other out, she and Jimmy, and now they were good for no one but each other. Most days, she thought that was no worse than anyone else had it, that the world was full of empty husks, smiling and following through. Some days, though, the bad ones and the best ones, she thought about running.

Her daughter would leave for college soon. When the time came, Dex’s mother thought, she would leave, too. She was almost worried that he’d leave her first, except that if Jimmy still had it in him to leave, she might have found it in herself to love him again, and to stay. She wanted her daughter gone so they could get on with it; she wanted her daughter to stay, wanted to hold on and scream stop growing stop changing stop leaving —then Lacey came along and soon there would be nothing left to hold onto, because piece by piece, Lacey was taking her daughter away.

Dex’s mother knew what it was to lose herself in someone brighter, to be trapped by the gravitational field of another sun. She knew what happened when it emerged that the sun was only a lightbulb, and what happened when the lightbulb burned out. It didn’t seem fair that her mistakes hadn’t been genetically encoded in her daughter, that there’d been no evolutionary adaptation, no innate biological resistance to light and charm. It made her shamefully jealous, watching her daughter fall in love, and what else could you call it — jealous and wistful and mindful of younger days, and maybe it even made her a little nostalgic for the strum of Jimmy’s guitar and the way his eyes had always found her in a sparse crowd, fixing her with every sorry lyric he sang. But more than anything, it made her feel like the mother of a daughter, like she’d taken Communion and joined a fellowship of women across distance and time, because finally, as had long been promised, Dex’s mother was afraid.

THE FIRST TIME LACEY GOT me high, nothing much happened. Lacey said the mushrooms were too old, and anyway her mailman’s cousin’s friend wasn’t exactly the most reliable supplier, so who knew what we were getting. I had angled for pot instead; pot was everywhere, and as far as I knew it couldn’t turn your brain into scrambled eggs, no matter what the commercials said. But Lacey said pot was for plebes.

The second time Lacey got me high, we went to church.

Nothing local, obviously. We drove to Dickinson, three towns over, and pulled over to the first cross-topped building we could find. We waved at a couple old ladies hobbling across the parking lot, and because they weren’t Battle Creek old ladies, they didn’t know any better than to wave back. What nice girls, I bet they thought.

We nibbled on the mushrooms. Lacey licked me on the cheek, which she did sometimes when she was in a good mood, quick and darting, like a cat. “ What you are to do without me, I cannot imagine ,” she purred. We’d just read Pygmalion in English, and the line delighted her. I liked another one— I can’t turn your soul on. Leave me those feelings; and you can take away the voice and the face. They are not you. — but it was harder to slip into conversation.

“When do you think it’ll start?” I asked her. The last time, we’d chopped up the mushrooms and mixed them in chocolate pudding, to make them go down. This time we were purists. It was like eating a Styrofoam cup.

“Maybe it already did.” She laughed. “Maybe I’m not even here, and you’re just imagining me.”

I gave her the finger, and we went inside.

It had been Lacey’s idea to settle into the wooden pews and wait for something to happen. She’d read about some experiment where a bunch of people got high for Easter Mass and had a transcendent religious experience, so we swallowed and closed our eyes and — for purely scientific purposes, she said — waited for transcendence.

Lacey always said that other people’s drug trips were almost as boring as other people’s dreams, but when it finally kicked in, inside that church, I’d never felt more wildly and indelibly myself. As if the world were re-creating itself especially for me, the walls whispering a sacred message, the minister’s voice blue light and warm coffee and slipping down my throat to my secret self, and I was an I like no other I had ever been, life was a question and only I knew the answer, and if I closed my eyes, the world outside, the colors and sounds and faces that existed only to please me, would vanish.

Inside that church, I didn’t discover a god; I became one.

The minister said the devil walks among you.

The minister said evil is in this town and the wages of sin is death.

The minister said cows were dying and chickens were slaughtered and dead cats were hung from flaming trees, and this is the evidence you need that these are the end times, that hell is upon you, that Satan’s cold fingers hold you in their grasp, that here and there and everywhere children are dying and children are killing and children are danger.

The minister reached out across the congregation, reached for us , and I could feel his cold fingers on Lacey’s lips, because her lips were my lips, because what was hers was mine. The minister said the devil will sing you to hell, but when he raised his hands, the choir sang in Kurt’s voice, hoarse and longing, their robes white, their eyes black, and Kurt’s voice sang my name, said you have always belonged to me . The minister’s eyes glowed, and the walls bled, and the people, the good, churchgoing, God-fearing people, they all turned to us, eyes hungry, and then Lacey’s hand was hot against my mouth, as if she knew before I did that I was going to scream.

She rested her other hand in my lap, fingers tight in a fist, then blooming open, and there was a flower she’d inked on her palm. I stopped screaming, then. I watched the flower. Its petals leached color from her skin. They glowed green like Lacey eyes and red like Lacey lips and pink like Lacey tongue. The flower whispered to me with Lacey’s voice and told me there was nothing to fear. Believing her was like breathing.

When the service ended, she held my hand tight and led me out of the church. Her lips brushed my ear and she smelled purple, and when she whispered “Having fun yet?” our laughter tasted like candy.

Fun was meant to be beneath us. Fun was for Battle Creek, for the losers who dragged their six-packs into the woods and groped each other in the dark. Not for us; we would get high only for a higher purpose, Lacey had decreed. We would be philosophers; we would devote ourselves to all forms of escape. After the service we would retreat to an empty field and spend the hours until we came down groping for Beauty and Truth. We would lie in the grass, search the sky for answers, make art, make something to make ourselves real.