Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

I didn’t know, not really, but I did know that Laura had long been half in love with easeful death, a line she espoused after I read Ode to a Nightingale to her when she was six. I thought that the darkness of death called out to a corresponding darkness in her, without her understanding its import in the least. I have always been afraid that the part of Laura that dances with self-destruction might one day win. That, knowing nothing of halfway measures, she might well jump onto broken old paving stones or into the warm, deep Gulf.

“Well, you don’t have to jump because I said you could come, as you well know, since you’ve been listening,” I said. “What about it, Pie? Do you think you can hold it in the road so I can have a job and live like a grownup? I really will have to call Papa if you can’t. This is the real world now.”

“I can,” she said fervently. “I will. I’ll grow up fast. I’ll be so grownup and responsible you won’t believe it’s me. You can get to be president of the world and I’ll be a great actress. Westminster has a super drama department. They win stuff all the time. They’ll be auditioning in September for Li’l Abner . I’m going to be in that play, Merritt. The brochure says eighth grade and up is eligible.”

I had to smile at her, even though I did not for a moment believe she would be capable of keeping her promise about responsibility. But I did believe that she would try. And her ardor was infectious; it always was. And there was something else. Much later, a continent away, she would fling it at me: “It wasn’t all give! You got your kicks for years through me! You lived a life through me you never could have had on your own!” Her words stung, but even in my anger I had to admit there was truth in them. During the years with Laura I soared to heights and sank to depths that I would never have reached on my own. It was as powerful a glue as the protective instinct she called out in me, and my love for her when she was at her best. I’ve always thought that if we had been nearer in age I couldn’t have stayed close to her, but there was never any filial competitiveness between Laura and me. On my side it was all parent; on hers, all child.

“So who’re you going to be? Daisy Mae, no doubt,” I said, ruffling her silky hair.

“Uh-uh. Moonbeam McSwine. She gets to show off everything she’s got. And you’ve got to admit I’ve got plenty.”

She pulled her Peter Max T-shirt tight over her breasts and hips. She was right. In the last year she had bloomed physically into the woman she would be, and that woman lacked nothing. I felt again the unease I had felt when I looked at her earlier that day, at graduation. It wasn’t, after all, a child I would be tending in Atlanta.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” I said. “There’s not going to be any funny stuff about sex. The first time there is I’m calling Papa. I might put up with the other stuff more than once, but the first strike is out when it comes to sex. I’m going to have to be at work late a lot of the time, and I’ll be going out with my own friends, and you’re going to be on your honor. I need to know I can trust you not to go wild with boys.”

“Are you a virgin, Merritt?” she said sweetly, crinkling her eyes at me.

“What I am is twenty-two years old,” I said coldly, angry to the core of me. The backseat of the pot-smogged Chevrolet and the damp, hot hands of the man whose name I had nearly forgotten floated into my mind and were gone again. “It’s none of your business whether I am or not. I know how to handle myself. Nothing you’ve ever done has shown me you can do that.”

“Bet you’re on the pill,” she singsonged. “Bet you’re not taking any chances on getting PG. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to get some for me? Then you wouldn’t have to worry about me getting knocked up.”

I was up and halfway down the stairs toward the living room, where my father still sat in front of the TV, before I heard her first shriek of fright. It was so desperate that I stopped and turned around to look at her. She clung rigidly to the banister, and her face and knuckles and lips were bleached white.

“I won’t ever say anything like that again,” she whispered.

“You won’t if you’re coming with me,” I said grimly.

She dropped her head onto her chest and let the curtain of hair hide her eyes. But I saw the silver snail’s tracks of tears on her chin anyway. I reached over and wiped them away with the tips of my fingers.

“Why do you do that?” I said gently. “Why do you always push things with me?”

She flipped the hair off her face and looked squarely at me. There was nothing childish in the topaz eyes.

“I have to know I can’t run you off,” she said. “I have to know you’ll stay with me no matter what I do. I have to know you won’t leave me.”

“You must know that by now. The only exception is the sex business. I will send you away over that if I have to. But you must know that I’ll stay with you otherwise. Haven’t I always?”

After a silence she said, “ Are you on the pill?”

“ Laura —”

“I need to know,” she said fiercely. “I need to know you won’t get pregnant and have some awful baby you’ll have to take care of!”

“I’m not on the pill and I’m not going to get pregnant,” I said in annoyance. “But if I did, I wouldn’t stop taking care of you. You could help me take care of the baby—”

“No! No baby.”

“That’s what I just said,” I said, and led her back to bed and tucked her in. She was asleep before I closed her door. But it was dawn before I finally slept.

She was as good as her word, or almost. Through most of the sprawl and scrabble of the seventies, Laura lived with me in the pretty little carriage house I found behind a big brick Buckhead estate and managed, with more success than not, to stay out of harm’s way. She never did get into the creamy little clique of sorority girls at Westminster whose fathers were the cadet corps of the city’s leadership; she went to few of the house parties and debutante balls at the Piedmont Driving Club or the Cherokee Club, and she did no volunteer work for hospitals and hotlines. She wore no starched shirtwaists and wrap skirts and kilts, either, and her grades were just enough to keep her in school. But she grew fully into the voluptuous beauty that her preteens had portended, and she had many suitors from the big houses on Habersham and West Wesley Roads. She ignored them and became thick with a small clique of taciturn, bearded, bell-bottomed, pot-smoking renegades, the ones on art and theater and dance scholarships, the ones who hung out in the burgeoning Virginia-Highlands and Little Five Points sections after school, talking endlessly about creativity and their stake in it, about their art, about their work. I was never quite sure what most of them worked at, but work they did. Or at least, they did not seem to play. They were the most detached, uncommunicative group of young people I ever saw, except among themselves. They might have existed in any decade; in any decade they would have been the ones who painted the flats and fiddled with the lights and drowned themselves in booming, jittering music, their ears stoppered with plugs and their faces empty and inward. They acted and rehearsed and danced and plucked or tooted at instruments; they stayed late and alone in stark, white-lit painting and sculpture laboratories, on empty stages. In my time we would have called them beats, LSU being a good ten years behind the rest of the country in its argot. I think they called themselves freaks. The decade washed over them carrying the flotsam and jetsam of revolt: Kent State and terrorists and protests and pornography and drugs and gas shortages and streakers and Richard Nixon’s disgrace and fall and disco and Roots and NOW. And they scarcely noticed. They worked. I did not know whether to be glad or sorry.