Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

Laura did indeed make the cast of L’il Abner , and everything else that Westminster mounted on its sleek new proscenium thrust stage. She was electric on a stage. She was beautiful and more than that; she was compelling far past her years. She had an eccentric, focused talent that would have been notable in one ten years older. She went about with the pack of darkling young who were her constant companions, her family, and, I suspected, her safety net. If she had a boyfriend I never knew it. If the group had sex, casual or otherwise, among themselves, I never knew that either. When Laura wasn’t in a play she was in rehearsals, writing scripts and screenplays, at the movies with the group, or talking about all of it in one coffee shop or basement rec room or black-painted, spotlit bedroom or another. I might have wished a more balanced life for her, better grades, more college and matrimonial prospects, but in truth, I was mainly relieved that she was happy in her amniotic bubble of obsession, and thankful that she felt safe there. I knew she did feel safe. Laura safe was Laura grooving on an even keel. I seldom went over to Westminster for anything but a conference on her grades or to see her perform.

“She should go on to a good drama school,” one of her advisors told me when she was a sophomore. “She has a real gift. I think she could be one of the ones who makes it on TV or Broadway. Maybe even movies. Providing she’s tough enough to stick out the lean times, of course, and that’s something neither I nor she can know yet. What’s your feeling about that?”

“I don’t know either,” I said. “I expect if she had some support, some help, somebody with her all the time, she could stick it.”

“This she’d have to do alone,” he said. “And she’d have to do it in New York or L.A. She can’t get what she needs here. She’s talking about the Actor’s Workshop in New York. I think she could get in. Could you and her father swing that, do you think?”

“We could swing the money,” I said slowly, thinking of the never-ceasing largesse of Cap’n Andy that kept Laura off her boat and out of her salt-blond hair. “I don’t know about her going away by herself, though. She’s never been alone—”

“Could you handle New York by yourself if you went to Actor’s Workshop?” I asked her toward the end of her junior year. “I mean, with just a roommate? You know I can’t pick up and leave the agency and go with you.”

“Sure I could,” she said. “I could come home whenever I wanted to. You could come up. Would you let me go, that’s the question.”

“You’ll be eighteen then,” I said. “It will be your decision, not mine. If you think you can handle it, it’s entirely your business.”

She frowned. “But I want you to tell me it’s all right to go.”

“I can’t tell you that,” I said. “You need to know that inside yourself.”

“No, you tell me,” she said stubbornly.

“I’m your sister, Laura, not your mother,” I said crisply. It seemed to me, suddenly, that we both needed to hear me say that.

“Well, I know that,” Laura said, and flung away trailing the fringes of her tattered blue jeans over her bare feet. But at the door she stopped and looked back at me. There were fine white rings around her eyes; I had not seen them there for a long time. I would, I knew, do a lot of thinking about New York. I hoped she would, too.

In the end, it was academic, because my father died the next winter. He had a heart attack somewhere at sea off Baja, California, and was dead by the time the rescue helicopter came scissoring in. I was shocked and stricken, but somehow dimly, as if he had existed on another plane than Laura and me, and perhaps by then he did. A death unseen, I have learned, is a death unrealized. I watched my mother die, touched her new coldness. It is not she who comes to trouble, tentatively, my dreams, to seek validation. It is, even now, my father.

Laura was cool and flip, whether protectively or not I could not tell.

“Yo, ho ho,” she said. “We’ll get enough money for Actor’s Workshop, won’t we?”

We didn’t. He left the Baton Rouge house and his meager estate to Cap’n Andy, and she promptly sold the house, withdrew her support to Laura, and bought a bigger boat. By the time her lawyers got around to telling us that we were essentially on our own, she was casting her net in the rich waters off Sardinia. I found it was hardly difficult at all to bury the pain of that, but Laura was frantic.

“What am I going to do?” she sobbed. “My grades aren’t good enough for a scholarship. Can you send me? Do you make enough?”

“I just can’t, Pie,” I said, in anguish at her pain, but somehow relieved, too. The thought of Laura in New York alone had been a stone in my heart for a long time. “I could probably send you to Georgia, or Georgia State, but I’m not making the kind of money for anything else. I don’t even know if I can swing the next two years at Westminster.”

“Then get another job,” she shouted, her face suddenly contorted with rage and grief. “Work nights! Borrow it! Or I’ll run away, I swear I will; I’ll go to New York or Hollywood on my own! Bootsie Cohn is going after graduation; I’ll go with her! I’ll be a hooker if I have to! I hate him! I hate her! I hate you!”

Her words were a knife in my heart, but I was angry with her, too. I loved her and the need to protect her ran deep, but I had had her in the fullest sense of the word since her babyhood, and I was suddenly weary of the roller coaster that was life with Laura.

“Then by all means hit the road,” I said coldly. “Maybe you could send me a buck or two along the way. You could probably pay me back for what I’ve spent on you in twenty or thirty years.”

She slammed out of the house, and did not come home for three days. After learning from Westminster that she had been in school all three days, and calling around until I reached the mother of the emaciated redhead to whose house she had gone, I did not try to contact her further. She’ll come home when her clothes get dirty, I thought. She’ll come home when she needs some money. I went to work, came home, cooked my dinners, and settled down with my checkbook and records to see how we were going to be able to live. I will at least have some peace and privacy for a little while, I thought. But I did not enjoy it. Her absence clamored in the house. Even gone, Laura pulled at me like the moon the tide. She still does.

She did come home, eventually, but that was the real beginning of her long, careening odyssey away from me. She was either sullen or rebellious, spent more and more time with her flock of gifted starlings, and began to get into trouble. She skipped school, flew into rages when she was there, smoked cigarettes in the restrooms and on the grounds, smelled of a sweeter, slyer smoke when she finally came in. The conferences concerning her behavior began. I was soon averaging one a week. Luckily, my boss was a laid-back ex-flower child who did not care when his staff got their work done, so long as they did. I did a lot of mine at home, at night, trying not to watch the clock as I waited for my sister to come home, trying to think that things would soon right themselves. I suppose I always knew that I was a timid disciplinarian, that I feared her pain more than her capacity for self-destruction. I had always been able to redeem Laura with love.

The night she came in frankly drunk, with magenta suck marks on her neck and shoulders and her now-blond hair in her eyes and her skirt conspicuously backward, I lowered the boom on her. My heart quailed, but I hardened it.

“Maybe I can’t pay for Saint Ida’s,” I said, “but I can manage one or two boarding schools you would like a whole lot less. There’s one in the mountains where you work in the kitchen and the pigsty to help pay your tuition. I don’t think it’s got a proscenium thrust to its name. Stop this crap or you’re up there, I promise you. I called them today. And if you don’t think I mean it, try me. I told you I wasn’t going to put up with any slutty stuff, and that includes drinking.”