Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

I hoped she would mistake the tremor in my voice for anger.

“You can’t make me,” she slurred. “You’re not my fucking mother.”

“No? I fucking well thought I was, the way you’ve been behaving,” I threw back at her furiously. “Decide now, toots, I’m not going to tell you again.”

“How’re you gonna stop me?” she said truculently, but I thought I saw hesitation on her face. Even like this, slack-faced and with her mouth pulped and smeared, she was still one of the prettiest things I had ever seen. Fear and anger and love warred inside me.

“I’m going to stop paying your tuition at Westminster,” I said. “And you can kiss your allowance good-bye. I’m going to tell the mothers of all your little playmates not to let you in their houses. And I’m going to call the cops the first night you aren’t in this house. You’re underage, and they’ll pick you up within the hour. I don’t think you’d like juvie any more than you would Saint Ida’s or Lottie Brewster Academy.”

She stared at me for a long time, and then dropped her eyes and ran, stumbling, to her room and slammed her door. She did not do it again.

For a long time after that she seemed fairly content, if never quite the winged thing she had been. She finished Westminster with barely passing grades and a string of triumphs on the stage, and started at Georgia State, with resignation if little enthusiasm, in the fall of her eighteenth year. There was a good, if not remarkable, drama department there, and considerable lagniappe in the person of a charismatic young professor who eventually directed her in some truly luminous, innovative plays. Her awesome focus kicked back in and her strange, canted gift throve. She won raves in the local newspapers and more when the troupe toured around the South. She was invited to try out for several local professional productions and the cast of one national touring company, and garnered high praise there, too. She had, apparently, no time for anything but the theater; for that entire first year I do not think she went out with a young man. I praised her, went to all her performances, stayed up to have cocoa and cookies with her when she came late from rehearsals and performances. Often we would talk and laugh until nearly dawn. My own work did not seem to suffer, nor did hers. I was, after all, still only twenty-eight, and she was eighteen. The gap between us seemed far smaller than it had when she was a child. She had, as she had once promised, grown up fast. For the first time I felt that the bond between us was more that of best friends, of true sisters, than that of parent and child. My own star was rising steadily at my agency, with a creative directorship in view, and I had several pleasant, if not flammable, relationships with attractive young men. And I had my sustaining friendship with Crisscross. She had her theater and her future. Things were, for a time, really good between us. Looking back, I can see that it was the best time by far.

And then I met Pom Fowler, and it was as if the year of peace and affection had never been. From the beginning, she hated him. She had not liked most of my other men friends, but there had been none of the spitting animosity that Pom called out. More than that, he seemed somehow to actually frighten her.

“He looks like that stupid little asshole on the top of wedding cakes,” she said scornfully, her voice shaking. “He’s ugly and stupid and he smells like a hospital, and goes on and on about the poor people till you want to barf. Shit, why can’t he pay that kind of attention to you? To us? We’re poor, too! He doesn’t even act like I’m in the room. And those snotty-nosed little brats…how can you oooh and ahhh over them like that? They’re horrible children! They hate you, anybody could see that.”

I knew that she had grasped the seriousness of Pom’s and my relationship, even though I was careful to downplay it and he, having been warned, tried his best to do so, too. He succeeded only in seeming to ignore her; even I could see that. Only the two little boys made much over Laura, and they could not keep away from her. Something in her face and manner drew them like magnets. They were at her heels constantly when Pom brought them over. But she was so sharp with them that he did not do it often. We stayed mostly at his house, where she would not go. She did not tell me why until nearly a year after she met Pom.

“You think I get a big thrill out of watching those brats act like you’re going to poison them and waiting for you and him to go upstairs to hump and leave me with them?” she hissed then, on a day when I had asked her, once again, to spend Sunday with us and the boys at the house in Garden Hills.

“You’re being terribly unfair,” I said to her. “They’re just little boys who’ve lost their mother, and now they’re afraid they’re going to lose their father, too. They’re much better about me than they were. You can see that. It’s going to be fine eventually, I promise. Why can’t you see that Pom likes you and wants to be friends?”

“Wrong! He doesn’t want to be my friend, he wants me to be gone ! He doesn’t give a shit about anything but getting you to take care of his precious little house apes so he can go make millions healing the fucking sick! But he’s too big a coward to tell me to butt out himself; he wants you to do it. You think I can’t tell, but I can.”

She was so upset that there was a choking whistling sound in her chest, and her white face was splotched with red welts. I put my arms around her and drew her down on the sofa beside me so I could look into her face.

“He doesn’t have a cowardly bone in his body,” I said. “He’s the bravest man I’ve ever known and the best. He’s been beaten and hosed in the civil rights marches; he was in Africa in the Peace Corps. He’s spent the last two years working eighteen hours a day in a clinic that treats people for free, down in the worst of the housing projects where all the rioting is, and the drugs and the crime and everything. He wants to spend his life doing that; he’s going to establish his own free clinic when he can. He doesn’t care anything about money; he’ll probably never have a dime to call his own. And he doesn’t want you to butt out. He wants you to butt in. He wants you to come and live with us for as long as you like…if we should get married, that is.”

She stared at me for a long time, and then she said, softly and bitterly, “If you do that you will never see me again. If you move in there and play wifey to that man and mother to those retarded kids, I’ll be gone before you’ve unpacked your suitcases. If you’d rather take care of another bitch’s little bastards than your own sister, go right ahead and see how long I hang around here.”

I looked at her in shock and incredulity. Her jealousy and terror were so complete and devouring that I could not seem to breathe the air in which they reverberated. I don’t know, now, why I was so utterly dumbfounded by her words, but I was.

Finally I whispered, “What has gotten into you? You’re nineteen years old! You’re a junior in college, with a wonderful career ahead of you; you’ve been planning to go to New York when you graduate for a long time now. You don’t need me to take care of you any longer. For goodness sake, Laura! You’re my sister, not my child. You don’t need me!”

“You promised,” she said, the tears beginning.

Pom and I were married in the little Mikell Chapel of Saint Philip’s Cathedral the following June, with only his parents and brother and sister-in-law and the boys and Crisscross present. Laura was not there. She had left a week before to go with the vulpine, redheaded Bootsie Cohn to California where, she said, Bootsie had been promised a part in a movie being shot in the Sonoma wine country. The second unit director, who was Bootsie’s boyfriend, had promised he could get Laura a job in the production company.