Losing Touch
Longevity
There’s a mile stretch of Westport where the houses look like fingertips and the Christmas lights stay up all year. You can’t see it from the interstate. You have to take a tree tunnel out a long dirt road. Laurie’s house had candles in every window, sills that puckered around ashtrays. Her mother, Tracy Ann, wore slippers and a pink terrycloth bathrobe. She smoked Virginia Slims and wandered room-to-room lighting the wicks that had waxed over. Laurie took to sleeping in a backyard hammock over a hole in the dirt. She was a druid now, and collected snakes. She hid a two-liter bottle of Coke and a velvet fanny pack full of brownish herbs in the grass across from the ferry dock: “It’s a fact: handfasting is more sacred than marriage. Show me a ring that binds us. Now show me a hand. Your hand. Now tie it to me. We’ll be together, always, with the sky and the trees.” We took a swig of soda. She pinned the snake against the ground and held it there.
Practical Concerns
After her parents had settled in the woods, Laurie hosted scary-movie parties. We’d drag the television toward the pond, tethered to the house by a long orange extension cord. In The People Under the Stairs, a single slender hand emerged through the heating vent. I screamed. Laurie spread her raincoat over the grass. “Shit,” she said, “It’s dewy. We’re all going to be electrocuted.”
White Lies
Laurie’s mother was a drug addict and something happened to her brain, or so we all thought. She’d tell us stories about how she’d been a go-go dancer once, and the inspiration for the Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie.” Laurie’s dad, a lawyer, worked weekends in the city. When I met him, he asked me what my parents did. Unsatisfied with my answer, he walked a circle around the room, straightening the family picture frames.
Human Sacrifice
I read that, once, “a band of druids, with hands uplifted to the sky, poured forth terrible imprecations on the land.” An imprecation is a curse, of course. Historians claim that we know nothing about the druids except that they existed; that they function more or less as legend. They acted as judges, as archeologists. They claimed exemption from quotidian roles. They intervened in armies and murdered criminals. They sacrificed each other to bring to light the revelations that sustained them.
Vacant Homes
To some people, a vacant home is an invitation, as funny as a hairpiece, as lonesome as a chair. The bones of the house are for holding onto, or for letting go. People steal things from each other, like lighters and boyfriends. Laurie barfed on me in the backseat; she dragged me into the damp concrete of a poured apartment foundation; she got around I guess, and so did I, and we spoke to each other in sharp-edged or simpering tones. We weren’t friends after that. I heard she moved to Florida for college, where she only dated ugly boys for months.
Imbalance
Five years after high school, they said her dad got cancer, that he promptly divorced Tracy Ann and moved to a houseboat in the Puget Sound where he soon died. Tracy Ann took off for Mexico, met a buxom Avon lady who taught her how to gamble, took a surgeon reference for her tits, and by the time Laurie found her, she’d had one boob done – a rock hard, bulbous thing. Laurie got injunctions, took her home, secured the rights to her mother’s money and her livelihood, refused to do the other side. An infection festered there, and Laurie’s mother died months later, but of an overdose of pills.
Introspection
Online, Laurie’s profile photo is a brain scan. Viewed laterally, it looks like a line of clenched fists. From the top, it’s an owl’s pressed feather face. People with names like “Bertha Sleepyhead” leave messages about her farm – a little extra pig slop, a black truffle found.
On Farming
I hear she raises snakes now. I hear she charmed an Armenian prince, that they’ll be married soon. They’ve already bought a wide swath of oceanfront property on the Oregon coast. I hear that she collects things: giant spools of wire fencing for her someday reptile farm, little strips of fabric that she ribbons to the walls. I hear her house is roofless; I hear that it’s a hole, and she, a mole rat, a snake burrowing around in roots. And so, I figure, she could be anywhere by now.