“Hey,” he said. He seemed confused. “You look like Laura.”
“I’m her sister.” Karen’s eyes began to adjust to the dimness. The room was a mess. An open mattress, a water pipe, bundles of clothes… “Can I talk to her?”
“Laura? Laura’s not here. Hasn’t been here for a couple of days.” Blankly: “You want to come in?”
Karen shook her head. She took a notebook and a pen from her purse and scribbled the address of the hotel. “Will you give this to her?”
The man shrugged. “If she shows up.” He hesitated. “It’s Karen, right?”
Karen paused on her way down the concrete steps. “You know me?”
“She talked about you.”
And so there was nothing to do but wait. The waiting made her feel guilty, passive. She ought to be doing something. But what? Hire a detective? It was ludicrous. And she couldn’t afford it. She waited by the phone and tried to bury herself in the texts she’d brought with her. Faulkner and Sir Walter Scott. The books blended in her mind, a weird double exposure, all these strange families haunted by the past. When the phone finally did ring—a day before her return ticket came due—she jumped as if she’d been slapped.
She yanked up the receiver and said, “Laura?”
“It’s no good you coming here, you know.” Small, distant voice. “I mean, I appreciate it. But it’s pointless.”
She gripped the phone with all her strength. “I want to see you.”
“I appreciate that. I don’t know if it’s possible.” “Today,” Karen said. “I’m leaving in the morning.”
There was a long silence then, the ticking and whispering of the Bell exchanges.
“All right,” Laura sighed. “You’re at some hotel?” She repeated the address. “I’ll be over later.” Click and hum.
Karen was faintly shocked when she saw her sister, though obviously she should have been expecting this: Laura looked like a hippie.
“Hippie” was a word Karen had heard mostly from the TV news. Scruffy people in protest parades. Drug abusers. At Penn State she had kept herself aloof from that kind of thing. She had a circle of friends, mostly women from her English courses, mostly conservative. She had seen joints circulating at sorority parties, passed from hand to hand like votive candles, but that was as radical as it got. They were all against the war, all politically progressive, never too much involved. They took a secret pride in their levelheadedness.
I Like me, Karen thought. She was the sensible one.
She had sensible friends.
Laura wore ancient denims and a T-shirt that had been dyed a blinding variety of colors. Her hair was braided and she had painted what looked like the signs of the zodiac on her fingernails. Karen felt strangely outmaneuvered by this, this visible declaration of eccentricity. She might be able to talk her sister out of a bad idea, a stupid plan: but a wardrobe was too concrete. That’s why they dress this way, she thought, to bother ordinary people.
Laura came into the room and sagged limply into a chair. “My guess,” she said, “is that you’re here because Mama sent you. Right? ‘Go find Laura, talk some sense into her.’ ” Laura mimicked the broad Mon Valley cadences of her mother’s speech.
Karen felt stung. “Mama gave me the money, yes.”
“So you think she’s right? I’m crazy?”
“You don’t have to be defensive about it. I don’t know—ere you crazy?”
“Yes. It’s a common condition.”
“You want to be talked out of it?”
“No. Very much no.”
“You look tired,” Karen said.
“I am. I’ve been making arrangements.” Added, more guardedly, “Did you read the letter? I’m going away.”
“Going where?”
“You’d probably prefer I didn’t say.”
Karen thought this was probably true.
“You look pretty wild,” she said desperately.
“I guess I do.” Laura peered at Karen then, and Karen saw something suddenly gentler in her sister’s face. “I’m sorry about all this mysterioso stuff. Do you want me to explain? If you came for an explanation—”
An explanation would be better than nothing. “But let’s walk,” Karen said. “I’m sick of this room.”
They took Cokes out along the beach.
“I came out to Berkeley,” Laura said, “mostly because of all the stuff I’d been hearing about California. Sounds stupid, right? Well, it was. Stupid and naive. But it was important to me… the idea that somewhere in the world there were people who used the word ‘freak’ and didn’t mean something cruel by it. It was always Tim who talked about us that way. Remember? ‘We’re freaks,’ he would say. ‘We ought to get used to that.’ ”
Karen said, “Tim always had a cruel streak. He had no cause to say that. Anyway, that was a long time ago.”
“It was when we were in high school. And the thing is, he was right.”
Karen turned toward the ocean. “You don’t believe that.”
“I do believe it. And you believe it.” She touched Karen’s arm. “I’m sorry. I know how you hate this. But we have to talk about it. We’ve spent too long not talking about it. We’re freaks and we’ve been freaks since we were born. That’s why Daddy hates us so much. That’s why he beat us whenever he caught us doing what we can do.”
Karen’s consternation was immense. She tried to summon the objectivity she had cultivated at school. In her psych, course, all this would have seemed very simple. But words like “Daddy” and “freak” lay in uneasy proximity and she dared not inspect them too closely. “Those old dreams,” she stammered, “those old games—”
“They weren’t dreams. They aren’t games.” Laura sighed, hesitated, seemed to consider how to proceed. Began again patiently: “When you’re told long enough, and hard enough, and early enough, that something is bad, and unmentionable, and dirty, then you believe it. You can’t help but believe, I believed it. But I was lucky enough to get beyond all that.”
(Karen thought, But you never did believe it. You were like Tim. Rebellion was always easy for you.)
Laura said, “At Berkeley, everybody was doing acid—”
“LSD?” Karen was horrified.
“Don’t believe what you read in the papers. I mean, it doesn’t live up to Leary’s rap either. But it taught me a few things. I was able to stand outside myself, really look at myself for the first time.” She became fervent. “The sense of possibilities—I think that’s what we’re really all about, you and me and Tim. We can see what other people can’t.”
“Possibilities,” Karen said dully: but this was all way beyond her control…
“Worlds,” Laura said. “Isn’t that what everybody’s looking for? A better world? You know, I used to go down to the Haight with some friends. And there was this same feeling—a better world is possible. You know what the Haight is now? A ghetto full of teenage crank addicts. That whole thing is dying. Dead. Everybody’s gone off—to the desert, to Sonoma, to Oregon. The vision is dead. So I came down here with some people who wanted to set up a community, a more creative way of living together—we used those words. You saw the house? A pit. And Jamie’s gone back to her parents, and Christine is pregnant, and Donald’s in Canada dodging the draft, and Jerry has a very bad needle habit. So the dream dies, right?”
Karen was appalled. Drugs and needles and communes. It sounded squalid.