Strong Motion (16 page)

“What are you doing this summer?” Louis said.

“I don’t know yet. Staying at home. Trying to be nice.”

“Can I see you?”

She looked up at him with something like terror. “What do you want to see me for?”

“Why does anybody want to see anybody?”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause I told Emmett I wasn’t going to see anybody. He’s working for his dad in Beaumont.”

“So you’re like engaged but not engaged. Fun arrangement.”

She shook her head. “It’s just I already made him so sick. He’s
really
a nice person, you know, not as smart as you.”

“Yeah, this is another thing. Where do you get the idea I’m so smart?”

“Well I only spent a whole vacation here at Christmas. I only heard how smart you are a couple hundred times. And you see how well I turned the other cheek.” She paused, appearing to consider her own history. “You know what, though? This semester, I got at least a B in every class. And I went swimming every day and I studied on Saturday night. I was on academic probation my whole sophomore year. It was like I’d go into the classroom and lie for an hour. Lie, lie, lie.” She looked up at Louis again and saw his skepticism; her eyes fell. “So anyway. I’m trying to read the Bible.”

“Congratulations?”

“I’m still more at the point where I like how I feel sitting here reading than where I’m actually reading. I go through the laws till I get to the sex laws. The punishment’s always stoning the person until they’re dead. That’s what you get for sodomy. Sodomy’s nice! But it’s an abomination unto the Lord.”

Louis sighed. “What’s with the new costume?”

“What do you mean?”

“The white dress. The, uh, Shirley Temple thing in your hair.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“What’s wrong with it, nothing’s wrong with it. It’s just, like, no offense, but are you on some kind of medication?”

She shook her head and smiled lamely. “No.”

“Lithium? Valium?”

His words sank in. Her eyes grew dark and she straightened her back. “What kind of question is that?”

“You’re just very different,” he said.

“I’m the way I want to
be
. So you can leave me alone, all right? Get out of my room!”

Louis, gratified by her response, was about to apologize when he was struck in the ear by the spine of a flying Bible. He leaned his head on the door and held his hurt ear. Lauren hopped off the bed and picked up the floppy Bible by one corner, as if it were a pelt, and sat down with it again. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah.”

“I haven’t been very nice to you, have I? I guess I must have a problem with you. I must not like you or something.”

He laughed sadly.

“It’s not personal. You’re obviously a nice person. But it’s better if you just keep away from me, don’t you think? So goodbye, OK?”

Louis felt exactly like a casual lover being discarded.

Later, though, after he’d driven home with his books and drunk a beer, he decided that the only explanation for how she’d acted was that she recognized his existence and had strong feelings about him. His logic was confirmed empirically the following week, when she called him on the telephone. Again there was a curious lack of connection between present and immediate past. She just started telling him what she was doing, which was mainly that she’d enrolled in a couple of summer-session courses at U of Houston. She wanted to graduate after one more semester in Austin and so she was taking a course about the Incas and the Mayas and also Introductory Chemistry, the latter because she’d gotten an F in high-school chemistry and she wanted to try to do something really hard now, as penance. She didn’t ask Louis about his own life, but at one point she did stop talking long enough for him to suggest they get together sometime. There was a silence. “Sure,” she said. “I don’t care. Just not at my house.”

He was waiting outside the physical sciences building at the U of H after her first chemistry lecture. A thousand grackles were conversing in the quadrangle, and there was an alien, a freak, among the students leaving the building. It was Lauren. She’d cut her hair off and shaved her head.

She was glaring at every student who looked at her. Her head was small and very white, almost as white as her dress, and the half-moons of bruise-colored pigment beneath her eyes seemed darker. She asked Louis, in a nasty voice, how she looked.

“Like a pretty girl who shaved her head.”

She turned away, disgusted. “You think I care what you think?”

As they walked to the parking lot he almost hoped some man passing by would be rude to her so he could knock him down. When they got inside her Beetle she didn’t start it right away. She twisted her head around as if she needed to feel its bareness. Her knuckles, on the steering wheel, were white. “Do you still want to sleep with me?”

“When you put it like that?”

“It’s what you wanted, right? I’ll do it if you want me to. But it has to be now.”

“I only want to if you want to.”

“Well I’m never going to want to, ever. So this is your chance.”

“Well so I guess that means no.”

She nodded, not taking her eyes off the windshield. “Don’t forget, OK? You had your chance.”

On the stoops in the neighborhood north of U of H, not much more than a mile from downtown, middle-aged men drank beer from quart bottles and listened to low-volume hip-hop on twenty-year-old transistors. The hoods of rusted yellow, orange, green wingtips were raised in the driveways of shotgun shacks that squatted in the sandy mud. The early evening air was still and smelled like the black hamlets at the end of gravel roads in backwoods Mississippi.

At a Vietnamese restaurant up the street from the King of Glory
HOLINESS CHURCH
, Louis ordered pork with lemon grass. It came with sticky, translucent rice pancakes which when wrapped around the meat and lettuce and mint and bean sprouts bore an uncanny resemblance to condoms. Lauren looked at them with grim amusement. She’d ordered coffee that she wasn’t drinking. She tore the tops off sugar packets and made them wink at her. Finally, reluctantly, miserably, she said, “What’s an electron?”

“An electron?” It was as if she’d mentioned the name of Louis’s best friend. “A subatomic particle. It’s the smallest unit of negative electric charge.”

“Oh thanks.” She was disgusted again. “That really helps me. I
have
a dictionary.”

“You can also think of it as kind of an imaginary construct—”

“I’m sorry I asked. I am
very sorry
” She looked around wildly, as if she wanted to walk out on him. “What
is
it about this stuff? It’s like the smart people aren’t really learning about science, they’re just learning how to sound like assholes.”

“What don’t you understand?” said Louis quietly.

“I don’t understand what the thing
is
. I don’t understand what it
looks like
. What’s it
for?
” Coffee sloshed from her cup as she shoved it away. “I can’t even explain this. I just thought you might be able to help me a little. It’s very hard for me and it’s not because I’m so stupid. I just can’t sit there and nod intelligently like everybody else when the professor goes on about electrons and protons. I want to
understand
it.”

“I can help you understand it.”

She sneered. “I bet you can.”

“We can get together and talk about it, if you want.”

She rifled her purse for a cigarette, shaking her head all the while. “It was just going to be me,” she said. “I was going to read and I was going to study something really hard for me. And now you want to come in and bullshit everything up.”

“Yeah, but . . . who called who? Who just asked what an electron is?”

“I was happy. I thought you cared about me. I’d had this idea and I wanted to tell somebody. But you’re just in it for yourself. You’re going to think I’m going to owe you something. You’re going to think you can put your arm around me, when I already said.”

“I just want to see you. That’s all I want.”

She’d inhaled a fifth of the cigarette, and now it seemed the exodus of smoke from her nostrils would never stop.

“Right,” she said. “You’re nice, I keep forgetting. But don’t forget, all right? I’m not going to owe you
anything
.”

As the days got hotter and the nights got longer, Louis watched Lauren’s hair grow back and saw the string on her wrist turn gray and shiny. She wasn’t shy about asking him for help. One night she spent almost four hours in his kitchen refusing to understand gram-molecular weights. Every statement in her chemistry book was like a nerd she specifically despised, and it wounded her pride to have to consort with it as a true and accurate reflection of physical reality. What she hated most of all, though, was Louis’s explanations. She didn’t want to hear about page 61 or page 59 if the problem she was having was on page 60. She claimed to understand everything except the one thing she wasn’t understanding right then. She just wanted him to tell her the
answer
. When she was especially provoked, she accused him of sounding like her father. But she always ended up thanking him for his help, and as the summer aged he believed he could see it getting harder for her to leave his apartment without touching his hand or kissing him goodbye. She had to bite her lip and bolt.

One night in late July he met her outside the chemistry lab, which smelled strongly of pickles, and he almost had to run to keep up with her as she marched to her car and yanked the door open. When they got to his apartment she ransacked his impoverished cabinets and opened his bottle of gin.

“You’re upset,” he hazarded from the kitchen doorway.

She burped rippingly and drank a glass of water. “We were supposed to make aspirin today.”

“I remember making aspirin.”

“I bet you do. But the Clown decided to have a little contest.” She wiped her mouth. “We all got certain amounts of chemicals and we were all going to weigh our yields at the end and whoever had the biggest yield would win. Just
win
, you know, whatever that means. These teachers, Louis, they set things up to be so good for people like you and so shitty for everybody else. The best person
wins
, and the people in the middle don’t, and the worst person
loses
. Well, Jorryn and me, we always finish last anyway. But we’re real careful to follow the recipe, even though we already know we’re going to be the worst because that’s what we’re there for. Meanwhile everybody else is bringing their aspirin up on filter paper—it’s this clump, like a potato after you chew it? And it gets weighed, and the Clown writes the names and percentages on his chalkboard, and things get louder and louder. The guys are all
roaring
, about, you know, a difference of half a percent: WO-HO! WO-HO!” Lauren savagely mocked the guys. “And there comes this point where you’re supposed to cool the stuff down and filter it, and there you have your aspirin. Well, we do this, Louis. We follow the instructions. And what happens is it all goes through the filter paper. There’s nothing there at all. And so then comes the Inquisition, like what did we do Wrong this time? Everybody’s staring at us, they’re standing there while the Clown reads my notebook. And he can’t figure it out! He goes, Did we observe this temperature rise? And we go, Yes! Yes! And did we scratch the flask to make it crystallize? And we go, Yes! Yes! And I’m thinking he’s going to say it’s all right, he’s going to tell us not to feel too bad. I’m feeling pretty bad already, although Jorryn’s standing there with her hand like this, you know, not
my
problem, man.” Lauren laughed at the thought of Jorryn. “But you know what he did? He got totally pissed off. He said we must have done
something
wrong. Because you cannot put these three things together and heat them up and cool them down and
not, get, aspirin
. And Jorryn and me throw our hands up in the air and we’re going, We did! We did! And there’s no aspirin! It just didn’t work this time! But the Clown he’s getting totally worked up and he goes, You’re going to get an
F
in this lab unless you redo the experiment and show me at least three grams of aspirin. He says he’s going to keep the lab open till midnight if that’s how long it takes us. Well, Jorryn starts shaking her head, like, fuck
this
shit—and she walks out. But I didn’t even have the heart to leave. I just sat there while everybody was writing up their final reports at the front, I sat there at the lab table all by myself, just sitting there
all by myself
being
punished
because I didn’t get any
aspirin
. And I followed the instructions. And there was NOTHING THERE.”

Lauren, leaning with both hands on Louis’s kitchen card table, began to cry more loudly than he’d known a person could. Fat staves of grief shuddered up through her chest and left her mouth. The voice was her own, voice the way it is before it becomes words: a bath of red sound. Louis put his arms around her and held her head against his shoulder. It fit in his hands. It was as if this were all there was to her, this crying head. He didn’t know why he loved her so much, he only knew he wanted admittance to her grief, to her whole damaged self, as he’d wanted it since the first time he saw her. He kissed her bristly hair and kissed behind her ear. For this liberty, she slapped him so hard that his glasses were bent and the plastic pad cut his nose and bruised the bone.

He stood there for a while trying to straighten the frames.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” she announced when she came back from his bathroom, her fist full of toilet paper. “But you said you weren’t going to do that. It’s not fair of you.”

She blew her nose.

At midnight they were still watching TV in his kitchen. When Lauren finally turned it off there was a delicious moment when he didn’t know what was going to happen next. What happened was she raised a window and said, “It’s cooled off.”

They went for a walk. Somehow a mild, damp Gulf breeze had banished summer to the north, restoring April. It seemed as if it were the breeze, not the hour, that had emptied the streets and sidewalks of everything but skidding leaves. The cars that did pass were less like cars than like waves breaking gently, like gusts of wind; the humidity sucked them back into itself as soon as they went by. In Houston, a city that accommodated nature, every patch of dirt could smell like beach or bayou. Louis loved the dense live oaks, where purple male grackles and tan female grackles sang irresponsible songs and mewed and moaned and laughed. He loved the squirrels, which were like Evanston squirrels wearing fake long ears; it was an insultingly transparent disguise.