Laura & Maura (sample)
Laura turned up uninvited the night before the last of the old-style SATs. Or, at least, the last if you intended to endure them just the once that hateful spring, which was certainly how I had it all planned out. In my seventeenth year the test would be revamped, implementing a 2400-point system with material reforms, including dropping the infamous analogies. Future generations would be spared what I’d suffered through— ANNOYANCE : FRUSTRATION :: ______________ (a) etiquette : discipline (b) plagiarize : borrow (c) emollient : soothing (d) gallant : recalcitrant (e) fecund : infertile This is to this as this is to this. This is to this as this is to this… The math would be a breeze. But words are slippery. I’d need to be prepared. More so than others. There are people to whom the right words, all the right things to say, come with grace, without effort. I’ve never been among them. So that was to that, and so on; the evening drifted into singsong, fitting words into descriptions of what they meant, or didn’t mean, or how the whole nebulous connection came together. It seemed to be helping, at least. BOON : BENEFIT :: “A boon is a benefit, it benefits.—A perimeter is a quadrilateral? An acorn is a sapling?” It was endless. But felicity with words was not my gift. Not in testing, not in life. Even now, I can get the words I want straight in my head, but the conversations never come out right. So I drilled. Little lilts on the incorrect answers, as if I was amused by such outlandish possibilities. I was working on DISTRACTION : CONCENTRATION :: when the Mullenbergs arrived. “I said no.” “Just come down and say hi,” my father begged. I thumped my notes. “I’m studying.” “You haven’t seen your cousin since Christmas.” “You haven’t seen my cousin’s parents since Christmas.” My father was aware. He had his reasons. “Just come down.” “You get five minutes. Five,” I grumbled, standing up and smoothing down my skirt. “What’s the problem?” he asked me. “You like your Uncle Jasper.” He was tactfully avoiding further mention of my cousin. He knew that she could be a little much. He was already dealing with a little much. My junior year had come with a number of financial concerns, but it struck me as ironic that an unexpected tax bill for my parents’ little business had been the final straw, as it wasn’t long on income to tax. (Small independent bookstores in the upper-upper half of New York State rarely prosper.) Borrowing against our house was not an option, and the money from my mother’s life insurance was long gone. Hence my father reaching out to family. He hadn’t told them why. Best, he thought, to pour a little wine first, to reminisce about old times, and foster bonds. “It’s a little song-and-dance I’m doing, Maura,” Dad reminded me. “I just want this night to go well.” “I don’t know what that means,” I began. I don’t believe my father disliked or resented my uncle, exactly. He just found it hard to wrap his head around his whole sort of person. My father and my Aunt Annette, as Logans of Utica, New York, had grown up with conventional middle-class American values: hard work, modest conduct, a certain downward tilt of one’s head. Mom was similar. Those genes were passed to me. But Mullenbergs ran rowdier. Flashier. Bold. It was something of a family joke that somehow all our introverts were non-Canadians. ANTITHESIS : CONTRADICTION :: My father clapped. “Come on,” he said. I flicked my flash cards. “You picked a weird time to bring family down, night before my SAT and all.” “He came when he could come,” my father said. “And he wouldn’t even think about that stuff, Laura’s grown. Do they have the SATs in Canada?” I couldn’t say. “I gotta get back down there,” Dad huffed. “C’mon. Be sociable.—I put out those little cheese-and-crackers you like.” He had the grace to shut my door behind him, at least. I sighed and steeled myself for Laura. It was what one did for her. Laura Mullenberg and I were never close, except in appearance and by two years in age, but our families treasured and/or pushed a private fiction that we were best friends, perhaps because it brightened up the gatherings to watch “the girls” play. This concoction, like all classic myths, had survived and evolved and endured. So every year around my birthday she’d call. Every year exactly on her birthday I’d reluctantly call. Independence Days I’d swim in her pool, unless that year Canada Day was more convenient; the Mullenbergs observed both, and always liked a party. After Christmas I’d write her a thank-you note for a gift that she didn’t pick out, and get one back from her for a gift I had nothing to do with myself. We’d taken countless photographs with arms around each other— RELATIONS : KIN :: I could paste on a smile for one more.
“Hello?” I called, unsmiling, from the top of the stairs. In response, I heard Laura’s voice before I saw her, but, then, most living people heard her voice: “Momo!” It had never been clear why she’d given me that name, or when I’d indicated approval. “Hello, Laura,” I murmured, traipsing downstairs. “You’re looking well.” She was; she took a twirl, and her red dress made a pleasing shape as it spun and the bulk of her Sprite remained in its glass. “Tha-anks,” she sang. “I kept that freshman fifteen the fuck off. I will own the beach this summer if it kills me.” “I didn’t know suburban Montreal had any beaches.” She shrugged and offered the name of a plage that I didn’t fully catch, then gave her waistline a pat. “Laura’s Friday class was canceled,” Dad explained, “and she was going home this weekend anyway, so she got there just early enough to come and see us. Isn’t that great?” “Boy, it’s something,” I replied, and heard my Uncle Jasper’s raspy cackle slither out from someplace I couldn’t see. “Surpri-ise,” warbled Laura, opening a cabinet for no apparent reason. “Made it all the way up, got told they’re coming back down.” “And speaking of going up,” I began, abandoned flash cards in mind. But she didn’t seem to hear. “Least the border’s still a cakewalk. Guess no one thinks I’m a criminal.” She leaned someplace. “Daddy, get off the phone! Come say hi to Mo.” Then straightened. “He’s wrapped up in some big deal in Saskatoon or something,” she explained. “But you gotta make time for family, right?” “Well,” I said, snapping my fingers. “Glad you made it, it’s been really nice to see you, but I—” “Damn right it is!” she squawked, then put her Sprite beside a coaster and ran into my closed arms for half of a hug. “How’ve you been? You never phone any more.” “Oh, you know,” I murmured, into her wild, unspooling hair. “You’re in college. Busy.” “Tell me about it,” she said, with what I assumed was a roll of her eyes; my own saw nothing but her hair. “I swear I only got into that school ‘cause I’m a legacy.” (Laura, like my aunt, attended Union College in Schenectady, New York.) “Or an international kid. I’m très exotic. But, you know those kids who breeze through high school and then gotta teach themselves to study? That was me.” “Well, speaking of studying—” I really, truly thought I’d found my out. “Ugh, I know. So boring, right?” She released me, then flung herself up onto the kitchen counter, kicking her legs. “We don’t need to talk shop. Come on, let’s go do something fun!”
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