Читать книгу A Song in the Daylight - Paullina Simons - Страница 23

Larissa, I told my mother.

You what?

I had to. I was losing my mind.

You told your mother? Why?

I needed help.

I told you I would help you.

I needed a different kind of help, Larissa. I needed counsel.

I gave you counsel.

I needed … different counsel. You’re my only friend. You’re like my sister. I love you. But you’re not hearing me.

Oh, for Pete’s sake. Why would you tell your mother?

Because there are things you don’t understand, Larissa.

What are you talking about? I understand everything.

No.

Che, you just don’t want to listen to me. That’s not the same as me not understanding.

It is. I don’t want to listen to you because you don’t understand.

Che, you’re sixteen years old and still in high school!

I know.

You think I don’t know how hard this is?

No, I don’t think you do. I think you would do what had to be done and wouldn’t lose a minute’s sleep over it.

Because I knew it had to be done!

I also know this. But I just can’t do it. You can. Not me.

Holy cow. What did your mother say? Oh, I can’t even imagine.

She cried. Then she prayed. For, like, three hours. Then she cried some more. She refused to talk to me until we went to church. Then she still refused to talk to me. She just kept crying. I said I know how you feel, Ma.

Larissa was now the one with her head in her hands, curled over a desk in her room.

My mother said she couldn’t believe I would be so reckless.

I told you that, too.

I know. You’re both right. Doesn’t help me much, though.

Did she say anything helpful?

She said she didn’t know I was being bad when I was out—she thought I was a good girl. She was so upset. How could I have been so careless with my life, she kept repeating.

I said that to you, too. But how is that helpful?

She beat her hands against her chest. Did you do that? I said to her, Ma, what are you so upset about? This is about me, about my plans. You should have thought about that before, not after, she said.

Okay, Ma, I said. I made a mistake. I was dumb. Can’t I be smart now?

It was too late for smart, she told me. Now it was time for action. Che bowed her head. My dad is semi-retired. Ma said he would take his retirement early and watch the baby while I finished school.

Che, no. Oh, my goodness. No. Don’t you count at all? What about you?

She said I could still go to college and leave the baby with them. They would help me.

But you’d never be free, said Larissa with fear and emptiness.

Ma said life is a bitch, Claire. Should’ve thought of that earlier. Now it’s too late.

It’s never too late. That’s the beauty of it. You make a little mistake, and three hundred bucks later everything can still go back to how it was before.

Che bowed her head.

It’s not too late!

My mother wouldn’t even discuss the other thing.

Why did you have to tell your mother?

If this happened to you, wouldn’t you tell your mother?

Never, said Larissa. And who says it hasn’t happened to me?

Now it was Che’s turn to gape at her friend.

Just kidding, Larissa said. But even if it did, I’d never tell my mother.

Che stared at Larissa. Larissa stared at Che. You have to think about it harder, Larissa said. Think about your life. It’s your life, not your mom’s, not your dad’s. Yours. You only have the one. Is this what you want?

No, said Che.

You’re sixteeen! It was a mistake. Everybody makes mistakes. You’re allowed one do-over.

Who said?

Oh, come on.

The baby is not going to get a do-over, though.

Yes, but you are. It’ll be like it was before. Nothing will be any different.

Larissa, come on, you don’t really believe that, do you?

With all my heart.

The whole universe will be different, said Che.

No, it won’t. And you’ll have your whole life to have another baby. Please.

Che kept staring at Larissa. You don’t think it’s wrong, Larissa, that a baby be sacrificed so I can live as I like?

You’ll have another baby!

You didn’t answer my question, Larissa.

“Ezra,” Larissa asked her friend on Saturday night, “why do we sit here every week and regurgitate the same old questions on the unfathomable workings of the bottomless universe? Are we really trying to figure it out? Or do you think we’re bored?”

Why did she sound hopeful? Did she want Ezra to be bored? Ezra, who had an opinion on every subject, could debate good and evil with the devil himself, could talk to an engineer about bridges, to a scientist about quantum mechanics; economists had to defend the margin of low supply side against him and Ayn Rand her objectivism and Christians their faith in the Triune nature of God and the nominal reasons behind the Great Schism. He was a linguist, a scholar, he loved movies and semiotics. He knew the differences between communism, socialism and collectivism, and could ask you fifteen questions about evolutionary theory for which you had no answer, not a single one. He could recite the Bill of Rights from the heart, knew the Declaration of Independence, and most of Shakespeare’s sonnets. By heart. His favorite writers were Dante and Donne. (“That’s because he hasn’t read past the Ds,” quipped Jared.) He thought Paradise Lost was the greatest work of literature in the English language. He spoke fluent French. No one could out-argue him. Ezra watched movies like Aronofsky’s Pi and said it was his favorite film of all time. To defy classification he also said Bachelor Party was his favorite film of all time. Larissa loved Ezra. He defied classification.

Could this Ezra be bored?

He looked slightly liquid, funny, completely engaged. “Yes,” he said cheerfully.

“Oh, Ezra, just stop it,” said Maggie, laying down her letters. “You’re not bored in the slightest. All you do is stir up trouble. Stop it. It’s your turn. You’re losing, darling, you’re last at Scrabble, Professor Bored. You have 80 points, while your uneducated wife and her over-theatrical though under-ambitious best friend have 120 and 113 points respectively. It’s your turn, sweetheart, the great conversationalist.”

Ezra put his letters down. Colloquy was his word. Bingo, plus 50 points, with Q on triple letter. Ezra was no longer last. Maggie snorted in derision and annoyance. Glancing sideways at a laughing Larissa, Ezra put his hand inside the letter bag. “All we think about is ourselves, Larissa. This breeds boredom. And unhappiness. We become like sharks, always needing to keep moving or we die.”

“Ezra,” cut in Larissa, “but last week you told me and Evelyn and Malcolm that we needed to think more of ourselves, remember?”

Ezra drew a blank look, and Maggie laughed. “I told you, Lar, he is nothing but a sophist,” she said. “Advocating only for the position you don’t happen to hold on this particular evening. Don’t listen to anything he says, darling.”

“I can’t imagine myself saying this,” said a defensive Ezra. “Since I think we’re spilling out our own ears. We are stuffed to the gills with ourselves.”

“Last week you said we were unknowable!”

“Yes? And how is that incompatible with what I’m saying tonight?”

“I’m not unknowable to myself,” bristled Larissa.

“You sure about that, Lar?”

“Positive.”

“Describe yourself in five phrases.”

“Fine. Um. I am a mother. I am a wife. I am a set decorator. I am a good cook. I am a lover of books.” She said the last one sheepishly.

Ezra drew a laugh. “No, Larissa. Not who you are. What you are.”

Less certainly she said, “I am neat. I am orderly. I am meticulous.”

“Ah,” said Ezra. “Three different words to say the same tedious thing.”

“I am motherly. And wiferly. I’m a planner.” She thought. “I am well-dressed.”

He nodded. “One more. But make it a good one.”

Larissa was still thinking. She was still thinking. It wasn’t fair. It was hard to describe yourself in five phrases.

“But you just said you knew yourself better than you know anything,” Ezra said. “Why should it be hard at all? Just think of the five most important things about you. You can name five things about a lion, can’t you? Or a chimp?”

Spending her days swirling red paint around on the sets of school plays. Larissa, the Jackson Pollock of high school productions of Guys and Dolls. Theater hadn’t even made the cut. How could that be? The children hadn’t made it. Love. Yearning. Contentment. None of it.

“Get rid of one of the neat freak traits,” Ezra said, “and you’ll have more room for painting.”

But Larissa felt it still wouldn’t get to the bottom of things. The bottom of who she was.

Ezra clapped in delight. “It’s easier after ten minutes of nominal research to talk for an hour about anabolic metabolism than it is to talk with any degree of authority about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself your whole damn life. Clearly you’re not thinking enough about yourself, Larissa,” he concluded, stretching out his hand with the emptied Margarita glass. “See, you think you’re bored because your glass is overflowing,” he said, “but what if it had tipped over and is empty and you don’t even know it?”