Characters can shape-shift, switch allegiances, turn back time and come back from the dead, at the writer’s direction. I could do none of those things for Laura.
Once upon a time, Sleeping Beauty decided to take a nap from which she would never wake up.
Love Letter to Percoset: A User Review by Miles
Say you’re bored. Or you can’t sleep. Maybe your mom is yelling at you, or the boy/girl you like doesn’t like you back in that same way, or you’re too fat to even consider going to prom. Or the closest person to you since you were babies in the cradle together has killed herself. The usual stuff.
Dread not. Don’t be depressed. Be a junkie!
You can’t count on people to nurture you through the trauma that is existence. But you already knew that. But did you know that you can always count on Percoset?
How-to:
Perc-popping is not a group experience. Dare to fly solo. It’s yours to enjoy on your own—chemical self-pleasure routing that tired old classic, your hand.
Start by drawing the shades in your bedroom. Welcome the darkness. Lift the pill from your nightstand, clutch the water glass in your hand. Offer up your divine thanks in advance. Be greedy—swallow the pill whole rather than split it in half to spread the wealth for a later date. Dilution is wasteful. Savor the wholesome wholeness.
Now lay down in bed. Close your eyes.
Wait.
Just a little longer.
Feelin’ it now? The tingle starting at the ends of your toes, creeping inside the tips of your fingernails? Smiiiiiiile. Yeah! The tingle spreads, mushrooming throughout your body, but not in a harsh, Hiroshima way. Only beauty.
Welcome!
You’re light as a feather, happy as a lottery winner who doesn’t have to pay taxes on their winnings. You are now high, even if in the Perc context that word is a misnomer. (That means a wrong or inappropriate name for all you non-SAT-studying stoners out there.) You’re not amphetamine high, bouncing out of your skin with energy, or psychedelic, LSD high. You’re velvet high. Completely relaxed. Numb.
Think as if you are in a waking dream. Choose the fantasy—you direct it, and not it, you. The world is a nice place. Suffering does not exist. Your American president, the supposed leader of the free world, is not in fact ruining the environment, the economy, your future. The boy/girl you love loves you back—he/she might even ask you to prom! The one person on Earth you expected to walk through life with you chose to give you warning that she was shortcutting out, that she no longer wanted to live. She told you good-bye. She at least invited you to come with her.
Mummify yourself inside your bed’s blankets—coffinlike, but not dead. Feel your body float away. Bye-bye, body, bye-bye! Heaviness transformed into nothingness.
Magic. You control the knobs.
Let your thoughts run free, as if your mind is taking a leisurely Sunday afternoon walk through a garden in spring bloom. Stop and whisper to the flowers, the violets and marigolds and gardenias, and don’t ignore the carnations because they’re a cheap variety. All this time, you thought the flowers were just pretty things. Turns out, they’ve been waiting for you to acknowledge the secret language they’ll share only with you, and with puppies. Absorb their flower wisdom. Listen in peace rather than engage.
Aw, puppies. They’re never not happy to see you.
Let the pretty pretties, petunias and puppies, lull you to sleep. Sleep sleep sleep, precious one. Sleep until your body is ready to return to the mother ship. Freefalling dreams with safe landings.
Beautiful violet-velvet coma-coffin. Praise be!
Worry not that upon waking, nothing in the world around you will have changed, other than your increasing desire for more Percs.
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Braids
LAURA IS DEAD BUT I AM HAVING A GOOD HAIR DAY.
Niecy braids my hair while I eat handfuls of plain M&Ms and we watch cartoons, the deepest form of entertainment we can tolerate today. We’ve been sitting in the living room of the carriage house for two hours, and the braids are almost finished. I like braids okay. I always like M&Ms. I don’t like TV, except for today.
My porcupine hair has been tamed, cornrowed into dozens of braids, with crystal beads, the expensive ones, hanging from the ends. Niecy and I chose the beads in honor of Laura—her eyes, and her spirit, both baby blue. Laura loved my hair done up in braids by Jamal’s little sister. Niecy’s hands have been extra gentle all morning, pulling the braids tight but sneaking in soft touches on my scalp, reassuring rubs on my shoulders. I don’t like to be touched, except for today.
Niecy stands in front of me, ready to braid the last section of hair at the side of my face. She admires the nearly complete result of her labor. I haven’t gotten around to putting on “the darkness,” as Jamal calls my cosmetic choices, and with my hair pulled back and no black eyeliner or Goth lipstick coloring my face, it’s possible to see I have one. “You have such a pretty face,” Niecy says, in her matter-of-fact voice that goes beyond her fifteen years. The remaining, unspoken part of her sentence, of course, is: for a fat girl. That’s always the implied ending of anyone telling me I have “such a pretty face.” “You should show it off more. But I can’t believe Jamal let you get a lip ring.”
I tell her, “You see, Niecy, I have this extraordinary power. It’s called ‘free will.’ Jamal’s girlfriends don’t know how to use it when he’s telling them what to wear to parties so they’ll look good at his side, but unlike those hoochie mamas, I actually have a mind of my own.”
She laughs and I laugh, and then at the same time, we look at each other and stop laughing. Today is Laura’s funeral and nothing is funny, except maybe the animated figures on the TV, who normally are not funny at all.
Years from now, if I make it that far: How will I remember this day? That I neglected to grieve because I was laughing, having my hair braided, and eating candy but picking out the red M&Ms because they creeped Laura out? Laura hated the color red for no reason other than Because I Just Do. She loved blue and yellow; green didn’t offend her although she didn’t necessarily like it, but red? Fireworks. She’d burn wrong-colored presents anyone might have innocently given her, a red scarf, a red bracelet. Red books she’d pass off to me. I could read them if I promised to keep them hidden from her sight.
The M&M sugar rush eases my morning-after Perc headache, the price I sometimes pay for beauty’s velvet night sleep. Must remember: Bedtime sorrow is for Vicodin (name-brand or generic hydros, must not be a snob). The bummer with hydros is, you don’t come down slow at all, you just all of a sudden realize it’s gone. But while the high isn’t as intense, the morning after awakens smoother—pink instead of black.
I am trying not to think of the colors Laura saw at the end, but I can’t help it. I am dying to know. I guess I can’t use that expression anymore. Can I?
When Laura passed over from darkness into light—or was it the other way around?—I want to know what she saw. Were there people waiting for her, or WELCOME signs, hopefully in blues and yellows? Or was there just nothingness? No color, not even gray? I know there was no God waiting for her, because no God could have let her find Him this soon.
Who will look after Sleeping Beauty on the other side? Who will tell her stories and rub ice on her arms when she’s hot? I am scared for her, even as I envy her.
Laura was considerate, as always. And not cheap. She wanted an anonymous person to find her, not me, not Jim. She checked into the deluxe suite at the fanciest five-star hotel in Georgetown. She spent her last afternoon there, with the drapes drawn, lying on the plush bed with headphones on her ears, listening to music as she waited for the pill stockpile to work its magic, to take her from us. She left a note for Jim, but not one for me. I don’t know what her note to him said. I imagine it said “Good-bye” and “I love you” and “Thank you.” I hope it did. Her manners were impeccable, and I would not like to think that changed just for a sui
cide note.
Niecy finishes the last braid, but it’s too tight. It hurts. I don’t complain. I want to feel the pain, to feel anything other than the rock-hard fullness in my belly. I ate a pounder bag of M&Ms with little help from skinny Niecy, and it might have been sawdust for all the taste my mouth does not savor. Once the fullness in my stomach has subsided to emptiness, I will rub my tongue hard around the inside of the ring until the lip swells. I will taste the blood and feel something again.
I don’t know what’s the matter with me that Laura could have taken her own life and I have not cried. I don’t believe it’s real. It’s like Laura took her own life, but not really. I expect to climb up to the tree house and find her there waiting for me with a book and a pack of cigarettes, and I will tell her all the drama going on down at the house. Laura, guess what? The mistress of the house, dead by her own hand—for real and not in some gothic romance novel.
Now that my hair is finished, I can go outside for a smoke break, find Laura if I try, follow her if I want. I’m not allowed to smoke in the house.
Laura was considerate, and secretive. I don’t think anyone besides me knew she smoked. She asked her own father to give up his smoking habit for her sixteenth birthday present to her. He did. Jim wanted to give her a car.
Braids complete, Niecy sits down on the couch next to my chair. She takes my hands in hers. Her big brown eyes are wet and the smile is gone from her face. I feel her touch but not her warmth. I am immune. Niecy says, “I don’t understand. Nobody had more to live for. How could she take her own life? It’s like stealing from God.”
Laura was like me. Secretive, and an atheist. She did not steal from God. She determined her own destiny, a leader.
I understand why Laura did what she did. I think I’m supposed to be mad at her, but I’m not. I admire her courage. She saw what the world had to offer and said, No thank you. She saw the lies and hypocrisy and violence and hate and meaningless of it all and she chose another path. She won’t live to see her grandchildren, but she also won’t live to see them suffer.
I pull my hands back from Niecy’s. “You’re right,” I answer. “You don’t understand.” Niecy has the perfect life. She’s pretty and smart, lives in a beautiful home with a loving family. She has a community, and faith. Laura had those things too, but she wanted not to need them. I have none of those things, but I don’t miss them either.
I do miss Laura. I miss her so much already and it’s only been three days. I still think she’s away on a trip and will return home at any moment, loaded with presents for me from a place like Italy or Venezuela or New Zealand. Jim used to invite me on their trips, safe in the knowledge that I would refuse. I am a D.C. girl. I don’t want to go anywhere. And I don’t want to be his charity case any more than my living circumstances make necessary.
How will I sustain the rest of my life missing Laura, every waking moment of every day of every year, forever? She went away in the past, but she always came back.
I want to be sick.
Niecy leans over to give me a hug whether I like it or not. I am stiff in her embrace. She says, “Don’t be like that. Today is not the day to be Miles.” She kisses my cheek and turns away from me to leave. Her mom and my mom are waiting for her at Jim’s house to help prepare for the arrival of guests. Mourners.
“Thank you,” I whisper, but Niecy is already gone.
When is the day to be Miles?
I stare at the commercial on the television. On the screen, a cartoon teddy bear jumps in the air, landing in a snuggly blanket. YAY! Fabric softener!
Nothing’s wrong with the world—go out and shop!
I don’t believe in anything, especially today.
The ’Nam
BACK IN THE ’NAM, IT’S A STEAMY JUNE DAY, A PROMISE of the oppressive, dangerous summer to come. The temperature is over a hundred degrees. Our nerves are at boiling point. The killing fields wait to implode.
Laura and I hide out in the tree house. Charlie surrounds us, but with the lush summer bloom of the trees outside the window, shrouding us in leaves and brush, Charlie is unaware. Still, we don’t dare light a cigarette. One false move, one smoke signal sent into the sky, and we will be shipped home in body bags.
“Once upon a time,” Laura whispers to me, “Bravo Company got lost in the Mekong Delta.”
It’s too late. Charlie has found us, snipping through the brush with his gardener’s hedges. He peers at us through the tree house window. “Hi, girls!” he chirps.
Game over. The ’Nam is no fun to play when the real Vietnam vet, Jim’s gardener and pet rehabilitation project the year we were thirteen, sits outside the window on a ladder.
“Miles!” I hear the grating voice but choose to ignore it.
The steamy heat of the ’Nam has infiltrated my bedroom. Beads of sweat gush down my face, epithets of frustration and panic. I can’t get the zipper at the back of my black dress to close. Last week it went up fine. The M&Ms reconnaissance mission has already swelled me.
Outside my open bedroom window, I hear people arriving for the funeral service. Through the dense trees, they won’t notice the carriage house sitting near to the side street at the back of Jim’s property, over the imposing fence, through the garden, past the pool. They’ve discovered the back-alley street with the secret parking spaces, but that thrill will quickly be forgotten as they walk around to the main street, where they will be blinded by the magnificence of the big manor house.
I watch the procession of elegance from my bedroom window as the mourners walk on the ancient cobblestones outside. They’re the politicians, socialites, and gay elite who populate Jim’s Georgetown world, and over the click of their fine shoe heels, I hear them talking to each other, bracing themselves for the afternoon to come. They’re tossing out phrases like “Such a tragedy” and “Senseless loss” and “That poor man.” I do not once hear them utter the solitary word that is the real truth. Suicide.
“MILES!”
I loosen the dress from my arms and let the top half hang from my waist. I spray another layer of antiperspirant into the pits. Then I put my arms back into the dress and open my bedroom door.
“Can you zip this up in the back for me?” I ask my mother.
“Miles! Did you hear me knocking at your door? Could you please be a little more cooperative, at least today?”
I’ll be cooperative enough to let her zip me up. I step over to where she stands at the door. She knows better than to walk all the way in without an invitation.
“Turn around,” Mel says. I stand with my back to her. “Deep breath, suck it in. This dress does not want to close.” I take a deep inhale, knowing the question that will come next, but still hoping for a pardon. No such luck. “Do you have anything else to wear? Something in a bigger size? I can’t get the zipper up all the way to the neck.”
“Don’t bother.” My braids and beads will cover the back. No one will know. My body is ever-expanding, like the universe, but my hair is long, like Laura’s.
I have always been the charity girl in the carriage house, content to play the role of sidekick to the princess in the big house, her fat shadow. Now who will I be?
“Jamal and Niecy’s mother is in the living room. She wants to talk with you before the funeral service.” Mel tugs on a bead at the end of one of my cornrows. “You look very pretty.” She has to turn outside the door to allow me room to pass. “Be polite,” she warns.
I’m always polite to Dr. Turner. She’s not my mother.
I try to walk away toward the living room, but Mel’s hand latches on to my own, to hold me back from leaving her sight before she’s finished.
I shake her hand loose. “What?”
Her face is gray and hard, jutted in grief, at odds with the harsh noon sun streaming through the hall window. The sun’s warmth and brightness feel like a direct laser link to, or from, God. The light’s strength is like God is playing a joke on us today. Hah hah, we’ve got Laura now, she’s all our
s.
I look at Mel’s face, which appears to have aged a decade almost overnight, and I know that today I will not be on the receiving end of the When Are You Going to Lose Fifty Pounds and Be Beautiful Like Laura speech. Today I am on the receiving end of my mother’s I Buried My Brother and Now My Niece, Both Suicides, face. Her vacant expression tells me that she and I share at least one emotion in common, in the form of a question: How are we supposed to go on?
Poor Mel. She wants comfort, to connect. She should have gotten a Niecy brand of daughter, one who doles out hugs, springs Hallmark sentiments, turns to her in joy and in sorrow. Not a daughter who wants to be left alone with a book, who doesn’t want to be touched, who is incapable of love.
She says, “I talked with Paul on the phone this morning. I told him maybe we should reconsider the summer plans. Do you need me to stay here?”
Mel’s classic at word-dodging. I know this because I don’t know much about anything, except words. Her real question is, Do you want me to stay?
She’s been on-off with this Paul guy for years; their relationship survives because of the long distance. She’s a painter who gets by as a waitress in D.C., he’s a sculptor who gets by as an egotistical success story in London. He often travels through D.C. when selling to galleries, and she stays with him in England during the summers when she can enlist my father to make special guest appearances in the role of temporary chaperone at the carriage house.
I have no interest in Paul, or in London. I like to be left behind. It’s what I know.
If I were a writer crafting my mother for a story, I would speculate that for Mel, procreation was something she thought she was supposed to do—biological imperative and all—but the whole deal turns out to have been a big disappointment to her, like motherhood was for Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. The book version of Scarlett loved her pretty daughter Bonnie, but Wade and Ella, her other two kids, the ones who didn’t show up in the movie, were runts like me, nuisances—easily written out. My author self might speculate that Mel’s like Scarlett, a flawed character with the potential to be a full one—if I took the time to flesh her out. But she’s my mom and not a literary character. I can’t be bothered. I’d rather read about Scarlett.