“I was no work of art at thirteen,” Laura said. “My hair was lank and greasy. My face was full of zits. My boobs were nonexistent. I was half a head taller than any boy in my class and clothes hung on me with the same elegance as a coat hanger. But to Marilyn I was just one, big, irresistible possibility.
“Within a month of my going to live with my father, I’d been taken to the hairdresser, signed up for a make-up course at the department store and enrolled in ballet lessons to make me graceful. If I dared complain about any of this, Marilyn always answered that while I might not like it now, I’d be terribly grateful in the future that she’d made me do these things.” Laura looked sidelong at James and laughed mockingly.
“My social life was her next concern. ‘Why don’t you ask your friends over, Laurie? There’s a football game on Friday night. What about asking everybody over for a little pre-game party?’
“I’d only just moved there. I didn’t have any friends, but I knew better than to admit that. I tried to deflect her by explaining it was a high school football game and, as we were only seventh graders, no one I knew would be going anyway. So there wasn’t much point to a party.
“‘Laurie,’ she cried in this tone that implied a particularly serious deficit of grey matter in my head, ‘Fun! A get-together to have fun! Teenage fun! These are the best years of your life. You need to take advantage of them!’
“Worse was the sock hop. In a misguided effort to socialize us, the junior high school held a sock hop in the gymnasium every other Friday after school. I would have preferred demonstrating toothbrushes to lions to attending one of these dances but when Marilyn found out about them, there was no peace.
“‘You must go, Laurie! It’s just for two hours. No, don’t worry if no one dances with you. No one ever dances in junior high. The point is to go! Be seen. Show your face. It’s the only way to be popular.’
“But the very worst was yet to come. One afternoon Marilyn picked up a copy of my school newspaper, which she’d found lying with my books. In it she saw an announcement for cheerleading try-outs. She had been a cheerleader in high school herself and she couldn’t imagine anything nicer. ‘Oh, cheerleading! Oh Laurie, how exciting!’ She said this as if she’d just read about the Second Coming. ‘I bet if we look through my things, we can find my old pompoms. Then I can teach you some cheers and you can knock ’em dead!’”
Laura looked over with a sardonic smile. “The trouble was, Marilyn never understood that I had no desire to knock anyone dead. The idea of being a cheerleader mortified me. The thought of doing such a vacuous thing in public was enough to raise the hair on the back of my neck. No, I wasn’t glamorous. I wasn’t exciting. And I certainly wasn’t popular. But I didn’t give a damn.
“All I really wanted was to be left alone and that was the one thing that didn’t happen. Marilyn pestered me constantly. I was powerless to stop it,” Laura said and shrugged in a way that indicated futility but not remorse. “It became intolerable. How I ended up handling it was wrong. I knew that even then at the time, but I was young and desperately unhappy. So I did the only thing I could think of. I lied to her.
“To get Marilyn off my back I fabricated this whole clique of friends to provide me with all the teenage fun she expected me to want. I created them from among real kids at school, kids who lived too far away from us to run into, but kids I knew well enough that I could talk to if we did chance across them downtown or something and they wouldn’t think I was a complete weirdo. I made sure they were good-looking, well-liked kids, but not the school stars, because I knew that might be pushing my luck. Then I started saying I was going out with them after school to dances or over to their houses on Saturday mornings. I’d dress the part and then change back into my jeans in the restroom at the gas station before going off to spend time on my own.”
“So you were away from the house?” James asked.
“Yeah.”
“So what did you do? You were still quite young, weren’t you? Thirteen?”
Laura nodded. “Yeah. And I didn’t really do anything. Go downtown mostly and just walk around. Or to the park. But an awful thing came from it – I discovered that I liked lying. I could open my mouth and out flowed the most preposterous stuff, but Marilyn always believed me. This, in a way, egged me on. I developed a real eye for the kind of details that would make the lies substantial. Notes in fake-friend Cathy’s handwriting would be left on the table with my school books so that Marilyn and I could have a girlish giggle over them when she brought my books to me and ‘accidentally’ happened to look at the note. I’d show her the necklace I’d borrowed from fake-friend Sally, which I then allowed Marilyn to fasten for me as I got ready for the school dance I wasn’t going to attend.
“Marilyn’s gullibility actually became a source of self-esteem for me. She wasn’t stupid; therefore I knew I had to be pretty good. Moreover, it worked. Marilyn was content that I was now ‘popular’ and she left me alone.
“About a year later, Marilyn got pregnant,” Laura said. “The news galvanized my dad. After years of hazy promises and no action, he finally decided we needed a proper house instead of an apartment. We ended up in this boxy little place in the suburbs with a chain-link fence going around the perimeter of a perfectly square yard and a single pine tree growing in one corner. The house had only two bedrooms, but there was an unfinished basement and Dad said I could have that for my room if I wanted, because they wanted the baby close to them in the other bedroom. The basement had hardly any natural light, was nothing but concrete walls and plumbing pipes, and I would have to share it with the washer and dryer, but I leapt at the chance. Like my attic on Kenally Street, it was enough out of the way to give me my much-longed-for privacy. So I didn’t care what condition it was in.”
A pause crept in. “Because, of course, what privacy meant was that at last I could be with Torgon. I could spend my free time in the Forest.” Laura was pensive a moment. “Torgon had become a bit of an obsession by that point. Hard to describe. Some of it, I think, was just being fourteen. You know how some girls that age are infatuated with singers in boy bands or movie stars? For me, it was Torgon. I thought about her all the time. I dreamed about her. I idolized her. I couldn’t get her out of my mind … It was an odd sensation, the way I felt about her in those years. Like an awareness of not being in her world, but of not quite being in my own world either, of being in neither one place nor the other. That aura permeated my teens, that sense of being stranded between here and a place no one else could see.
“I suppose I turned to Torgon for comfort. I was incredibly unhappy in those first couple of years with my father and Marilyn. I don’t think they were ever aware of just how unhappy. As a consequence I began desperately wanting Torgon and the Forest to be real. Tangibly real. The reason was simple. I wanted to go there to the Forest myself, which I couldn’t do if it wasn’t a real place. I wanted to leave Rapid City and my family behind and live there.
“I couldn’t figure out how to do this, of course, but I did hit on the idea of making a catalogue of all my knowledge about the Forest, as if that might somehow peg it down as a real place. I started with mapping the countryside. I drew a diagram of the compound where Torgon and the Seer lived. I made pedigree charts for various families in the village. I even tried to make a dictionary of Torgon’s language, although this was much harder than I thought, so I didn’t get far. I spent hours and hours and hours doing this, and kept everything very carefully together in this loose-leaf binder in my bedroom. It quickly became the most treasured thing I owned.
“What I longed for most, however, was a picture of Torgon. I wanted to see her with my eyes, not just my mind. Unfortunately, I’m a rotten artist, so try as I might, I couldn’t draw her. Besides, I wanted photographic quality. So I started combing through magazines, looking for pictures of people who looked like her.
“Then I happened upon a picture of Brigitte Bardot from the film And God Created Woman. The odd thing is, Torgon didn’t actually look like Brigitte Bardot at all – she wasn’t blonde or drop-dead gorgeous nor did she have that come-hither sensuality that Bardot was so famous for. But in this picture Bardot was standing in a field of crops, the wind pulling at her hair, which was rumpled and unbound, and her expression was pure Torgon – intense, knowing, very guarded. When I saw it, Bardot’s physical differences just vanished for me. I was looking right into Torgon’s face.
“I cut the picture out and stuck it on the wall of my room, so that I could look at it all the time.”
“In October my stepsister was born. They named her Tiffany Amber, which is just the sort of trendy, girlie-pink name you’d expect Marilyn to choose. Tiffie was the best thing, though. I adored her from the moment she popped out, in spite of her stupid name.
“Then came summer again. And my fifteenth birthday in June. Two nights before, Marilyn came down to my room in the basement and sat down on my bed. I was at my desk.
“‘Laurie, I’ve had something very strange happen to me today,’ she said. I could tell by her tone of voice that whatever it was, I wasn’t going to want to hear it.
“‘Your father and I thought we’d do something special for your birthday. We thought a little party at the Bear Butte Inn might be nice,’ she said and looked pointedly at me. ‘A little surprise party.’
“She gave me credit for smarts I didn’t have, because I still couldn’t figure out what this was about. The atmosphere, however, was definitely growing overripe. Something awful was going to drop.
“‘I phoned your friends, Laurie, to see if they might like to come to the party. And do you realize,’ Marilyn said pointedly, ‘that none of your friends knows you?’
“Arrrggghhhh! I wanted to drop off my chair in sheer mortification. Having to face Marilyn and my dad over this was nothing compared with what it was going to be like at school after Marilyn had phoned up all these kids I’d been using in my fake-friends scenarios. Most of them didn’t know me enough to even speak to me, much less want to come to my birthday party.
“She wasn’t going to leave it at that, of course. So when I didn’t give her an answer, she shouted for my dad. There was no point trying to lie my way out of it; so, I owned up to what I’d done and made a desperate effort to get my parents to understand just how cornered I’d felt by Marilyn’s demands. No one paid the least bit of attention to my explanation. Marilyn just wanted to know what I’d been doing with myself all those hours I was supposedly with friends. When I told her nothing, that I’d just been on my own, she turned to my dad and said, ‘The way this girl acts is not normal, Ron.’ That was the first time anyone had voiced it, although I suspect Marilyn, at least, had been thinking it for some time.
“I got grounded for two full months. Since it was summer, this meant I was stuck hopelessly at home all day with Marilyn and the baby. There was nothing I could do to escape her. All I did was play with Tiffie for hours on end, but there’s only so much you can do with an eight-month-old baby.
“In the end, I was so restless it began to bother Marilyn as much as it did me. Finally, one afternoon, I asked if I could go to the library to get something to read. She said I could. She drove me downtown, told me to stay right there at the library while she did the shopping and then she’d come back to pick me up. Still chastened, I did exactly as I was told. Marilyn was happy with that. She was pleased to see me so obedient, and I’m sure she appreciated the break from me as much as I did from her. So a few days later when I asked to go again, again she said I could. Even though I was still grounded, the library became an acceptable compromise. She liked it because it was wholesome and supervised; I liked it because it was away from her.
“For the first week or two, I happily engrossed myself in the books and magazines. Then the novelty began to wear off and I grew horribly restless.
“In the reference room, there was this enormous oak table about fifteen feet long, maybe five feet wide, and a warm honey colour that had become glossy at the edges by years of shifting readers. I went in there and sat down. The room was virtually empty. It was a hot July day, the perfect sort for picnics or swimming, so most people were outside. This was back before most places had air conditioning, and inside the library the heat was stifling. The sun was streaming down through these high, old-fashioned windows and I remember sitting there, watching the dust motes drifting through the sunbeams. The room smelled of dust. Dust and wax polish and that strange acidic odor of aging books.
“As I sat, I grew aware of my body calming down. It was a soft, peaceful sensation, almost a sinking, as if all the tension was oozing downwards to my feet and running out across the floor. I sat for several minutes just feeling it.
“There were these small containers of stubby little pencils dotted down the centre of the table and next to them, piles of scratch paper so that people could make reference notes. I reached over and took one of the pencils and half a dozen small sheets of paper and I began to write …”
Laura paused. The room became very quiet.
“I began to write Torgon’s name over and over again on the little pieces of paper. And then … I just started to write. It was the first time …
“As I wrote, the walls of the library vanished, the table dissolved, the barrier between us disappeared. I wasn’t me anymore. I was able to be in her world, to see it, to hear it, to feel it in a way that was as immediate and awesome as that first experience I’d had of her in childhood. And just as that first moment on the path through the vacant lot when I was seven had changed everything, so too now, my picking up that pencil in the library, again changed everything.”