The Lauras by Sara Taylor

Author:Sara Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIV

Ma met Margaret-Mary when she was called Mags, studied biology and gave herself bad perms in the bathroom of the freshman women’s dorm. She’d grown up in Nevada with very Catholic but very accepting parents, come back east to go to school, and liked girls about as much as she liked boys, but she kept that last fact under her hat pretty well until she knew that it was safe to mention it. She had short hair and dressed like Annie Hall and her favorite thing to do was kiss, though she didn’t go any farther than that with anyone because it would make the angels cry. She was a wide-eyed freshman the fall my mother came back from Michigan, and she was looked after for a year by Laura and Ma and the women they hung out with. Mags wasn’t a fool—she could handle herself in most rough situations—but she couldn’t take care of herself in the “Remember-to-eat-and-take-breaks-sometimes,-please,-for-the-love-of-good-sense,-Mags” way.

Then her dad died in a car accident.

She went home for the funeral, came back and tried to get on with work, and a few months later her mom kicked it, too. She had an older sister who handled the legal part of things, so all Mags had to do was handle herself, but she couldn’t quite manage that. They all tried to help her out, but there was only so much that they could do, so when she started going to church again they were relieved, because it meant that they weren’t the only people looking out for her. Even though she suddenly stopped talking to her then-girlfriend—who she’d gone much farther with than the minimum distance required to make the angels cry—they hoped church was helping, hoped that with enough church and crying and time she would find her feet and find a new normal.

It was only in retrospect that they could track the downward trajectory: Mass on Sunday became Mass and confession, then Mass, confession and Wednesday prayer meeting, which was when she cut her girlfriend out of the picture. Then morning Mass every day, and Bible studies and reading on her own, and it made sense because she’d grown up Catholic, all the religion was familiar and comforting, and making it to paradise was her only chance to see her parents again. Then, suddenly, Catholicism was not enough: Mary worship was idolatry, confession a replacement for Christ’s forgiveness; she had been wrong her whole life. The Catholics she knew were a bit stung by this, but they didn’t say anything; they were still hoping for a happy ending. No one knew that she’d stopped doing the assigned readings, stopped going to class, stopped sitting tests, stopped writing papers, stopped thinking about anything but death and God.

Mags started going to a different church, began wearing long skirts and covering her hair, and though she wouldn’t talk to them anymore they kept tabs on her as best they could, worried that she’d do something really stupid. They’d half expected her to become a nun.

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