The Rules of Attraction

I would only eat candy bars and drink Diet Coke. The radio was always on whether there were stations nearby or not. News would come on but there really wasn’t anything to hear. Earthquakes, the weather, politics, mass death. It was all boring. I carried with me a photograph of Victor, and I would take it out and sit in the car, Sean next to me sniffing constantly, his sunglasses kept on, covering glassy eyes, and I’d touch the photograph. It was black and white and Victor was shirtless, smoking a cigarette, half-leering into the lens of the camera, trying to look like an old-young faded movie star, his eyes half-lids, closed in sexy parody. I liked Victor even more because of this photograph and the mystery it contained. But then I didn’t, couldn’t like him because he stayed with Jaime, and that was unforgivable. The only tape in the car was old Pink Floyd and Sean would only listen to “Us and Them” and nothing else, rewinding it over and over, and the draggy rhythm would put me to sleep, which was probably what Sean wanted, yet then he would turn it up whenever the chorus would blast out “Haven’t you heard, it’s a…” and startled I would sit upright, my heart pounding and reach over and turn the volume down once his fingers left the control dial. The song would fade out, then he’d rewind it again. I said nothing.



Sean would light cigarettes, toss the match out the window, take a drag, put the cigarette out.



SEAN All of the trees were dead. There were dead skunks and dogs and even an occasional deer by the sides of the roads, their blood staining the snow. There were mountains full of dead trees. Orange signs announced road-work. The radio was only static, the tape player often broken, though when it wasn’t Roxy Music loud and garbled would play. The road seemed endless. Motels. Buying food in malls. Lauren constantly throwing up. She wouldn’t speak to me. I would just concentrate on the road or on people in other cars. When we could pick up a station there would only be Creedence Clearwater songs playing which made me sad but I didn’t know why. In motel rooms her eyes were dumb and accusing; her body wasted and pathetic. She’d reach out—a plaintive touch and I’d tell her to get away from me. At a gas station in some place called Bethel, across the border and into Maine, I almost left her while she went to the bathroom to throw up. I put close to 2,000 miles on the car that week. I thought of Roxanne a lot for some reason. I thought of where I could go, but couldn’t think of anyplace. There was just another motel or gas station. She would sit beside me, listless. She would break glasses in the motel bathrooms. She stopped wearing shoes. I drank a lot. I’d wake up the next morning, if I went to sleep at all, hungover and I’d look at her pitiful body in the bed next to mine and again think about leaving her. Without waking her up, stealing all her stuff, her make-up, which she had stopped wearing anyway, her clothes, everything, and split. She never took her sunglasses off, not even if it was night and snowing hard. The snow was slushy and would fall heavily. It would get dark at four in the afternoon, the snow drifting over the rise and fall of the countryside….



We came back to that gas station in Bethel—somehow we had made a full circle—and while she went to the restroom and was coming back, trudging through the snow, approaching the car, after throwing up, something clicked. The snow on the windshield started to melt. I reached over and turned on the radio but couldn’t find anything. The Roxy Music tape was ruined. I eventually found another station that was playing faraway sounding Grateful Dead. I lit a cigarette even though the guy was still filling up the car. She opened the door and sat down. I offered her one. She shook her head, no. I paid the guy and drove out of the station. It was early morning and snowing hard. Back on the highway, without looking over at her, I said, “I’ll pay for it,” then cleared my throat.



LAUREN He drops me off, waiting at the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street…. It had been twelve weeks. I keep thinking it must have been that night with Paul. It had to have been that night with Paul. Forms to fill. They will not accept my American Express, only MasterCharge. Want to know my age, religion. An abortion in New Hampshire: my life reduced. I’m calm but it doesn’t last. Tense when I read the words: Hereby Authorize Terminate Pregnancy. Graffiti on the tables in the waiting room: Feminine chaos, End of the term—things only other girls from the college had written. Was Sara here? They give me Valium. Someone explains the operation to me. Laying on my back wondering vaguely if it’s a boy or a girl. “Okay, Laurie,” the doctor says. An examination of Laurie’s uterus. The table rises. I moan. Lift the hips please. Something antiseptic. I can’t help it and gasp. The nurse looks at me. She seems nice. Humming noise. My stomach starts heaving. Sucking noises. It’s over. I sweat. I go to the recovery room. It doesn’t matter. I pass by other girls, some crying, most of them not. Come out onto the street after Sean picks me up, forty-five minutes, an hour later. Two girls from the high school pass by. I’m thinking, I was once that young.