The Humanity Project (3 page)

“Oh my God.” Laurie leaned in toward him to whisper, the kind of whisper you produced in a crowded bar. “Don’t look now, but there’s a guy over there who might be trying to find me.”

“Yeah?” He took in the portion of the room in front of him, saw nobody who looked to be paying her any attention. “Where?”

“Don’t look! Are you done with your drink? Can we go? Can you just pretend we’re leaving together, you know, like a date?”

She still had a hand on his arm, pulling at it, and she looked excited or scared or both. Sean said, “Trying to find you, what, another one of your Craigslist pals?”

“Please.” She reached up, kissed him. He was too surprised either to resist or kiss back. The sleeve of her silver jacket made stiff, crackling sounds, like the color had been sprayed on. “Just help me get outside.”

“Jesus Christ, lady.”

“I would be very, very grateful,” she murmured, her hand still on the back of his neck, her face still close to his.

“All right, hold on. Jesus.” It looked like he wasn’t going to get out the door without her. He detached her hand, prepared for movement. His back wasn’t going to quit hurting anytime soon. He stood, put on his windbreaker, and looked around the room again, nothing. He was irritated, he thought if there really was somebody who wanted her for some unknown reason, she should make the most of that. But the kiss had been an invitation, and even with a bad back, he couldn’t help thinking what might come of it.

She was walking a little ahead of him. Maybe she wanted him to watch her tight little ass, which he didn’t mind doing. She waited for Sean to open the door for her. “Where’s your car?” he asked.

“Over there, I think.”

He looked behind him at the restaurant. “I’m not seeing your stalker, if that’s what he is.”

“Will you walk me to my car?”

Sean sighed loud enough for her to hear it. Laurie led the way and again he trailed behind, thinking
stupid stupid stupid
, meaning himself, mostly. Head full of beer, fists jammed into his empty pockets, halos of blur around the parking lot lights, yup, one more wasted evening, and even though you wanted to believe you had an infinite supply of evenings available for wasting, you didn’t.

“Hey, your car matches your jacket,” he said, which he thought was kind of funny but the laughs weren’t coming. She stood by the driver’s side, again waiting for him to open doors. Which he did, leaning down, then standing back. “Well good night. Take care of yourself.”

“That’s him over there.” She was whispering again, tugging at Sean’s sleeve, and the next minute she’d fit herself next to him and was doing some serious grinding, and he couldn’t have said at first whether he liked it or not. Not, he was thinking, but then he felt his dick come to attention.

“Where is he?” Sean asked, putting his hands on her shoulders to slow her down a little, but she tilted her face up toward his and pulled his mouth onto hers. He tasted something that might have been perfume, making him recoil, but he pushed past the feeling, pushed his tongue past the small fence of her teeth and into the hot space inside.

When they stopped and drew apart she said, “He’s over there, don’t look, he’s just some guy who answered my ad and I was fooling around with him, online I mean, just going back and forth saying stuff, all this crazy stuff I didn’t mean, yeah, dumb. But I didn’t know if you were really going to show up so I told him I was coming and now he’s expecting me to leave with him but he’s probably not sure it’s me and anyway I like you, I like everything about you. Can’t we just go somewhere?”

“I don’t . . .” Sean began, without knowing what came next, don’t think so, don’t want to, wanted to but wished she wasn’t nuts. You’d have to be nuts to be humping in a parking lot with some guy you just met but maybe he was a little nuts too. “Where did you want to go?”

“Get in,” she told him, shaking the car keys out of her purse. “Let’s just get out of here.”

His phone buzzed. Conner. Sean put it up to his ear to answer. “Hey. I got a little hung up. Yeah, go on to bed, I won’t be real late.” He shut the phone off, relieved, he guessed, that he wouldn’t have to worry about Conner. He was covered, yes, free to follow his dick around all night, great idea. He walked behind the car to the passenger side, lowered himself with care—he was used to his truck, to climbing up—and shut the door behind him.

“Hey,” she said, smiling at him. The inside of the car was small, some little undersized Nissan. She started the engine and it came to life with a rattle.

“Hi yourself.” Sean draped an arm around her neck, tried to get some purchase on her left breast.

Laurie allowed this, waiting for him to be done with his probing and squeezing, then said, “It’s kind of hard for me to see behind me . . .”

“Oh. Sure.” He took his arm away. He needed to move the car seat so he’d have more legroom. It slid a grudging few inches. The pain in his back felt like a crack in glass, a radiating starburst. “Are you OK to drive? You want me to?”

“I’m fine. I just had to clear my head, you know, get some fresh air.” Laurie steered them out of the parking lot, down an access road and past a strip mall, darkened, closed, then onto 101 North. She checked the rearview mirror. “Good. I don’t think he’s following. Anyway, he doesn’t know where I live.” She was in the left lane but not driving all that fast. Headlights kept coming up behind them, bearing down on them with glare, then pulling around to pass them on the right. “So, Steve . . .”

“Sean.”

“. . . can I ask you about something because I’m curious, nosy, whatever name you want to hang on it, also cause I don’t see why we shouldn’t know each other a little better. Did you used to be married? Or maybe you are now. I shouldn’t assume.”

They were coming up on Petaluma but she hadn’t changed lanes and it looked like they were still heading north. Sean said, “You know what we should have done? Let me get my truck, so I can follow you, so you don’t have to drive me back later.” It had been stupid to leave the truck behind. You never wanted to be without an escape vehicle.

“Oh, I don’t mind driving, don’t worry about that. You know what they say about assume. It makes an ass out of you and me. Are you gonna tell me? Is this like, a sensitive subject, marriage?”

“No, I’m not married, we got divorced.” The front seat was small enough that they sat almost shoulder to shoulder, which made it hard for him to see her face unless he was obvious about it and turned around to look. “What about you?”

“Ha. I’ve been divorced almost as many times as I’ve been married.” She laughed at this, pleased with her own joke. “Don’t worry. Every other way but legal, I’m divorced. Whose fault was it, yours or hers?”

“Depends on who you ask. So where is it you live? You up in Santa Rosa?”

“No, Cleveland.” More of the laughing. Yeah, she was a scream. “I’m asking you.”

“Hers.” He was trying to keep his back braced, spare it some of the jolting. Crummy suspension. The car was so low to the ground, compared with his truck, that he had the sensation of the pavement skimming along just beneath his feet and one wrong move could make his door fly open, send him rolling under the wheels.

“Everybody blamed me when my son had his troubles. It’s always the woman’s fault, isn’t it?”

Sean thought about this, about what would be best to say. “Well a lot of people are just way too quick to judge. I guess I’d have to include myself in that. There’s definitely a case to be made for a lot of things between me and my wife, I mean my ex-wife, being my fault.” He reached for his cigarettes, decided against it.

“Like what. What would you say you did wrong?”

It was a test question, he thought, so he made a show of thinking about it, and although the real answer was
Take up with her in the first place
when she always thought she was too good for me,
he said, “I don’t know, I guess I took her for granted.” He still didn’t know exactly what that meant, even after getting it tossed in his face on so many occasions.

“That’s pretty tame, Steve. I can’t believe that’s the worst thing you ever did. The worst you’re capable of.”

He did turn his head to look at her then. She wasn’t smiling or anything close to it. He wasn’t crazy about the way she was driving either, lagging off the accelerator whenever somebody came up behind them. She said, “Did you ever hit your wife?”

“No, Jesus. What kind of question is that?”

“Push? Slap? Shove? Slam a door in her face?”

“Why would you think that? Come on.”

“Well if you did, at least you aren’t bragging about it. “

He let that one settle a moment, then he said, “You don’t have a real high opinion of men, do you?”

“Just human beings in general.”

“So I guess I shouldn’t take it personally.”

“Most people,” she said, and now Sean was able to put words to the feeling he’d had all along, that she was not really speaking to him, only carrying on a conversation with herself and he was just a shape or an obstacle within her field of vision and he should not take anything she said personally because at no point tonight had he been an actual person. “Most people don’t want to admit it, but they’ve at least thought about doing terrible things.”

“No they don’t. I don’t. Give me a break.”

“Things you hear about on the news,” she said vaguely, peering into the trail of taillights ahead of them. “All the sick, twisted stuff.”

“Yeah, well I’m not fascinated by anything sick.”

“You sure about that?” Her face turned briefly in his direction. The dashboard lights gave the silver makeup an iridescent green cast.

“This is kind of a stupid argument, you know? I can’t even remember how it started. You’re not real good at small talk, anybody ever tell you that?” He moved as far as he could toward the door, away from the unpleasant stiff touch of her weird jacket. He couldn’t remember what he’d thought was attractive about her. “You know what, I think maybe I should call it a night. I think you should take me back to the bar.”

A moment later he said, “You need to get in the right lane.”

They came up on top of the first Santa Rosa exit, then it was past them. Sean sighed. “Where we going, Oregon? I think you’ll have to stop for gas somewhere.”

She didn’t answer and she didn’t change lanes. He said, “This is really childish, Laurie. What is this, kidnapping? Should I call nine-one-one or something?” He was trying to keep it light, funny, even sound a little bored, but he was fighting a wave of sickness, as if the dread that had been following him all day or all of his unhappy days had finally caught up with him.
Conner
. His son’s name the only charm he had against it, his son all that counted in a life where he had not done any one worst thing, only a long series of bad ones, for which payment had now come due. And one of his mistakes had been thinking that every new woman was a way to start over.

Laurie said, “I really didn’t want to be alone tonight. I’m sorry if I got a little pushy.”

“That’s OK.” He was relieved that she was talking again. “Sure, that can get to you, being alone.” He waited. “I would really appreciate it if we turned around now.”

“Let me tell you a story,” she said, “about the worst thing somebody ever did.”

L
innea’s mom used to be married to Linnea’s father and Jay used to be married to a woman named Angela. Now her mom and Jay were married and they talked about their “practice marriages,” and this was terribly funny.

Jay and Angela had a daughter named Megan. Linnea’s mom and her dad had Linnea. Linnea’s mom and Jay had Max, who was still a little kid and unable to appreciate that he was the result of so much practice. Linnea guessed that she and Megan were the practice children. They were almost the same age (Megan fifteen, Linnea fourteen), and they hated each other and nobody at school better try calling them sisters because they weren’t. Megan was one of those total bitches who ignored people, then once in a while for no reason gave them a big fake smile. Once, when Megan was visiting, she walked into Linnea’s room and wrinkled up her nose and asked, “What smells so funny?”

Linnea’s father used to live in Ohio with them and now he was in California somewhere. Sometimes Linnea thought she remembered him but really, she was probably making things up. Linnea’s mom told people, even people who might not be expected to take an interest, that he hadn’t ever paid a nickel in child support but it was worth it to get rid of the sorry bastard.

They’d gotten by all right on their own, Linnea and her mom, for most of Linnea’s life, and then her mom decided she wanted a man around the house. Jay was OK. Except that he had big hairy eyebrows like Ugg the Caveman. And Max was OK, in fact he was one pretty cool little kid. But Megan was not OK. Angela was not OK, especially when she called the house for one excuse or another but it was all to try and remind Jay that she had the biggest tits in the world and didn’t he miss them? Why did Linnea have to have these people in her life, taking up space and inflicting their stupid selves on her? Not to mention people even more remotely connected who came up from time to time, like Angela’s loser boyfriend or the loser boyfriend’s parents, who were going to get Megan a car for her sixteenth birthday except Jay would have to pay the insurance. One more stupid phone call, one more stupid fight, all these random people with the power to annoy and distress her. It was embarrassing to have such a messed-up family.

Linnea’s mom said there wasn’t any such thing as normal family these days. And that men, by which she mostly meant Linnea’s father, had gotten it into their heads that life was to be lived without responsibilities, and expecting them to support themselves, let alone their women and children, was some kind of grave insult to their personhood.

Linnea’s mom was cutting Linnea’s hair in the bathroom and waving the scissors around to make her point. She used to be a beautician, so none of them was ever allowed to get their hair cut at a real salon. She added that Linnea might not like Angela or Megan, God knows she didn’t like them much herself—the scissors dove in, took another bite—but at least Jay was doing right by them instead of pretending they didn’t exist.

“Yeah, yeah,” Linnea said. “All hail Jay.” The view of herself in the bathroom mirror was discouraging. The mirror was never her friend. She was draped in one of the old towels and her hair was wet and combed down straight over her eyes. Her hair was an ordinary brown and her mom cut it the same way every time, shoulder length and with bangs. She was pretty sure Angela and Megan got their hair done at the kind of place that also offered massages and manicures.

But somewhere there was a mirror behind this mirror that showed her as she ought to be, was meant to be: wised-up, coolly amused, with her hair like a rock star’s, all mussed and slutty.

“Uncross your legs,” her mother directed. “Or I won’t get both sides even.” Her mother’s fingers moved through Linnea’s hair like a bird building a nest, making minute adjustments.

“Mom? Is Angela going to marry Bat Boy?” Bat Boy was the loser boyfriend. He was called that because of his peculiar, nearly lipless mouth.

“Now wouldn’t that be nice. Then maybe she wouldn’t always be pestering us. I don’t expect we’ll be that lucky.”

A lot of what her mom didn’t like about Angela was money. Angela took money out of their pockets and food off their table, Linnea’s mom said. Angela thought she deserved to live better than Jay’s new family and she wouldn’t be happy until they were all in the poorhouse and that’s why she called and said Megan needed all these extra expenses every month, like tennis lessons, and then physical therapy for her hand when she hurt it playing tennis. Linnea’s mom was always talking about money and worrying about money because she was only working part-time at a dry cleaner’s until Max was in school and meanwhile Linnea had better get good grades if she wanted to get a scholarship, because that was probably the only way she was going to get to college. College was supposed to be this thing she wanted really bad but she didn’t. And was there even such a thing as a poorhouse?

“Well say she did get married,” Linnea persisted. “Would she change her name to Angela Bat Boy, or whatever his last name is? Would Megan? Or would Megan still be Markey?” Jay’s name was Markey, which was now her mother’s name, as well as Max’s. Linnea’s name was Kooperman, after her dad. It was like there had been a whole forest of Koopermans and they’d cut down all the trees except her.

“I have no idea. Why are you even worrying about it?”

“Say you divorced Jay. Would you change your name back?”

“Flip your head upside down,” her mother said, turning on the blow dryer.

“I want to marry a guy with an absolutely cool name. Like, Cullen.” She had to holler over the scratchy noise of the dryer.

“Nobody’s getting married. Nobody’s getting divorced. Cullen? Where did that come from? Who do you know who’s Cullen?”

“Nobody.” Her mom was so dumb. Cullen was Edward Cullen from
Twilight
.

Her mother took a section of Linnea’s hair, stretched it around a brush, and started blistering Linnea’s scalp.

“Ow!”

“I’m not even touching you. Hold still.”

Linnea hated this part. Her mom never quit until her hair was completely fried. Finally she got to sit up while her mom did some more tugging and blowing. Her mom shut the blow dryer off. “You’re done.”

Linnea contemplated her finished hair. It looked like it always did when her mom got through with it: a brown blob with the ends flipped up. “Don’t put any hair spray on it.”

“Just a little.” Her mom held her hand over Linnea’s eyes while she gassed her. “OK.”

“Gee, thanks, Mom.” She looked like Mary Tyler Moore. Or no, like she was dressed up as Mary Tyler Moore for Halloween. She was going to have to wait until morning to wash it and get it back to its normal dumb unremarkable self.

Linnea beat feet out of the bathroom. Max was playing in his room down the hall and Linnea stuck her head in the door. “Hey Spider-Man.”

“I’m not Spider-Man,” Max said. He was four and he knew all the songs to the television shows and movies.

“Spider-Man, Spider-Man,” Linnea sang, trying to get him to join in, but he was busy playing with his army guys. Linnea got down on the floor next to him. Max had the army guys lined up on the edge of a Tonka truck and was pushing them off one by one, making explosion noises. “What are you doing to your guys?”

“They got shot.”

“Oh, that’s too bad. I hope they get better.”

Max looked up from the army guys and scrutinized Linnea. “Your hair looks stupid.”

“Shut up, Spider-Man.”

“Not Spider-Man.”

“Yeah, cause Spider-Man isn’t ticklish!”

Linnea dove for his ribs. Max shrieked and squealed. Their mother looked in on them. “Don’t get him all worked up, please.”

“I’m a radioactive spider and I’m biting him!”

“Linnea,” said their mother in a warning tone.

Linnea stopped tickling and Max took a few swings at her. “You’re a big fat spider,” he announced.

“I need you to set the table,” their mother said, heading toward the kitchen. It was kind of funny that Max looked more like their mother than Linnea did, even though he was a boy. Their mother looked like a palomino horse. Max had the same goldy hair and light eyes. Linnea guessed she looked like her father. It wasn’t the kind of thing anybody was going to tell her.

Jay came home and sat in the den watching the news. The news was all he ever watched. Linnea wasn’t allowed to watch MTV or some of the movies. Her mom and Jay were so clueless. They didn’t know all the things you could get on the computer or on a phone.

Jay worked at FedEx, scooting packages around on a forklift. He always came home tired, like it was so hard to drive around all day. Linnea set the table for dinner and tried to sneak back into her room. She was soft-footing it past the den when Jay called to her. “Hey sis. Come in here a minute.”

Linnea edged around the doorway, half in and half out. “How was school?” Jay asked.

“It was all right.” She figured Jay meant, did she get into a fight with Megan. But Megan was a sophomore and the two of them didn’t have classes together. They only saw each other in the halls, and they could usually steer around each other.

“Your mom did your hair, huh?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Don’t let her catch you making that face.”

“Can I do my hair a different color? Or even just highlights?”

“That’s up to your mom.”

“But you’d be OK with it, right?”

“You have to ask her.”

Jay still had his FedEx polo shirt on. It made him look like he played golf for a living. His eyebrows practically met in the middle. He wouldn’t let Linnea’s mom wax them. Linnea said, “Why do I have to learn algebra? I bet I never have to use algebra in my whole life.”

“Yeah, but what if you grow up and decide you want to be an algebra teacher?”

“You’re killing me. I got a B on my French quiz.”

“Why not an A?”

“Come on. Nobody gets A’s.”

“Linnea.”

“How about you pretend I told you I got an A.”

“Funny, kiddo.” Jay called her things like kiddo and sis, because she wasn’t his real daughter. And Linnea called him Jay, because he wasn’t her real father, just some guy that she’d gotten used to having around.

On the television, a bunch of foreign people were marching along a street and hollering. Then the picture switched to somewhere else, a flood, and then the president giving a speech, then a man came on who looked like Mr. Field her algebra teacher but wasn’t, and he said that the government was taking over everything now, taking over businesses and schools and banks and taxing everybody to death and coming to take their guns away.

“Do you have a gun?” Linnea asked, just to be saying something.

“That’s nothing you need to worry about.”

Linnea thought that might mean that he did, most likely in his closet somewhere, and that was kind of exciting, at least more exciting than most things about Jay. She was going to look around for it the next chance she had.

Her mom called everybody in for dinner. They were having cube steak and fried potatoes and green beans. Max got macaroni and cheese because that was all he ever ate. Linnea finished eating and took her plate to the sink and then went to the cupboard and fixed herself a bowl of Frosted Flakes. Her mom said if she was still hungry she should have had some more meat and vegetables and Linnea said no, what she really wanted was Frosted Flakes.

Sometimes she felt that these people she lived with, each one of which was related to her in some different way or not at all, were like a cartoon, like
The Simpsons
, and everything they did was probably really funny if you were just outside watching it.

The next day at school all the freshmen had an assembly about citizenship, and how they were all members of their community and they should all sign up for some activity, like helping old people rake their leaves or volunteering at the food pantry or reading to little kids at the library. They should get involved.

Linnea didn’t think she was the community type. There weren’t any windows in the auditorium and that sucked because outside it was a perfect October day, breezy and cool with the air full of colored leaves like fluttering birds. And today was only Tuesday.

She yawned and her friend Patti poked her. “Wake up. Get involved.”

Linnea poked her right back, then one of the teachers gave them the stink-eye so they both put on their best paying-attention faces until he turned his back, and then they had to try not to laugh.

Finally it was over and they got to go back to third period, which was English. They were reading Maya Angelou so they would know something about black people.

Linnea had to go to the bathroom and she told Patti to tell Mrs. Beet that she’d be there in a minute.

The bathroom was at the end of the third-floor hallway, one of the small ones with only three stalls. When she’d finished peeing, she washed her hands and fussed with her hair. She thought her mom had cut it too short. It looked like it had gotten caught in a blender or something and they had to chop it off.

The bathroom door opened and Megan and one of her trashy friends came in.

They were both surprised to see each other and maybe if it was just the two of them alone they could have let it go. But Megan’s friend was watching and so Megan said, “Oh lookee here. It’s the little skank.”

“Hi there, cupcake,” Linnea came back with. It was a new one she hadn’t used yet.

Megan’s face turned blotchy red. She couldn’t ever help it. She was growing big boobs, like Angela, and she always looked like a lot of her was squeezed upward, like her tops were too tight and about to strangle her. “Hilarious,” Megan said. Then, to her friend: “Say hi to skank-head.”

The friend smirked. She was one of those eyeliner girls. “Hi, skank-head.”

Linnea clutched at her chest and pretended to crumple. “Dying here.”

Megan and Eyeliner parked themselves in front of the mirrors. They made faces at themselves, sucking in their cheeks, and then they started in piling on more makeup.

“What happened to your hair?” Megan asked. “It looks extra queer today.”

“Shut up, bitch.”

Megan and Eyeliner looked at each other. “Oooh,” they said.