As Becky tried to think of a tart comeback, Laura Dobrinsky reappeared. Her cumulus of hair reeked of pot smoked in chill autumn air, which had hardened the nipples clearly visible through the crepe of her blouse, beneath her unzipped biker jacket. She sat down backward on Tanner, straddling one of his thighs.
“I’ve been telling Becky she needs to go to Crossroads,” Tanner said.
Laura appeared only then to notice Becky. “It’s not for everyone,” she said.
“You loved it,” Tanner said, his beautiful hands clasped low on Laura’s belly.
“I liked the intensity. Not everyone does. There were people who got fucked up by it.”
“Like who?”
“Like Brenda Maser. She had a nervous breakdown on the spring retreat.”
“She had a freakout,” Tanner said, “because Glen Kiel dumped her for Marcie Ackerman the day before the retreat.”
Laura asked Becky if she could imagine someone bawling for twenty hours straight. “It started with a screaming exercise,” she said. “You scream and then you stop, except that Brenda didn’t. I was in Ambrose’s car with her on the drive home. You could hug her, you could leave her alone, it didn’t matter. We ended up just sitting there listening to her cry. Kind of wanting to strangle her to make it stop. We got to her house, and Ambrose took her inside and handed her off to her parents. Like, here’s your daughter, there seems to be a problem, uh, we don’t know anything else about it.”
Becky tried to imagine Clem on a retreat, screaming, and could not.
“It wasn’t a nervous breakdown,” Tanner said. “Brenda was in school the next morning.”
“Oh, well, then.” Laura gave Becky a funny overbright smile. “Only twenty hours of crying. What’s not to like?”
Another thing Becky had enjoyed about her aunt was her disdain. Shirley had exercised it constantly, often with salty language. After she died and Becky’s mother pronounced her judgment, Becky understood what a survival mechanism disdain had been for her aunt, who had few other defenses against an uncaring world. For Becky herself, disdain was more of an emergency measure, taken only when someone directly tried to make her feel bad. Leaving the Grove that night, rattled by an unaccustomed sense of inferiority, she tried to summon it, but there was nothing to disdain about Laura Dobrinsky except her shortness, which Becky, even in an emergency, could see wasn’t fair. Laura was the Natural Woman that Becky had heard her sing about being made to feel like, in her giant voice, and there was no disdaining Tanner for anything. She went to bed that night wondering if Tanner had been right about her—if she really was afraid of life. The boredom she felt at her birthday party, the following night, was another sign that she needed to start living.
If Shirley hadn’t left her thirteen thousand dollars, she might not have chosen Crossroads as the place to start. She did have an instinct that showing up at Crossroads would be a delicious kind of shock to those who paid attention to such things. If she happened to like it, Tanner would be more respectful of her, and if she thought it was stupid, well, then she would have something to disdain. But she knew how her father loathed Rick Ambrose. She wasn’t exactly forbidden to go to Crossroads, but she might as well have been.
Only after he’d lectured her about Shirley’s money did she decide to defy him. It wasn’t that she thought he was wrong. She got that her loony aunt had played favorites and that it was up to her to make things right, by sharing her money. And yet she felt betrayed, in a way that hurt no less for being childish. How many times had her mother told her how specially dear she was to her father? How many stupid walks had she taken on the assumption that the walks were super-important to him? If she’d known he was going to yank away her inheritance before she could even be excited about it, she would never have gone on so many walks. What was the point if all she got out of it was a sermon about fairness? He couldn’t even wait for her to find her own way to a generous impulse. It was wham, bam, share the money with your brothers. Who, speaking of fairness, had never done anything for Shirley, never written her, never sacrificed valuable days of summer vacation for her, never lain awake on her convertible with eyes and nose assaulted by smoke. If her father was so fond of her, shouldn’t he at least have acknowledged that?
She invited Jeannie Cross to come with her to Crossroads. Jeannie would have run through a hail of bullets for Becky, and might have preferred it to visiting a Christian youth group, but Becky explained that Tanner Evans had dared her to go. Jeannie was duly impressed. “You’ve been hanging out with Tanner Evans?”