Holes in [M]y Slacks

I can't remember why I needed to go to the store. There's a lot I don't remember about 1994, so take this story with a grain of salt.

It was well after dark, but along with my uncle, I was cleaning and sorting through the apartment I had once shared with my mother. Two days earlier, she died after a long, brutal struggle with breast cancer. Now her brother and I were hauling away her things and picking those few of mine that would fit in a suitcase. In less than a week, I would be living in a state a thousand miles from mine with family I barely knew.

As I left the building, I was dressed for hard work in a ratty T-shirt and faded jeans so full of holes that they revealed much of my skin with each step. We lived in a shitty NY neighborhood, and normally I dressed for it in baggy clothes that hid my body. That night, I could have been sleepwalking for all I was aware of my surroundings.

I made the trip without incident and once home, resumed working. Then the phone rang.

As my uncle worked in another room, I answered, and a high-pitched voice - sounding bashful, almost boylike - asked, "Did you get everything you needed at the grocery?"

"Who is this?" I replied.

The voice ignored my question and began to giggle excitedly, like a little kid making a prank call.

"Is this Seth?" I asked. Seth and I were in the same 8th grade class, and a few weeks earlier, we'd gone to the movies together. It was my first date, except I wouldn't let him call it one or do more than hold my hand.

The voice explained that no, it wasn't Seth but it was someone who knew me, even though I didn't know him. He was watching out for me and he saw me at the store and he liked what he saw, he liked it a lot, but clearly I needed some new pants. "You need some new clothes. You got too many holes in your slacks," he said.

Something was very wrong and it was all there in that one word, slacks - too old-fashioned, and spoken too eagerly, like a man smacking his lips on a juicy apple. Using the same logic that had served me so poorly during mom's illness, I decided that as long as I pretended everything was fine, reality would contort itself accordingly. Instead of calling for my uncle or just hanging up, I stood there in the hall with the phone to my ear, listening to the boy talk in a whisper about everything he saw and everything he was going to see while I babbled back with increasing panic, "Seth, stop kidding around. Maybe you thought this would make me laugh but it's not funny, Seth...please stop." I'd begun to shake, and it was audible it in my voice.

"THIS ISN'T SETH."

Instantly, I was so frightened that my vision tunneled to a point as if I stood outside myself, watching a pale girl on the phone in a dark hall, a stranger talking to a stranger. No amount of denial could disguise that as the voice rose to a shout from a whisper, it darkened all the way down to the bass registers. Seth's voice had yet to change. The pale girl wasn't talking to a boy, she was talking to a man - a man so consumed with rage that he sounded nearly possessed by it.

The man spoke again. Now he sounded calm, even happy.

"You're ready; I know you are Laura. You showed me that tonight."

He laughed at my silence, then said something I can't recall no matter how long I sit here thinking about it. Whatever it was, it set my feet walking toward the handset, where I lay down the phone and paused. When it didn't ring again, I walked into my mother's room and without a word to my uncle, resumed throwing away all the pieces of her life that no one wanted anymore.

Within a week I was on a plane to my new home, but it took years to remember what happened, and I've given up on understanding it. I'll never know if the man who called me would have made good his threats. I'll never even know who he was. What I do have is the strangest and coldest possible comfort: like all good mothers, mine devoted much of her life to protecting her child from harm. I missed that protection bitterly once it was gone, but by dying when she did, my mother may just have saved my life.