The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer (3 page)

Norma winked at me and asked if we had set the date for the wedding yet. She's off her rocker if she thinks I go near him. Any boy I go near won't be pulling on my hair like that.... I think he'd pull on my hair the way they do in my fantasies. With their whole hand, slowly making a fist at the back of my head, and pulling me close for a tongue kiss.

I wonder if all penises look the way Dad's does. I can still see Mom trying to cover it with the sheet that night. It sort of reminded me of something raw. Something that might be okay in a while, or was okay a while ago, before someone pulled all of the skin off it and got it looking all pink and weird. Maybe I'll see a nicer one someday. God, I hope I do. I won't lie there like Mom did. Just like a fish on the dock, trying to learn how to breathe out of water. Little tiny huffs and puffs, but nothing else. If I can find the right man, maybe I'll be comfortable enough to act just the way I think girls should when they are with someone. Half in control and half... I don't know the word. Maybe I'm getting too nasty. I would just die if anyone saw what I've written.

The owls have started hooting. One of them is just above me in the tree... Something about him is strange. I know it is a boy owl, and I feel like he's watching me. Each time I look up at him his head moves like he is quickly turning away from me. I wonder if he knows what I've been writing. God, I had better start being a very good girl. Right away. Perhaps he is a bird like in that story I read. This big bird could swoop down and rest on someone's shoulder, acting very sweet, but would then read the person's mind. If the person was thinking bad thoughts, the bird would peck away at the person's eyes and ears so that there would only be questions of sound and sight in the person's head, instead of bad and nasty thoughts.

I dream of flying sometimes. I wonder if birds dream of going to school or to work sometimes. Having suits and dresses instead of the feathers we dream of. I would fly right over Twin Peaks and out over the land beyond it. I'd never come back if I didn't have to.

I'll write a poem, then head back home.

Inside me there is something

No one knows about

Like a secret

Sometimes it takes over

And I drift back

Deep into darkness.

This secret tells me

I will never grow older

Never laugh with friends

Never

be who I should if I ever reveal

Its name.

I cannot tell if it is real

Or if I dream of it

For when it touches me

I drift off

No tears come

No screams

I am wrapped up

In a nightmare of hands

And of fingers

And of small tiny voices in the

woods.

So wrong

So beautiful

So bad

So Laura.

I have to go home. Now. It is too dark. This is not a nice place to me right now.

Laura

August 16, 1984

Dear Diary,

Never before in my life have I been so confused. It is five-thirty exactly in the morning, and I can barely hold this pen I am shaking so much. I have been in the woods again. Lost. But have been led. I think I am a very bad person. Tomorrow I will start a new way of living. I will not think any more bad thoughts. I will not think any more about sex. Maybe he will stop coming if I try harder to be good. Maybe I could be like Donna. She is a good person. I am bad.

Laura

P.S. I promise, I promise, I promise to be good!

August 31, 1984

Dear Diary,

I have not written to you for ages because I have been trying so hard to be happy and good and around people all the time so that I am never alone to think about the wrong things. Today I must write to you, though, to tell you of the news.

I got my period. It is not at all what I thought it would be. School starts next week and now this. I was getting out of bed this morning and saw the blood. I called for Mom, and she of course made this enormous deal out of the whole thing. She called Dad when I had told her not to tell anyone. And now everyone probably knows up at the Great Northern. All I wanted was some damn pads or something, and she has to go into all of this stuff about how I am now a woman and everything. Okay. Okay. So it is kind of special. But this can only make things worse if I am not careful. I'm in bed now with cramps.

Mom moved the television into my room, which was nice, and I have a heating pad on my belly and tons of aspirin on my nightstand. Television doesn't interest me much, so I am left once again with strange thoughts of life and of... other things. I guess what is coming from me was to be the life source of some other being. I am glad there is no one inside me right now. At least not a child.

Sometimes I think there is someone inside me, but it is another, stranger part of me.
Sometimes I see her in the mirror.
I don't know that I ever want to have children of my own. Something happens to parents, or people who become parents. I think they forget they were ever children themselves and that things might embarrass or upset their kids sometimes, but they have just forgotten or decided to ignore that. Too many bad things happen to me sometimes late at night, so I probably would not be such a good mother. This makes me sad inside.

I am glad of one thing. Jupiter is beside me in bed, and he is purring away softly. Like you, he would never criticize me.

Laura

September 1, 1984

Dear Diary,

My breasts ache, which is almost silly because they're so tiny. I'll admit they are bigger than they were last week, and certainly nicer looking. Always hard at the little pink tips. But God they hurt.

Mom came in earlier and we actually had a nice talk. I told her I wished she hadn't told Dad about my period, and she apologized but said she only did it because she knew how proud he would be of his little girl's becoming a woman. She changed the water in my heating pad and rubbed my stomach for a long time. We didn't need to say anything to each other for a long while, and still I felt like we were talking.

She crawled into bed with me for about an hour after that and let me fall asleep on her shoulder. We shared a soda when I woke up, and for the first time in a long while, I felt like we were really close.

I hope I can sleep through the night tonight.

Love, Laura

September 9, 1984

Dear Diary,

I have discovered something about myself. Do you remember the night I told you I woke up with that wonderful feeling? Well! There is a special place on my body that lets me feel that as often as I like. A warm, wonderful place where everything else melts away and I am free to just feel good. My little secret red button. This is all mine. Finally something that will take me away along with my fantasies. I can do it in my bed, very softly with my fingertip, which is so sweet. I can do it in the bathtub with the water as it pours out of the faucet. (I never knew a bath could be so enjoyable!) Or in the shower, with a small stream of water coming from above. I move and jump and sometimes have to grab a pillow and put it over my head so that it is dark and no one can hear me making little noises. It is, after all, a secret, and whether this is right or wrong, I feel very good when it happens and no one need ever know, except you, dear Diary.

It has been quite a week with my period coming and all, and now this sweet-as-honey discovery. Now I am beginning to feel like a woman, and someday very soon, perhaps I will share this with someone special.

Good night! Good night! Good night!

Laura

P.S. I hope in my heart that I am not doing something that is wrong by touching myself. I hope this is something all girls do, and that I won't be punished for it later.

September 15, 1984

To the person invading my privacy:

I cannot believe the distrust I feel in my family and friends. I know for a fact that my diary was taken and read by someone, maybe several someones. I will not be writing any more in this diary for a long time, if ever. You have ruined my trust and my feeling of security. I hate you for that, whoever you are!

On these pages I have written things sometimes too scary or too embarrassing even to read again myself... I trust that these pages are turned only by me, only when I wish. Many things are hurting and confusing me. I need my private pages, in order to see my mind outside me, push it away.

Please stay away from this diary.

I mean it.

Laura

October 3, 1985

Dear Diary,

I have decided, over twelve months later, to begin speaking to you again. I have found a hiding place I will not speak of, in case you are found outside it and someone nosy wishes to know of its whereabouts.

I know it was not your fault someone found you and decided to pry, but it has taken me a long time to feel safe enough to write in your pages again. Many, many things have happened since you last heard from me, and many of these things have proven that my thoughts on the world's being mostly a cruel and sad place are true and have been confirmed as such.

I trust no one, and only rarely myself. I struggle most mornings, afternoons, and evenings with what is right and what is wrong. I do not understand if I am being punished for something I have done wrong, something I don't remember, or if this happens to everyone, and I am just too stupid to understand it.

First of all, I found out that Dad did not give Troy to me. Benjamin Horne did. The details are not important, but let's just say I overheard Audrey arguing with her dad about it, when I was up at the Great Northern visiting Johnny. Johnny is Audrey's brother, Benjamin's other child. Johnny is slow. He is older than I am, but has the mentality of a young child. That's what the doctors say at least.

Sometimes I think he's just chosen to keep quiet because it is so much more interesting sometimes to just listen to people instead of talking to them. He never speaks except to say "Yes" or "Indian." He loves Indians. He wears a headdress constantly. One made of beautifully colored feathers and died strips of leather. In his eyes the world is a strange mix of happiness and pain, and I think I understand Johnny more than I do a lot of other people. Perhaps I could find a way to spend more time with him. He is so often left alone.

I am glad that Troy is my pony, and I love riding him, walking with him, and just watching him graze. But now I feel awkward about Dad. Like he is less of an honest man for claiming that Troy was a gift from him. Maybe Benjamin wanted it that way, I don't know. But no matter what, I am somehow more intrigued by Benjamin now and feel like I owe him more than Dad. Sometimes I think that I would rather not have gotten a pony of my own at all, because that way I wouldn't have lost any respect for Dad, and Benjamin would just have been Benjamin. Even worse, Audrey and I will probably never ever get along now. I am a little sick inside that I am the one who caused this. Also it gives me a feeling of power. Why do these things happen to me?

You know, I think out of all of the men I know in the world, Dr. Hayward has been the most loving to me. He is unselfish, kind, and always shows me a gentle smile of inspiration or forgiveness -or anything that somehow always perfectly fills the gap I feel inside me. Thirteen years ago, he brought me into the world and held tight to my small body, for just a moment. In daydreams, I imagine that moment to be one of the warmest there ever was in my life. I love him for holding me, that frightened young child fresh to the air and light, and for making me believe, without even a word, that he would hold me again if I ever needed him to.

He reminds me of someone I wouldn't mind seeing every day of my life. A grandfather sweetness, inside a father's helping hand.

I'll be back after dinner. There is plenty of more news.

Love, Laura

October 3, 1985, later

Dear Diary,

Dinner was good tonight. One of my favorite meals, potato pancakes with creamed-corn topping and vegetables on the side. I'll have to start changing the way I eat soon, or run the risk of blowing up like a balloon. Mom made it special for me tonight because she knows I'm still upset about Jupiter. She and Dad ate chicken instead.

Jupiter is the other news. Usually he'll go out back and play in the yard area. It isn't fenced in, but he never wandered. I guess he was too smart to leave a home that loved him so much and fed him so well. Even though I didn't write to you often of him, he was one of the most special things in the world to me, always sweet and gentle. Always loved me no matter what I looked like or what I had done wrong or right for the day.

Often, on nights that I could not sleep, the two of us would play downstairs with a ball of string, to only the light of the tiny wall lamp. We would enjoy ice cream in the kitchen afterward. He was a true vanilla fan. It would be dark in the house, and the two of us prowled together until sleep found us, hours after we had given up on getting any at all. I still have a photo Dad took of Jupiter and me on the living room couch after one of these nights. We hadn't made it back upstairs to sleep and had fallen asleep on the couch instead.

I gave the photo of Jupiter to Sheriff Truman so that he could post it in the station. I hope they find whoever hit Jupiter. I know it was probably an accident, because a few minutes before it happened, he had found a small mouse or something... I hadn't paid much attention, but he raced off with it and was hit out on the road. Mom heard the noise and called for me to stay where I was until she knew what had happened. But sometimes Mom and I think the same thoughts, have the same dreams, and she knows better than to think I'd stay in my room
when I knew.
So I didn't listen and went out to see him, still breathing for a few moments afterward, and bleeding from his eyes and tummy.

I can't believe someone could hit a cat like that, right in the middle of the day, and not tell someone. Not think to stop and come to the closest house and report what had happened. Mom heard the car screech, and Dad says he wishes he had been home because he might have been able to tell what kind of car it was that hit him, just by the sound. I doubt it, but it was a nice thought.