“What do you remember about your childhood,” Dr. Lance asked Marlise. “Anything. The smallest detail.” Her mind towered, blank as cloud. Her first school, benign enough, hallways, beds in a row for the girls like her, who boarded during the weekdays. Daytime naps on floor mats. Sour milk. Small animals treading air in wire wheels above cedar chips in little cages. Cards above the blackboard showing how to make the letters she practiced drawing over and over on ruled paper. Chapel on Thursdays. Talk of God the Father, an abstraction as remote and unlikely to Marlise as parents, though she bowed her head and prayed.
Maurice, mildly affable, dutiful, distant godfather, still lived in Haddonfield then, and she spent weekends and vacations with him and his family, but a few years ago he’d moved to a stone farmhouse in Bucks County. He’d had a series of pretty wives, a host of wary step-children, one of whom, a girl about her own age, had fingered her when they shared a bunk bed on a family stay at the shore. Was she supposed to feel something as the older girl pushed two fingers up inside her? “Don’t you want to?” the girl had asked. “Look, I’ll show you how, silly,” taking Marlise’s hand and slipping it under the elastic waistband of the older girl’s pajama bottoms. Hair there where Marlise had none yet. Grains of sand in the sheets, the girl’s larger hand on top of Marlise’s, pushing her fingers down on top of the digits like piano keys, the older girl hot inside, wet, as she writhed and made small grunts, squeezing Marlise’s fingers with her body. Then she pulled Marlise’s hand away, rolled on her side, back to Marlise, and almost immediately began to snore. Fingers sticky, Marlise wiped them on the bedsheets. Later, she climbed out of the bed and made a pallet on the floor. Staring at the ceiling, she tried again, on herself, using the other hand. Nothing. She wanted to cry. When she woke up, it was morning. The other girl stood over her in a swim suit, then spun around and laughed on her way out the bedroom door. “You’ll be okay, Marly Baby,” she’d said. Marlise lay still on the floor, the rental house around her already smelling of the new day’s bacon, maple syrup, and suntan oil.
Marlise told none of this to Dr. Lance. “I remember Miss Olensky,” she said. The school librarian, who had shown her the Little House books, the “signature” biographies of the queens, the war nurses, the authors. Then later, real teachers showed her the writers who became her other teachers, opened worlds where orphans triumphed, Reader, I married him, but where, too, you could be shut up, fatally, in Prose. It would have starved a gnat to live as small as I. Or a posse of other lost children could crush your eyeglasses and kill you.
“Do you remember your mother and father?” Dr. Lance had asked.
Her father, not at all. He was a figment she’d mapped onto Maurice and her Uncle Cole, whom she could not recall ever meeting, though surely she had met him, her dead mother’s brother, the heir of Paradise Close, everyone else in the immediate family dead now, an oddball, who owned lots of properties he refused to repair or abandon completely. When Silas had suggested to her that Maurice might actually be her real father, Marlise had struck him on the mouth. Which had surprised them both, split his lip, and made him bleed. They both had laughed, dabbing at the scarlet blood with tissues. But this possibility was something that had also crossed her mind, and more than once. Why else would Maurice have been so doggedly devoted to her, in his remote and bumbling way, despite all of his own draining domestic and financial entanglements?
Once she’d dreamt that Dr. Lance was her father, helping her learn to tie her shoes, bent at her feet. “I remember my mother with an umbrella,” she offered. “What color was it?” Dr. Lance had asked. “Cochineal,” she lied, savoring the word. The photograph she possessed was black and white. And after all, Marlise was barely three when the car her father was driving slid on a sheet of black ice into the sludgy deeps of the Raritan Canal and drowned both parents. She recalled nothing about the funeral, and not much after that, either.
“Who are you, then,” Silas had asked at one point, his arm draped around her shoulder. They were on a sofa in the common room, where one of the nurses was wrapping a string of colored lights around an artificial Christmas tree though Thanksgiving was still a week away. Marlise felt the world sliding inexorably from equinox to the extremes of solstice.
“I’m Ignorance,” she’d said, “and Want.”
“That’s Dickens,” he said. “Not you.”
They sat for a while in silence, Silas stroking her arms, nuzzling her ears, nibbling her neck. “Schade. Marlise Schade,” he said. “You know, in German, schade means ‘bad.’”
“Too bad,” she’d said.