The bed that Marion is lying on has a huge red Leatherette headboard in the shape of a heart. Marion remembers the headboard from when she and John Bucci came here. She remembers that the wallpaper—in this room, anyway, in the honeymoon suite—was turtle-doves. It’s Eiffel Towers now, supposedly to go along with the new name, Bit O’ Paris, except nobody calls it that. Everybody still says the Meadowview Motel, and when Marion went to the bathroom she saw they still had the old towels with the entwined M’s on them.
There’s cable tv, though—that’s new. And this red duvet looks right out of the package. Marion has wrapped herself in the duvet because she suspects she’s in shock. From owning a pet store she knows that if an animal goes into shock, the first thing you do is cover it with a blanket or your coat. Then you raise its hindquarters to counteract internal bleeding.
“Not that I’m in danger of internal bleeding,” Marion thinks. “Lord knows.”
She lets out a short, incredulous laugh. The kitten on her stomach rides the movement. It is completely black, black lips, pads, black inside its ears. Every three hours Marion feeds it formula with an eye dropper, then she puts it in the bathtub and tries to make it pee. Sam was the one who said they should bring it along. “You can’t expect anyone else to get up twice in the night,” he said, and she thought, What a wonderful man. Now she thinks that this was just him leaping at the prospect of diversion.
Where is he? He’s been gone almost two hours, but she didn’t hear the car starting up. She imagines him standing on the wooden footbridge where they stood after supper and waved at their fluttering shadows way down on the river. She asks the kitten, “Do you think he’s okay?” and runs a finger down its spine. It frantically licks where she touched. Even its tongue has black on it—two black spots and a black tip.
“In the movie of my life,” she tells it, “you can cross my path.”
Marion had just turned nineteen when her mother was murdered. About a week after the funeral a white-haired secretary bearing two rabbit pies showed up from the school where Marion’s mother had taught grade three. “Nothing this terrible will happen to you again,” the woman said with such conviction that Marion snapped out of her hysterics, and from then on, whenever she found herself presented with some death-defying risk, she was inclined to take it.
Why she had become hysterical was that as she was putting the pies down, she saw a piece of skin stuck to the side of the refrigerator. She knew immediately what it was, although up until that moment her imagination had steered clear of the smithereens her mother was blown into. She’d been away when it happened, visiting her grandparents in Ayleford, and then, by the time she got home, the police and detectives had come and gone, and the kitchen had been scrubbed down by Mrs. McGraw, who had heard the shots across three fields and claimed she knew from the sound it was no regular shotgun.
The murderer was a man named Bert Kella. He was the janitor at Marion’s mother’s school. At about eleven o’clock on Saturday morning, when Marion’s father was in Garvey pricing wheelbarrows, Bert Kella drove to the house in his nephew’s ‘67 Mustang, kicked in the door, shot Marion’s mother twice from behind as she stood peeling potatoes at the sink, then shot out a living-room window and drove back to the school to drink a bottle of whiskey and have a nap. When he woke up he stole a tape recorder from the office and drove to the Catholic cemetery on Highway IO. He pulled over and started confessing. Marion never heard the tape, but her father did and there were excerpts in the papers. It was mostly a deranged ramble about all the stuck-up, cold-hearted “bitches” Bert Kella had ever met. It seems that he wrote Marion’s mother a love letter, which she never mentioned to anybody and which, on the morning of the murder, Bert Kella discovered ripped to shreds in one of the school’s garbage pails.
“That did it,” he said on the tape. “It was like a concussion really. I am a bit scared now.” Then there was the explosion of him shooting himself in the mouth.
The week before, Marion had signed her name to a Southwestern University application that her mother had filled out and more or less written the essay for. Her father had said he’d sever a couple of acres to pay the tuition. Her brother, Peter, who had graduated from the same university two years earlier and was now a vet in Morton, had phoned to say he’d show her around the campus.
That was the plan, but after the shooting nobody ever mentioned it again. Marion didn’t even get an acknowledgement from the university, and none of her teachers tried to talk her into returning to high school and finishing her final year. In other words, and for reasons that weren’t clear to her, she was off the hook, although she had trouble admitting this to herself until she was packing up her mother’s suits and blouses for the Salvation Army. “They wouldn’t have fit me anyway,” she wept as if, otherwise, she’d have reapplied to Southwestern. As if the only thing standing between her and a professional calling was the plain fact that all these career-woman outfits were two sizes too small.
Not going to school meant she didn’t have to get up at six-fifteen to catch the bus into town. Now she slept until a quarter to seven, when she heard her father in the bathroom coughing up phlegm. She went downstairs and let out the dogs. After breakfast she did the dishes, made two sandwiches for her father’s lunch, then had her shower. By eight-fifteen she was out the door. At four-thirty she came home and cleaned up the house a bit. Sometimes she saddled her mother’s horse, Daphne, and rode her down to the highway and back. At five-thirty she started supper. On Tuesday nights her father went to the Legion Hall, so at some point on Tuesday she ironed a good shirt for him. After supper, on the other weeknights, she sat in her mother’s La-Z-Boy chair and she and her father watched TV. When there was a commercial her father stood up because sitting was bad for his back. “Your mother was born with a hole in her back,” he came out with one night. “Size of a penny.”
“I didn’t know that,” Marion said.
“Above her hip.” He indicated the place on his own back. “Right where the second bullet went in, as it happens.”
A few minutes later, after he had sat down, he said, “That was just a fluke.”
He was a big, sleepy-looking man, smart with machines and animals and not much of a talker. (Of course, Marion’s mother had never let him speak. She’d say, “You tell it, Bill,” and then carry on telling the story herself.) Because of a mild palsy, his head shook, normally only a little, but at the funeral it shook so emphatically that the minister stopped the eulogy and said, “Correct me if I’m wrong, Bill.”
“You’re doing just fine, Herb,” her father told him in a calm voice, and he’d been talking calmly ever since. As devoted as Marion was to making sure he didn’t break down in grief, she expected him to at any moment. She saw him standing in the middle of the yard one morning, his head bowed, his hands up at his face, and she thought, “This is it.” Then he dropped his left hand and she saw the cigarette he’d been lighting against the wind, and she released her breath and returned to making his sandwiches, which is what her mother would have been doing right about then. Mrs. McGraw had told her that the police drew chalk outlines of her mother’s remains on the kitchen floor, and every once in a while Marion was struck by the strangely comforting sensation that those outlines were fitted along her own skin.
During the hours that her mother would have been at school, she killed time by driving her mother’s red Toyota on the concession roads, up one road, down the next, pretending that it was a job, a dire responsibility. Day after day she did this. Sometimes she drove at five miles an hour. Sometimes (remembering what the white-haired secretary who brought the rabbit pies said) she hit ninety.
Twice a week she visited Cory Bates, who had also dropped out of school and who lived with her parents in Garvey, in an apartment above a pet store. After saying, “I don’t get what Bert Kella saw in your mother,” Cory never again made any direct reference to the murder, and the last thing she did was treat Marion as if she were an object of pity. The opposite was true. “At least you’ve got a car,” she said enviously. She said, “At least your parents aren’t at each other’s throats all night.”
All day, Cory’s parents slept. Occasionally one of them got up and used the toilet or ate something standing in front of the refrigerator. Their light red hair and Mrs. Bates’s tallness and shifty green eyes seemed to discredit Cory’s claim that she was adopted, but as Cory pointed out, paediatric nurses have an edge when it comes to finding a good match. A couple of years ago Mrs. Bates had switched to looking after old people, and now she worked two nights a week in a retirement home. Mr. Bates was on disability. When Marion was there he never said a word, but Mrs. Bates was a complainer.
“The dishes aren’t done,” she said.
“I’m going to do them later!” Cory yelled in her amazingly thunderous and infuriated voice. Marion admired Cory for not sleeping all day herself, since she was always saying how tired she was.
“I’m an insomniac,” Cory said. “It started when I was pregnant.”
Her baby, a boy, was born a year ago and given to a couple who, by sheer coincidence, was also called Bates. When he grew up Cory said she was going to visit him and tell him what an asshole his father was. Although she didn’t know where he lived she wanted to send him the German shepherd puppy from the pet store downstairs.
“A boy needs a dog,” she said.
The puppy was the runt of the litter, the only one left. At night, when Cory’s father and mother were fighting, it barked and cried.
“Its cage is right below where my bed is,” Cory said. “And I swear to God,” she said, “the minute it starts whimpering, my breast milk starts dripping.”
Before going out, they usually stopped in to see the puppy. “Don’t you want to just eat it?” Cory said. Marion poked two fingers into the cage and scratched its head. “Don’t you want to just squeeze it to death?” Cory said, getting her entire slim hand through the mesh and wiggling the puppy’s hindquarters.
They drove to the new Garvey Mall. Twenty-five stores sandwiched between a Woolworth’s and a supermarket. At the Snack Track they ordered Coke sodas and fries and carried them to the mall’s eating area. Most of the tables were occupied by retired farmers who smoked cigarettes and nursed a single cup of coffee all afternoon. Some of the farmers Marion knew, and normally they’d have asked her how she was bearing up, but one look at Cory and they left it at a nod. Cory was theatrically tall and thin, and she wore thigh-high black leather boots and jeans so tight she had to unzip the fly to sit down. When there weren’t any empty tables she said “Fuck” loud enough to turn heads. Marion imagined Mr. Grit, who borrowed her father’s Rototiller every spring, going home and saying to Mrs. Grit, “Bill Judd’s girl is headed for trouble.”
Marion didn’t care. If anything, it touched her to imagine these decent men quietly grieving for her future. It comforted her. It was one of the mall’s homely comforts, along with the slow, murmuring parade of shoppers and the light-hearted music and the intermittent rumble of the men’s voices. Usually this atmosphere sent her into the same sweet trance that having her hair cut did, and so the fact is she hardly registered Cory’s savage commentary on most of the women who walked by. The only time she really paid attention was when Cory used her as her point of reference—”Oh, my God, I can’t believe it … that girl’s wearing the same ugly sweater you have”—and even then (because a raving beauty to anyone else was an eyesore to Cory), she was never aroused or offended enough to make anything of it.
They sat there for at least two hours. Sometimes they got up and wandered through Woolworth’s and the women’s clothing store, but Cory didn’t like to since she had no money to buy anything. If a newspaper had been left near their table, Cory turned to the classifieds and, in her loud voice, read the ads from the Help Wanted section.
“ ‘Experience in bookkeeping would be an asset. Must have a cheerful personality.’ Yeah, right. So they can walk all over you and gang bang you at office parties.”
One day she picked up the paper but immediately threw it down again. “I should have kept the baby,” she said. “At least then I’d be collecting mother’s allowance.”
“What about working for John Bucci?” Marion said from her reverie. John Bucci stopped by their table whenever he walked by. He managed the Elite Shoe Store, plus he was a partner in a gas station somewhere out on Highway 10 and he had an interest in a gravel pit.
“He seems like a nice fella,” Marion observed.
“Nice fella,” Cory mimicked. “Mafia drug boss, you mean. No way a guy his age—what, twenty- five, twenty-six?—no way he’s tied in with all these businesses unless they’re fronts for selling drugs.”
This woke Marion up. “Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” she laughed.
“Okay, he’s full of shit,” Cory said. “One or the other. Anyway, I don’t trust short, pretty guys.”
But half an hour later, when he came by their table, she pulled him onto a stool and asked if his gravel pit needed someone to answer the phone.
“Maybe, maybe,” he said, nodding, twisting the gold ring on his baby finger and glancing around. “Not till after Christmas, though.”
“I’ll have slit my wrists by then,” Cory said.
“Hey,” he said. “I black out at the sight of blood.”
“So I won’t do it here,” Cory said.
“Why don’t you work in the store?” he said. His eyes were on the open zipper of her jeans. “This Saturday. One day, try it out. I need somebody this Saturday. Commission plus salary.”
“Forget it,” Cory said. “I hate other people’s feet.”
“It’s their socks I can’t stomach,” John said. He looked at Marion. “How about you?”
“I like socks,” she said.
Cory snorted.
“I mean, do you want to work in the store Saturday?” he asked.
“Oh.” Marion was mortified by her mistake. “No, no,” she said. “Saturdays I can’t. Saturdays—”
“Hey.” John patted her arm. “No problem.” For the first time she noticed how black and sad his eyes were. Sad from his own mother dying, she thought. He had talked about coming to Canada with his mother and sisters, about helping his mother swab the ship’s deck to pay their passage, even though he was only five at the time.
“Bullshit,” Cory had said.
“It’s true, I swear to God,” he’d said. “My mother had arms like this”—he flexed his muscled arm—”from scrubbing other people’s floors. When she was my age, she looked fifty. But she was beautiful, like a rose.”
“Everybody thinks their slag-heap mothers are so beautiful,” Cory had said.
It’s midnight. Their car is still there. On the other side of the parking lot, outside the opened back door of the motel’s bar, two waiters whip at each other with dish towels. A dog snaps at the towels. The dog, Marion decides, is an Irish setter/Saint Bernard cross. She knows dogs. Dogs are one thing she knows.
She closes the curtains, goes over to the dresser and reaches for the eye dropper and the bottle of formula. In the light from the dresser lamp she sees two bruises on the underside of her wrist. She checks her other wrist, and it has one big bruise. When she and Sam were standing just here, and she was starting to unbuckle his belt, he seized her wrists and said, “I don’t have a real penis.”
She laughed.
“Listen to me!” he said, and there was such a feverish, lunatic look on his face that she went still and then, disoriented, she swayed, and he tightened his grip. She said he was hurting her. “Sorry,” he said, but his fingers didn’t loosen.
“I’m listening,” she whispered.
He said, “Okay,” and took a breath.
While her hands turned white he told her the whole story, going back to when he was eight and lived in Delaware. “He’s memorized this,” she thought at one point. She couldn’t catch it all. There was only the astonishing crux. “Wait,” she said finally.
“What?” he said.
“I want to see it.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I want to see it,” she repeated calmly.
“It’s a dildo, okay? You’ve seen a dildo before.”
“I want to see it.”
He released her wrists, turned around and opened his fly. She heard two clicks and then his fly zipping back up. When he turned back round he was holding it down along his thigh, concealed by his forearm. She glanced at his crotch, but he was wearing baggy pants—there was no confirmation of anything there.
“Let me see,” she said.
He opened his hand.
They both looked at it.
“It’s rubber,” she said.
“Silicone, I think. I’m not sure, actually.”
“How do you keep it on?”
“It attaches to a strap.” He folded his fingers around it and dropped his hand. “I hardly ever wear it.”
“I’m going to be sick,” she murmured. Instead her legs gave out and she fell to her knees while he tried and failed to catch her, first with his free hand and then with both hands, dropping the dildo on the dresser, but it rolled off and down the side.
“Oh, my God!” she said.
Since the dresser was bolted to a panel at the back and couldn’t be moved, he had to unbend a hanger to coax the dildo within his reach, an absurdly long and frustrating exercise that she watched in silence from where she had landed on the floor.
Cory didn’t work in John Bucci’s store on the Saturday he asked her to, but the next Saturday she did, and then in August she started working there full-time. Which meant that Marion only saw her Wednesday afternoons, when she came to the mall to do grocery shopping. Usually John wasn’t in the store. Usually nobody was.
“I can’t figure it out,” Cory said.
Marion could. Cory scared the customers, not on purpose, but she was so forbiddingly tall and glamorous, slouched in the door, and her blaring “May I help you?” had old women patting their hearts.
Driving home from the mall one day, it struck Marion that the reason John didn’t fire Cory was that he was in love with her. She looked at her stubby hands on the steering wheel and understood his craving for length. She pictured his and Cory’s light-red-haired, black-eyed, tall and short children. She saw these children, preordained, spectacular. But the following Wednesday, another salesgirl was lounging in the doorway, and when Marion asked her where Cory was, John came out of the back room and said she had quit. “She got a job stripping,” he said.
“You’re kidding!” Marion said.
He smiled. “Okay, dancing. You want a job?”
“Dancing where?”
“Ask her.” He kept on smiling. It wasn’t the smile of a broken-hearted man. “You want to go for a drive?” he said.
“Pardon?”
“You and me. Get some fresh air.”
Her eyes plunged to his shoes. In her mind one black pointed toe shot out and kicked a drug addict who didn’t have the money.
“Ah, come on,” he said. “It’s like a summer’s day out there. Beautiful. Beautiful as you.”
She laughed.
“Hey, you’re blushing,” he said. “I like that.”
He had a red convertible with the top down. Out on the highway the sun whipped her hair, but his black, combed-back hair didn’t move. Seated, he was no taller than her. Remembering what he had said about fainting if Cory slit her wrists, she wondered if all virgins bled. Her heart flapped in her stomach, but it could have been the murder. Out of the blue her heart sometimes rocked her whole body, and she put it down to aftershock. What haunted her these days was the second bullet entering a hole her mother was born with. Her mother should have been facing the other way, considering that Bert Kella pulled up the driveway in a car with a rusted-out muffler and then kicked in the door. “Why didn’t she turn around?” the police investigator asked. Nobody had an answer. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” the investigator said.
John Bucci drove to the provincial park, and they got out of the car to climb up the cliff. “Wait’ll you see the view,” he said, wrongly presuming that she never had. She followed him up the path, which had been railed with logs to provide a stairway. He loosened his tie. At the top of the stairs he opened his arms like an opera singer and made a slow, revelling circle that ended up aimed at her. With his tie off she saw the two gold chains around his neck. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he said. “I can’t believe I’m here and you’re here and it’s so warm and beautiful.”
She could feel herself blushing again. She turned and looked across the valley, where the tin roof of a house signalled out of golds and greens. A dog barked, probably from that place.
“Your hair is like music,” John said.
“For heaven’s sake,” she laughed. She had tightly curled hair the colour of barn board.
“Like pianos,” he said, stroking her head. “Like arpeggios.”
She walked away from him, over to a deep crevice in the rock. Her skin felt as if it was being pelted by rain. She went right up to the edge of the crevice and judged the distance across.
“I saw a porcupine down there once,” John said, coming up behind her.
Marion stepped back twenty paces.
“Hey, they don’t throw their quills, you know,” John said. She kicked off her sandals.
“Good idea,” he said, and started undoing his laces.
While he was still bent over, she ran past him.
Fifteen years ago she had watched her brother make the same jump. She did it the way he did, in a long stride, in splits through the air, landing on a lip of rock that jutted out below the crevice’s other side.
“Jesus Christ!” John shouted.
She grabbed a sapling to keep from falling backwards. John ran around the crevice and reached down to help her up.
“Jesus Fucking Christ,” he said. “Why’d you do that? I can’t believe you just did that.” She let him pull her onto the grass. “You could have killed yourself,” he said, dropping to the ground beside her.
“No,” she said. “I knew I could do it.” In fact, she felt like doing it again.
“But why the hell did you? I thought you were suddenly committing suicide or something.”
“I just wanted to.”
“You just wanted to,” he said, smiling, shaking his head. “In other words you’re out of your mind.”
She lay back on the grass. “I don’t think I am,” she said seriously.
He stroked her face. He kissed the scrapes on her hand. “You’re out of your mind,” he said. “I love you.”
He took off all her clothes but removed only his suit pants. The intercourse was so fast and painless she wasn’t sure it had happened until she saw a coin of blood on the grass when he was off retrieving her sandals and she was getting dressed. She placed a yellow poplar leaf over the spot. He came running back, slapping her sandals together. Driving to the mall, he said that she was so beautiful, like a peach. He said again that he loved her. She couldn’t tell if she loved him, not until the next day when she went to the shoe store and saw him kneeling over an old woman’s foot and she remembered how as a five-year-old immigrant he had swabbed a ship’s deck.
After she feeds the kitten she puts it in the bathtub and dabs a warm, wet washcloth under its tail. It bats at its pee streaming toward the drain. It jumps to feel her tears on its head. She picks it up and it sits alertly in her hand. She puts it on the pillow and opens the drawer of the bedside table and takes out the Bible. Whatever she turns to will be a message.
“And a woman,” she reads, “having an issue of blood twelve years, which had spent all her living upon physicians, neither could be healed of any.”
“Good heavens,” she says, and then covers her mouth with her hand because the door is opening.
It’s Sam.
“I came back,” he says sheepishly.
She looks him over for a clue that could have told her. His narrow hands. Musician’s hands, she used to think. He walks to the chair and sits with his legs spread.
“Did you always have an Adam’s apple?” she asks.
He touches his throat. “Not like this,” he says.
“Is that the hormones?”
“Yeah.” He keeps his eyes on her. He’s been crying, she can tell from across the room. Twice before she’s seen him cry—when his dog, Tibor, was hit by a car, and when the girl picked up her father’s shaving mug in the movie A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Those times, instead of thinking “Men don’t cry,” she thought she was witnessing a side of the artistic temperament.
She looks down at the Bible, at the word “Behold.” She says, “Well, I don’t hate you. I didn’t mean that.”
“You have every right to.”
Her throat tightens. “Is Sam your real name?” she asks.
“It is now, legally, but it’s not the name my parents gave me.” He runs his fingers through his fine blond hair, which is thinning at the temples because of hormone injections. Four years ago he started the injections. Two years ago he had a double mastectomy. His flat chest is the second thing she asked about.
“So what did your parents call you?” she asks.
His mouth twitches. “Pauline.”
“Pauline?”
“Yeah.” He gives an embarrassed laugh.
“Why didn’t you change it to Paul?” she asks, and the reasonableness and inconsequence of this question remind her of how she and her father used to dwell on why Bert Kella shot out a window in the living room instead of in the kitchen, and before Sam can answer her she cries, “I can’t believe this! I’m doomed or something!”
“Honey,” he says, coming to his feet.
“No!” She waves him back.
He puts his hands in his pockets and turns to look out the window.
“You don’t even have hips,” she says, her voice snagging. She falls back on the bed. The kitten pounces over and purrs into her ear. They have no name for it because as soon as it weighs two pounds it will be for sale. When she can speak she says, “You should have told me.”
“I know, I know,” he says. “I just love you so much. And I thought—” He taps his nails on the arm of the chair.
“Thought what?”
“I thought it would all be over by now.”
“What do you mean?”
The construction of a penis, the last in a series of operations.
“You mean you were never going to tell me?” she asks, twisting around to look at him.
“Of course I was.” He taps his nails. “You’d see the scars,” he adds.
“Who else knows?”
He looks surprised. “Nobody. Well, the doctors.”
“Does Bernie know?”
He shakes his head.
“Are your parents really dead?”
“They’re dead,” he says softly.
“You could have lied about everything,” she says.
He looks straight at her. “Presenting myself as a guy might seem like a lie to you. But to me I am a guy. In every way except one, and that’s going to change.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“Look, I knew you’d be shocked,” he says. “I expected there’d be a big blow-up. But we love each other, right? I mean, I love you, I know that. And …” He blinks and looks down. “I can still give you pleasure.”
She buries her face in the pillow. The hand that knew exactly what to do was a woman’s hand. “Let’s wait until we’re married,” he said every time her hand drifted down his body, down to what she flattered herself was an erection.
She starts crying again. “I thought it was something spiritual in you,” she says. “A vow to be pure or something.”
He taps one nail, a steady, agitating sound, like a dripping tap.
“I feel so stupid,” she says.
“I’ll never hit you,” he says quietly. “I’ll never shout at you. I’ll always love you. I’ll always listen to you. I’ll never leave you. I’ll never fool around on you.”
She has to laugh. “One thing for sure,” she says, “you’ll never get Cory Bates pregnant.”
She began to see John Bucci two or three afternoons a week plus Tuesday nights, when her father was at the Legion Hall. Because John lived with his aunt they couldn’t make love at his house, so they did it in his car. John wanted to marry her, or at least to see her more often, at nights especially, but he didn’t push her, not at first.
“I admire you for putting your father’s feelings above your own,” he said.
Which made her feel dishonest. All she was doing, really, was trying to keep everything on an even keel. Over the summer she had stopped sticking so faithfully to her mother’s routine, but she was still the woman of the house, and having a boyfriend felt like having an affair. “Maybe you can come for a visit in a couple of months,” she told John, thinking that by then her mother would have been gone a year.
His family she had met many times—his aunt, his two sisters, his four nieces and three nephews, his brothers-in-law—because on Tuesday evenings, after they’d made love, he took her to his place for something to eat, and there was always a gang in the kitchen. The sisters raved about her the way he did. They told her she had the skin of a baby, and they said they hoped her and John’s children came out with her blue eyes and dimples. They just assumed that she and John would get married and build a house on their aunt’s property, as they themselves had done. They urged her to make John hire somebody named Marcel to dig the foundation. They affectionately counselled her to hit John if he didn’t get the ball rolling. “Hit him with a stick!” they cried. “Hit him you know where!” With them she talked about her mother, since they talked so readily about their own. She knew from John that their mother had died in a car accident, but they told her how she had flown through the windshield and how in the casket her face looked like Dracula’s, it was so stitched up. They cried, and she cried. “You are our sister,” they said, which more than anything John said, or did, had her dreaming of marriage.
The aunt that John lived with, Aunt Lucia, wasn’t so friendly. She couldn’t speak English, for one thing. She glared from the stove and pointed at the chair that Marion was to sit in. She furiously circled her fist in front of her mouth if Marion ate too slowly. As Marion was on her way out the door Aunt Lucia usually thrust a jar of something at her—relish, spaghetti sauce—as if challenging her to take it, as if she knew that Marion would lie to her father about where it had come from.
“From Cory’s mother,” was what Marion told him. Her father had never met Mr. or Mrs. Bates and he probably never would, given their waking hours, so it was a safe white lie. Marion had phoned them three or four times to find out about Cory, but there was never any answer. She had finally gone to the apartment and rung the bell and knocked on the door. Still no answer.
“They’re there, all right,” said Mrs. Hodgson, the old lady who managed the pet store downstairs. “Every once in a while you hear a thump.” She said that Cory left one morning on the Greyhound bus for Toronto. “Gussied up like a prostitute,” she said without malice. “You know the way she does.”
“What happened to that puppy?” Marion asked. “The German shepherd?”
“Oh, it died,” Mrs. Hodgson said. “When I wasn’t looking somebody threw in a dog biscuit laced with, oh, whatchamacallit, oh—” She snapped her fingers. “Arsenic.”
“But that’s terrible,” Marion said.
“Yes,” Mrs. Hodgson said vaguely.
“Did they ever catch the person?” Marion asked.
Mrs. Hodgson shifted on her stool. “Shut your yakking!” she shouted at the parrot in the cage behind her. She turned back. “Poison’s an awful way to die,” she said. “Contortions and foaming at the mouth. But falling from a great height, that’s what I’d hate the most. Knowing in seconds you were going to splat. I heard of this man, he was like a mad scientist. He threw live animals from apartment balconies to see how they landed. Naturally, the cats tended to land on their feet, even if they died. But I’ll tell you the interesting part. The higher the cats fell from, the better chance they had of living. Because a cat has to straighten itself out in the air, and that takes time.”
A couple of weeks later Marion was driving by the pet store and saw a Help Wanted sign in the window. On a whim she went inside and asked about it. It was part-time, Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, and seeing as she never saw John before lunch anyway, she decided to take it. She was prepared to be alone in the store (Mrs. Hodgson’s plan was to do bookkeeping and chores at home), but more often than not, Mrs. Hodgson was sitting on the stool when Marion arrived, and she didn’t budge until Marion left. While Marion cleaned cages and fed the fish and birds and played with the puppies, Mrs. Hodgson handled the cash and told Marion—and any customer who happened to be listening—her ghoulish stories. Most of them she read about in Coroner’s Report, a magazine that her dead photographer husband had taken pictures for and that she still subscribed to, but she also had plenty of her own stories, many of which concerned animals. Cats put in ovens, dryers and dishwashers. Hamsters sucked up vacuums. A dog tied to the back of a car and forced to run to death.
One day, after describing the murder-suicide of a husband and wife, she said, “You probably know about that teacher out at Marley Road School, the one that was carrying on with the janitor and he killed her?” Then, before Marion could speak, she said, “What slays me is his name was something-or-other Killer. Bart or Tom Killer. Anyways, her husband was starting to get suspicious, so she decided to call it quits. Which sent Mr. Killer off the deep end. He stabs her forty-seven times I think the number was. Then he drives out to the cemetery on Highway 10, sits himself down on his own mother’s grave, and shoots himself between the eyes.”
“Good heavens,” Marion said.
“For a janitor he sure made an awful mess,” Mrs. Hodgson said.
What struck Marion was Mrs. Hodgson having no idea that she was Ellen Judd’s daughter. She’d thought that everybody in Garvey either made the connection right away or was told about it soon enough. So that was a surprise, Mrs. Hodgson having no idea. As for her mother and Bert Kella being lovers, people had hinted along those lines before, but no one even slightly acquainted with her mother, or with Bert Kella for that matter, believed it for a second.
Marion decided not to straighten Mrs. Hodgson out. Somebody else would, sooner or later, although that’s not why she didn’t say anything. And it wasn’t because she was too upset or too disheartened, either. Actually—and this was new for her—she felt disdain. “Stabs her forty-seven times,” Mrs. Hodgson said, getting that essential fact so completely and elaborately wrong, and Marion thought, “Nobody knows.” It was a thrilling, lonely revelation.
Eventually they fall asleep, Marion in the bed, and Sam sitting in the chair. Near dawn, screeching tires wake them both up.
Sam runs a hand over his face. “There’s no sense in staying here,” he says.
Marion looks at him. His blue shirt holds its colour in the gloom. He has wide shoulders. You could draw his silhouette and pass it around and everyone would swear it was a man. Last night she believed she had no choice except to divorce him. Now she’s not sure she even has what it takes to send back all the gifts, let alone to come up with an explanation for the marriage ending on the honeymoon. “I guess we should just go home,” she says, swinging her legs onto the floor.
“Okay,” he says carefully.
“Glenda will think we don’t trust her with the dogs,” she says. Glenda is the retarded girl who works for her part-time.
“She’ll be right,” Sam says, laughing.
“Nothing is settled,” she says sharply.
He gets up and goes into the bathroom. He’s in there a long time with the taps running. She feeds the kitten. When he comes out, she and the kitten go right in. She manages to coax the kitten into peeing, then she sits on the toilet and flushes to veil the sound. Sam calls out that he’s going to the office to pay the bill, so she decides to have a quick shower. Seeing her breasts in the mirror makes her cry. Everything about her from the neck down seems a waste now, and perverse, as if she’s the one with the wrong body.
By the time he returns she is dressed and is packing the few things they unpacked. He says he thinks he’ll have a shower, too. She sits on a lawn chair outside their door and eats wedding cake until the thought of him washing his female genitals crosses her mind, and she has to spit out what’s in her mouth. A few minutes later he steps in it, coming out with the suitcases. “All set?” he asks.
In the car, neither of them say a word. At one point he clears his throat, making what strikes her as a prissy sound, and for the first time since he told her she has the horrifying thought that people might be suspicious. She remembers Grace saying, “Does he ever have long eyelashes!” She looks over at him and he’s blinking hard. It means he’s nervous, but she used to think he had a tic.
Her eyes fill. The “him” that she used to love isn’t there any more. It never was there, that’s the staggering part. And yet she still loves him. She wonders if she’s subconsciously bisexual. Or maybe it’s true that she loves blindly. When she kept protesting that she loved John Bucci—years after the divorce—her friend Emma, who was always trying to fix her up with a date, told her about an experiment in which a newborn chimp was put into a cage with a felt-covered, formula-dispensing coat hanger, and the chimp became so attached to this lactating contraption that when its real mother was finally allowed into the cage, it wouldn’t go near her.
On Valentine’s Day, John Bucci gave her chocolates in a black velvet case as big as a pizza box. Also a gigantic card with a photograph of a grandfather clock and the message “Time Will Never Change Our Love.” She dropped the chocolates off at the pet store for Mrs. Hodgson to offer to customers. The card she took home in a shopping bag and hid in her underwear drawer. The next night, during supper, her father asked if she was seeing the Italian fellow who sold shoes at the mall, and her first stunning thought was that he had gone through her drawers, but it turned out that Mr. Grit had spotted her in John’s car.
“Oh, well, I have lunch with him sometimes,” she said, which was true. “He’s a friend of Cory’s,” she added, which was also true, or had been.
“He sold me those maroon loafers,” her father said. “Must have been three years ago now. Crackerjack salesman, I’ll hand him that.”
She didn’t know what to say.
“Doesn’t he have something to do with that Esso station out on Highway 10?” her father asked. “I saw him on the phone once. In the office.”
“I think he’s a partner or something,” Marion said.
Her father pushed his plate away and took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. When his head was shaking as much as it was tonight, he didn’t light his cigarettes in his mouth. He held the match under the end until the paper and tobacco caught on their own. “Used to be a Shell station,” he said, putting the cigarette between his lips and taking a deep drag.
“Oh, that’s right,” she said.
“Jack Kreutziger owned it,” he said.
She nodded.
“Before that,” he said, “there were the Diehls. Then before that, now this is going back, it was a restaurant. I remember you could buy two thick slices of roast beef, a mountain of mashed potatoes and a side order of fresh peas for a dollar forty-nine.”
“A dollar forty-nine,” she marvelled.
“Yes, sir,” he said.
She could have told him everything—this burst of conversation was him putting out the welcome mat, doing his best to be both mother and father to her. Instead she stood up and began clearing the table. It wasn’t that she thought he’d be mad or even particularly worried about her, that had never been the issue. Her mother might have had something to say about an Italian Catholic who drove a red convertible and wore gold jewellery, but all Marion could imagine her father saying was, “You should bring him around for supper.”
Still, she didn’t tell him, and although she was touched by what he was trying to do, and she was afraid he’d go away thinking he couldn’t get through to her, it was John she felt guilty about. Ever since Christmas, John had been badgering her to give him an exact date when she intended to introduce him to her father. “Not until the end of February,” was what she said at first, February second being the day her mother died. Now that it was almost the middle of February, she was thinking she’d better wait until after her brother’s wedding in April.
“If you’re playing games with me …,” John said, shaking his head.
“You can come around the day after the wedding,” she said. “April twenty-third.”
“I mean, if you’re trying to tell me something …,” he said.
Lately he was accusing her of having hidden motives. When she got her hair cut short he said she did it to get back at him for flirting with the French girl who worked in his store.
“I didn’t know you flirted with her,” she said.
“I don’t!” he shouted.
He accused her of thinking that selling shoes was low class. Otherwise, he said, if she’d wanted to work in a store, she’d have come to him for a job.
“But it’s better for our relationship if I’m not your employee,” she said. “Besides, I really love animals.”
“I hate you working there,” he said. “That old bag’s poisoning your mind.”
She let that go because it was probably true. Despite John saying “I don’t want to hear about it,” she couldn’t resist repeating Mrs. Hodgson’s grisly stories, usually to his enthralled sisters when he was in another room, but he always seemed to walk in and catch the worst part. He said she did it on purpose, as another way of torturing him. She kissed his clenched fist. She blamed his paranoia on herself, on the secrecy she was forcing him to live in. And her guilt was compounded by a misgiving that there was no real reason not to introduce him to her father, that there had never been any reason. This suspicion, and the prospect of losing him, gave her some troubled moments, although not so many that she moved up the April twenty-third date.
What moved the date up was something else altogether. The last Tuesday in March she arrived home early to do the ironing, and her father was waiting for her with a snapshot of a fat woman who seemed to be laughing her head off.
“Her name’s Grace Inkpen,” he said. “She’s coming here Friday to spend a few days.”
It turned out he’d been writing to her for five months. He had an accordion file of her letters, all of which were written in mauve ink on pale yellow writing paper. “You’ll get a kick out of the letterhead,” he said, showing her the drawing of an inkwell and quill pen and, underneath, a Michigan address. “Howdy Bill!” Marion read before he turned the letter over and let her read the newspaper ad, which he had cut out and taped to the back. “Queen-sized, happy-go-lucky widow,” it said. “Country gal at heart, 54, seeks marriage-minded gentleman. Age, looks, unimportant, although teddy-bear type a plus. Will relocate. No games!”
“Of course, I’ll always love your mother,” her father said.
Marion looked again at the photograph. Glasses, fuzzy blond hair. Yellow Bermuda shorts oozing chubby knees. So different from her trim little mother that she said, trying to get it straight, “But you’re not going to marry her.”
Her father stacked the letters and tapped the sides and ends to line up the edges. “That’s what she’s flying up here to see about,” he said, but he looked desperate, as though the whole thing had gotten completely out of hand, and Marion let out a laugh, then closed her eyes, overcome by a sense of the pure loneliness that must have driven him to this.
“Hey, listen,” he said. “This is your home. If you don’t take to her—”
“No, it’s okay, Dad,” she said. And it was only to reassure him that she added, “Because I think I’m going to be getting married, too.”
So John Bucci came for supper the next night, bringing two bottles of red wine, a case of brown shoe polish and a stack of gas coupons. He wore his sharkskin suit. He offered to have his gravel company grade their driveway, and her father took him up on it. After he had gone, her father said, “His heart’s in the right place,” meaning he was prepared to see past the suit and big talk. Then, after a minute, he said, “That’s what counts,” and Marion got the feeling he wasn’t thinking about John now, he was thinking about—he was selling himself on—Grace Inkpen.
He drove into the city to pick her up from the airport. He wore the charcoal suit he bought off the rack for the funeral. While he was gone Marion changed the sheets on the little trundle bed in her brother’s old room. Last night she had offered to let Grace sleep in her room, which had a double bed, but her father had said, slightly alarmed, “She’s not that big.”
Well, she was. As soon as Marion saw her getting out of the car, she raced upstairs and gathered her brush and comb, her nightgown, slippers, pillow and the photo of her mother that she kept on her bedside table, and she threw them on the chair in her brother’s room. Then she grabbed the pillow from the trundle bed and the vase of lilacs from the dresser and put them in her room.
When she got back downstairs, her father and Grace were still coming up the walk, Grace stopping every two steps to gaze around and exclaim. She had on a billowing pink coat and was holding a little artificial Christmas tree in each hand. “Bad boy!” she cried, laughing, when Sophie, their pregnant collie, leapt at an electrical wire dangling from one of the Christmas trees. Her father, who was carrying the suitcases, tried to kick Sophie in the rump but he missed. An unlit cigarette hung between his lips, and his head was shaking badly. Marion opened the door, and Grace, looking overwhelmed with joy, came straight for her. “Well, well, well,” Grace said, rushing and panting up the steps. Marion backed up a bit. “You okay with those cases, Bill?” Grace cried, but her ecstatic eyes stayed skewered to Marion.
She gave Marion a hug. She was still holding the Christmas trees. “I know who you are,” she said. She let go of her and shouted over her shoulder, “Why didn’t you say you had a pinup girl in the house, Bill?” Then, “You can light that now!” She turned back to Marion. “I upchuck if somebody smokes in the car.” She laughed.
“I know how you feel,” Marion said.
Grace used the point of one tree to push her glasses up her nose. “Now these,” she said, setting both trees on the counter, “are for you, Mary Anne.”
“Marion,” Marion said shyly.
“Out of season,” Grace said, “but what the heck, I made them myself. That’s my business, making Christmas trees. Where’s an outlet? Where’s an outlet?” She picked up one of the trees and hurried over to the stove. “There,” she said, pushing in the plug.
“Oh, that’s beautiful,” Marion said. The tiny lights shot off a rainbow of colours on the shiny metallic strips the tree was made of. “Dad, look,” she said.
“Hey, that is nice,” her father said. He came over beside Grace, and Grace put an arm around his waist.
“Now’s the time to tell you, Bill,” she said, beaming up at him. “Now that you brought me up here for my looks and personality.”
Her father stood there stiffly, giving her a smile that didn’t make it to his eyes.
“I’m a rich woman,” she said. “Oh, yes, oh, yes,” she said. “You got a stack of Bibles, I’ll swear on them. These here trees are a gold mine. I got a head office and five branch locations. I’m made of money.”
Marion is taking it second by second. Will she tell Sam not to come up to the apartment? A second later it’s, Will she let him unpack? While she’s wondering, he goes ahead. In the interval between one second and the next, he moves in.
One morning she wakes up and they’ve been married two weeks. She can’t believe it. She lives in amazement, perpetually in the first shocking moment. She’s in a kind of torpor, which she and Sam are pretending is the dawn of acceptance. Maybe it is. Before going to sleep on the couch he kisses her lips, and she lets that happen. “I love you,” he says, and she breathes shallowly and thinks, “What if we just go on like this?”
They never talk about it. If he still wears the dildo, she doesn’t ask. She avoids looking at his crotch. The rest of his body she catches herself looking at for slip-ups, as if the real Sam is somewhere else and this one’s a fake. She looks at him coolly and sometimes with distaste and wonder, saying to herself, “That’s a woman’s shoulder. That’s a woman’s arm.”
And yet she knows that whoever he is he’s who she loves. She knows that if she didn’t love him, she wouldn’t know who she was. He listens to her. He’s the only person who ever has, although until he came along she didn’t know that. Right from the beginning, whenever she was telling him what she thought or felt, she had the very real sensation that the breath of life was entering her, just as if she were a flattened blow-up doll taking shape. After he left the store she always felt lighter and rounder, and a bit cockeyed. She remembers punching the cash-register keys and the tips of her fingers feeling ripe enough to burst.
Now, all the time, she feels limp, despite the love being there. To her it’s a miracle, her love. It’s like the one thing, the one little tree, that survives the otherwise total devastation of a tornado. She’s going by the restaurant where he works, and she sees him in the window playing the guitar for nobody but the other two waiters (he’s the entertainment when it’s not busy), she sees the narrow curve of his back, and she would still stand between him and a bullet.
The only person who seems to have any idea that something’s the matter is her friend Emma. Everyone else makes newlywed jokes and asks how the wedding went. Glenda keeps asking when she’s going to have a baby.
“Never,” Marion says.
Glenda smiles as if she knows better.
Emma, on the other hand, says, “Whatever you do, don’t get pregnant.” This is after saying, “You okay? You sure? You look like hell.” One day she goes so far as to say, “A marriage licence isn’t carved in stone,” and Marion loses her temper.
“What are you talking about?” she says. “I’m coming down with a flu bug and here you are herding me off to divorce court.”
The idea of telling anybody, even Emma, is appalling to her. Here in Colville she has no fame. That has been the miracle of living in Colville. When she left Garvey and came here to live, all anyone knew about her was that she had enough money to buy the old plumbing supply building and turn it into a pet store and an apartment. She could laugh and nobody thought, How can she laugh? Eventually she could talk about her divorce from John Bucci because other people got divorced. Until she told Sam about the murder, not a soul knew that she had the nerve to open a store in a retail recession and to iceskate on the Grand River during a thaw and to recount Mrs. Hodgson’s pet-death stories without batting an eye because she was someone who had survived the most terrible thing that was going to happen to her.
She thinks that telling Sam was what made this other terrible thing happen. That talking about the murder here in Colville, where it had been under wraps for ten years, was like releasing a deadly virus. If it didn’t instantly turn him into a transsexual (and who knows? It’s not as though she hasn’t witnessed the frailty of natural laws) then it did make her fall in love with him, the first man since John she goes and falls in love with.
Before that she wouldn’t have dreamed that he’d be the one for her. He was the new man in town. The mysterious stranger, the catch. And then she started seeing him arm in arm with Bernie, a topless waitress at the Bear Pit. She saw the two of them kissing once, in the bank line-up, but the first time he kissed her, and she asked, “What about Bernie?” he laughed and said, “God, no. I mean, she’s great, it’s just …”
Marion waited. She wanted to hear it—the thing she could possibly have over a sexpot like Bernie. But all she got was, “She’s not you,” said so reverently, though, that she kissed him and told him she loved him, too, a delayed response to his declaration of a minute before. She was still bowled over by it. If he’d come out with anything else, she would have started crying. She’d just finished telling him about the murder. The name Bert Kella hadn’t crossed her lips in a long time, and it lingered in the air like a toxic gas that burned her eyes.
“He shot himself a few hours later,” she said. “What my brother always says is, ‘He saved me the trouble.’ “
“I love you,” Sam said.
She looked at him. He was blinking as if from a tic. “Pardon?” she said. He put down his cans of dog food, came around the counter, took her face in his hands and kissed her like a man digging into a meal. Between kisses he kept saying he loved her, but in a voice so full of doom that she figured he must have said the same thing to Bernie.
That tone of doom and everything associated with it—the looks of defeat, humility, anguish, the hesitation, the guarded answers, the withdrawing, the physical modesty (he wouldn’t even take off his undershirt!)—she got wrong all the way down the road. With Bernie out of the picture her immediate sense was that some emotional deprivation, most likely the death of his parents, had left him with the idea that he didn’t deserve love. So her job, her joyous crusade, became to persuade him that he did deserve it. He would sigh for no reason and she would say, “I love you.” “I love you,” she would say when she picked up the phone and it was him. He had a frailty she had never witnessed before in a grown man, not so much because of the way he looked, although he was slim and big-eyed, and not because he seemed frightened of loving her, either. It was something else—his dreaminess, partly, which she felt had to do with a spiritual bent, a private purity. Just as a room’s perils leap out at you when you bring a baby into it, everything that was common and hard about living in Colville seemed more evident to her whenever Sam was around. The very first time he came into the store and they got to talking, she’d wondered how anyone so open-minded would ever cope with the bull-headedness and rectitude of people here. When she’d started seeing him with Bernie, she’d said to Emma, “A racy girl like that will break his heart.”
Her innocence! That’s what floors her now. “What if I don’t mind whether you respect me or not?” she said once.
“I won’t respect myself,” he answered.
“Then let’s elope.”
“We said we’d wait until I visited my relatives.”
“What if I tear all your clothes off?”
“Let’s just wait.” (Moving her hand from his knee, coming to his feet.) “Okay, honey? I’m not cut out for this kind of thing.”
That’s exactly how he put it—he wasn’t cut out for this kind of thing. In six months he thought he would be. Then there would be the months it took to recover. What he told her was that he wanted to visit his parents’ grave in Delaware, then look up some relatives he’d suddenly heard of, get to know them, invite them to the wedding, and after that he wanted to do some camping in Vermont on his own. He’d be gone three, four months, he said.
But he misunderstood how complicated the operation would be. By the time he had the facts, and was therefore going on about delaying the wedding a few more months (he said his relatives might be away in the spring and it would be better to visit them in the summer), she was so sure that this was just him throwing up barriers between himself and his happiness, she wouldn’t listen. She covered his mouth with her hand.
Sometimes she feels as if her hand is still there. Oh, they still talk. They tell each other about their day, that kind of thing. But whereas she used to tell him things she’d never imagined telling anyone else (even before they said they loved each other she admitted having faked her orgasms with John), now they talk as if their conversation will be played back in church. Neither of them goes near words like “orgasm” or “sex.” She can’t even say “love.” She can’t tell him that the ferret has gone into heat. She says, instead, “I’m going to have to get hold of Arnie,” and leaves it to him to remember that Arnie is the guy out on Highway 10 who has a breeding farm.
She keeps wondering how long it can go on. The marriage, yes, but mostly how much longer they can keep up this uneasy peace. Then a letter arrives with a Boston postmark. She watches him read it. “Well?” she says from a state of calm that she can feel quickly giving way … to total rage or total apathy, she has no idea.
“I guess this is it,” he says.
“You’re not going to go ahead with it, are you?” she says.
He looks up, surprised. “Well, yeah. Of course. I mean, I thought that’s what you’d want.”
It’s rage. It shoots up inside her like a geyser. “What I’d want!” she cries. “Why would I want that?”
He just looks at her.
“What on earth do you think? That all this time I’ve been holding my breath for a penis?”
He starts to speak but she cuts him off. “It won’t be real!”
“It’ll be real. They’ll use my own skin and—”
“Oh, for heaven’s sakes, it makes me sick to think about it.”
“It won’t ejaculate sperm—”
“Shut your mouth!” She actually punches him.
“But it’ll get erect,” he continues in the same instructive tone. “There’s a way to do that.”
She collapses on the little stool where they put on their boots.
“What if I lost a leg and got an artificial one?” he says. “Or if I had a glass eye, or, I don’t know, a toupee, or I had a nose job? What about women who have breast implants?”
She shakes her head.
“What about fat people who used to be thin? What about Grace? You know what she said at the wedding?” His voice goes softer, more urgent. “She said, ‘I don’t know who this fatso is.’ She said, ‘It isn’t me.’ “
Marion swallows around what feels like an acorn in her throat. “You just can’t come into the world a woman and decide to be a man. That’s what this is all about. You can’t do that.”
He goes on as if she hasn’t spoken. “Grace has the same dilemma I have. She knows who she is.” He thumps his fist where she hit him, over his heart. “But she’s in the wrong container.”
Marion lets out a morose laugh. Grace as a container. “I thought I fell in love with a man,” she says. “I thought I was marrying a man.”
“You did,” he says. “You did.”
She lifts her eyes to his face. Against all the visible evidence, she says, “You’re not a man.”
He starts blinking. He lowers his head. He carefully folds the letter and puts it back in the envelope. When he looks straight at her again, she thinks he’s going to kill her. “Who are you to say that?” he says quietly. His pupils are the size of pinholes. “Who are you to tell me who I am?” He reaches, and she flinches, but he’s only pulling his jacket off the coat rack.
Her father and Grace were married in May, in Detroit, but they came back to the farm to live. It was a huge wedding, paid for by Grace, who waved away Marion’s father’s protests, saying, “The bride pays! The bride pays! That’s the tradition!” and who arranged it all so fast and with such scouring efficiency, blasting the caterers on the phone while zooming out seams on her wedding dress (which she was sewing herself, using Marion’s mother’s ancient Singer), that all Marion’s father had to do was stay out of the way.
After her second visit in early April she had moved in. She’d had her own phone line installed in the guest room, and she began doing all her Christmas tree business from there, sitting at Peter’s little rolltop desk. When she wasn’t on the phone—or sewing, or typing—she was baking. She showed Marion how to bake roll cakes and soufflés. She also painted the master bedroom pale yellow. She didn’t even consult Marion’s father, she just bought the paint and went ahead. “Green isn’t my colour,” was her explanation, not that Marion’s father demanded one. With the paint that was left, she put a coat on one wall in the guest room. “I’ve got ants in my pants,” she said. “I can’t keep still.” After supper, in front of the TV, she knit sweaters for Marion’s father, multi-coloured cable knits that straightened his posture, he wore them with such pride.
He’d come a long way since that first visit, when her bossiness, her spectacular size, and especially the news that she was made of money seemed to hit him like a shovel. That entire weekend he wore his neck brace to keep his head from thrashing, and after she was gone he fell into a kitchen chair and said, “What the Sam Hill have I gotten myself into?”
“I liked her,” Marion said. She did. She liked Grace’s good-natured self-awareness. When Grace had caught Marion’s father staring at the way she loaded food into her mouth, she’d said, “This isn’t a hormone problem, Bill. This is pure unadulterated appetite.”
“I liked her laugh,” Marion said.
Her father nodded.
“She’s going to teach me how to knit,” Marion said.
“You don’t say?” her father said. He frowned and scratched under his neck brace. “All that money’s something to think about,” he said uneasily.
“For heaven’s sakes, Dad. What if she were thousands of dollars in debt? Most people would say you’ve hit the jackpot.”
“Well, I don’t know …”
Something brought him around, though, something Grace must have written in the daily letters she continued to send. Because she came back. She came back with two trunks of clothes, a typewriter and eight boxes of business files. And three boxes of wedding invitations, already printed up.
The entire family, plus six of her father’s friends, flew down for the ceremony in a private plane. John went as Marion’s fiancé. He kept asking how much Grace had spent—he was comparing what they planned to spend on their own wedding in June, even though he had agreed to a small ceremony in the living room of Marion’s house, where Marion’s parents had been married thirty years before.
“What does it matter what she spent?” Marion said. Finally John leaned across the aisle of the plane and asked Grace. Marion cringed, but Grace couldn’t have cared less.
“This here shuttle bus,” Grace asked, “or the whole shebang?”
The whole shebang came to just under thirty grand. It was an amount that haunted John, and more or less ruined their own wedding. He made last-minute changes, hiring a drummer and electric guitar duo who played so loud people had to go upstairs to talk. He had a canopy erected behind the house, a complete waste since it was a cool, rainy afternoon and there weren’t enough guests to spill outside anyway. Because he was paying for the liquor he brought in crates of it and yelled at everyone to drink, drink. By the end of the night there was a line-up to be sick in the toilet. There was a fistfight between the drummer and the accordion player her father had hired weeks earlier. Marion’s last memory, before she passed out on the trundle bed, was Aunt Lucia’s bare stomach … Aunt Lucia with her red silk dress pulled up over her black bra, pointing at a snarl of purple scars under her navel and whispering, “Guarda! Guarda!” and Marion thinking that the scars had something to do with the birth of babies, that there was a Bucci baby curse Aunt Lucia was warning her about.
Apparently she was carried by John and her brother to John’s car, and then carried by John alone over the threshold of the Meadowview Motel’s honeymoon suite. They spent three nights there, a mini-honeymoon that John promised to make up for with a trip to Italy, when he could afford to take some time off. From the motel they moved straight into their new house, a two-year-old five-bedroom, three-bathroom, white-stuccoed back split on ten acres. It had pillars on either side of the front door, a four-car garage, a sunken ebony bathtub and acres of white carpeting in which the imprint of a foot remained all day.
John had never had any intention of living on his Aunt Lucia’s property. He bought the house back in April, assuming a mortgage so high that Marion left off one of the zeroes when she told her father about it. Her father was still thrown for a loop. He and Grace gave them the five major appliances. The black leather chesterfield, two red velvet easy chairs, black veneer bedstead and black veneer dining-room suite John bought with the money his business associates sent in Congratulations cards. He wanted everything to be modern and either black or red. In a linen store in Ayleford, Marion found a red bedspread and black-and-red-striped pillow cases. She kept her eye out for coasters, towels, vases, lamps, ashtrays in red or black. She capitulated completely to John’s taste because she didn’t have any. Pointing out the dress she liked in a store window or in a catalogue had been one sure way to make her mother laugh.
She planted red and white carnations along the front of the house. She put in a vegetable garden. And three mornings a week she still went into the pet store. John wanted her to quit, but he said he’d let it ride until she got pregnant. Now that she was his wife, he was more easygoing about things, he was back to being his hearty, adoring self. He brought her long-stemmed roses and bags of seedless grapes. He wasn’t home much—he liked to close the shoe store himself on the nights it was open, and he was always having to go to the gravel pit or the gas station to take care of some problem—but when he was home he followed her around, kissing her, undressing her, telling her how beautiful she was. He ran her bubble baths in the ebony tub and washed her breasts and belly. Some mornings she woke up to find him looking at her, the two of them almost nose to nose, and it gave her a start because his eyes were so huge and inky. Moved by what she took to be his gratitude and amazement that she was finally his, she wrapped him in her arms and promised to love him forever.
A couple of times a week, when he was working late, she drove over to the farm and watched television with her father and Grace and knit John a sweater. Friday evenings she went to Aunt Lucia’s to see John’s sisters. Aunt Lucia still glared at her, but now she also pulled her out of the kitchen and made her feel the hard lump on her left breast, seeming to want to know if Marion thought it was growing, and one night she did a couple of knee bends to let Marion hear all the places her joints cracked—knees, hips, ankles, feet. It sounded like someone breaking up kindling.
“Your brother’s a vet,” John explained. “That’s doctor to her.”
“I’m not a vet,” Marion said.
John shrugged. “Brother’s close enough.”
“Maybe she should see a real doctor,” Marion said.
“In a million years she’d never go. Listen,” he said. “She’s old. She’s gonna die soon. Humour her.”
Marion was glad to. She was glad to be a Bucci, to belong to this large, passionate family. She was glad to be able to get away from them as well though, to drive back to her own ten acres and her enormous white house and its silent, mostly empty rooms. Its newness and splendour. She wished her mother could have seen it, could have seen how both she and her father had landed in clover. Maybe it was all her mother’s doing, though. That thought crossed Marion’s mind a lot. Her mother still running their lives but with the power, at last, to go to town.
Her mother’s birthday was the fifteenth of October. On the morning of that day Marion and her father and Grace visited the grave, Grace laying down a garland of white roses with a red ribbon that said “Gone But Not Forgotten.” They all cried. “She had such a sweet, tiny face,” Grace blubbered, and Marion wondered where she had got that from—her mother had been rather moon-faced, as Marion herself was.
In the afternoon, as Marion sat in her kitchen looking through her old photo albums, it started to rain. She got up to close the window over the sink and noticed that the raindrops were small spheres aligned in a plaid pattern so exact it looked like chenille. It looked like the kind of orderly message her mother’s spirit might send.
No sooner did Marion think this than the phone rang.
“Hello?” Marion whispered into the receiver.
“Are you there?” a voice bellowed. “Hello?”
It was Cory Bates.
She was back in Garvey, calling from a phone booth. She had no place to stay because her parents had moved to Manitoba without telling her. She had no money. She had a black eye.
“Good heavens,” Marion said. “Well, you can stay here until you find a place. We’ve got plenty of room.”
“So I heard,” Cory said. “I can’t believe you married him. I mean, John Bucci! God! Does he wear his gold chains to bed?”
Marion had to smile.
“So, would he have a fit if I stayed?” Cory asked.
“Oh, no,” Marion said, leaping at the opportunity to praise him. “He’s really generous. He loves having people around.”
“Yeah, so he can brag. I mean, I can’t believe you even went out with him. But you’ve got a mansion and probably a new car, right? Can you come and pick me up? My feet are soaked.”
Marion gave her the only other bedroom that had a bed. It also had an en suite four-piece bath. Cory took a half-hour-long shower, then called Marion to come look at her two skimpy dresses, two pairs of jeans and three tank tops hanging in the wall-length closet. “Pathetic, right?” she said. She dropped back on the bed. She was so tall that although her head was on the pillow, her feet touched the baseboard. She lifted her head for a second to comb her fingers through her wet hair. It was jet black now, and cut an inch long all over. “Hand me those, would you?” she said, pointing to the pack of cigarettes on the bathroom counter. Her wide sleeve hung gracefully from her wrist. She was wearing an orange silk bathrobe, draped open below the crotch and showing off white, slender legs that made Marion think of the obscenely long stamens of tropical flowers. She gave Cory the cigarettes, and Cory offered her one.
“No, thanks.”
“Still a saint, eh?” Cory said. “Well”—she smirked—”not exactly,” and she scanned around her, implying that Marion was a gold digger.
So Marion told her about Grace, about all the money she’d actually moved away from to move in here. “Believe it or not,” she said, “I’m really crazy about John.”
“Christ,” Cory said, flicking ashes on the carpet. “You know, I leave this shit-hole town to make some money, get a better life. I work my ass off …” She stopped and chewed on her bottom lip.
Marion didn’t know what to say. “At least you’re safe from Rick,” was all she could come up with.
“Rick the Prick.”
“I feel sorry for the lizards, though,” Marion said.
Cory snorted. “I feel sorry I didn’t flatten their warty little bodies with a hammer and put them in his cereal box.”
Driving back to the house, Cory had told Marion how she’d landed a job at Rick’s nightclub near the airport. A high-class place, she’d said. No nudity, strictly pasties and G-strings. Using her talents as an ex-cheerleader, she’d worked out an act in which she bounced on a little trampoline, doing somersaults and splits in the air, then cartwheeled over to a rail and performed a balance-beam routine. Within two weeks she was the headliner and had moved into Rick’s twenty-fifth-storey penthouse condo.
Rick had two aquariums in which he kept lizards that shot blood from their eyelids when they were scared. Cory hated them, although she got a kick out of poking at them with a pencil. Evidence of blood in the aquariums was the only thing she and Rick had fights over, for the first six months, that is. Then Rick admitted he had fantasies of cutting her face so that no other guy would want her. Cory thought he was kidding until one night at a party he went after her with a paring knife. She forgave him because he was drunk and he missed her by a mile. But two nights ago, after she gave the bartender an innocent little birthday kiss, Rick tried to burn her with his cigarette lighter. She got away and ran right out onto the street, wearing only her G-string and pasties, and took a cab back to the condo. The first thing she did was pick up the lizards with hotdog tongs and throw them out the window. Then she stole the money on Rick’s dresser—a couple of hundred bucks—and spent two nights in a hotel before taking the bus to Garvey. She’d told everybody she was from the West Coast, so she thought it would be a miracle if Rick found her.
“You know,” she said now, running a finger under her blackened eye, “this place is even nicer than the condo.”
“We’re just thrilled with it,” Marion said.
“I like it here,” Cory said. “I wouldn’t mind staying here forever.”
She did, she did stay forever. At first it was going to be for two weeks. Just to get her out of the house, John rehired her in the shoe store, the plan being she’d save her wages to rent an apartment, but she didn’t last three days. Selling shoes was too much of a comedown after being a nightclub headliner, she said. John let that pass. He just wanted her out. He thought she was a slut and was ruining their love life. No more bubble baths, no more sex all over the house, which Marion missed, too, but neither of them had the heart to tell Cory to leave. She had nobody else. She had nothing. John gave her some money for clothes to apply for jobs in, but she spent it on a black leather motorcycle jacket and black leather pants, claiming she didn’t know how to dress like a hick. Waitressing at one of the town’s two bars seemed to be the obvious solution, except that they were country-and-western and she said country-and-western music made her puke. John thought he’d finally found the solution when the hydro worker who rented the apartment behind the Esso station moved out.
“It’s yours,” he told Cory. “Rent-free until you get a job.”
“Oh, great,” Cory said, tears welling in her eyes. “A hole in the middle of nowhere where I can get raped by every grease-ball in the county. Thanks a lot.” And she ran into her bedroom and slammed the door.
Her insomnia had disappeared. She went to bed at nine or ten in the evening and slept until noon. Usually she was still in bed when Marion returned home from the pet store. She had long showers and watched TV and drove Marion’s car to the mall, where she pestered John for cigarette money. While Marion made supper, she smoked at the kitchen table and cut to shreds whoever she’d seen that day, either at the mall or on TV. It was like old times, except that once in a while she went after John or his sisters or Grace, and even though Marion understood that this was just Cory trying to get her goat, she was nevertheless hurt and couldn’t help rising to their defence, which was like throwing tin cans at a sharpshooter.
With Grace and John’s sisters, her ruthlessness could take Marion’s breath away. With John, however, she showed some restraint. She allowed for the other side of the coin. Okay, she conceded, John was generous and handsome … a generous bullshitter, a handsome shrimp. One day she said, “I’ll bet he’s got one of those tuna-can cocks.”
“He does not!” Marion said. “It’s perfectly normal.”
“How would you know? Have you ever seen another cock?”
“I’ve seen them on animals.”
Cory burst out laughing. “Oh, right, you work in a pet store. Well, shit, I’m not saying that in a line-up of well-hung gerbils he couldn’t hold his own.”
Marion was furious. “I’m talking about horses,” she said wildly.
Silence. A forsythia branch tapped on the kitchen window.
“You’re kidding,” Cory said conversationally.
Not long after that the snow melted under the bushes, and the warm air blowing over the fields began to carry with it the smell of manure and mud. Cory started getting up earlier to sunbathe on the front lawn in her pink-sequined G-string and a tank top. “Owooo, Mama!” John howled at her on his way to or from the car. Suddenly he was always running off somewhere, never home long enough to worry about whether Cory was looking for a job. So Marion stopped worrying, too. In fact, with John away so much, she had to admit that she was grateful for Cory’s company.
Cory joined her now on her shopping trips for red and black things. She was an enormous help. “John will hate that,” she’d say confidently, and Marion would pause and realize that Cory was right. After shopping they’d drive to the Bluebird Café for lunch. “On John,” as Cory would point out, ordering dessert and an Irish coffee. She was gaining weight, but Marion thought she could do with it. Her hair was growing back to its lovely peach colour. Her eyes had their old shiftiness. She seemed to be over Rick, and one afternoon Marion ventured to tell her as much.
“Over him!” Cory said. “I hated that asshole from day one. You know, just because you live with some guy doesn’t mean you have to like him.”
“It does as far as I’m concerned,” Marion said.
“That’s you,” Cory said. She downed her glass of wine. She lit a cigarette and looked out the window. “Stupid people get everything they deserve,” she said fiercely. Marion assumed she was referring to Rick. “I have no pity for stupid people,” she said. “I can’t afford to.”
Two days later, during one of the rare suppers that John was eating with them, Cory interrupted a story he was telling about a man with a quadruple-E shoe size and bunions the size of eggs. “I’m sorry, John,” she said, “but she’s going to have to know sooner or later.” And she looked at Marion and said, “I’m pregnant and John’s the father.”
“Jesus Christ,” John said, dropping his knife onto the floor. A full confession.
Marion watched him pick the knife up. The back of his neck was the colour of beetroot. “Why do I feel as if I already know this?” she asked, genuinely curious. She looked at her lifeline. It was long but forked.
“Listen—” John said.
“I’m not having an abortion and I’m not giving it up for adoption,” Cory said.
John planted his hands flat on the table. “Okay—” he said. He took a deep breath.
“No way I’m giving it up,” Cory said. “Not this time.”
“Excuse me,” Marion said, pushing back her chair.
“Hey!” John said. “Where are you going?” He followed her into the front hall. “Come on. Jesus. Where are you going?”
Marion never laid eyes on him again. He phoned her at the farmhouse three times that night, but she wouldn’t talk to him. The next morning, while she lay on her old bed and wept, only letting herself really wail whenever the electric saw started up (Grace was having the kitchen renovated), her father and Grace drove to see him at his gas station. They told her nothing she hadn’t figured out. John was confused. He still loved her. He wanted to do the right thing by the baby.
“How’s he know it’s his, that’s what I kept harping on,” Grace said.
“It’s his,” Marion said. Hadn’t she foreseen John and Cory’s children?
And yet she waited for him to knock the door down, to beg her to come back. When he phoned he said he loved her, then started crying and couldn’t speak. She hung up. One day she stayed on the line to ask, “Do you love Cory?”
“Not … not … not …,” he said.
She waited.
“Not as much as you.”
She dropped the phone and went into the bathroom and considered the bottle of codeine. It wasn’t worse than when her mother died. Her body didn’t have that thin, hollow sensation of being made of crêpe paper. And the pain wasn’t non-stop. There were hours at a time when she felt fine, even relieved. Compared to her mother dying it could feel like nothing, but it could also remind her of her mother dying. Force her—especially when she was falling asleep or just waking up—to see the piece of skin on the refrigerator and the skirts and blouses flattened in boxes for the Salvation Army. It was like being an alcoholic, and somebody gives you a drink.
What helped was going into work six days a week. She sat with the beagle puppies in her lap and tried not to pray it was John every time the bell on the door announced a customer. When she finally let Mrs. Hodgson know what was wrong, Mrs. Hodgson said, “Here’s one that’ll cheer you up,” and told her about a woman who stole her best friend’s husband, moved into the marital house and a week later was fried to a crisp when the furnace exploded.
Thereafter Mrs. Hodgson’s idea of lifting Marion’s spirits was reporting on any sightings of Cory in town. Cory was seen at the liquor store “loading up.” At the drugstore buying a tube of lipstick with a hundred-dollar bill. One day Marion herself saw her. Cory walked in front of the car when Marion was stopped at a red light. She was wearing blue-jean shorts and Marion’s red-and-blue plaid shirt rolled up at the sleeves and knotted under the tender swell of her belly.
That evening Marion phoned John at the store, the first time she’d phoned him. She was crying. She didn’t know what she was going to say.
But Cory answered. “Is that you, Marion?” she shouted after saying hello three times.
Marion covered the mouthpiece with her hand.
“Listen, Marion,” Cory shouted. “You know, it’s not as if he wasn’t fucking half the jail bait in town!”
Suddenly another voice cried, “That’s a lie, and you know it!” It was Grace, on the extension. “You’re a liar and a home wrecker, that’s what you are!”
Marion hung up. A few minutes later Grace came pounding down the stairs. “I wasn’t eavesdropping,” she said. “I was just about to dial out.” She was panting and her face was startlingly red. “Holy mackerel, is she ever a stinker.”
“I want to go away,” Marion said. “I want to live somewhere else.”
“Oh,” Grace said. They looked at each other. “Where?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Far enough from here that nobody will know who I am.”
Grace pushed her glasses up her nose. “Well, I can’t say as I don’t know the feeling,” she said.
The night before Sam leaves to have his operation, Marion dreams about somebody who starts out being her mother but seems to change into John. Marion is embracing this person, melting with love, when she discovers a hole in the small of his or her back. She sticks her hand in, reaches up and withdraws the heart. It pulses and half-rolls in her palm like a newly hatched bird. It is so exposed! She puts it in her mouth and tries to get it down her throat into her ribcage without scraping its delicate membrane or stopping its beat. It catches on something though, a tooth-like thing in the area of her vocal cords, and tears in half. She lets go of it and it just slips away. She starts to cry. She wakes up crying.
She buries her face in the pillow so that Sam won’t hear. She wants her mother. She knows better, but year after year her heart goes on pumping out love as if all it knows is circulation, as if the beloved is right there in front of her to receive the love and purify it and send it back. She tries to envision her mother’s face, but she can’t. Instead she sees the heart she extracted in her dream. Then she sees an erect penis, a solid, ordinary thing, like a bird perch. Then a face—Sam’s face.
He’s standing in the doorway. She can feel him there. She opens her eyes but it’s so dark it doesn’t make any difference. He sits on the bed and begins to stroke her hair and her back. His hand draws the grief into his own hand, draws it in, lets it go. When she finally calms down, he slips under the sheet and lies beside her. Her bare back just touches his bare chest. She doesn’t move away. She is so grateful for the solid, living length of him.
Neither of them speaks. The room is pitch dark, and they breathe in unison. On her thigh his right hand rests lightly. His fingers are cool and not quite still. He keeps the nails on his right hand long for playing the guitar. It used to excite her to see that hand on her breast, the thumb and forefinger plucking her nipple into hardness.
She has brought her own hand to her breast. She doesn’t fully realize it until she feels his fingers brushing her knuckles. Something just clears out of her mind, gives up. She turns over and kisses him on the mouth.
He jerks his head back.
“It’s all right,” she says, meaning that everything is. Meaning that her love is panoramic, racing like an ignited wick from the night of the wedding to this moment. She kisses him again. She pushes her tongue between his teeth. She licks his teeth, bites his bottom lip. She drops onto her back and pulls him on top of her.
She keeps clinging to him as he sits up. She thinks he’s trying to get away. But he kneels between her legs and parts her labia with his fingers. Then he licks her there. It’s the first time this has been done to her. She assumes it’s preliminary. He keeps it up, though, soft, steady, devoted, cat-like licking until her body begins to loosen. Her joints unhinge. Her vulva breaks free and levitates, and her skin spreads like dough, a lovely, funny sensation, and then a disturbing one. And then she doesn’t care—she’d die to prolong it.
Her orgasm is like a series of electric shocks. Her pelvis jolts and her vagina contracts almost painfully. “I love you,” Sam says urgently, as if he knows that she’s in new territory. “I love you, I love you,” over and over until she lies still.
“Oh, my God,” she says then. “I love you,” she says. She hasn’t told him in five months. After a moment she says, “It’s you I love.” Under the circumstances that sounds more precise, more to the point. Tomorrow he is going into the hospital. Flying down to Boston by himself. Since she wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t even think about it, there was never any question of her going with him. Now, for the first time, she allows herself to wonder what will happen. She is still not ready for details, but she asks if the operation is dangerous.
“Apparently not,” he says. “I mean, not life-threatening.”
She turns to him and places her hand over his crotch. She knows he’s wearing underwear, which makes it easier.
“Don’t!” he says, wrenching sideways.
“No, let me,” she says, and puts her hand back. She presses her palm down and feels the springiness of his pubic hair. “It’s just like me,” she says, oddly relieved.
He doesn’t move.
“It’s you,” she says.
“It is,” he says. “And it isn’t.” He takes her hand and holds it to his chest. Then he covers them both with the sheet.
He is still holding her hand when she wakes up. His head is arched back and he’s snoring, a soft purring sound. It’s morning. There’s a band of grey light between the drapes, and another band flaring across the ceiling.
If somebody were looking down on them, Marion thinks—if, for instance, her mother’s spirit was that clean, geometrical flare—they would seem like any other man and wife. They would seem content, she thinks. Peaceful, and lucky. Two people unacquainted with grief. They would seem like two happily married, perfectly normal people.
If you enjoyed “Flesh of My Flesh” by Barbara Gowdy, look for the print and e-book versions of the entire short story collection We So Seldom Look on Love.
E-book: 9781443402484
Print: 9780006475231