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Marlena Page 3
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I walked straight toward the pines. Trails that started and stopped at random twined through the snowy field, converging a few yards behind our houses into a wider one, tramped down by a steady battering of boot prints. I followed it all the way to the jungle gym, where I crouched under the slide to light my cigarette. The path swung a little to the left and disappeared into the trees. I continued on, the woods thickening around me. Thanks to Dad, king of facts, I knew that the unruly rows of trees probably meant the forest had been around for a long time, since well before loggers struck down miles of Michigan trees and replanted them in perfect lines.
What was I doing here? The same thing happened to my family that happens to many families: my parents decided they didn’t want to be married anymore. But that didn’t exactly explain the move up north, which had driven me, an otherwise steady girl, to scream into my pillow at night, to saw off my own hair with kitchen scissors, to press a razor into the skin on my upper thigh until it drew blood. (Result: I didn’t have the stomach for it.) I turned fifteen the first week of December, a few days before we left Pontiac—it was cheaper, Mom said, to move in the winter. She had hung a Happy Birthday banner up in the living room, emptied, by then, of everything that made it ours.
When my parents split, my father, apron-wearing cooker of French toast, snowshoer and whiskey drinker and Red Wings fan, pick-you-up-and-spin-you hugger, beloved by my best friend Haesung, reviled by eldest and only son James, worshipped by me, was not the assistant manager of Foodtown, as he claimed. He’d gotten laid off four months before, give or take a week. And so, when he left the house early in the morning, Monday through Friday, work was not where he was going. From what I’d overheard, his days instead consisted mostly of sex acts with Becky, the twentysomething barista he was still seeing. The divorce was not fine, exactly, but it wasn’t a surprise.
Mom had lived near Silver Lake for a couple of years as a kid, and she called that time—all pebbly beaches, pines top-hatted with snow, boat masts piercing melodramatic sunsets—the happiest of her life. “I need a change,” she’d said, the summer of the divorce, which she spent mostly on the computer, messaging her friends from high school and flirting vindictively with men from all over the state. “Everyone here knows every last thing about us.” Jimmy told me once that for a while she was forwarding him five, ten listings a day, with subject lines like LOOK! HOW CHEAP. On this, my brother and I agreed: Mom was in the market for something only she could leave, and what better than a place of her own? Jimmy and I had this look we gave each other whenever Mom spun out on a tangent of hypotheticals—thinking about it makes me miss him. Mom bought the Silver Lake house without ever seeing more than a handful of photographs. I’m not sure even she was prepared for this nothingness, the gray snow, the trash-strewn yards, this dense tangle of trees that felt, as I moved through them, almost hungry, as if they would swallow you up if you weren’t careful. It was a twenty-minute drive to a grocery store that stocked any vegetables; nearly thirty minutes to the high school I’d be attending come January, which was in another township entirely. It might be pretty, and I could appreciate that, these woods with their old feeling, the clean, clear air, but this was a lonesome place.
I wrapped my scarf around my head, pulling it low over my brow, so that only the tiniest circle of my face was exposed, just enough for me to breathe and smoke. My throat was swollen from all the smoking—every time I swallowed, a lump moved from my tonsils to my chest. I had traveled maybe a quarter mile past the jungle gym when I noticed a set of snowmobile treads crisscrossing the path, drawing eights around the trees. Then music, tinny and faraway. I followed the sound until I could make out the melody, and then the voice of a radio DJ, clear as if I’d picked up the phone. The trees began to thin. Up ahead, they gave way to a clearing, where there was some kind of structure—long and low and dark as a bruise. A couple of snowmobiles were parked with their noses right up against the woods-facing, longer side. I followed the tree line, trying to stay out of sight. It looked almost like a train, or a piece of one, its windows painted black, except for one that was busted out and plugged with a propeller or a fan or something, the blades slowly rotating. A boxcar, like in that children’s series. A door in the wall slid open, and a man jumped out, shutting it behind him. He looked right at me. “Hey,” he shouted, taking a couple of steps forward. “Who’s that?”
I backed away. “I’m just taking a walk,” I said. I had to yell a little.
“Come back here a second,” he said.
I turned around, feeling him watching, and got the hell out of there. I didn’t slow down until I reached the jungle gym. Sweating under my coat, I slumped down in an area of relative snowlessness underneath the slide. I waited for my heart to quiet and then lit another cigarette. I finished it, calmer, and pulled the brown paper bag from my backpack. When I took a bite of the sandwich, I realized it was just lettuce and mayo and mealy tomato, because Mom had forgotten the meat.
* * *
Not long after I got home, minutes after I’d changed into a fresh T-shirt and scoured my hands until I could smell smoke only when I held my fingertips to my nose, our doorbell rang. I opened the door, kicking the word Dad out of my mind.
“Been meaning to introduce myself,” the man told me, standing uncomfortably close to the threshold. “Though now we already met. I live right there. Got a daughter about your age.” He had a very slight, unplaceable accent, his vowels loose. Up close, he was near as skinny as my mom, something starving but not unkind about his eyes. Aside from his size, the sores ringing his hairline, an especially raw one picked to bleeding on the right side of his nose, he could have been any old dad. He didn’t scare me, even if he had caught me snooping around in the woods.
“Hi,” I said. “I guess I met her. And Sal, too.”
“Sal? He’s a funny little shit,” he said, like we were old friends. “There’s nothing to see out back there, girl.”
“Okay.”
“Just trees, and private property.” His gaze roamed around. “Did you know, your gutter’s fallin’ off?” I stepped outside, onto the wooden platform barely big enough for both of us, and he pointed up where a row of icicles was tugging the gutter away from the eaves of the roof. “See?”
“I’ll get my mom.” I left him standing there in his sweatshirt, his too-large jeans, a boy with a very old face, as I intentionally shut the door.
Mom was in bed, buried under her blanket, wearing the glasses that made her eyes look like they were at the bottom of a well. “Who’s it,” she said, turning the page of the nine-hundred-pound paperback she was reading, one of those time traveler books about sex in Scotland. I’d read them all.
“Neighbor. Says our gutter’s falling off.”
“That weaselly guy from the barn next door?” Mom asked, swinging her legs out of bed.
Outside, Marlena’s dad walked us around the house, swiping at the icicles with a snow shovel so that they careened into the ground. “You gotta do this every couple weeks this time a year, especially when you live in one of these prefab thingies,” he said, “where they stick the gutters on with Silly Putty.”
“Thank you.” While he was faced away from her, slamming at the gutters, Mom nudged me and rolled her eyes. This guy, she mouthed. Thinks he knows everything. A dozen icicles came crashing down, and he looked at her for approval, leaning against the shovel, awkwardly out of breath. “I had no idea,” she said.
“Another day and they would’ve busted for good.”
“I see that.”
“I can do it, if you want, when I do mine. It’s no trouble.”
“That’s okay,” Mom said. I’d been silent the whole time, standing guard I guess, or maybe just curious. “Would you believe it, I have a grown son? I think this is probably a good job for him.”
“I can’t believe it,” said Marlena’s dad, his face entirely, inexplicably red. “You’re no more’n twenty-five, I’d say.”
The effect Mom had on
men infuriated me as a teenager, especially then, before I’d ever had sex. I resented her for failing in that way, too, by not giving me that quality, her charm, her way of making even prescription goggles look sort of geekily elegant. This is your daughter? people always said when she introduced me, like I’d stolen her, forced her to claim me as her own. This? I left them there.
I was in my room, reading my mom’s book from the exact place she’d left off, when Marlena opened my bedroom door. A flicker of annoyance—no matter how bad I wanted to be friends, I hated to be snapped out of a book.
“Your mom said you were in here. My dad’s in the zone. He’s shoveling your driveway now. I think he’s trying to be charming.”
“I noticed.”
“This place looks like a prison cell,” Marlena declared, scratching at her neck. She wore a man’s button-down over a T-shirt that, like the one I’d seen her in before, canoed along her collarbone, its neck cut out.
My room consisted of a mattress on the floor, a box serving double duty as a hamper, a taped-up picture of Haesung and me beside a torn photo of a shirtless model from an Abercrombie catalogue, six plastic drawers stacked three deep and positioned side by side. Two boxes in the corner nearest the closet that I hadn’t bothered to unpack. What was even in them? Stuff from my old room, a bulletin board, my American Girl doll, a couple ceramic horses that were a gift from my Nana, a week’s worth of Concord uniforms that I was saving for no good reason.
“I have an idea,” Marlena said, and left.
Soon she reappeared with two half-empty cans of paint, one yellow and one blue, Michigan colors, and a James Taylor CD, guitar songs full of campfire smoke that reminded me of Dad. We levered off the stuck-on lids with spoons and peeled away the skin of dried paint to get to the still-wet insides. We wiped trails on our jeans, each other’s arms, messing ourselves up on purpose. No paintbrushes, so we opened a brand-new pack of kitchen sponges that we found under the sink. We moved everything to the center of my room and then went to work, dropping the sponges in the paint and dabbing the excess off on my hamper-box. We each took a wall. Marlena sang as she painted, harmonizing with James Taylor, going higher or lower depending on the song. “You have a really good voice,” I told her, shyly.
“I have perfect pitch,” she said. “I used to get all the solos—gospel, pop, everything—until I missed too many rehearsals.” After the CD hiccuped and started over, I joined in singing too, stumbling my way through the words. I never had enough confidence to follow anything but the strongest voice. When “Fire and Rain” came on, Marlena talked for a while about how the magic of a song is in its transitions. She paused and replayed the tracks in different places, but I sort of lost the thread.
“So what do you miss the most,” she asked, frowning at the comet she was trying to paint. “Your boyfriend? Your best friend?”
Haesung had reached out since the move a grand total of four times. I responded to all her emails almost instantly, even the one that was just a chain forward. I felt like I knew Haesung so well—that she kept candy hidden from her parents in a shoebox under her bed, that she was hopelessly in love with our French teacher. I was there the day she got her period, and had coached her through the insertion of her first tampon. We’d spent almost every Friday night since childhood sleeping over at one of our houses. In the months before I moved, I’d sometimes try and push her to do something new—sneak out after midnight and walk down to the 7-Eleven, rent a movie like Eyes Wide Shut, even steal a little bit of Jimmy’s pot. Ugh, Cath, she’d say. You’re such a spaz. Or worse, she’d just ask why.
“My dad, I guess. Though I think that makes me a traitor. Can I say my school?”
“No. No you cannot.”
“It was a really good school,” I said, startled by the feeling in my voice. I’d campaigned hard to get my parents to even let me apply to Concord—neither of them had gone to college, let alone private school. When I’d had to leave, I felt my small life was over. I’m embarrassed to remember how silly and overblown my tantrums must have seemed to Mom and Dad; to Jimmy, especially. I withdrew, and Mom used the returned tuition to cover some of the moving costs.
“So you’re not just a nerd! You’re a genius.”
“It’s not—it’s just, my life was one thing, and now it’s really different.”
“I know what you mean. Like when you get a replacement puppy after your old one gets hit by a car.”
“Yeah, and the replacement has no legs.”
“And instead of puppy dog eyes it has, like, pieces of coal.”
“Or no face at all, just a deep, unshakable feeling of mortal sadness when you have to look at it.”
“Eww, I know people with faces like that. My boyfriend has a face like that when I tell him I don’t want to fuck. He literally goes…” She extended her tongue and crossed her eyes, until, finally, I laughed.
After her James Taylor CD restarted for the third time, she asked me if we had anything to drink. In the kitchen, I spent a long time trying to decide whether to bring her a glass of orange juice or just plain water. I chose water with a couple of cubes of ice. I hadn’t noticed the matchbook-sized silver house, a kind of brooch, pinned to her T-shirt, but I did when she pressed on it with her pinky, springing it open and taking care to catch the bluish pill that rolled out of the little cavity. She popped the pill into her mouth and sucked on it for a minute before, I think, crushing it between her teeth. Then she took a gulp of water, making the face you do when something is bitter.
“What was that?”
“So nosy.”
“What was it?”
“I get headaches.”
“Oh,” I said. It was odd, sure, but no odder than that she had a trio of marker-drawn hearts on the back of her right hand, or that her mascara was ever-so-slightly blue, or that her old-lady house pin was nicer, even in miniature, than all the houses in Silver Lake. She finished the water and sucked one of the cubes into her mouth. Then she sent me to go hunt down scissors.
When I brought them back, Marlena snipped one of the sponges into a heart shape. Outside my window, the sun was going down. Maybe she would stay for dinner. Maybe she would sleep over. I turned on the overhead light, so we could see what we were doing. She cut the last three sponges into the letters of my name, a lopsided C-A-T. In a cereal bowl she swirled together a dollop of yellow and blue paint until she made an Eastery green. She dipped her fingers in and wrote “sweet greens and blues are the colors I choose” in mouse-print along the baseboard. On my wall I’d done nothing but alternate yellow and blue squares, like I was decorating the dorm of an overeager U-of-M freshman. But hers—hearts in yellow, my name here and there in blue, song lyrics in varying shades of green running horizontally and vertically and even diagonally, little secret messages, so many that in the months to come I’d discover new phrases all the time.
When I looked at what she’d done, I felt embarrassed by my cookie-cutter geometric design, so on a clean square of wall below the window I tried for something different. After a long time staring I couldn’t come up with anything good, and just wound up drawing blue and yellow spirals until I wiped away the whole mess with a handful of solid blue. A sick green shone through where the yellow had been. As long as I lived there, whenever I saw that spot, I felt a sharp and particular pain.
I guess Jimmy was standing in the doorway for a while before we noticed him—we were singing again, and loud. “You are talented,” he said, blocking off the whole hallway, big as a grown man, and for a second I thought he was talking to me.
“Thank you,” Marlena said, and reflexively finger-combed her hair, streaking the blond a deeper yellow. That took me aback, too, how gracefully she accepted the compliment. Rich kids never bragged—the kids at Concord always spoke about their accomplishments with a kind of watered-down shame, forced or not, and so I did the same. Wasn’t it rude not to deflect compliments, especially when they came from boys? Immodest, unattractive, unladylike, somehow?
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“Wanna hear how high I can go?” She paused the CD player, leaving a smear of paint on the button.
“Sure,” said Jimmy.
She lifted her chest and formed a perfect O with her mouth, her eyebrows raised, cheeks hollow, and out came a sound that was all needle, so high it reorganized your cells, lifted the hair on your arms. Audible from the future, where it follows me around. When she stopped we were all quiet for a few seconds, but the sound was still in the room, as if she’d made something real out of her voice and set it free.
“That was amazing,” Jimmy said, clapping his hands.
* * *
I’ve never believed in the idea of an innocent bystander. The act of watching changes what happens. Just because you don’t touch anything doesn’t mean you are exempt. You might be tempted to forgive me for being just fifteen, in over my head, for not knowing what to do, for not understanding, yet, the way even the tiniest choices domino, until you’re irretrievably grown up, the person you were always going to be. Or in Marlena’s case, the person you’ll never have a chance to be. The world doesn’t care that you’re just a girl.
Let the record show that I was smarter than I looked. And anyway, I touched.
* * *
The cars started arriving at around ten in the morning on New Year’s Eve. First they parked on the lawn in front of the Joyner barn, barreling right through the snow. When the lawn was full they lined up along the street outside both our houses, a caravan of pickups. Around twilight, as Mom and I aligned dough-swaddled cocktail wienies into rows of bandaged thumbs on the baking sheet, a boxy van sped down the road, swerving on the pavement before coming to a stop right behind the final truck. Mom eased the tray into the oven, shaking her head.