Marilou Is Everywhere Read online

  One day, I was cleaning the oven. It was still hours before Virgil would pick me up. I got a piece of newspaper folded up under me so I could kneel in front of the oven. It was the worst mess in the house. Someone had been shoving things in there to clean up in a hurry. It was the same trash, the standard trash, except also plates with food rinds on them, and big undisturbed clusters of mold that were airy as dandelion moons. The oven itself was scalded black and dusts of dog and dry skin had fuzzed in the thin strip on the floor before it where the wood gave way to red linoleum. It felt wet on my face when I opened the oven door. A few times I had meant to deal with the oven and just stopped dead at the thought, but I began and I began by doing just one thing, throwing away one thing by one thing, and happily I made my mind to throw out the goddamned whole thing. A trash bag swallowed it all like a feasting snake. Even the plates. When the oven was clean, it beamed back while I looked. I mean that I could see my face in it, but it also had acquired a kind of intelligence.

  I hauled everything outside and ran my head under the spigot on the side of the house, sat on the concrete steps with a warm Coca-Cola and watched the goats. They watched me like I was an ocean, and might do anything to them. Summer was going to stop soon. The dust was starting to stick to the catalpa trees. They were sick of standing up in the sun. The air kept on thick but I knew better than to think it would be hot forever. The days would stop. It was plain.

  I had the idea that the goats might accept me and come to think of me as a goat if I sat there long enough. This was the kind of weird thought I had all the time then. I thought I could change things in the world by thinking them, so I thought about them all the time. And the first goat would approach me and lick my hand, and the others would come. I was not like anybody else, and they would see this. They would circle me and tell me things and show me how they climbed along the leanest little pickings of slate on a hill. Fearless.

  I had found a pack of Camels under a half-done crossword puzzle with a book of matches tucked into the cellophane, and they were sailing me out to a new idea. It was a dry day, the first when the wind had gotten chill and real like something slipping up from all of the basements. I knew just how to light a cigarette from watching Virgil, although nobody in my family was supposed to smoke or do anything technically sinning, and yet we didn’t do much of anything else. The cigarette tasted like wood, and spit welled up in my cheeks. The nearest goat blinked in the cloud I drew onto it but remained essentially uncomplaining. I liked my life. It gathered itself in an invisible fist around me and the air shimmered like something had slipped over it perfectly see-thru and tricky. I could name them, I realized, the goats, and feed them apples until they liked me, and if they didn’t like me, I could hardly care. Even I could see how dreadful my life was, but something about its ragged elements had combined in a way that was refreshing and funny and so much my own that I could eat it up and never be gotten at.

  This is how to live, I realized. To set something on fire. That is what is required.

  I don’t know where I get this trash. So unoriginal! Such a menacing thing, so ordinary. It powers everything. In every switch and ion there is a girl smoking her first idiot cigarette under a corrugated tin roof and etching a difference into the air. Try to find a jukebox free of the sentiment. Try to find a waterfall that isn’t made of this. You’ll die looking, I promise. The search party will quit and go home.

  I was still stoned on the luxury of my thought when I stood to go back inside. I was starting to hold my hand out to the doorknob but found Bernadette in the way, watching me. My arm burned where she grabbed it. We flew to the couch where she laid me out over her lap, belly down. This all happened in a rush. She pulled my shorts down as far as they could go and thrashed at me with something like a black leather flyswatter. It didn’t really hurt. I was too big, and she couldn’t find the right angle to swat me hard, but my forehead ground into the tweed cushion and I tried to bring my arms around so I could roll off and away.

  “Where have you been? That’s all I need, seriously, you go off like that I’m just, it’s over. Dammit. Dammit dammit dammit.”

  I tried to scream, but my throat was all air.

  “Now, oh yes. Now we’re scared, oh yes.”

  I pulled myself up and righted my shorts. She was breathing hard. I saw she was sweating all over but wanted to say more.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. My mouth was a clenched line and I could hardly get the words out.

  To get to the door, I would have to rush past the couch where she could no doubt reach me. She had strong fingertips. They dug at the back of my shirt. She had pulled me back and held one elbow. She slapped at my ear. It would have hurt worse if it landed but her aim was wrong.

  She was wearing a purple kimono over a men’s undershirt and boxers. Her stomach was fish white like mine, and her legs and arms were so skinny. She stared me down with her breath ticking. Then her eyes dropped, and she cleaned her lip corners with a triangle of tongue.

  “Honey,” she said. “I’m sorry. I did it again, didn’t I? Let me make you a sandwich.”

  She steered us into the kitchen. “I’ve been thinking we should really get ourselves out of here on a trip,” she said, scouring the fridge for cheese and butter. On the table, grocery store circulars were spread open like the bottom of a birdcage. “Someplace with a good coast, where they have those lodge motels. What am I thinking? Oregon, I suppose. But I need to see the water, Jude. I’ll be dead soon. My god how I’ve missed you.”

  I knew I wasn’t the one she missed. And I should have been scared. But I don’t think anyone had ever said such a nice thing in my direction, with the voice meaning it also. The tears started way back in my head and I pressed my eyes closed to stop them. I missed my mom. I missed how she would take our hands and polka us around the kitchen when we were in bad moods and didn’t even want cheered up. “This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, / This ain’t no fooling around.”

  Bernadette hadn’t noticed my silence. It took her no effort to keep up the conversation all by herself. She had a nice way of moving around the kitchen without needing to look at anything.

  “I know you hate it when I talk about death, but there it is. It’s the one thing we’re never incorrect to fear. Your godmother, I mean, that woman would love to tell you that heaven is the afterlife. Of course she wants you to think that her prayers will keep me alive until you find a provider. It’s just that I ask you”—she was shaving curls of butter from the block with an eye held squinted—“to consider the source.”

  Mondo nudged himself under my feet so my heels sat on his spine. I tensed my thighs to hold them up. There was a speedy rush to everything she was saying, how it wrapped around me.

  “I think we really ought to get some rhubarb in the ground this year. Well, of course. I’m always full of regrets! At this time of year, it’s just about dead anyway. I have your aunt Shirley’s recipe for that tart you like. It’s almost good if you double the sugar. She thinks we all have diabetes, or will any day now.” She tipped the sandwich onto a plate. A teardrop of old grease clouded the side. “You’re awfully quiet today, sweetie. Is something the matter?” I had already bitten the edges of the sandwich and had tented my mouth to let out the steam. I had no idea how long it had been since I last had hot food.

  “Not really,” I said. “This is good.”

  The smile that broke out from her face for this was a shining thing. I found I didn’t want her to put it away. She propped her head up on her wrist. Light touched the top of her hair again and I could see it was red under the dark.

  “I just hope you’ll tell me when it’s boys. Really, I do. I know a thing or two about all that.”

  “Ugh,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s coming. You can’t doubt it. And I’ll tell you this: We have always been very lucky in love, the women of our extraction.”

  I’ll tell you
a secret: Acting is nothing. Acting is what you have to call it later, to seem remorseful, after you’ve said how you wished and done how you wished and blew up your breath into the shapes that you liked. So I used this strange moment to try saying the truth.

  “OK,” I said. “There’s a boy. But I hate him.”

  “Maybe you really love him?”

  “No, I hate him. I don’t want him to touch me.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He, like, tickles. And other stuff.”

  “Yuck,” Bernadette said. “Ticklers are the worst. Cowards! No ticklers for Jude. Absolutely not,” she said. She scolded the lit match she held against her cigarette, and waved it to death with a slice of her wrist. “The only solution, I’m afraid, is a murdering.”

  I swallowed a sharp bit of crust. Was she serious?

  “Oh yes, we will shoot him. Right in the jelly of the eye!” I laughed out of alarm, more of a bark. Then we laughed at that. And she threw back her head like she was drinking hidden rain, beautiful. Beautiful. I had never laughed before, I’m sure.

  “I’ll kill him, I’ll drown him in the ocean. We’ll fill him up with juice until he turns purple and his stomach falls out.” I was still laughing. My blood rang. It felt so good to say a thing like that, even though maybe what I said was a bit too strange.

  Then the sun went behind a cloud and we were sitting in just the glare from the window. The radio hit a pocket of garble with the grainy high holy of the gospel station trying to push out from under the arpeggio, saxophone, bells. Bernadette studied the cuticles of her thumbs and had drawn her lips into a line. I was still eating the other half of the sandwich.

  “Who are you,” she said.

  “I—”

  “No. You just tell me who the fuck you are this minute.”

  “I’m Virgil’s sister. I’m here to clean.”

  “I don’t know any Virgil.”

  “He mows. He bales the hay. He’s tall,” I said hopelessly.

  “You have to leave,” she said.

  “He’s coming to get me at five.”

  “I’m from Texas, and I know the law. I can shoot you.”

  “Well,” I said. “This isn’t Texas. It’s Pennsylvania.” For some reason, that reminded her of Jude, and her face caved in.

  “You killed her! My baby, oh god. It was you!”

  “I don’t know where Jude is, I promise! I promise. I don’t even know her except from school.”

  “How do you know her name? How dare you. My baby! She’s dead.”

  I was up out the door with Bernadette after me, again. Except this time she wasn’t trying to grab me. Her spit flatted itself on the back of my leg. Another spit hit my T-shirt. When I turned, she had dropped to her knees. Her mouth swung wide with no air or sound coming out. I heaved myself up the hills, scrabbling my hands over roots to hold where it was too vertical, the leaves too slippy, they came away in big swipes under my heels and the blood would just pop my head open. I wished to be a tick and stick myself to the skin of the world and just live on what it fed me without fighting, and that is how I got up the hill, up onto our ridge spine, where Clinton was throwing a knife at a rotted stump and Virgil was nowhere around.

  Virgil took me back to Bernadette’s the next day. He said it was all fine, and she got confused on him sometimes, too. Sometimes she thought Virgil was Rock Hudson, sometimes her childhood love Bobby Bickham. It was the drinking. He said he was going to explain to her properly who I was, and fix the sink in case she didn’t believe him, or in any case he said it was good to have a clear reason to be in her house when she got confused. She got most confused at sunup and sundown, he said, so we went once the light was calling down unbroken in the middle of the dry morning.

  We knew something was wrong right away—Bernadette was in the living room, sat on the floor with her legs in a V and her head cricked back at a painful angle on the couch. Smoke poured out of the oven.

  Virgil got down on the floor by her to slap her loose jaw some, just light taps, and she came back up to the air with her eyes struggling. They spun like the cord that kept them in place had been cut. He waved me into the kitchen. The stove blared at me. It had been on all night ticking and grumbling. She had torn open a bread bag from the end that wasn’t supposed to open and the two pieces she had tried to toast were scorched so thorough that they fell away in black dust when I touched them.

  Bernadette had one of the bottles I had found under the sink clamped into her hand and I couldn’t get it loose. It smacked out against my arms while we carried her up the stairs and into the bathroom. Virgil hoisted the shower curtain to pin it around the rod and we lowered her against the front where rust stains wept down from the fixtures. The ring around the drain was jungle color, down all the way inside it. Clear water charged down while Virgil turned her head back and forth on her neck in the cold stream. The bottle rang against the tub so loud I was afraid somebody would come and arrest us.

  When she yelled, it wasn’t anything that matched with words, but sharp so I knew she was hunting back from the hidden place her mind had been, and Virgil turned off the water so we could get her up. She could step over the edge of the tub but needed carrying to the bedroom. It smelled strange and strict in there, strong and leathery. Her clothes swarmed from the closet and up onto the bed. There was only a little lip by the pillow where the covers had been pulled back. She slept under a pile of coats, like everyone had just left a party and run out into the snow.

  Virgil sat her upright and turned to get something from the closet to put around her shoulders, which is when I noticed that her chest was out. Both her titties had slipped up out of the stretch-neck T-shirt, which had got wrapped around her waist. When I turned away, she fell flat from the bed onto her face and my nerves sprang out all against each other. When she sat up, the blood was guttering out of her one nostril, and she was laughing.

  “Oh my god,” she said. “I’ve really done it this time.”

  I held out a sock for her to catch up the blood.

  “Aren’t you sweet,” she said. “But I’m fine, fine, fine. Wow. Wow.” We left her there, saying that on her side.

  We put the splayed furniture back into the divots in the living room rug. I threw the burned bread dust out into the yard and a goat helped itself to the black grass.

  In the basement, Virgil showed me where to look for her bottles. Alistair had shown him, I guess. I don’t know why any of us thought it would help since she always got more, but maybe it was enough to feel like we tried. She had a few tricky places where he checked first—the underside of a workbench furred in undersea dust, a shelf behind the plank stairs. I thought it was crazy when he took the lid off the cistern, but he hauled up a triple-bagged bundle tied with twine and lashed around with fishing line so you couldn’t see the thin wire of it, at the lip of it, gone down and down into the darkness. He moved on to an ancient walnut hutch crowded with canned grapes. The cans were dusty but trailed with dark finger sweeps from where he had looked other times. He came out with another bottle of gin.

  He poured out the bottles, ripped the labels down the middle and peeled them from the seam of glue along the back. I didn’t want to touch them because I knew they had a kind of power. Our mother had quit drinking when we were babies. Her method was to starve and get beautiful, buy lotto scratchers, read the Bible, scrape my hair up into these crinkle French braids that made me scream since she had to comb them out until they were right and the blood bounced under the skin of my skull. She sewed all of our clothes. She put Virgil in pageants. She made him a Superman costume that looked like the real, perfect thing.

  Virgil bagged the empties, and had me put them in the truck bed nooked against the back wall where they wouldn’t roll. The handles bit down through my fingers and being in the sun made me hard tired, like I had just pulled my new self from an egg. When I went back
inside, the sun had burned my eyes so Virgil looked like a red-and-green swarm.

  “What it is,” he said, “is she gets upset when she remembers that Jude is actually gone. Listen, I need you to check every day and pour out all the bottles, OK? Check all the places I showed you.”

  “OK.”

  “She helped me out,” he said. “You know. When Mom wasn’t around.” But I didn’t wonder why Virgil wanted to help. I wanted to help, too. I thought Bernadette was wonderful, if a little scary.

  “She thought I was Jude. A few times.”

  Virgil thought about it. “Maybe that’s the best way, actually.”

  “To do what?”

  “Just do things to keep her off of it, you know? And keep her from burning down the damn house. Maybe if she thinks you’re Jude, she won’t have to drink so much.”

  On the way back up to our ridge, he pulled over by a gravel bay where the turn went wide. The engine ran. He hooked both bags around his fingers and tossed them down where the hill fell away into jungle. I couldn’t hear them roll, but they shook the vines. It looked, almost, like a creature was about to appear there.

  The hair dye was my idea. Virgil had said I should keep Bernadette’s mind off her troubles, after all. It was just an experiment. It was just for a little while, to make Bernadette feel better. It was a kindness.

  I wondered why she’d suddenly turned on me when we had just a moment earlier been peaceably eating sandwiches and planning Clinton’s death. The only thing I could think was my hair had been wet, but when it dried blond, some important piece of the resemblance fled. That was the only way I could figure it. If I dyed my hair and found a spare of Jude’s glasses, maybe I could keep Bernadette from thinking about her missing girl.

  To be clear: This was nothing but delusion. I look nothing like Jude, even disregarding skin color. She had the tuned bones of someone nearly grown up, and her forearms were bladed with muscle. I was pudgy from eating and starving and Pepsi and salt. She was much taller than me, with wider eyes. My face was still round. And I had a way of standing around which indicated I would like to be pulled inside out and swiftly disappeared from the earth. Jude had another sort of way about her. People shut up when she raised her eyes to them. By this I mean: I was no brilliant actress, with no real disguise. Bernadette was in much worse shape than anyone knew.