Marilou Is Everywhere Read online

  Actually, Jude and I do have the same kind of low voice. We both sound like we’ve been smoking hard, longer than we’ve been alive. Virgil had even said so before. But that is the only resemblance I’ll claim. It’s no great struggle to trick someone who asks you if you want coffee, then pours you some, then asks again.

  One day, I got Shayna to walk with me to Pecjak’s to buy us some Popsicles. We had been watching Dr. Phil all day and our thoughts seemed unreal. While she was paying, I slipped down the aisle and put a box of black hair dye down my shorts. It was easy because Shayna was telling Sissy Pecjak about how to draw perfect eyebrows on a face.

  “No,” she said when I dumped it in her lap back at home.

  “It’s not for you. It’s for me.”

  “You got the kind with no dimension to it. Blue tones’ll make you look like an old tooth.”

  “I don’t know nothing about tones.”

  “Yeah, clearly you don’t. You sure? This shit’ll make you look dead, I’m just saying.” She sighed. I pulled her after me into the bathroom and sat on the closed commode.

  The dye was cool. Something unlocked in my spine as she painted it on my skull. I felt like something had snapped right in my backbones for once. She piled the strips of my hair up in a do on my head like a curled swan. I got taller, I’ll swear it, right then.

  We didn’t either of us have a watch or anything to tell how long to leave it setting, so she flatfooted into the kitchen and grabbed the clock, a sad cardboard thing, from the wall. Up close, the second hand shivered each time it ticked, which I had never noticed before.

  “I’m bored,” I said. “I want a Pepsi.”

  “You’re gonna be a Pepsi.” I loved it when she said things like that.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know, my mother says it.”

  “What’s she like?” I didn’t know what a big question I had asked, because Shayna told me the whole story.

  Shayna had apparently been working at the Bath & Body Works in Port Arthur, but she was just a year out of high school and it wasn’t enough money to live on her own, so she was paying rent to her mom to live in her teenage bedroom. She felt like if she was going to pay rent she could at least be someplace where she didn’t have to pick up the second phone in the kitchen and hear about her aunts’ knees and backs and pelvises. She seemed to live in a shell that wrapped around the house and the mall and the gas station, and which she couldn’t quite figure out how to leave in a real way. Then again, everybody else had to live within the shell, and life was the shell. It didn’t seem anybody was escaping. But then one of the other girls from the store was suddenly buying everybody smoothies and new purses and eating fifty-dollar all-day brunch and nobody could figure out where she was getting the money. She told Shayna she had a webcam show and people would watch her lie around in her underwear, and they tipped her extra for pulling down her bra or touching herself or dancing, and she had one regular who tipped her out what she’d make in a whole week of selling Lovely Dreamer body lotion for bringing the computer into the bathroom with her when she took a shit. So Shayna got all the lighting and equipment and made a profile called xVapeQueenx.

  Shayna had no idea she would like it so much. But it was like stepping into a tall truck. It wasn’t the usual bullshit, the way men would drive by her slow and make kissy sounds, say I can smell you from here and all that. Or it was exactly the usual bullshit, precisely the same, except with compensation. They were just names, DannyBoi87, TomKat, eddie_murderfag. They didn’t have faces and they lived for her, and if anybody said a foul thing she could banish them from her personal chat room.

  But also she learned things about them, almost by accident. DannyBoi87 was gone every few weeks for complicated intestinal surgeries that made him itch from the painkillers for weeks afterward. TomKat’s sister was an infirm teenager who pissed her pants and failed out of school and needed his endless attention. eddie_murderfag liked to pull the double-grown hairs from his chest with tweezers and paid extra for Shayna to rub jelly and peanut butter on herself in the tub. Her regulars lived to gang up on the amateurs who sometimes dropped in to critique Shayna’s thighs or talk hatefully. TomKat was a particularly attentive guardian, and he never pestered her to talk for free, and he never talked down to her, so she made him her enforcer. His devotion to his sister impressed her enormously. His life sounded hard, but he was resolved in decent cheer about everything. When they started talking off the clock, on Skype, it was her idea. She told him her real name. They started to plan shows together. It was TomKat’s idea that she should set up the laptop next to the tub and demonstrate some other uses for Lovely Dreamer body lotion. They had a good thing going. TomKat was Clinton, of course.

  Shayna’s mother was a hospice nurse who worked long days, and Shayna did the show only when her mom was out of the house. The more elaborate her sessions got, the more she worried she’d get caught, so as added insurance, she leaned a two-by-four against the front door so if her mother came home unexpectedly, it would clatter over and act as an alarm.

  But a terrible thing happened when it didn’t work. Well, it did, but the two-by-four fell sideways and smashed a ceramic pig doorstop, and Shayna’s mother assumed there was an intruder nearby, so she picked up the plank and stalked through the house with it. She heard the tub running. She heard her baby girl making noises. Anybody would break the door down. Anybody would bring the plank down on whoever was hurting her child, except Shayna’s mom found only Shayna in the tub, drools of body wash glossing her tits and the laptop chiming for tips like pachinko, and the twitch in the muscle that registers shock was already thrumming, so it was impossible for her not to keep swinging once the first swing had cracked Shayna’s knee.

  It was Shayna’s top-grossing performance to date. Through the roof. Thank god someone had captured the video, she said—she watermarked it and sold it on YouKandy.com as “Slut Gets Busted—Domme Mom Beatdown!” and made excellent passive income. Her regulars, especially the sadistic ones, were begging for more two-by-four clips. Her submissives offered miniature fortunes for a session with the domme mom. But it ended the arrangement. No more childhood bedroom, no more aunties. Shayna stayed a few nights with the store manager, Bryan, but he kept snakes in his car and the whole thing, the whole thing of Bryan, seemed off. Like how “I understand completely” is what Bryan said in response to really any word from her mouth. Clinton said she should come stay with him, absolutely rent free. She couldn’t exactly believe she was doing it as she bought the plane ticket. But Clinton was awfully good-looking, and wasn’t love a series of things you did in spite of how wild they were? Love is crazy, and this was crazy, so it must be love. It must.

  She had no idea how hard it would be to find our place. She had to hitch a ride with a tanker truck going out to the gas pad on Bernadette’s land, and her gut dropped the more they wound out into the foothills that made your ears pop, up one side and down the other, and the flat shadows of hawks slipping over the road and the last stoplight behind them by miles and miles and miles.

  “Do you know that everything looks the same out here?” she asked me.

  I looked outside. It was green. Although not without differences. There was a light patch on the facing hill like a bald head emerging from between breasts. Mules wandered over the breasts walking sideways in the brown grass and a tractor combed perpendicular across the temples. It was a place where the sun hit hard in the middle of the day. The clouds shifted and had a sound inside them as they moved over the sun. When they moved away again, the sun poured down more and hawks sailed all through this sound. It shone and shone. It was the blood in my head and the wind in my teeth. All the barns around had gone gray in the rain, and the boards shambled toward their peaks. I didn’t always see it like that, though. When I was younger, I thought the whole world was a part of my body. I would run, I would hear the wind of my running. I thought
they were the same thing. I thought if I ran hard enough, I could fall off the top of one of those ridges and go spinning away into space. I didn’t really know what Shayna thought of us, any more than I could see the dark inside my head.

  “I guess it does,” I said. She had been pulling big clouds off her vape. It looked like a metal radio box with a kazoo in one side. I held out my hand for it. I wondered if I could draw vapor serpents like hers, which sank to the floor and disappeared, and found that I could. I really could.

  The air got thin around me because I was very high up. All like that, I had become an adult. She bent my head down into the tub to rinse the dye out. My hair trailed down with the water.

  “Why is he acting so weird around you?”

  “I think he’s just a weird guy. He doesn’t know what he’s doing half the time.”

  “I really hope he doesn’t,” I said. She laughed at that, but I didn’t. “I don’t piss my pants,” I said.

  “I know that.”

  “He told you a lie, though.”

  “Well,” she said. “Clinton is the only man who really loves me.”

  “Is that true?”

  She picked a shred of lip from her lip. “Oh, silly. I don’t know. It’s a thing people say.”

  XI

  I had a new routine. Before dawn I walked down through the woods to Bernadette’s. If Bernadette was sleeping, or upstairs at least, I first looked for her bottle. Sometimes I found an empty one on the table with an impossibly lean fume of liquid left in the bottom, and I tore the label off and put it on the porch to take with me. I went down into the cellar and looked where Virgil had. The places changed sometimes. Most often I found the bottles in the cistern, which I wondered at since it took so much work to do. Sometimes it was almost funny, where I found them. Under a shelf where splay-legged dolls sat with their faces colored blue from a marker: doll, doll, gin, doll. Sometimes I thought she’d keep track of where I had found them, but of course her memory was bad, as I would discover, and the task had a sort of matter-of-factness to it eventually.

  I found it hard, though, pouring them out. I didn’t like to do it. It was the worst part of the day. Unless I pried off the plastic regulator with a butter knife, which I was sometimes too inept to do, it came out slow, like it had a grudge against disappearing. The smell reminded me of gasoline. It flowered up into the air like paint. I have always loved a fume. When Virgil topped off one of the vehicles from his store of gas in the shed I sometimes would go back to where he had spilled some and hold my head over the spot where it broke up from out of the earth like another world, with its ugly edges, which I loved.

  To reward myself for pouring out the gin, I would smoke a cigarette with the goats. I could try to have them like me, but instead I started to like their indifference. It’s nature’s genius, something that is both alive and indifferent.

  It was safest if I got there before she woke up. When she was groggy she was easiest to fool. When I said good morning and called her Mom, she would just squint and say hi. She made me little bowls of oat goo, which I ate to be nice. When we talked, I could get her to wring out all the facts from a thing since her conversations went in spirals, down and down into the heart of her life.

  It was not very hard to figure out. When Bernadette knew I was Cindy, she was sad because it meant her daughter was gone, or dead. When I was the slippery person, at daybreak or sundown, when I began wearing Jude’s harsh black-frame glasses around the house, even though they gave me headaches and brought the world into a blurred, distant point, when I talked back to her, when I sulked, when I sang out loud, all of these things I never did at home, I believed she mistook me for her daughter, in some way. I stood in the place where Jude was supposed to be, at least. And this, I thought, was a kindness.

  One day, the school bus swung down the road and came to a stop in front of Bernadette’s house. I was eating mock pâté on toasts with pu-erh tea and persimmons, balancing a moldy novel in one hand, and it just seemed impossible to me, in that second, that I had ever hoisted myself up into the bus and sat for whole days talking about civics and like that.

  I had not at all thought about school that whole time. As far as I was concerned, all had been forgiven—as long as I never had to go back. The squares of yellow light and the electrons that jumped from halo to halo and the gray green beans with the stringy diced ham hock (actually my favorite, even though they were gross) were funny little things from another life, and I would have them stay that way. The door cranked open. The driver hunched down to get a look at me. In one of the back windows, I could see Wyatt Tedrow from my grade wrinkling his forehead and trying to figure me out with the black hair and not at my own house. His forehead was white where it pressed against the window.

  I flapped my hand in a lazy way, which I hoped would look grown, and turned the page in my book without looking up, even though I was too panicked to read. I was afraid they would drag me away. I wondered if they would talk about me, and make up stories like I had disappeared, too. I imagined my homeroom teacher calling my name into the silence.

  The bus pulled away, and would not stop there again all year.

  Bernadette’s broken nose was healing a little wrong, but she wouldn’t go to the doctor, and she couldn’t remember what had happened in the first place. Sometimes I caught her pressing it in places and wincing, and I would ask how her face felt.

  “You know, it usually feels just fine, but today for some reason. I don’t know. Achy? I feel like I should have an aspirin. Or a drink.” She returned to this last point often. There was a glare in the sky, so she should probably put on a hat, or get a drink. She had read about a beautiful love story between a waitress and a cop, and could I sit down and listen for a minute to how wonderful it was, and get her a drink. It was the day of Saint Trea, and we should celebrate by eating oranges. And orange is lovely in hot toddies, so why don’t I bring out the bottle. I didn’t say no. I had stopped pouring out the bottles. They were my best disguise, after all.

  Virgil had made it clear my real job was to keep Bernadette from killing herself by accident, which she could easily do falling down the stairs, burning the house down, or breathing her sick back down into her lungs. The pilot light was busted on her stove so you had to kiss on it with a lit match, but she’d be in the middle of telling me about the Hapsburg Empire and forget, with the gas hissing out god knows how long. (“They say Leopold’s jaw was so deformed that his mouth filled with water when it rained.”) In between seeing to that, I cleaned things. I took everything down from the high places and wiped it off with a wet rag, all her carved totems and semiprecious stones and feathers and pieces of sentimental tin. She didn’t like that I touched these things and claimed in fact that they had a particular order and formed triads and hexagons and trines I could know nothing about, but unless she saw me messing with them explicitly she didn’t seem to notice.

  She was easy to manipulate. I wish it had not been so. But either from grief or from drinking she couldn’t keep a thought in her head for longer than five minutes most of the time, longer than any time I was in the room with her. When I left, or she left, the scene was reset. There was nothing I could do to keep from having the same conversations with her eighty times a day. Like:

  “Where’s my black beaded sweater?”

  “It’s too hot for a sweater.”

  “Oh, I know that. But I want to know where it is.”

  “Why.”

  “I want to be sure you didn’t take it.”

  “I don’t want your dirty old sweater,” I said. “I don’t care.” Too harsh. Leave the room, begin again.

  “Honey, have you seen my black beaded sweater?”

  “Sorry, I haven’t.”

  “You took it.”

  “Ma. It’s right here.” The sweater was spread in a cross on the back of the couch. She was sitting on it, in fact. It floated up be
hind her like an evil shadow.

  “Oh,” she said. She craned around and petted it, reassured of its presence. “Good. It’s my favorite one. I got it in Redondo Beach, you know.”

  “What’s Redondo Beach?”

  “It’s a place in California where they sell you the very soul of a fish on a platter for one thin dime.”

  “What’s California like?”

  “Serene. Yet dark. It’s a frightening place, but the flowers are beautiful.” It was getting dark. The air went out of the room with a hiss. Lamplight moved on the beading and it looked like a crawling thing. Bernadette went to put on the kettle. She had already put it on and forgotten about it twice that evening. I could tell the handle was still hot because she jumped her hand back away from it, though she said nothing. She dipped the match into the burner and the flame boomed up. I had thrown away the other spent matches. She always thought it was for the first time, everything.

  She went back to the couch and took up her crossword puzzle again. And asked me what’s this and what’s that, the Tiber, the emu, pahoehoe, Tiger Woods.

  “Where’s my black beaded sweater?”

  “It’s too hot for a sweater.”

  “Oh, I know that. I just want to know where it is.”

  “Why.”

  “I want to be sure you didn’t take it.”