Marilou Is Everywhere Page 14

  It didn’t matter how many times I told her about it. She stared up sometimes from her notes. She never seemed shocked. She looked at me like my face was a long hallway, and I was somewhere at the back, playing with my fingers, wiping up dust with my fingers. She wasn’t wrong. I was back there, all the way. I would walk back out past the old people in their gowns, attended by IV trolleys, while the squat buses kneeled to take them off in every direction, and I tried to think about who Dr. Holden reminded me of.

  It was the goats, of course. They had looked at me the same way when I snuck outside with a stolen cigarette after I had spent the gin down the sink, and even after I had started keeping a little jam jar of it in reserve for myself, which I drank warm, hot, really, in the smallest sips like it could go and sew my face up for all time, and I might never have to talk to anyone again.

  I knew Dr. Holden was a great therapist because she didn’t believe anything I said.

  Bernadette seemed to get better. The weather stopped shifting. The hot gorges of air stopped turning and shimmering over the garden. No more bright days flowering up in the middle of the week, and the weather began to sustain a long slide into winter. I think it was easier for her then, to know what would more or less happen a few days in a row. I didn’t go home anymore. She wore her black beaded sweater all through the morning and only took it off in the afternoon when the air would seem to heat and pile up around us, moving so little in the shade that it would boil us, but as soon as the sun dropped behind the hills it went crisp right away, like somebody had turned a switch.

  Our days fell into a kind of ordinary beauty. Mondo nipped the goats back into their bitten-down circle when they tried to slip up into the patch of saplings. I made coffee. I fixed toast lined with the orange stewed mussels Bernadette liked and which I could never get a taste for. They felt like boiled erasers, earlobes, something that should still be attached to a body somewhere. I took the plate outside and watched her eat while the dew faded up from the grass and it went dark in the sun. I stopped hiding the gin bottles entirely. I really thought if I kept an eye on her drinking I could make it work out. There seemed to be a spot between the first drink and falling down where she loved me.

  This is funny. I didn’t know what soy sauce was when I moved into Bernadette’s. She liked to make a dish with green beans and ground beef and ginger. When we ate it, which was almost once a week, she put a little bottle of ink on the table. The bottle was not marked. She dumped jots of it on her plate. She was always doing things I couldn’t understand. Keeping up with her laws was impossible, and neither was it workable to follow her lead. Once, I tried to help her fold an afghan which she was beating against the side of the sofa, and she shooed me away, saying, “No, no virgins may assist me.”

  I found out later that she decanted the stuff from a rectangular can kept in the basement. It looked exactly like a gas can except its label was something like River Pearl or Black River or Black Swan, and there was a swan with its head knocked in reverie. But it looked just like ink to me. The bottle was squat, exactly like I imagined an ink bottle might look.

  So much of her custom was strange to me. We ate dinner by candlelight, when the electric worked perfectly fine and the bill was all paid. Some of her things were not to go in the washing machine. She shrieked when she found me tossing a black blouse with white chrysanthemums in with the bedsheets. The dirt on carrots was fine to eat. To wash them off first was prissy. But the lettuces swam in a tin bowl of ice water until all their grit had sifted out. We sat in front of the wood stove with a picture book from a museum, and she wanted me to say what was happening in each picture. I thought she wanted me to sound intelligent, and I tried to. But what made her really happy was when I got sick of that and said instead exactly what I thought, which is that the saints looked like droolers and Mary looked kind of full of herself.

  I devised a method: Whatever I thought, I did the opposite. I cried at beautiful moments. I ate the hated persimmons, even the gluey ones. I told her I would rather die than look average.

  But sousing my food with ink was too much. I watched it each week. She moved it from the cupboard when she set the table. She returned it after the meal. It was not consulted the rest of the time. It had no special roles. It could have been a lucky totem. She had lots of these. Bernadette put a laminar clay elephant in the tub with her when she bathed, then dried it with the corner of her towel and propped it back in the window. Sometimes, she would stand abruptly, jot something down on a yellow legal pad, then go outside and lay the page flat on the grass, drop a burning match onto it, and watch it warp away. It was a minor mystery. If it made her happy, I was happy to let her keep casting her intentions around us with totems and indexes.

  Eventually, I did it. I dropped dark slashes of the stuff all over my plate. Bernadette had been picking at me over dinner. Why did I insist on shaving my armpits? It was so pleading. Why did I look at her like a guppy? I was too eager. Why did I put pickle juice in the potato salad? Well, I thought everyone did that. I was pissed at her, and so I thought: Here you go, you big-panties bitch. I’m going to eat all your uppity spiritual ink and just to hell with you. The salt burned because I put on too much—how was I supposed to know its evil potency? It pulled all the spit down to my gums. But I ate it all, and smiled, and learned my life.

  And then three things happened. The weather broke hard and everything was washed silver in the mornings. The light was gone down to nothing almost right away. It felt like midnight by the time I was done making dinner.

  Deer season began, and the days had more gun blasts in them quite suddenly. Each one sounded like a big round hole of cannon fire in the sky, something with ragged, fizzy edges. I thought of a darkness opening up right in the air where the bullet ripped through to go heart, heart, heart toward its heat.

  And at night, what the hunters would do is look for where the deer liked to go. They tracked them with flashlights, just big utility ones which they shined through the windows of a truck cab. The lights chased over fields like a devil thing. Like any light, they could move so fast from near to far it was like a magic creature from a storybook. I could see them from Bernadette’s sitting room scanning the goats’ field across the road. Sometimes they caught sight of a deer and it froze from its panic, or sometimes also they caught a goat. They always looked to me unreal when they were trapped like that, with their edges turned to flame and all the little dust sparkles drifting down around them. Which were always there, but it required a flashlight to see that the world was really shot through with such a glamorous dust.

  We didn’t get spotters up on the ridge because it was too hard to drive the bent spine of road and follow the spotlight’s roaming blot into anywhere. It would go jagged and crash upward or downward crazily and no point in it. In the bottoms, where the valley platted out in a floodplain around the crick, it was easier to sight things.

  So I guess I never had the experience of being seen when the spotters went by. I believe now that it was mostly a kind of accident, mostly a lazy thing, that they didn’t turn off their spotlights when they drove by the house. If I were in the cab of the truck, I’d think it was stupid to turn it off for the five seconds that we were gone past a house, I’d let it run, I’d be looking for deer and not thinking, or I’d just see the blue stutter light from the televisions inside all the houses, and I wouldn’t know how the spotlight would invade them. It would not occur to me, even mildly. I would not lose any sleep about it either.

  But inside the house, when they drove by with their skimming lights, for a second it would shine up the whole room from the top to bottom corners with a broad eye that roved and got to showing all the fingerprints and scratches on the window glass so it had halos sketched around it in white lines. It felt, it felt to me, exactly what I imagined it would feel like to be in a dollhouse and seen by the accosting huge eye of a giant. I froze always. And took to feeling my fists against my thighs, just wh
erever I was feeling them, but to stay still, because I knew in those moments that maybe someone was seeing me.

  That was itself bad enough. It happened maybe once a night, usually during the evening radio news, while a bored British woman intoned about sanctions, sanctions, sanctions in a voice that sounded like it lived in a lemon. But what was worse, what started happening, was the trucks would slow down and look, actually look into the room. I could tell they were looking because they moved the spotlight from side to side. It roved, like to trace a moth through the air. And my skin chilled and I got so angry I could shoot something myself.

  The second thing that happened was I had been reading the book called Wuthering Heights, and I had been reading the book called Valley of the Dolls, and I had been reading the book called Man and His Symbols, and I had been reading the book called Steppenwolf. I had not seen any books meant to be read by adults before. Even in school, we had only versions of adult things. They had been summarized and abridged since we could not be trusted to glean anything but the fattest seeds of wisdom from them, and even for those we were not much hungry. I had thought a book was for telling you something obvious: Old people are sad, children are in trouble, your mom loves you, the big evil is out there in the woods watching. I had never read a book that seemed to be able to imagine me reading it. The sentences led down into a warren of blind white paths, which shifted as I traced them, because I traced them. I was the big evil, the watcher in the woods. I was the roving bright eye casting into their rooms and seeing the merciless everything, the pouring scumming glitter of mink coats and chilblains and hidden diaries. It was romance, as I have said.

  The third thing that happened was a phone call. I had thought Bernadette was out checking Mondo for ticks on the front porch—it had stayed warm the winter before and none of them had properly died off. We kept finding them on his ears and his butt, big as coffee beans and a sick gray, a swollen color. But actually, she was hunkered down in the kitchen looking for a jar of saffron threads, and before I could stop her, she picked up the phone.

  “Bernadette Satterwhite,” she said, “who’s this?” And after a pause, she said, “What sort of nonsense is that? Jude is right here.”

  That could have been the end of it all, right there. I was terrified the detectives, if they ever talked with her directly, might send someone to check on Bernadette, or put her in a hospital. I ran upstairs to plug in the second phone, which I had hidden in a closet under a rag rug. I picked up the receiver and shushed my breath with a hand over my mouth.

  “Are you listening?” a voice said. It was harsh from holding itself so quiet. My heart spiked itself right out of my body. “I’m in Cavetown, Maryland. His name is Richard Klink. It’s a white house with a white barn. I don’t know the road. The mailbox is on a green post. I’m on the second floor. I can hear horses, like, hear them running—hello? Hello?”

  “I don’t know what kind of foolishness amuses you,” Bernadette said, “but my daughter is right here in my house.” But I knew it was Jude.

  “I’m so sorry. Mom. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “What?”

  “Mom, it’s me. You need to write this down and call the police.”

  “I don’t need to do a single thing. I suppose this is one of those scams.”

  “OK, OK, you got me. I’m just upstairs, and I thought it would be funny, Mom. To call you. I’m sorry. It wasn’t very funny.”

  “I’ll say.”

  “But, let’s play a game? OK? Write it down like it’s a story, and tell it to Dad. OK? It’s a game, right? OK. He’s keeping me on the second floor. I’m sure he has a gun, I don’t know. The sun rises from across the road. I can hear the horses—”

  “Well, come downstairs this minute. I can’t find the saffron for the life of me!” And she hung up.

  I half expected the phone to start ringing again right away, then realized I was listening to the dial tone.

  When I went downstairs, Bernadette again had her head in the spice cabinet.

  “Really, Jude, you’re a little old to play tricks on your poor old mother. And to say you’d been kidnapped! A dead giveaway, my dear. How very morbid. I think you’ve been reading too much of Gogol, too much entirely.”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, and ran outside to brace myself on the chill.

  I never intended to keep this information to myself. I didn’t have some kind of plan. Like most evil, I suppose, mine was only a hurt hiding in whatever materials were near. My hurt had no imagination for other people. Other people, Jude, Bernadette, whoever, were about an inch deep at best, but I went on for miles. And maybe this is why, as I stood there blowing frost clouds, my thoughts began to say: Well, you don’t know it’s Jude for sure. Why wouldn’t she call 911? Maybe it was just a joke, and if it was a joke, wouldn’t you feel dumb to destroy all these comforts? For no reason? And besides, besides, it’s not like you did anything but overhear a conversation. In fact, most would agree that the polite thing to do when you overhear a conversation is to pretend that you didn’t.

  The next night we watched Sunset Boulevard, and Bernadette painted my toenails green. I started to get a bad feeling. I knew why. I wasn’t a fool. The phone call had surfaced in my mind in a sudden flashing stab, and my shame was so great that I was panting.

  “Can we stop the movie?”

  “Honey, you know this is my favorite part.” Gloria Swanson was holding the gun to her heart, chasing William Holden down the huge staircase, and no one ever leaves a star.

  “But this—”

  “Pipe down, for godsakes!” She held her face in her hands as if she didn’t know he would slap into the pool with the bullets in his back, but really we watched the movie all the time. Once it was over, she was petting my hair and telling me the lazy truth about how life is all flaw, and it’s what lets us love one another, and I felt too narcotically happy to even speak.

  XVI

  After the phone call, the shine fell out of things. We woke up into a winter that turned my toes white and made the hiss of the stars sound very threatening and personal. Well, we were both drinking. It was out in the open. She liked to pour a drop of raw gin in her tea. I just drank it with an ice cube in it, in little stabs at first, and then it went down like water. Sometimes I would remember Jude’s phone call in a panic, but it was easy to forget. My mind knew how to hide from it.

  I was watching her mend a pair of army pants. Her face was vacant of history like the heads they put on coins staring out not at the human world but into the thin metal rim, which arced away over and behind them. Like that. Her face was like that. Then she stopped and the fire snarled around the new log she threw in and she saw me and laughed.

  “I’ve got hot dog soup for dinner,” Bernadette said. “My eyes are done anyway for now.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said.

  “Ha.”

  Hot dog soup, a Bernadette signature, was a can of chicken broth with hot dogs cut up in it and a handful of cabbage cut off a withering core in the fridge, with a can of vegetables to round it out and dark brown bread heels propped along the sides.

  We sat with each other and I found that I didn’t want to look at anything, but the salt burned and felt warm at least. It found a cavern at least into me. My hair had dried in strange, wavering tendrils, a few that hovered away from my head no matter how I brushed them down.

  She was reading in a book and she said do you want to know a story.

  Sure, I said.

  She said, “I was young and it was Halloween, Easter, something. They had a cider press at the farm up the road from us and we went there in church clothes to help. But children never help with such a thing. We found a stick and stripped the twigs off and used the bad apples to play baseball with in the field.”

  “Baseball?”

  “It didn’t last.”

  “Why?”
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  “The apples were smashed. And we had to get new ones.”

  “Oh.”

  “One of the apples hit me in the head. I was running the bases. I never got to do that kind of thing.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Oh yes. It hurt my eye. I couldn’t open it for a week. But when I could open it again, I could see other things with it.”

  “What kind of other things?”

  “I could see who was going to call on the phone before the phone rang. I could see when something bad was going to happen before it did. I could see snow falling through space.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I know you’re not my real daughter.”

  I watched a little chip of ice go flying around my eye. Mondo pressed his rump against the table leg and slumped down, so he was sitting up with his hot breath fading across my knee.

  “You are not my real daughter. You’re an impostor. They took the real one away in the hospital and gave me you instead.” I must have looked a bit shocked.

  “It’s OK. I don’t mind. I raised you just like you were mine, and I love you.”

  At first, I thought she meant like she had chosen me, Cindy. Like she remembered the phone call, and she decided she would rather keep me. But I knew this could not be possible. If anything, Bernadette’s memory had gotten worse. She had always milked the goats, even after I began tending them, but one day, she came to me and meekly asked if I might show her how to do it. She asked me where Aunt Gina was keeping her hair, and other mysterious things like this. If I didn’t immediately understand what she was saying, she got angry and pinched the skin of her forearm, which left little red moons up and down her arms.