Marilou Is Everywhere Read online

  “Could I speak with Cindy?” she said when I picked up the phone.

  “This is Cindy.”

  “Huh. You know, we really do sound alike.”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Jude. I was hoping you could come down before dinner. There’s something I wanted to bring up.”

  “OK. Wow. Yeah.”

  “Just to be clear. I don’t want to hear any ‘sorry.’ We’re not doing that. You have to take that somewhere else. Do you understand?” I didn’t, but I didn’t say anything.

  “Oh. OK. I won’t. Should I—”

  “Come by at five,” she said, and hung up. I put on a blouse for some reason. I had started dressing up whenever I didn’t understand what was going on. It seemed like Jude had requested my appearance in a private court, and I went with my head heavy down the hill in the lufting spring twilight. The spring peepers had just started singing maybe the week before, and all around me a blue light washed the rocks and small new leaves. My breath went all the way through my body, very solid, the way it would sometimes after I had been crying.

  The house gleamed like a ship. It had been a few months since I had come down to shovel. It looked like a brand-new thing. Someone had set it to right. Someone had put up a smart-looking split-rail fence behind the barn, and a glossy red porch swing inched on the breeze. There were again goats in the pen. Not amber grays like the Kiko-Alpines. I didn’t know what they were. They didn’t know what I was either. Heat sang up from the grass. My stomach looped.

  Jude was at the door. “Well, come on,” she said.

  I was dizzy to be inside the house again. There were still shabby spots along the baseboards and all the crowded ideograms and amulets hung in their secret configurations, but the junk was all gone and everything looked like it had been swept and set and made right and kept up in a way that made the room feel cool and light. Bernadette was nowhere. The barn kitten was now a sluggish yellow tom that spotted me over its shoulder and declared me uncompelling. I followed Jude to the kitchen, where she flatted her hands on the table like a teacher who’s about to tell you that you failed a test.

  “So,” Jude said. “They’ve sent you to therapy, huh?”

  I had no idea how she knew this.

  “I saw you a few times. My therapist is in the same building.” When she saw the look on my face, she said, “Relax, it isn’t the same one. That would be fucked up though, wouldn’t it?” She seemed amused by this. Without especially paying attention to her hands, she got up and began chopping dill into green dust. Something about it reminded me exactly of Bernadette. “I wonder if that ever happens. In the morning, you hear ‘He done me wrong,’ and in the afternoon, you hear the opposite. Shoot, I bet some therapists are kind of into it. Small-town soap opera.” I must have looked horrified, because she came back to the table with a bowl of dip and crackers. Rabbits and moons and stars around the rim—Alistair’s gift. “It’s beet hummus. I know, I know. But Mom likes it. She calls it dippable borscht.”

  I took a cracker up to my mouth and chewed and nodded without tasting anything.

  “You can talk, you know.”

  I swallowed hard. “I don’t know where to start. I really don’t know what to say.”

  “When I don’t know what to say, I usually ask a question.”

  “How are you doing? Since you’ve been back?”

  “Ha!” And like Bernadette, she also threw back her head when she laughed. “Tricky question! I don’t ever answer it, myself. Try again.”

  “What did you want to talk about?”

  “Fair enough. I have a proposal for you. For now, I just want you to listen to it. Don’t decide.”

  “OK.”

  “Well—you probably heard about Mom. She’s worse, actually. I mean, she’s been sober since last July, and her vitals are great. But her memory has gotten way worse. She’s more confused.”

  “I heard about the cow.”

  “Yeah, that. She’s been getting a little dangerous, I hate to say. Not for me, but people she doesn’t know, she doesn’t trust them. She’s sure everybody’s part of some big lie.” A spike of ice fell through me. I had never imagined this consequence to my pretending. “And it’s dangerous for her, too. She can’t be here alone. One day I forgot to lock up the medicine cabinet and she OD’d on fish oil capsules because she kept thinking she had forgotten to take them. No big deal, she just felt sick. But something worse would happen eventually.”

  “You want to leave.”

  “Are you for real? Of course I want to leave. I’ve been trying to get out of here since I was six. But also, I got into Yale for religious studies. I want to go. And I don’t want to be back here every weekend because Mom poisoned the UPS guy again, you know?”

  “Religious studies? You don’t seem like, I don’t know—”

  “Ethics,” she said, and cut her eyes up to mine, almost smiling. “Anyway, I guess I’m trying to ask if you’ll live with her again.”

  “Full time?”

  “Around the clock. I mean, you know what she’s like. She can get into a lot of trouble in a few hours, but if you sit around with her, she just drinks her tea and tells you stories about the Hapsburgs.”

  “What about school?”

  “I wondered about, well, I guess I thought you might drop out, like Clinton did? We’d be paying you out of the settlement, I guess. I didn’t know how much school mattered to you. Dad and I haven’t talked about it, but I bet he would help you get in a GED program.”

  “Paying me?”

  “Minimum wage! I don’t know. This is all Dad’s idea, honestly. But, yeah, it’s work. You know how it is. I know you do. She isn’t easy. Really, don’t say anything now. Think on it overnight, take a week, whatever you need. It’s asking a lot. I don’t want you to say you can do it just because you feel obligated.”

  “I am obligated.”

  “Well. I don’t know what you think. You should just take your time, that’s what I’m saying.”

  I couldn’t put my mind to what was strange, exactly. I had imagined falling to my knees, Jude wailing or speaking from a quiet wrath. I don’t know. She had tucked her feet up under her and sent the pom-pom on her hoodie tumbling back and forth across her chest in a distracted and easy fashion. Her head came to a bit of a tilt when she looked up, considering her words as she said them, as if she was watching them float away in bubbles.

  “Do you ever hear from Virgil?” she asked me.

  “No. Not really. He used to send me postcards.”

  “Me either. Not lately, anyway. He used to call me in the middle of the night. To talk about spaghetti, baseball, weird stuff like that. I just hoped he’d make his way back here eventually.”

  “Me, too. He might. Who knows.” A little blue tint was sneaking into the light. The tears came up in my eyes but didn’t spill over until I blinked. “Can I ask you something? I don’t know if it’s OK to ask.”

  “Go for it.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Well, not for your sake. I’ll tell you that much.”

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, Cindy. I don’t intend to waste my life on you,” she said. “That’s all.”

  Well. No one leaves a star, like they say.

  It’s not like it was, but then, I wasn’t really taking care of Bernadette before. Oh, I made her pots of tea and kept up the goats and washed the dishes, and it all seemed so adult at the time. Never mind how I fed her all this gin. Stone sober, I sometimes catch Bernadette stomping a bat she caught in a shoebox. She’s still seeing William Holden movies in reflective surfaces, but this no longer disturbs me. In fact, it makes her easier to corral, as I have no more of my old tricks. Jude made it entirely clear that I am to be myself only and always, and I respect that wish, even though I sometimes wake up in the night to find Bernadette a
t the foot of my bed, demanding to know this second who I am, holding out her favorite quartz spike to impel me. Once, she wedged a pile of poison sumac leaves into my pillow, and my lip swelled up so big it hung off my face. She is, I think, really trying to kill me sometimes. Anytime I’ve left my dinner unattended, I chuck it out the back door into the garden, just in case.

  Before, I never thought once about Bernadette’s vitamins, medicine, sleeping, cholesterol. I am now quite rigorous on those matters. I bathe her feet. I lotion her cankers. I check her blood sugar. We bicker about whether we’ve already eaten our half baked potato and our scoop of cottage cheese like old married sad-o types, and I love it. Some nights Shayna comes down to spell me a few hours, and I drive into town, just to slap my eyes upon a stranger and see some neon lights. When Jude and Alistair visit, I stay with my mom, and we do what we can to be together. It’s not much, although we both like cleaning. We’re repainting the house room by room.

  The goats I don’t name. That is my truce with them. I change their hay perfectly. Sometimes, when I milk them, though, I lay my forehead against the shuddering warm cages of their ribs, and cry.

  I did negotiate one term: I asked to bring Wade. Jude didn’t like it, considering, I suppose, how easy he would be to poison. But she figured it was my problem, and why not. Thank god. Bernadette has no idea who he is, except in the way that all children belong to a divinity which she has never ceased answering to. The goblin prince, the babe o’ the bower. Little junco, shuggie bear, schatzilein. She’s made a million names for him. She’d cut a wedge out of the sun if it would please him.

  “You will grow up to be a king,” she tells Wade. I almost believe it. She’s teaching him all the bones in the body, all the birds and flowers and beetles. And how to sing “La Bamba.” I don’t know what we’ll do when he goes to kindergarten. We’ll have to take up goat soap operas again, I suppose.

  Jude said she didn’t intend to waste her life on me, and I was hurt. I didn’t know what she meant. But now I think: I don’t intend to waste my life on me either. Not on my mother, not on Clinton, not on myself, not on the flames of old hurt. I do not care to stand in the doorway of myself, making a list of punishments. I’m the kind who can only see the road ahead so far. I’m the kind that has to get empty somehow. I tried all the other ways. The only one that wouldn’t kill me was taking care of friends and wildlife. I’m no martyr, I promise. No savior, no hero, no saint—I eat too many figs to qualify, I’m afraid. Neither do I think some tally will be balanced. I’m not sure I can be forgiven in full.

  But on some mornings, the air is washed in an old way I remember, and Bernadette says:

  “Ann Richards, I am getting sick to death of you stealing my black beaded sweater.”

  “Is that right?” I say.

  “Oh yes, I am heavy tired of it. I know you sold it for one thin dime.”

  In a place where the air was ancient. “Why, yes. Redondo Beach,” I tell her. “I’m a teenage runaway. You’ll never take me alive!” This is our best homemade joke. We tell it to each other all day.

  And then I read her Jude’s letters, or I read to her from the 1977 Fern Finder, her favorite book. “If blade is strap-like with a blunt tip and oblique sori, it is Hart’s-Tongue.” “Spore-bearing parts: See next page (important).” And on like that, and on like that, in the chilly blue world without boredom. Wade introduces us to the monsters of the earth and sea, all quite personal to him. He runs with the goblins of the forest. We make lemon curd for the postmaster and mend pants with those awful waxy patches and notice the new smells in the air. I move my hands over what needs done, and I get empty, I get gone.

  I’m a throat.

  It’s a song.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is dedicated to Janice Hatfield, my eighth grade English teacher and the first person who told me that I could be a writer. I don’t know where else I’d be, Mrs. H.

  Thanks to my parents, Dan and Jan Smith. Thanks to all the families that sustain me.

  Thank you to all the teachers, staff, and students at the Michener Center for Writers and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, in particular Antonya Nelson, Colm Toibin, Charlie Baxter, Ethan Canin, Sam Chang, and Daniel Orozco. Special thanks to Marla Akin, Deb West, Jan Zenisek, and Connie Brothers. Thanks also to the MacDowell Colony and the Rona Jaffe Wallace Foundation.

  Thank you Atom Atkinson, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Anne Marie Rooney, Ben Pelhan, Zach Harris, Scott Andrew, Ethen Jerrett, Greg Koehler, Smith Henderson, Martha Stallman, Tony Tulathimutte, Meredith Blankenship, Ben Watson, Nana Nkweti, Kyle Minor, Nicole Boss, Corinne Beaugard, Brian Booker, Jake Hooker, Garth Greenwell, William Wingo, Tracy Towley, Charlie Verploegh, Anna Rauhoff, Michael Glaviano, Haley Butera, Jess Williams, Clara Wilch, Robin Bower, Jason Kirker, Bri Cavallero, and James Yu for help of every possible kind. To the entire May Day Marching Band, my total gratitude. To my beloved cat, Nellie Belle, thank you especially.

  Thank you forever to everyone at Riverhead Books and Hamish Hamilton. Claudia Ballard, thank you for reading so damn many drafts of this book. And Sarah McGrath, thank you for showing me its truest and best shape.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Sarah Elaine Smith holds MFAs in fiction from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and poetry from the Michener Center for Writers. She is also a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Wallace fellowship.

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