Marilou Is Everywhere Read online

  “Fuck if you would,” Clinton said. “Give me something.”

  She brought a pie out from the icebox and my brothers took into it with their forks and ate the whole thing down to the tin in two silent minutes.

  “She said anything today?” Virgil asked and lit his cigarette.

  “She’s been watching cars,” Mom said. “I don’t know.”

  “Was you watching cars, sweetness?” I had my head leaned on the wood lip of the door frame, and softly, softly, I smacked my temple on it, just from being bored crazy. Sometimes I pressed in soft places on my head just to see the color flashes. Virgil put his smoke down in the pie pan and tilted it around in a circle so the tip was a dark gray cone. He focused on that, and blew out hard. “I got another house lined up. The Satterwhite lady. The one with all the wind chimes down the hill? She wants the grass done this afternoon.”

  “She wants the grass done every afternoon,” Mom said. “I thought you was down there yesterday.”

  “If she wants to pay, I don’t mind it. Her business.” He stretched and ran his hands over his ribs.

  “You just go over there at night, paint it all green. Bet you she’d never notice.”

  “Afternoon,” Clinton said, and sucked his teeth. “Is what it already is.”

  “We got to go now, is what I’m saying.”

  “Man, I can’t. I’m too bored to think about it.” Clinton prayed his hands together and pulled his hair down over his face in a stiff blond spike.

  “You better take her with,” Mom said, and flapped her hand toward me. “I got to not be stared at for a minute today.”

  The window light blazed around them and they were dark with just some edges. Clinton peeled off his glasses and butted his wrists into his eyes to grind out the sleep sand, the little moon-green boogers. We all got them, as a family. A rind of heat was singing through the screen door and I wandered to it. A black truck went down the road. It was so black it was green, but it wasn’t our truck. The woman driving it had a red ponytail and little round sunglasses. She looked long at the house when she went by but she couldn’t see us. I didn’t think so. I made a grocery sack with my things in it. I didn’t get to leave the house all that much. For all I knew we were going away a long time.

  Virgil pushed the mowers up on boards that ramped into the truck bed, shoved the boards up after. He boosted me onto the tailgate with his two big hands on my ribs. They held the heat of the sun, or maybe it was his blood that did it. I shimmied crabwise back into the hay dust that gathered in the black grooves and put my back against the window into the cab. Mom was laying more boxes on the burn pile. Her head had disappeared behind the scary milk that came off the fire.

  The truck shook when Virgil turned it on. My tailbone buzzed from it. Clinton came falling out of the house. The way he walked, his legs just caught up in time to keep him from tipping. He had a baseball cap on backward and the plaid shirt flew open so I could see his shoulders where the undershirt cut away. He was always sleeping in his glasses. They left a deep red line across the bridge of his nose. He had put a bottle of pink wine down in his back pocket. He touched it to make sure it was still there.

  “Shit. Shit!” Virgil clapped twice. He turned up the radio. He looked back out at me and winked.

  The road had grass grown up in its middle between the tire tracks. It bowed under us as we went out along the ridge. We turned onto a paved road that took us down from the hill spine. At the bottom there was a proper painted road with the yellow lines and some mailboxes off it. I couldn’t hear the music in the cab very clear. Virgil and Clinton smoked from the pack of USA Gold on the dash. My hair made a stinging cloud. It whipped around my face. I tried to gather it in a hand and hold it but gave up and let it whip into my eyes and stick on my lips.

  The house sat back on a stamped-down run of grass that looked to not need cutting. It was a bruised green from being mown already. A husky dog folded its paws one over the other on the porch. It stood when our truck crawled up onto the gravel, but the woman on the porch put her hand flat on its back and it sat again. Across the road some goats were picking across a whole field of mud, all the flat part along the crick churned up from their hooves. They held very still, but with their tails fluttering.

  I jumped down and set the ramp boards like I had seen Virgil do it always, but he moved them a little, moved them back. He waved at the woman, and she came toward us with her hand visoring her eyes. Her dress was long and the grass pulled it back as she walked so it spread behind her like a train on a bride, which I thought was very pretty. She moved like there was juice in her bones and nothing to hurry about. I know it now: It’s the way people walk when they like what they are. But I had never seen it before. She wore a bunch of purple tin bracelets with diamond shapes bit out of them. Her tan went right up under her clothes and didn’t have the ghost edges of a T-shirt anywhere. My mother was also tan, but in the reverse of the low-cut shirt she wore every day. Mom’s chest was a brown, wrinkled plat the shape of the mat they put down in the batter’s box.

  “Back already?” she asked Virgil.

  “We ran out of gas the other day. Didn’t get the edges of that back field.”

  “Well, how kind of you to return. I probably wouldn’t even notice. I’m about to fix us BLTs, if you’d like a plate when you’re done?” I started to walk up to the woman with the skittering bracelets because I wanted BLTs right away, but Clinton stayed me with a hand on my chest.

  “Oh, your little girl can come in the house,” she said. “It’s too hot to leave her outside.”

  “She’s our sister.”

  “She waits in the truck,” Clinton said, squinting at her.

  “Well, on the porch, at least.” She was used to getting her way. I could tell. She ducked her head so she could look at my eyes. “Honey, you like doggies?” I nodded.

  I jumped down and she pushed me along with her hand flat on my shoulders. It was like she could steer me by invisible strings. I wanted to do just whatever she wanted me to.

  The dog was named Mondo and it had a teddy bear face, all one color. She showed me how to let Mondo smell my hand before I patted him on the head. He let me push his ears around in circles, but when she went inside, he walked away with his tail hanging right down, like he was done for the day with pretending to be a dog.

  Inside there was a girl with her hair pulled back tight across her head. She was edging inside the window with a paintbrush. The way the light hit her glasses made her eyes just blanks. This was Jude, of course. I knew her a little from the school bus. She was always putting on her deodorant as the bus churned away from her house, and when she slipped it up inside her sweater I could see a slice of her stomach.

  Jude must have been fourteen, a freshman at West Greene. She was the kind of person who seemed older than the teachers sometimes. Once, there had been a competition at school to know math in your head, which they made us all watch. She had won, I remember, but she looked bored the whole time. When she was thinking up the answers, she balanced on one leg with her head tilted down, as if she barely needed to think. She wasn’t like anyone else. Everything she did, surely it was the coolest thing to do because she did it. If I tried, I came off like a freak. I did not know the origin of this curse, but I was so thirsty to know that I cursed myself, I’m sure, even more.

  She was looking right at me, on the porch, so I waved at her. She brought a cigarette up to her lips and blew the smoke out through her nostrils. Had she seen me? It seemed like she had not. I was surprised she was smoking in the house. At school she was a brain, and brains supposedly did not do stuff like that. But then she heard the side door open and she dropped the cigarette in a water glass and pushed it out of sight. “Mondo, hey, no,” she said. Her voice fell as she walked away.

  I took out my games and the mowers crossed over each other droning like two people having a conversation abou
t unrelated things. And then something happened in my head where I couldn’t like my toys anymore. I was getting too old for games, but nobody knew what to do with me. Neither did I. My mom used to pet the bridge of my nose and whisper me gossip stories when I couldn’t sleep, but one day she just stopped, and would stay in her bedroom with the air conditioner running, and have headaches. I had a wood paddle with a rubber ball on a string stapled to it and a tube made out of the plastic plaid from lawn chairs that you could trap your whole thumbs inside. My doll would not hold up her head. Her head was on a stick that went down into her soft body and I had broken the stick when I rolled over on it sleeping too hard. I wanted for her to be restored. She would just rest her head on her chin for all the rest of time. I felt disappointed by her. I felt like she had been dipped in oil. My hands made prints on her neck. I was too old for dolls, but I still saw them as alive. What would they do when I abandoned them? They could not go to work or have children to distract themselves. It made me so sad I got my breath stuck in my throat and thought I could cry.

  The lady came outside with a glass of orange juice and it had ice cubes in it. She put it down next to me and sat on the edge of the porch. There was no sandwich, but neither did I want to ask about it. Mondo trotted up, on duty again. She ran a wire brush over his back and blew the fur balls so they caught in the air and sailed away.

  “Your brothers work really hard.”

  Clinton would be stealing a sip from the wine bottle under the truck seat if she would just go inside. He slapped the sweat off his face and turned his glare away since I was watching him.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Cindy,” I said. I looked very hard at my doll. She had pink circles on her face, and brown braids.

  “Do you want to brush him?” she asked. “He likes it.”

  I knee-walked over to her and she steered the brush in my hand. It left furrows in the dog’s back. When I ran the brush over the bones of his haunches his head jerked and swiveled like a broken toy.

  “It’s OK. It doesn’t hurt him. His nerves are coming back to life. The people who had him before kept him in a box and he didn’t get to use his legs.”

  We kept brushing him until a smell compelled Mondo elsewhere. She got up, too, and walked off, twisting up her hair. The hills went out in waves. The faraway ones were blue from all the water held up in the air. I jumped down from the side of the porch to follow the lady and the dog, but instead I saw Virgil leaning with an arm up above his head, buckling his fingers on the tree bark so the tips were yellow-white. He kept his hair long on top. The back of his neck was buttered from sweat. He tilted his head in like he was listening to a tiny trumpet off in the distance. No, he was kissing her. Jude had her hands folded behind her back, against the tree trunk. It looked artificial, like she would in a second recite a poem from memory. It was the first time I had seen two people try to eat each other up like that. And it worked. They were both gone. They were replaced with this wavering image.

  Jude opened her eyes and caught me watching. Her stare pinned me to the earth. The mower was still running. It jigged ahead like a sleepwalker. Virgil must have felt her attention switch because the next thing he stepped back to the Lawn-King and resumed like nothing had happened just then. But I couldn’t move.

  It was probably not such a long time that Jude and I stood there, staring at each other, but I got lost in it. Sky-blue paint speckled her face like stardust. I would have taken all the fingernails out of my hands to look so elegant and possible as she did. Then my head went thick from a sudden stillness, and I realized the lawnmower engines had been cut. Out by the truck I heard Virgil setting the boards and Clinton pulling both mowers behind him. The grass was like a washed thing. If you could drink it, it would fix you and all your bruises would fall off, and all your freckles and bug bites. Clinton pissed on a tree. The crape myrtle hid his hips.

  “Cindy. Come on,” Virgil yelled at me from the driveway. Jude was trying to cross her arms but could not seem to keep still. “Um,” I said, and then she walked away. So I ran up on the porch. The ice cubes in my orange juice were gone to almost nothing and I sucked them up into my teeth. It was one of my best games. I would freeze my jaw stiff chewing on ice and then feel the muscles seize up. I was hoping the woman would come back out and put her hand on my shoulders again before we left.

  “Cindy. Leave it,” he shouted, and threw the truck into gear. I put the dog brush in with my things. I don’t know why, but I wanted it. There was a blur of mouse-color hair stuck in the wire. When I got home, I would trail it along my arm, to feel the shivers.

  I went across the wet shady spots. Heat was in the grass and it bled a little fume of green onto my sneakers. I had to jump up onto the tailgate by myself. It took a few tries, and as soon as I was in we were backing down the driveway, swinging wide.

  Clinton brought the bottle out from its dark, but right away had to stow it again. The lady hung there in his window and he cursed a long, grumbling word. She had come running out when she heard the truck going. Behind her, I saw Jude was back on the porch and she had a violin grabbed up under her chin. The bow chopped down, two strings by two. She was tuning it. I could tell she was waiting for us to leave.

  “That was fast,” the woman said. “You want forty? You said forty?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Virgil said, ducking to look at her. He must have been really scared about getting caught kissing, because Virgil never forgot to get paid.

  She pulled two folded bills from what seemed like behind her back, like a card trick. I wondered if she had hidden them next to her skin. Or did she always and that’s where her money came from. There were little globes of white in her armpits and her hair was red on top where the sun was getting at it.

  Clinton put the money in the glove box and waved a two-finger good-bye at her, and Virgil let the truck jump away down the road. It spit gravel. Some hit the lofting folds of her dress and sent out billows. Like the curtains in a theater, I thought, when somebody in a cartoon would throw a rotted cabbage at the singer who trilled the high notes too hard. It looked like she didn’t have any legs under there. The lady frowned. She was going to say something to me. I have always wondered what. But the time when I would know Bernadette was years off at that point. Whatever she was going to say, I saw her swallow it back down as the gravel popped under our tires. And she got smaller and smaller. Or we got smaller and smaller. Mondo ran out in the road and barked at us leaving. He followed some ways and then, satisfied by our defeat, turned and hobbled back home. I lay on my back and let the sky tear itself up between the leaves, and then the trees closed in and I was returned to the green dark place where I belonged.

  My mother was not very old when she had us. She had been on a school trip to Disney World when she got pregnant with Virgil. She was in the marching band, and everybody in the marching band had to go on the trip, even though it was expensive. They tried to make it fair by having everybody sell candy bars from flimsy cardboard suitcases with plastic handles that always fell off by the end of the first day.

  But it wasn’t fair at all. Nobody in her school—which was also my school—had a lot of money, but some kids got their parents to buy up all the right number of candy bars and the family would put them in the freezer to eat on for the rest of the year, until the next band trip. My mother sold all her candy bars herself. She got rides into town to sell them in front of the Giant Eagle and walked along the strip of dentist offices and the lab places by the hospital where they draw your blood and spin it apart. Really, it was a pretty good idea to go to the dentist offices, where people were walking out with those new teeth that your tongue just slips over.

  She had never been out of state, unless you count West Virginia, which you shouldn’t, because it’s the same as the place we are from in landscape and custom and all of that, and how people talk, and what they call a good idea.

  So it w
as an exciting thing for her. They went around in a park with smaller versions of Europe, little German picture bracelets and Spanish leather coin purses and white-skirted dancing maidens. There were fireworks every night, lagoon rides. And so many other people, people who you could see once and then never again.

  Everybody was to stay in groups of three. My mother’s group followed the letter of this rule but not its intention, and they found three boys who were just park rats with nothing better to do than hang out with them. Park boyfriends. They held hands in line for the water rides. The boys stole them cups that had a waterfall of blue goo and glitter trapped inside. At the end of each day, they planned what landmark they would meet at the next morning, and every morning the vow renewed at the World of Motion, the Universe of Energy.

  At that point is where my mother would start skipping parts of the story because she didn’t want me to know anything about the rest of it, how you find a soft spot where the shadows are thick and the shredded bark mulch is feathery. And how all the other things. How the two people are thinking so hard about getting their clothes off, and how terrible their clothes are, getting caught on everything, elbows, heels, the way a person’s jeans button is backward from where you’re used to finding it on your own body. And how everything about the experience is backward because there is now somebody else sucked into the bubble where you live, and they are like you but different, and if you just met them yesterday you still can’t really remember their face when you close your eyes, except in these small flashes, and those are too lovely to let you breathe at all.

  She was still in school. She kept on going right until the last month. When she finally dropped out, it wasn’t because she complained. It bothered people too much to look at her. Mrs. Donnerbrau let her stay in the home ec room during lunch to make baby clothes, and some of the girls talked to her at the lockers like nothing was new, but in gym class, they gave her a red dodge ball and put her out to wait in the hallway until the bell to change clothes rang. Like a dog. Everybody wanted to give her privacy while she changed back into her shorts with the big elastic patch and her WVU sweatshirt, which was all she wore every day, except that they would die of not looking. The veins on her belly were big and green. You could see straight through her skin, of course.