Marilou Is Everywhere Read online

  When Virgil finally came in the house and clapped his hands on his ribs to say he was done fetching for the day, my heart was still shuddering. All the sounds were leaping my pulse, so I had picked up a book to get my mind to go elsewhere. I was reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I had flipped to the middle at random, where a woman wanted children so they were putting honey on her parts, which was so wild that I had forgotten I was sitting in the middle of a witch’s house.

  It’s strange now to think about it, those first few days in the house before I met Bernadette. My memory is so full of what came later: her fussing, winding yarn around a cardboard guide to make pom-poms for our boots, for Mondo’s collar, and eventually all the goats, or boiling down gingerroots when we both caught coughs from the damp, hanging the ginsengs that looked like fat little headless babies trussed at the feet. Or burning up cardboard boxes in the yard and stirring them around with a busted rake, just like my mother did, ashes and flake touching off on the wind. Probably she was sleeping it off that day, but I would know about that later.

  When Virgil came down the stairs I realized he had changed clothes. They were perfect new. The pants were darker in lines across his legs where they had been folded on a shelf. He was putting something away into his pocket.

  “You ready, then? What you got there?”

  “Can I take this?” I asked him, holding the book’s cover toward him. He squinted.

  “You can’t take things unless you ask. How about we’ll ask next time.”

  “Can we ask now?”

  “Leave it, Cindy. Put it down.”

  I stood up carefully, since I had already hid Gone with the Wind down the front of my shorts and I didn’t want its line showing at my T-shirt. Even after how she’d scared me, I knew Bernadette wouldn’t mind.

  IX

  There was a girl Clinton talked to on the computer. Her name was Shayna and she lived in Port Arthur, Texas. She called it a greasy old hole. She raked her hands through her hair, a repeating claw, and pulled out brown pieces of it and dropped them to the floor where I couldn’t see.

  I got stoned on watching her. The blue light bloated her face, or it was the camera. It looked wide though you could see her chin pointed out so she was healthy and not too fat, but that was the kind of thing a girl could fool you about by how she held her head, was what Clinton said. He had a lot of girlfriends in other places.

  Shayna sounded like everybody I knew, ever. She didn’t want to work at her job which was, when she did it, to sell soaps and lotions at a store in the mall. She had drawn eyes around her eyes with a purple pencil and she looked mutated from a mirror with frayed edges where she blended the skin-looking stuff in. I knew it because she did the makeup while she talked to Clinton. While she worked her brushes, another woman roamed up in her like shadows falling off of the sun.

  Ever since our power had been shut off, Clinton ran the computer and the internet off of the generator, which meant I couldn’t watch TV when he talked to Shayna. It was so loud I didn’t know how they could hear each other at all, but maybe looking was the point. In the rest of the house it was dark and so quiet. Clinton would close the bedroom door as much as he could, but it had been painted over so many times that it hung off the floor by some inches, and wide of it there was a gap I could see through.

  I started on the couch with my ledger in my lap. Sometimes I drew pictures of the cars that had gone by that day, except I added my embellishments: They were all on fire, they were all bucking over the moon, they all had eyeballs for wheels, and things like this. Other times, I drew castles made of crystals and tears, and big crying roses, and women wrapped around swords. As it got too dark to draw I waited to hear her voice snapping out of the speakers like electrified dust, and I would slide kind of down and over until I was basically on the floor and I could just see her running like blue TV light all over Clinton.

  “I care about the way it gets written down,” she would say. “I can’t have them thinking I don’t pay attention in case they want to overcharge me on something else by like a hundred dollars. I want them to know my name when I call.” Shayna rehearsed a lot for the rest of life. There was always a revision of the things she would say at people.

  “That’s good,” Clinton would say. It seemed really boring to be a boyfriend. I wanted to know when he would ever talk about anything that wasn’t her paperwork.

  She was shaping her mouth while she said all that so her words came out in blunt lumps. She dragged a dark brown pencil around her bottom lip and used a Q-tip to fuzz the edge in.

  “God, what was I even saying? Sorry. I’m so fucking done. I have this hangover I can’t get out from under.”

  “Are you going to work tonight?” he asked her.

  “Yeah, a little,” she said.

  I knew somehow that they were talking about a different job that was not selling lotion at the mall. But I had not entirely figured it out. It was something like she liked it but didn’t want to let on. I could tell she was making it sound more boo-hoo. And Clinton always asked. He always wanted to know.

  Sometimes I got a funny feeling, like my skull was getting too tight, and I would pluck at my eyelids or press on the bridge of my nose to click the bones inside. I felt strange like that, watching Shayna, except I didn’t fidget. There was a certain way, if I crossed my legs, that the seam of my shorts pressed against my privates and the feeling was a well but also a wave.

  I sat up straight to push the tension better and my leg flung out to the side, the glint along the shin, I didn’t know where the light was coming from and I thought I had better stop, I had better stop before they heard me but Shayna was hanging her head down and brushing the underside of her hair. She looked like some species of alien. I ran outside and stood in the dark. I didn’t know what I was doing except totally. A car was coming. Its groan got higher as it washed closer and I saw the headlights start winking up through the branches. That kind of rain that falls through you from outer space, so light, was coming down and it was hot out. I stood up behind the fence and lifted my shirt as the car went by. I don’t know what I hoped they would think or do about it. My belly underneath my shirt was blank and mottled and had red rasping all through it where the little bloods blushed on the hot night full of chap. Greatness! The air rang around me and I dropped down behind the fence just after the car passed so they wouldn’t see me, and I’d be a ghost, and they’d wonder.

  One day, Shayna was real, by which I mean she was really in our house. Clinton had gone to town for food and new tires for one of the mowers, so I didn’t pay any special attention when I heard the truck idling down to nothing in the shed across the dirt road where we kept it. But I heard her voice instantly. It was high, like his, but she sounded happy. She was carrying a box of groceries with a big purse hiked up on her shoulder and sunglasses on top of her head. She turned and laughed at whatever Clinton said.

  At first I presumed she must be someone famous because I knew I had seen her face before and she was skinny, famous skinny, and her arms were a hard, dark color. I had only seen her in the blue computer light before, while she did her makeup and shook out her hair and chuckled over the camera. I could tell I was staring at her, which made me more shy. Clinton looked grim, like he was holding something heavy from the corners of his mouth. Her arms moved in bright forms. She looked like she was the only real thing, like the grass and tree dust were just a backdrop. I would learn that she created this effect by applying careful layers of fake tan spray and shimmering dust from a purple tube. She put it on every day and stood like an X in the bathroom while it settled on her skin. She would let me sit on the toilet and flip through her magazines while she did this.

  Shayna had brought all of her clothes for the visit in her huge purse. It was white snakeskin with pink and blue streaks. She had a lot of clothes in there, but they were all small things like shorts and halter tops, or tubes that stretched out whe
n she pulled them down from her armpits and turned out to be whole dresses, aqua and orange and silver lamé.

  Clinton seemed unhappy. I couldn’t tell if he had known she was coming. The two of them would disappear into Mom’s bedroom for the afternoon, and I could tell they were having sex by how quiet they were. I mean, they still made sounds, but the sounds they were trying not to make were louder. Tentative and shuddering things. I imagined a chrysalis the size of the whole room shifting and tearing with a dull plastic light at its middle. Although of course I tried not to linger near the door because I didn’t want them to catch me when they came out.

  Shayna was my immediate best friend because she brought a stack of magazines. I loved magazines. I loved looking at people. I never got to see anyone. It was different from reading my catalogs. All of mine were for things like Sears. The people didn’t look like they even had belly buttons. I had never put on makeup before and I didn’t know that I would like how it looked on me, but I started to wonder. I looked at the magazines whenever I could.

  The women in the magazines had vivid faces. Sometimes they looked hurt or lonely, but gorgeous. Maybe I was used to pictures of women who seemed happy to see me, women who seemed to be saying: Holy crow it’s snowing look how happy we are about it in snowsuits from $49.95! I knew that wasn’t real. But sometimes I caught myself smiling back at happy pictures, or at the TV when the story was about something good happening, like a woman finding her lost dog or a girl getting laser surgery and throwing away her glasses forever. That’s how stupid I was.

  These women were not like that. Nothing was actually happening to them but they looked perfect. No, it was something else. They looked like they knew things. They knew that they looked perfect, and it seemed like they knew I was looking at them. In whatever second the photographer had taken the picture, I felt, they were looking right at a future where I was scraping the dust off the bottom of my feet from the filthy kitchen so I could tuck them up under me while I read, by which I mean I looked at the pictures, and the summer heat swelled up blue in the far-off hills which I could see walking off so slowly that they seemed not to move at all.

  One day, I asked Shayna to do my makeup for me, and she laughed.

  “Oh, sweet thing, I couldn’t do that. What you got is called a fresh face, you know.”

  But I didn’t. My face looked like a thing made of dough. I had lots of freckles that touched almost, and dusty moles that stood out from my neck. At fourteen I had decided I was ready to be a woman. I hated how much I was looking for in the mirror. You could tell by my eyes that I wanted to see someone else there inside my face.

  At first, she would only give me a little bit of light lipstick and some mascara. I sat on the toilet and she crouched before me, one knee up. I felt funny when I looked at myself. That sick feeling, and something winching up in my stomach. The mascara made me look like I had more eye than usual in my head, and they were already too big. The lipstick made me look like I had been feeding at the wound of a killed thing, a wolf. Shayna’s armpits smelled like onions, but it wasn’t gross. It made me hungry. She was wearing a peach shirt tied up so you could see her stomach.

  “What about like this?” I showed her my favorite picture from the magazine. It was from a set where all the models made evacuated shapes against the mirror wall of a skyscraper. The one I liked, she had light brown skin and her hair was pulled up from her face as a globe, almost like a head directly above her own head. Her eyes were dark and blue-dark and glittering. She wore a gold chain with a rectangle attached by the corners, very small, and her mouth was wet and shining.

  “Well, we’ll wash it off before Clinton sees it, OK?” How did she know we had to hide it from Clinton? I hadn’t thought about it, but she was right, of course. Clinton was the one who got upset about my outfits and called my cutoff shorts “racy.” Shayna winked, as I recall. Would that be all it really took to win me over? Who’s there? Who else is moving the scenery? Is this a chewing gum commercial? Are you my mother?

  But as I’ve said, I smiled at nice things happening to people on television, so it was possibly as easy as that.

  Shayna opened the curtains that covered the small, high-up windows so she could see in natural light. Up in the faraway corners I could see daddy longlegs dead and folded up into diamond shapes in places. I was to keep my eyes closed, and the brushes skimmed down over me in a way that I thought about moth wings batting against a screen. I could feel her breath, sour and cool, moving over the bridge of my nose. She was only a year older than Clinton, but I would have believed she was thirty-five rather than nineteen. Her face had attained certain angles I associated with minivans and sun freckles and Kmart jewelry. She and Clinton drank canned margaritas all day, slow and civil. As she worked, she told me to look up and down sometimes, and sometimes she swore a little when I blinked and ruined the line she was trying to draw under my eyes.

  “There’s a girl who died from around here,” I said. I was trying to impress her. I felt strange that we weren’t talking. “I mean, she probably died. Nobody knows for sure.”

  “Oh yeah,” Shayna said. “I know some dead girls.”

  “She disappeared after a camping trip. Like, vanished.”

  “That happens. Or maybe she wanted to disappear,” Shayna said. “I knew a girl who everybody thought was dead, but she had just got married.” I couldn’t believe how easily she had thrown over the most dramatic story I knew.

  It felt like nothing was happening, and I wondered that maybe she was tricking me, running empty brushes all over my face to please me and she had no intention of really making me look different. She blew under my eyes. Some parts she blended with a fingertip and her long nail scratched under my eyebrow but I didn’t move. All her attention was like a heat moving over my face. I was afraid that I would start sweating, even. I was somewhat offended that Shayna didn’t even care to talk about Jude. That was my prize, the best morsel I had to trade with.

  When she let me look in the mirror, I was a creature of some lovely pain. I could have been somebody else. There was new gravity in my eyes, which sank and sank me down against my own edges, except now my edges were everywhere and my body shifted to make space for them. My bones were aluminum. I could not talk to anyone without being terrified as myself, but the things I could imagine this face saying, using words I didn’t even know, I had to touch my lips to make sure I wasn’t saying all of these wild things out loud. Then Shayna would be afraid of me, if she knew about my metal bones. For the first time in my life, I realized that I could get up and walk out of that house and never come back.

  “Wow, huh?” she said.

  I said wow.

  And when Clinton and Virgil came in the house swearing at each other for fun with pollen luffing up out of their hair and I heard the chairs stumble around in the kitchen, Shayna said shit, shit. She ran a pad of paper towels under the sink and gave it to me to clean myself up with. She shut the door a little too loud. A little too hard, she demanded Clinton take her somewhere for once so she could get a cold drink and eat a real dinner.

  It hurt to take the makeup off. I didn’t know how to do it. My face was rubbed red under my eyes and smudges of black stayed around my temples like ink and soot. Why had I been crying, Virgil wanted to know when I came out of the bathroom a long time later. The house was empty. Clinton and Shayna had already gone off. Virgil was dealing himself a hand of solitaire. But I had not been crying. I had not, and I told him.

  X

  Shayna had been staying with us for what felt like a long time, although I figured out later it had only been about a week. Every day, I stole a lipstick or mascara. Soon I had a little kit which I hid under my pillow. I put some on every day and dared anyone to say how grown I looked. It’s insane, how you can have a whole new face and nobody talks about it. But I did look older. I could feel it.

  Around that time, Virgil started letting me walk down
to Bernadette’s by myself and clean the whole day alone. He picked me up at five each day and took me to Burns Delite for ice cream. I felt the apology in it, but I didn’t know what it was for. The police were interviewing him, of course, although I didn’t know that at the time. It was quicker for me to walk, anyway, and I didn’t think too hard because it felt so good to get out of the house and away from Clinton. Down the steep side from our back porch I could make it in five minutes through the woods, and feel my lipstick warm from the sun and feel the heat of grass growing and the drowsy tumbling bees. Every morning Virgil reminded me not to go upstairs, not for anything, and not to wake Bernadette up. I had not seen or heard her since the day we talked through the bathroom door.

  I knew where to slip my hand through the tear in the screen like he did, and got adjusted to the heat and smells and the house’s ways. I would sit in a pile of silk kimonos, pink sateen dressing gowns that caught on my hangnails, shift around the salt shakers and touch her brass and crystal arrangements in a way that was possibly spiritual, an experiment. It was the beginning of ritual. Usually my feelings rushed in over me like water. They fit so close I didn’t notice them, or I thought it was just bad light pouring down, and the bad light had an itch for me no matter what I did. But when I wore Bernadette’s strange striped pajamas over my jean shorts or balanced her tongueless copper bells on the backs of my hands, I don’t know. I found a distance. I found a perch where I could watch the moments tolling down. They were desperate and beautiful and stark.

  I didn’t seem to make much progress cleaning. No matter how many bags of garbage I hauled outside for Virgil to take, the next day, I found the spot I had cleared again crushed in with promotional tote bags and jars of buttons and things like this. I wondered if Bernadette came downstairs when I left and pulled more junk out of the closets to cover the bald spot I had made in the carpet.