Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

  It was a testament to her father’s abilities that, even when the light in his eyes had gone out, he not only saved the house but put meat on the table and continued to pay for Shirley’s dancing and voice lessons. He now worked as the sales manager for Western All-Sport, which he’d sold, for less than its book value, to cover his other losses. In a mental state like the one for which Marion was later hospitalized, if not worse, he dragged himself out of bed every weekday morning, dragged a razor across his cheeks, dragged himself to the streetcar, dragged himself through meetings for a company he had no hope of making his again, and then dragged himself home to an unforgiving wife, a favored daughter whose disappointment tortured him, and Marion, who felt responsible for what had happened. Because she was invisible, she’d noticed things the other three of them hadn’t. She’d known that something wasn’t right.

  As her father, too, became invisible—a gray-skinned ghost who slept in his study, spoke in a murmur, shook his head when asked to repeat himself—she did her best to be his caretaker. She met him at the streetcar in the evening and asked him how his Golden Bears were doing. She tapped on the terrible closed door of his study and braved the bad smell in it to bring him a piece of fruit she’d cut up. He’d always loved fruit above all other foods, the Californian freshness and variety of it, and even now a light flickered in his eyes when she urged a cut-up pear on him. He didn’t smile when he ate it, but he nodded as if it had to be admitted: the pear was good. And Marion, at ten and eleven and twelve, was already aware of how inextricably mixed up good and evil were. When she got her father to enjoy a piece of fruit, there was no telling if the glow she felt was purely love or also the satisfaction of being a better daughter than her sister.

  Like the Great Depression, the dark years seemed to have no end. In the fall of 1935, Shirley boarded an eastbound Pullman sleeper, as happy to be escaping San Francisco as Marion was glad to see her go. With something of his old financial magic, her father had come up with a semester’s tuition money for Vassar College, thereby fulfilling a long-standing promise to Shirley. But the effort seemed to have finished him. Within weeks of his darling’s departure, nothing could induce him to dress and go to work. Isabel, who for six years had occupied herself with such threats to her way of life as the rage for contract bridge, a game which, horribly, only four women at a time could play, now finally was forced to reacquaint herself with reality. She obtained a small loan from her Jew-hating brother in Sonoma and persuaded the owners of Western All-Sport to grant her husband a short furlough. Although Marion always felt that she and Shirley had drawn very poorly in the mother lottery, she had a grudging admiration for Isabel’s resourcefulness in a pinch. Isabel’s self-preservative instincts, her ultimately successful battles to maintain her standing in her fivesome, were both laudable and pitiable in their way. And so, as ever, Marion blamed herself for what her father did.

  The problem was that she’d discovered theater. Shirley had been the family’s presumptive talent, Marion the invisible one, but as soon as her sister left for Vassar, Marion and her best friend had tried out for their school’s fall production of The Five Little Peppers. Aided, perhaps, by the fact that she was short, she’d landed the part of the smallest and most adored Pepper, Phronsie, and discovered that she, too, had talent. With a familiar sense of ambiguity, uncertain if she was doing something good or something bad, she became a different person in rehearsals, became visible to the other players, entered a kind of trance of not-herselfness. Because the school theater was where this happened, she was smitten with the wobbly paint-smelling flats, the great thunking toggle switches of the light board, the backstage hanging sheet of tin that was endlessly fun to make thunder. After school, instead of going home to look after her father, she stayed to rehearse and paint flats.

  In early December, during the play’s first dress rehearsal, she was being Phronsie, preparing to charm a real audience, when a gray-braided school administrator entered the theater and called her down from the stage. It was a rainy afternoon, already dark at four thirty. The administrator silently walked her to her house, where all four of her mother’s friends had already gathered. Her mother was sitting by the cold grate, her expression blank, a folded sheet of stationery in her lap. There had been, she said, an accident. Perhaps embarrassed to be mincing words in front of her friends, she shook her head and corrected herself. Her expression still blank, she told Marion that her father had taken his own life. She spread her arms, beckoning Marion to come and be embraced, but Marion turned and ran from the room. To get to her father’s study, to find him there and show them they were wrong, she had to run up two flights of stairs, but it seemed to her that she was going down, hurtling down a tunnel of guilt toward her punishment. She could hear, strangely distant, the screaming of the girl being punished.

  A boat captain that morning had seen a man pulling a child’s red wagon on a pier below Fort Mason. When the captain looked again, too soon for the man to have gone back up the pier, the wagon was standing at the end of it. Two hours later, when a body was raised from the water, the police deduced that the wagon had contained the heavy chain the man had locked around his neck and shoulders before jumping. The wagon, a well-made toy of solid steel, its red enamel still bright, had once been a Christmas gift to Shirley, later a stand for potted geraniums behind the house. Marion never read the note that her father had left behind while her mother was out breakfasting with her friends, but it was apparently not an apology or a farewell but simply a confession of the financial situation he’d hidden from her. The family’s debts were hopeless, there were liens on everything, multiple liens, a tissue of fraud and bankruptcy. The last conceivably leverageable dollars had been spent on Shirley’s first semester at Vassar.

  In the story Marion told Sophie about herself, a story she’d worked out in the hospital and in her years of Catholic introspection, her guilt was inextricable from her ability to dissociate. Two nights after her father’s death, with the definitive thunk of a light-board switch, she turned herself into Phronsie Pepper, telling herself that the show must go on, and proceeded to be adorable onstage for two hours. After each of the show’s three performances, she returned to her grief and her guilt. But now she knew that a switch inside her could be flipped at will. She could turn off her self-awareness and do bad things for the momentary gratification of them. The trick of dissociation was the beginning of her own illness, although she didn’t know it yet.

  She and Shirley were allowed to finish the semester at their respective schools, but the house was about to be repossessed, its furnishings sold at auction. Her mother crisply informed her that she, Isabel, was going to stay for a while as a houseguest of the richest of her friends. Shirley, who hadn’t bothered to come home for the funeral, which some previously unseen cousins of her father had materialized to pay for, intended to find work and lodging in New York City. But what to do about Marion? Her maternal grandmother was senile, and Marion would be one houseguest too many at her mother’s friend’s. The only people who might take her in were her mother’s brothers. If her mother had sent her to her uncle in Arizona, James, the landscape painter, Marion still might have been saved from herself. But Isabel believed that Jimmy was a homosexual, unsuitable as a guardian, and so her younger brother, Roy, in Sonoma, had agreed to house Marion until she finished high school.

  Roy Collins was a man of many hatreds. He hated his forebears for pissing away money that should have been his. He hated Roosevelt, labor unions, Mexicans, artists, fairies, and socialite phonies. He especially hated Jews and the socialite phony sister who’d married one. But he wasn’t one of those weak men, like his fairy brother or his suicide brother-in-law, who shirked a man’s family duties. He had four kids of his own whom he supported by working hard at the farm-machinery distributorship he’d started with the pittance his grandparents had left him. Although his wife and his children were too cowed to disagree with him, he liked to remind them, at nearly every meal, how hard he worked
. Marion didn’t find Roy especially suitable as a guardian, but he did have money. He was the opposite of her father, a lot richer than one might have guessed from the plainness of his house in Santa Rosa. He’d kept his business solvent through the heart of the Depression, and, as the sole trustee of the family orchards and vineyards, he’d borrowed from himself so heavily, on the trust’s behalf, that his own name ended up on the titles to the land. Marion didn’t learn about this until she went to Arizona, but it went some way toward explaining why Roy had fed and clothed her for three and a half years, and why he so hated his sister and his brother. It would have been harder to rob them if he hadn’t.

  Until she was fifteen, Marion had been the mild daughter, the easy daughter, but to live with Roy Collins was to flip the switch in her. The two of them fought about the cigarettes she’d started smoking. They fought about the way she wore her socks, the friends she brought home from Santa Rosa High, the lipstick he couldn’t prove she’d stolen from the drugstore. Once she flipped the switch, she hardly knew what she was shouting. At her new school, she gravitated toward the theatrical girls, the fast girls, and the boys who chased them. Her own fast credentials were in order because she came from the city and her father had killed himself. She smoked fiendishly and used the suicide to upset people. She thought that if she was bad enough, hateful enough, Roy might give up and send her somewhere else. But he knew what she wanted, and he sadistically refused to give it to her. Much later, she had the thought that he’d been sexually attracted to her; that people were cruel to what they were afraid of loving.

  Her best friend, Isabelle Washburn, was prettier and taller than Marion, a shining blonde with a sharp little nose that drove the boys wild, but Marion was smarter and more daring and made Isabelle laugh. Isabelle fancied herself an actress, but she couldn’t be bothered to join the Thespian Society. She preferred going to the movie house, where the ushers, in deference to her nose, would often let in her and Marion for free. Marion’s former self was now mostly a memory, but to her the theater was still the place that had distracted her from her father, a place of guilt, and so, although she might have ruled the thespians, she never tried out for another play. She threw herself instead into the real-life drama of discussing boys, provoking boys, and, finally, falling in love with a boy, Dick Stabler, who lived down the street from the Collinses.

  Dick was beetle-browed and husky-voiced, with a mild congenital lisp that made her weak in the knees; he looked and sounded the way she imagined Heathcliff. His parents rightly distrusted her, and her senior year was a serial drama of subterfuge and secret outdoor locations where she could be alone with Dick and kiss him and let him touch her breasts. She’d determined that she was “oversexed”—at times, she was literally cross-eyed with her urges, ill with them, dying of them. She was ready to do whatever Dick wanted, including marrying him, but he was bound for college and a higher grade of wife. In the spring, there came a night when his parents heard a noise in their parlor, well after midnight, and his father crept downstairs to investigate, switched on the most glaring light in all of Santa Rosa, and discovered her and Dick on the parlor sofa, clothed but fully horizontal. After this embarrassment, and under the steady pressure of his parents’ disapproval, Dick’s passion for her faltered. She was left feeling dirty and bad. Her uncle, in one of his rages, went so far as to use the word slut, and instead of shouting back at him, as she’d done so many times, she collapsed in tears of self-reproach.

  Her mother, in San Francisco, was still a houseguest. In her infrequent letters to Marion, she claimed to miss her baby, but she couldn’t impose on her hosts by inviting her baby to stay with her, and she wouldn’t subject herself to Roy’s hostility by coming to Santa Rosa. When Marion took a bus to the city to meet her for lunch at Tadich’s, a month before she finished high school, it was eight months since she’d last seen her. She was there to discuss her future, but her mother, whose hair had turned white, and whose cheeks offered red evidence of morning drinking, had exciting news of Shirley in New York. After some difficult years at a Gimbels perfume counter, Shirley was now on Broadway—in a small role, to be sure, but launched as an actress, with prospects for larger roles. Isabel’s maternal pride, a quality hitherto absent in her, might have seemed poignant to Marion, suggesting as it did a woman desperate to keep up with friends whose sons were Ivy Leaguers, if Marion hadn’t felt so enragingly effaced by the news. She felt that someone, probably she herself, ought to murder both Shirley and her mother, to avenge what they’d done to her father. Her “talented” sister in particular needed murdering. When a waiter brought her a plate of fried sand dabs, a Tadich specialty, she ashed her cigarette on them.

  At home, in Santa Rosa, Roy Collins had been wearing her down, preying on her shame and self-reproach, and had just about convinced her that she would, indeed, be very lucky to start work as a clerk in his distributorship after she graduated. An earlier dream, which was to head to Los Angeles with Isabelle Washburn and try to break into the movies, had gone dormant in the months of her obsession with Dick Stabler. She’d seen less of Isabelle and become more realistic. Although she’d smoked her way to weighing one hundred and three pounds at the doctor’s office, careful attention to the calves and ankles flashed onscreen at the California Theatre had led her to suspect that her legs were too peasanty for Hollywood. Isabelle, however, whose legs were better, still intended to go to Los Angeles, and she’d never retracted her invitation to Marion. Sitting in Tadich’s, her cigarette ends soaking up melted parsley butter while her mother nattered about the doings of the Francisca Club musical committee, evidently too repelled by the scowling of her baby to broach the subject of her future, Marion experienced a rage so murderous that her decision made itself. She was going to go to Los Angeles and flip the switch and see what happened. She would make herself visible, and she was definitely going to murder someone. She just didn’t know who.

  Isabelle had a plan for being discovered by Hollywood, involving a cousin who was William Powell’s physician, and although she gamely allowed that Marion could be a part of it, she seemed unthrilled that Marion was going with her. In Los Angeles, at the Jericho Hotel, to which they’d retreated after learning that the homes for aspiring actresses all had waiting lists, Isabelle no longer laughed at the things Marion said. When her doctor cousin asked her out to lunch, she decided it was better, after all, if she met him alone. Getting the picture, and adding Isabelle to her list of people in need of murdering, Marion moved into a ladies’ rooming house on Figueroa Street. She went to some of the agencies that advertised in the newspaper, but there were a million other girls like her. When she’d exhausted the three hundred dollars that Roy Collins had given her, with an angry vow never to give her anything else, she took a job in the back office of Lerner Motors, which was the largest General Motors dealership in Los Angeles. With her first paycheck, she bought a stack of old plays for a nickel apiece and read them aloud in her room, trying to recapture the feeling of not-herselfness, but she needed a theater and had no idea how to get into one. How had Shirley done it? Had someone discovered her at the perfume counter?

  Her first Christmas alone wasn’t so bad that it didn’t later seem good. A girl in the Lerner back office had invited her to dinner with her family, but she’d had enough of other families’ Christmases. In the afternoon, she rode the streetcar to the end of the line in Santa Monica and sat by herself on a bench by the water, parceling out her cigarettes, writing in her diary. She read the entry from exactly one year earlier, when Dick Stabler had given her a silverplate chain and she’d given him a leather-bound volume of Khalil Gibran and her longing for his touch had colored every minute. The weather in Santa Monica was fine, the far snow-capped peaks floating bodyless above the winter haze. Everything seemed more or less in balance. A breeze from the east kept the marine layer offshore, and the sun’s downward progress was made tolerable, less alarmingly a reminder of life escaping from her, by the timeless repetition of the waves,
their breathlike breaking on the wide, flat beach. The pressure that was lately always in her head, the loneliness and something less definable, a low-grade dread, was balanced by her outward composure. She was a girl interesting enough to herself to sit alone, pretty enough to draw glances from men walking by with their families, tough enough that no one bothered her for long, and smart enough to know that being discovered while sitting on a bench was just a daydream. When the sun finally sank into fog, she walked to the first diner she found open and ate pressed turkey with canned gravy, potato puree, a slice of cranberry jelly.

  “Marion?” Sophie Serafimides said.

  One of Marion’s hips had gone dead and prickly. She was used to an arm or a foot going to sleep, but not a hip muscle, not since the last time she was pregnant. She suspected she had her heaviness to blame for it.

  “I’m afraid our time is almost up,” Sophie said.

  Marion shifted her weight, allowing blood back into her hip, and opened her eyes. Snow was falling on the rail tracks outside the window. The white flakes seemed speeded up by the half-closed slats of the venetian blinds.

  “I’d like to know what you mean with your silence,” Sophie said. “If you think you might tell me, we could do a double session. I had some cancellations—you’re my last patient today.”