by Ava Dellaira
“Which is what?”
“He ran into their car and then said some shit that was so bad James wouldn’t even say it back to me. He called the cops when they had a birthday party for James’s grandma! I knew he was messed up, but I didn’t know—”
“I don’t want to be here any more than you do, but if you hate it so much, maybe you should be less focused on James and more focused on your career.”
Her mother, of all people, will not be the one to help her process this. Marilyn takes a deep breath. “I know we have nowhere else to go right now, so I’ll try not to cause any trouble with Woody, but James is my—my friend—and you can’t change that.”
Sylvie’s posture stiffens as she walks out of the room.
She returns, minutes later, with a cup of cool milk she insists on dabbing over Marilyn’s face. (Disgusting, Marilyn thinks.) The next day Sylvie keeps Marilyn home from school, applies masks of blended cucumbers, black tea, oatmeal, and by the time they arrive at picture day, her face is again pale, her fragile new skin ready to be photographed.
Marilyn stares at the camera, blank-faced. She wills her brain to turn to static, white noise. She follows the instructions. She smiles. She looks fierce. She changes outfits. She allows herself to be photographed in underwear. She arches her back; she juts her hip; she puts her hands in her own hair. She imagines James’s hands there, and small, shy roses bloom in the apples of her cheeks.
“That’s it. That one’s golden,” the photographer calls out.
She puts on the sweatshirt borrowed from James, listens to Sylvie gush her thanks to the photographer.
“You’ve found a whole new way of being in your body,” Sylvie says to Marilyn as they walk out. Marilyn imagines she’s right—James has woken up every nerve within her. But since the difficulty of their last night together, she feels those nerves standing on end, anxiously awaiting the renewal of his touch.
When they arrive back at the apartment, Sylvie opens the miniature door on the mailbox, carries the stack of paper into the apartment. She piles the bills for Woody on his desk, keeps the mailers to cut coupons from, sets aside the People magazine wrongly delivered to their address, then turns to Marilyn and hands her an envelope.
“For you,” she says, purposely nonchalant.
Marilyn looks at the return address: The College Board. She carries the envelope into her room, and, as soon as she’s alone, tears it open.
She’s done well. She’s done very well! Her first thought is that she has to see James. He must have gotten his today too. This is just what they need, she thinks—something to celebrate together. Searching for an excuse to get out of the house, she finally gives up and tells Sylvie only, “I’ll be back in a little bit.”
Sylvie looks up from the People magazine she’d begun flipping through. After a long moment, she just nods and moves her eyes back to the page.
Marilyn hurries down the stairs, knocks on James’s door. Rose answers, wearing her pink sweat suit.
“Come in, sweetie.” She moves aside to let Marilyn enter.
“Is James home?”
“He’ll be back in a half hour or so. You’re welcome to stay if you like. I sent him to the store to pick up chicken for dinner, and of course his brother tagged along. Anywhere James goes, Justin wants to go.”
Marilyn follows Rose as she moves into the kitchen and pours glasses of lemonade.
“Justin’s quite fond of you as well,” Rose says with a girlish smile. “I think he hopes you’ll be James’s girlfriend. But you have to be careful with that one,” she cautions. “He has a great big good heart, but he has a hard time settling. After his momma died, you know he didn’t talk for nearly a whole year? Of course that was a long time ago … He’s doing well now, but he still misses her.”
Marilyn just nods, surprised, startled even, by Rose’s candor.
As if reading her mind, Rose says, “I can tell by your eyes you’re one to trust. Nothing like your uncle. I’ve always had that power, since I was a girl. Could read people—pick out the good ones—in a matter of moments.” Rose sets out two glasses of lemonade and a plate of cookies before disappearing from the room. When she returns, she’s carrying a huge stack of slim photo albums.
“I’ve got one for every year,” she says, “since 1956, when I married Alan. Their momma, Angela, came only a year later. She was our only one.” Rose sifts through the stack. “These here are from when James was a baby boy.”
Marilyn begins to flip through the first album Rose hands her. It’s like reading the story of James’s life. She’s arrested by the beauty of his mother holding him as a newborn; her face, serene, open, seems to glow even through the faded film. Another photo shows baby James on his grandpa’s lap. James wearing mouse ears at Disneyland, James with cheeks puffed up to blow out three birthday candles, James in the bath. She wants to wrap the little boy in her arms, to keep him close to her, always. In another photo, James sits atop a man’s shoulders, smiling. This must be his father; she recognizes the shape of his mouth, the familiar way he tilts his head to the left.
“They split up,” Rose explains. “When Angela was pregnant with Justin. He lives in Texas now, remarried, with two little girls. They go visit him in the summers. Luckily after Angela passed, he didn’t fight us for custody. I don’t know what I would’ve done without the boys. They’ve been my reason to get out of bed in the morning ever since we lost her.”
Marilyn turns the page to find a photo of young James resting his head in the crook of his mom’s shoulder. He looks so innocent, so satisfied. Like he knows he’ll always be held.
At that moment, the front door opens. James and Justin walk in, carrying grocery bags. James stops midstride when he sees Marilyn.
“Hey,” he says, his voice guarded.
“I was just showing your friend my books.” Rose smiles.
James looks over Marilyn’s shoulder to the picture of him with his mother. Marilyn glances back at him, but he’s wearing his closed-door face. He moves away to the kitchen, starts to put up the food. Justin, on the other hand, rushes over.
“Where’s the ones of me?” he asks. “Did you show her when I was born?”
“Not yet, baby,” Rose says as Justin begins rifling through the albums.
Marilyn isn’t sure if she should get up, follow James. But now Justin has the page open, pointing to a photo of him as a baby in his brother’s arms.
“Wow,” she says to Justin, his eager eyes on her. “You were insanely cute.” Justin skips forward, comes up with a photo of him as a toddler with a plastic baseball bat.
“This is when I won the Little League.” He pages through the album until he arrives at a studio portrait of James, baby Justin, and their mom, dressed in matching red polo tops. And then another one, where James, maybe eleven, stands beside Justin, five or six, both of them dressed as Ninja Turtles for Halloween.
“Which turtle are you?” Marilyn asks James as he reenters the room.
“He was Michelangelo,” Justin chimes in. “But I’m more like Michelangelo; really he’d be Donatello.”
James doesn’t respond to his brother, but instead goes out the front and brings in the hummingbird feeder. He fills it and hangs it in its place.
As he comes in and closes the door, Marilyn thinks she can feel a heat like anger coming off him.
She turns in her chair. “Sorry,” she says, “I just—I got my scores, so I wanted to—I just got excited, so I came down. I figured you’d maybe have gotten yours too.”
“Mail come?” he asks Rose, his voice neutral. She points to a pile of paper on a stand near the door. James sifts through until he finds the envelope he’s looking for and opens it, neatly along the seal. From the look on his face—almost blank, a hint of fear around his eyes—Marilyn thinks he hasn’t done well.
He hands her the paper. He has an almost perfect score.
“James,” she says softly. “This is amazing. I mean—congratulations. I’m so happy
.”
He just nods. “Well, thanks for helping me study. You did good?”
“Yeah. I mean, not quite as good as you, but yeah.”
Rose and Justin watch them curiously. “A test we took,” James says, “to get into college. The SAT.”
Rose nods. “He’s got his momma’s brains. She was brilliant too.”
“To college where?” Justin asks, his face scrunched into a frown.
“I don’t know yet, Jus. Nana, you need help with dinner?”
“Peel the potatoes, will you? Marilyn? You want to stay?”
She glances to James, but he doesn’t meet her eyes.
“No,” she says. “I mean, thank you so much, I’d love to, but I should get home.” She wants nothing less than to leave, but what can she do? He didn’t invite her here. He’s closing every door; she can almost hear the echoes of him slamming himself shut.
She reminds herself that she’s leaving in less than a year—nine months, at most—alone. To start her life. Her own life.
But when, an hour later, in her room after an American cheese sandwich, Marilyn smells the scent of Rose’s chicken drifting in through her window, it smells so good, so much like home, it almost makes her cry.
The next day the winds start. Santa Anas. In Joan Didion’s words, drying hills and nerves to flashpoint. Panes rattling, branches scraping, sirens all through the day and night. Dirt in Marilyn’s eyes waiting for the bus from school. Dirt in her mouth. Only a glimpse of James through the barred glass, walking up the driveway, face sheltered by hand. Too gusty, even, to open the window, so there is no music that night. People are wrong to say there’s no weather in California (notes Joan Didion, and Marilyn agrees). You have to know the city, have to live within its unpredictable rhythms, to understand how deeply they can run, how they can get into your blood. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are. A fight in the high school hallway. At home, the sound of breaking glass. Marilyn cracks her bedroom door, peeks into the living room to find her mother cleaning up the shattered remnants of Woody’s beer bottle. An accident or not, she doesn’t know. He’s popping open another. Marilyn feels the wind blast through her, imagines the landscape of her body catching fire. Disaster weather. It hurts.
When Saturday finally comes, Marilyn steps silently past Woody, who doesn’t turn from his computer screen, and sits outside on the steps, shielding herself with her hand, a scarf tied too tightly around her throat, waiting for James. She can feel the wind drying her eyes, can taste its cry.
She doesn’t know how long she sits there, but it is long enough to know James will not appear. Still, she can’t bring herself to turn back and climb the steps to Woody’s apartment. She feels a kernel in her chest heat with anger to the point of popping, as the voice of something small and abandoned within her pleads, No, you cannot leave me.
She finally stands and knocks on his door.
A long moment later, he answers. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Sorry, wasn’t sure if it was cool for me to come upstairs to tell you, what with the bullshit with your uncle and all, but I can’t do the library today. I’ve got a bunch of stuff I have to take care of around the house. My grandma’s not feeling well.”
To skirt the risk of him hearing her voice break, she just nods, turns, and goes home.
* * *
By the time Marilyn wakes on Sunday morning, the wind’s passed, having left behind only traces of its presence—palm fronds littered over the streets, trees bent to their knees, candy wrappers and takeout bags blown into bougainvillea bushes. What they need is rain, something to cleanse the air, but too-hot sunlight rules the now static sky. She cranks her window open and then opens her schoolbooks, forcing herself to focus on The Grapes of Wrath.
There is no sound of James until late in the afternoon, when she hears the familiar rhythm of his footsteps. She watches him walk down the drive in his basketball shorts and sees him burst into a run—as if there were a tiger chasing—the moment he hits the blacktop.
She doesn’t change out of her cotton shorts and old T-shirt. She only puts on sneakers and takes off toward the park where she’d seen him a few months ago. Her breath is ragged in her ears, her checks pink as the clouds in the evening sky, when she arrives and spots him sprinting across the cement, racing against a ghost, against his shadow, against the blazing sunset, brilliant in color because of the wildfires broken out in the hills—a repercussion of the wind.
As he bends to rest, hands against his knees, Marilyn walks forward, his eyes now locked on hers. His breath is loud enough it could be echoing in her own body. As she searches for words to break through the wall between them, she takes in the curve of his bicep flexing as he stands, his hand tensing into a fist, his beautiful eyes watchful from behind their closed doors.
At once, she stands on her toes and kisses him, her face trying to find the right angle. He kisses her back, and their sparks are not gone, certainly not, but somehow they cannot land in each other’s presence the way they so easily had.
He pulls back, glances at his watch. (His rest between sprints has already gone on too long, she realizes.)
“What’s up?” he asks.
“James, what’s wrong?” she replies, her voice threatening to split with a sob.
“What do you mean,” he answers, but it hardly sounds like a question.
“I’m sorry,” Marilyn says finally. “About Woody. And the beach the other day, when you took me to your spot—I loved it, and I’m sorry I—I just—sometimes I just want you so much. I mean, I like you so much, I get afraid, and … I said the wrong thing.”
“Don’t worry about it,” James says, and gives her a quick kiss on the forehead.
But it’s not enough.
“I don’t get what’s up with you—with us,” she blurts out.
He looks off toward the invisible smoke coloring the sunset sky, doesn’t meet her eyes.
“Why were you so weird when I came over the other day?” she pushes.
“You can’t just open the door and walk into someone else’s house like that,” James says, remote.
“Not everyone has somewhere they belong like you do,” Marilyn exclaims. “Not everyone has a perfect family. Sorry I was enjoying talking to your grandma. She invited me in.”
“Perfect family? My mom’s dead. My kid brother’s growing up without ever having known her, with a father we only see for two stupid weeks in the summer. And you weren’t just talking. You were going through my childhood pictures—pictures of me and my mom, like it was just some casual entertainment.”
Marilyn fights away tears. In the distance, the sunset now begins to extinguish itself.
“I said I didn’t want a girlfriend, okay. I said from the beginning it wasn’t gonna be like that—we both have other shit to focus on. You’re leaving next year. Whatever happens, we’re probably not gonna be in the same place, so it just—it doesn’t seem like a good idea to get too attached.”
She feels it in her chest, the sudden, sharp pain, followed by the shortness of breath. Is it because of Woody that he doesn’t want to get too close to her? Is it because he lost his mom that he’s afraid, thinking she’ll leave too? She wonders this in a whisper of empathy, but her fear, her hurt, raises its voice first: “Look, if you—if you don’t want to hang out with me anymore, that’s fine. I mean, I can handle it, you don’t have to spare my feelings.” She feels the heat building in her throat. “But you can’t just—disappear and pretend it doesn’t mean anything. ’Cause we both know there was something between us, something that mattered. At least it did to me. We could help each other. We have helped each other.”
She turns and walks away as the tears finally escape her eyes. She stares at the sky gone soft with before-nightfall blue, feels the chill of fall sneaking into the air. Though she forbids herself from looking back at James, she can see him, in her mind’s eye, tearing across the concrete, moving near the speed of light.
M
arilyn’s hair smells like mayonnaise—Hellmann’s brand, to be exact, which has its own particular scent. Sylvie never cheaps out on the mayo for the hair mask. In the middle of the bright aisles of Smith’s this afternoon, Marilyn suggested they go with the generic store brand, since it was only going on her head, but Sylvie rejected the notion.
It’s been one of their rituals ever since she was a little girl: the evening before an audition, Sylvie measures out a perfect cup of mayo and works it into her hair, starting from the scalp and moving down to the ends. She then twists Marilyn’s mane into a mayonnaisey mess on the top of her head, wraps it in cellophane, and finishes by covering it in a warm towel. The first time they tried the mask was before the My Little Pony audition, and ever since Sylvie’s thought it brings good luck. Despite the fact that Marilyn shampooed her hair three times after the treatment, she can still detect the smell that makes her think of a picnic gone on too long.
Ellen-obviously has booked her an audition for a Levi’s super-low-jeans commercial—the girls are simply meant to walk around in the jeans and midriff tops, she’d explained. (Later animation will make the belly buttons of the chosen girls appear to be doing the talking—or, rather, singing a rendition of “I’m Coming Out.”) Sylvie went to bed by nine o’clock, and sent Marilyn to do the same, warning she needs her “beauty sleep” for tomorrow.
But Marilyn’s been wide awake for what feels like hours, staring out at the moon as it travels into the corner of the window visible from her bed, rising in the night until it crosses the distance of her little pane of glass. She watches it now halfway out of view on the other side, slipping into the portion of sky beyond her. We move from one point to another, into and out of view, but the shifts are impossible to track with bare eyes. When had James slid into her heart? What gravity has pulled him away?
Finally she flips on the light and picks up Slouching Towards Bethlehem. She opens to the essay she and James were meant to read together last Saturday when he didn’t want to go to the library, and begins it on her own. “On Keeping a Notebook” turns out to be one of her favorites so far, but it’s these lines that take hold of her: I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
