by Warren Read
“They’re both fine,” she said, on impulse. “Jonas is working a lot. Holidays and all.”
“How is it the bank gets busier at Thanksgiving?”
“I don’t know. He says they just are. Maybe people need money to get out of town.” It didn’t make sense to her, either.
“And the boy?”
“Eugene? He’s…” She stopped, paused to shape the words that seemed to be tumbling in her head like a Laundromat washing machine. “Him and Marcelle,” she said. She looked down at her shoes. There was hardly any mud on them, even after walking through four sheds and an acre of waterlogged sod.
“Kids, huh?” he said. He stepped down and patted Lyla on the arm. “Thank Christ I never had any. But they’ll grow up sooner or later. We all do.”
“Yeah well, let’s just pray for sooner over later.”
“I don’t want to stir up trouble,” he said, “but can’t that husband of yours have words with his boy?”
Lyla looked up at Tin. He filled the doorway to the trailer, his brow every bit as gouged as her father’s ever was. She had tried to make plans long ago, plans that saw Eugene in college, or in the Army. He would be on his own and calling her and Jonas once a week to check in, sometimes coming by with his wife and babies just to watch television and even share in the Thanksgiving dinner she had worked all day on to get just right. But those plans just weren’t working out as she’d hoped.
“Jonas?” she said. “He’s spent hours talking to him; twenty-three years of talking. He’s a good father, you know.” She zipped up her jacket and slid her hands in the pockets. Jonas’ pockets, lined with soft sheepskin that smothered her hands in warmth. “Eugene wasn’t an easy boy to raise. Jonas was patient in ways that I could never even come close to being. He took him camping when he was little, tried to get him involved in scouts. They went deer hunting once.”
She looked up at Tin, and he nodded, as if he remembered at least some of what Lyla was telling him. She said, “He could never really understand Eugene. They’ve always been so different from one another, the two of them. Anybody could see that.”
Tin leaned against the doorjamb and ran a hand over his bald head. “I never said you was doing anything wrong,” he said. “Hell, what do I know? Only thing I ever raised is them minks out there, and look how good things turn out for them in the end.” He laughed and shook his head. “That boy was always tough on you and Jonas; we all knew that. Kind of like a wild animal. Stuck in a world with rules that just don’t fit his nature.”
“A wild animal? That’s what you think?”
“You know what I mean. No matter how wide the boundary is around him, he’s gonna try his damndest to push his way out. He knows it’s there. Just the idea of a fence around him—no matter where it is—he won’t abide it.”
Marcelle
Before she was Mrs. Eugene Henry, she was just plain Marcelle Ruth Foster, and she lay with her best friend Patrick on an open sleeping bag on the playfield behind the elementary school. It was way past midnight on a January school night, and they were almost sixteen, close enough to one another that she could feel the warmth of his body through her sleeves. They ate corn chips and stared at the stars, and talked about things that stood out in their minds at the given moment.
“Sandy Bates started crying in Home Ec today,” Patrick said. “We had a test on hand stitching.”
“When I did that, I sewed the scrap to my pant leg,” Marcelle said. “Mrs. Kirkpatrick had to get on her knees so she could give me a grade.”
She closed her eyes and ticked off numbers from one to ten, as he had instructed her to do. She meditated on the icy air freezing the insides of her nose, each breath sharp on the intake, forgiving with the slow exhale. But when she opened her eyes and looked from the moon to the Big Dipper, everything was the same as before.
“Are you sure it wasn’t aspirin?” she asked.
“Just wait,” he said.
The night on the playfield had been right at the beginning of Eugene, but nobody knew about the two of them just yet. She decided she would tell Patrick before the night was over. She would tell him, and then it would be out, and she would be legitimate.
“I’m gonna drop out of school,” she said to Patrick. “This Friday is my last day.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Patrick said. “Losers drop out.”
“I’m not stupid,” she said. “And I’m not a loser.”
Patrick cleared his sinuses, rolled to one side and spit out into the grass. “How come Friday, anyway?”
“There’s a pizza party in choir. And I already put in my five dollars.”
She closed her eyes again and felt a tickle along the back of her neck, like tiny spiders crawling out of her hair. She didn’t like it, but it didn’t scare her. She shook her head and brushed her hand over her collar.
“Look at my breath.” Patrick sat up, and a white cloud billowed from his lips. It shrunk together in a cottony cloud just over her head, tumbling and rolling, before finally breaking apart and dissipating in tiny silver pinwheels. Marcelle sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. The security lamp stood over the school building, a sharp cone of light dropping from the bulb. It broke through the mist, settling in a milky pool over the graveled courtyard. There was a slight ripple of movement in the cone and then it bent at an angle. Slowly, the cone rippled and bent, until it began to dance from side to side, like the gown of a towering angel.
Patrick stood and turned a full circle, once, twice, his arms open wide. He moved away from the sleeping bag and lay down on his back, arm stretched out from his sides. He ran his hands over the grass, the blades white and stiff against his fingers as he moved slowly, back and forth, caressing the fur of a giant beast.
“Can you hear it?” Patrick smiled at the sky.
“Hear what?”
“The frost,” he said. “It’s whispering in poems.”
Marcelle put her ear to the grass and strained to listen, but there was nothing. Nothing but the scratching of wind licking at her hair.
There had been only two left. This is what Patrick had told her that morning at school. They were the very last ones, and they would do them together. They would hold hands and listen to each other’s breathing, and when they did this she would finally, finally understand him. She would be connected to him in the deepest way, inside his head, and she would see everything he had ever seen in his life. And then she would never have to ask again, and he wouldn’t have to tell.
But things went sideways, and she never got to hold his hand. Patrick spent most of the night combing the expanse of frozen grass, and she went through the entire playground, piece by piece—the swing set, the merry-go-round, the climbing gym with its domed arches—all of them, speaking the names of Eugene and Marcelle into every single one. Because then no matter what happened, no matter how it all turned out, their names would be forever bonded to the atoms or molecules that made up the cold metal against her lips.
Marcelle was awakened by the scraping of chairs over linoleum, above her head. On weekdays, Jonas and Lyla Henry would get up early and eat breakfast together. Marcelle had seen them on occasion, having white toast, scrambled eggs, and black coffee. Every time. They’d be sitting on opposite sides of the small, gray Formica table in the old flower-wallpaper kitchen talking quietly, so quietly that Marcelle could only ever hear the clinking of forks on plates. When they finished Mrs. Henry would clear the plates and then they would leave together, Mr. Henry to his job at a bank in Lake Stevens and Mrs. Henry to volunteer in the church office, where she would stay until mid-morning most days. Once in awhile the slamming of the back door and the rattle of the window over his head woke Eugene an hour and a half before his alarm.
When this happened, he might give a jump then fall back to sleep. Sometimes he wrapped his arms around Marcelle and clung tightly to her as he dropped off. He’d squeeze and she’d squirm and struggle to put a little space in there. But he could be one of those
constricting snakes, a python or a boa, holding on as if he was terrified of letting her loose. In the early days she liked this kind of thing. Him needing her. Almost a year later, she lay there counting the pocks on the wall and waiting for him to relax his grip and turn over, so she could slip from under the covers and go up to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal.
On this morning, Eugene coughed and jostled next to her, and then there was the tinny click of his lighter. Marcelle caught the sweet smell of butane and then came the thickness of smoke. She rolled over. He sat up, the blankets bunched at his waist, his cigarette pointing up from the hand he rested on his lap. His greasy blond hair stood up like he’d been smacked.
“I don’t know why you do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“That.” She nodded her chin at the smoke rising from his hand. “You’re gonna make your mom mad.”
“She’s not here, is she?” He reached up and picked a flake of tobacco from his tongue. “You get paid yet?”
She ignored him and rolled onto her side. He kept talking, going on about the motel and how much she wasn’t working, and she tried to focus on the sound of his voice, not the words themselves. Like chocolate. He was standing in the bank parking lot in a bright orange vest, stuffing paper and cans into a plastic bag like he was one of Santa’s elves. Marcelle had been with her girlfriend Tia. They’d come from the AM/PM, where they had bought vanilla ice cream sandwiches. They had already eaten them halfway down.
“Damn,” he said when he saw her. “Where’d you come from?”
Tia answered, “Over there.” She pointed over her shoulder toward the minimart.
“Not you.” He nodded to Marcelle. “You’re brand new. I like new.” He put his hands on his hips and arched his back, pushing the thick crotch of his jeans at her. Right then, Marcelle was hooked.
She brought her knees to her chest and pulled the covers to her chin, while he blew streams of smoke over both of them. Marcelle wondered what had happened to Tia. The girl had phoned a couple times after that day, and Marcelle had promised to call her back. But it had slipped her mind.
Eugene groaned deep in his throat and stretched his body, and then he reached over to her and dug right into her panties. He took her in a hard grip. She said “No,” but he rolled his heavy self on top of her anyway and kissed at her with his filmy tongue, all the while she tried to get whatever air she could through her mouth, to try and hide the stale rawness of his breath. She pressed her legs together and pushed at his hand with her own.
“Don’t,” she said.
“What do you mean, don’t?” He put his hand back and dug at her with his fingers.
“I mean, don’t.” She pushed at him again.
He said, “Goddamn it, Marcelle. What the fuck is with you now?”
She scooted herself back from him, knocking her head against the headboard. “What do you think?” She pulled her hair back from her face and looked at him square in the eyes.
“Jesus Christ. I said I was sorry.”
“So what? Sorry doesn’t automatically make everything okay.”
Eugene dropped his cigarette into a can of soda on his nightstand. “I don’t know what you want me to do, Marcelle.”
“You’re always saying sorry, and it doesn’t mean anything.” She pushed at his arm and slid out of bed.
“Fine, Marcelle,” he called after her. “I’m not sorry. That make you happy?”
She bunched her clothes from the bureau and locked herself into the small bathroom behind the stairs. She dressed with the lights off, cracking the shade a tiny wedge. In the mirror, she was all shapes and shadows.
There was a time when she really thought she could solve Eugene’s puzzle, when she believed she could help him find all his missing pieces. But it was useless. The more she tried to figure him out, the more he confused her. He could be so sweet, and when he was, he was all honey. The drives up to the river with the radio playing loud, and his smile with a dimple so deep she could put her fingernail into it. And the notes, folded white squares with hearts in pencil, some of them with the word Sorry in big, block letters. She still had them all in a shoebox, kept closed under the bed.
She raked out her hair and leaned in close to the mirror. She stared at her own mouth and whispered, Stupid, Stupid Marcelle. And then just before she went out, before she opened the door to leave, she took Eugene’s toothbrush and gave it a good swirl in the toilet bowl water.
The night before, Marcelle had watched the drift of light snowflakes outside the window, and it had made her think of Christmas. Today, though, it was nothing but a cold drizzle coming through the tumble of clouds, washing out what little white had collected overnight. She cut over slushy lawns, feeling herself starting to sweat under her parka, the itching and acrid odor working its way up through her open collar. She walked past the crippled, black frame of the old Laundromat, the chalky odor of charcoal still heavy in the air. For some time she had wondered if the smell would ever go away. But three years later it was a fixture in town no more unusual than the chemical sweetness that always seemed to spill from Sunrise Drycleaners or the constant barbecue of the Burger Barn.
For a while Marcelle wondered if it had been Eugene who set the fire, only because whenever the subject came up, his name rose out of it somehow. But she told herself he was too cute to be that much trouble. He was football-player-square in the shoulders, and he had a smile that could have been in a John Hughes movie. He was better than any boy she had ever been with, not that she had really been with any other boy. Not in the same way, anyway.
“They’ll be hauling my ass in any day,” he told Marcelle. “You wait and see.” His thick arm ran along the edge of the car seat, and he tickled the back of her neck with his fingers. “I swear to God. A person can’t fart in this town without everyone blaming it on me.”
Marcelle walked up the empty staircase of the high school like an adult would. She held onto the rail and took the steps slowly, and looked over the multicolored fliers taped over the walls. She hoped no one would see her, but if they did, she wanted it to be matter-of-fact, not an uncomfortable reunion with a riot of squeals, and a million annoying questions about her life with Eugene, and her job. But when she came to an open classroom door she rushed past, using those moments to scratch at her eyebrow or casually turn her head to look the opposite way. A couple of girls appeared from around the corner and walked toward her, hot pink squares of paper fluttering in their hands. They were skinny girls, with giant eyes and goose pimple boobs, and they slid past her like scared stray cats. Freshmen. They had no idea who Marcelle Henry was.
Bobbie Luntz was seated behind her desk talking on the telephone, but she looked up when Marcelle opened the door. It’s no fun, I know, she said into the phone. Her hair was longer than Marcelle remembered it being. Before, it had been cut to the collar like a boy’s, but now it was pulled back in a ponytail that fell all the way down around her shoulder. She said, You can put the clothes in the dryer on a high heat and it will kill them. Marcelle could see that she had no makeup on at all. Both the live ones and the nits. Her Creamsicle eyebrows and naked lashes were like powder, absorbing into her pale face. She smiled at Marcelle and winked an eye, a blue pond on a freckled, ashy field. All right, she said. Let me know how it turns out. And then she hung up the phone.
“Wow,” she said. “Isn’t this a surprise?”
“Yeah.”
She came from around the desk and met Marcelle at the door, taking her hand with one hand. She squeezed Marcelle’s shoulder with the other.
“How have you been?”
“I been fine.”
Bobbie leaned back, and her eyes zeroed in on Marcelle’s bruise. “Really?” she said.
Marcelle tilted her head and let her hair fall over her face. “I’m pretty good,” she said. “Still getting used to being a married lady, I guess.” Her hands began to tingle. She pushed them into her pockets.
Bobbie said, “Okay.�
� She stepped back and folded her arms over her chest. “Are you working?”
“Yeah. At the Sleep Inn, cleaning rooms. It’s just for now, though, till I get something better.”
“Don’t apologize for honest work,” Bobbie said. She studied Marcelle some more, then she reached up and brushed a finger to her own cheek. “What’s going on here?”
“Nothing.”
“It looks like a bit of something.”
“No.” Marcelle felt her face flush. Her underarms itched, and she could smell her own sourness drifting up.
Bobbie cocked her head to one side and raised her eyebrows in twin arches. “No?” she said. “There’s no issue whatsoever?”
“Well,” she said. “A little one.” She unzipped her coat and walked from Bobbie, and sank onto the butcher-paper-covered mattress. Bobbie pulled her chair from behind the desk and sat opposite her. She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and nodded at Marcelle’s eye again.
“So?”
Marcelle swallowed. She could feel the growing lump there and her eyes stung, and that made her angry with herself. She hadn’t been there five minutes, and she was already falling apart. And besides, the black eye wasn’t even why she had come. It had just come along with her.
“That son of a bitch.” Bobbie clenched her jaw and leaned back in her chair. She looked Marcelle hard in the face. “At least tell me this is the first time, then.”
Marcelle stared down at her swollen fingers. The cuticles were raw from not wearing gloves at work, like Roxanne had told her to do.
Bobbie sighed, weary and weighed down. “Marcelle. You don’t have to put up with that. When I said you could come to us anytime, I meant it. I still mean it.”
“Okay.”
Outside, the rain was peppering the windows in tiny drops that grew fatter and fatter, until they finally streamed down the glass to collect at the chipped wood panes. She should have waited, she told herself. Until the eye was better. The eye was making it all so much worse.
