h, yes,” he breathed. A hiss of wind through wormy wood.
Her hand wasn’t controlled anymore. It trembled and enraptured him.
“Yes,” he said again, and she poised on the verge. The trembling in her hand spread. She was pausing. She knew that she was pausing.
He was solid and yet not solid, earthly and yet unearthly. Standing this close to him, she could not see anything except his face. The rest of the world seemed obscured, blacked out. It wasn’t smoke or even darkness. The rest of the world just didn’t exist.
Here, locked in his embrace, she could dissolve into his otherliness, into the tantalizing cold and numbness. She would stop feeling angry, stop feeling afraid, stop feeling and just dissolve.
Or, she could snap out of it and push the stake home, into his heart. If she had the strength.
t that moment, he was in every moment. That was the meaning of eternal, as I well knew. He had the weight of stakes pressing into his heart eternally, and eternally, he was pressing back, the stake to her breast.
That moment stood out, unique, the hard wood between them, a selfconsciously phallic tool, a man’s tool, awkward and foolish in the hand of a woman, but at the same time arousing. She was one woman, a thousand women, distinctive women with the red iron scent of blood flushing their faces. Yet, she was, they were, the woman.
nd, of course, I was there. Neither of them could sense me, even though between them, their senses were acute. They knew I was there, without sensing. Everyone always knows.
hese things are whispered about, mostly when everyone is drunk, huddling together against the chill and the darkness. The whispers go on all the time, little pshpshpsh sounds in the nighttime, susurrus, little breaths blowing the candlelight, making it flicker. If you listen, you can hear them.
“He only comes out at night,” the old man said, grinning a slim wide grin. “Pale as the moon, white as the stars, he is, but his face and hands are the only light in the darkness. Dark, dark, all around, him that serves the darkness.”
“Oh, be quiet, then, you’re scaring them.”
“I better be scarin’ you youngsters, now, for I don’t want you wandering out there near the darkness, out in them caverns. In the winter, like now, when the sun goes down so quick, be back here before your mother calls. Don’t be caught out in the night time, I’m sayin’.”
“Dad, you don’t need to beat on them with your scary stories. Nora, Neil, you run off to bed. You two know well enough to come home before dark.”
The children ran off up the stairs. Their mother put her hands on her hips.
“Dad,” she said, in an exasperated tone.
“Youngsters need to know how to be afraid of the dark.” He took another drink of whiskey, not stopping to taste it.
“Need to not sleep at night, you mean,” she turned back to the dishes in the sink. “And come running to my bed with night terrors. You’re drunk, Dad.”
“What’ve I got to do but be drunk in my old age and tell the stories? You won’t believe them, I know, my Katy, but the kids is young enough… not so blinded by what’s s’posed to be true.”
“Well, no more whiskey for you tonight, I guess.” She shuffled the bottle off the table along with the children’s glasses and plates.
“You can take the whiskey away, my dear, since I’m jus’ an old man without any money of m’own. But I know what I seen.”
Like that. I was there that night, because the old man was old, and later on that night he had a stroke, and it was time to take him away. Maybe his daughter would have let him have the bottle and stay up scaring the children all night if she knew, but then maybe the whiskey is what killed him to begin with. You’d think I’d know such things, but I don’t know for sure any more than you do. I do know all about his life, though. I know the lives of everyone who has died.
I know that once he was a young man, and when he was a young man, he had a wife.
hat do you think?” he asked, twirling her around so that she couldn’t see the place at all. She was laughing, and her face lit up when she laughed.
Her mouth was large and comic, and her eyes twinkled. She was stout instead of tall but she was pale, pale white with black hair and clear blue eyes to match her skin. “It’s lovely,” she said, “does it ever stay still?”
“Ugh,” he said, setting her down. “You can stand more spinning than I can.”
“It’s still spinning, to me.”
She ran a hand thoughtfully over the gray-white stone along the fireplace. “It’s beautiful.”
“I’m ever grateful to my uncle for dying,” he told her. “Or I’d never have enough of a livelihood to marry you.”
“Oh, you’d find a way, I’d guess.” She jumped up and put her arms around his neck. “It’s really ours, all ours, and just far enough away from our families to never worry about them again.”
“That’s right,” he said. “And I’ll farm and keep the sheep and chickens, and maybe a goat, and you’ll raise two dozen little brats.”
“Two dozen, eh?” she asked. “I’ll be doing more watering and feeding than you will, I bet.”
“I guess if we’re making two dozen of the little animals, we’d better get started,” he told her, and then he kissed her. That was their first night in the house. It was never better than that first night.
ut she wasn’t the one I started talking about, at the beginning. The one I started with had come from California, had grown up there because her mother ran off to become a movie star. You know how things happen. No one ever becomes a movie star, except the movie stars.
er mom was dead. She barely remembered her. Sometimes she dreamed of gold hair flying backwards in the wind, impossibly gold, almost white, competing with the glow of the sun against the pale blue of the sky. She didn’t know if it was a real memory, but it was all she had.
Her mother named her Marilyn, after Marilyn Monroe. Her mother herself went through five names before she died. First, she was Eileen O’Brien, but she shed that right away. Then, she was Virginia Monroe. When she married, she was Ginny Carter, which subtly changed to Jeany Carter. When she found out she was pregnant, Jeany did not seem motherly enough. So she reimagined herself as Marion Carter (after Marion Cunningham, the most motherly person she could think of. She also liked the resonance of Marion and Marilyn, Marion and Marilyn…Marionandmarilyn… like a poem, or a song.)
Marilyn called her “Mom.”
However many names she gave herself, Marion Carter was still Eileen O’Brien, the same as the day she left home.
t was cold and early, that day, when Eileen left. The air was filled with mist, and when the sun breached the horizon, it would glow white and gray. Even now, the darkness seemed yellow instead of black, and the air seemed to glow.
The fog always seemed alive to Eileen. You could reach out your hand and almost touch it, it was so thick, and it would leave a cold, slimy coat of water on your arm, as if you’d just touched a giant, insubstantial dragon.
Eileen liked the fog. There could be anything right in front of you—any fantastical creature, any fantastical life.
She’d been holding her breath.
Getting up out of bed, softly, having not slept a wink. Not a noise in the house, for once, not a sound. Around dawn, he usually slept.
Down the stairs, wrapped up in her coat, carrying her bag. Now, out in the glistening darkness, she could feel the top of her nose turning to frost, her cheeks reddening, her fingers and toes. She let out her breath, finally, softly, and it turned to precious crystals in the cold, dark air.
“You’d never get up this early to work, so I’m guessin’ you’ve got some other thing in mind.”
The crystals dispersed.
“Dad,” she said, trying to stand tall. “I’m going.”
“Going right up to bed, I’d think.”
She stood there.
“Now, you could never stand being whipped, and I’ve been kind to you about it in the past.”
His hair was gray-white, but his muscles were hard from working the farm. She stepped back from him, into the whiteness.
“You’re not going,” he said. “You know you’re not. It’s just a fantasy of yours, not real.”
The land was real. The animals were real. Some girl’s daydream of being a flickering form on a screen was not real.
She stepped out of his sight, into gray, into white, into crystalline forms floating in air. And just disappeared.
Eileen ran until she was out of breath.
I get to see both sides, you see.
It was only seven years later when he died, her father, and the scene still played through his head. He wanted her there with him, safe, like he felt safe when he was a boy, with his mother and father. Even when his mom smacked him with a hairbrush, he felt safe, maybe even safer than when she folded him in her arms. Even when his father crashed the motorcycle into a tree and broke both his legs, he felt safe, because his father laughed and laughed, even though he was crying, too. He laughed until his mom wanted to beat his dad with a hairbrush.
The nice, safe feeling seemed to fade as he got older. That was the world changing, he thought.
Really, it was an illusion of childhood fading away. I could have told him that he never really was safe. I’ve been with children with bellies big from malnourishment as they pass out of the world; I’ve been with little girls with bald heads from chemotherapy whose parents silently pray and pray that they’ll get better, go into remission, come back to them. I’ve been with little kids who trusted a stranger, a man with blank eyes who can’t see other people in the world, only objects passing in front of his view, like the flickering on a movie screen. I’ve been… Little children aren’t safe, have never been safe, but in childhood, the world around you maintains an illusion of safety.
When he grew up, he could never let go of the illusion, the world where you believed in Santa Clause instead of believing in Death. He hung on to the illusion, thinking that everything would be all right if he could just go back to the way things were, if he could just pull the family back together, stop the nuts from making stupid laws, revoke the permissiveness, wash the unclean things away…
He had a tape of the one and only national commercial that she had made, Eileen, under the name Virginia Monroe. She had bleached her hair platinum, but it was her all right.
OPEN ON: A KITCHEN
The YOUNG WIFE stands over a sink full of dishes. Her hair is a mess, and she’s dressed in sweats.
She wipes her brow. She’s exhausted. She just doesn’t have time for anything!
CLOSE ON: The toaster as it pops up a blackened piece of bread.
THE WIFE takes the toast, distraught, and throws it on a plate. She’s trying to scrape off the burnt parts when:
The YOUNG HUSBAND comes in, ready for work, and sees the burnt toast and dirty dishes. He looks aghast.
The young wife bursts into tears.
The husband holds her to him. There, there.
CUT TO:
Husband and wife are walking down the bright, shining aisle of BERTRAM’S HOME STORE.
They stop in front of the toasters and pick the very best off the shelf.
In the APPLIANCE SECTION, a helpful salesman shows the couple the latest in dishwashers.
CUT TO:
Black and white sequence. The YOUNG WIFE, put together in a fine cocktail dress and with her hair done, glides around the kitchen with a convenient mop.
She takes a shiny, clean plate from the DISHWASHER.
The TOAST pops up--perfect.
The YOUNG HUSBAND enters to see his glorious breakfast provided by his beautiful, smiling young wife.
They embrace.
CUE MUSIC.
CUT TO LOGO:
BERTRAM’S HOME STORE
Making your house a home.
e watched it over and over, and he cried and cried because his little girl was so far away in some imaginary world of hers. Maybe it was better there. He just didn’t know.
When he was in the hospital with lung cancer, immobile after being a hard-working man all his life, he would watch the tape and think about her disappearing into the fog and then somehow walking into the television screen where she got a new dishwasher and a new toaster and everything was all right.
Not really, though, it wasn’t all right. It never is, is it?
Marilyn’s mom was a mess of highs and lows. She did some theater and some commercials and two television pilots that never got picked up. She was Third Alien Amazon in From Far Beyond Venus. She tried on this personality and that hairstyle and a new kind of shoes and a new type of drug.
Eileen-or-Virginia was working as a waitress, because that’s what out-of-work actors really, actually do to make ends meet, when Hank Carter came into the coffee shop and ordered a piece of blueberry pie and a cup of coffee.
Eileen-or-Virginia liked the pies more than anything else. They had every kind of berry pie and rhubarb and banana cream and apple and peach and pecan and cherry cheese and sweet potato, pumpkin, mincemeat, chocolate mint custard, key lime, orange cinnamon, chocolate orange, and the list went on and on, except that you had to special order some of them ahead.
They were out of blueberry.
“We’re out of blueberry today,” she said. “But there’s a blackberry pie left, or boysenberry, or mixed berry.”
He shook his head, and his eyebrows furled.
“I can’t get a piece of blueberry pie?”
“You can,” she said, “but you’d have to wait for it. A couple of hours to bake a fresh pie.”
“Okay,” he said. “Bring me a cup of coffee while I wait.”
“You want to wait two hours for blueberry pie?”
“I like to get what I want,” he said.
She brought him a cup of coffee, black, and it was a slow day with nothing to do.
His name was Hank, which she thought was funny, like a cowboy. But he looked it, too, she told him.
Her name was Virginia, she told him, which he liked. “Old fashioned and solid,” he said. “Sweet.”
She was getting tired of acting as a career. Maybe it was all just a crazy dream inside her head, not real, like blueberry pie is real.
He liked that she was full of life and had dreams. Not enough people had dreams nowadays. They got too busy with the hectic world and never looked up to the sky anymore. That’s why no one ever got anywhere.
What did he do? He was a carpenter, made handmade wood furniture, real and solid.
Like blueberry pie.
Right, real, so you could touch it.
His father thought it was “pie in the sky,” though, at least when he started out. It turned into a regular good business after all, showing his father that he wasn’t completely crazy. People wanted quality. If you could do a quality job, you could have a thriving business.
Virginia never realized that he was just like her father, that’s why she felt so comfortable with him, so safe, so calm. People never see it, while it’s happening. Sometimes they see it later, too late. Virginia, I don’t think she ever noticed. She didn’t make those kinds of connections, but she knew when she was happy or when she was unhappy. The stranger-father-friend became her lover-father-husband.
hy shouldn’t I go back to school if I want to?”
“It’s just another pipe dream, Marion [Virginia having gone the way of Eileen, discarded, thrown away]. Like acting. That’s fine when you’re a kid, but you’ve got a kid yourself now. You’ve got to take care of her.”
“A pipe dream? Getting educated—making something of my life? Isn't that what your father said to you when you wanted to start your own business?”
“Damn it, it’s different. You’ve got a home now. A family.”
She threw a plate that crashed against the wall. That’s the thing about home. Some people never get comfortable there, but they can never be comfortable anywhere else, either. You get to see the patterns after a while, after watching it happening over and over again.
ll Marilyn remembered of her mother was the glint of yellow-blond-gold hair against the pale blue sky. And just a faint hint of laughter.
his is how she died:
“Ah, yes,” he breathed. A hiss of wind through wormy wood.
I know, I said that was the daughter, Marilyn, but it was also the mother, Eileen-Virginia-Marion. It was the same, always the same. She was there with the stake, pressed between them, shivering of its own accord, sending its shivers into her hand, her arm, her spine, her eyes. She could see only his face, and after a while, his face filled everything, swallowed her up, consumed her. The rest of the world just ceased to exist, but a lot of it never seemed very real to her to begin with. She went into the blackness and never came out. The stake clattered to the dank, cold ground and lay there to rot. Eileen-Virginia-Marion did not rot, but she died.
arilyn and Hank never knew what happened to her. Hank woke up one morning, and she was gone. Just gone.
Perhaps she meant to call them after a day or two. Perhaps she left a note that fell down on the floor and got whisked under the refrigerator by a draft from the back door and lay there musty for twenty years or more, never seen or read by anyone. From Hank’s point of view, she disappeared as completely as she had vanished into the fog on the day she left her father.
She took her car and drove all the way to her girlhood home. She liked to go off into the caves when she was younger, to be alone. Her father didn’t like her going there. He warned her away from them. They’re not safe, those caves. Nothing was safe, to her father. She went, anyway, with the arrogance of youth, and there she would fall into a deep reverie, sometimes hours would pass and she wouldn’t even realize it.
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