James starts the ignition, his body still tense, his energy bent toward self-control as he pulls off down the street, taking Marilyn away from there.
* * *
They drive in silence. James gets on the freeway, and without asking she knows he’s going to the ocean.
Finally she turns to him, and her voice comes out in a whisper: “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For my uncle. That you had to see that. That he talked to you like that—I should’ve known he’d come home … I should’ve been more careful.”
“It’s not your fault he’s a fucking asshole,” James replies. He’s squeezing the wheel so tightly he could be choking it. “But you can’t live with him, Mari. I can’t let that happen to you.”
“I know,” she says. “You’re right. But I don’t know what to do. We have nowhere else to go, and my mom will blow it off. She’ll say he’s just volatile, she’ll tell me we’ll be out of there soon, up in our house in the hills.”
James inhales, holds it in.
“It’s only a few more months. I just have to make it a few more months, and we’ll both be … somewhere else.” She brushes his hand with hers. “Together. Starting our own lives.”
He takes another deep breath. “He ever does that again, I’m going to fucking kill him.” By the look in his eyes, Marilyn almost believes he might.
“You promise me,” he says. “You promise me that if he ever does that again, you’ll tell me.”
“James…”
“Promise me.”
“Okay.”
* * *
When they arrive at the ocean, Marilyn tries to let the sound of the waves soothe her, but she can’t rid herself of the old feeling that she’s somewhere else, not really there at all. She tries to focus on the facts of the world: water receding from the shore, shards of iridescent mussel shell, tangled masses of seaweed beached in the rough shape of bodies. Beside her, James stares out at the horizon, his hands clenched into fists.
As the sky begins to dim, she gets up, leading them to the spot beneath the pier. Surrounded by the old wood smell of the cedar boards mixed with the salt air, Marilyn brings her body against his.
“I don’t have anything,” he says.
“Just, pull out?” she suggests in a whisper, already running her hands over his back.
In the salt dark of five o’clock on New Year’s night, sex feels like a fire hot enough to transform her rage, his rage, into something else, something hot and clean, something sacred. It is an absolution. An answer.
“You can’t go upstairs by yourself,” James says when they arrive back at the apartments. “Come over and have dinner with us. You can stay the night if you need; I’m sure they’d let you sleep on the couch. Or at least wait till your mom’s back.”
So Marilyn follows James to his front door, noticing Woody’s car in the drive, wondering if he’s watching through the window. His slap has left a soft red stain across her cheek, which Rose spots as soon as they come in.
“Baby, what happened to your face? Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” Marilyn says. “I’m fine.” She glances at James. “I fell asleep on the beach. I must’ve gotten too much sun.”
Rose frowns, but maybe because Justin’s right there, she only nods. A moment later she reappears with her blanket from the couch—the soft fuzzy one with fringe at the ends, which smells like muddled roses, and puts it around Marilyn’s shoulders. The scent of it reminds Marilyn of crushing petals for “perfume” when she was a child.
She sits at the kitchen table, wrapped up in it, snapping green beans, the fragrance of rice and chicken filling the room, Jeopardy! on the television, Alan calling out the answers and slapping his knee at every right response, James lying on the couch quietly next to his grandfather, offering responses only when Alan doesn’t have one of his own. Justin stealing bites from the kitchen before Rose swats him away, Justin coming to sit by Marilyn and telling her about his math teacher with a prosthetic leg who has a policy of tossing Starbursts to the kids who raise their hands and get the answers right. He runs into his room and comes back with a huge collection carried in his T-shirt that’s pulled into a pouch, and shows them off to her proudly.
“You haven’t eaten any of them?” she asks.
“Nu-uh.” He grins.
“I’m very impressed.”
As they sit down to dinner, Marilyn can hear footsteps above—her mother’s, she guesses, because it sounds like heels. She tries to concentrate on her food, which is delicious. The feeling in the Bells’ house is so warm, so full—she wants to crawl inside of it, to stay wrapped up with them.
And then, a knock. Quick and insistent. James gets up to answer and finds Sylvie standing there, still wearing her heels from work, her hair coming out of its bun and sticking to her neck. Alan follows his grandson to the door.
“Hi, Ms. Miller,” James says politely, flatly.
“Hello. I’m assuming my daughter’s here?” she asks with a tight-lipped smile, peering between James and Alan to get a glimpse into the apartment.
Marilyn slowly rises.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Come on, first day back at school tomorrow. You need your beauty sleep,” Sylvie calls in a voice that’s forcefully bright.
“I’ll be right up,” she says.
But Sylvie makes no move to leave. Instead she waits, hovering in the doorway.
“We were just eating dinner,” Alan says. “Would you like to come in?”
“Oh, no. We’ve got to be going.”
Marilyn gets up, not wanting the scene to escalate.
“Thank you for dinner, Nana,” she says as she moves to hug Rose good night.
“At least take your food with you, baby.” Rose stands abruptly and gives Sylvie a sharp glance as she goes to the kitchen. She comes back with a Tupperware container, and they all wait in awkward silence as she packs Marilyn’s mostly uneaten dinner into it.
“Thank you,” Marilyn says softly, and kisses her on the cheek.
She can feel James’s eyes following her. She doesn’t touch him in front of her mom, but she meets his gaze, trying to say, I love you. It’s all going to be okay.
“See you tomorrow?” she asks.
He only nods as Sylvie shuts the door behind them.
* * *
Marilyn heads toward the steps to their apartment without a word, when she feels Sylvie’s hand on her arm.
“I was thinking we’d have a little mother-daughter time.”
“I thought I needed my ‘beauty sleep.’”
“Marilyn … come on.” She gestures to Rose’s Tupperware with a wave of her arm. “You don’t need that. Let’s go get something really good.”
Marilyn clutches the container when Sylvie tries to take it from her hands, but she follows her mom to the car. Sylvie drives them to Johnny Rockets—a surprise, because she’s hardly allowed Marilyn to eat a whole meal, much less a burger and fries, since Ellen-obviously’s entrance into their lives.
Marilyn eats from the giant basket, one fry after another, as her mother sips her iced tea, looking into the glass as if it were a crystal ball.
“I heard what happened this morning,” Sylvie says, setting down her drink.
“He hit me, Mom.”
Sylvie’s quiet for a long moment, her mouth drawing downward, the bags beneath her eyes visible through her makeup. “I’m sorry,” she says finally. “But you know you shouldn’t have had James in the house. I warned you.”
At once Marilyn’s heart begins to thud its protest.
“Listen,” Sylvie continues, reaching for Marilyn’s hand across the table. “I know what it’s like to be your age, and to think you’re in love, but—I don’t want to see you settle the way I did.”
Marilyn turns away from Sylvie, stares out the window.
“Are you—are you having sex with him?” Sylvie asks.
Marilyn eats another fry. “No.”
“Okay,” Sylvie says. “That’s good.”
Marilyn swallows and turns back to the window, focusing on wrapping her rage in a tightly contained ball in her stomach. She watches an old man in a walker being helped along by a chubby nurse. A young mom struggling with a stroller and a tiny fluffy dog on a leash. A trio of teenagers smoking cigarettes against the neighboring building.
“James,” Sylvie presses on, “is a nice boy. Good-looking too. But, Mari—you have your whole life ahead of you. If you can just wait—I promise you, the world will become your oyster. You can’t even imagine the choices of men you’ll have.” Sylvie allows herself a small smile. “Men like the ones you see on television, Mari. And they could be yours. You’re that beautiful. You’re that special. You just have to be patient with life, you have to believe…”
Marilyn opens her mouth to speak, but before she can, Sylvie continues, “It’s not that I’m against the fact that he’s—well, I actually, perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you this, but I slept with a black man once, just before I met your father.”
Marilyn feels suddenly ill.
“If that’s”—Sylvie clears her throat—“what you want, give it a little bit of time and I’m sure you can find one who’s more—well—suitable for a rising young star.”
“Can you even hear yourself? I cannot believe you’re saying this right now! I LOVE JAMES. James. It has nothing to do with wanting to be with someone of a particular skin color, it has to do with falling in love with a person. And there is no one else like him in the whole world, there is no one else more right for me than he is, and you don’t even know him—not at all—so you have absolutely no right to talk about this. You don’t even know me. I am not a rising young star. I am not your payday. I’m a high school kid who’s going to college next year. I want to become somebody, but not because of how I look. Because of how I think. You have never respected that. You have never encouraged that. James does. James has known me for six months, and he knows more about how I feel than you ever have, because you never listen. Our lives have nothing to do with what I want, or what’s good for me—it’s all about what you want, and using me to get it, and you can’t even see that, is the worst part.”
Sylvie stares back at Marilyn, her mouth half open. Finally she moves her lips, as if to speak, but nothing comes out.
At that moment, the waiter arrives with two cheeseburgers, and Marilyn becomes aware of the furtive eyes of the other diners watching them. Sylvie asks for the check and gets up, leaving the uneaten food on the table. She doesn’t say a word to Marilyn the whole way home.
* * *
Marilyn’s wide awake in the dark. It’s too early for sleep, but all she can think to do is to try to remove herself from the world. She’s been shaky, literally, since they left Johnny Rockets, feeling as if the ground were moving below her feet, as if her body were changing shapes. Finally she sits up, takes out Rose’s Tupperware, and eats the chicken, now cold but still good. Marilyn hears the phone ring in the living room, then Sylvie’s voice through the thin wall, though she can’t make out the words. A moment later, her mother opens her door.
“You got it,” she says flatly. “If you even want it.”
“What?”
“The Levi’s commercial.”
“I did?”
Sylvie nods and shuts the door.
Marilyn stares after her mother, angry at herself for half wishing Sylvie were wrapping her up in her arms like she’d done when Marilyn was a little girl, in this same bedroom, and Sylvie had come in to give her the news about My Little Pony.
She tries to remember how clear, how hopeful everything had felt with James just yesterday—mailing in their college applications, the night at Runyon and the sky bursting open. She wishes she could run downstairs, tell him everything. Instead she pushes open the window, though the night is biting, and hears Aaliyah’s voice, sweet and clear in the January air—Let me know, let me know … The song ends and begins again. Marilyn knows he’s playing it for her.
She gets up, knocks on Sylvie’s bedroom door. Sylvie doesn’t answer, but Marilyn can hear shuffling inside. She peeks her head in to find Sylvie in her satin pink nightgown, flipping through US Weekly. When she looks up, Marilyn sees the tears running down her face.
“Mom…” she starts, and takes a deep breath as she sits at the edge of the bed. “Listen, I wanna do the commercial, and I want you to keep half the money—to put toward a new place, or for whatever you want—and I want to take the other half to put in an account to use for college. Okay?” She does her best to keep her voice even, matter-of-fact.
Sylvie looks back at her, with the eyes of a girl who’s been left alone at school for too long, waiting for someone to come and pick her up. Marilyn calls up a memory from her own childhood—days blurred into a single afternoon.
She’s home from school sick, a cool washcloth on her forehead (she learned to relish the feeling of fever coming on, just to feel her mother’s love like this), eating toast sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, sipping ginger ale through her twisty straw, her head resting in Sylvie’s lap, watching daytime soaps while Sylvie strokes Marilyn’s head and smokes her Salems. Marilyn can still hear the voice—Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives … During those afternoons, her mom would talk to her in ways she never did otherwise. Twirling a lock of Marilyn’s hair between her fingers, she’d light a cigarette and stare into the distance and tell stories of her girlhood in Bishop Hills, the tiny dust-blown town outside of Amarillo, flat red dirt as far as the eye could see, Sylvie would say. She told of waiting for her own mother to come and get her from school, watching the clouds changing shapes in the blue, blue sky. How some days her mom wouldn’t come, and Sylvie would walk home two miles, her worn, patent-leather shoes blistering her feet, to find her mother in bed, the shades drawn, smelling of alcohol. On days like these, she would turn on the TV and escape into the same soap operas she still loves, or, even better, she might walk to the town’s one-screen theater and sneak in after the film had started. She would hide in the back all night, quickly picking up people’s half-eaten buckets of popcorn or boxes of Jujubes between showings, watching and rewatching the film, memorizing the lines that she would then act out in whispers when she couldn’t sleep at night. Her favorite: Gone with the Wind. Marilyn can still see her, exhaling smoke, performing the lines from her childhood, her voice turning soft and girlishly fierce even as she spoke Rhett’s part—That’s what’s wrong with you. You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how.
She talked, also, of her high school days—she’d been a grade-A cheerleader, she said with a wistful smile, and based on the old Amarillo High School yearbook—one of the few nostalgic items from the past that she carries with her—she’d been beautiful. Her childhood love of the screen transformed into a dream of becoming an actress, though perhaps, even then, she hadn’t really believed it would come true. That was her problem, she said. You must believe in yourself. You must be around people who believe in you.
She told of Marilyn’s dad. They’d met when Sylvie, at seventeen, drove into Amarillo with her girlfriends. He managed the hotel whose bar they liked to go to for its bowls of free peanuts and lack of vigilance in checking IDs. Patrick had comped three rounds of pink drinks the first night, and though Sylvie wouldn’t agree to go out with him right away, slowly he won her over. She hadn’t been interested in the football players at school; she knew the reign of their royalty would fade after graduation. Patrick was not the most handsome, but not ugly, either. He was sturdy, ambitious (already managing the hotel at twenty-three), well-groomed, smelling of detergent and Old Spice. He was the kind of man who’d stay with you, she thought. He bought her dinners, opened doors for her, and most of all he seemed full of the promise of a new life. The kind of life she saw all around her, on television, in movies, in magazines—a pretty white house with a green lawn, nice clothes, a diamond on her finger, and a baby in her belly. So she made what
she’d thought was a solid choice in marriage. A man who could take care of her. Until he died and left her with nothing but an upside-down mortgage, as she’d often repeat to strangers in the checkout line at the grocery, holding tightly to Marilyn’s then tiny hand.
It had been Sylvie’s television shows—the same shows that she and Marilyn watched together on her sick days—that had comforted Sylvie through the long empty afternoons after his death, through the loneliness that was loud enough to be deafening, the sudden sense of purposelessness. She wanted her little girl to have a chance at something better, better than the dustbowl they came from.
Sylvie, stubbing out her cigarette, kissing young Marilyn’s hot cheek: “So I packed up my baby and headed for the city where dreams come true.” The washcloth refreshed, newly cool, and Sylvie’s voice: “I believe in you.”
* * *
Marilyn now looks at her mom in her nightgown—lace unraveling at the edges, a soft brown stain on the chest, her blond hair flattened against her head—and conjures, best as she can, the image of her mother as a child in her dusty patent-leather shoes, alone on the open Texas roads, repeating movie lines. She thinks that young version of Sylvie is not so different than she herself—both of them dreaming of somewhere else.
“You’re going to leave me,” Sylvie says finally, with the sharpness of grief. “I don’t think I can stop it.”
“Mom,” Marilyn tries, “I’m just going away to school. That’s normal. I’ll still be your daughter.”
“I’m sorry,” Sylvie says, looking off into some invisible horizon. “I’m sorry I couldn’t give you more.”
Marilyn can see now that it’s not only the money her mother has wanted for so long; she’d wanted to buy them a new life, one she imagined they’d share. Perhaps she wanted Marilyn to have those things she’d always dreamt of—the pool, the castle on the hill, the prince—because she had believed they would make Marilyn happy too.