Crossroads

This was the kind of suggestion—moderate, sensible, incremental—that Marion might have made to one of her kids, but waddling around on a stage with other middle-aged suburbanites held no appeal. She needed to be the intense, skinny woman smoking a cigarette at the back of the theater, watching the actors fail and finally losing her patience, striding up to the stage to show them how to do a scene. A fantasy? Maybe, but maybe not. Once upon a time, on a Murphy bed in Los Angeles, her acting had mesmerized Bradley Grant.

“What are you thinking?” Sophie asked.

“I’m thinking I’m going to let you go home.”

“Yes, in a few minutes. I feel we’re—”

“No.” Marion stood up. “Russ and I have to go to the open house for clergy. Doesn’t that sound fun?”

She went to the door and took her gabardine coat off its hook.

“I guarantee you,” she said, “it won’t be fun for Russ unless one of the wives is good-looking. Otherwise it’s just another occasion for his insecurity, and I’m no help with that. I’m the fat little humiliation he’s married to. His only consolation is how good I am at playing nice, remembering the name of every wife, making sure they all get greeted by a Hildebrandt. Later on, he’ll tell me how bad it felt to be the oldest junior minister at the party, how frustrated he is, and I’ll tell him he deserves his own church. I’ll tell him how much better his sermons are than Dwight’s, how much harder he works than Dwight, how much I admire him. That’s another role I’m insanely good at. Except then, if the party was hard enough for him, he’ll complain that his sermons are only good because I write them for him. Ha!”

Batting her eyelashes, exaggerating her role, she turned back to Sophie.

“Oh that’s not true at all, honey. The ideas are all yours, I just do a little tidying up to help you express your ideas more clearly. I couldn’t do anything without you. I’m just an empty vessel who knows how to write a clean English sentence—Ha!”

Her audience of one was watching her with somber compassion.

“You wanted mad?” Marion said to her. “I can do mad.”

She meant mad as in angry, but the way she exited the office, jerking open the door and closing it too hard, was mad in both senses. She was mad at herself for using the word fantasy, mad at Sophie for pouncing on the slip. The self she’d unearthed was only a fantasy? They’d see about that. The important thing, she told herself, as she sailed past the Greek receptionist and out into the weather, was to not eat one more goddamned cookie, ever again. To properly starve herself; to see food as the enemy it was; to glow white-hot with the burning of her fat, false self. If it was mad to be obsessed with her weight, then let her be mad. Her fat-loss program in the fall had been a feeble thing, born of a dumpling-sanctioned hope of rekindling Russ’s interest in her, of avoiding a split from which she stood to lose far more than he did. Her heart hadn’t been in it, and now she knew why: she’d never gotten over Bradley. The man in whom she’d invested herself had been a second choice—as insecure as Bradley was confident, as clumsy at writing and tentative at sex as Bradley was magnificent. Maybe, at the time, in Arizona, she’d needed a man she could manage and be more brilliant than, but the marriage had long since dwindled to a mere arrangement: in return for her services, Russ didn’t throw her to the wolves. She still had Christian compassion for him, but when she thought about his penis, vis-à-vis Frances Cottrell and the other pretty women of New Prospect, it wasn’t quite true that there was no comparing him to her long-ago abuser. That much the dumpling had been right about.

The old corner drugstore had been Rockwellian when the Hildebrandts moved to town, but the owner had since remodeled it with ugly laminates, covered the wooden floor with linoleum, and installed fluorescent lighting. In the same improving spirit, the Christmas tree inside the door was artificial, its needles silver, not even fake green. Behind the front counter, doing the Sun-Times crossword with a pencil, was a large-eared man in his late twenties, too old to be working as a clerk if it wasn’t a career path he’d somehow, heartbreakingly, chosen. Marion stepped up to the counter and surveyed the candy-bar display with militant loathing.

“I need cigarettes,” she said.

“What kind?”

“Strangely,” she said, “the only brand that comes to mind is Benson & Hedges. It’s because of that TV commercial, the one with the elevator door.”

“‘They take some getting used to.’”

“Are Benson & Hedges any good?”

“I’m not a smoker.”

“What’s a popular brand these days?”

“Marlboro, Winston. Lucky Strike.”

“Lucky Strike! Of course! I used to smoke them. One of those, please.”

“Filter, no filter?”

“Good Lord. I have no idea. How about one of each?”

Handing over her money, she was tempted to explain that she hadn’t had a cigarette in thirty years; that she’d quit smoking after being released from a locked ward and moving in with her uncle Jimmy in Arizona; that cigarette smoke had aggravated Jimmy’s asthma and tasted wrong to her at high altitude; that she’d filled the hole of her missing habit with rosary beads and daily visits to the Church of the Nativity, a walk of two thousand four hundred and forty-two steps (habitually counted) from Jimmy’s front door; that she’d discovered Nativity when, eager to be helpful, she’d accompanied Rosalia, the mother of Jimmy’s man, Antonio, to a Sunday mass, because the men were late sleepers and Rosalia kept forgetting where she was going; that Marion, whose state of mind was like the high country in spring weather, strong sunlight snuffed by clouds and breaking out again, over and over, all day long the alternation, brightsummerwarm, darkwinterchilly, had thrown her soul open to every single thing she encountered, because none of these things was a locked ward, and that the presence and majesty of God, revealed in a womblike little Catholic church where her uncle’s lover’s senile mother received Communion, had happened to be one of them; that God had become a better friend to her than cigarettes. It saddened her to think that the big-eared young man had no larger ambition than working in retail, and she would have liked to enlarge his evening by sharing some of the high-country vividness with which, all of a sudden, she was recalling her life pre-Russ. But the clerk had already picked up his crossword again.