The house was nothing to a man like Derek. The land was everything.
A man like Derek, he could never understand it was their home. It was their whole childhood. More than that, Dara thought, her eyes blurring.
Suddenly, she remembered something Marie had said, months ago, before she moved out.
They had been looking out the front window at the old weather-beaten colonial across the street, the sold sign on the weedy lawn. The latest of many.
“We could do that,” she’d said. “We don’t have to live here forever.”
“Is that so?” Dara had said. “You wanna run away with the circus?”
But Marie kept looking, her fingers on the windowpane like when she was little.
“We could put it up for sale.”
It hurt to hear. That house of their childhood, however varied and unsettled, their mother crying at her vanity table, her chignon slipping loose, their father raging down the hall, knocking his fist into that peeling plaster and demanding respect in his own home, or at least attention.
“We could,” Dara said pointedly, reminding Marie of the facts. “Charlie and I could. Because it’s our house. But we wouldn’t.”
* * *
*
Did you say something to Derek?” Marie asked later.
“About what?” Dara replied. Her sister had come upon her as she exited the powder room—the one she could never set foot in without thinking of her sister and Derek in there. The way the sink now wobbled on its base.
“I don’t know. He left early. He didn’t even say goodbye.”
Dara didn’t say anything, suppressing an unexpected smile.
“What if he’s done with me?”
“Marie. Marie.” There was something so desperate about it. Her sister who knew how she felt, her disapproval over this entanglement. But who else could Marie talk to?
“When he says he has to go, I follow him out the door. I chase him down the spiral stairs. I beg him to stay.”
“Pathetic,” Dara said as coolly as she could even though Marie’s intensity—her face pressed so close, her mascara sweat-stippled—was making her hot, confused.
“I don’t care. I don’t care. I have no shame. He ate away all my shame.”
“No wonder he’s getting tired of you,” Dara said. “I’m tired of you.”
“I need to hear his voice at night. I can’t sleep without his voice in my ear, talking and talking, all night.”
It was just like when they were little, Marie always begging to sit with their father while he drank his beers and watched Columbo reruns, old movies. How she would ask him to explain everything and he would, on and on. See, he looks like a magician, but he’s really a Nazi. I mean, Christ, look how clean he is.
“He’d promised he’d stay over tonight.” She looked up at Dara, her eyes bewildered like a child’s. “Why is he doing this to me?”
Dara shook her head. Everything he said was a con.
“I’ve done everything he asked me to. Such filthy things,” she said, voice rising, “I’ve done it all and liked it.”
Dara paused a moment, pictures flashing in her head. Marie’s degradation. Hairy and ugly and splotchy, his great tufted back, his made-to-order teeth, the marks his socks left on his ankles. Battering away at her, splitting her open, slapping her softness, fist wrapped in her hair.
“That was your mistake,” Dara said. “You have to hold something back. Now you’re no longer his conquest. Now you’re just his whore.”
But Marie wasn’t listening.
* * *
*
The next morning, Dara approached the back office, following the sound of Marie’s lilting titter.
She saw the look on Charlie’s face first.
She heard him say, “Marie, what did you do? What did you do?”
And Dara thought she might walk into the back office to find Marie with a black eye like out of a cartoon, a pink slab of steak pitched over it.
“I don’t know, Charlie,” Marie was saying, her voice softly shrugging. “I just did it. I just did it.”
That was when Dara saw it. Marie’s hair. Caught up in a ponytail and stripped from sandy blond to near whiteness.
The whole office smelled sweet and chemical.
“You look ridiculous,” Dara said.
“Only to you,” Marie replied coolly. Then touching her hair a little nervously, patting it.
Seated at the desk, Charlie didn’t say anything, just kept staring.
Well, it was impossible not to. She looked like an old-time pinup who should be lounging in silver lingerie, in bright lamé. A gangster’s moll. Or maybe a hooker, high-end. The kind their dad, when he had a load on, talked about seeing in the port cities when he was in the Merchant Marines. Always a few with a fancy doll look you’d pay extra for just to come in their faces.
“Derek likes it,” she said, touching the nape of her neck, slipping the elastic free. “I like it.” Leaning down, whispering hotly in Dara’s ear, “He liked it so much he fucked me all night.”
Dara coughed loudly, feeling sick. That wasn’t a word Marie used, or didn’t use without stumbling over it, like she had the other night.
“Well,” Charlie said. “That’s that.” And reaching for his back pills, shaking the container, pills tumbling across the desk felt.
Something was hovering near the front of Dara’s head, but she couldn’t name it.
Suddenly: A phrase floated forward in her brain.
Hot Buttered Blonde.
She couldn’t get it out of her head, every time she saw Marie that day, her head like the fizzy top of a dandelion, a daffodil’s crimped corona.
It was many hours later that it came to her. That time last year, Mrs. Bloom submitting to the hairdresser, to the tantalizing name: Hot Buttered Blonde.
A coincidence, surely.
Mrs. Bloom, the year before, a brazen blonde. Her shame over it.
Marie, of course, had no shame.
* * *
*
He tells me things, Dara. He tells me what I do to him.
He says when he leaves here, he smells of it. All the heat and cunning.
The smell of the studio, which is the smell of me. Musk, baby powder, sweat.
He says he can smell it on his shirt cuffs, in the creases of his shoes. All the bodies so close, daring eyes and straining limbs. The salty brine of hunger and pain. Bodies, he never knew they could be so complicated, so tortured. He never knew how much girls like to torture themselves.
It was impossible. That man, with his two phones and his big voice and his swagger. A cliché of what women supposedly liked, secretly, under the skin.
This man—he was a nothing. There was no center to him. No feeling. And he didn’t care about Marie and would toss her aside soon enough or already had because a man like that—
He says he thinks about me when he’s driving home on the highway. When he’s pumping gas or rolling a cart down the grocery store aisle, the pink stacks of meat.
He thinks about having me again. Spreading me open. Pinning me like a butterfly.
His glove compartment—did you know, Dara—he keeps one of my leotards in there. He pulled it off my bedroom floor, pressed his face against its soft, wet crotch. Stuffed it in his pocket when I wasn’t looking. At stoplights, when he’s stuck in traffic, when the light goes red, he pops it open, puts his hand in there, thinks of me.
* * *
*
Maybe we should call someone,” Dara said to Charlie that night, finally home from his PT appointment, the Shamrock taxi pulling up just after nine.
“Like who?” he said, a muzzy look in his eye. “The sex police?”
“You don’t get it. You don’t get Marie.”
Charlie looked her.
“I get Marie,” he said. “Believe me.”
* * *
*
You never really knew what went on in other people’s bedrooms, in their heads, Dara thought.
But this thing, this desire to be bossed around, dominated—such a cliché. Such an old, dusty woman thing she’d never understand. She’d never felt it herself.
But with Marie, it made sense, in a way.
She’d always been willful, resistant.
Yet it turned out she couldn’t wait to be bent, broken, split in two.