She popped another breath mint then entered the humid church. The lozenge seared her stomach and gummed her mouth as if a sticky cocoon nested there. Too much Scotch the night before. Too much wine before the Scotch. She processed past sweating limestone walls alongside her husband as a foggy choiring issued from the church gallery to float beneath the vaulted stone ceiling. Rise up my love, my fair one, and come away. She nodded at a few of Jane’s aunts and uncles and cousins and several workplace friends and colleagues, including Nina and Martin, Jane’s co-directors at the agency. Marilyn knew them all, from various get-togethers, but not well. Jane had lived other lives, Marilyn knew, and the thought now webbed her head blind.
Rand steered her to a glossy pew in one of the first rows and they sat. A woman in front turned to them with a tight smile. Not Jane. Marilyn cast a backward glance, then more carefully scanned to her left and right. Not a single Jane here, the one Marilyn did know. No girl in a blue robe and white wimple performing St. Mary at a Christmas pageant Marilyn herself attended as a guest of another faith—a title with which the priests addressed her afterward in the church basement where Marilyn and the Allen siblings helped serve tea. Though what had faith been to Marilyn growing up but the Sh’ma recited before bed until she was eight years old? Or the Hanukkah latkes percolating in a fryer? Nothing, not a sliver beside her faith in Jane and her ability to plunge ahead and her seeming faith that Marilyn would follow not far behind a girl who swept off her wimple to pick scabbed knees or who, at sixteen, back-and-forthed tequila behind the high-school portables before first-period English. Who lifted purple eyeliner from drugstore shelves and co-contemplated doing a fuckton of boys in the Ottobar’s bathroom stall—and sundry other ordinary pastimes of girls and almost-still-girls with limited resources striving to invent themselves with what lay close at hand, ridiculous boys and petty crimes and misdemeanors, but striving nonetheless. Who as women fished through the labyrinthine aquifer of underwater caves and the hidden interiors of shipwrecks, pushing back the darkness of the unknown—of themselves too, of what they could do. This Jane. And for a time this Marilyn.
Rise up my love. My fair one. Come away.
It was glorious, this moment. Her brain nearly shrieked with it. She felt wonderful, astonished, at once repellent and ascendant. Jane was dead. Dead! If still believing in Jane wasn’t faith, what was?
In a corner of the church basement someone’s blazered sleeve caught her saucer, and tea washed over the lip of the cup. She tracked her husband as he conversed by the coat rack with fellow condolencers. She shrank further into her corner. Then came Amy.
Forgive me, she blared, expression contorted.
Please, Marilyn said, startled. There’s no need.
Amy’s legs nearly straddled Marilyn’s. There is, Amy said.
A whiff like insecticide—Marilyn’s own alcohol-mint breath on the rebound? Forgive me? Marilyn said.
Amy’s face grew heavy, relaxed into sadness. She reached out and touched one of Marilyn’s curls. Stay in touch, Amy said. Don’t be a stranger. Like she was.
Ass-fucking hypocrites.
Vintage teenage Jane. On her hands and knees on the neighbour’s patio, upchucking while Marilyn braced her from behind. They’d been babysitting and, having delivered their charges to bed, had quickly bellied up to a line of Jell-O shooters on the kitchen counter.
Your family advocates anal sex?
Outside on the grass Jane had lurched to her feet. Precisely, she said. Through the back door if you have to, but remain a blessed virgin until your Mr. Prince shows.
Fearing the snitch-neighbours, Marilyn and Jane hadn’t exactly hollered to fuck Mr. Prince, fuck him up good. But drunk as could be they’d laughed so hard in each other’s arms that they’d eaten each other’s hair. Summer gnats hovered over them like tiny souls.
In her living room she cracked a fresh bottle and poured another sloppy one.