And losing? Don’t even get her started. For starters, she’d already lost and lost. And how could Rand know what it felt like to really lose someone? She remembered thinking this clearly for the first time maybe six months into their marriage. Came out of nowhere, felt like. They were in the kitchen and there was the broken bowl. Her mother’s. What was Rand’s grief—what were his griefs—by comparison? Adopted as a baby, he’d never known his parents. When she first met him he was already half a lifetime into surely a lesser state of grief than hers. How could he love what he’d never really had? He broke the bowl—an accident, apparently, always accidents—and she leaned her hip against the dishwasher and took in the blue shards on the maple floor. How could he? The broken bowl, his dim fucktard apology. Or whatever he was calling it. Sorry!
In her car now she gripped her fingers around the wheel. Anger and pain jaundiced every chamber of her heart. Instead of the park with its swing set and fiery maples, she saw three people who together had hooked and crooked a big mess. Her mind flooded, just thinking. She licked her lips and buzzed up her window and peered through the windshield, longings fulvous as the rotting leaf piles that reminded her of sepsis and the mephitic whiff of sewers and sulfurous sinkholes to which she felt astonishingly drawn. Where Jane went. Where Marilyn now understood she might still go. How astounded she suddenly was by herself. In her wildest dreams in her old life of work and work, she would never have thought that who she was now was possible. That she could possibly think, Stupid crier, at Bowman’s yacking and clacking Hear Ye’s. That she could be this bored up here in the boring bounded world, a portly squirrel lugging a bagel beneath a red-and-blue teeter-totter, four black helicopters as usual fleeting the west as smoke plumed one or two mercantile citadels, evidence of incendiaries and injunctions and nothing and everything to do with her and hers. Business as usual on a day so ordinary she could puke, she pressed End Call.
She parked at the cemetery. Pardes Shalom. The car’s heater blasted. She undid her coat, hiked her dress to her hips and waited for Bowman’s callback. She traced the pattern on her thick tights as if memorizing the peaceful garden’s snaking ridges—as if her tight’s woven tattoo echoed the rows along the hill before her, lanes organized by affiliations and denominations here distributed under crusting and crimping sycamores and stalwart evergreens skirting the spiny arrays of east-facing headstones, including her parents’ double memorial.
Soon though she tired of waiting—heart hot and heavy, lickety-splickety she dug in the bucket placed next to the path. Despite the pain in her forearm. Because of it. And in no time she had rocks in her coat pockets and hands. Rocks dun-coloured and heather grey flecked with quartzite. Rocks smooth and flat and round and rocks shaped like stars, plums, dates. The pretty pit of Bowman’s Adam’s apple—how it jumped when she’d rammed her tongue between his teeth to quiet him at the corner table in the oyster shack. Narcotized and stupid-novice bent, or merely assailed by some stomach bug, Bowman’s slutty drawl edging into her and then, hours later, back at Bowman’s, she couldn’t unload her gear from the truck. Rand’s silence a bludgeon. Bowman a shadow evanescing altogether. What was he, scared? Pussy. What was she? Monster, going and going. That night he’d stayed gone and the next morning too and then she and Rand left. Six days no calls and now? Rand must have gabbed on her.
She stood with her rocks. She knew! Losing. It’s what she did best. It occurred to her she could lose whatever it took.
To clear things out, tunnel to the root, whatever. Get at this new-new thing she’d never seen before. Her. Herself.
Up the hill she now went. Above the trees an undammed sky so blue her veins hurt. Her eyes hurt—her fovea pricked by tiny dots. She cuddled into her coat. The lumps in her pockets bruised her legs. Rocks in her head, she traversed the swale and arrived at ma and pa in no time and laid her offerings to rest. How parched she was. Dying.
36
Forget the soured sun on Bowman’s flimsy trailer and oyster shacks not exactly booming with business. This far north—way past the most weakly guarded perimeter—and this late in the season most of the peninsular town’s shop and hotel windows were boarded up in anticipation of a harsher-than-last winter’s harsh. Many of the cottages that cusped the lake side and semi-circled the bay side and serried through the wooded hills most likely already had their pipes shut. Rand drove fast, scudding the gravel while, visible through chinks in pine forest and sumac, white-capped waves reared. Soon Rand parked his black behemoth behind Leo’s white one, next to the timbered A-frame set back from the road in a stand of cedar and spruce. When Marilyn thumped on the front door, faded leaves drifted against her ankles and pine needles matted under her feet. No answer. Her stomach cramped and her head swam. Suddenly she could hardly believe she was here, about to go through with things. And, leaning against the door frame to steady herself, she could hardly believe she wouldn’t. Which fear was worse?