The Misfortune of Marion Palm
Emily Culliton
For my sister, Kate
In Upper Flatbush, already two miles deep inland from the bridges, a young woman of Manhattan asked a druggist how she might get into certain territory well south of there. Without thought of irony he began, “Oh. You want to go to Brooklyn.”
—James Agee, Brooklyn Is: Southeast of the Island: Travel Notes
Penn Station
Marion Palm is on the lam.
A blue JanSport knapsack filled with $40,000 rests between her ankles. She’s taking a train to a midwestern city. She’ll buy the ticket under an assumed name. She said goodbye to her two daughters an hour ago and lied about where she was going. She did not say goodbye to her husband. He’ll need to figure this one out on his own.
Marion Palm took her daughters to a Greek diner on Montague to say goodbye. She and her youngest agree: the cheeseburgers have a palliative texture because the meat, cheese, and bun present similarly. Her oldest has never cared for hamburgers and french fries but appeases her mother when she can.
Marion Palm ran out on the check because it was cash only and her cash was in the knapsack, organized with rubber bands. The rubber bands are multicolored and from her desk at work. She keeps them in a tray meant for rubber bands, paper clips, and loose change. Opening the knapsack at the diner would mean her daughters might see all the cash, and they would tell. Better to run from the $27 check.
Marion’s train moves up a line on the clicking timetable, and Marion taps the toe of her left shoe. She’s mimicking a woman ten feet away who is not on the lam. Police with German shepherds stroll through the crowd. Marion wants to smile at the police and say, Hi, officer! She wants to pet the dogs.
A homely woman is an invisible thing. This is her and her disguise. Her heart recognizes that she is on the lam and beats harder for her. This is a natural progression of criminal behavior. She is wrathful and sad that she must go on the lam. She will miss her daughters.
The money does not belong to her. There is no honest reason why she should have it.
A man stops in front of her to rattle coins in a creased paper cup. He wears filthy sweatpants, a parka, and a bag shaped like a tennis racket. He smells like urine. He bows to Marion.
“Spare change?” he asks.
“Haven’t got any,” Marion says. All the cash is needed, and she left her coin purse behind in the basement of her brownstone, along with her credit cards, Social Security card, passport, driver’s license, and cell phone.
The man intuits the woman’s fixedness. He moves on.
Her train rises up once more, and Marion knows she must purchase her ticket soon. She closes her eyes to stem her panic.
The Wall, Or Progress
Nathan Palm doesn’t know he’s alone in the house. He thinks his wife is downstairs because he hasn’t heard her leave. In his office on the third floor, he looks at a legal pad on his dark wooden desk. There’s a pen next to it. He can’t make any decisions because he thinks he may have done something terrible.
He writes half a line, but rather than finish the thought, he relives his morning, which was fine and normal until he opened his mouth. He stands to call out for his wife. He’ll ask her about their plans for the weekend. How about an excursion, a family excursion? He’ll plan it, he’ll say. He’ll do anything. He must fix this before he can write. He bellows her name and jogs down the stairs with his head still on the legal pad but also on the morning and now on the weekend. If he can just see her face and locate within her face that all is well, he’ll be allowed to keep writing. He looks into the bedroom, the living room. He pauses and listens to the house. The creaks and moans of the stairs and uneven hardwood floors give up occupants’ locations; the house is quiet. “Marion?” he asks. He has a first line, it could be a way in, but Marion hasn’t answered, and without that answer from Marion he’ll never write the second line. He checks his watch. The line in is never good, but he knows he has to write it. The doorbell rings.
The line isn’t it, but he won’t find it with the doorbell going. He waits for Marion to spring up from wherever she is and answer. The air is unsettled by the doorbell, but nothing moves.
Nathan opens the front door and discovers his daughters out there on the stoop, eight and thirteen, and they look abandoned. Their coats are zipped, but his youngest shivers. At this time of day his children should not belong to him; they belong to school.
“What are you doing here?”
His youngest wails that she is sorry. She is really sorry. When his daughter wails, she is usually wailing that she is sorry.
“Mom signed us out. We had cheeseburgers and then she said she was going to visit Shelley for a week.”
This is his oldest, Ginny. She is good with details but has a capacity for cruelty. Nathan Palm relates more to his younger daughter than to his older daughter.
“What?”
“Shelley.”
His youngest is now in the doorway with Nathan, wrapping her arm around his thigh and crying. When Nathan kneels to look her in the eye, she gives up his thigh in favor of his neck.
“Why is Jane so upset? Why didn’t your mom bring you home? Why did she take you out of school?”
His oldest frowns and shrugs.
“Don’t know. Dad, do we need to go back?”
Nathan pictures his work on the third floor. There’s that half line, which could be a full line, and now he believes it might be good. He imagines the book the poem would be included in; he conjures up the spine of the book, found on an old crowded bookshelf. His success is something past. The work is finished and he is content. His daydream is to be home again, but he has never commuted. He once sledgehammered away a low ten-foot-long concrete wall. When they bought the house, this wall bifurcated the backyard. Marion wanted to hire someone, but Nathan, inspired, bought a sledgehammer at the hardware store. It was a good purchase to make. He learned how to wind the sledgehammer behind him and up, over, and down into the wall. He repeated the action until the concrete fractured; then he focused on the fracture until he could dislodge a piece of the wall. The wall became less. There was movement. There was a display of accountability. When the wall was gone, he missed it. He would lose that line. It seemed good only on the first floor. It would sour on the third.
“No. Let’s watch some television and drink juice.”
The Palm girls watch a rerun in the den and sip cranberry cocktail. Nathan stands in the kitchen to phone his missing wife. He thinks of the terrible mistake he made that morning. As the phone rings, he lives his morning again but chooses not to see his wife in her nightgown, rotating her wrists, and because he does not see her, this wiser and ideal version of Nathan never says a word.
Women Who Embezzle