Marion at fourteen is restless. She is one of the poor quick and bright but does not get to go to a private school. Instead she attends a large public school for gifted students in the middle of Brooklyn, but fails after her first year. Her mother slaps her face. Marion transfers.
She graduates from high school eventually, and applies for college. She lives at home. She takes a few courses at Hunter but stops attending early in the semester. Her mother doesn’t hit her again, but there is no suggestion that another semester will be paid for. Mother and daughter glare at each other over the dinner table. Each has failed the other. Neither has gone or will go to college. Marion’s father chooses to ignore the seething women; instead he tells them how beautiful they are. It is an interruption and a pointless one. It does not make them feel good. Marion and her mother know they are not beautiful. They think they are living with a fool.
Without the pretense of classes to attend, Marion sleeps in. She sees her friends at night, and during the day she drives her father’s car. She drives herself to Long Island and back. She enjoys summer places in the winter. She spends time in dive bars near the coast with fishing nets on the walls. The men in the bar stare, but she has a beer and reads. When winter turns into spring, she drives to the beach, the first to brave it. She has a chair and an umbrella and a cooler. She goes to the beach like others go to work. She reads a wide range of genres on the beach, but prefers dystopias. She likes it when everything is going wrong, and ignores the morality lesson she’s supposed to be learning.
It is perfect beach weather when Marion finds herself about to be kicked out of her house. Her mother accuses her with test scores, with tales of prodigy-like behavior as a young girl. Marion knows she was no prodigy; she met the other prodigies when she was fourteen and she was not like them at all. Marion was something different.
Marion’s bags are packed, and she moves in with another disappointment. They giggle about it over cheap red wine the first night. Nick has a kitchen table and that’s where they sit. He doesn’t have much else. Nick was never considered smart, but he has turned out to be gay. Marion holds his hand when they admit to each other how frightened they are. They’ve made some decision that has landed them in this shitty apartment, but they can’t remember when they made it or why. They are both from Sheepshead Bay. Her father works for the MTA. His father is a real estate agent. Her mother gives music lessons. His mother worked until she died of ovarian cancer. They now live in Red Hook, and it is empty but near the water. They both need that. That first night, Nick slides a switchblade to Marion for her walk home from the subway.
Marion at twenty is restless and scared. The apartment costs money and she does not have any. She needs to go out and get some money. Nick works for his open-minded cousin as a man with a van. The cousin can look past Nick’s sexuality because of Nick’s size. Because Nick is so large, they can now advertise that they move pianos. It’s good business.
Marion can’t move pianos, but decides that she will find something. She applies to be a waitress at a SoHo café. A small woman with a stutter declares that she will make Marion a better person; she means a better worker. She screams when Marion reaches for a coffee spoon with her right hand instead of her left. This is the small woman’s restaurant, and she is bipolar. The other staff scuttle around the room, and they all reach for coffee spoons with their left hands. They all set the table the same way, the most efficient way. They are little robots, and Marion, trying to be a little robot, fails.
But the bipolar woman keeps Marion on in spite of all her flaws as a server, because Marion’s cash register is perfect to the cent at the end of the night. The owner quizzes Marion and discovers that the flawed server can calculate difficult equations in her head. The owner’s eyes get smaller, and she decides she can trust Marion. It is partly because Marion is white, and the owner holds her racist generalizations close, believes in them like tarot cards, but it’s also because of Marion’s charmless and robotic way with figures. Marion might save the owner some money.
With a panicked heart, Marion learns to reach for the coffee spoon with her left hand always. She returns home with cash. She dreams about serving brunch. She has a fuzzy sense of purpose. Her chest tightens when she gets off the train at Second Avenue. The customers can destroy her with thoughtlessness when they treat her as less than human. She’s good with money. She has that she tells herself when she grips the cash and the knife in her pocket.
Ginny’s Detention
Ginny’s homeroom teacher informs her of the detention. Three tardies equals one detention. One more tardy will earn her another detention and a call to her parents. Three more tardies after that will mean disciplinary action. Ginny knows better than to argue, but she wishes her homeroom teacher wouldn’t repeat this litany and smile. It makes Ginny feel like she should also be smiling, but that would be misread and could earn her another misdemeanor. She tries to look repentant.
Detention will be from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. Ginny understands.
She calls her father, to let him know that she will be late, but he does not answer the phone. This is normal, but now she’s unable to reach either of her parents. In other circumstances, she would go by her mother’s office. Sometimes Marion would tell her to go away because she was working, but other times Ginny got a cup of sugary tea. It’s a time they shared.
Ginny feels like she should look at her mother’s desk. She has ten minutes left of her lunch, and she picks up after herself and goes. Her mother’s office is in the basement in the new building with the lower school, and while it’s all fluorescent lighting, there is something cheerful and warm about it, a pale pink-and-orange glow, and it’s a nice place to be when the weather is cold.
The door to her mother’s office is open. Her mother is not at her desk, and this was to be expected, but it still upsets Ginny. She walks behind the desk and sits in her mother’s chair. She opens and closes a drawer. She taps the computer keyboard, and the hard drive whirs awake. The monitor blinks on. Ginny taps into her mother’s inbox and reads the unread subject lines. Where are you???? say many of them. One is from Ginny, sent last night from her phone. She thought she should try.
She’s investigating the inbox when her own email, remarkably, goes from unread to read. Ginny stands. She pulls her phone out of her back jeans pocket and quickly types another email to her mother’s work address. Mom? is all it says.
Then her email goes back to unread. Ginny has frightened her own mother away.
“What are you doing?” It is the dreaded Daniel, her mother’s officemate, in the doorway.