“Oh, I remember that one. I remember that perm too. You want to look like Julia Roberts?”
Marion shakes her head. She does not want a perm. But isn’t it funny? The weirdest things can pop into your head. The hairdresser starts gossiping about a friend of hers whose piece-of-shit husband used to beat the shit out of her on a semiregular basis. She didn’t understand why her friend wouldn’t just leave him—he was bad news, they’d told her so before the wedding. But the friend was stubborn in her love.
“Well, it’s complicated sometimes,” Marion says. The hairdresser pauses to take in Marion’s supposition with a big open mouth.
“Oh, honey,” she says. “Don’t tell me about complicated.”
Marion’s hair is washed, trimmed, dyed, and tinfoiled. She’s given a magazine to kill the time, and she learns about new sexual positions that she should try if she wants to keep the mystery, aka keep the man. She listens in on conversations around her. This is not Carroll Gardens or Boerum Hill. The girls are not in yoga pants with swishy ponytails and enormous purses. The women who work in this establishment are from the same social class as the clientele, or at least this is the pretense. Coolness is not a commodity here. Rather, it’s a contest of how much they can relate to one another. I’ve been there. Don’t tell me. I know you. I am you.
Marion looks at herself not talking in the mirror. She isn’t agreeing. Instead she’s sitting in judgment of all these women she doesn’t know. She has to become one of them again, and she hates them. She remembers when her mother stopped liking her. It happened one evening at dinner when Marion was sixteen; her mother passed her the potatoes and wished Marion would just go away. She said, I don’t care where to. Marion thought there would come a time when she would look across the dinner table at one of her two daughters and vocalize a similar desire. At least she’s avoided that, Marion thinks. At least either Ginny or Jane has been spared.
Board of Trustees
Good afternoon.
May I just interrupt? One teeny tiny second, I promise. I just want to give a big thank-you to everyone for the kind wishes about my recent health concerns. I’m happy to report that my doctors feel very confident: it’s benign.
Thank you for sharing.
Congratulations.
Yes. Well. The audit. The audit is what we need to discuss here today. It seems that Daniel felt the need to reach out to the IRS to explain Marion’s absence. He seemed to feel that this was necessary, and Deb—apparently—encouraged him to do so.
I thought we told him, no emails.
Can we fire him? Why can’t we ever fire anyone?
I’ve talked to Daniel, and he’s very sorry. He thought he was helping.
So now they know.
They know, and they would very much like to meet with Marion, to discuss some peculiar transactions and the odd deduction. I’ve been in touch, and they were—to give credit where credit is due—understanding. However, they made it clear to me that sooner or later they will need to speak to her. Or there will be consequences. For the school.
What kind of consequences?
Financial. Financial consequences that we cannot, well, afford right now. So I just wanted to gather the board and ask once more, has anyone seen Marion Palm?
No. As you know, I’ve been in the hospital—
Anyone else?
Anyone? No? That is complicated.
The lawyers are still—
Concerned. Yes, I know.
How did the conversation with the daughters go?
Unfruitfully. They seemed to get the strange idea that we were after their mother.
After? How funny. Cute, almost.
Like the Mob? Like the CIA?
Something like that. So they refused to say anything.
Is that not, if I may, troubling?
How so?
The Palm girls believe their mother must be protected from us. From the school. What has Marion Palm done that requires such protection?
I hadn’t thought about that.
Perhaps it would be wise to find out.
Dinnertime
Marion buys more black beans and rice from the taqueria. The woman behind the counter compliments her hair. It’s time to move on from the Sunset Park sex motel.
The Palm family has dinner without Marion for the third time. Indian takeout. Ginny avoids cubes of cheese in her spinach. Jane eats all of her chicken masala to please her father. Nathan drinks a bottle of wine quickly.
A boy intrudes on a train of commuters. He rocks, and a space clears around him. The commuters look down at their phones, thumbs dart across screens, while the boy makes sounds of terror. He moans and rocks. A space clears where he is.
Demands
In her room, Jane marries and divorces her dolls. The marriages are elaborate and shoeless, because she cannot keep those little shoes on her Barbies’ frustrating feet, but other than that, they are whirling operas of chaos. Fights break out, outfits are changed, sex is had.
Jane is supposed to be in bed but felt like playing, so she’s playing.
The divorces are simple, somber, and usually only one other doll is in attendance: the lawyer. Most of her classmates’ parents are divorced, and she’s seen some movies, so she has the basic principle down. As she understands it, two people sit on opposite sides of a table, with a lawyer in between. They fight and argue about money and children. Usually one person is hoping to marry a different person. But both the mother and the father are there at the table. Even if one person moves to a smaller apartment in Manhattan or to a house on the other side of the park while the other remains in the brownstone, they are both still around. Her mother’s absolute absence throws off her logic. But dolls do disappear, it’s true; it’s like they walk away.
Jane expects to hear her mother’s voice, and as it does not come, she cannot be stilled, and so she is always in motion. At first she imagines her mother in the room, but now this doesn’t help. She knows too well that her mother is not in the house. She hasn’t gotten a clear answer from anyone on when her mother is coming back.
Grown-ups look past her, and she wants to kick their shins to make them notice her. Everyone tells her what to do. You should be patient and not kick. No one listens to her. Her father listens to Ginny because he is frightened of her. Ginny has mutated from a child into something else.
Jane rages. She opens her mouth and howls.
Ginny’s watching a television show about teenagers with dramatic lives and quirky syntaxes. All of Ginny’s friends watch this show and text each other as they watch. One friend tried to text Ginny, but her mother told her to stop playing with her fucking phone. Ginny was relieved, because she didn’t know what her friend wanted.
Nathan’s watching too when Jane begins yelling. He doesn’t hear the tantrum until Ginny points it out. “Oh, right,” he says, and gets up. Nathan was in the process of passing out; otherwise he would not have consented to watch the television show.