Bury Me Deep

Part Two

It had been only a month, thirty-four days. Yet Marion could no longer remember the before of it. Her body, she would rest her hands on it and it was changed. The face in the mirror, hers yet not the face that had been there before.

Her fingers on the calendar, so glad that the blood had come, would go to church twice that week for the blood, had gone twice last week asking for it.

Fingertips on the calendar, she saw forty-six days before Dr. Seeley might come for Easter.

IT WAS IN THIS MODE, this reckless mode, that she, fevered head to toe, laid herself open. Would that she had her head about her, she would not have let him talk her, breathless and confused, into stealing away to the third-floor supply room at the clinic, three oxygen canisters rolling, rolling endlessly across the long floor as her legs curled and curved about him.

That evening, she had gone after work to Diamond’s department store intending to purchase the straw, grosgrain-ribboned hat of taffy pink in the front window with the five dollars Joe Lanigan had given her, twisting the bill between her breasts, saying, “Here’s a little candy, Marion. Show me something.” Once she arrived, however, she found herself in the undergarments department, lips tearing between her teeth, softly fingering lingerie. The salesgirl slipped the shirred ribbon garters and peach crepe de chine step-ins into a slim box of deep blue. Jostling on the streetcar, she tucked her hand in the bag and rested it on the top of the box the whole ride.

But he did not appear that night and apologized the next day, on the telephone, as she covered her face with her hand, elbow resting on the typewriter. What’s more, he could not see her tonight either. Why could she not manage two days without, and what would she do if Dr. Seeley arrived, if money held and he forbore, and arrived in town now just over five weeks away.

That night, he with a daughter’s birthday dinner and she off to Louise and Ginny’s and Louise was going to henna her hair and Ginny decided that Marion should go platinum.

“Oh no, Ginny, Dr. Milroy wouldn’t like it and I don’t think it suits me.”

But Ginny, lips gleaming, was jiggling soap flakes into a footed dish tingling with peroxide and teary ammonia.

“Have a cocktail, Marion,” Louise said. “So’s you won’t notice while Ginny burns you like morning toast.”

An hour later, they were rubbing her head with a soft towel, one on either side of her, and when she looked into the waved mirror, it was like a swirling puff of cotton edged in bright silver. Trying, she could barely see herself from six months ago, the long thick sandy mane she had to soak in castor oil. Now she saw this twirling silver pinwheel. Who did she think she was, and Ginny twisting a tube of violet lipstick and dragging it across Marion’s lips dizzily, her happy breath on Marion’s face?

“What did you do to our fair girl?” A voice rang out from the front door, and wouldn’t you know it was Joe Lanigan there, carrying a creamy wedge of birthday cake.

“Joe!” Ginny squealed, and Louise ran over to take his coat.

Marion stood, shaking her hair, which felt unreal to her, like someone else’s silk trimming.

“Don’t she look like Joan Bennett?” Louise said, taking the cake wedge from him and lifting it to her outstretched tongue for a taste. “Isn’t she a dream?”

“It was my idea, I’ll have you mark it,” Ginny piped up.

Joe Lanigan, he was looking at Marion and she felt her neck still wet from the sink. She felt the front of her shirt clinging to her and she felt his eyes on her. It did things to her.

“Do you like the new Marion?” Louise said.

“I like all Marions, old and new,” Joe said, running his icing-edged hand along his mouth. “And I like how many Marions there are. And how many you have to give,” he said, winking at this last bit.

“Look at Gent Joe getting an eyeful,” Marion heard Ginny say.

“So you like what we proffer, Joe,” and this was Louise. But Marion could only focus on Joe. She felt her skin raise up under his eyes. And she knew she was in trouble.

By the time he had walked over to her, her legs were quivering, vibrating—all with Louise and Ginny seeing everything. Knowing for certain what they may have only guessed before.

“Marion,” he was saying, and he was putting his hand in her hair and then he was right up against her.

“Maybe they want to be alone, Lou-Lou,” she could hear Ginny say, giggling.

“I don’t suppose they mind either way,” said Louise, as Joe Lanigan was pressing Marion into the small bedroom, pressing her against the shutter doors, skin pinching, his hand flat on her wet front, “but I’d just as soon play Parcheesi.”

“The hell you would,” Ginny was saying. “Wouldn’t you like to see Marion’s pretty skin?”

“I don’t need to watch that to see Marion’s pretty skin, Ginny.”

“What, dear heart, might you be suggesting, and please pass the peanuts, I got terrible hungry, just like that.”

From one of the girls’ twin beds beneath her, springs squeaking, Marion could hear them play Parcheesi, the dice clattering.

“I’m eating your pawn, Lou-Lou.”

“Eat away, little brute. Show me your teeth, and your tongue.”

AN HOUR LATER, maybe more, floating in and out of sleep on Louise’s bed, the peroxide tingling in her nose, her head, she could hear Louise talking, or thought she could, through the door.

“Remember, Gent Joe, remember. Remember, because I surely do. Watch the way my gums move up and down and up and down. When I have the inclination, I just can’t stop talking.”

And he, and she could hear the laughter in his voice, keen and sharp, and she could feel it jigsaw in her stomach as if his hands were back on her: “How could I forget, Louise? I wouldn’t want to. We all marvel at that gorgeous mouth of yours, don’t we? It’s worth all the noise it makes.”

“Don’t play. You got enough to play with.”

“That I do.”

Then Marion shook her head and felt a swell of the ammonia all through her head and there were no more voices, no voices except her own, recalling her own past words to Dr. Seeley, Remember me. Do not abandon me here. Remember me.

What could her letters to Dr. Seeley say now after so many days of this? Dr. Seeley, I have let this man in, this smiling gentleman, and the things he has done to me, could I list them for you? Could I share the time he pulled the ribbons from my dress and wrapped them tight round my baby wrists? Could I share the time he rubbed me raw, my face flat on the Oriental carpet of his drawing room, my face speckled red, knees strawberried raw, and not one curl of regret as he ruined me, Dr. Seeley, over and over again? Is this something I can share with you, Dr. Seeley, and have you forgive me still? Especially after your own sorrows and the ways in which I have punished you for them, for your private weakness? For some things there can be no forgiveness, nor even words. Some things are meant only to be fevers in the brain.

“YOU KNEW ABOUT Mr. Lanigan and me,” Marion said later, hours later, as Ginny played with her hair.

“Oh, Marion.” Louise smiled. “Oh, Marion.”

“You acted the goodly virgin, Marion,” Ginny said. “And all the time you were playing the hots with our Gent Joe.”

Marion felt her face rush red. “You know it wasn’t like that,” she said, shaking her head away.

Ginny laughed and leaned back. She was rolling and unrolling something in her hand. Something green. She rolled the bills tight and fashioned a horn and blew into it.

“It’s all clover. Joe left behind something for us too,” Ginny said, winking.

“You figured it all,” Marion said, still dazed.

“We knew, Marion,” Louise said. “Of course we knew.” And she smiled again and there was something flickering in her eyes, gentle or not, but flickering, and Marion, Ginny’s fingers tangling in her hair, tried to read the thing in Louise’s eyes, tried to understand it. But she could not. She could not. There was no way to see.

IT WAS A BALANCE. A surprising and quite fragile and quite beautiful balance of all the elements, and it felt so delicate that Marion knew it could not last. But for a few weeks, it did. Louise and Ginny held Marion fast to their chests when Joe Lanigan spent nights away to parts unknown, or even in his own homestead. And Joe Lanigan continued to take Marion for long drives into dark corners outside of town where he whispered tender things and placed his hands on her in ways that she couldn’t bear because the bearing was so sweet. But it was all like the pressure before a crackling summer storm, strangely still air knocking curtains ever so lightly against the window screens and the sky turning colors slowly, simmering from blue to brown to violet and you knew it was going to break, and break in ways for which there was no preparing.

It was within days that it all turned, as if in a second. Marion could even point to the exact moment that this man for whom she had broken herself to pieces and built herself anew, a platinum pleasure doll, showed her, showed her he had begun to grow a little bit bored.

“Aren’t you coming by, Joe? Mrs. Gower will be at her choir practice and I could make you supper.”

“I’d like to, Marion, I would. You know I’d like to see you all the time. It’s just this lodge function. They need me.”

And the next day hearing, from Louise, about the raucous smoker at the Silhouette Club where the men brought in ten burly-q dancers for the night, paid them each twenty-five dollars to dance on tabletops and Oh, Marion, Mr. Trask told me, you know, he is a member of the lodge, he said, confidentially, more than one of those girls stripped down to her birthday suit and jumped into the big punch bowls. The janitors spent hours picking up spangles, sequins, fluttery feathers. And she could see, in her head, Joe Lanigan, in some back room, in some side hallway, mouth pressed against sugared, sticky skin, oh, she knew, she knew it. She could taste it herself.

“And Mr. Lanigan,” Marion said, looking at her fingernails, pale and freshly torn from a night spent teeth to nub. “He was there.”

His eyes never stopped moving. What would it take to make his eyes stop moving?

What had she imagined? She as a desert Rapunzel preening in her tower, Joe Lanigan, fingers buried in her long locks, grappling to reach her, to rescue her, to save her and in so doing be saved? Oh, she couldn’t have possibly thought this. There was no time. It was all too fast.

“Don’t be jealous, kitten,” Louise said. “That’s how he is. It’s his way. It doesn’t mean he cares for you any less.”

How could it not mean that? she said to herself, and Louise, as if mind reading, said, “You’ve an awful lot to learn, Marion. I do wish I could have saved you from learning.”

It was kind of her to say, but Marion did not want to hear Louise being kind. Louise always knowing so much more, about Joe Lanigan, about everything. “I don’t care what he does,” Marion said, chin up, like Lillian Gish playing prideful.

“Of course you don’t.” Louise smiled. “But do remember, Ginny and I, we are true to you. We’re always true.”

Thinking of Joe in that smoker, mouth covered with sequins, a filthy image, she could think of nothing else. She in the same company with those girls, those dancing girls. In a voice automatic like a thing possessed, she said, “I must live with it. If I were stronger, I would make myself stop. I would, Louise.”

“No one’s telling you to stop, Marion.”

THE FOLLOWING DAY, Marion looked in vain for Louise, peering down every hallway at the clinic. Where was Louise, her swishing, fishtailing walk?

“She had to catch a night train,” Ginny told her. “Her brother got pegged in Calico on a vag charge. She didn’t even know he was out this far west. Last time she saw him was in St. Louis right after the Crash.”

Marion hadn’t even known Louise had a brother. She knew about vag charges, though. Dr. Seeley had three to his name, the last in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, not fourteen months before. Marion thought him gone forever, but he was only on the junk. On the junk, that was how the policeman put it, as if she would know what it meant, which she did.

“Is she going to post bail?” Marion asked.

Ginny nodded. “Don’t I know it. We were at Slanty’s at the crack of dawn pawning all our honey. Everything but our sweet lil six-shooter and the Silvertone. I made her promise me that. He’s blood, sure, but I worked hard for that radio. And the pistol, well, Joe Lanigan gave us that after a suitor with a bad case of the rapes got itchy for Louise and tried to squeeze in our bedroom window. It’s good to be heeled. Did the doc leave you heeled, Miss Silk?”

Once, when Dr. Seeley had gone to the hospital for ten days in Victorville, he left her with a flare gun. Marion hid it under the bed, afraid to look at it, and when the doctor got out, he sold it for the thing he sold everything for.

“How can I help, Ginny?” Marion said, trying not to think of Ginny doing as she did sometimes, pretending to twirl the gun like Annie Oakley and shoot the cigarette out of Floyd’s mouth. “Do you have everything you need while she’s gone?”

“Do I ever. She wants you to keep an eye on me, but that’s how she is. She knows what’s best, but if she’s gone, who needs best?”

“But, Ginny, you don’t want Louise to have to worry about you too.”

“She should worry about me. I count more than her lousy brother, goes off with sailors, gets lockjaw, always in some scrape.”

THERE HAD BEEN something in Ginny’s face. It was an avid insolent look, even a defiant one, and Marion thought of it more than once throughout the day. After work, she took the streetcar to the girls’ place. Ginny didn’t answer the door, but it wasn’t locked and Marion went inside, ylang-ylang and jasmine flooding her nostrils and mouth and bright clothes strewn everywhere, even an errant peacock feather on the sofa trembling from the draft. On the coffee table was a bottle of Auntie Sheba’s Lung Syrup and a highball glass red-bottomed with the remnants of its glossy charms.

Marion poked her head in the bedroom, which, pocket-sized as it was, was in similar disarray, a long red strand drizzling from a bottle that read Heering Crème de Cerise oozed from the head to the foot of Ginny’s bed and Louise’s was stacked high with phonograph records flung from their sleeves, empty jars of cold cream, a corset that could’ve wrapped around Ginny three times.

But no Ginny.

Marion could think of no way to reach Louise and it made her nervous to think of telling her. She thought of telephoning Joe Lanigan, thought he could help her, but she did not know what she might say if someone else answered the telephone. She sat down on the divan and tried to concentrate. It took her a long time to think of Mr. Loomis, and she was glad to see his name in the address book Louise kept in a wall nook in the kitchen.

She telephoned from the soda fountain three blocks away.

“Oh, sounds like Ginny’s on a tear,” Mr. Loomis said, called away from a winning poker hand by his anxious wife.

Marion could hear Mrs. Loomis in the background, crying out, “She’s like a trapped bird. It’ll be like the last time, smashing windows all through town.”

“Get, get, angel mine.” Mr. Loomis shushed his wife, who was always dancing the sharp edge of hysteria. “Get-get.”

“Louise will be panicked,” Marion said, fingertips edging along her teeth. She could picture Louise in some far-off county jail laying down bill after bill, her home emptying itself for the pawnshop, pearly bit by pearly bit.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Seeley,” Mr. Loomis assured her. “I bet she’s back with her old pals, those chickadees working the Hotel Dunlop.”

Marion recalled Louise saying Ginny used to work there, high-kicking it bare-legged to great acclaim.

And one night, one night at a party, Mr. Loomis had pulled Marion aside, sweaty-faced and brined, told her about the night he first met Ginny nearly two years back, about how he’d made his way, by virtue of sheer salesman charm, backstage at the Crimson Cavalcade. The showgirls all had red blotches smack in the center of their powdery cheeks, like baby dolls. Their ruffled panties, deep red and deeper violet, were trimmed with gold-flecked ribbons that dangled from them, slipping about between their half-gartered thighs.

There was Ginny, he said, curled daintily in their frilly center, like a doll’s doll, painted and trimmed and with a pink O for a mouth, an O open for all kinds of pleasures and now for the heavy bottle of moon passing among the dolls’ bright-gloved hands.

“My, that’s fine,” Ginny had said, not even noticing Mr. Loomis. “That’s mule for moon baying.”

Ginny had lived so many hundreds of lives, had she not?

“She doesn’t much care for alone,” Mr. Loomis said now. “Louise is her everything, you see. With her gone, she will find fluffy feathers elsewhere to plush her lil nest.”

It reminded Marion of something. Something seen, half in sleep, many weeks before. She had stayed the night with the girls, curling up on the sofa under Ginny’s muslin, a garment no doubt laced with heavy sickness but also popping whimsy, and awoke unsure of the time, staggering, blurry, to the sliver of a bathroom, and as she did, passing the girls’ bedroom. The accordion wall gaping slightly and the tableau like a gold-leaf painting. No, like a soft-wash painting on the wall of a pink-walled powder room in an elegant hotel, fairy nymphs at rest on a bed of clover. Ginny’s curving, marble-white thigh slung and Louise’s arm slid between Ginny’s bent leg, dimpled knee, and Louise only stockings, garters sapphire blue and her fingers spanning Ginny’s bitty doll breasts, lifting with anxious breaths.

Later, she would swear she’d dreamt it.

It was a purer love than Marion had ever known.

AND SO MARION WENT HOME. She went home and tried not to fret about Ginny and hoped in fact she was with friends who would take care of her. And at nigh on five o’clock in the morning, Joe Lanigan had found his way in through Mrs. Gower’s back door and up to Marion’s room and he crawled in beside her with a gust of applejack and confetti crinkling from his hair, seeping from his suit. A friend’s anniversary celebration, he whispered, and all I wanted was to get here, Marion, for I know I’ve been negligent and I so wanted to give you something new. And with that his fingertips were on her lips and—

—I wish I could help myself with you, Marion, he said, then she could feel him shake his head on the pillow. That is a lie. I don’t even wish it, not for a moment. I just want to do things to you, he said, and he rubbed something on her lips, her gums. And it was buzzing, and everything was buzzing. She tried to reach her fingers to her mouth, but there was nothing there, nothing there, it was like her hand would go straight through.

What is that, she asked. What is that, but it came out funny, and her heart was thudding and he began to do things, such things, and she did not stop him or ask any more questions.

MORNING, BEFORE WORK, coming on seven o’clock, Marion, cotton-headed and raw and sick with herself, took the streetcar to Hussel Street.

The house in even more disarray than the day before, Marion slipped on a throw pillow torn seam to seam on the floor, its feathers fluttering in the air like a chicken coop—and was that wax beans crushed into the carpet, she wondered. And what of the empty jug of Cheracol cough syrup nestled upright on the corner of the divan, like a child’s stuffed bear?

She found herself pausing before peering into the bedroom—what might she see? But before she worked up the nerve, she heard something like water lapping and the bathroom door was partially open and she called out, “Ginny?”

There was a familiar twitter. “Then she met a sailor man named Popeye the Skipper.”

Marion tentatively placed three fingers on the door, the steam glazing her face, the warble vibrating wetly, “When she was mean, boy how he used to whip her.”

Marion looked down at Ginny, eyes closed, naked as the Kewpie doll she had tucked in her arms, sinking in a half tub of water.

“Ship ahoy,” she crooned. “Ah, ship ahoy.”

“Ginny,” Marion said. “What goes on?”

Her eyes fluttered open, her red mouth smeary.

“It is the she herself,” she said, and the warble was gone and the voice was hissing, it was a keening hiss.

“It’s Marion,” she said, realizing her own hands were clasped to the doorframe, clasped tightly. “Ginny, are you all right?”

“It is the she herself. Why are you not in Calico, or something like it?” Ginny’s eyes, normally so baby-bird blue, crackled roughly.

“Ginny, it’s Marion,” Marion repeated, as if talking to a blind woman. “Louise is in Calico.”

Ginny tilted herself and a splash of water flew from the tub and caught Marion, ice-cold on the leg.

“I figured you was with her. I figured you was off with her,” she said, slanty-faced, that sheet-white face, blue in the temples. “I might do anything when it’s like this. I’ve done things. You can’t guess what you’d do until you’ve done it. Just you see what I can do.”

It was such a strange thing to say and Marion felt struck. “What do you mean, Ginny? You were the one who told me where Louise went. I’ve been looking for you. I was worried about you.” She had never seen her like this, never once. She remembered Louise once saying things, meaning things (Marion, Ginny is prone to dark moods. She must be watched. She must be kept bubbling, mustn’t be allowed to sink, sink).

Ginny’s eyes began to slowly soften and she squirmed in the tub. “Oh, Marion, well, I am glad. I am glad. You’re my friend, aren’t you, Meems? Aren’t you? You don’t leave me to sawdust, do you?”

“No, Ginny, no,” Marion said, finally stepping forward, shaking off her strange words. “Ginny, that water is like ice. You must come out.”

“I had a nosebleed and I thought it might help,” she squeaked.

Marion turned to reach for a towel hanging on a hook, but found it sticky, and before she could do more, Ginny let out a long scissoring hack straight from her ambered lungs.

Swinging around, Marion looked down to see Ginny, spread forsakenly, long strands of blood lashing down her face.

“Ginny,” Marion said, and could say no more.

“Don’t fret.” The minx grinned, breath wheezing from her like when putting your ear to a seashell. She covered her nose and mouth with a bone white hand and grinned more widely. “Don’t fret.”

“OH, MARION, I am sorry for that mess Ginny sunk you in,” Louise said on Monday morning, her eyes feathered with red.

“It was all fine,” Marion said, placing her hand on Louise’s. “It truly was. I tucked her under every coverlet in the house and the hot-water bottle to boot.”

Louise rolled her eyes, wringing her kerchief and sniffling. “Well, let me tell you, she was in a bath all weekend, a pickle bath, that’s what’s what. I just hope that’s the worst of what she started up.”

“Oh, Louise.”

“I should have had you come over. I should have had you stay with her.”

“Louise, you—”

“By morning she was barking like a dog. Like a coal-mining dog with consumption.”

And Marion could see the worry painted all over Louise’s face, across her ruddy cheeks.

“And don’t get me started on that brother of mine,” she groaned. “Cost me four bills and then skipped town with a merchant marine.”

HER MAD WEEKEND behind her, Ginny skidded hard into a toffee-sludged, lung-clotted collapse and her face within days became edged with blue death. Blue rimed lips stretched across teeth, oh, it was not pretty.

Louise was frantic and finally hocked the Silvertone radio, but it was not nearly enough. Finding Marion at her desk at the clinic, she leaned against the doorframe and gave a cold look.

“Your lover man is ducking me like I was the bill collector, Marion.”

Marion saw anger and a gaunt fear twinning dangerously in her eyes. “I guess he’s occupied with business. He has that new store opening on the south side.”

“Well, I have some business for him. I need some lettuce or some packets of pink or anything else he can sling my way, or else my girl’s going to break a set of ribs, hacking like a piner miner.”

“He has been hard to reach in recent days,” Marion lied. She had been hot cheek to his thigh not ten hours before. She wondered why he could not help the girls. She believed he would if he knew, really knew. She must make him know. But he had only just returned to her after days of gallivanting sideways. What if he slipped loose again?

“Gent Joe’s old vanishing act,” Louise said, clacking her fingers, jittery and white, on the doorframe. “Word is, he’s papering a shopgirl downtown with Alexander Hamiltons.”

Marion looked up from her stack of patient records.

“I am sorry, Meems. You know I am. But it’s true.”

“There’s always gossip about Joe,” she said. Inwardly, she considered that Louise might be lying. But then there was the thing: the smell on Joe, on Joe’s wrist cuffs, frantic perfume and woman scents, and it was on his hands and other places and she had pretended not to notice. Because she did not want to know. And she did not want to look at the fact that knowing might not change anything. Not for her.

“I’m just saying, give a poke, Meems,” Louise said, clucking Marion roughly under the chin. “It’s not just about our radio and our chrome toaster. It’s rent and medicine and food on the plate.”

Marion nodded, but she was still thinking of shopgirls and nurses and office girls and could not focus.

“Marion, we need to take care of things,” Louise said, and she tugged Marion’s ear. “You gotta get off the dime. We need to keep our Mr. Lanigan local.”

That evening, Marion wrote a letter to Dr. Seeley in which she stated that her cough had returned, and some of her women’s troubles, and might he send an extra five dollars next time? She sealed the letter and walked to the mailbox to post it before she could change her mind. When the slot shut, she thought she might begin to cry, but she did not.

She would ask Joe for money for the girls. She would ask him. But not yet. Not while it seemed he might be flickering away, like some beautiful mirage.

MARION, do you know what it means to be willing to do anything? Louise had asked her that once, one night, so late, both nestled side by side, face to glowing radio, singing. I’m just a lonely romancer, Right at the end of my rope, Though I’ve had your answer, I can’t give up hope, and that was when Louise, eyes heavy with happy-tired and fingers tapping on the burning green dial, asked, Marion, do you know what it means to be willing to do anything?

I do, Marion thought. That I know. That I know. I didn’t once. I know it now.

And so much worse to suspect, privately, when all alone with thoughts, that he wasn’t worth it. Not even close.

Then again, maybe that’s what lies at its center.

He is nothing and yet still.

THE GIRLS COULD TALK of little but how to get their pawned radio back. Ginny was small as a dormouse on the sofa, a handkerchief to her face, but her spirits were still high, rabid even.

Louise, worry-browed, was mixing up a home cough brew, glugging in ammonia and chloroform boosted from the clinic.

“Don’t we got any glad stuff at all, beanpole?” Ginny mewled. “Better yet, how ’bout a li’l yen-shee suey?”

“Ask Marion,” Louise said. “Marion, have you talked to our Doc Joe?”

“I haven’t seen him yet,” Marion said, truthfully.

Louise’s eyebrows knitted together and Marion felt her heart pinch a little. She would talk to Joe. She would.

“I know you’re trying your darnedest, doll,” Louise said, touching her arm gently while, with the other, she stirred the pot with a wooden spoon. “We’ll make do.”

“We gotta be creative,” croaked Ginny, raising her legs in the air and doing wee kicks. “Like ’fore Gent Joe came along. We got on before him.”

“It was a lot more work,” Louise said.

Suddenly, Ginny said, “Have you ever done it for money, Marion?” and she was smiling and there was a shine on her lips, a shine gleaming and Marion felt her stomach flip. “It’s a cash register waiting to ring, ring, ring.”

“Look at her,” Louise said, thumb hooked back at Ginny. “Wouldn’t billfolds go fat ready for her?”

The two of them, so casual, Marion couldn’t speak. Were they truly asking this?

Ginny sliding around in her silk pajamas, arching her back and twisting feline in her favorite china blue lounging pajamas with long white lilies tipped in green twisting down the front, bought in San Francisco’s famous Chinatown by Mr. Burton Haskell, who owned Haskell’s Dry Goods and who had been such a good friend to the girls until transferred, tragically, to Oklahoma City.

Louise nodded her head in Ginny’s direction and said, “We can trot out that little slip of a thing again, Marion.”

And there was Ginny, fingers overspread, splayed across the dragon embroidered thickly, fierce red tongue vaulting between her bosoms.

A twitch in her brow, Marion felt like she was staring at one of those trick drawings where it looks like nothing but fancy women gossiping but then you stand back and see the face of the devil himself, begrimed and thick-lipped and dreadful.

She looked over at Ginny, who had started up a new cough that looked like it might make her face split.

“You never do such things,” Marion said softly, even as her hand set on the space the posh radio had sat. “You never do.”

“Fine coin she’d get with that,” Louise sighed, eyes on the thread of blood that had begun issuing from Ginny’s bluing lips.

Marion rushed to Ginny’s side and let her curl up against her, white hands clawing.

“She won’t put any food in her either,” Louise said, shaking her head.

Ginny held her hack back, punching her chest with her hands. “I’ll not eat,” she said, and her voice was stern, like a minister in a pulpit. Then softer: “I’m trying something,” she said.

“They say she’d best get lots of fresh air and lots of food,” Louise said. “So she stays in here and doesn’t eat.”

Ginny burrowed into Marion’s lap, tassels whipping round, twisting, “I bet they’d still spread bills for me. I got talents you’d cry over.”

“Don’t I know it. I’m crying now,” Louise said, stone faced. “Marion, don’t fall for her fairy dance. Let’s you and me settle. Won’t you rub my shoulders like before?” Louise sat down on the floor beneath them, dragging a pillow beneath her.

“Come here, Meemsie,” she went on. “Come here, Marion. You’re like a little buttercup over there.”

Marion slid away from Ginny’s stiff blue hands and huddled onto the floor beside Louise.

“Sit quiet with me and let me play with those goldilocks,” she said. “You’re so sweet. My, your face is warm.” And Louise’s hands, light and soft, played in Marion’s hair and along her downy cheek.

Marion wanted to comfort her, but it was Louise who comforted, she surely did. Something old and lovely fanned before Marion’s eyes, herself as a young girl, three or four, curled in her mama’s lap, her mama feeding her sugar lumps off sticky fingers. She could taste them. Oh, Mamy, darling thing.

“Isn’t it sad, Marion, to have no bosoms at all?” Ginny said, looking down at them from her perch on the sofa.

Marion looked up and saw it. It was something happening in Ginny’s face, a spectral thing. A flattening. Her face snapped flat like an Indian head.

“You’ve such small, lovely tulips,” Ginny went on, in the strangest high tone, like ice tapping on windows, “but I’ve not even that.”

Then there was a tug of the ribbon on her silky bed jacket—ta-da!—and Ginny’s baby-soft skin, only two rosy nipples like the blushing dots painted on a porcelain doll cheek. “I dab them with rouge, for effect,” she said, lifting a small rouge pot from the side table.

Marion felt her mouth open, then close.

“But Louise has enough tomato for both of us,” Ginny said, laughing, or looking like she was laughing but it was just the look of a laugh. She curled a puny finger into the rouge pot.

“We’ll get the funds,” Louise said, ignoring Ginny, twisting Marion’s nose with a grin. “We always do.”

But Marion was still looking at the icy blond thing on the sofa, at Ginny, whose fingers danced light and pretty along her own chest, swirling the rouge in strange patterns as she whistled soft to soothe them all.

AT WORK AGAIN, walking down long clinic hallways, spinning carbon paper and willowy onionskin around the feed roll, jamming keys under fingernails, taking long dictations, crying in the ladies’ room, tearing tissue into long curls around her fingers.

What glamour might I cast, she wondered, to embed needs under this man’s skin, make him crave me so deep like the deepness of something that goes through the blood, goes through the blood and bursts soft or swells hard in the brain?

A new hairstyle. A violet dress like the one in the window at Heckscher’s, the one she could not afford any more than the plain shirtwaist one at S. H. Kress & Co. Underthings, could it be more underthings, not so genteel, like her peach lace dainties—no, more like the canary yellow sparking out from under Louise’s dress as she slid from Ginny’s spindly arms to slip over to Marion to take her into her strong arms, “Mimsies, come to sup, I made a jellied ham roll just for you.”

Was that what was needed? she wondered. Because that she would do. And try as she might she had no thought of toasters or grocer bills or rent money for her girls. She could not make herself think of it.

“I DON’T MEAN to leave you forlorn, my darling girl,” Joe Lanigan said. “I don’t mean to break so many engagements.”

She nodded, she nodded and held on to him, fingers curled around his lapel as he stood in the clinic’s main office, waiting to speak with Dr. Milroy.

Anyone might have come in, but she had seen him and he was there and she had him for a moment.

He made as if to dance with her, spinning her slightly.

“You’re the apple of my eye,” he crooned, as he was looking through the large glass windows at the new nursing students gushing by. “You’re the cherry in my pie, the angel in the sky.”

But even as he said it, the eyes were darting, pupils hopping like Mexican jumping beans, taking in the willowy blondes, the crackling brunettes, the freckle-dancing redheads in their starched whites, just through the glass.

The corridor, filled with girls—she saw suddenly how it appeared to him. How it was like the grandest candy counter in the finest department store in town. A candy counter packed fat with brassy blond nougats and licorice-whip brunettes and auburn twists of taffy with round cinnamon-button cheeks, honey-faced brickle with sweet dimpled legs powder sweet as marshmallow, jellied lips of every color, with mouths red and glossy and waiting for him. He need only drop his pennies on the counter and take his pick. And pick and pick. Candy Man.

What candy could she tuck in her own wet palm to keep his lips sugared?

This was no way for a strapping man of thirty-five, handsome-faced, broad of chest, fast of grin, strong of heart, to live, night after lonely night in the airless mahogany and velvet house his wife had chosen eight years before and which was now the most expensive gingerbread-trimmed sickbed the town had ever seen. This was no way to live when each evening the streets filled with burbling office girls and waitresses, librarians and students, dancers and school-teachers, all bright-eyed and twitchy-tailed, little canaries with Jean Harlow puffs of hair, cheeping and twittering to him, “Come and get it!”