Even the city skyline has become a commercial venture. Flabby tourists buying Johnny Cash coffee mugs and guitar pick baseball caps. Oh, and hockey jerseys. Hockey. In Nashville. For God’s sake. Almost overnight, it’s as if Dwight Yoakam had transformed into Chris Hemsworth.
It’s not bad. It’s just...different. I haven’t been home in years—though I am loathe to call this place home—and I don’t know, but Nashville never seemed all that...cool. Tourist trap? Yes. Southern Mecca to country music? Absolutely. Legitimate destination for Brooklyn hipsters fleeing Williamsburg? No freaking way.
But no matter how hip it has become—or how many bachelor parties grace the streets of Broadway—there is one thing that is incontrovertibly the same as before. The same as it always was, ever since I was a little girl.
Nashville. Is. Hot.
Temperature hot. Like, the combination of heat and moisture in the air. It’s not swamps-of-New-Orleans hot, but it definitely gives you a good sheen if you spend more than a few minutes out-of-doors.
I tromp through the carpeted, airy terminal in a Seahawks hat, sunglasses, nondescript t-shirt, and jeans. It’s my purpose in life to blend in, and I’m usually pretty successful at it. I dread being noticed. I’m not famous, but people know me, so I have to be on guard in public places.
It’s like I can see their eyes on me, the people who seem to know me. They stare until their face pops with recognition. Sometimes, they move their lips, whispering monster under their breath, but mostly they just stare fuck yous into me from a distance.
Only, the girl at the Starbucks does a double-take when I step to the counter for my usual latte. It’s readily apparent why as soon as I order my latte.
The recent TV special. It aired a few weeks ago, and so the public interest is peaking right now for the Witches of West End, the Haints of Hillsboro Pike. Whatever. Pick a road or a neighborhood from Nashville, and attach a really cruel adjective to it, and you’ve got me pegged.
She nods as I talk, but you can just tell when someone is just going through the motions. I pretend not to notice, but I know what she’s thinking, even as she takes my card and swipes it through her machine.
She’s thinking, How do you live with yourself? What is wrong with you? Do you ever wish you were dead, instead of him?
The answer to that last question is yes—all the time—but that’s beside the point.
Ugh. I can’t wait to fall back into obscurity, go and get my coffee in peace. But, for the time being, I’m a pseudo-celebrity. Like Twitter famous, but way fucking worse.
I was big news.
At one point, I was the symbol of internet violence, the way Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were 90s poster boys for school shootings. I was the first in a long series of tragic situations involving low self-esteem and high internet usage.
I’ll go back to being nobody again, but for not, I’m a sickening curiosity.
And that’s precisely how she’s looking at me, though there is certainly a star-struck quality to her ogling. I guess even People is putting true crime on the cover these days.
She gives me that look, that I-want-to-say-something-but-I’m-not-quite-sure look, and then I get the inevitable rhetorical question. “You’re her, right?” she says.
She doesn’t actually want to know. She already does. She’s just confirming her suspicions, and I’m left to play the opposite side of this little badminton game.
She’s a stupid college student, or maybe she’s still in high school, so I don’t tell her to go fuck herself, though I get close.
“I’m nobody important.”
“No,” she says, sliding the receipt across to be signed, “you’re her. The girl from the TV documentary. You’re the girl who—”
She stops herself.
Bullied a kid into killing himself.
That’s what she wants to say. That’s what’s in the back of her mind and on the tip of her tongue. Somehow, I keep myself in check, and I sign my receipt without much of a response.
“I’m not that person,” I say, and I jet out of there.
I get weird looks from the people behind me, but I’m outside the shop and hurrying toward my destination before their eyes really settle on me. Not that it matters. I am who they say I am.
I am Mary Ellen Hanneford, the original Suicide Blonde.
2
THEN
Mary Ellen Hanneford has come into her own. She spent the summer before junior year at Dallas-Dudley Academy getting herself right, eating nothing but salads and running three miles every single day, winding through the labyrinthine neighborhoods on the outskirts of Nashville proper.
And now she’s ready.
She’s got a new ‘do—with highlights—and a whole new wardrobe, courtesy of a mother-funded shopping spree at the Green Hills Mall. Also, she’s grown an inch-and-a-half and has lost the remaining baby fat around her middle.
This is the year she wants to distinguish herself, to make an impact. She’s tired of living in the shadows of her school, barely going along to get along, and so she’s decided to give it her all. If she can’t turn it around this year—actually become someone she would be proud of—then maybe there is no turning it around.
Luckily, the hard work pays off at the year’s outset. One day, as she’s grabbing her bowl of yogurt—with banana and granola, of course—the most popular of the popular girls eyes her, as though seeing her for the first time, and then waves her over.
This is it, she thinks. This is the way things are supposed to go.
She feels the weeks and months of discipline rising slowly to the surface and spreading out in the air all around her, creating a new reality just for Mary Ellen.
It’s Gillian Meitner and Audrey Winstead, two kids largely considered royalty in the halls of Dallas-Dudley Academy. They stir a whole lot of emotions in the student population, but mostly it’s fervent jealousy. If other kids are pretty, they’re beautiful. If most of the girls are wealthy, they are old money. If everyone else is cool, they’re ice cold. They are popular and snarky and envied, but they are also vicious and mean, so standing near them is like falling into a tiger cage at the zoo.
Oh, and there’s Madeline St. Clair, the end-all, be-all of the upper echelon at school. She exists on a different plane of existence than the rest of humanity, even the underlings who snarl and growl at the hem of her gown. She is long-legged, tall, and wispy, as if composed of air and body parts cut from magazine centerfolds.
“Why don’t you come sit with us?” Gillian Meitner asks, glancing timidly at the long-legged blonde at the head of their table.
Mary Ellen knows who she is, just as she should know who Mary Ellen is. Just last year, this very same group of girls spread rumors about a very private, very embarrassing phone conversation she’d had with a boy from Briley Academy. How Madeline St. Clair found out, it was anybody’s guess, but Mary Ellen got called DSL (for dick-sucking lips) for a month before it finally let up.
So, yeah, this should be an awkward situation.
But there is no guarantee Madeline St. Clair knows her. Mary Ellen is not worth knowing, in the sense that Mary Ellen is neither a rival nor a supplicant to her, and she sure as hell is not looking to be in their crosshairs any more than she has been.
However, she is drawn to them the way gazelles happen upon water near crocodiles in the African Savanna.
“So, are you going to sit down, or what?”
It’s then Mary Ellen realizes she’s been standing there awkwardly for nearly ten seconds. Just kind of holding her tray and grinning.
“Sure,” she says, lowering herself to a seat as her real friends at another table stare on silent horror. They all know Mary Ellen is making a mistake—even Mary Ellen—but she knows she can’t help but make it.
And the truth of why presents itself almost immediately.
“But, there’s a catch,” Madeline adds.
She glances conspiratorially at the other members of her coven. Her eye
s twinkle. “You have to tell us something about your friends over there, the frumpy ones with the bad skin.”
Madeline giggles, and the rest of them react, but Mary Ellen is still in too much shock to do much at all.
“I mean,” Mary Ellen begins. She clears her throat, stalling for time. “Brenda plays field hockey, and she’s more into The Backstreet Boys than N Sync—”
“Girl, you know that’s not what we’re looking for,” Audrey says, her nostrils flaring so slightly it almost gives her nose a new look. One that her parents did not pay for.
Mary Ellen glances over at them, her real friends, who seem unaware of what’s about to happen. They’ve been with her for years now, supporting her. Helping her. Encouraging her.
She considers all of the embarrassing secrets, one by one, wondering what she could get away with without actually destroying friendships.
Madeline and the rest of them look on in a kind of fascinated anticipation. Mary Ellen is no dummy. Cruelty is their currency, and so this represents her way in. These kids operate on secret information, and they need a constant supply to stay on top of the food chain.
But, in the end, Mary Ellen shakes her head and turns away. “I can’t,” she says. “They’re my friends. I couldn’t do that to them.”
For a moment, she considers running back to her table. Back to the comforting presence of her own friends. And she doesn’t know this, but if Mary Ellen had walked over to her old table, where her friends are discussing the latest episode of Dawson’s Creek with bated breath, her life would have turned out much differently.
But the star of this universe leans forward and asserts her authority.
“Oh yeah?” Madeline St. Clair says. “They’re your friends?”
“That’s right,” she replies uncertainly.
She suddenly doesn’t know. Are they her friends? What doesn’t she know?
“Who do you think told us your deepest, darkest secrets, the ones that got passed around the school like cheap weed? Those friends. Yeah, but go on back to them, if you love them so much.”
“That’s not true,” she barks, almost out of instinct.
Mary Ellen means to take a step. If only she can get her feet moving, she believes she can break free of the force field holding her here, among these vipers.
She has the chance to use her newfound swan status to assert independence, but inside she is still the little girl—an ugly duckling—and the death of her father still bleeds fresh on her mind. Thinking of him, of her Daddy-O, still cuts like a sharpened blade through her guts, and so she finds that wounded place in her, and she treats it.
By sliding closer to them.
It’s like pouring rubbing alcohol on it, but the burn feels so good.
With the eyes of her only friends burning holes into the back of her North Face jacket, Mary Ellen leans forward and begins spilling all their worst secrets.
Soon, she will be an unwitting accomplice in their worst schemes, but for now she’s just glad to be anything at all.
NOW
Mother is pressed into her hospital bed like a chocolate from a Whitman’s Sampler. Like the bed’s been made just for her. I can’t help but stare. In the luminous hospital room, it’s impossible not to inspect her. Even from behind sunglasses, my eyes linger on her painfully thin arms, the veins protruding like crisscrossing roads in a poorly planned city.
This is her masterpiece. Her Guernica. She is finally sick in a way she’s always imagined, and even with her eyes closed, it’s obvious she’s not ready for it. She has the look of someone whose whole body is made of pins and needles, as if unclenching her body and relaxing would cause her to bleed.
Maybe it would. Maybe she is bound to have some kind of horrible, otherworldly experience, to burst open and spew gouts of blood like the elevators from The Shining.
Not that she deserves it.
She was a good mother, up until the point she wasn’t. Once the paranoia set in, she became this...figure in my life. Not a parent. Not a friend. Not even a nuisance. An oddity, perhaps. She’s always existed in the periphery of my life, veering in and out of focus as her many neuroses slowly subdued her. At one point, I thought seriously about hiring a priest to do an exorcism. Truly. I thought she was possessed, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt to give God a chance. I’m not Catholic, and I never went for it, but there always seemed to be more to her condition than simple hypochondriasis. (I learned the proper term a long time ago.)
Out of a kind of instinct, my eyes dart toward the chair in the corner, where no one sits. Where my father would have been, had he not dropped dead of a heart attack when I was a freshman at Dallas Dudley Academy. His death was just enough of a shock to drive a wedge between us, but not enough to permanently ruin the family. I came home in college and endured holidays in a kind of dulled silence, but over time the trips became rarer and rarer. Now, I don’t really visit at all. I just have to survive the four-alarm fire phone calls from my mother and then slink off to my own life, pretending she’s not actually mentally ill.
You can almost draw a straight line between my father’s death and my mother’s current...situation. I almost hate my mother more for what she has done to my memories of my father than I do her obsession with death. I could handle squeezing her breasts for lumps or listening to her long-winded recitations of symptoms for Hodgkin Lymphoma as if they were a poem she had been forced to memorize in school.
It was the way she sullied my relationship with my father that I’ll never forgive her for. His death became her death, in a way, and then it became a self-involved mission. No matter how long I played her medical Sancho Panza, it was never enough.
One day, I just...stopped caring. It was as if the freon in the A/C vent had just...leaked out. The cerebral cortex or whatever physiological doo-dad that doled out empathy still pumped air. It just turned out to be hot and stifling and poisoned.
“Hi, mom,” I say, taking a seat on the edge of a chair next to the bed. I don’t want to touch more than necessary. The sickness seems to float all around me like pollen.
She doesn’t answer. She’s fast asleep, her eyes fluttering from behind the lids, but there’s no real there there.
I sit for a long time before the tedium becomes predictably boring. Since she’s asleep, and there’s no one around, I catch her up on my life.
“I’m working at a startup,” I say. She responds with a single bark of a snore. An electric drill ramping up. “I’m not dating anyone, and I don’t have any friends. I’ve been working really hard, though, and I wish I could grow up and get out of this...funk. But I can’t.”
Funk. It’s such a strange word. Like soul, but not. My funk feels, if I’m being honest, like riding in a plane flying on autopilot slowly descending toward a mountain. No one’s even in the cockpit, and it’s not like they’d stop the crash, even if they could.
There is comfort in being mildly suicidal, knowing that at any point in time you can take up your cause and end it.
It’s not like other people couldn’t; they just haven’t yet.
I'm don’t actively think about killing myself. Just keeping my options open. This is where my mother and I are both achingly similar and completely different. She’s always wanted a way out but was afraid to take it. I, on the other hand, know where the exit is. I just haven’t found a reason to turn on the blinker and get off the interstate quite yet.
I’m in the middle of telling her about my loneliness when the words catch in my throat. I’ve been hanging onto something, but I don’t think it’s grief. It’s like something’s lodged inside my esophagus and won’t come out.
A nurse wanders in and sees the tears, and there is a kind of sympathy on her face.
Little does she know.
Eventually, the lump passes, the nurse leaves, and I’m able to continue. “I know I’ve been a shitty daughter,” I say, “and I wish I could change...everything.”
As if my own self-reflection is a tonic for her, she
opens her eyes, fluttering the lids like a silent movie starlet. An aging Mary Pickford. An unwell Clara Bow.
She seems to digest what I’ve said.
“Oh, darling,” she says. “So good to see you.”
“I know,” I say. I prepare myself. “Me too.”
“I hate it’s come to this,” she says cryptically.
It takes me a moment to realize what she means. It’s a dig. The subtext is, I hate that it’s taken me dying to get you to come see me.
I try my best not to react, but I have been told I have a severe case of Resting Bitch Face. It’s a weakness; Mom sees that she’s gotten through the armor, and so, for the time being, she’s mollified.
It’s time for her to revel in her grief.
“It’s the worst they’ve ever seen,” she says, measuring my face to see how I react. I try—I really do—but I can’t muster up the kind of fawning terror she expects.
But I go through the motions.
I clench her hand, squeeze it appropriate, and look into her eyes. “Well, I’m here now,” I say, even if I would rather be anywhere else.
The nurse checks her vitals, writes some numbers on a sheet on her clipboard, speaks briefly about what is going to happen in the next few hours, and then she goes away again.
My mother watches the woman waddle all the way out of the door, and then, eventually, her eyes return to me.
She sees me, really sees me, and then something curious happens: her eyes go blank. She doesn’t know who I am. There is a spark of recognition in there, but some synapse or other thing has misfired, and it takes her a long, drawn-out moment for that thing to pass. It’s like she’s just realized I’m in the room.
I suppose I could help, could prompt her, but I don’t. I don’t have it in me, not yet.
Then, as if a switch has been flipped, memory floods back to her, and I take off the sunglasses.
Time to be seen.
“Oh, Mary Ellen, how good it is to see you,” she says, her mouth struggling around the words like she’s chewing awkwardly-shaped food. “I didn’t expect for you to come.”
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