Marlena

by Julie Buntin

  Our apartment is a bright, clean square, the walls bare except for a few black-and-white photos of landscapes. We have a big TV, and built-in shelves of books. The fixtures are new, even though they’re not, not really—classic steel and granite, glazed wood floors. Nothing here has any history. I slid the six-pack into the fridge and asked Liam if he needed help.

  “I’m okay,” he said, pushing up his glasses. He was suspicious—probably my too-extreme hello—but it would have been weird of me not to stop, hug him a little around the waist. Liam is tall, all elbows and knees and floppy black hair, with a narrow frame. I pressed my face into the place where it fit, right between his shoulder blades.

  “I got Stella,” I said to his T-shirt, before letting go. Sometimes when I was buzzed, I called attention to alcohol on purpose. Offense as defense. I pushed all the magazines and old mail to one corner of the table and soon we were eating, one of Liam’s sloppy clean-out-the-fridge stir-fries, a beer open in front of each of us, and I was safe because he’d asked me if I wanted one and when I said sure there was no long, disapproving pause, no tightness to his voice, no Do you really need another? He told me about his day—he’s a CPA, and it’s always stories about the people in the office; Randy, who came in at noon and bullshitted his way through meetings; Selena, who was bubbly and too thin and, I suspected, his workplace crush. Whenever I went to one of Liam’s work events, Selena said the same thing, in the same jokey tone: It’s so cool that libraries still exist! Going strong, I always said back, which was true, and so lame and humorless that it effectively ended the conversation.

  When it was my turn, I told Liam about Sal, but I made it sound like it wasn’t a big deal, really, like I was more stunned by the strange coincidence of it, the timing, than by the prospect of seeing Sal in the flesh so soon, after so much time. Liam knew about Marlena, but the broad strokes only—if anyone from my life outside of Michigan knew, and not many did, that was all they got. As a girl, I’d had a friend who died. We were close. I didn’t talk about it. When you grow up, who you were as a teenager either takes on a mythical importance or it’s completely laughable. I wanted to be the kind of person who wiped those years away; instead, I feared, they defined me.

  “You should go through that old box,” Liam said, getting up, his plate like a child’s—clean except for the broccoli. “From the closet. Maybe there’s something you can take him.” He disappeared and came back with a shoebox full of Marlena stuff, stuff from my old room in Silver Lake. Mom had sent it to me after she lost the house to foreclosure and moved to Ann Arbor, the summer after my freshman year of college. I’d carted it with me from apartment to apartment ever since. A plain old Adidas box, the contents lifting the lid from underneath. I took it and a fresh beer with me into the office, while Liam cleaned up.

  Papers, mostly, scraps covered with hearts and the gossip of the day. A slippery clipping of folded newspaper—an article with the headline, LOCAL BIG BOY DEFACED. A Polaroid of me and Marlena at the beach, the two of us far more physically alike to my adult eye than my teenaged self would have believed possible—more than anything, we both just looked like children. Marlena’s pin, bigger than I remembered, and painstakingly detailed—scalloped roof shingles, the windows etched so that each of them contained the suggestion of curtains, of a life going on inside. I pushed the face, clicking it open. Empty, except for a layer of white pill dust. I ran my finger around the cavity, and then popped it into my mouth, sucking the bitter dust off. Sunk to the bottom, a silky knot of T-shirt collars, the size of Liam’s fist, which confused me at first. Underneath everything, my old cell phone, mummied in its charger cord. I plugged it in and held the power button, feeling a distant wonder when the phone came alive slowly, the Nokia symbol emerging from the glow, the pixels reorganizing to the resting screen. A tiny time warp. There we were—text after text after text. The phone beeped. Even plugged in, the battery couldn’t seem to hold the charge. I opened my laptop and began hurriedly typing out our messages.

  I think it’s pretty common for teenagers to fantasize about dying young. We knew that time would force us into sacrifices—we wanted to flame out before making the choices that would determine who we became. When you were an adult, all the promise of your life was foreclosed upon, every day just a series of compromises mitigated by little pleasures that distracted you from your former wildness, from your truth. Sylvia Plath, Marilyn Monroe, Edie Sedgwick, Janis Joplin. They got to be beautiful forever. And wasn’t that the ultimate feminine achievement—to be too gorgeous, too fucked up, too talented and sad and vulnerable to survive, like some kind of freak orchid with a two-minute lifespan? Who else could we look up to? Being young doesn’t seem like enough of an excuse—we egged each other on, committed, together, to these poisonous theories, until we reached a point where disagreement would have meant a betrayal of our friendship. How could we have been so wrong and so stupid? For years after Marlena died, it comforted me to remember her talking about how she never wanted to get old. Wouldn’t it have been death to her anyway, to grow to twenty-five in that barn, thirty, still taking pills or worse, her looks gone, her voice gone, her brain fuzzier and fuzzier every day? Silver Lake was quicksand. What possibilities were there, for a girl like Marlena, outside of the pills, the highs and lows—I hope she would have wound up somewhere entirely else, that her life would have taken an unimaginable twist or turn, but I can’t see it. After things fell apart, instead of trying to get out, she hunkered down.

  I got another beer. I didn’t want to—that was not a lie. I didn’t want to. But I felt a desire for it that was separate from wanting, a yearning that came from the body, strong and clear and propulsive. It gnawed at me as I typed out all the dumb things Marlena and I’d said to each other, so many of them about getting fucked, hammered, shitfaced, wasted. I just want to have fun, she texted me, more than once. Were gonna have fun tonite. I would have tea instead. No, a beer. Why not, wasn’t it too late? I was already drunk. I wouldn’t. No. I did. And again. Liam went to bed without saying good night, so I’d been wrong, he was mad, and I would have to deal with that soon, but for now I was alone. I was free. When I popped off the top with the end of the can opener, the crimped metal circle spun into the air, dinging against the garbage can. I was already thirsty for water, my limbs estranged from my body. Such boring agony. The restaurants with their beautiful menus, the five o’clock feeling, just one, two, the tricks that never worked, no brown liquor, no clear liquor, no liquor at all, no wine, only beer, all the rules I’d tried, the days’ worth of hours up at three, four in the morning, thirsty and buzzing, the sleep that never came back, work the next day, whole weeks wreathed in padded gauze, the taste in the back of the throat, the hunger and never being full, the too-strong smell of all food, the way my hair got strawlike, after, face puffed to the seams, the wanting more and the wanting to stop in equal measure, not equal measure, not yet, one more. And repeat. When I was forty. If we had a kid. The phone beeped again, louder, and died. I held the power button but it wouldn’t come back on. There was a lot I hadn’t gotten to. Ctrl-S. I went whole months sure I’d misjudged. Months of normal, of having the same as everyone else, stopping like Liam, after one. I tried the power button again; nothing. But the desire was always there, the insidious little tug, how saying yes to it felt like giving into a laugh, letting myself go. How much of it was a choice. The sweet and easy click, then the fade to black.

  Michigan

  Up at the top of Michigan, closer to Canada than the rest of the United States, just a twenty-minute drive south of the Mackinac Bridge, winter arrives in mid-October and sticks around until March if you’re lucky, April if you aren’t. Maybe it was the remoteness of that place, blocked off even further by the near constant snow, that made us so indifferent to the greater world—we never talked about politics, or celebrities, or anything that happened in the news. It took a long time for trends to reach us. There was a war going on in Iraq that we didn’t understand and were, vaguely,
against. Marlena didn’t have a computer, and Ryder was never online; sometimes Greg and Tidbit and I chatted online, but my Internet connection was dial-up and unreliable. We listened to burned CDs that Marlena, who was a dictator about such things, compiled at my house with surgical attention. Even the radio seemed to channel some backward era. Each day had a narrow scope. We were focused, mostly, on getting high and drunk, and everything we did was organized in service of that immediate and urgent goal, especially if Marlena was sick or pissy. Our universe was limited to each other, hemmed in by the perimeters of Silver Lake and the towns around it, where Oxy had already laid down roots, farmed out by doctors treating a pain that most everyone seemed to have. The mecca was Shearling, less than an hour away, where there was a doctor who would give you anything if you listed the right symptoms and braved the line to see him, which filled the parking lot and spilled onto the street, people waiting in their cars for hours, ordering pizzas that were delivered to their windows, some of them even wearing sleep clothes. Marlena had seen it.

  There were kids like us all over rural America, I’d find out later; we were basically statistics, Marlena especially, members of a numb army, ranks growing by the day. Alone in our bedrooms, falling asleep in class, meeting in parking lots and the middle of the woods. Marlena attended to her pills with a kind of loving ritualism—selecting her daily allotment from her stockpile, wherever it was hidden, and secreting them away in her pin. Once, someone slammed into her in the hallway at school and the pin popped open, two pills skittering to the floor. I watched her, normally pathologically cool, lose her shit, crawling around on all fours, near tears. One trend that did touch us. Now it strikes me as a profoundly American thing—an epidemic that started as an abuse of the cure, a disease we made ourselves. But what did I know about America? Back then I’d been infected with a chronic political apathy, a symptom, maybe, of being part of a family that was always barely scraping by, conditioned to be wary of the system.

  For all of February and most of March, it was way too cold to spend time outside, and if we sat in Ryder’s car we had to blast the heat, which gobbled his gas, so on weekends we bounced between two places—Marlena’s, if her dad was out, and the warrens under St. Patrick’s. “No one is going to expect four teenagers to get stoned inside a church,” Ryder said, scratching the horn off the unicorn temporarily tattooed to his cheek. Marlena had given it to him the night before, after we finished off a box of my mom’s Franzia snuggled arm to arm under the jungle gym, holding open the plastic spigot for each other so that wine dribbled down our chins, soaking our coat collars. “It’s so dumb, it’s genius.”

  He was relaxed, and that put us all at ease. Since a few weeks after I’d started going to school, he’d been jumpy. The night of his tattoo he’d made me walk with him around the entire neighborhood. “Shhh,” he said, grabbing my hand so that I’d stop. “Listen.” We stood like that in the middle of the road. I heard nothing but wind. Every time a gust surged by or a bird rose up out of a tree or something invisible shuffled through the ditch, Ryder squeezed my hand. The moisture between our palms was coming from me. When he started walking again, I pulled my hand free, unsure whether he’d meant to continue holding it. I buried both of my hands deep in my coat pockets, trying and failing to dry them against the nylon, and followed Ryder down to the end of the street and then back through a series of backyards until we reached mine.

  “What’s that?” he asked, leaning so close I could feel his breath scuttle across my cheekbones, smell his baby-powder smell. He slowly lifted his arm, pointing to my kitchen window, where Mom’s shadow floated behind the curtain.

  “Ryder, what on earth? It’s my mom.”

  “Why is she at the window?”

  “My house is tiny. If you’re in the kitchen, you’re in front of the window.”

  Marlena said he was getting paranoid. “I don’t feel sorry for him at all,” she told me that night after the boys left and we were under my bedcovers, occasionally terrorizing each other by pressing an icy, outstretched toe against the other’s back. “I never wanted him to start dealing. He should be paranoid. He’s stupid about it. Before he dropped out, he used to brag all over school about selling joints dipped in crystal, all his dipshit tricks to try and make extra money.” She called his shit “a weird concoction, basically a scam” and told me that if it weren’t for the fact that he sold mostly to popped-collar tourists, he would have gotten the crap beaten out of him a million times over. “It’s dangerous,” she kept saying. “And dumb on so many levels.” I felt a little sorry for him after that—maybe he’d started dealing to impress her. I could understand.

  I miss St. Patrick’s; I dream about it still, dreams where I wander through the tunnels, looking for something I can’t find, and dreams that seem to be set there for no reason. I’m grocery shopping, buying my regular stuff, except instead of shelves and bright lights the store is in the basement of St. Patrick’s, heads of lettuce lining the passageways. I loved how we sneaked in so brazenly, leaping up the church steps and walking into the foyer like we too were there for worship. I loved dabbing my fingertips in the holy water, cool and somehow viscous, like it really did harbor a living essence. I loved the little ricocheting jolt of fear that traveled through my veins when we ducked around corners, peering for nuns, before running straight for the gym and the janitor’s closet, our shoes squeaking against the waxed floor. I even came to love it underground, in that place we’d colonized, like explorers.

  But Greg and Marlena complained. Why couldn’t we go to the Mapletree, where there was heat and a TV and beds and couches and access to a fully stocked bar?

  “It’s so lame here,” said Greg. “It’s too dark to record anything, Tidbit is afraid that if she gets high in church Mary won’t save a place for her in heaven, and I can hear fucking mice. There are probably fucking mice on me right now.”

  “Fucking mice!” I said.

  “I’m with Greg,” said Marlena. “Ryder, I haven’t even seen your mom in forever. I want to thank her for the groceries.”

  “I said no. Something’s up,” Ryder said. “Something’s not right.”

  “What are you talking about?” Marlena put her hand on his leg, right above his knee, her voice full of exaggerated concern. She was reinsinuating herself into the role of Ryder’s confidante. She’d go weeks treating him like an annoyance, but the instant she wanted something—information, cigarettes, a ride—she’d turn on this over-the-top act that everyone—except, apparently, Ryder—could tell was a lie. Greg squeezed my wrist. I couldn’t see him, but I knew the face he was making.

  “First, I saw someone poking around the cabins.” Ryder glanced down at Marlena’s hand, and then met her eyes. She nodded. “I thought he was looking to buy. I walked up to him and he looked at me hard, like he was like, trying to remember my face. And then he just shook his head. It was so fucking weird. I think he was a cop.”

  That was it? I expected Greg and Marlena to laugh it off, but they were both quiet. “Did you see what kind of car he got into or anything?” Marlena asked.

  “No. I acted like an idiot. I didn’t want to lead him into 42 where my shit was all out, so I just strolled out into the woods and froze my dick off hiding there for like an hour.”

  “Did he have facial hair?” asked Greg.

  “Greg, you are such a fag,” Ryder said.

  “You said ‘first,’” I said. “Was there something else?”

  “I’m telling you, cops don’t have facial hair. Have you ever seen a cop with facial hair before?”

  “I’ve been getting these emails,” said Ryder. “Someone who says he’s gonna bust me, that he’s taking me down. He says he has video evidence. That he saw me online.”

  “What the fuck,” said Greg.

  “Why didn’t you tell us this sooner?” Marlena asked.

  “Now he’s talking about blackmail,” Ryder said, miserably.

  “Jesus.” Greg whistled. I thought of the v
ideo Greg had posted on YouTube, the bike falling apart and coming back together, the long glimpse of Ryder carrying that acetone, the hit counter ticking up, perhaps not entirely because of us. I heard myself saying the word audience. It obviously hadn’t occurred to Greg. Marlena teased me for my habit of apologizing for everything—maybe Greg’s video and Ryder’s tormentor weren’t connected. Or maybe, I wanted Ryder to get caught. Either way, I said nothing.

  Would it have mattered, though? If Greg had taken the video down? It wouldn’t have stopped Ryder from what he was about to do.

  “If it’s not a cop, we can talk to my dad,” Marlena said.

  “Yeah, right,” Ryder said. “He’s not going to help me.” He said “he” with such sudden viciousness that the word cut right through my thoughts, stopping them. “He’d arrest me himself if he could.”

  * * *

  In Pontiac, Jimmy was always surrounded by a cluster of boys who barely knew my name. They hogged the remote and stank up the living room with their sock-and-pot smell. But I guess in Silver Lake, he was lonely, because little by little, he wormed himself deeper into our group. At the time I thought it was pathetic, but now I realize how hard it must have been for him—a nineteen-year-old working at a plastics factory, living with his mom and sister in a new town. He’d join us on the couch when he got home from work, or knock on Marlena’s door if the four of us were over there, carrying a six-pack or a forty that he refused, on principle, to share with me, though he didn’t exactly object to my drinking—he just didn’t want to be the supplier. There was a BP station on U.S. 31 that would sell him beer, if the female cashier was working. He only had a couple nights off a week, but more often than not he spent them with us, especially when Greg and Ryder were off doing something else. Neither of us could quite look the other in the eye when we hung out with Marlena and Ryder, Tidbit and Greg—Jimmy treated me less like a sister than like an inconveniently placed object. A chair in the middle of the room.