Marlena

by Julie Buntin

  But sometimes, in our sibling way—that particular closeness that’s been lost to us since I left Michigan—we had moments of inspired collaboration. I came up with the idea—the statue, the cover of night, that it would be a penis—the basics. But the logistics of the penis plot were all Jimmy. He suggested building it from papier-mâché, and even volunteered to drive the car. At first he spoke hypothetically, stoned and a little rambly, but the more invested Marlena got, the more he did too. “Paper, chewed!” Marlena said. “You are a genius! So gross and right.”

  We found a bunch of conflicting recipes online, but in the end we just tore up a bunch of yellowy newspapers unearthed from a junk pile in Marlena’s house. To give the penis its shape, Jimmy began with a piece of wood that Marlena claimed had once been part of her mother’s favorite rocking chair, and layered the wet strips on top. “Mom would approve,” Marlena said, dipping a crumpled washcloth into a plastic Tupperware full of rubber cement. My eyes stung from the glue. She carefully wound an extra strip around what would be the head. “The frenulum,” she said, using her fingertips to mold a little ridge.

  “Like anyone’s going to be able to see that it has a frenulum.”

  “What kind of person are you, Cat? The kind of person who takes the easy way out, or the kind of person who makes sure they get things right?” She brushed the blond wisps that had escaped her ponytail away from her eyes with the back of her wrist, too purposeful, and very obviously directed toward Jimmy.

  For the balls, we settled on two grapefruits that Marlena nicked from the natural foods store downtown where the tourists shopped. It took an entire newspaper and another half of a jumbo tube of glue to get them to adhere to the shaft. After it dried, Marlena said the balls were a little too bookend-y, but it looked like a dick to me, like a 3D version of the drawings that Micah kept leaving on my desk in Algebra.

  “Whatever the opposite of a chode is, this is it,” Marlena said.

  In those days, if you entered Kewaunee from the south, heading up Charlevoix Avenue, the Big Boy was the first landmark you’d see before reaching downtown proper. The diner shared a long building with an arcade and putt-putt course called the Jungle. The Big Boy himself was perched on a stone pedestal, maybe three feet off the ground, with his white-and-red-checked overalls and duckbill hair, a giant burger balanced on his outstretched right hand, his eyes blue and maniacal. The restaurant closed at ten, the Fifth Third Bank on its right closed at five, and the Walgreens across the street closed at eleven. Jimmy and Greg drove us out there at three in the morning, the penis and a can of black spray paint between us in the backseat, me and Marlena both in dark colors, knit caps pulled down to our eyebrows and rolls of duct tape on our wrists. Ryder, whose paranoia had reached hysterical levels, refused to come.

  “This is just like in A Clockwork Orange,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, totally,” said Marlena. “It totally totally is just like something from some obscure thing that nobody’s ever heard of but you.”

  “Eat a peen, philistine,” I said, and tilted the penis until it prodded her cheek. Jimmy laughed, taking my side, and I quietly forgave him.

  The drive from Silver Lake all the way to the far end of Kewaunee took nearly forty minutes, a Thursday night, even the main roads completely free of cars. Nothing in town stayed open twenty-four hours, except a BP station way back toward Coral. The streetlights were shut off, except for one on the corner, shedding watery light onto the deserted intersection.

  Jimmy parked two blocks away, and Greg kept watch for police cars up on the road. First we had to dry off the statue with our coat sleeves, since it was already slicked with dew, moisture on the verge of ice—March, and still the parking lot was wreathed with dunes of exhaust-stained snow. Marlena held the penis to the Big Boy’s body while I tried attaching it with the tape, using my teeth to tear the strips from the roll, but she was stoned and giggling and kept fidgeting, and every time I thought I’d used enough tape, the second we let go the penis clunked to the ground.

  “Mar,” I hissed. “Stop. I can’t do this with you moving.”

  “It’s heavy! And I’m freezing.”

  “I told you to wear gloves. I told you you’d be cold. You always do that. You don’t wear the right shit and then you complain.”

  “Car,” Greg stage-whispered, and Marlena and I leaped off the pedestal and into the bushes behind it, breathing hard, the penis half stuck on.

  Eventually I figured out that we’d have to tape the dick just between the Big Boy’s slightly parted legs, right up against the swell of his belly, in the little trapezoidal space there, and the tape had to go all the way around like a belt. Just to be sure it would stay until the morning, we wrapped until the tape was gone, figure-eighting it around the balls so that the lower half of his overalls was mostly silver by the time we were through. Marlena spray-painted Mr. Ratner across the Big Boy’s back, and then the word Ratner again and again, on the topmost burger bun, over the neon-blue BIG BOY on the Big Boy’s chest, even on the base of the pedestal. The dick was covered with the word PERV—we’d done that ourselves with permanent marker, as soon as the glue dried.

  “Car!” Greg said, but it didn’t matter, we were done. Marlena snapped a photo with Jimmy’s fancy phone, and the three of us ran, ran, ran. That’s what I remember most, our bodies slicing through the night, Marlena’s hand in mine, the rows of sleeping houses looking on, our breath silver in the air, how we slammed the car doors and Jimmy sped us away, the windows down and the freezing dark whipping our hair, laughing for thirty minutes straight. We had so much time. Eight months and a handful of days before they found her in the river, enough time to stop what was coming, if we’d known to look for it.

  Together, we had power. We were capable of revenge. Like I said—the two of us made one perfect, unfuckwithable girl. Nothing could hurt us, as long as we weren’t alone.

  * * *

  Mr. Ratner lived just down the street from the Big Boy, and would have to drive by to get to KHS. What’s more, he ate there at least two days a week for breakfast, or so said Tidbit, who worked as a cashier at the Jungle. She said he sat with his wife and his four-year-old son in a booth by the window, overlooking the parking lot and the Big Boy statue.

  As soon as he entered the classroom, five or so minutes late, the class started to giggle. He didn’t acknowledge it. He said that we’d be watching a movie, his face expressionless. Bill Nye, something about volcanoes. Several times, he stepped out of the darkened classroom. Through the narrow window in the door I could see him talking to other adults, to Mr. Lacey, to a police officer. The movie ended fifteen minutes before class was over.

  “You can go,” he said, and we filed out of the room. I packed my things slowly, but he didn’t seem to notice or care, though he usually took special pleasure in stopping me on the way out the door, telling me I needed to focus, that he’d seen me texting under my desk. What had he felt, when he pulled up to the stoplight? Had he felt seen? Had he known why? I banished a flicker of pity.

  The next day we were front-page news. A first and last for all of us, I’d guess, except for Marlena. The article contained a quote from Janice Ratner, Mr. Ratner’s wife, who, in the photo they ran, looked pretty and not much older than Marlena and me. “This is a small community,” said Janice. “And I hope whoever did this thinks long and hard about how it impacts our family, how I had to explain this to my little boy.” Mr. Ratner declined to comment. They removed the penis and spray-painted the Big Boy black from head to toe, the only way, we assumed, they’d been able to cover up Mr. Ratner’s name.

  “Do you feel bad?” I asked Marlena that night.

  “He got what he deserved.”

  “But I didn’t think about his wife.”

  “We did her a favor.” Marlena rolled over, so her backside was edged up against the length of my arm. She was a bed hog. “She should know who she married.”

  “You think? Maybe it’s better for her not to know. T
hey’ve got a kid.”

  “Don’t be stupid. That kid’s way better off without him. Perv rubs off. How do you think guys like that grow up to be pervs in the first place?”

  “I guess.”

  “Tell me a story,” said Marlena, half asleep.

  “You wouldn’t like what I’m reading. It’s about an orphan governess who’s in love with her ancient boss, except he’s got his crazy wife trapped up in the attic. And she’s obsessed with God.”

  “See? It’s not just you. No one thinks about the wives. Does the governess know about her?”

  “She thinks it’s complicated.”

  “No. I don’t want that. No silly girls. Tell me something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “Tell me a story about us.” She rolled over to face me, waking herself up. “And make it good. Give us knives, or something. Make us strong.”

  * * *

  The same day our penis made the front page, the paper also reported on a break-in at Ludlow, a family-owned local pharmacy, located about five miles from the Big Boy, near a cluster of summer homes that were mostly empty that time of year. Our prank, with its vulgar showiness, had gotten most of the cover, though the pharmacy piece filled a slim column on the left-hand side that ran into the third page. It was luck that I noticed it at all—I was only looking at the paper because of the article about us. The police suspected that whoever was responsible for the crime had a connection to a Ludlow employee; there were no signs of forced entry anywhere on the premises. But hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth—that’s what the paper said, a number I couldn’t fathom—of drugs had been lifted from the shelves. Most of what was missing fell under Schedule II and III classifications—drugs whose active ingredients included Oxycodone and methylphenidate, benzodiazepines and dextroamphetamine. I didn’t have any proof that Bolt was responsible for the break-in, and as long as I lived in Silver Lake, no one was ever caught and prosecuted for the crime. But from around then and well into the summer, Marlena seemed to have an even easier time getting pills.

  * * *

  Six thirty in the evening on a Friday night in April, and Mom was getting ready for a date. She zipped between her room and the bathroom clouded in perfume and anxiety and hairspray, her outfit different every time she tottered out in her spiky boots to check her reflection in the foyer mirror, the only full-sized one in the house.

  “I knew this day would come,” I told Marlena, who had already plowed through two bowls of Cap’n Crunch. Sometimes, Marlena could seriously eat.

  “Of course it would. Your mom’s hot, she’s pragmatic, and she’ll try anything once. Shit, I’d do her,” said Marlena, quoting from my mom’s online dating profile. One night, at around three in the morning, we’d practically memorized the whole thing when Marlena hopped on my computer to see if Greg was online and had found, to her mortified delight, my mom’s Plenty of Fish account logged in and up on the screen.

  “You’re hilarious.”

  “Jimmy’s working, right?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “Maybe your mom won’t come home at all tonight. A home run.”

  “Please, please, please can you not be gross about my mom?”

  “Please, please, please can you not be a bitch about your mom?”

  “How I am being a bitch?”

  “You’re so fucking mean to her. You’re like, so haughty. She could come out here and tell you that she has cancer and you’d roll your eyes. It’s like you forget that some of us don’t have the luxury of being bitches to our moms.”

  She threw her bowl into the sink where it clattered against mine, and then flounced off in the direction of my mom’s bedroom. What was I supposed to say to that? I resented how Marlena occasionally used the shitty details of her own life to establish a kind of moral superiority over me. I resented how she could always play the fucked-up friend trump card, how my problems seemed so childish compared to hers. She was cranky because she was almost out of pills and whoever she kept texting wasn’t going to come through. Why should I get punished for that? But she was right. I was a bitch to my mom, for that inescapable reason alone: she was mine.

  “Doesn’t she look amazing?” Marlena called from the bathroom, all the fight absent from her tone. “Come see.”

  Mom’s hair was so straight-ironed it beamed the bathroom light back onto itself, all the brighter for reflecting off that waterfall of shimmery blond. Next to the two of them, I was the one who didn’t belong. They were all bright and yellow, bikinis and popsicles, cut grass and stinging-hot vinyl chairs in the midday sun.

  Mom wore an Eagles T-shirt I’d never seen before, worn so soft and thin fine holes edged around the neckline like lace. Her jeans were tight. She didn’t look old, but there was something in her face—you’d never take her for a girl as young as us. I was always aware, in some buried place, that girls my age had just entered their peak prettiness, and that once my pretty years were spent my value would begin leaking away. I saw it on TV and in magazines, in the faces of my teachers and women in the grocery store, women who were no longer looked at, and I saw it when my mother sized up me and Marlena, some memory flickering in her eyes.

  “Where’d you get that shirt? I want to borrow it.” I leaned against the doorframe. There wasn’t enough space in the bathroom for me.

  “I’ve had this since I was your age, just about.” She strung a silver triangle through her earlobe, flinching. “Some things are sacred. Everything in this house belongs to you kids. I have to have a few things that are just mine. One hundred percent mine. You get that, don’t you? You don’t like it when I borrow your stuff.”

  “Mom! I’ve never even seen you wear it.”

  “Are you really going to make this into some big thing?” Marlena slid a tube of sparkly gloss from her pocket and handed it to my mom. “I think you should go gloss over lipstick. Lipstick is too ‘Take me serious.’ Gloss is like, ‘Don’t you want to kiss me?’”

  The doorbell rang. “One second,” I shouted.

  We’d checked out a few of the guys my mom was messaging before I made Marlena X out the window. Mostly they were old or oldish sad-sack types who seemed like they were probably still married and just using Plenty of Fish for a kick, to anesthetize themselves against the mundanity of their middle-of-nowhere lives, their berber carpet, the flats of Capri Sun stacked in their garages. Some of them were rich summer people looking to line up dates in advance of arriving for the warmer months. They wrote things to Mom like, “hey hottie, what u up to 2night?” or “send me a pic!” or “you + me + boat = July 4!” Mom never answered those, I noticed, with some relief.

  When I opened the door, it was Bolt who stood there waiting, the hair on his head shaved close to the skin, a tattoo curling out from the sleeve of his denim jacket and blooming across the back of a hand that held a single blush-colored rose.

  “Jesus Christ,” Marlena whispered, from somewhere right behind me.

  “I’ll be right there,” Mom called from the bathroom. “Tell him he can come on in!”

  He looked at Marlena without surprise, a smile creeping across his face. “Hold on,” I said, and slammed the door on him.

  “What the fuck is Bolt doing here?” I hissed at her.

  “I don’t know. How am I supposed to know?” I heard her ask me not to press this. I heard her ask me to be cool, to let it go. Bolt knocked, two polite raps.

  “Don’t treat me like an idiot, Marlena. This is my mother.”

  “What are you two doing?” Mom asked, standing in the foyer entrance, looking like something cut from a better universe and shoddily pasted into this scene. She was about to drive off with a dealer who was willing to exchange baggies of pills for ten minutes rounding second base with my best friend, and I said nothing. “Did you just shut the door on him?”

  The door opened a few inches, and Bolt jammed his head into the crack. “Everything okay?”

  “Oh, come in,” said Mom, not
sounding at all nervous or weird or date-y. “Mike, these mannerless heathens are my daughter, Catherine, and her friend Marlena.”

  “I’ve known Marlena since she was this big and half as pretty.” Bolt flashed a row of gray teeth and held his palm out flat, measuring an invisible child. “I been friends with her daddy since high school.” He squeezed her to him, kissing her on the top of the head with an exaggerated smack. Mom bristled. At Marlena’s funeral, there was a lot of talk about her presence, the atmosphere she carried around with her everywhere like the effervescence that hovers above the surface of a glass of Coke. When she was shy or scared or unhappy, everything that made her herself turned off and that atmosphere vanished, so that she became, there really is no better word for it, a shell. With Bolt’s touch, Marlena braced herself, and Mom noticed it, too.

  Bolt wasn’t bad-looking, but his teeth were crooked. I’d never seen him this close before, in normal light. His face was handsome in a slightly menacing way—he rocked on the balls of his feet, tapping the flower against his jeans. Very different from my dad, who, with his bumbling, put-on need for help and affection, was the male version of a damsel in distress. Bolt thrust the rose at my mom. Who was going to stop this?

  Within minutes they were gone.

  “She’ll be fine. He’s not like, evil. They’re going to Applebee’s. Don’t freak out.” Marlena’s face always got kind of puffy after she ate a lot, and she needed to wash her hair. “If he was going to be, like, your new stepdad,” she went on, “I’d be making sure that we did something.” But it’s just a date, she kept saying, reminding me that my mom never got out of the house after dark, or put on an outfit, or even got to go eat a burger at the pub, have a beer like a normal person. “There’s not a chance in hell your mom is actually going to like him. She’s hot. And smart. He’s had like two thoughts in his life and one of them is I’m hungry.”