Jane Was Here

by Sarah Kernochan

CHAPTER SIX

  Jing-a-ling.

  Marly wakes up just before three a.m. The heat is fetid inside the single wide trailer. Her nightgown is pushed up around her armpits and damp with sweat. For a moment she can’t think of what woke her.

  Then she remembers. It was the tinkling of the bell on the gate outside. Someone either arriving or leaving.

  It must be Russ going off, because he’s no longer beside her in bed. She waits to hear his delivery van start up, the tires rolling off the grass onto the blacktop, the vanishing thrum of the engine as he hightails it home to his wife.

  Pook rises from his station at the end of the mattress and totters over to lick her face, scattering the hard little poops he deposited earlier on the sheet. Eighteen, blind and incontinent, the terrier needs to be within 10 feet of Marly at all times; her smutty odor orients him.

  Whenever she puts him out of the bedroom, an accordion gate keeps him from going into the kitchen and jumping on the banquette, and from there to the counter, where he would ravage cereal boxes and choke on party-mix. The gate exiles him to the narrow corridor running past Pearl’s bedroom (door always closed) to Marly’s room (door always ajar). Pook knows from bitter experience that if he stays in this corridor, he will be stepped on by Marly, or her hefty daughter, or one of Marly’s men groping his way to the bathroom.

  The dog’s hearing is still excellent. After whatever man is on top of Marly makes that loud moan or curses enthusiastically, passes out or puts on his clothes and leaves, Pook knows he can hop on the bed and go to sleep enveloped in the familiar odor of sex.

  Jing-a-ling.

  Did Russ forget something and come back? Marly doesn’t hear his boots on the front step, or the pop of the latch. Sliding out of bed, she stands up, her head starting to pound. Ever since the collision—with Hoyt of all people!—she’s been living on Advil. Might be whiplash or something. No, just a headache, she tells herself. And: it could be worse.

  Pushing the burlap window curtain aside, she peers out. She can’t see anyone outside. Russ’ van is gone. The gate is closed, the bell still.

  Marly is puzzled. Only some living thing opening or jostling the gate would cause the bell to ring. The fence keeps Pook from roaming, but the merry tinkle of the bell she installed signals the approach of company, the departure of company, the flow of life.

  Now she’s awake, and hot. Maybe if she cracks a beer and watches TV in the kitchen, the string of infomercials will send her back to sleep. In another five hours she and Pearl have to go to work.

  Glancing at her bureau, she is gratified to see a few folded bills there. Russ always leaves something—unlike Seth Poonchwalla, who seems to think that she should pay him for the honor of receiving his seventeen-year-old uncut manhood. Seth’s father is not much more generous, plus he leaves marks on her neck.

  Marly never discusses money, leaving it up to the men to decide if she was worth rewarding. It makes the money seem more like a gift, a pleasant surprise. Marly doesn’t consider herself a prostitute, a delusion that keeps her sunny.

  Turning on the light above the sink, she removes a can of Miller Lite from the fridge. Pain flares in her head as she pops the ring on the can, peeling the tab back. The ring breaks off in her hand, a thin spout of foam shooting from the can.

  After she tosses it in the sink to spend itself, she notices a bead of blood appearing on her finger: the metal flap on the can must have sliced it.

  About to run cold water over the cut, she hears a tinkling sound outside.

  Jing-a-ling.

  The bell on the gate. For the third time.

  The hairs on her arms prickle; from the bedroom, Pook growls. Switching on the outdoor light, Marly pushes the front door open, stepping out into the yard.

  Crickets grind away. The moon confers a monotonous tint to the neighborhood: swing sets, barbecue grills, rubber trash cans, droopy hydrangeas, basketball hoops, and her maimed car. Getting the headlight fixed cost her plenty; the bashed-in grill will have to wait until she wins the lottery (it could easily happen).

  She checks the white plastic picket fence. The gate stands open just a few inches, barely enough for a cat to slip through. Between the time Marly peered out her bedroom window and popped a beer in the kitchen—five minutes at most—someone unlatched it.

  Warily she looks around the tiny enclosed yard, dread brushing across her skin like a trailing spiderweb. No sign of anyone.

  Then she feels a wetness on her palms. She glances down.

  A strange, dark liquid covers her hands.

  Scrambling back into the kitchen, she studies her arms under the well of light. The liquid is red, thin and warm as blood. Before her eyes, the stain spreads quickly, flowing upwards, against gravity, over her wrists and branching up to her elbows.

  “Oh!” She wrenches the sink faucet on, whimpering. The beer tab must have sliced her finger deeper than she realized—though she feels no stab of pain as she splashes water over her arms, rinsing the red off.

  She turns her clean hands, looking for cuts. Her skin is whole, unruptured. No gash or wound anywhere that could have produced so much blood.

  Noticing red smears on her nightgown, she wrestles it off in disgust, stuffing it in her laundry and putting the bag by the front door. She’ll take it to the laundromat tomorrow after work.

  Sleep will erase everything bad, she knows: sleep and the light of day, letting a person bounce out of bed with a positive attitude.

  You won’t get off that easy, the pounding in her head argues. She takes four Advils, climbs back into bed and hugs Pook to her heart, waiting for oblivion.

  THE GRAYNIER BED & BREAKFAST is a splendid old mansion; Marly is proud to walk into it every day. When Graynier Glass ruled the town, the house was Philip Graynier’s; now old Mrs. McBee runs it as an inn.

  In the breakfast room, several inn guests are helping themselves to the buffet. Mrs. McBee summons Marly to her table where she always takes her morning tea.

  The other employees may call Mrs. McBee a “stingy, dried-up old coochie” behind her back, but Marly refuses to think ill of her. The old dear puts an extra twenty in Marly’s pay envelope every Christmas. Twenty’s not nothing.

  “Gabriella just phoned me,” says Mrs. McBee bitterly, wired as usual on three cups of Oolong. “She’s going to have a baby, she says.”

  Marly’s co-worker is a peppy petite young Brazilian woman working three jobs. “Wow. That’s so great.” Marly eyes the coffee urn; after last night’s weird events, she needs a strong caffeine infusion. McBee doesn’t offer her any. “How far along is she?”

  “She is having her baby today.” Mrs. McBee’s lips press together; she exhales sharply through her nose. “I never noticed she was pregnant, did you?”

  “No, ma’am.” Marly must admit that Gabriella had looked plumper during the past month. But no more than you’d be after a couple of milkshakes. She hid it better than me, she thinks. Marly had gotten fired from her barmaid job in the fourth month.

  Name: Pearl Amy Walczak. Weight: 7 lbs 2 oz. Recorded

  Time of Birth: 5:38 p.m. Mother: Marlene Josefina Walczak.

  Father: Unknown.

  Mrs. McBee fumed, “That means the child will be an American citizen. That’s what they’re all after. More mouths for the taxpayers to feed. Last night I wanted to watch Hello Dolly and it was in Spanish! Well, you’ll have to do her rooms today in addition to your own.”

  A few hours later, after Marly finishes her ground floor rooms, she stops by the front desk to beg some Tylenol from Frankie the receptionist. “Got a punishing headache, hon.”

  Wheeling her cleaning cart down the second-floor corridor, she wonders, Why am I being punished? What have I done to deserve this? Crumpled car, whiplash, bleeding, migraines…

  Then she scolds herself: God must have a reason. God doesn’t give you more than you can bear. You’ve been through worse times. Too many to count, but she won’t dwell on them.

  Gabriella’s
rooms await. Marly’s plastic clogs shuffle behind the cart; the ancient oak floorboards, with their dark, buttery sheen, crack and snap as loud as a rifle shots.

  A guest sidesteps her cart, averting his eyes. She can’t remember his name or when he was last here, only that she spent an hour in his room after work. He wore a lace thong and told her to call him Joanne.

  Mrs. McBee doesn’t know she has the only one of the Top-20 New England Country Inns with a whore on staff. Marly’s patrons are discreet. She likes to think she’s doing her little bit to enhance the place’s popularity.

  Starting in on Gabriella’s rooms, Marly feels the pain in her head intensify, bumping around her skull like a trapped balloon. She rushes carelessly through her duties: slipping paper bands over toilet seats without cleaning them; refilling hair conditioner mini-bottles with body lotion; kicking dirty towels under beds.

  In her final room, something rackets in the vacuum cleaner. Shaking the tube out, she finds a gold brooch with a broken catch. Pretty, though: a wreath of two roses entwined. Which proves her point: just when you think things are bad, heaven sends a little something to cheer you up.

  Marly slips it into her pocket. Maybe Pearl will like the piece. Not that her daughter gives a hoot about her appearance; every morning she leaves the house without a stick of makeup on. It’s a crying shame, because she has such a nice face.

  When she was born, the nurses said Pearl was the loveliest baby they’d ever seen. But from her first contact with the rubber nipple of a bottle of formula, it became apparent she’d swallow anything.

  By middle school she was known as “Hurl.” Even now Pearl deliberately fills up with food. She seems to have been born knowing the role she must play: that she must always embody her mother’s mistake. And she must forever inflate, by eating and eating, into a bigger and bigger mistake.

  On top of that, the girl is abrasive, casting a sullen pall wherever she goes. She has never made any friends. She feeds off her mother’s good nature like a tick drinking blood. The more Marly grovels before her, the more contemptuous and self-lacerating Pearl becomes. Their tiny trailer crushes them ever closer together, until even the oxygen seems to seep away, suffocating them.

  So gray a pall does Pearl cast that Valyou Mart is the only place willing to hire her. Valyou employs only the most demoralized and blinkered working poor, at punishingly low wages, and with a promise of advancement they all believe (in vain). Pearl works in the stock room, out of sight of the customers who had complained about her attitude.

  Still, Marly has never lost faith in her daughter.

  She urged anti-depressant medication on the girl. It had no effect. She sent pictures of Pearl to an extreme makeover TV show. When a pre-interview invitation arrived in the mail, Pearl opened the envelope and went into a rage.

  “You can’t have it both ways, mother. You can’t go ‘round telling me I’m pretty and then send me off to be blendered. Make up your mind. I’ll go on the stupid show if you say to my face I’m ugly as bait. Say it! Say it!”

  “Honey, you’re very attractive. You just need to believe it.”

  “Then we have no problem. I do believe it. You know why? Because my mother tells me so every day of my fucking life.”

  AT SIX O’CLOCK Marly is waiting in her car outside the service exit. Pearl emerges, stripping off her Valyou Mart smock. She heaves onto the passenger seat and slams the door, twisting around to stuff her smock in the laundry bag on the back seat.

  “How was your day?” Pulling away from the curb, Marly braces herself for a tirade.

  “Sucked the big one. No thanks to the whore in Juniors who told me the stock smelled of smoke and ‘You should’ve asked for a cigarette break,’ even though they don’t let you take a break for anything, plus I don’t smoke. I’m tempted to pee on the stock because they won’t let you take a bathroom break—like ever—and then she could complain that the stock smells like piss and for once she’d be right. Where are you going?”

  Marly has turned off Route 404 onto Honeyvale. “I have to stop by the laundromat.” Remembering the brooch in her pocket, she digs it out and hands it to her daughter.

  “What’s this?” Pearl turns the bauble in the light.

  “An old pin I found. I could polish it for you. It might be valuable, I don’t know.”

  “It’s junk.” Pearl tosses it out the window.

  She goes next door to Madame Bertha’s to have her fortune read while Marly lugs the wash into the laundromat. It’s crowded; people sit waiting for machines.

  By the time Pearl returns, Marly has only just started sorting the clothes to put into the washers.

  “This time Madame Batbrain told me I’m going to inherit a lot of money,” Pearl reports, “but for it to happen I have to give her some money to bury in the yard, and it’ll be multiplied by a hundred when the inheritance comes through…”

  Marly hunts for the bloodstained nightgown; she’ll treat it with spray before adding it to the load.

  “…I guess the theory is, if I’m stupid enough to give her five bucks for a reading, then I’m stupid enough to give her a thousand so she can blow town. Skank. If I had a grand don’t you think I’d blow town myself?”

  Pearl notices her mother staring in a panic at her nightgown, flapping it this way and that. “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” mutters Marly, stowing the nightgown in the washer and pushing in the coin slot.

  Last night, the blood from her arms had smeared all over the front of the gown, red on white—she saw it.

  There were no bloodstains on the nightgown now. Not anywhere.

  BY BEDTIME MARLY’S head pain has vanished, never to return. But in its place come the bad dreams.

  She dreams about the pale girl she glimpsed just before the accident. The girl stands outside Marly’s gate, a long old-fashioned dress draped over her thin figure, gleaming through the night. She lifts her chin, as if to peer at the stars, head straining farther and farther back, until the muscles on the neck give and Marly hears the sound of crackling, of bones separating. Suddenly the woman’s head topples to one side, as if snapped off its stalk.

  Marly cries out in the dream, then wakes to the sensation of Pook’s warm tongue slithering over her hand, ardently licking its way up her arm. She raises herself with a groan, thrusting Pook away. She squints at the clock through the darkness: 3:42. Irritated by the callous red glow of the numbers, she turns its face away, closing her eyes and sinking back on the pillow.

  The next minute, the dog is all over her outflung hand, lavishing his tongue on every fold and crevice.

  “Pook!”

  When she switches on the bedside lamp, the burst of light shows what Pook was licking with such relish.

  Red blood, welling under her fingernails, springing up faster than the dog can lick it away.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  She’s back in the pool.

  Seth looks out the window at his sister Gita. She thinks the chlorinated water will lighten her skin. Gita has a drawer full of bleaching creams; she’s always adding extra Clorox to the pool, steeping in it for hours.

  The various welfare families who live at the motel sit around the pool, dully sopping up the hot sun. Seth’s parents are visiting family in Mumbai for three weeks, so he is stuck indoors at the reception desk.

  His parents make the trip every summer; usually they take Seth and Gita with them, but this time both children refused.

  Seth doesn’t mind being Indian, but he hates India.

  Gita is okay with India, but she hates being Indian.

  Ironic, since only last year she was the world’s most obnoxious Hindu, berating her parents for their hypocrisy in joining the St. Paul’s Episcopal Church: “You throw away your whole heritage because you’re afraid to be different!”

  True, but the Poonchwallas like to feel part of the community, and church is a pleasant way to mingle with neighbors and feel accepted. They chose St. Paul’s because in mid-
August it holds a fair with rides and raffles, and the whole town attends; and the date coincides with the festival of Ganesh, the elephant-headed son of Parvati and Shiva, so the Poonchwallas feel they have only cheated a little on their religion.

  “You think being a Christian will make you white!” Gita told her parents, running off her mouth about Krishna and Vishnu at every meal, as if they needed to be taught their own faith. For months she threw herself into worship and meditation, painting a bindi above her unibrow and stumbling around in a sari, until the school asked her to stop.

  Of course, Gita would sell her soul to be white.

  After the Hindu thing came Gita’s holy roller, born-again phase. She rode her bike to First Calvary of Innocents on weekends. Once when it rained, she asked Seth to drive her. He went along because he’d heard that the Pentecostal girls were brilliant at oral sex: all that speaking in tongues. This turned out not to be the case. And the service was bogus beyond belief, like a rave without the Ecstasy—crumpin’ with a cross—not to mention non-stop solicitations for money, which he had to lend his sister.

  The fun part was when some parishioners testified about their struggles with dope addiction. Seth knew them all.

  He’s their dealer.

  After a month of getting washed in the blood of the Lamb, Gita switched to the Unitarians, taking the bus to Sunday services ten miles away in Quikabukket. There was a mosque nearby, so Gita stuck her head in there too, but they wouldn’t let her in.

  Eventually, she stopped shopping.

  She has something going on, though. Tacked to her bedroom wall are pictures she drew of weird mutants, some kind of private pantheon he can hear her praying gibberish to.

  Wack job.

  Their parents walk on eggshells around Gita. They seem frightened by both their children, who say and do as they please with sullenness and disrespect, the hallmarks of American adolescence. Frightening children are yet another cost of fitting in. Mother and father have only one condition: that the children excel in math and science. Since both kids post stellar grades in all their subjects, humiliating their peers, the Poonchwallas can feel as if they’ve gotten back at America.