Megan Abbott - Bury Me Deep

Marion, do not doubt my shame in leaving you as I have. My father, your father, these are men. I wish to be men such as these. My desire and commitment to take care of you was the most noble of my life—a life I have time and again thrown away. I intend to restore that part of myself strong enough, and good enough to be worthy of you. But to do so I must confront my own weaknesses and I must cure myself of them. I am working on just this with more diligence than ever in my life. What I mean to say is this: I have not touched the stuff, Marion, I swear to you, I haven’t had one taste.

Oh, what did she care, what did she care… Reading it now, the tenth time in so many missives…how much could it mean, this man who’d plucked her from her sawmill Midwest town, who’d danced with her at her church social and spoke of a cottage on a river and tousle-locked children and all that a committed young doctor could give…

It meant nothing.

And now, in her swivel chair, working, trying to do her work.

In her head, it was like this:

You turn your heel and press the ball of your foot, feel the quiver there. Because when he looks at you, you feel it five different places, places you did not know about, like a violin string vibrating. Like a string vibrating hot under your fingertips. A trickle hot now in the small of your back slipping from knot to knot on your spine. And most of all of course in that place where your cotton underthings meet, pressing against the metal of the garter, down to where the garter tugs mercilessly, as if gnawing the wool tops of your stocking itching, rubbing you raw, metal clasp cold, stockings rough, slashing strands of cold sweat, the friction unbearable and there and there again and the typewriter keys clapping, tapping, 4 DAYS FROTHY MUCUS SPUTUM, SOME NOCTURIA, MORPHINE, BROMIDES AND HYPNOTICS ADMINISTERED AS NEEDED. DIGITALIS LEAVES, GRAM 0.1, 3X/DAY, even as you feel everything twisting, churning, rubbing. Enough to make you sick and you’re smiling, you realize you can feel it on your hot-cold face. DR. WARNER ATTENDING, SCHED. UV RM. 2X/WK. Oh, to put him out of the head, to put him in a drawer and shut the drawer, she pictures herself— clap clap clap keys—putting the thinking of Joe Lanigan in the cardboard-bottomed drawer of her dresser and shutting it and shutting it and then the thinking of him gone and her legs stop trembling and and and…

LOUISE WAS CHATTERING away in the lunchroom yet again, chattering in such dipping lovely lyrical ways and Marion didn’t have to listen too closely and she could just let it hop along, brush up against her, keep her distracted.

“Oh, she’s a fine one, did you see her with no girdle swinging her stuff around? No sale here, swivel hips.”

Then:

“That orderly, he wants some of her honeypot, but I ask you, has he two dimes to spark? Orderlies, they can make time with chambermaids, factory girls. This is America, Marion, doll. Stars bursting.”

Then:

“Oh, Marion, did you see that? Myra. She’s always giving me the fisheye. She thinks I cost her friend Fern a job. And she’s right.”

Marion glanced over at Myra, a broad-faced country girl known for good spirits and a clear, sunny whistle that the patients loved.

The look she was giving Louise twisted that face into something rigid and brow-beetled.

“What did you do, Louise,” Marion asked, trying to focus, trying not to slip back away.

“That two-faced crackpot Dr. Milroy…I had to go back east to see my ma last fall. Was gone for nine days. Just nine days. Two days coming and going. And while I’m gone, he had no one to run the new X-ray machine. I’d gone for special training to learn and it cost me forty dollars. So I’m gone not three days and Dr. Milroy decides to show this other nurse, this claptrap Fern, how to use the machine to make X-ray pictures. He told everyone, ‘She’s from a farming town and is familiar with equipment.’ What, tractors? So I come back and they don’t want to pay me the extra four bits a week anymore.”

“That doesn’t seem fair. Nor safe,” Marion said. “Those machines can be dangerous.”

“You don’t have to tell me, buttercup. But I showed them,” Louise said, grinning. She leaned forward. “First chance, I went into the X-ray Department right before her shift and turned the voltage up real high. The next day, darling Fern uses it and near burns a hole right through some poor clod.”

Marion looked up at Louise, wondered if she could be serious.

Louise grinned, red-lipped like a baby caught with hands in the jam jar. “Well, shouldn’t she pay for being such a louse, such a nasty little s.o.b.? Myra best keep her talons short. She causes trouble, wait and see. Wait and see what I got cooking.”

Marion thought, Why, she’s just playing, she always plays. Besides, there was Joe Lanigan to think of. Joe Lanigan.

She wanted to share it all with Louise, but she really couldn’t, could she. What might Louise think? For Louise, bad behavior was coming by for supper with empty hands, or not paying mind to Ginny, so clearly itching to play Tiddly Chase or Chinese checkers. Sins were looking down long noses at unmarried girls while carrying on with parlormaids on the sly.

“So do tell where you and Joe Lanigan stole off to on Saturday, my little nightingale,” Louise said, over hoecakes she’d brought for them.

“We went for a drive,” said Marion, fingers to her mouth. She felt like everyone could see it on her, Louise most of all. Like the one time, the only time, seven years old and being fresh, she sassed her father and he made her stand under the cherry tree at the foot of their lawn with a writing slate hung round her neck that said, I DO NOT FEAR OUR MAKER.

“I thought you went the way of the Parker baby, but Ginny has a slyer eye,” Louise said, smiling the whole time. “She says to me, ‘Marion plays the prairie flower but she’s got a hot mitt on Gent Joe.’”

Marion could feel her chin shake. “He needed someone to talk to. You know, his wife is so ill.” This was true. Joe had talked about his wife, at length and in ways that made Marion feel he had sorrows deeper than her own.

“They do hot-air treatments,” Marion went on. “When it’s bad, her lips, they…” Here, telling her, he had touched his fingers to his mouth, embarrassed. “They taste of urine.”

He told her too that when his wife came to realize this herself, kisses stopped forever. Her humiliation was so great. She was dirty, she said. Dirty and foul.

Before she fell sick, he’d admitted, he’d never seen her lily-white bride flesh, even in low lamplight, curtains heavy across every window. He’d not seen an inch of it, only felt it, tense and wincing, under his hand, under two coverlets, under the grave dead dark of long winter nights.

Now he saw that flesh and it was pushed full with air, with sick, with awful inner squalls of illness. It was like touching the thin, skeiny membrane of a newborn birdling.

“Is that how it is,” Louise said to Marion now, nodding, eyes fastened hard. But she seemed to be, could she be, finding a giggle in all this.

“She has the Bright’s,” Marion said. “She’s infirm.” Marion, you must understand, he had told her, fingers on the ties that held her dress together, I cannot help myself. You are all I have that is not dead. Dying or dead. Dying and dead.

“Is that what they’re calling it now? You don’t have to tell me about Mrs. Lanigan, Marion,” Louise said. “The three months I worked for her were the closest I’ve come to San Q.”

“You worked for her? You were her nurse?”

“When I first blew into town. It didn’t last. She’s no bed o’ roses and that’s how come I always felt so for dear Joe. Can’t be pretty in that household. We try to keep his spirits up. Seems like you’re doing the same.”