Megan Abbott - Bury Me Deep

“So grand you can only get in with a referral.”

“My.”

“And two bits.”

“And the referral usually means whispering ‘sarsaparilla’ through a sliding peephole,” Louise said, then clanged her ladle against a pot lid and whistled. “Soup’s on, kiddos.”

Lifting her golden head from the cushion with a sly smile, Ginny tucked her hands under the edges of the muslin and stretched her arms, spreading the muslin wide, showing long ribbons of blaring music notes stitched in Turkey red floss. The hot-water bottle glugged to the floor.

CRIMSON CAVALCADE . Just the name painted such plush-throated images in Marion’s head. She had never known women who had been to such places. She had certainly never known women who worked in them. Back home, when her brother had his troubles, he’d taken to killing his sad evenings in a little place called the Silver Tug Club, or so she found out when her father and Dr. Seeley went looking for him after he’d not shown up for dinner or work at the insurance office in nigh on four days. Dr. Seeley explained to her that such places were really just gentlemen’s clubs but that gentlemen, not like her father but other types, sometimes liked to sit back after a long workday and have a postprandial beverage with other gentlemen and smoke a cigar and talk over current events, and there was nothing really wrong with that, was there, and shouldn’t she know her brother’s had hard times enough, what with losing his bank job in ’27 and losing his wife to a railroad man in ’28?

THERE WAS HASH with a glistening egg on top and chow chow crackling with vinegar, and there were pickled peaches with some kind of delicious glaze on them that made Marion’s mouth go hot. The girls all sat around the pocket-sized card table, tilting despite three matchbooks under one leg.

Louise ate eagerly, sopping up egg with puffy dinner rolls and chatting away at Ginny, who almost never stopped giggling and who never seemed to lift fork or spoon, only her glass.

As they talked, Marion’s eyes found their way through the pink-lit enchantment around her. So different from any home she had ever been in, so different from her room at Mrs. Gower’s, with its bare walls (save the Currier & Ives calendar) and heavy curtains faded from the sun. There, she had nowhere to look except the rippled mirror above her washstand.

Here, her eyes bounced off everything. The gleaming stand mixer on the kitchen counter that still had store tags on it, a Silvertone cathedral radio, an amber decanter with cordial glasses, a portable Carryola Master phonograph, a silver-plated ice bucket into which someone, Louise, she’d guessed, had dumped peppermint candies of the kind they kept in the children’s ward at the clinic.

Random, she thought, to have such a high-tone radio but only a rickety card table on which to eat. And over there, a Hot-point samovar that stood eighteen inches tall and must have held twelve cups of coffee, all for two girls, yet only one easy chair with thin velvet worn through to the spongy netting beneath.

“We met at a clinic in Denver,” Louise was saying, although Marion hadn’t asked. She poured a long syrupy slug of something terribly sweet and beguiling into their glasses, something tasting of plums and covering Marion’s mouth as if she were swallowing big gummy tablespoons of warm honey.

“I did Ginny’s X-rays,” Louise said. “Looked like someone spattered her chest with birdshot.”

“I’d come from a year in Illinois,” Ginny said, pronouncing the s with a smiling slur. “The winters clogged me up but good. I was headed west when I got very poorly in Denver and had run out of coin withal.”

“We got on like a house afire and I decided I needed a change of scene. When she was hale enough, I cracked open my piggy bank and bought us two tickets out of Dodge. And what better place than this, a place in which one is expected, nearly required to rise up from one’s own ruins. Renewal from one’s own ashes.”

“You got to haul your ashes,” Ginny said. “Haul ’em but good.”

“Starting anew,” Marion said, thinking about Dr. Seeley, thinking about the promises he had made of new starts.

“Lou-Lou’s always been an absolute peach,” Ginny said, more seriously now, shaking her head fiercely. “She works double shifts when things get tight. I’m a drag on her.”

Marion nodded in sympathy.

“Fuh,” Louise said, waving her hand in the air, “what else should I spend my dime on? Even if I get hitched again, my insides are tied up good. Might as well throw mama sugar on this yellow chick.”

“Tied up?” Marion said, her face feeling so glowy, the conversation going so fast. Was she really understanding? “You mean you can’t have children?”

A thread of nerve whipped across Ginny’s face as she looked at Marion.

Louise tilted back in her chair and you could feel a swell of plain-eyed sorrow pass across her, turning her into the suffering Gaelic mother of yore, like the brown-tinted portrait of Dr. Seeley’s beloved mother, anchored on the fireplace ledge of their home, when a home was still something they had.

“They scraped me so bad when I lost my boy,” Louise said quietly. “After that, it all went to ruin with me and Frank.”

Marion had heard Louise was married but hadn’t known if it was true, or what had happened to Mr. Mercer if it was. Louise’s long, ruddy fingers were bare.

Ginny slid from her chair and collapsed herself on Louise’s lap, arm around her long neck. “Oh, Lou-Lou, don’t. Don’t let’s fall down that mine shaft.”

And Louise, in a second, squiggled out a smile and squeezed little Ginny tight. “You’re right, Gin-Gin. We have Marion here. We have our wonderful new girl Marion and, not only that, we have Golden Glow parfaits!”

These parfaits, they were beautiful, shivering golden cloud in fine-stemmed glasses. Marion scarcely wanted to dip her spoon and disturb it, but she did and the taste on her tongue was like summer lemons dipped in sugar.

Marion asked her what it all was, her voice starting to do funny things, the words slipping around in her mouth and the s ’s stretching out. Her temples throbbing hotly, she began to feel certain that the plum juice they had been drinking was very likely wine.

Louise replied that the parfaits were so simple, lemon junket, milk, an egg white, sugar, stewed apricots.

Marion told them both she’d never had dessert except on special Sundays, and on her honeymoon.

And then Marion found herself telling them, as they sat across from her, eager-eyed and rapt, how she left home the first time on her wedding night, three weeks past her nineteenth birthday, and that honeymoon trip was the first time she’d ever set foot in the lobby of a fine hotel (the Palace Hotel in Cincinnati, she still remembered her hand on the rail at the foot of the walnut and marble staircase, looking up), the first time she’d dined in a restaurant (turtle soup, an encarmined roast beef and maraschino ice cream for dessert, served in a chilled dish of sterling silver that tinkled like a bell when her spoon hit it), watched Gilbert Roland make love to Norma Talmadge in a motion picture, or seen a motion picture at all, the first time she’d seen a stage show ( The Cameo Girl ), or put on roller skates, or spotted a lady smoking on the street.

“First for other things too, don’t I guess,” Louise said, her smile filled with mischief. Ginny laughed and squeezed Marion’s hand, which made her feel cared for.

“The only first on Louise’s honeymoon,” Ginny said, still clinging to Marion, swinging her arm, fingers interlaced, “was putting her real name on the hotel register.”