Megan Abbott: Bury Me Deep

“That ain’t true,” Louise said, twisting her lips like butterscotch hokum. “I didn’t sign the register at all. The bum still had desertion charges outstanding courtesy of the old battle-ax down in Sacramento.”

And she and Ginny laughed together, a giddy, earthy, delightful laugh, and Marion laughed too. She laughed too and it was all so grown-up. She’d never met any women so young yet so grown-up. So beautiful and no husbands around or downy babies, and if it weren’t for the tubercular rack that ripped through Ginny’s laugh as it further unpeeled, everything would seem too perfect for words.

SOON, MARION WAS COMING for supper two or three nights a week. It was too much fun. They would play cards, look through Screen World, it didn’t matter.

There were often new treats to be had, new ones all the time. Once, Marion noticed the big samovar was gone. “Louise cleaned it with bleach and nearly killed us all,” Ginny said. “I made her pawn it for that. ” She pointed to a satin nickel roll-around cigarette box with a red handle. Marion, charmed, lifted the handle and noticed no cigarettes inside. “Who has dough enough for more than one pack at a time?” Louise shrugged.

One night, Louise made Marion take all the pins from her long, springy hair and they sheared six inches off, giving her a shingle bob and declaring, save the blond hair, Marion looked all the world like Sylvia Sidney. They told her she was now ready for one of their parties, which, they said, were very famous. What kind of parties were they, Marion wondered. And who would come? Who did these girls know?

AND SOON ENOUGH, shimmering pictures in the distance assembled themselves and it was all there before your eyes.

“Marion, can you hop on the streetcar quick as a wink? Ride a mile and smile the while, dontcha know. Promise me you will.”

It was a Tuesday night, nearly eight o’clock and the first time Marion had ever received a telephone call at the rooming house. She told Louise she had work to do, a sheaf of case files, fist thick, her fingers sore, her forearms tingling even as she spoke. She never seemed to get any faster, always taking work home. Her fingers just didn’t move that way. They fluttered, danced—they didn’t, as the other office girls’, march in tight formation, march with the clack, clack, clack of industry, of invading armies, of Progress.

“Don’t be a killjoy, Meems. You’re off the clock. Your fingers should be tickling the ears of handsome men, tickling their lobes, softer than all keys.”

Marion felt her face go red as she stood in the rooming-house hallway. The hallway smelled as always of cabbage, cabbage for pickling, gusts of vinegar heat wafting through every time Mrs. Gower came in or out the kitchen door.

“Marion,” Louise said, “put on that yellow dress of yours. Mr. Abner Worth is here, he of Worth Brothers Meat Market, and the Loomises. Sheriff Healy and his hollow leg. Mr. Worth brought his hand organ. We told them that you were in your church choir and now they all want to hear you sing ‘After the Roses Have Faded Away.’ They’ve decided to call you the Prairie Canary.”

AND AN HOUR LATER, from the rose-hued corner of the girls’ living room, she was singing. Surrounded by the red-faced Loomises, she with paper fans for everyone, brought in, inexplicably, from Spokane, Washington, and he with a serape from Tia Juana, a serape now wrapped around little Ginny, who vamped it like Dolores del Rio, Mrs. Loomis dotting her cheek with a jet-black beauty mark, to everyone’s delighted approval. Sheriff Healy, still wearing his uniform and tin star, twirled Ginny around like a Russian ballerina. And Marion singing, “The Mansion of Aching Hearts,” “My Mexicana Queen,” “Sipping Cider Through a Straw” and “In Old Ireland Where the River Kenmare Flows,” and Abner Worth spinning his hands, rotating them to unfurl the deep trill of the hand organ. And Mr. Loomis finally crying, crying as Marion warbled, “When you lose your moth-er, you can’t buy an-oth-er, If you had all the world and its gold” and Louise having to drag him down to the sofa, bring his teary head to her bosom, stroke his pink bald head, cooing assurances and reminders that we all love our mothers and it can never be enough.

She would not forget this: Pulling Marion aside in the cramped pullman kitchen, Mr. Worth said, “Another world, my girl, you’d be bright-lighting it at the Palace Theatre in Chicago now. You’d be high stepping it with governors and making Scar-face Capone cry in his beer.”

Marion, the only one, need you say it, the only one not gurgling bootleg all eve, smiled, sweet and gracious, as she did to the men in her father’s church, praising with warm eyes her stirring rendition of “The Old Rugged Cross.”

But inside, inside, my, this was fine. Oh, there were other worlds, weren’t there? Worlds just beyond her tired fingertips. What she might sink those tips into, soft like clover.

“JUST YOU WATCH OUT FOR THEM, DARLING,” Louise whispered as they strode down the clinic’s main hall together, Marion’s arms filled with patient charts and Louise’s with the sputum cups. “The docs ask you to their house for dinner. Trot out the wife. You think it’s all copacetic. They’re just being grand old dad to you. Next thing you know, they have you knees to flat wood at Old Church of Fair Splinters twice a week plus Thursday night Bible study.”

Marion smiled as if she knew what Louise meant and shook her head. “Dr. Milroy has been very kind to me.”

“Oh, boy,” Louise said, rolling her eyes. “Let’s go to the supply room and sneak a smoke, dontcha think? I’ll tell you more than you ever wanted to know about all this starch-collar-’n’-high-boots act they’re pulling.”

Marion did not smoke, but she started going all the time with Louise and she liked how Louise would lift up her long skirt and flash her leg like a can-can dancer, heel propped up high on a supply cart to slide a creased pair of Old Golds from under her garter belt, a ruffle of surprisingly bright orange. Marion had never seen garter elastics in colors like that. It was like the French lady in the pictures Dr. Seeley kept under his talc and his foot powder and the blond strand of baby hair from his brother who died, age six, from diphtheria and his special pills and two francs and a subway token from New York City and his Silver Star.

“These docs, Marion, they do the nastiest things when your eyes shut, or you turn corners, or, God help you, set foot on a stepladder. Keep your wits about you. I got an eyeful of Dr. Tipton just last week,” she whispered, loudly, shaking her match and blowing smoke at Marion.

“What did you see?”

“He was doing something for that pretty redheaded lunger, the one with enough wind left in her sails to blow for a doctor with a snug wallet and a way with the soft solder.”

“Oh, Louise, are you sure?” Marion said. Dr. Tipton was nearly forty years old with grown children and a wife famous for her church hats and ladylike ways. But then again, Louise seemed to know everything that went on at the clinic, and sometimes it seemed like the doctors made special efforts to ensure she was well treated. You never saw Louise carrying bedpans or on laundry duty.

“Sure as summer rain, dolly girl,” Louise said, flicking tobacco off her lower lip like Warner Baxter. Then she gave Marion a long look and shook her head. “You’re lucky you met me.”

NIGHTS, SHE’D THINK about Dr. Seeley leaving her here, even as there was no helping it, even as he was not to blame, could never be to blame, her devoted husband going on four years but seemed both longer and much shorter, much shorter. Sometimes wondering who this man was they’d spent so much time apart, so much time in hospital wards, in clinics, in such places. In her head, thinking of him, it was no longer that elegant doctor, a dozen years her senior, with the kind voice, so soft, soft like the soft, gentle pads of his long, elegant fingers. Instead, it was the picture of herself walking down long, milky hospital corridors, seeing him at the other end, seeing him turning the corner to face her, dark-ringed eyes and he smoothing that long forelock and fighting off his shame and she wishing he would not feel it, did not deserve to feel it. Whose fault, after all?