Megan Abbott - Bury Me Deep

“What are you doing, Louise?” She wondered if it was feminine troubles like Ginny was always having, Ginny who had pains lasting two weeks each month, requiring massages, low lights and a steady supply of something called Cardui Treatment, which came in a green bottle and which she’d spoon into her favorite highball glass. “Blessed thistle, black haw and goldenseal,” Ginny would lisp, finger pressed on the bottle label. “Stops flooding spells, heaviness in the abdomen. Giddiness.” Am I less giddy, Marion, am I? She was not.

Here was Louise slipping her fingers under her ruffling bloomers and pulling out loose pills, one after another, into her other palm still sticky from squeezing lemons for the drinks.

“Can you take these for me, Marion? I don’t want Ginny to find them,” Louise said. “She thinks whatever I get is all for her. But I have to pay the rent with something other than my fine bottom.”

“Where did they come from, Louise?” Marion asked. Her husband’s face flashed before her eyes. He was the first person to show her such pills, without meaning to, tucked in his trouser cuffs, on their honeymoon trip from Grand Rapids to St. Louis. When she lifted his suit from the trunk, pressing her hand into the knife pleats, the pills scattered all over the floor of the train car and his gasp was loud and pained.

“Mr. Lanigan, of course,” Louise said. “Isn’t he kind?”

“Louise, what are you doing with…with narcotics?”

“Oh, Marion, don’t pull a face with me. They’re just medicine. You know how the other fellows, Mr. Gergen and Mr. Scott and Mr. Worth, all bring us notions? Even Sheriff Healy once brought us a marble bust with a bullet in it from that big raid at the Dempsey Hotel. I sold it for four dollars. Why, Mr. Worth brought us the baby lamb just last Sunday. They all bring us the things they sell. Well, Mr. Lanigan, he sells medicines. And he knows Ginny’s in such terrible, terrible pain and so he brings me little treasures. And I dole them out one by one. But, Marion, Ginny loves pills of any kind, she’s not particular, she just loves them such a darn lot and I’ve tried to hide them but don’t you know she finds them, the little minx.”

Marion looked at her in the tiny bathroom, Louise all legs and hot breath atop the sink, her damp hands dotted with pills, eyes on her so anxiously.

“But you said something about paying your rent.”

“If I were to buy her medicine, all of it, my darling, I couldn’t rub together two dimes for rent. I couldn’t, Marion. Don’t you know it? Sure, I could pawn the radio. Do you want me to pawn Mr. Loomis’s lovely radio, Marion? Mr. Loomis was so happy to give us that radio.”

Mr. Loomis had been awfully pleased to give them the Silvertone cathedral radio. Marion had heard the story many times, including from Mr. Loomis himself, who spoke breathlessly about how he’d had it wheeled in on a dolly while the girls were at Sunday services (that’s what he said, though she had never heard of either Louise or Ginny attending church), and when they came home, there it was in the living room, trilling Eddie Cantor singing, “Potatoes are Cheaper, Tomatoes Are Cheaper, Now’s the Time to Fall in Love.”

So Marion slipped the pills into the pocket of her dress, but Louise said that was not near good enough and she wrapped the pills in a handkerchief for Marion and told her to tuck them in her step-ins. Marion felt her face go red and she would not do it and Louise laughed and laughed and laughed. They strode back to the party arm in arm and Louise was still laughing and so beautiful.

Opening the door to the room—the door was vibrating with music, with music so frenetic, that “Tiger Rag” song they’d played five times before, and when the door opened it was like a blast of moist heat in the face, all the energy of so many in such small spaces and the men with collars sprung loose and the women with no shoes.

Mrs. Loomis was waving around the girls’ tiny Colt pistol and shouting she’d blow everyone to pieces at midnight and one of the other women screamed.

“Aw, hold your hokum, that ain’t nothing but a cig lighter,” someone groaned, but Louise said that wasn’t true and tried to stop Mrs. Loomis, who was spinning the pistol around her finger, dancing some kind of crazy jig.

And there was Ginny pouring champagne into the oysters on a big silver platter and then walking around with one in each hand to tilt in someone’s mouth.

It was the most exciting thing Marion had ever seen.

But she’d had enough spirits and she liked her head steadier and she found her way to a corner of the room by the window and she curled herself up over there and watched everything and turned down lunging offers to dance with smiles, even as Ginny shook her head and murmured, “Marion, there’s not enough girls to go around. Take your turn around before we wilt.”

So she did one turn with Mr. Gergen, his hands like ham-hocks slapping against her, the smell of gin and pickles gusting from his mouth, and when he finally released her, he hurled her right into the chest of Joe Lanigan, who was standing, amused, by the accordion wall, a bottle of Triple XXX root beer in his hand.

She backed up quickly but not before he’d reached forward and lifted, with one finger, a wayward curl from her forehead.

“He likes Marion,” she heard one of them whisper in the background behind sweated palm.

It happened so fast she almost missed it because Mr. Worth had his arm around her waist for his turn.

She was being twirled, she was being twirled, and it was like she was a spindle top.

And then Joe Lanigan, he turned to her. He turned to her and focused on her and she felt as small as a baby doll rocking in the corner. She thought if she opened her mouth baby goos would come out. So she didn’t say anything. And he folded his arms and looked at her and nodded and she knew he knew everything. About the starch in her underthings, the Isabey powder she passed up and down each leg after bathing and about the baby doll rocking in the corner. He knew it all.

LATER, THE ORDER OF THINGS, she wouldn’t be able to piece it together. Not because of the charging liquor but because of everything else, the whole gypsy tumult of it. Later, what she would remember most were flashes, flickers like when the film’s running off projection reels. Herself, hand holding a champagne glass, the champagne sloshing over her pink fingers:

…pinches my nose, Mr. Lanigan.

…they all say that, who doesn’t like a pinch, and call me Joe, call me Joe, Mrs. Seeley, Mrs. Seeley you don’t seem like any doctor’s wife I ever knew and I’ve known them all.

…you’ve known them all, how is that?

…well, Mrs. Seeley, I own some stores, you see.

…he owns a dozen stores, Marion— that was Louise, suddenly there —Marion, he’s Valiant Drugs where you buy your lemon soap, isn’t that something? Where you buy your witch hazel and your talc and your tooth powder.

…what else do you buy at my stores, Mrs. Seeley? Is that where you buy the sweet magnolia in your hair, the sweet magnolia I will smell on my shirt collar tomorrow, on my cuffs and collars and in my dreams when I dream of you tonight?

MONDAY, Louise looked pale and pinched.

“My head, Marion, it’s two cotton balls wadded with spit,” she groaned. “Two days and still hanging heavy as my granddad’s long johns.” She had a compress on her head like Barney Google in the comic pages.

Marion gave her a cup of weak tea with geranium. She had so many questions about the party but didn’t know how to ask them, which words to use.

“You’re the shiny penny. Why couldn’t I keep temperance like you? Bet you could dance a Virginia reel and still keep that liverwurst down.” Louise peeped out from underneath the compress. “Listen, Meems, did I by any chance give you something to hold for me the other night, or did I just dream it?”