Lynne Tillman - Haunted Houses

Grace had nearly not been allowed into the transvestite club but Mark talked the doorman, who was a woman, although you’d never know it, into giving Grace permission. Mark couldn’t believe that Some Like It Hot had been made in the fifties, even the end of the fifties. The first time he’d even been in front of transvestites was with his parents, a nightclub they’d taken him to, unaware, they claimed, of what was to come. There was a strip act done by one of the very best drag queens, not Lynne Carter but famous, and everyone was riveted on him. Her. Then came the big moments after all the bumps and grind and she, he, tore off the little top and there was nothing there. It was flat. “You should have seen the looks on the men’s faces, men like my father. So disappointed. All this buildup and nothing.” Mark couldn’t remember how the women reacted because he was already so focused on men. “Born gay I guess,” was how he put it. Grace looked around the club and thought she might be the only woman in it, although that was hard to tell, or she could say born woman, or was it natural woman or real woman. It didn’t matter. She told Mark she felt like a transvestite.

Marilyn Monroe had at least four names, none of them her real father’s. She had all her mother’s married names, then her own married names, but for her acting name, Monroe, she took her grandmother’s married name. Mark looked sadly into his vodka. She died thirty-five years to the day her grandmother was committed to a mental institution. Grace knew Marilyn’s mother had been put away, but she didn’t know about her grandmother. Talking about Marilyn’s death made her think about Ruth’s almost certain death, so she switched subjects, back to The Misfits and Marilyn Monroe’s breasts. What a good comedienne she was. How she told people in high school that Clark Gable was her father and kept his picture on her bedroom wall. That The Misfits must have been a dream come true, because in it Gable loves her. Except he dies a week after the picture’s over, and she thinks she caused it because she was difficult. “That’s crazy,” Grace objected loudly. It was almost a shout. Mark would later write a line for the play: “A silk scream in the night when it isn’t quite right.” It was too bad that Grace didn’t look anything like Marilyn but maybe it didn’t matter. Makeup, Mark thought.

The thoughts that entered Grace’s mind upon leaving the hospital had ranged from picking up anyone to killing herself or someone to laughing at how dumb everything was to cold-blooded matter of factness. She hated her mother anyway. But maybe she didn’t hate her mother completely. What difference did it make now. Ruth wasn’t a mother. All of which reminded Grace of Ellen’s chants in the mental hospital: “My mother is the Rose of Sharon, my mother is lily white, my mother is the whore of Babylon. My mother is better than your mother.” Then Ellen stuck her tongue out and wiggled her fingers at Grace, the way kids do.

Ruth didn’t wake up. The doctor said she had three more heart attacks and there was nothing anyone could have done for her. And if she had lived she wouldn’t have been the same because of the brain damage. Ruth used to say she wanted to go in her sleep. She didn’t want to know she was dying. And she didn’t want a fuss. No big funeral. No graveside eulogy by a man who didn’t know her, especially since she didn’t think there was a God for anyone to be addressing. Still, Grace’s father said that she had told him it was up to them, to him, to do what he wanted. Ruth had been convinced she’d die before her husband, as did her mother before her father, and she had repeated often, “I just want it to be fast.” Secretly Ruth prayed that if there were a heaven, her soul would find peace in that next world.

Mark read some parts of De Profundis aloud to Grace, because Wilde was the poet of suffering and because Mark thought he should do something. Grace insisted she wasn’t suffering. Mark read on into the night, and it was distracting, especially when, after a few drinks — he called what they were doing a wake — he began marching back and forth through his railroad apartment declaiming and ranting. Upon finding the passage where Wilde complains that prison attire is so dreadful prisoners are condemned to be the zanies of style, Mark shouted, “We’re all zanies of style, the zanies of style died for our sins.” His new constellation of stars was Poe, Wilde, Marilyn, and Jane Bowles, whose life ended in a Spanish asylum. She died without knowing her name. To Mark that fate seemed especially terrible for a writer, but in Grace it produced the image of her mother, all swollen, who also didn’t know her name. Not exactly didn’t know it but couldn’t speak it. And what good would it have done for her anyway to speak. Except maybe she could have said something. Dead is dead, as Ruth would say, and homilies rushed into Grace’s mind and out her mouth, so that after saying one she wanted to slap her hand over that mouth, but even that gesture may have been borrowed or stolen from her mother. “I hated seeing her dead,” Grace announced, as if Mark and she were discussing Ruth. “Although she looked almost alive, but not as alive as when she was in a coma. If she’d spoken I bet she would have found something to criticize. Fuck her."

Mark considered beginning the play by having a narrator speak in a singsong voice, as if it were a fairy tale, some of the facts about Marilyn’s life: Once upon a time there was a little girl who didn’t have a father. Her mother told the little girl that her father was alive and showed her a picture of him that looked just like Clark Gable. Then the little girl’s mother, who can’t take care of her — she puts the little girl into foster homes — retrieves her to try and be a real mother to her, but fails at the part and everything else, and from the age of ten or so the little girl has a mother who’s institutionalized. Her real mother refuses to allow anyone else ever to adopt her. So the little girl grows up an orphan, no matter who cares for her. With her mother and grandmother certified insane, the little girl fears the onset of madness all her life, but to protect herself she tries to find love and makes herself into the most lovable star in the world, Marilyn Monroe.

It was winter and the ground was hard. Mark had wanted Grace to wear a veil but she said he could go in her place, wear a veil, and no one would know the difference. Grace had thoughts like, when does embalming stop working? If Ruth froze would she stay like that forever, but then the ground would get warm in spring, the big thaw, and she’d melt in her coffin and the worms would get her, the worms crawl in the worms crawl out, they eat your guts and spit them out. But how do the worms get through a solid coffin, are there wormproof ones? Her body had seemed hollow, lying there in the funeral home with those creepy guys around and people saying sympathetic things. People told Grace, now you only have your memories, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to remember or, if she did, what would she choose to remember. She’d have to pick and choose carefully, to construct something that hadn’t existed anyway. She could almost hear Ruth saying life wasn’t a pretty picture with only happy endings. Grace picked up some dirt and threw it on the coffin. She felt peculiarly free, because she was really alone. Although when saying that to herself, she caught herself and restated it as if giving a lecture to someone else. There’s no difference now. A bad mother deserves a bad daughter she thought as she walked to meet Mark at a neighborhood bar they’d soon call home.

Mark thought of Marilyn’s life as a kind of in-the-blood tragedy. Revenge in the blood, of the blood. Blood tells. Grace had called Maggie in Providence. She promised to visit after finishing some work, and Grace didn’t know if she meant a john, a drawing, or a circle, but she didn’t ask. Celia was going to get married any day and asked Grace to come to the Midwest for the wedding, Grace said she’d think about it, but wouldn’t. She told Maggie that her new roommate, whom Mark had found for her, was so skinny it would make Maggie sick. Sarah had the bedroom and Grace slept on a convertible couch in the living room. Sarah was supposed to be okay because she kept irregular hours and kept to herself. Her entire career she’d been playing nothing but ingenues, and since she no longer was near being one, she starved herself so that she didn’t have any curves and hardly any breasts. “Flat,” Grace reported to Mark, “like that guy doing the strip.” She should have been heavier, her body looked like it was dying for weight. Large bony hands that didn’t look like any ingenue’s, or should she say virgin’s. Sarah in fact led a nunlike life and didn’t drink, smoke, or eat red meat. What she ate was mostly white, and it was eaten with piety. Mark told Grace that Marilyn was raised a Fundamentalist and then became a Christian Scientist. Funny or horrible when you think about how dependent she became on pills. She always had trouble sleeping. Always. Maybe she was afraid she’d die in her sleep. And she slept with her bra on. Mark loved the sadness of her life. He and Grace went to see a revival of The Misfits and sat through a whole day’s performances. Sometimes Grace hated her, the way she parted her lips, ready to be hit or stroked like a puppy. “She’s a baby,” Mark said, “she should be the child to some Madonna. If I could paint, I’d paint without perspective, like Giotto.” “The baby can’t be a girl,” Grace answered, putting on her black coat.