Authors: Megan Abbott
“Is she going to post bail?” Marion asked.
Ginny nodded. “Don’t I know it. We were at Slanty’s at the crack of dawn pawning all our honey. Everything but our sweet lil six-shooter and the Silvertone. I made her promise me that. He’s blood, sure, but I worked hard for that radio. And the pistol, well, Joe Lanigan gave us that after a suitor with a bad case of the rapes got itchy for Louise and tried to squeeze in our bedroom window. It’s good to be heeled. Did the doc leave you heeled, Miss Silk?”
Once, when Dr. Seeley had gone to the hospital for ten days in Victorville, he left her with a flare gun. Marion hid it under the bed, afraid to look at it, and when the doctor got out, he sold it for the thing he sold everything for.
“How can I help, Ginny?” Marion said, trying not to think of Ginny doing as she did sometimes, pretending to twirl the gun like Annie Oakley and shoot the cigarette out of Floyd’s mouth. “Do you have everything you need while she’s gone?”
“Do I ever. She wants you to keep an eye on me, but that’s how she is. She knows what’s best, but if she’s gone, who needs best?”
“But, Ginny, you don’t want Louise to have to worry about you too.”
“She
should
worry about me. I count more than her lousy brother, goes off with sailors, gets lockjaw, always in some scrape.”
T
HERE HAD BEEN
something in Ginny’s face. It was an avid insolent look, even a defiant one, and Marion thought of it more than once throughout the day. After work, she took the streetcar to the girls’ place. Ginny didn’t answer the door, but it wasn’t locked and Marion went inside, ylang-ylang and jasmine flooding her nostrils and mouth and bright clothes strewn everywhere, even an errant peacock feather on the sofa trembling from the draft. On the coffee table was a bottle of Auntie Sheba’s Lung Syrup and a highball glass red-bottomed with the remnants of its glossy charms.
Marion poked her head in the bedroom, which, pocket-sized as it was, was in similar disarray, a long red strand drizzling from a bottle that read Heering Crème de Cerise oozed from the head to the foot of Ginny’s bed and Louise’s was stacked high with phonograph records flung from their sleeves, empty jars of cold cream, a corset that could’ve wrapped around Ginny three times.
But no Ginny.
Marion could think of no way to reach Louise and it made her nervous to think of telling her. She thought of telephoning Joe Lanigan, thought he could help her, but she did not know what she might say if someone else answered the telephone. She sat down on the divan and tried to concentrate. It took her a long time to think of Mr. Loomis, and she was glad to see his name in the address book Louise kept in a wall nook in the kitchen.
She telephoned from the soda fountain three blocks away.
“Oh, sounds like Ginny’s on a tear,” Mr. Loomis said, called away from a winning poker hand by his anxious wife.
Marion could hear Mrs. Loomis in the background, crying
out, “She’s like a trapped bird. It’ll be like the last time, smashing windows all through town.”
“Get, get, angel mine.” Mr. Loomis shushed his wife, who was always dancing the sharp edge of hysteria. “Get-get.”
“Louise will be panicked,” Marion said, fingertips edging along her teeth. She could picture Louise in some far-off county jail laying down bill after bill, her home emptying itself for the pawnshop, pearly bit by pearly bit.
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Seeley,” Mr. Loomis assured her. “I bet she’s back with her old pals, those chickadees working the Hotel Dunlop.”
Marion recalled Louise saying Ginny used to work there, high-kicking it bare-legged to great acclaim.
And one night, one night at a party, Mr. Loomis had pulled Marion aside, sweaty-faced and brined, told her about the night he first met Ginny nearly two years back, about how he’d made his way, by virtue of sheer salesman charm, backstage at the Crimson Cavalcade. The showgirls all had red blotches smack in the center of their powdery cheeks, like baby dolls. Their ruffled panties, deep red and deeper violet, were trimmed with gold-flecked ribbons that dangled from them, slipping about between their half-gartered thighs.
There was Ginny, he said, curled daintily in their frilly center, like a doll’s doll, painted and trimmed and with a pink
O
for a mouth, an
O
open for all kinds of pleasures and now for the heavy bottle of moon passing among the dolls’ bright-gloved hands.
“My, that’s fine,” Ginny had said, not even noticing Mr. Loomis. “That’s mule for moon baying.”
Ginny had lived so many hundreds of lives, had she not?
“She doesn’t much care for alone,” Mr. Loomis said now. “Louise is her everything, you see. With her gone, she will find fluffy feathers elsewhere to plush her lil nest.”
It reminded Marion of something. Something seen, half in sleep, many weeks before. She had stayed the night with the girls, curling up on the sofa under Ginny’s muslin, a garment no doubt laced with heavy sickness but also popping whimsy, and awoke unsure of the time, staggering, blurry, to the sliver of a bathroom, and as she did, passing the girls’ bedroom. The accordion wall gaping slightly and the tableau like a gold-leaf painting. No, like a soft-wash painting on the wall of a pink-walled powder room in an elegant hotel, fairy nymphs at rest on a bed of clover. Ginny’s curving, marble-white thigh slung and Louise’s arm slid between Ginny’s bent leg, dimpled knee, and Louise only stockings, garters sapphire blue and her fingers spanning Ginny’s bitty doll breasts, lifting with anxious breaths.
Later, she would swear she’d dreamt it.
It was a purer love than Marion had ever known.
A
ND SO
M
ARION WENT HOME.
She went home and tried not to fret about Ginny and hoped in fact she was with friends who would take care of her. And at nigh on five o’clock in the morning, Joe Lanigan had found his way in through Mrs. Gower’s back door and up to Marion’s room and he crawled in beside her with a gust of applejack and confetti crinkling from his hair, seeping from his suit.
A friend’s anniversary celebration,
he whispered,
and all I wanted was to get here, Marion, for I know I’ve been negligent and I so wanted to give you something new
. And with that his fingertips were on her lips and—
—
I wish I could help myself with you, Marion,
he said, then she could feel him shake his head on the pillow.
That is a lie. I don’t even wish it, not for a moment. I just want to do things to you,
he said, and he rubbed something on her lips, her gums. And it was
buzzing, and everything was buzzing. She tried to reach her fingers to her mouth, but there was nothing there, nothing there, it was like her hand would go straight through.
What is that,
she asked.
What is that,
but it came out funny, and her heart was thudding and he began to do things, such things, and she did not stop him or ask any more questions.
M
ORNING, BEFORE WORK,
coming on seven o’clock, Marion, cotton-headed and raw and sick with herself, took the streetcar to Hussel Street.
The house in even more disarray than the day before, Marion slipped on a throw pillow torn seam to seam on the floor, its feathers fluttering in the air like a chicken coop—and was that wax beans crushed into the carpet, she wondered. And what of the empty jug of Cheracol cough syrup nestled upright on the corner of the divan, like a child’s stuffed bear?
She found herself pausing before peering into the bedroom—what might she see? But before she worked up the nerve, she heard something like water lapping and the bathroom door was partially open and she called out, “Ginny?”
There was a familiar twitter.
“Then she met a sailor man named Popeye the Skipper.”
Marion tentatively placed three fingers on the door, the steam glazing her face, the warble vibrating wetly,
“When she was mean, boy how he used to whip her.”
Marion looked down at Ginny, eyes closed, naked as the Kewpie doll she had tucked in her arms, sinking in a half tub of water.
“Ship ahoy,”
she crooned.
“Ah, ship ahoy.”
“Ginny,” Marion said. “What goes on?”
Her eyes fluttered open, her red mouth smeary.
“It is the she herself,” she said, and the warble was gone and the voice was hissing, it was a keening hiss.
“It’s Marion,” she said, realizing her own hands were clasped to the doorframe, clasped tightly. “Ginny, are you all right?”
“It is the she herself. Why are you not in Calico, or something like it?” Ginny’s eyes, normally so baby-bird blue, crackled roughly.
“Ginny, it’s Marion,” Marion repeated, as if talking to a blind woman. “Louise is in Calico.”
Ginny tilted herself and a splash of water flew from the tub and caught Marion, ice-cold on the leg.
“I figured you was with her. I figured you was off with her,” she said, slanty-faced, that sheet-white face, blue in the temples. “I might do anything when it’s like this. I’ve done things. You can’t guess what you’d do until you’ve done it. Just you see what I can do.”
It was such a strange thing to say and Marion felt struck. “What do you mean, Ginny? You were the one who told me where Louise went. I’ve been looking for you. I was worried about you.” She had never seen her like this, never once. She remembered Louise once saying things, meaning things (
Marion, Ginny is prone to dark moods. She must be watched. She must be kept bubbling, mustn’t be allowed to sink, sink
).
Ginny’s eyes began to slowly soften and she squirmed in the tub. “Oh, Marion, well, I am glad. I am glad. You’re my friend, aren’t you, Meems? Aren’t you? You don’t leave me to sawdust, do you?”
“No, Ginny, no,” Marion said, finally stepping forward, shaking off her strange words. “Ginny, that water is like ice. You must come out.”
“I had a nosebleed and I thought it might help,” she squeaked.
Marion turned to reach for a towel hanging on a hook, but found it sticky, and before she could do more, Ginny let out a long scissoring hack straight from her ambered lungs.
Swinging around, Marion looked down to see Ginny, spread forsakenly, long strands of blood lashing down her face.
“Ginny,” Marion said, and could say no more.
“Don’t fret.” The minx grinned, breath wheezing from her like when putting your ear to a seashell. She covered her nose and mouth with a bone white hand and grinned more widely. “Don’t fret.”
“O
H,
M
ARION,
I am sorry for that mess Ginny sunk you in,” Louise said on Monday morning, her eyes feathered with red.
“It was all fine,” Marion said, placing her hand on Louise’s. “It truly was. I tucked her under every coverlet in the house and the hot-water bottle to boot.”
Louise rolled her eyes, wringing her kerchief and sniffling. “Well, let me tell you, she was in a bath all weekend, a pickle bath, that’s what’s what. I just hope that’s the worst of what she started up.”
“Oh, Louise.”
“I should have had you come over. I should have had you stay with her.”
“Louise, you—”
“By morning she was barking like a dog. Like a coal-mining dog with consumption.”
And Marion could see the worry painted all over Louise’s face, across her ruddy cheeks.
“And don’t get me started on that brother of mine,” she groaned. “Cost me four bills and then skipped town with a merchant marine.”
H
ER MAD WEEKEND
behind her, Ginny skidded hard into a toffee-sludged, lung-clotted collapse and her face within days became edged with blue death. Blue rimed lips stretched across teeth, oh, it was not pretty.
Louise was frantic and finally hocked the Silvertone radio, but it was not nearly enough. Finding Marion at her desk at the clinic, she leaned against the doorframe and gave a cold look.
“Your lover man is ducking me like I was the bill collector, Marion.”
Marion saw anger and a gaunt fear twinning dangerously in her eyes. “I guess he’s occupied with business. He has that new store opening on the south side.”
“Well,
I
have some business for him. I need some lettuce or some packets of pink or anything else he can sling my way, or else my girl’s going to break a set of ribs, hacking like a piner miner.”
“He has been hard to reach in recent days,” Marion lied. She had been hot cheek to his thigh not ten hours before. She wondered why he could not help the girls. She believed he would if he knew, really knew. She must make him know. But he had only just returned to her after days of gallivanting sideways. What if he slipped loose again?
“Gent Joe’s old vanishing act,” Louise said, clacking her fingers, jittery and white, on the doorframe. “Word is, he’s papering a shopgirl downtown with Alexander Hamiltons.”
Marion looked up from her stack of patient records.
“I am sorry, Meems. You know I am. But it’s true.”
“There’s always gossip about Joe,” she said. Inwardly, she considered that Louise might be lying. But then there was the thing: the smell on Joe, on Joe’s wrist cuffs, frantic perfume and woman
scents, and it was on his hands and other places and she had pretended not to notice. Because she did not want to know. And she did not want to look at the fact that knowing might not change anything. Not for her.
“I’m just saying, give a poke, Meems,” Louise said, clucking Marion roughly under the chin. “It’s not just about our radio and our chrome toaster. It’s rent and medicine and food on the plate.”
Marion nodded, but she was still thinking of shopgirls and nurses and office girls and could not focus.
“Marion, we need to take care of things,” Louise said, and she tugged Marion’s ear. “You gotta get off the dime. We need to keep our Mr. Lanigan local.”
That evening, Marion wrote a letter to Dr. Seeley in which she stated that her cough had returned, and some of her women’s troubles, and might he send an extra five dollars next time? She sealed the letter and walked to the mailbox to post it before she could change her mind. When the slot shut, she thought she might begin to cry, but she did not.