We Were the Mulvaneys (42 page)

S
he was waiting, and she was patient, but she couldn't deny even in her prayers she
was
hurt. It just didn't do any good to think about it. Alone in the room she shared with Felice-Marie, when Felice-Marie was away, hurt prickling her like the start of poison ivy and she'd find herself moving blindly, pacing the narrow floor, not knowing where she was or when it was only knowing the hurt whispering aloud “Don't you love me?—I'd thought you all loved me,” working up silly tears, nuisance tears as Mom called them, recalling for the ten-thousandth time the errors she'd made, one-two-three-four-five, after the prom going to that party instead of back to Trisha's house and accepting that drink from Zachary Lundt she hadn't wanted and after that her head swirling and giddy and—next thing she knew she and Muffin were being bundled off in Mom's station wagon and driven hundreds of miles to Aunt Ethel's melancholy little bungalow in Salamanca—“Why can't you forgive me? Why can't I come home?” But the sight of her pouty flushed face in a bureau mirror made her laugh.

She'd hug Muffin who'd been perched atop the bureau all this while, watching her with a look of concern. “Oh, who cares? Right, Muffin? We've got work to do.” At least, Marianne did: fifty—or was it sixty—hours a week at the Co-op, in the house or out-of-doors or in the store, which was thriving, in town. And studying and writing papers for her course, the single course she was taking this semester, at the college.

Well, she'd signed up for the course, anyway. “Introduction to English Literature”—required for all teachers' ed. majors. What with one emergency at the Co-op (there was poor hair-straggling-in-her-face Val Allan desperate because she had baking duties all day, dozens of cherry tarts to prepare on order, and an exam at 8
A.M.
the next morning, so naturally Marianne volunteered to make the tarts though she herself had a term paper due in forty-eight hours) or another (there was Abelove's perpetually frantic assistant Birk rushing about looking for someone to help him deliver crates of fresh produce to the Pennysaver Food Mart at the Kilburn Shopping Center—something had happened to whoever was scheduled to help him, it was an emergency situation and naturally Marianne volunteered though she'd set aside a precious morning for schoolwork which was weeks behind) it didn't look promising that she'd complete the course, let alone get a decent grade in it. Her professor had called her in for a conference, he'd expressed concern she'd missed so many lectures, warned her she'd have to get a “high, solid A” on the final just to get a C in the course, and Marianne had stared at the floor, shamefaced and tongue-tied. She wanted to say
Oh but this isn't like me really. In high school I never missed any classes. I did all the work and my grades were A's and B's and I was never scolded, never.
Instead she murmured a whispery apology and slunk away in disgrace.

If Patrick knew! Well, Patrick didn't have to know.

Patrick had such high, impossible standards. It just wasn't realistic to expect so much of
her.

Returning sometimes to the house, to her room, in the afternoon, so tired! her head spinning! especially if it was a day spent clerking in town at the store, where the cash register's
ring-ring-ring-ringing
wore her out, having wakened at 5:30
A.M.
and by 5:30
P.M.
exhausted, about to fall sleep on her feet, but it was a normal tiredness she supposed, a healthy tiredness, preventing her thoughts from flying off in the wrong direction. Despite the commotion in the house at this hour of day, raised voices, footsteps pounding the stairs, telephone ringing and dog barking, Marianne would gather up Muffin and slip beneath her quilt on her bed, curl up luxuriantly to sleep, twenty minutes was all she required, or only ten. Only five! Cradling the soft-furred lanky cat in her arms and pressing her cheek against his side so that his deep resonant purr entered her being, thrummed along her nerves and quieted them. Within seconds she was deeply and dreamlessly asleep.

 

Avidly Marianne read Charlotte Brontë. Not just the assigned
Jane Eyre
which she'd already read in high school, which she loved, and which made her cry, but
Villette
as well—what an unexpected heroine, the passionately chaste Lucy Snowe. And a collection of Charlotte Brontë's letters. Out of which she copied,

 

Out of obscurity I came—to obscurity I can easily return.

 

Marianne was so happy at the Green Isle Co-op, where everyone liked and respected her, maybe sometimes took advantage of her trusting nature but nonetheless respected her—sometimes she felt guilty about wanting in secret to go
home.

Not that she ever uttered the word
home
aloud. She gathered that certain of her friends thought it strange that, virtually alone among them, Marianne was the one who never, at holidays and even in the summer, went
home.
Sometimes only two or three Green Isle members remained in the house during recess, and Marianne was always among them. But they'd learned not to ask. “Oh, Marianne, aren't you going home?”—for Christmas, Easter, whatever. Marianne knew, to her embarrassment, that they talked behind her back; the last time the question was asked, by a girl named Beatie, stuffing clothes into a suitcase at the start of Christmas recess, Beatie clamped her hand over her mouth and stared at Marianne in horror, like a child who has uttered a forbidden word aloud. “Oh, sorry—excuse me, Marianne.”'

Marianne laughed, though a needle was turning in her heart.

“I guess I'm not going home right now, I have so much work to do here.”

It was a gracious answer. She hoped Beatie would relay it to any others who were curious about her.

Most of the Co-op members, male and female, from the youngest who was eighteen to the eldest who was in his thirties, complained of
home.
It was fashionable among the Kilburn College students generally, Marianne noted, to complain of
home, family.
Her professors made witty jokes about “domestic American rituals”—Thanksgiving, Christmas gift-giving, family summer vacations—in such knowing ways, everyone in class laughed; or almost everyone. Marianne perceived that to be without a family in America is to be deprived not just of that family but of an entire arsenal of allusive material as cohesive as algae covering a pond.

There was her roommate Felice-Marie, who wore day following day the same shapeless dungarees, Green Isle sweatshirt, and combat boots—the daughter of an Amherst, New York physician, and very well-to-do. Felice-Marie made Marianne swear to secrecy the fact that her mother insisted upon giving her ridiculous Laura Ashley dresses, cashmere sweater sets—“Nobody in the real world wears sweater sets! In 1979!” There was pretty, sarcastic Amethyst who was majoring in women's physical education despite her mother's certainty she'd never find a husband in such a restricted field—“She worries I'll become a
lesbian,
can't bring herself to utter the word but that's what she means, we just quarrel all the time and it wears me out!” There was Val Allan whose parents embarrassed her because they were such old parents, having had her in middle age, and they were forever turning up in Kilburn hoping to take her out to dinner, or to buy a new coat—“It's so pathetic, I could cry, Mother and Daddy can't accept I've sloughed off my bourgeois ways forever, I practically have to scream at them and then they
don't hear
!” There was Birk, the bundle of nerves, funny-frazzled Birk who'd been drifting through Kilburn College for eight or nine years, whose father was a lieutenant colonel in the New York State National Guard and a “neo-Nazi disciplinarian.” There was Gelb whose mother was a superintendent of schools in Albany—another “neo-Nazi disciplinarian.” Jill, Flann, Dwyer, Smith—all had
homes, families
that provoked curled lips, derisive smirks and eye-rollings, or pitying head-shakes and the murmured sigh, “That generation, they still believe in Vietnam for God's sake it's
hopeless.
”

Abelove, however, never complained of
home, family.
At least not that Marianne knew. Rarely did he speak of personal matters; rarely was he critical of others, let alone scornful. He was capable of losing his temper, boiling over as he called it, impatient with the slowness or incompetence with which his ideas were executed, but he shrank from passing judgment in any categorical way—“‘Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.'”

Uttering these words, thoughtfully, gravely, stroking the wiry-gleaming blond hairs of his beard, Abelove was a thrilling presence. The only person of Marianne's acquaintance who could quote Jesus Christ's words as naturally as if they were his own.

 

Then one day late in the winter of 1979, Abelove's assistant Birk disappeared—“Vanished off the face of Earth,” as Abelove said in a dazed, hurt voice. Birk, long entrusted by Abelove with crucial responsibilities, had made the early morning's round of deliveries to area stores, handed out invoices and collected revenue, returned the pickup truck to the Co-op, and vanished. Nothing appeared to be missing from his room which was a clutter of old clothes, textbooks and papers dating back nearly a decade. He seemed to have left no message of farewell. The house was in an uproar as a rumor spread that five hundred dollars was missing from the Co-op's accounts, unless it was fifteen hundred, but Abelove insisted that no money was missing at all. As the agitation peaked, Abelove called an impromptu meeting of the members, stood on the stairs and shouted for them to be quiet—to cease at once spreading such a demoralizing rumor for even if it was true, which it was not, the tacit accusation that their friend and brother Birk was a thief was unfair to Birk since he wasn't present to defend himself.

Abelove was plunged into such low spirits, so distracted for days afterward, Marianne summoned up courage to volunteer for some of Birk's duties. Abelove said, with a faint smile, “
You?
Why, thank you, Marianne, but I doubt you'd be capable.”

True, Marianne probably didn't look capable. Not that morning, at least. In her familiar elastic-waist corduroy slacks, a motheaten red wool sweater rescued from the communal rag-bin, her size-five canvas sneakers faded to dishwater gray, and a Buffalo Bills cap, also from the rag-bin, covering most of her short-trimmed hair.

Marianne laughed. “Abelove, it isn't fair to judge beforehand!”

The founder and director of the Green Isle Co-op blushed, stroking his beard. If there was one quality Abelove publicly cultivated, it was
fair-mindedness.

Quickly then Abelove apologized. He assigned Marianne, with an optimistic smile, certain of Birk's duties. For instance, he and Birk each “expedited” deliveries to Kilburn College Food Services and to the half dozen area markets that stocked Green Isle baked goods, prepared foods and fresh produce; Marianne was to take over Birk's half of these duties. Much of “expediting,” Marianne discovered, was performed over the telephone, and the telephone was—what?—something magical in her hand, like a wand, or a mask. A cheerleader's bright megaphone that allowed you to speak to complete strangers in a voice not exactly your own—louder, clearer, happier, more assured. Marianne Mulvaney's shyness evaporated as soon as the party at the other end of the line lifted the receiver and said, “Hello?”

Within ten days she astonished Abelove by adding a new store to their list, a farmer's market willing to stock Green Isle baked goods to see if their customers would buy. And Marianne was enthusiastically “expediting” one or two others.

The duty of Birk's which he'd most neglected was keeping the roster of Co-op assignments up-to-date. Each member had his or her special area of responsibility but each had other, rotating duties as well. The “roster” was a large accountant's ledger in which were listed, by hand, names, duties, dates and hours (kitchen/meal-preparation / cleanup / baking / house maintenance / grounds, etc.); members consulted the roster, or were supposed to consult the roster, to see what their duties were. They were supposed to sign in, and sign out, like employees. But Birk had disliked the task, for obviously it caused occasional friction; he'd become increasingly negligent, and many assignments went undone, or half-done; or were done spontaneously, as in a large family in which responsible, capable members step forward while others purposefully hold back. As soon as Marianne took over the roster, she disposed of the old ledger entirely. What a dull, dreary thing! It had made Co-op duties seem like—duties! Within days there was a new roster; on a bulletin board in the kitchen, amid colorful decorative touches, dried wildflowers, snapshots of Co-op activities, sunburst ribbons, were smiling crayon drawings of the members' faces, and beneath the faces were notecards listing their duties, thumbtacked in place. “Oh, Marianne! Did
you
do this?”—how many times the identical remark was uttered, Marianne had to laugh.

Overnight, as everyone marveled, the emphasis had been switched from
duties
to
people.
The roster had been transformed into a work of art—or almost.