MARILYN MERCURY

Rina slammed the bedroom door. She slammed it hard. I heard a crack.

My brother continued to make himself ham, fake cheese slices and jalapeño mustard sandwiches on white bread. His mouth formed a white slit.

Rina let loose a dramatic sob that signaled she had had enough. Enough of Joseph, enough of me, enough of her tiny, falling down house, enough of it all.

Joseph’s ears turned red. He cut his sandwich with unnecessary force. He refused to go into his own bedroom and calm Rina down. He refused to let her run his life.

Our dad would not have fallen for such a trick from our mom, but our mom would never have cried in front of anyone, let alone slammed a door.

He slid the cut sandwich into a baggie, sealed it as Rina sobbed even louder. We heard her throwing things about. A bang against the wall. It was perhaps the framed picture of the both of them in front of the big geyser at Yellowstone. Maybe she used one of going-to-the-bar shoes, the heavy black pair of heels she had bought on sale at Wal-Mart.

“You found a job yet?” Joseph grabbed two of the mini packs of Granny Goose chips, sour cream and onion.

“You got any leads in that notebook of yours?”

His eyes slid to me rather than the closed door, which hid whatever his wife did to their bedroom in her fury for attention and his ear. She had never been without a man in her life. Her tactics of drama and discount fancy shoes seemed to draw every man about like flies to tuna casserole left on the counter.

“I got some applications out,” I replied with careful optimism, so as not to cause his wrath to fall on my head. I didn’t wish to be homeless just yet.

“Great. I got a buddy at the vet clinic, used to. I haven’t talked to him in a year. Want me to try Colby?”

“Sure,” I had already crossed off the vet clinic, as they were not hiring, at least, not hiring ex-murderers fresh out of Coffee Creek. Everyone in Vale knew my story, even if they didn’t know my story. I had become a local legend, not in a good way.

“Do you or not, Marilyn?”

My belly went tight. I swallowed a mouthful of words. I had learned so well to just keep a neutral face, nod, go along.

“I already checked there, is all. But try Colby, sure. Might have more luck.”

“I’ll call, anyway. Damn it, huh?” Joseph closed his small cooler, his sandwiches, chips, apple and Zingers ready for the day ahead. “You got to be persistent. And you’re big and strong. You can handle a cow. Or a pit bull.”

Out my brother went to his truck, without giving in to Rina. I turned my head as his engine started up. I watched the bedroom door as Rina emerged, her pointy face splotchy, her eyes round blue marbles in small lakes of red-laced white. She just wore a bra and her skinny jeans, but she had to be the skinniest, tiniest woman I had ever seen.

“He just left?”

Rina skimmed across the warped linoleum of the kitchen, across the stained pea green carpet of the living room to stare out the screen door at the spot where Joseph usually parked. Her own tiny car, a red Geo Metro, waited to transport her to Willa’s, where she’d give old lady perms and trim the sideburns of the local men. I could see every bone in her back. She ate, it just didn’t stick to her ribs. Some people are like that. I once watched Rina inhale twenty tacos, her little belly bulging out in protest. But she burned it all off with her spite, her constant moving about and her sheer malice.

Such women draw men to them like moths to a nasty flame.

“He at least take his lunch?”

Her giant blue eyes marked me, hated me, judged me for not only being too tall, but too fat. I nodded. She skimmed her way back to their bedroom, the door slamming all over again, even harder. I saw a crack in the painted wood.

I sat at the kitchen table until my sister-in-law went off to work, her face fixed, her hair piled high in gold-tinted curls and swoops. She smelled of peaches as she went by me. The house and I both sighed as she squealed away toward Ontario, that poor Metro almost certainly about to blow its engine the way she drove this morning.

Of course the fight had been about me staying there. A tiny one-bedroom house, with me living on my brother’s couch for now, just chapped her backside something awful. It chapped my brother’s as well, but we had been beaten by daddy into the lifelong belief that family mattered above all. You dropped everything, you put up with whatever, because family and God mattered above all. I had no place to go.

My other brother lived in Commiefornia, as Adam referred to it from his shared apartment in Stockton. He had a roommate, but everyone did in that state.

Got no room for her, Adam had told Joseph.

I closed my notebook, with the few possibilities of jobs scribbled on the clean pages. I had to keep my chin up, as Tilly had told me over and over. This was before she hung herself with shoestrings she’d stolen from Anna two cells down. As Tilly was not allowed shoestrings or anything of the kind she could use to hurt herself.

Tilly told me to go ahead without her out to the yard, she’d be along in a bit. That did  not happen. Taking advice on being cheerful and positive from a suicide queen seemed a little creepy even now.

Nobody is gonna hire you, my dead ex-husband said inside my head.

I turned, saw him for a bit in the dusty window. Not exactly something I could tell my brothers or Rina. I saw Jesse now and then. He spoke awful things in my head now and then.

I made myself a fried egg sandwich. I drank coffee, the house so quiet it ached in the middle of my skull, but a good ache. An ache of peace and wishing it could always be like this. But if I worked real hard and minded myself and abased myself before God, Vale and the rest of the world, I might be able to afford a closet in someone’s trailer house in about twenty years. Sad, stupid little joke but it rang too true.

Killing my husband had not helped me at all.

Jesse stood by the screen door, watching the magpie watching me.

Sometimes I saw him clear as anything. Sometimes he left me alone. I had no idea if it was his ghost or just something broken in my head. Some weird little valley filled with shame because I couldn’t be what people needed me to be.

You try so hard to be tiny, Tilly had once told me. Stop it. You’re a giant, be a giant, maybe that’s what your God wants.

She told me this after trying to cut her wrist on a rough edge out in the yard.

Jesse walked out onto the grass, flapped his hand at the magpie, which flew to a higher branch. He had hated birds when alive, he still hated them. Maybe being dead isn’t such a change after all.

Jesse Applegate had been a local god. Handsome running back that took the Vale Vikings to state twice, and son of Vale aristocracy. Him taking up with me, a no-account crazy Mercury, had shocked everyone but me. He wanted a grateful door mat who wouldn’t say boo to him. I happily played that, from fourteen to almost thirty.

Something in me snapped like a twig one day, I fought back instead of taking it.

That he would have killed me escaped near everyone’s notice. Taking that skillet to his head saved my life.

My life did not matter at all, I found out the hardest of ways.

I fought back. Just that once, and the one time only.

My rebellion made his usual slap and twist the nipple punishment for dishes not sparkly enough turn into some sort of death match. I knew that instantly when his eyes squinted down, when his mouth pulled upward on the left. I had a moment to throw myself down at his feet, beg for mercy, like I always did when it got bad.

Instead I took up the frying pan.

That what happened, Jesse called from the yard. His voice in my head like one of those kid songs you can’t stop hearing.

I had a trial, they found me guilty. I went to Coffee Creek with the rest of the women desperate or stupid enough to get caught.

I took my bottle of water, my banana, my peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich in a baggie, stuffed them into my pink and gray backpack, the same one I’d used in high school. If my baby had lived, she’d be using it now. I miscarried early on. Jesse got me bent over his tailgate and not long after, I was a teen unwed mom to be.

And then, I wasn’t.

I never told anyone. I got sick, something inside me nearly killed me until my mom, not long from her own death, took me into the clinic over in Idaho where no one knew us and got me looked at.

Infection, infertile, no more kids. I never told Jesse that, or that I couldn’t breed the pack of sons he wanted.

That’s how he put it. Breed me a pack of sons.

I walked to the library to use their computer. I signed up, and waited my hour to log on. I read Watership Down while I waited, the librarian having recommended it to me. Rabbits. A whole adult book about rabbits? I barely made it past the first chapter, boring as hell, but it picked up, became this adventure story. Rabbits looking for a home, fighting off badgers and hawks, floating down the river. I understood all that.

You got to keep fighting or they get you. Sometimes you got to pick up a skillet, swing it real hard.

“Marilyn? It’s free.” Janice smiled at me, and I smiled back.

My email held rejections. Not one place even bothered to give me an interview--not the mushroom plant or the Starlite or the school for being a janitor.

My job search, futile as it had become, turned up part-time caregiver at the Sharon Young Assisted Living Facility. Two weeks ago. Not filled yet, said Job Hunters.

I could cook and clean. I’m strong as an ox yet, even at over fifty. I have twinges of arthritis, but nothing too bad yet.

“You want to check this out?”

I pushed Watership Down back at Janice. “I don’t want to lose it. I can still come here and read it?”

“Sure. You find anything? Jobwise.”

“Not really,” I said, so as not to jinx it. “Does that book have a happy ending?”

Janice put the novel on the pile that needed to be shelved. “Have to read it to find out.”

That meant no.

The cool of the library contrasted with the sweaty armpit heat of A Street.

I headed down A Street, toward Graham Boulevard, toward Rosemead, where the old folk’s home had to be. I checked the address, written down in my notebook. 56 Rosemead--across Graham that took you eventually toward Bully Creek Reservoir.  

I ran my arm over my wet forehead, kept walking. My robin’s egg blue blouse had a mustard stain. But I didn’t have anything else nice enough to wear to an interview, let alone pick up a job application.

Fifty-six Rosemead had moving trucks in front of it. Arnold’s Moving Services. Men in dark gray jumpsuits moved a gray couch into the back of a white truck. I saw a small black man in a yellow shirt with a sky-blue tie dangling toward his belt, directing more men carrying big clear plastic boxes full of files and papers. They loaded those into yet another moving truck.

“Hey, something going on here?” I asked one of the moving men, a giant with a Santa belly pooching out his overalls like he was preggers. A sunburned face with acne scars across his cheeks, chin and nose, but not a mean face. I read him as ‘nice guy’.

“State shut them down. Violations or they killed too many old ladies, who knows.” He looked past me. “Hey, we supposed to load up that back room next, Austin?”

Austin proved to be a young kid, with a soldier hair cut and beady green eyes. He shoved a floor lamp against the gray couch already loaded, wandered over to us.

“Dunno. I was just told to get it all out. Hey. Hi.”

I inclined my head back, still so polite and so careful. “I can help. I ain’t doing nothing.”

“Sure. Just start hauling shit out. I’m Deke, that’s Austin. We could use some help. Barry didn’t show. Again. Nobody wants to work.”

“He broke his foot,” Austin said, small creases in that young forehead.

“I worked with a broken arm! Bunch of...uh.”

“Kitty cats,” I finished, and both men smiled, appreciating I could play along with pretending I didn’t know any cuss words and yet offering kitty cats instead of pussy. You have to learn to get along with everyone, be what they wanted. Tilly didn’t know shit. She was dead, after all.

I helped strip everything from the Sharon Young Assisted Living Facility. I got looks and grumbles but I lifted and carried without a complaint. I worked all morning, had my lunch with the guys who just accepted my presence, went back to work with the sweat running down my back.

We got everything loaded by four that afternoon. Arnold’s Movers took off and I had eighty bucks in my pocket, from Deke, for working almost eight hours, and a possible job.

Deke and Austin both lived around Vale so I had a ride to work, or my brother, when he wasn’t working construction jobs, could take me. Or even Rina.

I walked back to the library. Janice made a face at seeing me but nodded as she helped an old man search for books about the Battle of the Bulge. I had not peed or pooped since this morning, so I let go in the library bathroom.

After, I checked my appearance as I washed my hands.

Sunburned face as red as a stop sign greeted me. Hair flat and greasy, my one hair pin lost but my hair did what it wanted most days, with more gray and more silver. I had a streak of dust across my forehead. I had a cut on my cheek. I had a grape jelly stain now on my shirt. My body knew that tiredness of a long day working, my soul a sort of numbness.

You shoulda washed them dishes better, Marilyn, Jesse told me, now standing at the mirror. He fluffed his thick golden hair. He examined that smooth skin over his cheekbones, his fingers so long, so elegant. Footballs stuck to his hands the way magnets worked. Some people just have magnet hands.

“You were gonna kill me,” I reminded this ghost or hallucination. Jesse caught my chin, but he had never much kissed me. His mint Trident breath went up my nostrils.

Was I? I just wanted the dishes clean. Was that too much to ask?

My eyes had gone sideways and down, his fingers digging into my chin meat. “I just wanted free.”

“Free of what?”

Janice walked in, went into a stall, closing the door. I stood before the mirror, with Jesse looking over my shoulder before he vanished.

“Just talking to myself, I guess. You ever do that?” I dried my hands, gulping down laughter, gulping down sobs. “I think I got a job. Moving stuff. Arnold’s movers or...?”

I heard her peeing--such a familiar sound.

“Oh sure. That’s great. Good luck.”

“Can I check out Watership Down?”

The rumble of the toilet paper being yanked, her heels as she stood up, as she finished her business.

Her professional smile as she proceeded to wash her hands, her fingernails painted an elegant dark pink. “You sure can. You don’t have a card but we can fix that.”

“Everything can be fixed,” I said.

Janice left. I put my hand against the mirror, against my dead ex-husband. I could almost feel the wall of his chest against my palm, against my wide-spread fingers.

“You leave me alone. You get. I’m done with you.”

No Jesse. My fingers had left a greasy smear.

I wondered how Watership Down would end. I wondered what the next day would be like cleaning out some hoarder’s house over by Nyssa. I wondered at the giggles in my belly that burped upwards and turned my still, careful face into something rather wonderful.

Author’s Biography

Ann Wuehler has written six novels-- Aftermath: Boise, Idaho, Remarkable Women of Brokenheart Lane, the House on Clark Boulevard, Oregon Gothic, the Adventures of Grumpy Odin and Sexy Jesus and Owyhee Days. The Blackburne Lighthouse appears in Brigid Gate’s Crimson Bones anthology. The Snake River Tale was included in Along Harrowed Trails. The Ghost of John Burnberry appears in Penumbric. The Caesar’s Ghost Quest made it into the October 2023 World of Myth. Cassie’s Story was just accepted by Great Weather For Media. Mouthpiece will appear in the Horror Zine’s summer 2024 edition. Rock Love, a short story, was just accepted by Eternal Haunted Summer for their 2024 summer edition.