called her Razorback Marylyn saying her spine and shoulder blades reminded him of his daddy’s razor. It was just another mean name made from harmless nothing and a bit of prejudice. You know how it is; she was poor. And she knew it. Once you know it you can either give up or move on.
I guess she sustained herself the same way desert plants do. Conservative. Very conservative. Not heedless. She took smiles from strangers in the supermarket as love, and made friends with the people she saw from a distance on a regular basis. Shop clerks, crossing guards, bus drivers—that sort of thing. Just like a desert plant, never expecting too much and adapting, compensating as a result. But not dead. Not at all dead, and in a slow scraggly way moving on in life. No bitterness, no pain, but still dirt poor.
High school was hard on Marylyn. There was no room for her in the well-dressed crowd of whispers and giggles. No one wanted to waste her time on a girl who didn’t have anything bad to say about anyone. They called her weak and noncompetitive; said she would not thrive. She had nothing against them.
She spent her lunch hour with her brother and his friends under a sycamore tree near the baseball field. Every day five or six of them sat there in the root dust smoking cigarettes and talking about cars. In the winter, when they couldn’t sit down, they’d shield themselves from the wind with that big tree. Their wet feet coiling away from the slushy mud, they still smoked cigarettes and talked about cars. Marylyn didn’t smoke. She just sat, or stood depending on the weather, and listened. The boys rarely paid much attention to her. They had too many different cars to dream up and then smash to nothing in their minds using all their reasons for impossibility.
Do you understand the desert? No. I suppose you wouldn’t. You water your lawn and let the faucet run while you’re brushing your teeth. Well, hold your mouth open for five or ten minutes. Then put a drop of water on your lips and remember that’s all you’re going to get. It’s hard to be poor.
Being alone is virtually impossible. I don’t know what drove her. Instinct, I guess. There was nothing to her. She didn’t speak, really. She had hardly anyone to care about or who cared about her. That brother was always a little bit loose, if you know what I mean. It’s strange really. But the way I look at it, you can either give up or move on. I guess I already said that. The point is, the only way to give up is to die. Marylyn never died during those high school summers. Others did. Suicide and car wrecks.
But Marylyn wasn’t stupid and wasn’t a smoker. You might think she would have been. Her mother was. When Marylyn was little her brother used to load cap gun charges down in their mother’s cigarettes. The skinny lady would be sitting with one foot pulled up underneath her on the chair in the morning tracing a coffee cup with an absentminded finger and eyeing a sparrow on the sill, all quiet and lonely, then—bang! And the barefoot brother would scurry into the room laughing. “Shouldn’t smoke, Mommy. It’ll kill you.” Sometimes the mother would get up and chase him all over, saying, “Let’s hope it does, kiddo!” but mostly after those infinitesimal explosions she’d put the cigarette down and forget it. Sometimes the brother cried or he screamed, “I hate you. I hope you do die, Mommy. You never let us do anything fun.”
But it wasn’t ever a matter of her withholding permission. She didn’t ignore her children, or neglect her children, or refuse to answer to her children; there just wasn’t any money. So nothing mattered when the sparrow was holding their mother’s interest. Her thoughts were simple and repetitive. Such wings, such ugly wings, were all you needed to fly.
Marylyn’s mother was ruled by the tiny bird. He was her prince, but she was little if anything to him. Attention and the power of her longing stare were all he needed to go on with his brash, unforgiving tirades. “This and that about the morning dew! And who but the Murphys, with their splintery old feeder, to forget my breakfast! Never had a mind to go anywhere else, but the winds of this place are atrocious! Too much work to leave!” Then Marylyn’s mother would bow, nodding an apology.
Flight is the only animate form of perfection. Yet the ugly little sparrow was always bitching about something. The children’s mother, those mornings, stared, amazed at such a pompous spectacle. She usually smiled. A vague hesitant smile. It’s good to know that humans aren’t the only pompous fools.
This was the way things were. There was nothing to be done. He was right. Every morning he would scold her, and then rush off in a huff, while Mother shook her head, missing him. Hoping he would come back if she did the dishes.
Or cleaned up a bit in the living room.
Marylyn—this is back when she was the little razor-backed girl—stood in the doorway out of her mother’s view, watching the sparrow too. But she had different thoughts. Come to think of it, those mornings must have been Sunday mornings. There wouldn’t have been time to linger any other day. Mothers who work will know. Busy and tired. Always, always, busy and tired. And probably running late. “Ask me again later, dear.”
Anyway, the little girl grew up that way. Her yellow-walled room closed in on her, and the mother passed away. Always buying and wrecking cars in his mind, the brother talked on about his own big plans and ended up making do with somebody else’s bad habits. He was too used to hand-me-downs, I guess. No big surprises. “Isn’t it a shame about the Baxter boy?” “Oh, well, how could you really expect otherwise—what with a mother like that?” There were plenty of looks of concurrence, nods of assent, but then one intrepid white-hair might point out, “But look at his sister. She’s doing quite well.” “Marylyn?” “Yes. Odd, no doubt. But happy. Doesn’t it seem?” And a quick round of nods would hurry across the circle, followed closely by a plate of vanilla sandwich cookies and more coffee.
Inside, alone, Marylyn hated mirrors on account of her teeth. They were mostly straight except one in the front that overlapped the one next to it, and they were all different sizes. Just another gift of charity, I suppose. It seemed as though all the teeth had been taken from other heads and thrown into her smile.
You’re not from a small town. It’s hard to make you understand. In cities and big places you need names and made-up identities. Names aren’t necessary in little places because you know the people and they know everything about who you are. Names are only slipshod approximations. They’re cop-outs really. There is more time in small towns. You can watch a person live her whole life in a stereotypic small town. And a name, any one arbitrary word, cannot possibly describe a lifetime like Marylyn’s.
Anyway they all watched it happen; she got older and so did her teeth. She bought the pet store and walked to work every morning, with a fresh sweet roll wedged in her jacket pocket.
Some said she knew the baker quite well. It usually wasn’t nice when they said this. Others said she was too, well, too something to know quite a bit of anyone. But she walked every morning from the old house on Lincoln Street to her tiny pet shop on the square. She’d get there and look over her shoulder, the folks in the courthouse said, before she ever fished her key out of a hidden pocket and began to unlock the rattling door.
Lights on, blinds up. Then—and this is what the people all loved—she took a careful half-hour setting up a most elaborate tangle of twigs and vines outside on the sidewalk. Weather didn’t seem to matter. Someone mentioned to me in passing once that her brother had built the bizarre sculpture for her out of gnarled branches from the woods where they used to play. Who knows how much truth there is in that tidbit? Most people say he hasn’t been much use in years. But Marylyn would set up those branches, so carefully, and bring out a tiny sparrow, which no one would think to buy, and place it, so gently, on a curving twist of a twig.
Customers stopped in through those years of days, ringing the old cow bell that hung above the door. Marylyn always said, “Welcome. Glad you stopped in,” and doled out goldfish like a miner, sold turtles to every eight-year-old with a jarful of pennies. So much to be done. There were questions to be answered about this or that newt. And paperwork on health and cleanliness. There was mon
ey to be counted and saved. Once a pretty old lady asked if her poodle’s pink satin claws could be manicured. No one ever heard whether Marylyn had done it; the lady was from out of town. But I believe she probably painted those claws whatever color the lady wanted. She must have. Why would Marylyn say no? She swept the floor, periodically, and invited summer kids to watch a ferret run through the heating shafts along the floor. At night, when the first streetlights came on, she’d start her closing-up routine, which was rhythmic and tidy and grim.
Even during all this, though, there were long periods of tame times when she would sit at that pet store window, with one foot pulled up underneath her on a stool, looking out, watching her sparrow flit around in its tangle of branches. Such a creature to hop and cock his head and proclaim mightily that there was so little to know which he could not tell you. Marylyn was obliged to listen. Every night he returned to a cage.
FLAG BOX
A violent, vibrant storm rushed in and then vanished leaving a stupid, ripped flag all tangled in our do-it-yourself rose arbor. The one my wife never felt was a good enough incarnation of her dreams. So I took the