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PART IV
IN THE DAY OF BATTLE

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90

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Trey had only been gone an hour when Marina opened the front door to see a beautiful bottle-redhead in a sweet dress with a couple of bottles of Polly’s Pop and a wide smile that was forced.

“Hello,” Marina said softly.

“Hi,” she said brightly. “I’m Ethel Routetska. I’m, uh … I, uh, work for Trey.”

Marina blinked. There was no question what her job was, and there was no question that she was nervous and faking her cheer.

“I see,” Marina said gently and moved to welcome her into her home. She wondered if Trey had been indecent with Ethel, but she was too polite to ask. “Come into the kitchen, if you don’t mind.”

She caught the glance Ethel cast to the parlor and knew immediately what she thought.

“I would ask you into the parlor,” she said, leading the way, “but I have an angel food cake to tend.”

Ethel blinked as if she didn’t understand. Perhaps she didn’t. Marina gestured to the table and sat to continue beating the egg whites.

“What … ?” Ethel asked, gesturing to the bowl.

“You have to be quick about these,” Marina said matter-of-factly, as if having a prostitute in her house bearing Polly’s Pop in the middle of the afternoon was a normal thing. But nothing about Marina’s life was normal, which meant everything was normal. “The egg whites will collapse and the cream of tartar only works so long to hold them together. I wasn’t trying to keep you off my parlor furniture because of your job at the speak. The thug I live with sits on it all the time.”

Ethel barked a surprised laugh. “Uh, well … I … ” She coughed in her hand. “You are a plain-speaking girl, aren’t you?”

Marina shrugged. “I’m not a good preacher’s daughter anymore, am I?”

“Is … there anything I can help you with? The baby?”

“She’s taking a nap, but you can see her when she wakes up.” She tilted her chin at the pop. “You know how to get to a girl’s heart. Bottle opener in the drawer over there.”

Ethel laughed hesitantly, but her face softened into a genuine smile. “You really are a nice girl.”

Marina blushed. “Thank you.”

While Ethel opened the bottles, Marina fetched the sifted flour and began to fold it into the egg whites.

“That looks like a fussy cake.”

“It is,” Marina said absently, “but Trey’s birthday is tomorrow and I wanted to make him something special. This cake isn’t worth the trouble otherwise.”

“It’s his birthday?”

“Mmm hm.”

“How old?”

“Twenty-six.” At her silence, Marina looked up. Ethel was staring out the window, a troubled look on her face. “What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t know he was that young,” she said softly.

“I take it he had to grow up fast. You, too, I suppose.”

She nodded a little. Her throat bobbed. “I, uh … You probably want to know why I came.”

“I want to know if you were indecent with Trey, too, but I wasn’t going to ask.”

Ethel, shocked, gaped at Marina then began to laugh when Marina couldn’t contain her smile anymore.

“I’m guessing yes?”

Ethel nodded and her smile faded. She took a deep breath and swirled her bottle. “I am here to confess,” she murmured. “I would tell Trey but he wouldn’t know why I’d feel a need to do so and in his eyes, that would make me … ”

Marina waited for the word, but it went unsaid. By Ethel, anyway. “Weak?”

Ethel pulled her lips between her teeth. “But they say confession is good for the soul … ”

“That’s what they say,” Marina returned gently. She would have stopped Ethel from confessing at all, but Trey’s world demanded she know everything, no matter how bad.

She waited while Ethel gathered herself. She fidgeted. She fussed with her bottle. She looked out the window. She tugged at her skirt. She fiddled with her hat.

“I love him,” she blurted.

Marina’s eyebrows rose.

“I’ve been in love with him since he picked me up off the street, dusted me off, and—”

“Put you to work,” Marina murmured, wondering if there was ever a more misplaced and pathetic love than this.

“Well … sort of. He hired me as a waitress. I was the one who wanted to go upstairs, which was when he and I stopped … ”

Huh. “Why?”

“When you see the money flowing through those bedrooms, and you know they have a place to sleep at night and food to eat, but you’re waitressing for peanuts by comparison and have to pay room and board … I needed to survive and after a while, I realized Trey was never going to marry me.”

“Oh.”

“But Trey doesn’t fuck his own girls—” She gasped. “I mean, um, pardon my French. I mean, he’s not indecent with them … ”

“I hear that language all the time,” she said dryly.

“Yes, but you’re a nice girl and I don’t want to disrespect you, especially in your own house … ” She cleared her throat. “Anyway. So … yes. That—that is what I came to confess.”

“Does he know?”

“No.”

Marina’s mouth pursed in commiseration. “Well … thank you? You didn’t have to, you know. It’s not a sin to be in love with someone.”

“He belongs to you, though, so … ”

Marina arose and fetched her tube pan, and carefully began to spoon the batter into it. “I don’t think that’s what you came to confess,” she said matter-of-factly, not looking at Ethel so as to give her some privacy to collect herself. It was always easier to confess if you didn’t have to look at anyone. “You’re still too tense.”

Ethel was silent for a few seconds. “Trey said you were really good at that.”

“At what?”

“Seeing people. Knowing when they’re lying.”

She shrugged. “I see and feel things in pictures. I can see how things connect, but mostly never why. Even if I understand why, I can’t put them into words. Trey teaches me how to do it.”

Ethel said nothing for a long time. Then, “I was the one who drugged you.”

Marina’s heart nearly stopped and her body tensed, but her hands went on gently scraping the batter into the pan as if they were about their own business and didn’t care about anything else. “How?” she finally asked. “And when?”

“Um … ” She sniffled. Marina did imagine she was crying, and she supposed that was the point to her admission that she loved Trey.

Ethel began to weep softly into a Kleenex. “I … At Kresge’s. I paid someone to, uh … We tried so many times, kept adding more and more and then … ”

“I see.” Marina tried to arrange her own thoughts into something she could put words to. She crossed the room to slide the cake into the oven. “That’s how you knew I like grape pop.”

She nodded hesitantly.

“Did you know I don’t remember what happened with him?”

“Yes,” Ethel said in a small voice. “Is that … good or bad?”

“Both. What you don’t know is that I sleepwalk and talk, as if I were awake. We think I was given enough to make me drowsy and either I was asleep through most of it and thought I dreamed the rest, though I didn’t know enough to dream it in anything but metaphors. Or else it just made me someone else entirely.”

“It was a lot more than most people need.”

“Huh. Well, for whatever it’s worth to you, I still have to have sweet tea to be indecent with him.”

“He’s not giving you sweet tea!” she blurted, then clapped her hands over her mouth, her eyes wide.

Marina stared at her, her mouth slack. “I … don’t— What are talking about?”

She gulped and sighed. “He’s giving you sugar. He’s never drugged you himself.”

Marina’s jaw dropped and she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “But … I … told him to.”

“If you don’t remember, how would you know?” Ethel said weakly, then she began to cry in earnest. “I’m sorry, I just can’t … I have to— I wanted you to know—”

Marina grabbed a hand towel out of the drawer and soaked it in cold water, then wrung it out. “Here,” she said softly when she returned to the table, this time sitting beside Ethel instead of across from her. She took Ethel’s chin in one hand and gently patted her red, splotchy face with the cool towel, taking care around her closed eyes that were leaking tears. “Why did you think I needed to know all this?” she whispered, still patting her face.

“I—I—I—” she hiccuped. “I can’t keep any of it to myself any longer. I didn’t mean to tell you about the sugar, though.”

“You know why confession’s good for the soul?”

Ethel shook her head, but took the towel.

“It’s because the burden of guilt is too heavy for the sinner to carry and he wants to get it off. Sometimes a priest isn’t enough, so he puts it on the person he offended. Then the person he hurt has to bear the weight of the offense and the knowledge.”

She burst out into fresh sobs.

Marina let her, but she held her hand in both of hers. She didn’t know Ethel’s story before she had gone to work for Trey and she didn’t know how long she’d waitressed before she’d “gone upstairs.” What she did know was that this woman was not evil, not jealous, not vindictive. Her love, however misplaced and pathetic, was pure.

“Ethel,” she murmured, reaching out to caress her cheek. “Ethel, look at me.”

She shook her head.

“Please.”

She raised her face, but did not open her eyes. It was probably as much as she could do.

“I’m not angry with you.”

That was when her wet eyelashes began to flutter.

“I understand why you did it.”

Her eyelids opened but she was looking at Marina’s chin.

“You loved a man so much you did what you had to do to give him what he wanted most.” When she had Ethel’s attention fully, she said, “I could never do that. I’m too selfish.”

It took some time for Ethel’s tears to dry up, but they did because she was too confounded by Marina’s reaction. Marina didn’t know why her reactions were so unusual everyone stopped to think about them.

“And … ” she added. “Thank you. Ethel, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.”

Ethel simply gaped at her.

“I don’t like the life Trey lives. It’s scary and confusing and dark and unhappy. But I can’t imagine my life without him now. He listens to me. He can put all those pictures in my head into words for me. He makes me feel wanted and important and smart. I have freedom I never imagined. I am never ever going to love him the way a woman loves a man, certainly not that much. But other than my best pal Dot, Trey is my best friend. And I do not want my best friend being indecent with other women. No, no—” she added hurriedly when Ethel wanted to protest. “I am not talking about you. I’m saying that I know he won’t be.

“I call him a thug because he is. I say it to his face. He doesn’t take offense because he knows he is and he doesn’t care what I think. He is a thief and a liar and a pimp and a murderer, a purveyor of false happiness and hope. He doesn’t turn into a different man when he’s here. But when he leaves in the afternoon and comes home in the morning, I know that I am important to him, that our baby is important to him. As important as 1520, as important as his employees.” She really wasn’t sure about that. “He cares about you, all of you. That is more than my real mother and grandparents ever had. That is more than many, many women have. That is what Dot’s mother has from her father and I didn’t know it, but I was always so envious and now … I have the only thing I’d have wanted in a husband, but I never thought about it because I never thought I’d have a husband at all.”

Ethel blinked.

Marina nodded. “So … thank you. Thank you for giving me your man and … I’m sorry that he couldn’t see what you were offering him.”

Ethel stared at her for long moments. “Are you real?” she asked wondrously, reaching out to touch Marina’s face.

Marina puffed a tiny laugh. “My mind’s not right,” she said wryly. “I’m tetched. In the head. Most everybody thinks I’m stupid,” she confessed. “He told me I think so far ahead of everyone else that I don’t see what’s going on in between. So … if you’re in love with him because he picked you up and dusted you off, then you can see why I’m here. Why I stay. Why I don’t want him to stray.”

Ethel bit her lip. “Would you stay,” she whispered, “if he strayed?”

Marina shook her head. “No. Because then everything he said to me would be a lie. But, Ethel, I’ve seen him in the midst of pretty girls who want his attention, who would see me as a poor little dumpling they think they can shoo away with the flick of a wrist. He doesn’t see them. To him, they’re just bodies in his way.”

Ethel nodded. “Yes.”

“I can’t forgive you because there’s nothing to forgive. You have my gratitude, if you can take it and put away your guilt.”

“I … can try,” she whispered. “I’ve lived with it for so long, it’s habit. It’s something I … wear, I suppose. Like an ugly dress I hate but can’t get rid of.”

“Burn it.”

90

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