EDITH: Did she ask about me?
DOREEN: Sure, honey. Sure, she did.
EDITH: What did she ask?
DOREEN: Oh, you know, how you were doing. I told her you were doing great.
EDITH: We’re not doing great. That’s not true.
DOREEN: Edie, sweetheart, I’m tired. My brother kept me up all night, moaning. He’s in a lot of pain. I can’t keep talking in circles.
EDITH: She sent us a letter and a poem.
DOREEN: Well, that’s good.
EDITH: Did she say anything else about me?
DOREEN: She said thank you for that fuzzy bathrobe you sent her. She was wearing it. I could tell she liked it.
EDITH: She wrote in the letter that the doctors are torturing her.
DOREEN: That’s nonsense. You know that’s nonsense.
EDITH: She said they’re overmedicating and deforming her.
DOREEN: You gotta let her get better. You gotta let the doctors do their work. I have to go now, baby. Give Mae a kiss for me, will you?
EDITH: Yeah, okay. Tell Tyrell I said hi.
DOREEN: He’s with his daddy, but I will when he comes back. Bye, baby.
DOREEN
Marianne left you with her messes. Most people walked away, but once in a while she’d find a fool, a fool like myself, who couldn’t. I’ve known her since she was in diapers. My momma worked for her daddy, Jackson McLean. Everyone liked Jackson. After his wife died he hired my momma to help him around the house.
When I was little, my momma spent so much time over there, taking care of Marianne that, it’s true, I got jealous. I had five younger brothers and sisters, and my momma was wasting all her love and affection on a white girl across town. She’d come home tired and lie down. People only have so much to give and Marianne was taking it all. My friends in school, their parents worked for white people and none of them got invested the same way my momma did. I wondered if she was in love with Jackson, and I know my daddy wondered too. Sometimes I’d hear them fighting about it at night.
Because I was the oldest, I was responsible for my brothers and sisters. I made them food when they got home from school. I sewed their clothes when they ripped them climbing fences or being wild. My momma would bring Marianne over sometimes and make me play with her and that was one more chore on my list. My momma never said it, but I was expected to treat Marianne like a little princess. We did eventually become close, just because we were similar ages and spent so much time together. We’d pick blackberries that grew wild in the bushes along the railroad tracks and my momma taught us both how to can them and make jam.
Marianne wasn’t handy and she had no common sense, but she was good at making up stories. She’d even convince herself that what she was telling you was true and eventually you’d start believing it too. The swamps would become fairy castles and witches’ lairs, that kind of shit. As I got older, though, her imagination started to bug me. I could never afford to be strange because I had people depending on me. Being weird is a luxury. I was embarrassed to be seen with her. She’d trail after me and my friends, floating, round-eyed, walking on her toes. It drove me crazy the way she would walk, her heels never hitting the ground. The girl could hardly make herself a sandwich. I finally got into a big fight with my momma about it.
I was my high school valedictorian and I already knew what I wanted from life. I was going to go to college and become a nurse, move out to a big city and make something of myself. I told my momma that I didn’t need spacey Marianne, like a weight around my neck, dragging me down during my last summer at home. Oh, my momma got mad. She never usually laid a hand on me but that time she slapped me with the comb she was using on her hair. Here we were, all of us fighting for civil rights, and this girl was my responsibility? How do you figure? How is that fair? My momma felt we owed something to Jackson. But I think she would not have gotten so angry with me if she hadn’t seen my point.
For years I didn’t hear from Marianne. Both of us left town, got married, had kids. For a while the world had seemed big and anything was possible. I did what I had hoped I’d do: I moved to Atlanta, went to college on a full scholarship, and became a nurse. Then my momma got sick, and I had to move back home to take care of her. She passed away, my husband left me for someone else, and I stayed on here. Marianne had moved back too and I still felt responsible for her. Her weirdness got darker. She wasn’t happy with her husband. They’d fight and fight, loud enough for everyone to hear. I’d run into him at the store, buying paper plates because she’d broken all their regular ones. Eventually he left after she put herself in a coma with pills. Her daughters stayed with me while she was at the hospital and he moved out.
God, she was so selfish.
She’d say, “You don’t understand, Dor, it’s hell.”
Right? ’Cause that ignorant little bitch was the only one who’d ever felt pain.
And I’d say, “Marianne, choose the hell you know over the one you don’t, because it can always get worse.” It’s what my daddy used to say.
She didn’t believe in that, though. She’d say the only hell that existed was the one she was living in.
Her husband left and things got better and then worse again. She put me in charge in case anything happened to her, gave me power of attorney. But I had enough of my own problems, shit: a divorce, a teenage son who wouldn’t talk to me, a little brother dying in my living room. When she tried to hang herself I did what I could. I kept her out of the state hospital, got her a bed in St. Vincent’s, made sure she had good doctors. It’s an expensive place, but I got her ex-husband to pay for most of it and I rented out her house to help pay the rest.
EDITH (1997)
It pricks a little where the water is hitting me, but my skin has mostly gone numb. I am with you. Your eyes are the only things sticking out above the icy water. You are an iceberg. I am an iceberg. We are across the country from each other but our teeth chatter in unison—
“Edie, I really have to pee.” Mae is banging on the door.
I turn the water off and wait. I count to five, shivering. My fingers are numb. They don’t give her the towel right away, I’m sure. The nurses make her wait, those sadistic bitches. They make her shiver like this.
“Edie, come on.”
I pull the green towel off the hook and wrap myself in it before unlocking the door.
Mae pushes past me to the toilet and starts peeing as soon as she sits down.
“Your lips are blue,” she says.
They are. Like I just ate a blue Popsicle. I stretch my lips out over my teeth and look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror.
“You look like someone just thawed you out of a glacier,” Mae says as she wipes and flushes. I move aside and let her wash her hands.
“Jesus.” She touches my arm.
I shrug her hand off. I don’t need to get into it with her.
“Edie, what are you doing? Stop torturing yourself.”
Why should I? Saints whipped their backs raw then wore shirts made of thorns to punish themselves. Cold water is nothing. Cold water is pathetic. But I don’t say this because Mae doesn’t like other people’s feelings. Whenever Mom would get upset you could just see it in Mae’s face, her shutting down. And that’s the