Everything I Never Told You(15)

She should have known it was coming. All morning her mother had been dissatisfied with everything. Marilyn’s dress wasn’t white but cream. It didn’t look like a wedding dress; it was too plain, like something a nurse would wear. She didn’t know why Marilyn wouldn’t get married in a church. There were plenty nearby. She didn’t like the weather in Boston; why was it so gray in June? Daisies weren’t a wedding flower; why not roses instead? And why was she in such a hurry, why get married now, why not wait awhile?

It would have been easier if her mother had used a slur. It would have been easier if she had insulted James outright, if she had said he was too short or too poor or not accomplished enough. But all her mother said, over and over, was, “It’s not right, Marilyn. It’s not right.” Leaving it unnamed, hanging in the air between them.

Marilyn pretended not to hear and took her lipstick from her purse.

“You’ll change your mind,” her mother said. “You’ll regret it later.”

Marilyn swiveled up the tube and bent close to the mirror, and her mother grabbed her by both shoulders suddenly, desperately. The look in her eyes was fear, as if Marilyn were running along the edge of a cliff.

“Think about your children,” she said. “Where will you live? You won’t fit in anywhere. You’ll be sorry for the rest of your life.”

“Stop it,” Marilyn shouted, slamming her fist against the edge of the sink. “This is my life, Mother. Mine.” She jerked herself free and the lipstick went flying, then skittered to a stop on the floor tiles. Somehow she had made a long red streak down her mother’s sleeve. Without another word, she pushed the door of the bathroom open, leaving her mother alone.

Outside, James glanced anxiously at his wife-to-be. “What’s wrong?” he murmured, leaning close. She shook her head and whispered quickly, laughingly: “Oh, my mother just thinks I should marry someone more like me.” Then she took his lapel in her fist, pulled his face to hers, and kissed him. Ridiculous, she thought. So obvious that she didn’t even need to say it.

Just days before, hundreds of miles away, another couple had married, too—a white man, a black woman, who would share a most appropriate name: Loving. In four months they would be arrested in Virginia, the law reminding them that Almighty God had never intended white, black, yellow, and red to mix, that there should be no mongrel citizens, no obliteration of racial pride. It would be four years before they protested, and four years more before the court concurred, but many more years before the people around them would, too. Some, like Marilyn’s mother, never would.

When Marilyn and James separated, her mother had returned from the ladies’ room and stood silently watching them from a distance. She had blotted her sleeve again and again on the roller towel, but the red mark still showed beneath the damp spot, like an old bloodstain. Marilyn wiped a smudge of lipstick from James’s upper lip and grinned, and he patted his breast pocket again, checking the rings. To her mother it looked as if James were congratulating himself.

Afterward, the wedding reduced to a slideshow in Marilyn’s memory: the thin white line, like a hair, in the justice’s bifocals; the knots of baby’s breath in her bouquet; the fog of moisture on the wineglass her old roommate, Sandra, raised to toast. Under the table, James’s hand in hers, the strange new band of gold cool against her skin. And across the table, her mother’s carefully curled hair, her powdered face, her lips kept closed to cover the crooked incisor.

That was the last time Marilyn saw her mother.





three



Until the day of the funeral, Marilyn has never thought about the last time she would see her daughter. She would have imagined a touching bedside scene, like in the movies: herself white-haired and elderly and content, in a satin bed jacket, ready to say her good-byes; Lydia a grown woman, confident and poised, holding her mother’s hands in hers, a doctor by then, unfazed by the great cycle of life and death. And Lydia, though Marilyn does not admit it, is the face she would want to see last—not Nath or Hannah or even James, but the daughter she thinks of first and always. Now her last glimpse of Lydia has already passed: James, to her bewilderment, has insisted on a closed-casket funeral. She will not even get to see her daughter’s face one last time, and for the past three days, she has told James this over and over, sometimes furious, sometimes through tears. James, for his part, cannot find the words to tell her what he discovered on going to identify Lydia’s body: there is only half a face left, barely preserved by the cold water of the lake; the other half had already been eaten away. He ignores his wife and keeps his eyes trained on the rearview mirror as he backs into the street.

The cemetery is only a fifteen-minute walk from their house, but they drive anyway. As they turn onto the main road that circles the lake, Marilyn looks sharply to the left, as if she’s spotted something on the shoulder of her husband’s jacket. She doesn’t want to see the pier, the rowboat now re-moored, the lake itself stretching out into the distance. James has the car windows rolled up tight, but the breeze shakes the leaves of the trees on the banks and corrugates the surface of the water. It will be there forever, the lake: every time they leave their house, they will see it. In the backseat, Nath and Hannah wonder in unison if their mother will turn her head away for the rest of her life, every time she passes by. The lake glints in the sun like a shiny tin roof, and Nath’s eyes begin to water. It seems inappropriate for the light to be so bright, for the sky to be so blue, and he’s relieved when a cloud drifts over the sun and the water turns from silver to gray.