In
front of the TV Marlene was curled up on the couch, absent-mindedly stuffing
her face with corn chips while occasionally stroking the gray cat that was
curled in a ball of contentment and sleep beside her. Once All In The Family was over she’d be turning
in for the night. Marlene wasn’t really
a cat person. She quite preferred dogs,
particularly Shepherds and huskies. The
cat was a neutered male named Genghis Khan, which she inherited from a
previous boyfriend, Philip, who was now touring the U. S. playing base for a
famous heavy metal band. Philip had been
Marlene’s first and only boyfriend since Kristoff, the Swiss cocaine dealer
who’d wrecked her life for her in Toronto.
Philip had been for her a consolation, a warm and healing presence. They hadn’t exactly broken up, though she
supposed they had let each other go.
Marlene had always thought of the cat as belonging to Philip, as though
she expected that he’d return to reclaim him.
Though Marlene didn’t expect that she’d be getting back with him, so
much she had grown to enjoy her solitude.
The cat provided a kind of connection between them. To her surprise Marlene had grown very fond
of the cat, who she decided wasn’t much different from a sleepy affectionate
dog. Without the odour. Still she did at times miss Philip. He had been for her a genuinely healthy
presence. Sometimes, against her will,
Marlene caught herself thinking of Kristoff, whom she blamed equally on both
her parents.
Edging on fifteen, Marlene was
becoming impossible for her mother, who finally informed her that it was either
a group home or her father. Had Marlene
known what was coming she’d have chosen the group home. Marlene still hadn’t told her mother about
what her father did to her. She still
kept trying to block it from her mind.
Instead of submitting to his molestations she fought back, hard. Had she more skill with that knife he would
never have fathered her four half-siblings with that pathetic Chinese
girl. Still, Marlene had succeeded in landing her father
in hospital emergency. He nearly died
from loss of blood. Marlene still caught
herself grinning bitterly at the thought of almost successfully castrating her
own father. The judge, on hearing the
evidence, put her on probation, moving her by court order back to her mother’s.
Before Gavin could be charged with having violated his daughter he skipped the
country with his young bride. The
charges were eventually dropped and Marlene, for a long time, struggled against
wanting to find her father in England and finish the job.
It had taken Glen and their mother’s
financing to rescue her from Kristoff.
She’d met him in a biker bar on Main Street and he took her to
Toronto. He was Marlene’s senior by more
than fifteen years. He had blown up his
nose an entire promising stage career.
With Marlene Kristoff made currency of his cocaine habit, coaching her
in basic acting skills—not much of a chore given her natural theatrical talent. In any number of disguises Marlene had met,
usually at the airport, much of Kristoff’s famous clientele, concealing in a
designer handbag or in the folds of a nun’s habit little baggies full of purest
Colombian. Marlene particularly enjoyed
her nun’s disguise, at which she’d proven to be a little too clever when she
was greeted by the wrong priest. He appeared
just as Kristoff had described him—mid-twenties, blonde and handsome with brown
eyes. And the young father mistook
Marlene for another sister. Marlene
sensed that something was amiss when he asked her to show him where her car was
parked. When he redirected her to a
parish church in East Vancouver Marlene really knew that she had the wrong
priest. In the sitting room of the
parish rectory, where Marlene had reluctantly accepted his offer of a cup of
tea, she confessed that she was not Sister Elisabeth, and presented him with
the plastic bag full of cocaine. The
police came, and Marlene, to her own surprise, had never recalled feeling this
safe and relieved. She gave evidence in
exchange for immunity, and became part of a sting operation, which backfired
when Kristoff’s final beating in Toronto, where he caught up with her after
the RCMP had helped her relocate, landed her in hospital.
Marlene’s debt of gratitude to her
brother weighed on her still like a granite memorial column. They had never been close as children and now
she loved Glen more as a very good friend.
And their mother? Her mother. Maybe there’d remain always between them this
tension, this mutual guardedness. Would
they ever break through this wall? This
classic mother-daughter barrier? Marlene
thought that it might be embarrassment.
That Alice McIntyre, a female, had given birth to Marlene, another
female, by way of that most intimate region, the vaginal canal, and that
Marlene, a female, for her first six months had sucked the nipples of her
mother’s breasts, also a female. And
that now Marlene, now a mature young woman, had for so many years been so
utterly dependent upon Alice, her mother, herself a woman. How she had had to fight her when, at
thirteen, her own young body had almost overnight exploded into full womanhood,
and suddenly she was thought to be nearer twenty than twelve. Marlene had fought, resisted and snubbed that
poor unhappy beautiful woman, her mother; and Alice looked on, wounded,
helpless, and unjustly hated as Marlene exploited every conceivable, and
inconceivable, means of distancing herself from her hated mother, asserting her
independence, shamelessly flaunting her luscious nubility in the poor woman’s
face. So Marlene, daughter, declared to
Alice, her mother, “I am woman now, I have no further need of you, I am
replacing you.”
For Marlene the real insult remained
that her mother should be so incredibly beautiful. Marlene herself was very pretty, but always looked
plain next to her mother’s incandescent good looks. After so many times of being mistaken for her
mother’s sister, or friend, Marlene’s sense of rebellion soon turned into an
apocalyptic howl of outrage. There was
not a single drug from marijuana, to airplane glue, to LSD that she wouldn’t
take, nor trashy sorry-looking boyfriend whom she wouldn’t parade in front of
her scandalized mother in order to brutally emphasize her outrage. Marlene kept doing this, if only to tell
Alice her mother how much she hated her. At
eighteen the worst conceivable humiliation had befallen Marlene. She was dating Alfred, who was twenty-one,
clean cut and well-behaved. Marlene
brought him home for Christmas. Boxing
Day, she caught him in bed with her mother.
Very quickly Alice lost her daughter to Kristoff, cocaine and a life of
crime while her affair with Alfred continued for the next three years.
While Edith Bunker kindly admonished
Archie for being a complete idiot, Marlene stroked the soft gray cat that lay
next to her in a leaden, insensate slumber as she crammed her face with a
cheesy, salty fist-full of Doritos.
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