Marion

Marion committed suicide, my mother tells me this morning. Her daughter just called to give me the news. I hear the quiver in my mother’s voice. Her friend of forty years gone—the link to her own young motherhood, her own lost beauty and youth. Another reminder of her gnawing mortality. My mother up there in that tired, vanquished town, waiting for her turn…

And I’m sick of suicide. Ed’s parents, my uncle, and now Marion. Most people don’t know suicide like this, and I get to claim three. Marion with pills; and the other two choosing a basement beam and a tightly knotted rope.

She was a Welfare mother, too, living next door to us in the housing project just off Seneca Hill. What I remember about her apartment was the large family portrait that hung above the couch, with Marion posed like one of those women in an old Elvis movie. Her long blonde hair brushed seductively over one eye, and draped to the side of her angled, bare shoulder. Her four kids arranged like props around her. We had no money for such things as family portraits, and so I remember staring longingly at that airbrushed photo with the fake pink blush across Marion’s cheeks. My mother was beautiful, too, in her dark curly hair, her sinewy frame. But when people came to our apartment, our walls boasted only the free pin-up calendar that Barrett’s Insurance gave out each year, and the paint-by-numbers picture of a matador and his bull.

Despite the blonde hair and white lipstick, her hips, her travels, and the men who orbited her life right up until she swallowed the pills last night and went to bed, Marion was always on the run, always on the move. It was her idea that she and the kids jump off the bridge that day--into monstrous snow banks deposited by yet another Lake Effect snowstorm. Huge white cushions of snow covering the railroad tracks below, the snow still tumbling from thick gray clouds; schools closed for the day because of the storm. And when he jumped—her only son, her first-born—they heard the crush of bone, but did not hear the quiet snap of spinal cord, his neck breaking... At 17, he spent a full year in rehab, learning how to brush his teeth and dress himself, his wasted limbs indifferent to the struggle.

And what is a Welfare boy to do in a wheelchair in a town where it snows from October to May? Marion understood that, and did what any desperate mother would do: she used the only resource she had to help her son. And so at night, under the cover of shadows, the men came knocking. She moved her Elvis-movie body, shook her provocative hair. Until eventually she saved enough in a plastic bin that she kept hidden under the bed. Then she took her children to Florida. Bought her boy a house, had it fitted for a wheelchair.

The next time I saw her, Marion’s long blonde hair had been bleached to straw. It was also the day after her facelift when my mother and I arrived. Marion in her movie star sunglasses that she removed each day just long enough for me to take her picture, wanting to chronicle her healing. The purple stitches like hyphens on her eyelids, tucked into the recesses by her ears; I tried not to gag as I held the camera steady. She was a nudist by then, too, and when she asked my mother and me if we wanted to see her photo albums, we both declined…

And she had a ridiculous house, even by Florida standards. A Spencer’s Gifts house, with toilet tissue rolled off a penis shaped holder; hand soap nestled in the exposed bosom of a ceramic figurine. She laughed as I recoiled. You’re too uptight, Rachel! she teased that week while we were there. Yet I knew she was hiding behind all that...

And now she is dead, and I wonder if they will drape her hair off to the side, if they will put her in the ground as she wanted to be seen: in her nakedness, her Avon lipstick. And her son will wheel himself to her funeral next week, say goodbye to his mother—never knowing what I know. Not knowing exactly how much she loved him. How much she suffered because of that day in the snow.

And here in New York, they report on the news that a 38-year-old woman jumped last night from the Tappan Zee Bridge. Left a note in her parked car. Marion and this young woman—two strangers—choosing a hushed and sober evening in September to end their pain.
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