It was interesting how Sophie, who played the prosecutor when Marion defended Russ, turned around and argued for tolerance when Marion impugned him. She wondered if this was a subtle therapeutic strategy or just a way to keep her coming back every week with twenty dollars.
“I guess I haven’t reached that higher plane,” she said irritably. “You know what I think made me eat the cookies? I think Becky was one too many happy people to handle in one morning.”
“You preferred it when Russ was suffering.”
“Maybe. Yes. Did we somehow determine that I’m not a bad person? If we did, I must have missed it.”
“You feel you’re a bad person.”
“I know I’m a bad person. You don’t have any idea how bad.”
Sophie’s smile gave way to a more censorious expression. The timing of her therapeutic frowns was comically predictable. Marion felt infantilized by it.
“I could have eaten the whole batch of cookies,” she said. “The only reason I didn’t was there wouldn’t have been any left for Judson. But I definitely could have eaten all of them. Six pounds in three months of starving myself, and it’s not as if anyone has noticed. It’s not as if I deserve to be thin. The disgusting thing I see in the mirror every morning is what I deserve.”
Sophie glanced at the spiral-bound notepad on her little side table. She hadn’t written on the notepad since the summer. There was a hint of threat in the glance.
“It’s not just me, by the way,” Marion said. “I think everyone is bad. I think badness is the fundamental condition of humanity. If I really loved Russ, shouldn’t I be rejoicing to see him happy again? Even if it meant him being with the fair young widow and lying to me about it? I don’t really want him to be happy. I only want him not to leave me. When I saw him in that shirt this morning, I wished I’d never given it to him. If suffering is what it takes for him to stay married to me, I’d rather that he suffer.”
“You say that,” Sophie said, “but I’m not sure you believe it.”
“Also, for your information,” Marion said, her voice rising, “I’m paying you money I can’t afford to be here, so I don’t really care to hear about how well adjusted you and your husband are.”
“You may have misunderstood what I was saying.”
“No, I understood you very well.”
Sophie glanced again at her notepad. “What did you hear me to be saying?”
“That you’re not depressed. That you have a happy marriage. That you have no idea what it’s like to look at a girl in a summer dress and wish a terrible life on her, a life as terrible as your own. That you’re lucky enough not to know how lucky you are. That you’ve never had to find out how selfish all human love is, how bad all people are, and how the only love you can be sure isn’t selfish is loving God, which isn’t much of a consolation prize, but it’s all we’ve really got.”
Sophie drew a slow breath. “You’re giving me a lot today,” she said. “I’d like to understand better where it’s coming from.”
“I hate Christmas. I can’t lose weight.”
“Yes. I’m sure that’s a disappointment. But I’m sensing something else here.”
Marion turned her face toward the door. She thought of the money in her hosiery drawer and the ugly cheap cassette recorder she’d bought for Perry. It wasn’t too late to go out and get him a set of good stereo components, or a really nice camera, something he would truly enjoy having, something to atone in some tiny way for the blackness she’d put in his head by being his mother. The other kids would be all right, but she was very much afraid that Perry wouldn’t, and it was unbearable to know that the instability she could sense in him had come from her. If she kept seeing Sophie, the money would be gone by summer, and all she’d have to show for it would be the biweekly moments when Sophie, with an odd backhanded motion, without looking, reached behind her and opened a credenza drawer to fish out another handful of free physician samples of Sopor?, methaqualone, 300 mg. The samples were the one indisputably useful thing Marion got for her twenty dollars a week. A prescription would have been cheaper, but she hadn’t wanted to be a woman with a prescription. She’d preferred to pretend that her anxious depression was temporary and the drug samples were an ad hoc way of managing it. Perry’s most worrisome symptoms had abated, and in the fall he’d joined the church’s youth fellowship, and she’d allowed herself to believe that Sophie was right—that the problem was her marriage. She’d believed that Sophie could help her get better. But she wasn’t getting better. The Sopors did help her sleep more soundly than being confessed once had, but at least in the confessional she’d been able to speak the worst truths about herself. She could be as crazy and unhappy as she wanted without being expected to fight to save her marriage, which she now believed there was no saving, because she’d never deserved it in the first place, because she’d obtained it by fraud. What she deserved was punishment.