Her best friend, Isabelle Washburn, was prettier and taller than Marion, a shining blonde with a sharp little nose that drove the boys wild, but Marion was smarter and more daring and made Isabelle laugh. Isabelle fancied herself an actress, but she couldn’t be bothered to join the Thespian Society. She preferred going to the movie house, where the ushers, in deference to her nose, would often let in her and Marion for free. Marion’s former self was now mostly a memory, but to her the theater was still the place that had distracted her from her father, a place of guilt, and so, although she might have ruled the thespians, she never tried out for another play. She threw herself instead into the real-life drama of discussing boys, provoking boys, and, finally, falling in love with a boy, Dick Stabler, who lived down the street from the Collinses.
Dick was beetle-browed and husky-voiced, with a mild congenital lisp that made her weak in the knees; he looked and sounded the way she imagined Heathcliff. His parents rightly distrusted her, and her senior year was a serial drama of subterfuge and secret outdoor locations where she could be alone with Dick and kiss him and let him touch her breasts. She’d determined that she was “oversexed”—at times, she was literally cross-eyed with her urges, ill with them, dying of them. She was ready to do whatever Dick wanted, including marrying him, but he was bound for college and a higher grade of wife. In the spring, there came a night when his parents heard a noise in their parlor, well after midnight, and his father crept downstairs to investigate, switched on the most glaring light in all of Santa Rosa, and discovered her and Dick on the parlor sofa, clothed but fully horizontal. After this embarrassment, and under the steady pressure of his parents’ disapproval, Dick’s passion for her faltered. She was left feeling dirty and bad. Her uncle, in one of his rages, went so far as to use the word slut, and instead of shouting back at him, as she’d done so many times, she collapsed in tears of self-reproach.
Her mother, in San Francisco, was still a houseguest. In her infrequent letters to Marion, she claimed to miss her baby, but she couldn’t impose on her hosts by inviting her baby to stay with her, and she wouldn’t subject herself to Roy’s hostility by coming to Santa Rosa. When Marion took a bus to the city to meet her for lunch at Tadich’s, a month before she finished high school, it was eight months since she’d last seen her. She was there to discuss her future, but her mother, whose hair had turned white, and whose cheeks offered red evidence of morning drinking, had exciting news of Shirley in New York. After some difficult years at a Gimbels perfume counter, Shirley was now on Broadway—in a small role, to be sure, but launched as an actress, with prospects for larger roles. Isabel’s maternal pride, a quality hitherto absent in her, might have seemed poignant to Marion, suggesting as it did a woman desperate to keep up with friends whose sons were Ivy Leaguers, if Marion hadn’t felt so enragingly effaced by the news. She felt that someone, probably she herself, ought to murder both Shirley and her mother, to avenge what they’d done to her father. Her “talented” sister in particular needed murdering. When a waiter brought her a plate of fried sand dabs, a Tadich specialty, she ashed her cigarette on them.
At home, in Santa Rosa, Roy Collins had been wearing her down, preying on her shame and self-reproach, and had just about convinced her that she would, indeed, be very lucky to start work as a clerk in his distributorship after she graduated. An earlier dream, which was to head to Los Angeles with Isabelle Washburn and try to break into the movies, had gone dormant in the months of her obsession with Dick Stabler. She’d seen less of Isabelle and become more realistic. Although she’d smoked her way to weighing one hundred and three pounds at the doctor’s office, careful attention to the calves and ankles flashed onscreen at the California Theatre had led her to suspect that her legs were too peasanty for Hollywood. Isabelle, however, whose legs were better, still intended to go to Los Angeles, and she’d never retracted her invitation to Marion. Sitting in Tadich’s, her cigarette ends soaking up melted parsley butter while her mother nattered about the doings of the Francisca Club musical committee, evidently too repelled by the scowling of her baby to broach the subject of her future, Marion experienced a rage so murderous that her decision made itself. She was going to go to Los Angeles and flip the switch and see what happened. She would make herself visible, and she was definitely going to murder someone. She just didn’t know who.
Isabelle had a plan for being discovered by Hollywood, involving a cousin who was William Powell’s physician, and although she gamely allowed that Marion could be a part of it, she seemed unthrilled that Marion was going with her. In Los Angeles, at the Jericho Hotel, to which they’d retreated after learning that the homes for aspiring actresses all had waiting lists, Isabelle no longer laughed at the things Marion said. When her doctor cousin asked her out to lunch, she decided it was better, after all, if she met him alone. Getting the picture, and adding Isabelle to her list of people in need of murdering, Marion moved into a ladies’ rooming house on Figueroa Street. She went to some of the agencies that advertised in the newspaper, but there were a million other girls like her. When she’d exhausted the three hundred dollars that Roy Collins had given her, with an angry vow never to give her anything else, she took a job in the back office of Lerner Motors, which was the largest General Motors dealership in Los Angeles. With her first paycheck, she bought a stack of old plays for a nickel apiece and read them aloud in her room, trying to recapture the feeling of not-herselfness, but she needed a theater and had no idea how to get into one. How had Shirley done it? Had someone discovered her at the perfume counter?