Her first Christmas alone wasn’t so bad that it didn’t later seem good. A girl in the Lerner back office had invited her to dinner with her family, but she’d had enough of other families’ Christmases. In the afternoon, she rode the streetcar to the end of the line in Santa Monica and sat by herself on a bench by the water, parceling out her cigarettes, writing in her diary. She read the entry from exactly one year earlier, when Dick Stabler had given her a silverplate chain and she’d given him a leather-bound volume of Khalil Gibran and her longing for his touch had colored every minute. The weather in Santa Monica was fine, the far snow-capped peaks floating bodyless above the winter haze. Everything seemed more or less in balance. A breeze from the east kept the marine layer offshore, and the sun’s downward progress was made tolerable, less alarmingly a reminder of life escaping from her, by the timeless repetition of the waves, their breathlike breaking on the wide, flat beach. The pressure that was lately always in her head, the loneliness and something less definable, a low-grade dread, was balanced by her outward composure. She was a girl interesting enough to herself to sit alone, pretty enough to draw glances from men walking by with their families, tough enough that no one bothered her for long, and smart enough to know that being discovered while sitting on a bench was just a daydream. When the sun finally sank into fog, she walked to the first diner she found open and ate pressed turkey with canned gravy, potato puree, a slice of cranberry jelly.
“Marion?” Sophie Serafimides said.
One of Marion’s hips had gone dead and prickly. She was used to an arm or a foot going to sleep, but not a hip muscle, not since the last time she was pregnant. She suspected she had her heaviness to blame for it.
“I’m afraid our time is almost up,” Sophie said.
Marion shifted her weight, allowing blood back into her hip, and opened her eyes. Snow was falling on the rail tracks outside the window. The white flakes seemed speeded up by the half-closed slats of the venetian blinds.
“I’d like to know what you mean with your silence,” Sophie said. “If you think you might tell me, we could do a double session. I had some cancellations—you’re my last patient today.”
“I only brought twenty dollars.”
“Well.” Sophie smiled pleasantly. “You can think of it as a Christmas present, if you want.”
Marion shuddered.
“The holiday seems to have a particular association for you,” Sophie said. “Will you tell me what it is?”
Marion shut her eyes again. The Christmas she’d spent alone in Santa Monica later seemed like the last day that she and the outside world had been in balance. In the first weeks of 1940, storm after chaotic storm dumped rain on Southern California. The streets were black and oily with it on the evening she stayed late at Lerner Motors to type up papers on the preposterous sale that Bradley Grant had made. Sideways rain was slapping the window of her boardinghouse room long after midnight, when she wrote in her diary, Something awful has happened and I don’t know what to do. It must never, ever happen again.
Bradley Grant was the star salesman at Lerner. Although Marion was lonely, she’d taken to eating her lunchtime sandwich in an unused room in the parts department. There, she at least had the undivided companionship of a book, until Bradley Grant began intruding on her. Bradley was fifteen years older than she was, but he had the fatless body of a teenager and a face whose handsomeness was hard to judge; there was something cartoonlike about the stretchiness of his features, especially his wide mouth. When he saw Marion with a volume of Maupassant stories, he invaded her lunch-hour sanctuary to hold forth on Maupassant. He was an avid reader, a literary man by training. He struck her as being most interested in himself, so overflowing with words that he had to troll the parts department to find an outlet for them, but one day he brought her his own copy of Homage to Catalonia, by the English writer George Orwell. He was distressed about the rise of Fascism in Europe, about which she knew essentially nothing. She duly read the Orwell and began to pay attention to the front page of the newspaper, in order to seem less ignorant to Bradley. One day, he remarked that a girl as intelligent and pretty as Marion ought to be in the front office, and the very next day she was transferred to the front office. At Lerner, the lesser salesmen were rank perspirers, changing their undershirts at midday, afraid of the pink slip every Friday, but Bradley Grant was so valuable to the dealership that only the owner, Harry Lerner, could overrule him. After her transfer, Marion continued to eat her lunchtime sandwich in the back. Becoming a front-office typist and file fetcher was hardly her idea of being discovered.