Her condition was that she could barely speak. The impulse that should have led to speaking was diverted into swallowing and blushing, a clotted sensation in her chest, an involuntary recollection of opening her legs. All morning, on and off the floor, her mind was so scrambled with self-consciousness that when she opened her mouth her mind lagged behind and then dashed forward, propelled by the anxiety that what she was saying was unintelligible. Each time, she found that she’d spoken halfway appropriately, and each time this seemed like amazing luck.
At lunchtime, in the lounge with some other girls, she sat in a posture of friendly attentiveness and tried to listen to their conversation, but her eyes refused to look at whoever was speaking.
“… on sale at Woolworth’s, you wouldn’t think they’d…”
“… an inch too wide to fit, how on earth do you measure it three times and get…”
“… me to the premiere last Thursday, he knows the guy who…”
“… but then your hands smell like orange all day, even if you wash them…”
“… Marion?”
Without raising her eyes, she turned toward the girl, Anne, who’d said her name. Anne was the one who’d invited her to Christmas with her family. Anne was kind.
“I’m sorry.” Despite great effort to breathe, Marion’s voice was choked. “What did you say?”
“What happened last night?” Anne repeated with a kind smile.
“Oh.” Marion’s face burned. “Oh.”
“Mr. Peters said Bradley was still selling at nine o’clock.”
She thought her head might explode. “I’m so tired,” she found that she had said.
“I bet you are,” Anne said.
“What … do you mean?”
“I don’t know where that man gets his energy. He’s like a selling fiend.”
The lounge was a minefield of female eyes on her. She tried to say more but quickly realized it was hopeless. All she could do was stand up and go back to her desk. Behind her, in her imagination, there ensued an appalled discussion of her sluttiness.
Although she’d spent an inordinate amount of time alone in Los Angeles, she didn’t consider herself shy. The way her new condition felt to her was that every person who spoke to her was somehow Bradley Grant; every exchange of words, no matter how trivial, a rehearsal of the dire conversation she feared she would be having with him. A year later, in the hospital, one of the psychiatrists asked her if she wouldn’t rather be like other girls, not always so deathly serious—there was nothing wrong with small talk—gaiety was attractive in a girl—wouldn’t it be nice to escape from her thoughts in the flow of a light conversation? Marion wanted to file a criminal complaint about the psychiatrist. She happened to know that not all men required gaiety. She wondered how many other women on the ward had encountered the kind of man excited by morbid taciturnity: the literary kind of man, for whom craziness was romantic, or the sensualist kind, to whom still waters betokened sexually churning depths, or the chivalrous kind, who dreamed of saving someone broken.
Bradley was all of those kinds of man. At least two other unmarried girls at Lerner were prettier than Marion, and Anne was as much a book reader as she was, so something else must have attracted Bradley. He’d detected craziness in her before she’d sensed it herself. Without her knowing it, her new condition made her more interesting to him, not less. On January 31, another fateful date, she returned from a protracted afternoon bathroom break and found, on her desk, an envelope with her name typed on it. Bradley was outside on the lot with a customer while the lesser salesmen stood at the windows, watching their lives go down the drain. It seemed likely to her that she’d been pink-slipped, and she opened the envelope to make sure. Seeing a typewritten poem, she ought to have thrown it in her wastebasket or at least waited until evening to read it. Instead, she took it back to the bathroom and locked herself in a stall.
SONNET FOR MARION
I dream I’m at the wheel and I’ve forgotten how
To drive or never learned. I’m dreaming I’m
Nineteen again. The car is young and powerful,
It seems to drive itself, and by the time
I find the brakes I’ve gone into a spin,
A blur of storm-tossed palms and traffic lights.
And you are at the wheel, not I. Within
You a calm capability, as on that night—
Oh, that night, when I was spinning and you
Were speed and safety both. Did I only dream