Marion took the House Mother job the day before her twenty-fifth birthday. Not an old maid by any stretch of the imagination, but with her oatmeal-colored cardigan and sensible shoes, the honey blondes who traipsed in and out of Zeta Tau saw her as something worthy of blending in with the wallpaper. A warning of a future that would never belong to them. They were too pretty, too charming for anything less than a two-carat solitaire by the time the tulips poked their heads through the melting snow their Senior year.
Of course, she’d lied on her resume and during the interview. She would be the youngest House Mother by far. Most of them were soft-bodied blue hairs with wrinkled hands and rosy cheeks who doted on their girls in the manner of grandmothers. Ran their houses with military precision while keeping the oven filled with cookies their girls would only nibble at. Marion had told the board she was thirty-five. Solidly committed to her life without a husband. Without children.
“Probably barren,” one of them had whispered as Marion gathered her things to go. She pretended she hadn’t heard as she tugged her cardigan from the back of the chair.
In the end, the extra ten years hadn’t mattered. No one remembered her. No one ever remembered her. The board hadn’t checked her references or asked for transcripts or proof of her degree, and she moved in to the old Greek revival on campus on a Thursday morning.
“We’ll do a formal introduction on Sunday during the chapter meeting. Do you have anything white?” Marion opened her mouth, but the board president waved a hand at the words she was still trying to cough up. “Doesn’t matter. You’ll have time to find something if you don’t. Chapter rules. You might not be a sister, but it does a world of good to show solidarity. Reinforce the tenets of sisterhood.” She pressed a set of keys into Marion’s hand. “Front door, side delivery door, shed, your suite, and then two more that are to God knows what.” She dusted her hands together. “Well, that should do it. I trust you can take it from here?”
Marion nodded at the president’s retreating back, her hand locked around the keys.
The house was silent as she let herself inside. Morning classes were already in full swing, and those lucky enough to avoid the 8 a.m. rush slept on. Marion opened her mouth. Breathed deep. Love Spell body spray. Flat iron singed hair. A fermented, unwashed sourness beneath it all. Girl smells. Private, secret smells. She poked her tongue out to taste. Let her eyes slip closed as she imagined the dust invading her lungs and settling, spore-like, into the meat of her. It was the closest she could get to a possession, and she wondered what sort of incantation would hold such a phantom inside her. Keep it there so it became more of her than the woman she’d become.
The foyer was all marble and gold light fixtures that opened into a large dining area, a gleaming, stainless-steel kitchen on the left, and then another hallway that led to a common area dominated by an oversized leather couch and a television that had no right being as large as it was. Floor to ceiling windows poured golden light over the gleaming floors and a claw-footed table held framed photos of the somber-faced founding sisters. An ornate gold, floor length mirror was propped in the corner, and she avoided looking into it. Didn’t want to see herself in this sacred space. It was like stepping into a doll’s house. Everything looming over her. Threatening to gobble her up.
At the back of the house, a set of stairs curved up to the bedrooms, the single hallway stretching the entire length of the house. Marion went from door to door, touching the knobs, feeling for any warmth that might linger there, waiting to see if anyone would open their door and scream, a hand pressed to their chest because she’d scared them, but then how they’d laugh and laugh, and she would introduce herself, and the girl would clutch at her hands and tell her how relieved, how happy she was that Marion was finally home. They’d been waiting for her and could she show Marion around? They could have lunch together after, and by then, most of the other sisters would be back from class, and they could all get to know each other. So fun, right?
She turned one of the handles, felt it give under her touch. Unlocked. All those doors unlocked and waiting for her to finally arrive. But no. She let go of the handle and stepped back. There would be no reason for locked doors in her house. Her girls would leave them open. An invitation and reminder that she was welcome. Wanted, even.
She made her way back down the stairs and through the foyer with its framed composites dating back to the times of big hair and frosted shadow. She paused only to look at the most recent. Told herself she would not look at the composite for spring 2003. The year she’d been a freshman and full of a hope her mother would have laughed at if cancer hadn’t dissolved her insides.
When she passed it without even a glance, she gave herself a little pat on the back. She’d have it taken down. Maybe even thrown out. She doubted anyone would notice. And even if they did, she could make something up. Cracked glass. Chipped frame. Easy-peasy.
Another, shorter hallway opened to a study area with a handful of computers, bookshelves crammed with textbooks the bookstore wouldn’t buy back even though they were brand new at the start of the semester and three hundred dollars. Red, plastic cups covered whatever open surface there was, and two open pizza boxes revealed half eaten slices of Supreme Veggie. She frowned and made a mental note to identify which of her girls had befouled her house in such a way.
A shared bathroom, two storage closets, and then the final door. The House Mother’s Suite. Someone had already placed a placard with her name beside the door. She touched it with careful fingers. Traced the gold script of the name no one recognized. Marion Wallace. Seven years ago, she’d written that same name in pink glitter gel on a name tag, a diamond secreted in a corner so that anyone who saw it would know exactly where she wanted to be. Who she wanted to be.
And now, the room—this room, inside this house—was hers.
She unlocked the door, and the air that pushed against her as she stepped inside smelled of powder and lilac. Nothing at all like the girl smells the rest of the house carried like holy relics wrought in Bath and Body Works body spray. She wrinkled her nose and coughed, trying to clear her lungs of old lady. Of the reminders that her body would only continue to age. To wrinkle. To gray. Even as the girls around her never changed. Forever blonde. Forever nineteen and twenty with their fake ids and daddy’s credit card tucked inside their Coach purses.
There was a hard, wooden chair. A mattress and a frame and a set of sheets folded on top. A metal desk and filing cabinet. A telephone with faded numbers scrawled beside the speed dial keys. A plumber. A food distributor. A handyman. Someone known only as Bryan H. She imagined them in the house; their coarse, greased hands touching all those pristine things. Invading the house. Her house. Marking it with their scents. She pulled the plug from the wall hard enough for the tiny plastic tab that held it there to snap. She could have crawled inside that sound and eaten it from the inside out.
She slipped off her cardigan. Her blouse and bra. Tugged her skirt and underwear over her hips and let them pool on the floor before spreading herself over the bare mattress. Panted as she breathed in the remaining dust of the previous House Mother; her fingers hooked at the mattresses edge; her hips pushing down and down and down; her mouth and teeth opening as she screamed without sound.
Marion found the hole in the wall three months later. By then, she’d fallen into a routine. Food order for the week on Mondays. Organic and lean proteins. Fruits that her girls giggled over and called “exotic.” Housekeeping on Tuesdays with her observing as a team descended on the house and left it smelling of bleach. Landscaping on Thursdays and then Family Meal where she sat among them, quiet as she watched them eat the dinners she’d prepared, the pieces of herself she’d secreted inside. Her fingernails. Her saliva. Her monthly blood.
They called her an angel. Blew her kisses. Wrapped their arms around her and said they didn’t know how they had lived without her. And each time it was ecstasy. To be so seen. So wanted.
The weekends were quiet affairs. She kept herself locked in her room, back pressed to the mattress so she would not have to see her girls stumble home, hair limp with bar sweat and reeking of a stolen, ‘only when I drink’ cigarette. Even less did she want to see the fraternity boys they sneaked in after mixers, all of them the same variant of floppy hair and pastel button downs and loafers without socks.
On the hung-over Sunday mornings, she made them light breakfasts that would go down easy. Coffee. Gatorade. And in the afternoons, she emptied their trashcans that held their used condoms and mounds of tissue and then went into her own, private bathroom to vomit and sob and wonder what more she could possibly do to make them see.
They didn’t need anything else. Only this house. Only her.
And so it was a Sunday night when she found the hole. Sunday nights were Chapter nights, and she’d not yet been invited, so Marion used the time to float from room to room. To touch the cool silk of their dresses and open drawers to peek inside at the underwear and push up bras. All lace and pink. The color of something’s wet insides. And she would shiver, knowing they were just downstairs. That any one of them could come upstairs and find her there.
She could feed them an excuse. She was the House Mother, after all, but there would be suspicion. Talk. And she would not be able to bear it. To hear her name whispered from their glossed mouths; their eyes looking everywhere but at her even as she went among them. Like that day seven years ago when she’d come to the house after rush ended. After she’d written only Zeta Tau on pref night even though she’d been told not to. That it was suicide to select only one sorority. And then on Bid Day, when the sisters in that 2003 composite had stared at her with wide eyes and whispered that they’d not given her a bid, so why had she come? She’d stayed until it felt as if her skin had come loose from her bones and then fled back to the dorm where she sat in the dark, quivering in front of the mirror, watching as the shadows bent her face into something unrecognizable.
Here, in the closet, was a dim rendering of what had come before. A ghost set loose in the rooms where she’d not been invited.
The hole was at the back of the storage closet in the common area. She’d gone hunting for spare towels; thought she remembered seeing a stack of them folded haphazardly on the top shelf.
The closet was deep. The air thick with the dust of previous lives. Shelves with canned peaches that would go uneaten. Boxes filled with cleaning supplies deemed ineffective but never thrown out. The towels weren’t on the shelves, and she knelt, pushing aside the boxes as she peered into the dark. Crept forward until the closet swallowed her up, the door swinging closed on silent hinges as she reached a grasping hand forward into that unending black.
She heard them at first. A quiet murmuring that prickled her skin. And then the light—a dim flickering that hinted at candlelight. At ritual.
She pushed forward, her ribs scraping along the floor until she could see into the hole. It was the length and width of her arm. Enough room to place her neck along the jagged strip of drywall and imagine a blade suspended above her. She let the feeling shiver through her, her lips open and panting in anticipation, before she looked upward, the phantom of anticipation vanishing as she took in the blank space between the walls. A pinprick of a hole that was the source of the light.
The open space ran along the length of the back of the house, enough room to stand. To walk. To go hidden within the guts of the house, creeping from room to room without being seen.
The drywall crumbled in her hands as she pulled at it, ripped her way into this other, secret world, and then pushed through, the dust covering like a caul. Marked. Holy.
They were singing now. Her girls. Their voices so lovely as they floated through the notes, and she placed her hand against the wall. Felt how it trembled for them. This house. Her own heart.
Their heat pulled her to that secret room. The room she had not known existed with its secret, hidden door. She wondered which of her girls had the key. If she wore it around her neck like a talisman. If it burned her, the scar hidden beneath a pale indentation on her skin, a ribbon her husband’s fingers would one day trace as he asked her, jokingly, if it was what kept her head on her neck.
She could hear them, behind the wall, and she held herself still. If she’d had a knife, she would have cut herself just to quiet her heart. The heavy rush of her blood drowned out their voices, and she wished for anything that would lessen herself in the face of this unknowable leviathan.
She stayed there, the dark holding her in its great mouth, until she heard chairs shuffling, and then she went tumbling out of the closet, blinking against the sudden, awful light. Brushing the dust from her clothing and hair, she rushed back to the kitchen where she would finish preparing for the start of the week. They called to her as they passed, wishing her a good night, and she kept her body angled away so they wouldn’t see her clothes. The smeared, white dust on her blouse. Her skirt.
She stayed in the kitchen as the house drifted into its nocturnal quiet. Waited until she was the only thing left awake. Like those years when she was a girl. Cold under her thin sheet as she listened for the sound of her mother’s car, her stomach clenching around the dinner she’d not eaten because the refrigerator held only mustard and molded cheese and soy sauce packets, even though she should be grateful for the roof over their head. The clothes on her back. For the fact that her mother even had a job and was able to provide for them after her father had left to live in sin with his new whore.
As if in remembrance, her stomach ached to be filled, and she licked at the dust on her skin. Took the house into herself as if in Holy Communion. Her skin swollen with it. Her stomach filled. She would eat of their body. Their blood. And she would be blessed as they had been.
She found a screwdriver. Went back to the closet and pushed herself inside; the air humid and close as she bore a hole into the wall. A tiny thing. Just enough for her to see that secret room with its long table. Its chairs. The pale oak paneling and the carved crest affixed to the far wall. If she held her nose to the hole, she could still smell them. Her girls. How she’d anointed them with her own scent.
Like any mother, she would know them anywhere.
It felt sacred, on this holiest of days, that her dress was white. She’d gone out earlier in the week and bought it, her hands trembling as she watched the woman behind the register wrap it in tissue paper before placing it reverently in the bag. It was a plain organza, scoop-necked with puffed sleeves. The sort of dress her mother had never allowed her to wear. Why did a little girl need that sort of attention? Pride was a sin, after all. No daughter of hers was going to go around with her chest on display like some whore.
As she stood before the closet door, she wished for a veil. Not bridal, but a first communion. A symbol of reverence toward what she was about to witness. What she was about to enact.
It had been Jesus who chose the cross. Who had called out to his father and asked why he had been forsaken only to be answered in blood. So many times, Marion had chosen righteousness and suffered a crucifixion. She could choose again. Inside the house, there would be a resurrection. And her girls, her precious girls, would bear witness.
She’d not joined them at dinner. Had lain out their repast and gone to her suite where she scrubbed at her skin until it was raw and pink. Tied her hair back into a simple knot. A sweep of mascara and pink gloss. All the things she’d denied herself since that day when she’d opened up her bid card only to discover Zeta Tau had not offered her a place among them. She’d not been worthy of such vanities. Her mother would have called it a sin. The mascara. The gloss. Would have held her face underwater until she was washed clean. A necessary baptism.
She bared her teeth to the mirror. Wondered if she peeled her skin away, if her bones would be as white. As sharp.
It was silent when she emerged from her suite. She’d locked all the doors earlier that afternoon. Had thrown the keys out the window of her suite before her girls had gone to get ready for Chapter, their heels clicking as they hurried across the foyer.
The closet opened before her like an altar, and as she crossed the threshold, she almost sobbed. Finally, she was home.
The drywall saw was where she’d left it on the highest shelf. Her only other purchase that week, she’d bought it for the feel of the wooden handle in her palm. How it felt almost like holding nothing at all. But she didn’t need it. She’d already cut a hole wide enough to fit her body. Taped the drywall back in place with duct tape, knowing no one would notice the seam. Her girls didn’t have the capacity for such things. It was why they needed her.
She knew the shape of their meetings now. The lights dimmed as each sister paused to light one of the candles at the front of the room. A call to order and recitation of the motto. The requisite taking of attendance. The treasurer giving her report before the rest of the leadership team’s announcements. Open floor for any sister to present any known issues. The president’s closing reminders. And then they would sing. Quietly. Each note delicate and airy, and it didn’t matter that Marion had heard it six times over, she wept every time. They were so beautiful. Her girls. Her house.
It had been a mistake to rush those seven years ago. It was better for her to come to them this way. As their mother rather than their sister.
The tape came away easily. A little push and then the hole opened, and she almost giggled as she stepped through because none of her girls had heard anything at all. None of them turned to look and see as she crept behind them on all fours. As she knelt just behind them, the drywall saw somehow in her hand even though she hadn’t needed it at all.
Her nostrils flared with the scent of them, and she panted, their salt on her tongue as she reached to touch them. Her girls. That shining, golden hair. So much like the candlelight that cast twisted shadows on the walls.
“My darlings,” she whispered. “I’m here now.” She wrapped her fingers through that thick hair and tugged. Pressed her teeth against a delicate throat. The first of many.
When they began screaming, Marion smiled. She would have known the sound anywhere.
A mother always knows.
Originally published in Mother Knows Best, edited by Lindy Ryan.
