Maryanne

When I first meet Marco, he’s perched on the roof of Mel’s Auto Body Shop, crouched like a bird of prey ready to swoop. He’s a small kid, nine or ten years old, and I wouldn’t even notice him except that he’s up there against the bright blue of the sky with a mirror in his hand, trying to catch and reflect the rays of the sun. I stop, put down my bag, then look up. “Hey, kid,” I shout, “what are you doing up there?” 

“Sending messages to foreigners who don’t have phones—‘Help, I am in trouble.’”

“What trouble?” I glint up into the sun. “What foreigners?”

Marco tries to whisper back to me, but because he’s perched two stories up into the sky, his whisper sounds more like a hushed shout. “There are foreigners all over this country who read messages sent by the reflection of the sun into mirrors. They have no other way to communicate. Didn’t you know that?”

Before I can think of what to say back, Marco has scooted down the flagpole next to the auto body shop and is standing in front of me, looking up quizzically. A tuft of wiry, dark hair sticks up two inches above his forehead, and a large grease smudge stains one of his cheeks.

He puts his hand out, smiles shyly, then says, “Name’s Marcus Aurelius DeLorenzo.”

“Marcus Aurelius?” I say. “Like the emperor?”

“Don’t know about that. But you can call me Marco. We’re new here. My dad works in the shop back there.” Marco points to a sea of fenders, car doors, bumpers, chrome strips.

“Nice to meet you, Marco. I’m Maryanne. Me and my boyfriend, Billy, live here in the warehouse.” I gesture toward the gray, boxy structure next to the shop.

“Help you with your stuff?” he offers.

* * *

Billy’s on an extended trip to Louisiana to bury his grandmother, and I don’t have much to do with him gone, so I spend a lot of time with Marco at my kitchen table in the warehouse, where he tells me all kinds of strange and fantastical stories, also known as lies. In one story Marco runs into a burning house after the firemen give up on it to rescue a baby from a crib. “Marco,” I say, “I’ve heard that story before. Everyone has.”

“She was a sweet thing,” he says. “Sound asleep when I got to her. I didn’t even wake her charging through the flames like I did.”

Another story involves Marco’s aunt—“Funny, she has the same name as you, Zia Maryanne”—who fell into a well back in Italy. According to Marco, it took a week to lift his aunt out of the well, and because he was the only one small enough to fit in the dark hole, he brought her food twice a day until the authorities managed to pull her out.

“Marco,” I say, “Maryanne isn’t even an Italian name. Plus you never lived in Italy!”

“I was born there,” he says, which may or may not be true, I’m not sure.

When I ask Marco where his mom is, that’s when the light leaves his eyes, and his face scrunches up into a question mark. “Maybe one day,” he says, “she’ll answer the messages I send through the mirror.”

* * *

Every day when I come home from working at About Face, the cosmetics store at the mall, Marco is outside the auto shop, waiting for me. One day in the kitchen, after I give him milk and cookies, he pulls something out of his backpack. It takes a moment for me to register what it is, but eventually I can see that it’s a small plastic chess set, the kind that folds up so you can take it anywhere with you.

“You play?” Marco asks me.

“I could learn.”

There’s a lot of strategy to the game of chess, I can tell that immediately, but the basic moves aren’t hard to learn and I’m a quick study. “The most important thing you need to know,” Marco tells me, “is that the queen is the most powerful piece on the board.”

“More powerful than the king?”

“The king’s the most important.” Marco’s voice drops. “But the queen’s got more power.”

* * *

“That,” I tell the old gray woman at the cosmetics counter in front of me, “is a lovely color on you.”

“You think so?” She looks at herself in the mirror I hold out.

“Absolutely. As if it was made just for you.” I look closely at the woman then and realize that it actually is a good color on her, strange but fitting. Usually women that old can’t wear pink, but this shade of pink changes her gray eyes into green and her gray skin back into flesh. I don’t say any of that, of course—they trained me better than that at the Contemporary College of Cosmetology.

“I’ll take it,” she says. “You know”—she puts the lipstick into her purse—“usually women my age can’t wear pink, but there’s something different about this color.”

Before she leaves, the woman asks if I do makeup.

“My specialty,” I tell her.

“Would you . . . ?”

“I’d be happy to.” I open my appointment book.

“Are you available next Tuesday at two o’clock?” she asks.

I pick up a pencil to write her name in my book, and that’s when she says, “Night. Mrs. Agnes Night.”

“Night,” I respond, “as in night falls fast on the City of Angel Wings. That’s a line from one of my boyfriend’s poems.”

She smiles. “No. Knight, as in my black knight takes your white one on the chess board.”

“That’s strange,” I say. “A coincidence.”

“What’s that?” She looks at the name tag I wear on my cosmetics counter smock. “Maryanne?”

“I’m just now learning to play chess. It’s funny how the knight moves. Two and one. One and two. Leaping over anything in its path. Different from all the other pieces.”

She’s looking away from me out the window into the distance when she says, “Yes, you’re right, the knight indeed moves in a unique way. His power is fickle, though, diminishing with time. Unlike the queen. Next Tuesday, then.” She snaps her purse shut.

* * *

Three days after meeting Marco, I have my first encounter with his dad, Luigi. I come home from work late on a Friday to see a string of lights strung across Mel’s yard. It’s a homey touch for an auto body shop, so I stop to look.

“You the one playing chess with Marco?” I jump at the sound of the gravelly voice because even though it’s near me, I didn’t see or hear anyone approach. The voice is from the other side of the chain-link fence separating the back of the warehouse from Mel’s, and by the time I see a face and make out that it belongs to Marco’s dad, he’s too close to me, his left cheek pressed against the metal diamonds of the fence.

“Yeah.” I back away and start to say something like I hope that’s okay or I hope you don’t mind, but he interrupts me.

“He’s all yours.” He laughs then, a sound like a screeching bird, but I don’t understand what’s funny. “Just don’t get your hopes up,” he says. “No telling how long we’ll stick around.”

It’s then that I see a bottle of something in Luigi’s hand, some kind of alcohol: not tequila, too dark for that, whiskey, maybe. I can smell it, too, a strong, stale smell coming not just from Luigi’s breath, but from his entire body. It’s the same smell my Uncle Paddy used to carry with him everywhere he went. Until he drowned in the Los Angeles River, that is, in water that didn’t seem deep enough to do the job. Accidental or on purpose, we never knew for sure.

I shiver even though it’s not cold, and that’s when I notice the bottle’s half empty. “Where’s Marco?” I ask.

Luigi shrugs his shoulders, a gesture meaning he doesn’t know or care, I can’t tell which.

* * *

It turns out that string of lights really is a homey touch, because even though I’m quick at some things, I’m dense about other things, things that someone else might have noticed right away. Like the fact that Mel’s yard really is Marco and Luigi’s home, that the two of them live in the back of the shop in Luigi’s beat-up Ford station wagon, surrounded day and night by all those auto body parts, and that they go together every other day to the Y to take showers and clean up as best they can.

I discover all that over a few hours on a Sunday when I come home early in the morning after spending the night at my grandma’s house and see Luigi getting out of the beat-up Ford, yawning, stretching, shielding his eyes from the sun, nursing a whiskey hangover, I imagine. It’s immediately clear to me that neither Luigi nor Marco has been anywhere else to sleep the night before, and then it hits me like a pie in the face that they haven’t gone anywhere since I first met Marco. I give Luigi an evil-eye look, wanting to say something, but in the end I don’t know what to say.

Later that day I question Marco, and he makes up something about the situation being temporary, “Until the remodel of our bungalow is finished,” but I’ve gotten used to Marco’s lies by then. When he tells me about using the facilities at the YMCA, describing them like they are part of some fancy country club, I say, “Showers at the Y! What kind of father/son outing is that?”

He doesn’t respond.

“A lousy one,” I answer my own question.

* * *

When things are slow at About Face, I think about Marco’s situation. A kid should have a home, I think, at the very least. I mean, it’s hard enough being a kid with a home and a mom and a dad, or a home, a mom, a nanna, and a crazy sister, like me when I was growing up. Imagine being a kid with just a dad and a station wagon! At least Marco has the chess set. When he’s playing chess, I can tell he doesn’t think about much else—not the mirror, the messages, his dad, not even his mom.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Knight starts coming into About Face almost every other day. She always asks for me; she won’t let anyone else do her makeup. The gray of her face is fading into beige-gray, and I worry that one day she’ll disappear completely. The skin on her face is beginning to feel not so much like skin either. And it’s not just old age. I know old age. When I was studying for my cosmetology license, I had to practice on real people, Nanna Rose being as real as they get. Her skin was old but it was still skin. With Mrs. Knight it’s like she’s got something else covering her up besides skin. It’s hard to find a color and a texture that mixes with rough gray to make smooth flesh again, but when I’m bored at work with nothing else to do, thinking about Marco, I make a special foundation for Mrs. Knight.

One day after I finish her makeup, I watch as she moves thick strands of gray hair away from her forehead. That’s when I realize her hair is the most striking thing about her: thick, wavy, like water falling. “You have beautiful hair,” I tell her.

She looks down at her hands folded in her lap. “Thank you, Maryanne. I’d already given them my breasts. I didn’t want to give them anything else. They think I’m crazy, but maybe you will understand?” What I understand immediately is that Mrs. Knight is trying to tell me something important about herself and her life, but I don’t want to hear it. What with Billy still gone and the uncertainty around Marco, there’s no space in me for Mrs. Knight and her problems.

* * *

I’m not a big drinker, like some people I know, but one night I go to the Sandstorm Bar with my friend Sofi, who I call So Fine because she is, and I can’t help it, I drink too much. When I come home, I don’t know what makes me do it. Maybe it’s not Luigi’s fault that he and Marco are living in a station wagon in Mel’s backyard. Maybe there’s a long history of bad luck that I know nothing about. But one thing I know for sure is that none of it is Marco’s fault. It’s late but I don’t care. I stand on my side of the fence, shaking it back and forth, making noise. “Hey, you, Luigi,” I shout. “Wake up. This isn’t right. You’ve got a son to think about. Get yourself a home. Put a roof over Marco’s head.”

And then, of all the strange things in the world, I start to cry, a big-time cry, the tears slow and fat, the first time I’ve cried in years. My eyes well up like a river rising over the banks in a flood. And I don’t even know why I’m crying. I read an article once that said sadness can make you feel like you’re in solitary confinement with grief, and the best thing to do is find other people to help you through it. The thing is, though, I don’t feel like I’m in solitary confinement with grief but rather that I’m hovering over solitary confinement with grief. The real people in solitary confinement are Marco and Mrs. Knight, and when I look down I see the two of them sitting at a table on one side of a chess set, facing an enemy I can’t see.

* * *

By mid-August we are under siege, held hostage by a heat wave that crashes down on the City of Angels. I become, like my sister, Deirdre, who wants to be a nun, religious too, praying daily for a slight breeze to blow in softly from the ocean, sway its way into East LA. When I’m not at About Face, I take Marco with me on a quest for air-conditioning. The public library nearest us, on the corner of Crescent and Flower Drive, serves as our home away from home. Marco becomes obsessed with reading Huckleberry Finn. He checks it out, reads it fast, and then keeps reading it again and again. I imagine him imagining himself as Huck on the river, exploring the world, saving Jim from slavery. Mostly I think he imagines himself as Huck faking his own death, escaping his dad. He tries out some of the vocabulary from the book on me, stuff like, “Maryanne, did your mom or dad ever whale you one?”

“Whale?” I say. “What do you mean?”

“You know, hit you real hard?”

I look at Marco then and gently reach my hand out as if to bring him toward me, but he jerks his body away from me and says, “Hey, I was just asking!”

I have yet to beat Marco at a game of chess, so at the library I go to the games section and make my selection: Beginning Chess; Girls and Chess; Chess for Everyone; It’s Never Too Late to Learn to Play a Good Game of Chess.

It feels as if Billy has been in Louisiana forever, and sometimes I wonder if he’s even coming back. I miss two things about him the most: the touch of his body against mine and the poetry he writes on the walls of the warehouse. We talk almost every night on the phone, and I’ve told him all about Marco and Mrs. Knight. One night he tells me he’s writing a poem about everything I’m going through, and he’ll share it with me when he’s finished.

During the heat wave Luigi is drinking more than ever. When it gets especially bad, when I can hear him shouting and screaming, yelling nonsense, I go down and get Marco, bring him up into the warehouse to sleep on the couch. Sometimes, when it’s too hot to sleep, we stay up late into the night playing chess, the sound of the pieces on the board echoing loudly.

The heat wave continues, driving everyone in LA into a state of near hysteria. Mrs. Knight visits About Face almost every day now. “Just keep a standing appointment for me,” she says. “If I’m too sick to come in, I’ll pay you for it the next time.” I understand that it is not really the makeup Mrs. Knight wants; it’s the contact. When I rub the foundation into her face, she closes her eyes before I can see the dreamy look I know is there take over. She goes somewhere else then, to some other time and place, maybe to a time when someone sweet touched her face so softly that it felt like a feather tickling. When she’s like that with her eyes closed, her skin tingling, that’s when she asks me about myself. I decide it must be because of her illness that she is reaching out to people, and for some reason I don’t understand, I’ve become the person within arm’s distance.

“You grew up in LA.” It must be so obvious because Mrs. Knight makes it a statement, not even a question.

“Born and raised.”

She shifts her body just slightly in the seat. “How’s the chess going? Are you still playing?”

“All the time,” I tell her. “And when I’m not playing, I’m reading up on it. All those strategies! There’s so much to learn.” I think that I should probably stop talking but I can’t stop. “The neighbor kid’s teaching me, Marco. What a character that kid is. He wants to be Huck Finn.” I think then about telling Mrs. Knight everything—how Billy’s been gone too long, how my dad disappeared before I was even born, and how my mom wandered off one night, ending up on the 405 draped in nothing but sorrow and a white nightgown until a big rig hit her, killing her instantly, according to the cops.

I don’t say anything, though, instead pressing my fingers into her skin, too hard, I guess, because she pulls back from me suddenly, saying, “That’s a little rough, Maryanne.”

* * *

That night I dream about her, a scary dream with no colors, just gray, black, and white. I scream in my sleep, waking myself up, and my body is shaking all over. I don’t remember the details of the dream, only that Mrs. Knight is in it. I try to remember but the only thing that comes to me is her name repeating again and again: Knight. Knight. It makes me remember a poem Billy wrote last year before his grandmother died, before he left and Marco and Mrs. Knight came into my life.

O Night

Leave.

For the shadows loom.

Day come

Upon us.

Night into Day.

O Night leave

O Day come.

* * *

Mrs. Knight doesn’t come to About Face for a whole week after that, but she visits me every night in the dream when I fall asleep. I don’t remember the dream, but I’ll never forget the after-dream. Every night I wake up, shaking from the nightmare of what I’ve seen, and the only thing that helps me relax is the memory of Billy’s poem. It’s as if he knew what I’d be up against when he left. O Day come—I hang on to that line.

The day the heat wave breaks and a cool wind winds its way quietly back into LA, I look up from the cosmetics counter where I’ve been rearranging lipsticks and see Mrs. Knight standing in front of me. When I see her the dream immediately comes to me, like a film on a screen.

She is lying down in my bed in the warehouse, and I come home surprised to find her there. “Mrs. Knight,” I say, “what are you doing here?”

“I’m so tired, darling, so very, very tired. I hoped you wouldn’t mind.”

“Mrs. Knight, this is the bed I share with my boyfriend, Billy, the poet. Remember him?” I am polite but firm as I let her know she shouldn’t be there. “Mrs. Knight, I’m happy to do your makeup at work. You are one of my best customers. This, however, is unacceptable.”

At that point she starts to cry, repeating, “I’m sorry. So sorry. So sorry.” Then she sits up in my bed. “I had nowhere else to go. I wanted you to have this.” She holds up to me, offers me, a removed breast. At first I don’t understand what she is giving me. I think it is a dead animal in her hands. Then I see the nipple, hard and erect, and the blood that drips from the whiteness of her breast down her thin, white arms. That’s when I start to scream.

In real life I’m shocked by her appearance. She is thinner, more drawn, grayer even than before. “Maryanne,” she says, “I’m in desperate need of some makeup. And I think this might be the last time.”

* * *

When I get home that night, Marco doesn’t meet me at the warehouse door, and I can tell that Luigi, drunk or sober, isn’t there either. His wagon sits in Mel’s driveway, where it has sat all summer, but the string of lights is unlit, and there’s an abandoned feel to the place. Later that evening I hear commotion in Mel’s yard, so I look out the warehouse window where a police car, with lights blinking bright, is parked in front of the driveway, and two policemen are rummaging around in the station wagon. For some reason I grab the chess set Marco leaves in the warehouse and run down the stairs, out the door.

“What’s going on here?” I say. “Where’s Marco?” The policemen, one young, one old, look at me blankly, then at each other, in the know. “The kid who lives here?” I say. “You know who I mean.” I don’t want to play their stupid game. “This,” I shove the chess set into their faces, “is his.”

The young policeman tries to grab the chess set from me, but I snatch it back and hold it tightly to my body.

“There’s been an incident with Marco’s father. You know him too? Luigi?”

“I’ve met him.”

“He’s been arrested. Felony charges.”

I don’t care about Luigi. I really don’t. I just want to know about Marco. “What about the kid?” I say. “Where’s the kid?”

“He’s been taken into protective custody at Social Services.”

“What are they doing with him there?”

“They’re taking care of him, ma’am.”

“What about his mom? Could you find her?”

“He’s got no other family as far as we know. His mom’s been dead a long time.”

I try to tell the cops that I’m Marco’s family, that sometimes people connected to you by blood and genes don’t mean anything, that sometimes family can be people you play chess with, people you go to the library with. “I’ve been baking cookies for that kid all summer,” I try. The policemen don’t care about my culinary skills. They are rummaging through Luigi’s things, throwing them around like they are totally meaningless.

“Can I see him?” I ask. “The kid?”

“We don’t think that’s a good idea, ma’am,” says the older cop.

* * *

Another week goes by and it’s one of those strange weeks when the life you’re living doesn’t feel like yours, when things you’ve gotten used to, like doing Mrs. Knight’s makeup and playing chess with Marco, don’t happen. There are new customers at the store and no one living in the wagon at Mel’s Auto Body Shop. Billy says he’ll be home soon, and he tells me he’ll learn to play chess—he knows I miss Marco. But Billy doesn’t have the mind for chess. He’s never liked to play games by the rules. He’ll want to move the pieces in any kind of order he wants.

I go to the Social Services office, and they admit they have Marco, but they won’t tell me where he is. “That’s our policy, ma’am. It’s confidential information.”

I worry that the cancer has eaten Mrs. Knight alive, so I look through my records and find her phone number. I let the phone ring twenty times before I give up—no answer, not even a machine with her voice coming out of it. I begin to think she and Marco are phantoms, figments of my imagination, something to occupy me so I won’t have to think about why Billy’s been gone so long, what the future holds.

Then one day I come home from work, the wind in the alley between the warehouse and Mel’s somewhere between haunting and soothing, unable to decide. At the entrance to the warehouse, I see Marco sitting cross-legged, distracted, hunched over a small chess board. I run toward him and he looks up when he hears my shoes on the pavement, giving me a big Marco smile.

I know he hates it when I go gushy on him, but I think after so much time I have the right, so I bend down, scoop him up in my arms, and hold him tightly to my body. “Are you okay?” I ask. “I’ve been so worried. They wouldn’t tell me anything.”

He struggles out of my arms, straightens up, then says, “I’m okay. I did run away but just for the day.” I don’t know if I should scold him or try to hug him again. “They think they found a home for me. They seem like okay people. The guy plays a little chess at least. I wanted to see you before I go anywhere.” He pauses, looking over at Mel’s shop, now quiet, no machines working, most of the junk rusting. “How are you? You still playing?” He gestures toward the chess set.

“When I can,” I tell him. “I have to play by myself at the moment.”

That’s when he says, “There was a woman here looking for you. An old woman.”

I want it to be Mrs. Knight, but I’m afraid to think it could be her, so I say, “My grandma?”

“No. Someone not from around here.”

“What’d she look like?” I ask.

“Gray,” he says. “Like a ghost. With bright-pink lips. She left you a note on the door and asked me to give you this.” He picks up a large, heavy-looking box.

We walk together to the front door of the warehouse, where an envelope is tacked to the door, my name written on it in large, beautiful letters—Maryanne.

I take the envelope and Marco and I go inside to open the box. I’m scared the whole time, thinking about my dream, thinking and knowing that she couldn’t possibly leave me her removed breast. When we open the box, the first thing I see is a folded-over chess board. I lift the board to uncover the treasure below, blinded by the glitter of the pieces. Under the board lie golden chessmen, a stripe of black onyx and a stripe of white mother of pearl separating the sides. Marco and I stare a long time at the pieces before he says, “Imagine the game you could play with those.”

I sit down and open the envelope.

Dear Maryanne,

Thank you for taking an interest in me and my cosmetic needs. I won’t be here much longer, so I’m off to the southwest to visit an old friend who will see me through to the end. I’d like you to have my chess set. Years ago I bought this set because I liked the queen. She reminds me now of you. Enjoy many games on this board. And think of me when you play.

                                                                                                Mrs. Knight

I make Marco eat something before we sit down to play a game. It’s like old times except on a new board. There is one other difference, though. I must have gotten better. At a certain point in the game, I know that I can beat Marco. I see my move. But I decide not to take it.