Or she was. But no matter. If Marta was Bad, Bad Love incarnate, and she was yo’ Momma, oh, woe is you. She’s gone but not forgotten (who could forget Marta?). Installment XXX of The Will of Venus shows you why you never had a chance. Especially if your name is Danae. Unless, maybe, you have a sister, and her name is Livia. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Never a good idea.
Always a good idea, though, to think things over one more time. Have another look. Consider from a different angle. Any and all of which you can do, Bad, Bad Lovers, by clicking right here.
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Marta left early every morning when the fields and trees along the dusty road were still covered with mists and dews, before Danae was awake, even before the birds invaded that intermediate land between dreams and sleep, grey territory where anything was possible. Even though Danae never saw her before she left, she knew about the candy-cane pink uniform that clung suggestively to her mother’s breasts and hips, so like her own, the cheap fabric that followed the line of Marta’s thighs to just above the knee, about the dark hair wound into a knot beneath a hair-net which, on most women, would have been highly unflattering but, on her mother, simply provided jarring contrast to her starkly beautiful face, a face whose beauty was not marred but, rather, pointed up by the abuses of tobacco and alcohol.
Since the night she’d told them about meeting the lawyer, Marta never got home until after everyone else had gone to bed. Danae suspected that sometimes she didn’t come home at all–she had vague wonderings about what her mother did during all those hours she spent with the lawyer but, in general, she didn’t allow herself to dwell on it very much. An alley you glanced down but never explored until it was time, and for her, it wasn’t time yet. Danae simply knew that if you did those things, and if you were as beautiful as Marta (which she was, or at least she showed every promise of becoming), the men asked you to marry them.
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At the handsome man’s house, Marta was busy and she went out a lot, and when she got home she was exhausted, like a little girl with an endless succession of birthday parties to attend, too tired to put her clothes away. She left her lingerie and her dresses all over the room–over the backs of chairs, on the floor, on the part of the bed she didn’t sleep in. Silk panties and satin nightdresses, slippery and forbidden-feeling under Danae’s furtive fingers, rough, itchy wool or cool linen suits that Marta wore to sedate afternoon teas in the salons and rose gardens of other Biloxi ladies, ladies who thought she was married to the handsome man. Then there were the evening dresses–billowing seas of chiffon, sheaths of sequins like diamonds and jewels, folds and folds of quiet, secret velvet for winter.
The daily visit to her mother’s room had been one of Danae’s private rituals for as long as she could remember, but the touching of Marta’s garments as they hung, unworn, in the closet (Marta wore her diner uniform every day to work; she had five) had only begun once Danae realized, with a clarity that struck like a lightning bolt straight to her heart, that her mother might be leaving any day.
When they’d lived at the handsome man’s house, Marta probably wouldn’t have cared even if she’d known what her daughter was up to. But at the Aunts’ house, with her dignity and her possibilities worn thin, her mother would have been angry at Danae’s silent invasions of her bedroom.
After the handsome man disappeared, Marta hardly left the big house, but she was almost never in the master bedroom, where the dresses were. She had started sleeping on the couch, late, with the television on and a glass in her hand. During the day, Marta sat at the kitchen table by herself, smoking, with a cup of cold black coffee in front of her.
And the dresses hung on padded wooden hangers, unworn, in the closet in the master bedroom (Marta wore her housecoat a lot in those days). Some of them were draped in plastic and Danae lifted it every day when she went in to touch the dresses, to finger them, to imagine herself old enough to wear them.
Then she opened the bottles and vials of perfume ranked like a collection of grown-up dolls across her mother’s dressing table, one after the other in ritual order, a rosary of scents and shapes her eager senses had memorized. The bottles were heavy glass or crystal, with words on them in foreign languages that Danae couldn’t read. The scents were powerful, heady and overbearing, and if you left two bottles unstopped the smells clashed against each other, fighting to invade your nostrils, each wanting to be the strongest.
Those scents didn’t seem to belong to her mother–they were for someone else. Danae’s mother was the disheveled young woman who drank too much, the tired, pretty face under cheap makeup woven through her memories of early childhood. That mother never wore perfume. The few times her mother had held her or truly embraced her she had smelled of cigarette smoke and sweat. Sometimes, Marta had kissed Danae on the forehead when they left the mansions that Danae had helped her to clean, and then she smelled faintly of bleach and floor wax, and sweat.
Maybe the different mother who lived with the handsome man had worn perfume, but, until the man disappeared, Danae had hardly seen her. She and Livia had had nannies–quite a succession of them–and Marta had faded out of the reality of their everyday activities into abstraction. It was only after the handsome man disappeared that Danae and her mother became re-acquainted.
And that mother, who was neither of the mothers Danae had known, but another mother altogether, didn’t wear perfume.
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More to come, Bad, Bad Lovers, more to come.
Right here, IN TWO WEEKS’ TIME, same bad channel, same bad, bad place…
Till then, y’all be good. Or if you can’t be good, then please, please, please be very, very bad.
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