Black Out by Lisa Unger

He was tall, taller than he’d seemed standing outside. He didn’t have to slouch to come in through the door, but almost. He dropped his bag on the floor and it landed with a heavy thump.
    My mother made him a fried-bologna sandwich, then another. I watched while he inhaled them as if he hadn’t eaten in days. He had a thick neck and broad, heavily muscled shoulders. He wrapped his free arm around the plate, gazing up every so often, as if he were afraid someone would come and take the food away from him.
    “I’ve only got six months to emancipation,” he told us, making his childhood sound like a kind of slavery. But he didn’t look like a boy, as my mother had called him. At seventeen going on eighteen, he was more man than child, I suppose. There was something feral about him, something hungry and knowing.
    I stood in the corner sullen, angry, but watching him with secret interest. The look on my mother’s face, vacant and eager to please, made me sick. This is how she acted around men.
    “Then I’m going to join the Corps,” he said. “No one’s going to fuck with me after that.”
    “Wow, the marines!” my mother gushed, twirling a strand of her hair. “Frank didn’t tell me.”
    “How long are you planning on staying here?” I asked with naked annoyance.
    He shrugged and gave my mom a hangdog look. It was so fake. Couldn’t she see that?
    She patted his shoulder and gave me a warning glare over his head. “You can stay as long as you need to, Martin.”
    “My name’s Marlowe,” he said quickly, angrily. I saw the ugly in him for a second, a dog baring his teeth. Then he softened, turned a sweet smile on my mother. “Please call me Marlowe.”
    “Sure, honey,” she said, petting him again. “Marlowe. Do you want something else to eat?”
    “Yes, please,” he said to her, and then he moved his eyes over to me.
    My recall of Marlowe’s arrival has a funny, sepia-toned quality. I remember weird, hyperfocused details, like my mother’s cuticles, jagged from her endless gnawing at them, and that the tag on her shirt was turned out. I remember hearing the dramatic voices from the soap opera blaring from the other room. But it’s as though I’m remembering something I saw on a television screen, all of it happening behind a thick piece of glass. I don’t feel like I was a participant, but rather an impotent observer watching mute and helpless as things unfolded. It was another of those moments that I had dissected again and again with my shrink. Another place where I might have made a difference.
    “Try to remember,” Dr. Brown says, “you were a child; your mother was the adult. You didn’t have any power. Your mother was responsible for inviting these men, her boyfriend and his son, into your lives.”
    “I opened the door.”
    “If you hadn’t, she would have.”
    He was right. My mother was not a smart woman, not intelligent, not instinctual. She lived in her own little world. She never saw him coming.

9
    The next night I force myself to go to Ella’s cocktail party. In spite of my efforts to isolate myself from the crowd and appear generally antisocial, an older woman clad entirely in white drifts over to me and asks me what I do. She looks as though someone sprayed her with shellac, so unmoving and stiff are the various parts of her—her flesh, her bobbed hair, the muscles in her face. She’s so thin I can see the tiny bones in her wrist.
    “I’m a housewife and a mother,” I say without the sheepish tone in which I’ve heard so many women deliver this information. What I don’t say is that I’m a housewife who doesn’t do much cooking or cleaning. And that my daughter is in preschool most days. My life consists of these big blocks of free time while I wait for Victory to be done with the various activities in her busy little life. It’s dangerous for someone like me; I should really think about getting a job. The devil would find work for idle hands, my mother used to