Marry or Burn by Valerie Trueblood Page A

though we were the kind of parents who secretly wanted their daughter back, but in this period we came close to telling Meg she might be happier staying with Lali, who had invited her. Because there was nothing we could do but get up and go through the day with her, while hopelessly trapped in the parental obligation of rescue, with Sam already wandering the house new to his retirement and susceptible to despair. She had not come home to be with us, though, so much as to be as she had been before, thereby repudiating, even obliterating, the happiness of two years. Finding this impossible, she mourned with a silent concentration.
    In the spring, Andrei reappeared. He had finally gone to California and made a movie—we had read about it, disbelieving, in People : a documentary about megastores. First Stacey called Meg and said, “You know you’re in that movie.”
    â€œWhat movie?”
    â€œThe movie Andrei made, the Walmart movie.” There was a low buzz of talk about the film because it introduced scenes of nudity into a study of the giant complexes going up in small towns faster
than the house the fairies built over Wendy in Kensington Gardens. Andrei had elected to film a long-haired woman wandering nude into these stores in various parts of the country. The furious or horrified response of supervisors or security guards, which he filmed with a handheld camera, represented defense of the status quo. The woman also strolled outdoors, past empty storefronts or among the backhoes on farmland being paved for parking lots.
    That the film, as Sam pointed out, was the work of a man exiled from a ruined economy, who despised communism more than he hated the consolidation of wealth, was not mentioned in People , which addressed its readers on the subject of the Human Body. Why must a lovely woman be hidden from the great unblinking corporate eyeball? What did the corporations have to lose? What did they so fear from the Human Body?
    The naked woman was not Meg, thank God. But Meg did indeed appear in one scene, her fingers leafing through a rack of CDs. The camera lingered so long on Meg, on the vintage high-necked blouse we knew Andrei had given her and we had advised her not to accept, her lowered eyes, the limpid, shy, music-imagining beauty of her face bent over the CDs, that Sam and I were almost in tears.
    We had never met Andrei in the crawling-through-the-transom period, but now he was back and he had shoes and black shirts and a beard grayer than Sam’s and a Saab. He was a success.
    He came every few days with books and videos and flowers and plants for Meg. Orchids, impossible to keep alive, spilled over the dresser in the bedroom where she slept in the painted iron bed of her childhood. All she did through the summer, and the two more quarters she took off from school, was sit on the porch with the same book in her hands, none of those Andrei kept finding for her, but Kevin’s novel.

    Andrei was dressing in black cashmere sweaters, taking vitamins and St. John’s wort, and drinking wheatgrass. He had put away any notion of the international Jewish conspiracy. He seemed to have rid himself of much of his original personality, certainly those things that had made Sam call him borderline—though not his obsessive notions about Meg.
    By the time Meg folded up Kevin’s shirts for Goodwill and found herself another apartment, a year had limped away. We swallowed our tears as she got into the Saab with Andrei and waved goodbye to us.
    â€œDo you think she’ll marry the guy?” Sam croaked. I said no. Of course she was only thirty-seven years old, and anything could happen. Not that she wasn’t involved with Andrei; she was, by then. We had seen her cross from bare toleration of him—with his bitter asides, his sneers in Russian, his tender glances and sudden indrawn breaths of impatience, his palliating trinkets—to musing smiles as she listened to him.
    Would