content warning: brief mention of killing self and others
The Plan (Original)
Marilyn Finch was a mother of six. Three boys and three girls. But they weren’t boys and girls anymore. They were young men and women. Or reasonable facsimiles thereof. Two in their twenties (one married), two in their late teens (one in college), and two in their mid-teens (one in high school, the other just graduated middle school). In descending order, they were Susan (the married one), David, Kevin, Pamela, Scott, and Janet. Pretty much the names you’d find listed in the top twenty of the Social Security Top 1000 Baby Name Index for the years covering 1955 through 1965. And yes. They were all born within the span of ten years, each approximately two years apart. You could conclude that Marilyn and her husband Frank – the children’s father (although Marilyn had some doubts about Janet’s paternity) were really good Catholics (fair, actually) or they really liked to fuck – at least during the first ten years of their marriage (they did until Frank started drinking too much and had experienced intermittent performance problems – hence Marilyn’s doubts concerning Janet’s true parentage). But in the summer of 1979, as her sixteen-year-old son Scott was teaching himself the bass line to “My Sharona” upstairs in his bedroom, windows open, neighbors complaining, Marilyn had other problems to worry about – mostly, that she was only forty-five and her life had slipped away, and she thought she was still an attractive, vital forty-five-year-old as compared to most of the housewives on the block or those women within her small, stifling social circle at the IBM Country Club.
The truth is, after twenty-four years of marriage, six kids and two extramarital affairs, Marilyn had had enough. She decided she would do what all her children had threatened to do at one time or another in their privileged, pampered, relatively trouble-free, middle-class suburban lives but had never made good on those threats. She’d run away. And she wouldn’t threaten either. She wouldn’t tell a soul. She’d just pack a suitcase and leave.
Alternatives to the Plan
Kill Frank– Too messy.Kill the Kids– Too many.Kill Herself– Why bother? She could just as easily stay married and stay put and get the same results. But it would be a slow drip, nonetheless.
Reasons to Run Away
Too numerous to list but a few highlights:
Frank – A putz. OK. Maybe too harsh. He was great in the sack (not to mention in the back of his 1954 Chevrolet Bel Aire turquoise convertible) the first eight years of marriage. Until he started drinking. That was the next seven years. Then he got sober. He got religion. Those goddamn AA meetings. No more cocktail parties with their IBM friends. A decent father but Jesus, Mary and Joseph, so boring.
Susan – Twenty-four. Firstborn. Conceived in the back of that ’54 Chevy. She has all the annoying traits of a firstborn child. Particularly a daughter. Perfectionist. Worrywart. Wise beyond her years, old before her time. A cliché. A prude. She married (Steve) a year before she graduated college (Marist) which pains Marilyn to no end. Majored in English. Wants to teach high school but now she’s pregnant. Susan is equally excited that they live only six miles from Marilyn and Frank. Built-in babysitters she exclaims. Uh. Yeah. No.
David – Twenty-two. Frank’s big disappointment but Marilyn argues that college is not for everyone. Susan didn’t make the wisest choices even with half a college degree under her belt. David is enterprising, making more money than most young men his age and handsome as hell. Marilyn suspects his investment in a chain of coin-operated laundromats up and down the Hudson River is a front for serious drug dealing – something he was expelled for once in high school. David is smart. He learns from his mistakes – mostly, how not to get caught again. But if he does…what Marilyn refuses to know now she’s less likely to be blamed for later.
Kevin – Twenty. Average. Bland. His face. His complexion. His coarse, straw hair that can’t commit to color. He was the least interesting baby, the most forgettable child. Was it not just an accident that Marilyn neglected to pick him up at the mall once with the rest of the kids, that Frank left him behind at a rest stop on the Mass Turnpike during a trip to the Cape one summer, that he was often the kid the bus drivers missed on the return from school field trips? Speaks in fragments. Stutters. Plays sports with neither vigor nor finesse. Benchwarmer, lukewarm at best. Attends some SUNY school upstate but Marilyn forgets which campus. Cobleskill? Cortland? Delhi? Oneonta? Dull as dishwater. Just like Frank.
Pamela – Eighteen. Soon to be freshman at DePaul University. The brightest of the bunch. The prettiest too. The only one of the Finches to fly out of state. Marilyn knows she’s not coming back. Chicago offers her a life. Poughkeepsie offers her a life sentence. Marilyn is not sad to see her go because Pamela sees right through her and doesn’t like what she sees – a fraud. Or someone who just didn’t try. Not only her harshest critic but the most honest.
Scott – Sixteen. Pothead. Stoner. Better than being a drunk like his father. And probably David’s best customer. That he annoys the neighbors with his music – The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, The New York Dolls – doesn’t bother Marilyn at all. You wouldn’t know anyone still lived on the block except for the complaint calls she never answers.
Janet – Fourteen. Smart. Perhaps too smart. Not a budding intellectual like Pamela, but she knows enough to understand simple concepts like genetics and that she doesn’t look like anyone else in the family. She jokes to Marilyn, “Maybe I’m adopted. Switched at birth.” Jabs an elbow into Marilyn’s side. “Did you have an affair, Mom?” Still too naïve to believe the answer to be yes. No point in telling her the truth. But to a fourteen-year old with silly romantic dreams which will only derail her promising life, all Marilyn should say is “it was a casual fuck and I’m ridiculously fertile. And I don’t remember his last name.”
Poughkeepsie – If Hell were a country, Poughkeepsie would be its capital city. But Hell has better weather. Better shops. Better schools. Marilyn kicks herself every time she thinks about Frank turning down an assignment to an IBM lab in Tucson twelve years earlier. He said it would be hard to move with six kids ranging from toddler to preteen, but she would have done all the heavy lifting, the packing, the switching of schools. He was more worried about not finding a compatible AA group. What? They don’t have drunks in the desert? Their marriage dried up for good instead.
Marilyn – She’s been trying for a do-over since she was thirty-five. As soon as she was able to pack Janet off to nursery school and Susan started high school, Marilyn began volunteering as a docent at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Gallery on the Vassar College campus. Then she applied for a job at the gallery four times a week. A secretary. Frank didn’t see any issue with her working as long as she was home in time for when the kids got out of school and Frank let out from work and their dinner was on the table by six. Enlightened by half. But sober. There was always that, she snickered. But what she didn’t tell him was that besides the measly paycheck, she also received an employee waiver on Vassar tuition. Marilyn wanted to finish her degree in art history. The one she was halfway through completing at Salve Regina College when Frank showed up in his 1954 Chevy Bel Aire turquoise convertible, bringing along some classmates from Providence College down to Newport for a dance. Marilyn often wonders what would have happened if she had snuck off with that naval officer from the base instead of humping Frank in the back of the Chevy. Tim? Tom? True. She still could have been knocked up. But he graduated from the Naval War College just about the time she gave birth to Susan. Shipped off to a base in Southern Europe. Italy? Greece? Oh! What she could have done with her art history degree there, immersed in the Florentine masters. Yet she outgrew her love of all things Renaissance. Not that she was disinclined to a rebirth. But taking a one-semester course (American Women Artists) in her last semester at Vassar, she discovered hope and possibility through the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe – as opposed to the dread and despair she encountered while studying Mary Cassatt. Screw the domestic. Marilyn had lived that life too well. It wasn’t as idyllic as Cassatt’s paintings would lead anyone to believe. The Southwest desert beckoned like their mirages offering water to anyone dying of thirst. A dried white cow skull. A bursting atomic sunset. Georgia O’Keeffe could probably use an assistant at her age (almost ninety-two), but she was in New Mexico. Marilyn would travel one state farther, hotter, drier.
The Plan (In Detail)
Sketched out on a cocktail napkin at The Hunan Garden. Unlike Frank, Marilyn can handle her liquor. Gin & Tonic. Bombay Sapphire. She’s sitting at the bar, moving from the corner booth after her long lunch with a couple of old friends. No. Not friends. Wives of other IBMers whose nests have started emptying like hers. Except they’re lamenting, complaining, while Marilyn rejoices (silently), celebrating the freedom. Marilyn waited until Joan and Janice and Barbara departed for home or the South Hills Mall. Said she was ordering take-out for the kids still living at home, but she sidled up to the bar and ordered the G&T, pulled a dry napkin from its holder near the barkeep and grabbed a pen from her purse. She uses a half-dozen napkins, writing on both sides, sketching her escape around HUNAN GARDEN RESTAURANT POUGHKEEPSIE, NY, as if the green embossed lettering served as a reminder that she has but one purpose in life: Get Out!
Marilyn sips on her G&T, washing down another fortune cookie the bartender places beside her refill. She smiles a thank-you to the red-vested gentleman rinsing glassware and filling garnish trays, prepping for the imminent happy hour crowd. Marilyn is the only customer in the restaurant. She organizes her napkins side by side, one row above the other, as if she were playing Three-Card Monte with herself twice over. Only the dealer wins and she’s done losing. In no particular order:
- Close out rainy day savings account
- Leave before Janet starts high school*
- Bus or train or automobile**
- A big city or a small town?*** What’s smaller than Poughkeepsie?!?
- Sleep with Frank more. Let him think everything is OK. Also agree to babysit the grandchild you’ll never meet.
*She’ll adjust easier
**Enough money for a used car???
***Easier to get lost in a big city. Or better yet – Where no one will find you.
Destination or Which Big City?
Manhattan– Too close.Boston– Too provincial.Chicago– No. She might run into Pamela.Los Angeles– She’ll need a car.San Francisco– Too in love with itself.Tucson– No. Too many IBMers live there. Someone who transferred from Poughkeepsie might recognize her.- Phoenix – She’ll still need a car but not necessarily a good one. Not sprawling like L.A.
Trains and Boats and Planes. So sings Dionne Warwick on the radio tuned to WKIP above the bar. Metro North to Grand Central. Take the shuttle to Times Square. Walk to Port Authority and board a Greyhound. Marilyn will figure it out once she gets to Manhattan. It’s early June. She decides on late August. Gathers her napkins. Puts them in her purse. Replaces them with a twenty as if to ensure the bartender’s silence.
The Plan (Modified)
Susan – Miscarried in her first trimester. Inconsolable at first, until she discovered Steve was cheating on her and she decided to take a teaching position in Warwick, Rhode Island, but not before filing for divorce. She packed up and left the first week in August.
Frank – Fell off the wagon (briefly) at the loss of his first grandchild (a boy) and the first divorce in the Finch family (how would he handle the second?) but those AA meetings pulled him back on before Susan was flying east across the Massachusetts Turnpike.
David – Expanded his laundromat investments into Plattsburgh (where Kevin was enrolled – Marilyn completely missed that one. Poor Kevin!) But the fact that David opened the coin laundry just off the SUNY campus convinced Marilyn she was at least correct about his drug dealing. And of course, it was close to an Air Force base – a better paying clientele, no doubt.
Pamela – Cleaned up her side of the bedroom she shared with Janet, confirming for Marilyn that she had no plans of returning. Left with all her childhood mementos and two dozen books (Metropolitan Life and Uncommon Women and Others among them). Boarded the Lake Shore Limited heading north by northwest to Chicago with a backpack and a steamer trunk at the Poughkeepsie Train Station. Pamela was the first of their kids not to be personally escorted to college by their parents. She wouldn’t be the last.
Scott – Switched from bass to drums, The Knack to Van Halen, annoying the neighbors even further, but he also kept his eye on his little sister as she entered the halls of high school that first week in September.
Janet – Adjusted easily in her new school surroundings just as she adjusted when Pamela vacated their bedroom. As if nothing changed. As if she never had a sister. Surprising, as they had always been close. Marilyn wondered – toyed with the idea actually – if she revealed her paternity (Tony? Gino?) would she get a reaction – any kind of reaction – from her youngest. And then she thought better of it. There was enough cruelty for Janet ahead.
Marilyn – skipped her monthly luncheon with “the girls” at The Hunan Garden and drove to the Marine Midland Bank on Raymond Avenue instead. Vassar students were milling around the sidewalks, a sure sign of autumn complementing the October crispness to the air. After closing her private savings account she’d kept hidden from Frank all these years, she drove three miles towards the Hudson River and left the car on a side street in the Mount Carmel District where it would be towed before she would be discovered missing. Scott could use the car once they finally found it – even a stodgy Cutlass Supreme. And she could always buy something cheap in Phoenix. Marilyn walked down the hill and entered the cavernous station. Purchased a one-way ticket to Grand Central. Grabbed a coffee and cheese Danish from the snack shop and walked slowly down the steps to the platform. She left nothing behind. No notes. No good-byes. Just a fully stocked fridge. And she took a cue from her best and brightest, taking only a few family photos, a couple of bestsellers (Sophie’s Choice and The Dead Zone), and her newly minted diploma (B.A. Art History – Summa Cum Laude), while carrying two suitcases and a purse, heading south then west. The muffled speaker overhead announced the New York City-bound Amtrak arriving shortly from Rhinebeck.
And then she was gone.
Brenda Kilianski’s play, Free Radicals, was published by Chicago Dramaworks, its world premiere produced by Stockyards Theatre Project. Her work has been published in Brava! Chronogram, HalfHourToKill, ONTHEBUS, Shotgun Honey, Spillway, and The Yard: Crime Blog. She currently lives in Albany, NY with two cats and ten thousand books and works as a reference librarian, the closest she could get to becoming Nancy Drew.
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