Kellie Wells

Marjorie was the inaugural elderfrump, preeminent biddy, once and future forerunner, the model A Crone, world-wizened prototype, hobbled yardstick, the primordial roadmap, Crone 1.0, preternatural Alpha Crone, blue-haired blueprint, primogenial archetype, the dawning of cronology, a proper hag’s hag she was, Crone genesis, right hoary dowager Queen, the maiden progenitor, bursitic and grizzled ground zero, the original Auntie Cedent they called her, quintessential Crone among Crones-to-come, the block from which all future Crones would be carved, crème de la Crone, Crone Fatale, the tree from which all beautifully withered and worm-eaten apples fell, the ur-ur-ur-liest of them all.

Marjorie Crone the First routinely encountered prosodic dullards that saddled her with facile and ill-fitting monikers, Large Marge, Marge the Barge, despite the fact that she had always been a creature so très petite in stature and growing eternally smaller, vertebra by crumbling vertebra, you could almost hold her in your hand, Crone bones thinning to a whisper. But large of spirit was Marge, and so she accepted dull-witted sobriquets with her usual wry cordiality, her signature sub-rosa sneer invisible to all but the most studied eye.

It was Friday and therefore the day Marjorie Crone went to the beauty parlor to have her hair teased and twisted and lacquered into a shape that made her appear as though she were adorned with a helmet of silver roses. Loretta, the beauty operator and crone-in-waiting, filled Marjorie in as she pumped the lever and ratcheted the chair to a workable height, bobby pins pinched between bright red, beestung lips, and delivered the dish on all the latest deaths, betrayals, and desperate investments. The air tacky with Aquanet, it was here that Marjorie Morningmoon felt most herself, amidst the colorful curlers; the jar full of rat tail combs; the row of dryer chairs, hoods cocked and waiting to envelop heads redolent with ammonia, setting curls in place with one sustained exhalation.

Marjorie Crone was older than she had ever been before and she drowsed as Loretta recounted how an escapee from the assisted living facility down the street—Etoile Ladetsky was her name (Etoile pronounced not in the French manner, as if to emphasize that hers had been a life of labor)—had been discovered, two days after she’d slipped past security, at the carnival that pitched its tent annually in the parking lot of JC Penney’s. There she was found eating funnel cake and cotton candy and adamantly refusing to disembark from the Ferris wheel she’d been riding for the better part of that day. Upon Etoile’s involuntary return to The Facility, it had been Loretta’s job to detangle the sticky strands of candy from the whipped froth of silvery hair that swirled round Etoile’s head. Like a spiral galaxy, thought Marjorie.

“A what?” asked Loretta through the bobby pins. This was always happening to Marjorie of late, her thoughts so loud they kept escaping the confines of her skull. Marjorie looked at Loretta in the mirror and smiled, and Loretta paused then continued her styling.

As Marjorie settled her bones onto the vinyl seat of her Plymouth Fury and cranked the ignition, she remembered she’d promised her difficult friend, Helen, she’d meet her at the Myron Green’s Cafeteria for lunch. Helen worked the cosmetics counter at the Bruce Smith Drugstore, and she was forever bringing Marjorie a well-used, lip-whittled sample lipstick in a shade she never found flattering. Marjorie had a tender spot for Helen, despite her many superficialities and her tendency to insistently herd everyone in the direction of her own desire while trying to persuade them it was their idea, because she felt Helen, no fault of her own, had been all but ruined by late-breaking beauty. Were it up to Marjorie, rewarding anyone for the angular rise of their cheekbones, the lush flutter of their eyelashes, would be a criminal offense, but, well, too late in any case for Helen, a reflecting pool too shallow to drown anything but your most trifling sorrows in. Marjorie saw the ruthless side-smirk the younger clerks barely concealed as they disparaged her beneath their breath, because poor presbyopic Helen could no longer see the black clots of mascara that dotted her tear troughs. Despite her own face doing little good in the way of advertisement, Helen was, nevertheless, the best hawker of greasepaint in all of Johnson County, no small swindle in that limp parsnip of a place, bastion of tedious respectability, where even the White Castle drive-in was painted beige.

When Marjorie got home, she thought maybe she’d cancel her date with Helen, who liked to take wax paper with her to the food bar so that she could smuggle corn fritters and white fish into her pocketbook to take home with her for lunch the next day, strictly forbidden by management of course, who had posted a hand-drawn sign: ALL YOU CAN EAT IN ONE MEAL NOT ONE WEEK, but Helen wasn’t the only one. No shortage of fixed incomes and Depression-era austerity sensibilities at the Myron Green’s Cafeteria. The wait staff always eyed Helen warily, as her silvery black hair and fox trot-firmed calves made her stand out among the shuffling pensioners, and the thought of it now made the sagging arches of Marjorie’s feet ache. She thought about how Barbie dolls are forever on tip-toes, even while sleeping, poised to wear steeply angled heels that would inevitably give them bunions, resulting in the need, later in life (is there a later in life for Barbie?), for a podiatrist. Bunioned Barbie, a poor seller. She suddenly wanted a belt of bourbon and a scoop of chocolate ice milk in a coffee mug with a drizzle of chocolate syrup.

Marjorie sat at the kitchen table with her jelly jar of bourbon and mug of ice milk. Alice lay on the floor beneath her, head draped across Marjorie’s foot, long ears pooling around her head like spilled velvet. There was evidence that, when Marjorie was gone, Alice would lie on the folded quilt she left for her in the kitchen. But when Marjorie was home, Alice insisted on having at least a paw in gentle contact with the material fact of Marjorie, who understood Alice’s skepticism about persistent existence, the way the world could so suddenly shift shape with the clack-click of a front door closing.

The spoon she’d pulled out of the drawer was a grapefruit spoon, serrated at the tip to help liberate the wedges of flesh from the thick skin. Marjorie looked the spoon over and tried to recall the last time she’d eaten a grapefruit. She had long steered wide of foods that had been curdled for her by their association with slimming regimens, grapefruit and cottage cheese, Melba toast and carrot sticks, water-packed tuna fish, hardboiled eggs, vinegar-dampened iceberg lettuce, shudder. She’d always looked upon asparagus as a nice accompaniment to bechamel sauce and make it a double.

And where had this spoon come from? From Elmer, she imagined, her neighbor who worked at the Roeland Park Suds and Fluff Laundromat and who brought to her some of the left-behind lonely objects never claimed from the lost and found, predictable things like zebra-striped towels and percale sheets with graying blood stains. And then less predictable things like grapefruit spoons, gerbil food, a glass eye.

Although the spoon was overqualified for the task at hand, she decided she liked a utensil with a strong sense of purpose, a little moxie, and she bared her teeth back at it. Out the window she saw another crone perched on a limb of the sweetgum tree. The crone was kicking her bare feet and pitching prickly sweetgum balls at a cat crouched below, the cat eyeing her in that still and calculating, tail-snapping way of cats, as if the Crone were a wounded robin about to fall. Alice, as telepathic a familiar as Marjorie had ever known, raised her head and emitted a single incensed woof, then settled again at her feet.

As Marjorie’s eyes took in the woman sitting in her tree, something about the way she kicked her feet was vaguely familiar to her, and then that rubber band of recognition snapped in her brain and it came to her: it was a woman she had once taken a water aerobics class with at the senior center, on Tuesday nights, bone dry sense of humor, bright eyes the color of sea glass, shared disdain for over-zealous authority (the aerobics instructor always made a point of checking to see that everyone had wetted themselves down in the shower, a pool rule, before walking down the ramp and into the shallow end, a routine that made both Marjorie and Etoile roll their eyes at one another as they dripped performatively in the instructor’s direction). Etoile! This was the same woman whose hair Loretta had recently been called in to rescue from its run-in with spun sugar, Etoile Ladetsky. And it came to her, too, that Etoile had enrolled in that class at the urging of her family, who worried the death of Etoile’s longtime companion—what was her name? Penelope? Giselle? Meg? Peg, that was it!—would be more than her well-bent body could bear if she didn’t get a little exercise (Etoile had remarked to Marjorie that people were always maundering on excitedly about exercise, as though it were the cure for being human, short-sighted and self-sabotaging, full of soft tissue and vulnerability). Peg had been a chemist and a crack chess player Etoile had told her as they circled their arms in the water. And a lover of Ferris wheels. And funnel cakes. And cotton candy.

Marjorie was feeling the spinning heat of the bourbon wind through her  limbs, a pleasant burn that always made her feel like a bubble of molten glass at the end of a glassblower’s blowpipe, braced to hold the shape of a warm exhalation. She could see now that Etoile was looking in the direction of the kitchen, as the evening light began to briefly empurple the sky behind her.

Marjorie Crone placed a dollop of ice milk in her mouth and coaxed it from the bowl of the spoon onto her tongue, then got up and set the mug inside the freezer, the jelly jar in the sink. She looked at Alice and saw her milky eyes swivel upward and she thought then about this unorthodox planet, once thought to be a wandering star wandering lonely in the vast expanse, imagined it spun from a whirling barrel of blue-green-white-brown strands of energy, slowly accumulating into more than just an intriguing idea, this celestial seizure, bursting into being like a breast from a too-tight bodice, then settling onto its tiny perch in the solar system, the solar system flumping itself with thermonuclear flair onto its designated roost in the galaxy, the galaxy rolling around amidst other galaxies, occasionally colliding in an electromagnetic game of ringtaw, galaxies enrobed in galaxies encased in infinitudes swimming inside the universe. Imagining the Great Ubiquity always caused Marjorie to sneeze, and Alice raised her head, trying to decide if she was going to need to pull her body up to standing. Marjorie had read once that dogs sneeze when playing with other dogs to communicate that their growling and paw-thwacking was just friendly dog theatre, sneeze-sneeze, pals for life. She made a brief study of the sneezing of humans and was disappointed to determine that human sneezing, on the other hand, is always earnest, frequently seasonal, and never friendly.

Marjorie walked out the kitchen door and into the sideyard, Alice at her heels, glorious ears gently aflap. The cat had grown bored with the amount of time it was taking this sick bird, wounded star Etoile Ladetsky, to drop from her perch and had gone in search of an easier quarry. Marjorie saw now that it was a cat she had named Smudge, whose patchy, matted fur made him look to her like a drop of ink spat out by a stammering fountain pen. His ears were as mangled as those of an aging prizefighter, his tail bent at the tip like a periscope, and one eye bulged and wept, mellifluous, permanently inflamed. She could not coax Smudge to come near her and so left him and the others scraps of food when she had some. Marjorie and Alice watched as Smudge slinked toward the storm drain, which had become a subway system for the safe passage of all the stray cats in the neighborhood, a place the coyotes didn’t venture.

Marjorie sat down at the picnic table and regarded Etoile, who pitched at her a sweetgum ball. Marjorie, who was a dexterous centerfielder for the intramural softball team she played for in the All Crone league, snatched the seedpod from the air, fast as a frog’s tongue snaring a moth, without even looking at it. Etoile smiled and said, “How you doin’, Crone?” to which Marjorie replied, “Can’t complain, Crone. You?” Etoile pinched her nose with one hand and fluttered the other in the air before her to indicate she was going under.

“I see you left your goggles at home.” In water aerobics, Etoile always wore dark blue swim goggles, which caused the instructor to toot her whistle angrily, because Etoile, who circled her arms with enthusiastic abandon, could not see that she was forever listing to one side, and so she often smacked one of the other aerobicizers in the nose. “We’re not going under water, Etoile!” the instructor would huff, but Etoile refused to remove her goggles, wore them to every class, and continued, purposely it seemed to Marjorie, to gently bludgeon the other aged water nymphs with her pool noodle.

“No swim tyrant to irritate,” she said. Marjorie smiled and Etoile stopped kicking her feet.

Marjorie rolled the spiky ball between two palms. “The sweetgum tree is self-reliant,” said Marjorie, “monoecious, requiring only the wind to propagate.”

“The least you could do is buy a girl a drink first, sailor,” said Etoile, and she grabbed a branch above her and slowly hoisted herself to an upright position. Marjorie stood and Etoile tottered a bit, causing Marjorie to throw her hands in the air. Alice’s head snapped up and she emitted a lone “woof.”  

“If the sky wants to fall,” said Etoile, gripping the bottom branch with her bare toes, “you can’t stop it.”

“But I can help you,” said Marjorie. Etoile tilted her head upwards like a heron, and Marjorie followed her gaze. The molten yellow-pink of the sunset reminded her of a rosy maple moth, which would soon pupate into a flaming flock of flamingoes. The world was like that, one thing one minute, and something completely different the next. A Protean mystery whose pleasure was in being unsolvable.

“Flamboyance,” said Etoile. “A group of flamingoes. Peg was very particular about collective nouns.” A flaming flamboyance of flamingoes, thought Marjorie, and Etoile nodded.

Marjorie walked over to the tree and gripped the scalloped back of the metal lawn chair that sat against it. She put one foot on the seat of the chair, which had some bounce to it, and this got her close enough to the bottom limb that she was able to grab and scrabble her way onto it. She scraped the palm of her hand on the rough alligator skin of the bark. The tree was in a state of decline, lichen beginning to enshroud the trunk, and Marjorie thought a little blood of the Crone might lend it resolve in its waning. She held her oozing hand against the tree, and as she did Etoile lowered her body onto her branch. Marjorie held tight to Etoile’s hand until she’d steadied herself beside her. There they were, two crones in a tree, the impetuous orange of evening giving way to night, night dropping onto their shoulders like a shawl. Alice paced on the ground beneath them and panted, and Marjorie thought watching old women act like squirrels might well have caused Alice’s understanding of the world to wobble just a skosh. Smudge emerged from the storm drain and positioned himself in a crouch, his eyes fixed on these two old birds.

Etoile began quietly to sing, an old song about building a stairway to the stars, a song her Peg used to sing to her as they danced in their living room at night, lights off, moon angling in through the bay window, silvering their feet as they stepped, paused, stepped. How heavenly to climb to the stars with you. Etoile’s face was bright with memory, and even the yellowing sclera could not dull the glint of her eyes, which shone like polished nickels. In front of them, through the limbs, appeared a satiny darkness, so dense with absence it inhaled the sky around it into its endless maw, and in this way the night, this night, this one particular night, began to churn. When Marjorie peered into it, she saw everything, the undulating nothing from which everything is comprised: stars and rivers and wolves and watermelons and cyanobacteria and spacetime and skyscrapers and water striders and submarines and quarks and Pangea and wombats and burial mounds and monarch butterflies and Jupiter and salt mines and pterodactyls and nanobes and corpse flowers and also, and also, and also, vast and thrumming: bottomless grief and longing and loneliness, terror and anger and sorrow, so many hearts struggling to beat, and beneath all of that, in a fissure inside a crevice inside a crack: love.

Marjorie clasped Etoile’s hand and guided her into the bright darkness, the place that drinks in all maiden light before it has a chance to exist, the place where all Crones begin and end and begin again, its incandescent event horizon, dark and dazzling edge of the observable yonder, an extended hand. And Etoile Ladetsky squeezed Marjorie Crone’s hand then released as she stepped and paused then stepped again toward the howling, the end-all, the numinous void.