The Mysteries

By Marisa Silver

From the New York Times bestselling author of Mary Coin, a masterful, intimate story of two young girls, joined in an unlikely friendship, whose lives are shattered in a single, unthinkable moment.

Miggy Brenneman is a wild and reckless seven-year-old with a fierce imagination, hellbent on pushing against the limits of childhood. Ellen is polite, cautious, and drawn to her friend's bright flame. While the adults around them adjust to unstable times and fractured relationships, the girls respond with increasingly dangerous play. When tragedy strikes, all the novel's characters grapple with questions of fate and individual responsibility, none more so than Miggy, who must make sense of a swiftly disappearing past and a radically transformed future.

Written with searing clarity and surpassing tenderness, The Mysteries limns the painful ambiguities of adulthood and the intense perceptions of an indelibly drawn child to offer a profound exploration of how all of us, at every stage, must reckon with life's abundant and unsolvable mysteries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: May 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781635576450

Marisa Silver

Marisa Silver is the author of the novel Little Nothing, published in September 2016. Her other novels include Mary Coin, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Southern California Independent Bookseller’s Award. The God of War, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and No Direction Home. Her first collection of short stories, Babe in Paradise was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. When her second collection, Alone With You was published, The New York Times called her “one of California’s most celebrated contemporary writers.” Her fiction has been included in The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, as well as other anthologies. She lives in Los Angeles. For more, visit MarisaSilver.com.

Book preview

St. Louis, 1973

1

They are running. There is no reason to go slow. They run out of Miggy’s bedroom, down the stairs, through the living room, skipping over the albums that lie scattered across the floor. Miggy nimbly avoids Brubeck, Evans, and Monk, but she wants to crush them, too. To hear the satisfying snap of the records under her Keds. To feel the momentary pulse of destruction.

No, her mind says. Why not?

Because no, her mother would say sharply. Jean’s reactions are one part anger and two parts fear, the fault between those feelings a line Miggy senses in the quaver of misgiving that passes across her mother’s face when she wants to reprimand her daughter. It is a line Miggy can’t resist treading, the same way she must trouble a loose tooth, the sharp pain and dull tickle equally irresistible.

Please, no, her father would say, his sigh the signal that he’s already excused her. Julian, whose eyes always look sorry, whose hands are always jammed in the front pockets of his blue jeans, his shoulders hunched the way a tall man’s must to make him feel part of a shorter world.

A punishment would gather in the following silent, inscrutable stillness, the unspoken battle her parents wage when it comes to their only child. Miggy, skin and bones, hair perpetually in a tangle, knees stained with bruises from her fervent and intemperate play.

Who are you? her mother asks, after Miggy shatters the back window of the station wagon with a rock, or draws a butterfly on the living room rug, because a rock, so dense in the hand, must be flung, and a Magic Marker, its tip as wet as a dog’s nose, must draw.

I am Miggy! she says. But of course, her mother knows who she is. The words mother and father don’t exist without the word Miggy. She is the reason for them.

I am Miggy! she declares now as she dances around the albums, imagining them as lily pads, imagining herself as a fairy so light she can land on the water between the pads and not drown. Or maybe the albums are the water and the spaces between are leaves the size of elephant feet. Because everything is always itself and the inside out of itself.

A shirt. A lie. Vomit. A dream.

I am Ellen, Ellen says, more quietly. Because this is not her house. These are not her father’s records. Those are not her parents’ empty tumblers sitting on the coffee table where water rings and cigarette burn marks are branded into the wood.

Miggy digs the lemon twists out of the glasses and hands one to her friend. These are our drinks now, la-di-dah, she says, sucking the boozy sweetness out of the rind. Just like her parents do after they put her to bed each night. Alone in her room, Miggy hears the muted wail of a horn or the scribble scrabble of a piano, though what she listens for is the rhythmic bass rumble that emerges from the woods behind the house at exactly the hour when her parents are paying no attention to her and she is unsafe and alone. This is the roar of the terrible monster who lives among the trees and who is desperate to satisfy its nighttime hunger with a squirrel, or an opossum, or a seven-year-old girl named Margaret Ann Brenneman who makes no sound, who barely breathes, who is certain that she will be snatched out of her bed and dragged into the terrifying maw of darkness.

Ellen bites into her rind with tentative, mousey nips, excited by Miggy’s daring. So many things she gets to do at the Brenneman house are forbidden at her own, the distance between Maplewood and Webster Groves not one of miles but of allowed and not allowed. If Olga, her family’s housekeeper, could see her now, she would say, Na, na! Drink is not for little girls. Na, na! Don’t run in the house. Shhhhh. Your mother, she needs her rest.

We’re so drunk! Miggy exclaims. We’re out of our minds!

They wobble. They spin in dizzy circles, they flop down onto the purple couch, a color so subversive to Ellen that merely sitting there feels like an exciting transgression. Popping to their feet once more, they careen into the kitchen, past Miggy’s mother who is also Mrs. B., a confusion that makes Ellen uneasy. It is disorienting that the lady who stalks across the studio at On Your Toes Ballet School, shoulders thrown back, neck long, chin up, and tells her to run, run, leap! is the same person who is now squatting to wipe a spill off the green-and-beige linoleum squares. Her wavy dark hair is loosened from its bun; her leotard and tights have been replaced by a corduroy skirt and a paisley print blouse. Ellen is certain that her teachers at Mary Queen of Peace do not exist beyond their classrooms. When the children leave for the day, the nuns sit at their desks and wait for them to return. She thinks that if she saw a nun crouched down, knees parted so that Ellen could see up her skirt to a flash of red panties, which is what she’s looking at right now, she would never be able to go to school again.

Miggy pulls a kitchen chair over to the cupboard, climbs up, and investigates. Then, judging the snack choices unappealing, she jumps down and throws open the freezer door.

Will you stop? Just for one minute? Jean says.

But even when Miggy tries as hard as she can to stand still, something inside her sparks like the telephone wire that whipped across the street during last winter’s ice storm, spitting electricity into the frigid air. She bursts with the desire to move, to speak, to sing, because there is So Much. There is So Much all the time that even if she could spread her arms wider than the universe, she still could not hold it all. There are the mosquito bites that she is not supposed to scratch. There are starbursts of blood on her arms and shins because she can’t help it. There is knowing what she is supposed to do and not doing it, and knowing how she is supposed to behave and misbehaving. It makes her skin prickle. It makes her choose a grape Popsicle but then wish she’d chosen red so that her lips would be painted in defiance of her mother, who says that makeup is not for children. Her rage at the injustice overcomes her. She is mad at the Popsicles. And mad at her mother, who always says choose one. But How? And Why?

So she takes a red Popsicle, too.

Now, there is that dangerous storm lurking in her mother’s dark and blazing eyes. Now there is the exquisite, stomach-knotted, Waiting to See If She’s Gonna Get It. But her mother will not punish her for wanting more and different and everything at once because Ellen is here. And Ellen is our guest. And Ellen gets first pick of Popsicles and Pop-Tarts and soda pop. Which is fine with Miggy, because when Ellen comes to play, Miggy can get away with So Much More.

2

Like: Boob!

Miggy points out when Jean’s blouse falls open to reveal the acorn of a nut-brown nipple. Miggy relishes the word her mother detests on account of Women’s Lib. But to Miggy, Lib is an even more vomitous word that reminds her of Grandpa John and his troublingly pendant earlobes, the useless fobs of skin sickening in their pale excess. Boob, by contrast, is such a wonderful word. It’s bouncy like a ball. It floats like a balloon. She hopes that hers will not end up like her mother’s, which hang down and eventually might even scrape the floor.

And whose fault is that? Jean said, when Miggy made this observation one night as her mother stepped out of the bath. Miggy watched from her usual perch on the countertop, studying the curves and protuberances of Jean’s body and the disturbing hair between her legs and underneath her arms.

There are so many things that are Miggy’s fault besides nursing for so long that Jean’s breasts, at thirty, have begun to surrender to gravity. Like leaving her cereal bowl by the television when Jean did not go to college to spend an hour picking Rice Krispies off a dish. Or the fact that Jean and Julian argue more than ever about whether Miggy should be sent to her room when she throws a fit or if Julian should take her onto his lap and tickle her neck with his hot breath until she laughs so hard she has to clutch herself to hold in her pee.

Boob, boob, boob! Miggy cries, sending the words into the air. Orange! Pink! Yellow! Take a pin and pop, pop, pop!

Boobs are for idiots. Breasts are for women, Jean says. Real words for real things.

Penises are for boys, vaginas are for girls! Miggy declares.

Ragged splotches of red bloom on Ellen’s cheeks at the mention of these down-there words, but she is saved from further mortification by Miggy, who is now running down the basement steps. Ellen follows her into the cool, earthen room that smells of laundry detergent and dog. Susie, a black mutt with a white stripe down her nose, lies in the cardboard box that Julian brought home from his hardware store and cut down with a utility knife. Miggy, fond of secrets, admired the blade for the way it retracted, making something so dangerous that it might cut off your finger into a stealth possibility. The girls crouch by the dog, silenced by the mysterious potential of her engorged belly and her Good & Plenty nipples, and then, impatient for those puppies to be born, they run back upstairs, through the kitchen and the living room, and out the front door.

Miggy leaps off the porch steps, landing hard, her ankles stinging, then runs back up and leaps once more. Ellen takes an extra moment to think about how she might fall and scrape her knee and so, when she finally summons her courage and jumps, she does exactly that. By the time she picks herself up off the ground, Miggy has reached the corner of Kensington Avenue. She grabs the telephone pole with one hand and sails around it, angling her wiry body as far out as she can in order to feel the exquisite possibility of falling. Her whole being seeks that perfect, exhilarating millisecond of almost that is everything. A car honks its horn. The woman at the wheel stretches her orange-lipped mouth angrily around words Miggy can’t hear because the car windows are closed against the late June heat. Miggy shouts Aieeeeeeee! at the lady, and then shouts Aieeeeee! at all of St. Louis, and all of the Whole Wide World. Which was a mimeographed piece of paper the first-grade students at school were supposed to color, but which Miggy tore into pieces, softened with her spit, and swallowed so that the world was inside her body and her body was the whole world of the world.

Now, dizzy and a little vomity, she boomerangs back the way she came, her smile fierce with angry joy, her body carried by physics that have nothing to do with how fast her legs move or how powerfully her arms pump, but with the energy that vibrates inside her all the time, as if there are birds trapped behind her ribs.

Ellen, soft and round, feels the labor of running. Posture! Grandmother Pat announces whenever she sees her granddaughter, as if someone named Posture is standing next to Ellen and is the person Grandmother really wants to see. Ellen is conscious of the swing of her arms, of her sticky thighs, of the elastic band of her red shorts cutting into her stomach. She is relieved when Miggy turns back to the house because now she will not have to run all the way to the corner and she will not have to yell at traffic, which is almost like talking to strangers who might offer her candy and take her to a place where her mother will never find her. Her mother who needs her rest and has promised that soon she will be back to her old self.

Step on a crack, break your mother’s back! Miggy shouts as she flies past.

Ellen stops cold. She steps carefully, tiptoeing from one paver to the next to make sure, because she doesn’t want to break her mother’s back. She catches up with Miggy on the side of the house where a garbage can lies toppled, its contents ransacked the night before by a raccoon. The girls study the torn-to-shreds box of Apple Jacks, a piece of blood-streaked butcher’s paper, and a bloodier napkin, the kind, Miggy now explains, that mothers shove between their legs when they refuse, as hers does, to make a baby for Miggy to play with.

There’s half of a sister in there, she says with quiet reverence for the tantalizing mystery of an unbelievable truth.

Which half? Ellen whispers.

Miggy knows everything about the body because her parents burp at the table and do not apologize because we are not ashamed of Our Bodies, Ourselves, which is a book that instructs Jean to hold up a mirror between Miggy’s legs, pronounce the harrowing words labia and vulva, and tell Miggy to see for herself how many holes there are. No one in the Brenneman family bothers to close the door when they pee. Miggy, because she’s worried about falling into the toilet, and Jean, in defiance of her mother’s enduring use of the phrases number one and number two. When Grandma Carol and Grandpa John come for their annual Easter visit, Carol reports on which gas stations they stopped at along the way, the cleanliness of each restroom, and what number was deposited as a result.

Urine and feces, Jean says, translating. Real words for real things. She wants to remind her mother that the distance she’s traveled from the world of Carol Warshofsky’s euphemisms is greater than the 250 miles and three bathroom stops it takes to drive from Kansas City to St. Louis.

Piss and turd! Miggy will seize the opportunity to shout, because these edge up to being bad words but are not, her parents have decided, punishable.

Julian has only to stand and unzip his pants when he pees, so no one can see anything anyway. Although, one morning, while he shaved his sideburns, wearing only a towel hitched around his hips, Miggy crawled between his legs.

What the hell! he yelled, as he pulled her up roughly and slapped her.

Miggy was too stunned by the dark, dangling thing she’d seen to cry.

The only penis Ellen has ever seen belongs to Louie, her baby brother, born at the end of May. Olga calls it a vec, a funny little word for a funny little thing that can’t do much more than send up the occasional arc of pee if Olga isn’t quick about fastening the new diaper in time. But now, Miggy explains that in order to get a baby, a father and mother must sit catty-corner in the bathroom, their legs spread wide, and watch while an egg rolls out of the mother’s vagina and a little fish swims out of the father’s penis.

When the egg and the fish meet—she claps her hands—the egg cracks and the yolk and the fish scramble around and then, she says, tenderly fingering a pink and permanent blemish on her cheek, the doctor takes spaghetti tongs and yanks you out.

Ellen imagines her mother and stepfather sitting in the bathroom when it was time to make Louie. Her stepfather wears his business suit. His blond hair is combed neatly across his forehead, and he smells like the Dry Look. Her mother wears her pink bathrobe. Before Louie was born, Ellen’s mother was her mother. She brushed Ellen’s hair each morning and separated it into bunches that she tied with matching ribbons. She took Ellen to the zoo in Forest Park to look at the apes with their somber expressions. Her mother sang Ah, Poor Bird and Kookaburra, and Ellen followed her into the rounds, proud to create harmonies that made her mother smile. But now that Louie has been yanked out with tongs, her mother is too tired to play. Olga changes the baby and feeds the baby and carries him up and down the stairs, her stockings swish-swishing against the nylon of her uniform. She tells Ellen to stop waiting outside her mother’s bedroom door.

For a time, Miggy and Ellen stare at the bloody napkin and think vaguely, and sadly, and differently. Then Miggy, seized by some new internal instruction, takes off into the backyard. The girls climb onto the swings. Splinters bite into the backs of their thighs.

Did you know, Miggy says, that if you put your finger up your nose all the way you can touch your eyeball?

Did you know, Ellen says, that if your belly button gets untied your stomach will fall out?

They pull and push, going higher and higher, until one of the legs of the frame leaps out of its hole.

Cherry bumps! they cry, as the chains lose their tension and their stomachs flip in airborne indecision. Miggy flies off her swing and lands on all fours. Ellen drops down hard onto the wooden seat. Pain judders up her spine, but there is no time to cry because an F-15 fighter passes overhead, flying low, its engine loud and aggressive.

We are thirsty! Miggy shouts. "We are stranded on a desert island and