Marlene’s Severe Mental Exhaustion and Suicidal Tendencies

Marlene’s severe mental exhaustion and suicidal tendencies enter the narrator’s family life first as a stillness that seems to spread from her to everyone around her, and later as the history of repeated suicide attempts that her father had kept confidential. Her stay in the family home offers no simple explanation for her wish to die: when asked, she says she does not know why she tried, and years later her father says she never knew. The distance between that unanswered question and the vivid, ordinary details of her presence gives her story its particular force.

Referral and Arrival

Marlene came to the family through a discreet arrangement. Her parents had sought the narrator’s father after something serious had happened, but he would not disclose who they were or what had occurred. He made clear that the matter was confidential and especially sensitive. Marlene could not, her father said, be placed in a psychiatric institution because she was considered too sensitive for such a setting; at the same time, outpatient treatment alone was not enough. The solution was for her to stay with the family while receiving care.

The narrator and his brothers awaited her arrival without knowing what to expect. The guest bed was prepared, and the narrator accompanied his mother to Divi to buy the groceries specified by Marlene’s parents. The list called for forty miniature BiFi salamis, twelve tins of tuna, gummy bears, orange marmalade, and ten jars of beetroot. The unusual quantities sharpened the children’s curiosity, but their mother could offer no explanation: the narrator’s father was not permitted to tell them why Marlene was coming. She was fourteen, a year older than the narrator, and was initially expected to stay four weeks.

When the narrator returned from school the next day, Marlene was sitting at the kitchen table with his mother, doing nothing. She wore a pink dress, a bright red cardigan, pale floral tights, polished nails, a cross necklace, and pearl earrings. The narrator describes her clothes as seeming to rest temporarily on her, rather than belonging to her securely. Her hands lay on the table; her face gave little away. She did not appear plainly tired or sad, yet her expressionlessness could not be ignored. Her presence filled the room precisely through its apparent absence of activity.

The Stillness at Home

Over the following days, Marlene’s passivity affected the whole household. The family sometimes found themselves staring as if frozen, and the narrator’s mother once leaned against the hallway wall midway to the bathroom, exhausted. Even evenings in front of the television ended with everyone’s eyes closing by eight. The Family dog seemed at ease with Marlene’s quiet, as if her stillness vindicated his own habit of sleeping for long stretches behind an armchair.

The narrator’s father tried to get Marlene and the dog out for walks by setting a destination rather than a time limit. A half-hour walk, he had learned, might mean no more than reaching the garden gate; asking them to walk to the edge of the woods gave the outing a clearer endpoint. Even that journey proceeded so slowly that the narrator imagines the world itself on the verge of falling asleep. At meals, Marlene took so long to pass the butter that the toast had gone cold by the time it arrived. Her bathroom visits could leave the room unavailable for an hour, sending the family to the guest toilet in the cellar.

The narrator’s childhood alarm at the bathroom is also part of this account. He heard steady dripping behind the door and noticed that Marlene sometimes did not flush. The water in the toilet bowl looked blood-red. He went to his mother, who reassured him that the color came from the beetroot Marlene was continually eating. The episode joins the strange, bodily particulars of her stay to the child’s uncertainty: what looks frightening to him has an ordinary explanation, while the more consequential fact of Marlene’s suffering remains undisclosed.

Marlene’s afternoons at home alternated with sessions and therapy appointments under the narrator’s father’s supervision while the narrator was at school. She often sat in the sun before a large glass sliding door, brushing her hair from top to bottom and slowly sucking on a single gummy bear. The narrator watched her and eventually asked whether she was ill and why she was staying with them. Her neutral gaze seemed to expect nothing from either him or herself. He could not tell whether she despised the family or simply remained apart from it; the scene establishes his uncertainty, not an explanation of her inner life.

Suicide Attempts and the Unanswered Question

When the narrator asked directly why she was in the house, Marlene answered that she had tried to kill herself. She said she had swallowed pills, taking all the tablets she found in a cupboard, then fallen asleep and awakened in hospital, where her stomach was pumped. Asked why she had done it, she could not say. She suggested that perhaps she might have an answer if asked again a week later. Her response gives the attempt a stark sequence of actions and consequences, but no motive that either she or the narrator can recover.

Her stillness also shaped the narrator’s brothers’ responses to her. The eldest brother showed her his fish and played records; the music seemed to the narrator to drag, while the guppies, angelfish, and cichlids appeared to sink toward the algae-covered gravel. The second-oldest brother gave talks that wandered away from their subjects beneath Marlene’s unreadable gaze. These efforts to impress her register how thoroughly the household oriented itself around her, even as she remained difficult to reach. The narrator, meanwhile, remembered her fine wool sweaters and their fuzzy fibers at night, and found himself unable to sleep. His response is presented as a child’s emerging attraction and fixation, distinct from any knowledge of the reasons for her illness.

The Later Revelation

Marlene stayed for eight weeks, twice the four weeks first anticipated, and then returned to her parents. The narrator’s father did not explain the underlying crisis during her stay. Only a few years later, while he and the narrator were changing at an outdoor swimming pool, did he tell him that Marlene had died by suicide the day before. He said this while picking up his underwear with his toes, tossing it into the air, and catching it—a comic physical flourish at odds with the grief in his disclosure. He then went to swim, and the two walked together to the showers, the narrator now nearly his father’s height.

At the showers, the father said that Marlene had made four suicide attempts and had simply wanted to die, though she herself could not say why. He added that the wish had been present even during her time with the family. This retrospectively changes the meaning of her earlier answer: it was not a mystery solved by treatment or by the passage of time, but an absence of explanation that persisted through repeated attempts. He also told the narrator that he had treated her for six years, that they had understood one another, and that he had liked her very much. Her parents, he stressed, were kind people and were not the reason for her death. His voice broke as he admitted that until the end he had thought she might make it.

The account places the limits of the father’s care beside its intimacy. He had arranged a home setting when hospitalization was judged unsuitable, supervised Marlene’s treatment, and continued to treat her for years; still, neither he nor Marlene could provide a reason for her suicidal wish, and he could not prevent her death. The narrator first encounters the crisis as a child through food, delayed gestures, and an unreadable face, then receives its fatal history in a later, candid conversation. Marlene’s stillness is therefore not offered as a diagnosis or as proof of a motive. It is the form in which the family remembers her, made more painful by the knowledge that behind it lay a suffering that remained resistant to explanation.