Marlene

Marlene is a fourteen-year-old girl whose stay with the narrator’s family brings a private crisis into the children’s everyday life. After surviving a suicide attempt, she receives care from the narrator’s father at home rather than being admitted to the psychiatric hospital. Her watchful stillness draws the family toward her, while the question that brought her there—why she wanted to die—remains unanswered even to Marlene herself.

Identity and Crisis

Marlene’s parents seek out the narrator’s father after something serious happens to their daughter and they no longer know what to do. The nature of the crisis and the family’s identity are kept confidential. The explanation offered for treating her outside the hospital is that she is too sensitive for an inpatient setting; outpatient treatment alone, however, is considered insufficient. The arrangement makes the family’s home a temporary place of care without making Marlene’s condition any less grave.

The narrator first learns about her through the preparations for her arrival. Her mother takes him to a large supermarket to buy the unusual list of provisions requested by Marlene’s parents: forty mini salamis, twelve tins of tuna, gummy sweets, orange marmalade, and ten jars of beetroot. The narrator is told that Marlene is fourteen, a year older than he is, and is expected to stay for four weeks. The extravagance of the shopping list gives his curiosity a concrete focus, while the adults’ uncertainty leaves the circumstances of her arrival obscure.

At the Family Home

During the day, Marlene attends sessions and therapy under the narrator’s father’s supervision; in the afternoons she is with the family. The narrator watches her sitting in the sun by the large sliding glass door, brushing her hair from top to bottom and slowly sucking on gummy sweets. Her unhurried manner and distant gaze make her difficult for him to read. At times he imagines that she despises him and his family, but when he asks whether she is ill, her neutral expression gives him no clear answer.

When he asks why she is staying with them, Marlene says she has attempted suicide. She explains that she swallowed all the pills she found in a cupboard, fell asleep, and woke in hospital after having her stomach pumped. Asked why she did it, she says she does not know; finding out is part of why she is there. Her answer does not disclose a hidden explanation or motive. Instead, it leaves the central question open, and Marlene herself suggests that she might have an answer later.

Her presence alters the family’s ordinary routines. The narrator’s brothers try to impress her: his eldest brother shows her his fish and plays records, while his other brother launches into talks that falter under her impassive attention. The narrator, meanwhile, reads on the sofa while observing her and later finds himself thinking about her at bedtime. His fascination is mixed with unease: Marlene seems both captivating and remote, and the children’s attempts to win her attention do not make her more legible to them.

Departure and Death

Marlene remains with the family for eight weeks, twice as long as the four weeks initially expected, before returning to her parents. Her departure does not end her connection to the household. A few years later, while the narrator and his father are changing at an outdoor swimming pool, his father tells him that Marlene died by suicide the previous day. He says it was her fourth attempt and that she had wanted to die even during the time she lived with them. According to him, her parents were kind and were not the reason; after treating her for six years, he still could not identify why she did not feel attached to life.

The father recalls Marlene with affection, describing her as a girl he liked very much, and admits that he had hoped until the end that treatment might succeed. The revelation is strikingly plain: he tells his son while they walk toward the showers, then goes swimming. In the following days, Marlene’s parents send the family a hand-blown glass sphere. Sunlight makes four diamond-shaped pieces rotate around a pin inside it. The object remains on the living-room windowsill for years, until it bursts into a thousand fragments during an exceptionally hot day.

Narrative Significance

Marlene’s story is shaped by the gap between what can be observed and what cannot be explained. Her careful grooming, slow eating, and level gaze remain vivid to the narrator, but none of these details supplies a reason for her suicide attempt. Even Marlene cannot say why she took the pills. The later news of her death therefore does not resolve the mystery that attended her arrival; it makes the limits of the family’s knowledge more painful.

For the narrator, Marlene is both a childhood presence and a later lesson in the persistence of death within ordinary life. The family first encounters her through a grocery list, afternoons at home, and the brothers’ efforts to impress her; years later, her father’s grief and the fragile glass gift connect those domestic memories to her death. The sphere’s long life in the house, followed by its sudden shattering, gives her brief stay a material afterlife without turning it into an explanation. Marlene remains someone the family cared for and remembered, but whose deepest reason for wanting to die they never learned.