Mary

“‘Well, you would know better than me.’ Burton scribbles on the pad. Rip. He hands me the slip of paper. ‘Look, I don’t envy the experience,’ he says, and now he’s talking to both women in the room. ‘But try to think of it as a second puberty. No fun. But natural. Glad you’ve come to spend some time with us in Arroyo.’”

After Mary passes out in the shower, she has to go to the hospital at the Cross House to get treatment. Like her New York doctor, Dr. Burton ignores the severity of her symptoms because he assumes that they are related to menopause. Instead, he describes what Mary is going through as “natural” and “a second puberty”—demeaning language that infantilizes her while brushing aside her very real concerns.

“‘Hey.’ Eleanor says to my back as I fit the books into my purse. ‘I’ve got a crazy idea.’

‘No!’ I quickly look back at her. ‘Not crazy.’

‘Um…what?’

‘Don’t call yourself crazy. That’s a word people use to make you small. Don’t do it for them.’”

Throughout the novel, Mary bristles and reacts strongly anytime someone says the word “crazy.” Her childhood and the abuse she suffered at Clearview, a psychiatric institution, have made her deeply aware of the Stigma of Mental Illness and Medical Trauma. At the same time, Mary’s anger at the word “crazy” reflects centuries of gendered assumptions about women being more irrational and mentally unstable than men.

“It’s been a while since I was able to look at my body in such good, bright lighting. It feels as though I’m looking at it through two sets of eyes. One that recognizes it as mine, feels ownership, pride. Then another set, critical, mean, cruel. I pinch the places that didn’t use to be pinchable. I prod the soft areas that used to be firmer. Random explosions of purple veins in some spots, pebbled splotches in others. Is this really me? Where did my body go? I think of Eleanor’s perfect youth and feel a kind of resentment, as if aging was a thing I did by mistake.”

When Mary showers at Eleanor’s home, she takes the opportunity to look at her own body for the first time. She mentions seeing “it through two sets of eyes,” which foreshadows the fact that two entities exist in her. Mary claims the body with “pride”—it is the physical aspect of a survivor. Damon Cross, meanwhile, is disgusted by the middle-aged body and wants to destroy it. However, since neither the reader nor Mary knows about Damon’s presence, his hateful ideas come across as Mary’s internalized misogyny.

“I’ve never felt like this before, so capable of doing something awful. Because they’re all against me. They’re all actors, only I’m not the audience, I’m just a prop.”

As the novel goes on, Mary begins to feel isolated and paranoid. She desperately wants to feel Power, Agency, and Usefulness. The language of the theater here foreshadows her relationship with Damon, whose father desperately wanted him to be an actor. In Mary’s inner monologue, however, the idea that everyone around her is only pretending seems to point to unreasonable mistrust.

“They’re used to it. They deserve it. Without your eyes on them, they’ll go back to behaving real quick.”

Eyes are a recurring motif throughout the novel that highlights the theme of Power, Agency, and Usefulness. When Mary struggles with the ghost women, she is instructed to ignore them to strip them of their agency.

“‘Exactly! Like I don’t exist. Women our age get to know that feeling well, huh? Although’—she gives a wry chuckle—‘it’s a little different when you’re brown. In this country, when you’re brown, you don’t exist until something goes wrong. Then you really, really exist, you know what I mean?’”

Nancy tries her best to empathize with and support Mary throughout the novel. Unlike male medical professionals, who dismiss Mary’s symptoms and have little interest in actually making her feel better, Nancy offers both medical advice (a prescription that she herself has used) and a shoulder to cry on. Nancy also offers one of the novel’s few considerations of the way that race affects the invisibility of middle-aged womanhood. Here, she describes being “brown” as a double-edged sword: People of color are treated as disposable but stereotyped as responsible when “something goes wrong.” At the end of the novel, this is exactly what happens to Nancy: The FBI agent who finds her protecting Wallace assumes that she is responsible for the murders that Mary and the Furies committed and shoots her to death.

“Boys usually get to keep that confidence, I think; girls have to give it back like it never really belonged to them.”

Throughout the novel, Mary is never sure whether she is perpetuating the violence that takes place around her. In Arroyo, she wonders whether she is responsible for the murder of Carole and also the kidnapping of Wallace, a little boy who attends school at the Cross House. Because Mary is an unreliable narrator who often zones out or loses time, the reader also doesn’t know what she has done. Here, Mary is annoyed by Wallace’s “confidence,” which reminds her of the sense of power she used to have until it was taken away. Her dark thoughts make it plausible that she killed Wallace.

“‘See? This is what I’m talking about, Mary. Something in your brain is broke. And going to work in that house was no good for you. I warned you.’ She points the hammer at me. Shoves it in my direction. The exertion, on top of the yelling, causes her to fall into a coughing fit. When she gets ahold of herself, her voice rumbles, ‘There is an evil in that house. You can think I’m stupid for believing in that kinda stuff, but that don’t mean it’s not true. God, when you were little, you were obsessed with that house. You used to draw it all the time. I’d catch you outside, just staring at it. That house does bad things to people. I don’t know what or why, but it sure seems to drive you crazy.’”

Nadine accuses Mary of being “obsessed” with the Cross House as a child. To Nadine, Mary’s interest in the mansion is a sign of mental illness, though eventually it becomes clear that it is actually Damon inside Mary who is fixated on his old home. It is never clear where the boundary between Mary and Damon’s thoughts is; later, when Mary moves into the house, she feels a sense of deep belonging. The large, spooky house that contains secrets and stores the past is a mainstay of the Gothic horror genre. In this novel, Mary calls the Cross House “Memory Mansion” because it is both the site of Damon’s past life and the place where information about his victims is stored.

“I have the sudden urge to drop myself at Nadine’s feet and cry. Sob. Maybe then she’ll be forced to do something—put her hand in my hair, rub my back, tell me it’s okay, even if it’s just to shut me up, I don’t care, I just need someone, a mommy. But I don’t have a mommy, do I? She burned up in a fire, and that was probably my fault, too. Nurse Nancy’s voice in my head: If I hadn’t had my mother and my sisters…don’t try to do this alone…Barb’s: We only have each other to rely on…”

Mary clings to her independence while also deeply desiring to be part of a family and a community. As a result, she is drawn even to unhealthy or unhelpful opportunities for this kind of belonging. Here, in search of comfort, she finds herself wanting to “force” Nadine to take on a maternal role—a dynamic that cannot possibly work out. As an adult looking for “a mommy,” Mary infantilizes herself in an attempt to give herself the kind of childhood she never had.

“I’m scared, Nadine.

Somehow, I managed to forget everything. About my past. About my present. How can I know who I am if I don’t know who I’ve been?

I’ve been thinking a lot about past lives and destiny and…I don’t know, is change even possible? Can a person ever start a new life, or is it always out of our hands because we’re just running a track that’s already been laid down in front of us? Barb said they’re two different things, destiny and past lives, but are they really?”

Following her brutal fight with Nadine, Mary wants to make amends. Additionally, she begins to wonder about parts of her past—her time in Clearview and her childhood, for example—that she doesn’t know about. She is becoming closer to learning the truth about being Damon reincarnated, leading her to wonder how much control she has over her own life.

“But even then, I was with you. You felt so alone because they tried to drive me from you. But I was there, waiting. You were just acting. You’ve always been such a good actor. You’re so good, you disappear into your role. But, Mary, that’s not you. You’re not quiet. You’re not forgettable. You’re not invisible.”

Once Mary is forced to look at Damon, she finally understands who has been speaking to her throughout her life. The horrible voice she has always assumed was internalized misogyny is actually the thoughts of a serial killer who preyed on women. However, now that Damon needs Mary to be his vessel, he encourages her for the first time, praising her acting abilities and making her feel that she could have power over others—through Damon’s control of her, of course.

“‘Can you tell me what is more deserving of worship than the desert? What is more beautiful? What is crueler? The desert demands humility. It asks for great sacrifice, but it rewards by burning away your excesses and making you stronger than you could have ever imagined. Like our ancestors who had to survive without any of our modern creature comforts. To worship the desert is to be made strong and also worthy of strength. In the desert, everything has use. Because only the useful can survive.’

Let the women among you…I think, and a shiver runs through me.”

While Dr. Burton claims that the cult worships the desert because it makes the community strong and of “use,” Mary remembers that many of the women in the community talk about having “use” as a way of explaining their subjugation at the hands of men. This highlights that in Arroyo, women are treated as objects to be used, ignored, and thrown away.

“The thing about faces, he’s saying, is they’re always a lie. Even before they’re slathered in makeup. Faces make us different from each other. And we’re not—not really. We try so goddamn hard all the time to be different, to be unique. You know what we all just really are? When you strip away the dumb expressions we all practice to try to look a certain way?

Meat.”

Damon cut off his victims’ faces to reduce middle-aged women to “meat” and thus strip them of humanity, identity, personality, and inner intellectual and emotional life.

“That unsettled feeling flutters inside of me again—I am Bad, I am a monster, somehow coexisting alongside I am an imposter, I am a pretender. I think again of that clean dresser in Brenda’s room. That painful simplicity. Then a solution of sorts occurs to me.

Today is a birthday, goddammit. Today is a day for rituals.

Time for a New Mary to be born.

Time to put Old Mary to rest.

And I’m going to do it by burying the woman who helped make her.”

As Mary becomes celebrated and accepted by the community, she feels more confident and less invisible. This causes her to treat her birthday as the “second puberty” that Dr. Burton described—a coming of age that will empower her to seize control over those around her in the way she wants to. However, Mary isn’t fully under the sway of Damon; instead, she decides to bury Nadine first as a way of saying goodbye to the old version of herself.

“I think it’s pretty understandable we’re all a bit skittish when it comes to big-city lawmen. Not just because of what they did to our prophet. But because of what they represent. The Laws of Man. The Laws of the Outside. But we reject man’s government, do we not? We reject the Outside!”

As the cult’s ritual begins, Dr. Burton opines on why Arroyo feeds on isolation. He claims that this is because of religious conviction; in reality, by rejecting “The Laws of the Outside,” Burton is allowed to have as much power over the flock as he wants. Ironically, it is not someone from the outside that undoes his reign; it is the newly empowered ghosts of women whom Damon killed.

“‘She has served her use,’ Burton replies.

The crowd sighs in echo: ‘She has served her use!’

‘No longer the girl, no longer the lover, no longer the mother. Her moon has moved, and this is her final gift to us!’”

The cult’s harvest ritual involves sexually assaulting and murdering middle-aged women whom they deem no longer desirable to society. The chant reinforces the idea that women’s main function is to be the objects of male desire; nowhere does the chant acknowledge that the women themselves may have sexual interests outside of their ability to procreate. Expressing their own needs and desires makes middle-aged women uncontrollable and thus dangerous.

“Damon Cross? Wasn’t shit. He wasn’t a great man. You know who was? My father. My father, who took all of Cross’s bullshit and turned it into a religion. Who knew the hicks and rubes in this town would make him king as long as he gave them permission to blow off a little steam. That’s my legacy. You ask me if I’m a real doctor? If the Cross House is a real hospital? It is, but fuck all that. What you really tried to mess with? Is a king.”

When Dr. Burton tries to kill Mary in the desert, he admits that he does not care about Damon—he only cares about power. Mary’s actions and her existence as Damon’s host threaten that power, leading Burton to try to get rid of her.

“No, fuck that, I don’t need his rage, my rage is enough, it is complete and total on its own.”

As Mary begins to burn alive in the desert, she instinctively turns to Damon for help. However, she reminds herself that she is powerful enough on her own, which indicates that she is beginning to realize that she doesn’t need Damon anymore. However, her attempt to go it alone is misguided: Her “rage” is not actually “enough,” and she needs the assistance of the Furies to really enact her revenge.

“Now that I really picture the layout of the house, I can place this secret room as near the exact middle of the mansion’s two primary identities: the school and the hospital. As I step into the room, that fact makes a strange sense to me. This room of horror exists as a sort of nexus—between education and innocence and science and death. It’s as if those all of these things are truly just words. Facades. Because they all wind up here, in the place where victims are tabulated and where gory trophies sit in unseen display.”

Like the prototypical Gothic horror mansion, the Cross House contains multitudes. It is the site of birth, death, knowledge, and exploration. In many ways, the house represents everything that Mary contains, emphasizing her power.

“I remember the cactus wand, the stirrups, imagining that invasion. Burton’s cruel, mocking voice telling me how it could have—would have—been me. How men are allowed to forget what it’s like to have a body.”

Mary and Nadine were supposed to be the sacrifices at the harvest. The fact that she came so close to death and somehow avoided it makes it clear that she is never allowed to forget that she has a body. Unlike men, who do not contend with feeling threatened in many circumstances, Mary and women like her are always aware that they are not in complete control of their bodily autonomy.

“I am.

‘Huh,’ I say to the room. ‘You know, I never noticed it before, but…that’s a complete sentence, isn’t it?’

All this time…I never considered that.”

For the majority of the novel, Mary tries to finish the sentence “I am…” However, she realizes that this is already a sentence in and of itself: She has always been a person with power even before Damon revealed himself.

“‘See what you can do?’ I say.

She does see. They all do. They strain like hounds to be let loose.

‘Go. And know that, wherever you go, I see you.’”

Mary allows and encourages the ghost women to violently kill almost everyone in town. When she first arrived in town, they were purposeless and thus inactive. Now, they are powered by her sight and attention, and she restores their agency by giving them the mission to explore and reach their full potential.

“I can hear them even now in my bedroom upstairs. It’s bad acting. They’re performing the roles of the Pursued in some cheap drama.”

Before the ghost women attacked them, the men in town acted invincible. However, now they are taking on the role of “victim,” which feels fake to Mary, who believes that the men have gotten what they deserve.