Windkill

“We have cameras set up all over in the valley to film you as you go from site to site. If you watched the show in the past, you know the cameras are hidden. But if you see one, we ask you do not walk to it and make it obvious you have seen it.”

The scenery of the ‘Dairyland State’ passed by as the show’s representative spoke. He was sitting next to Cal and reading from papers he had pulled from a briefcase.

He knew that look all too well. Marilyn was determined to be on the right. This decision would not be wrong, no matter how her family felt. If there was a problem in her family, it had to be with everyone else, so her decision to place them all in danger was the best way to force them all together. In twenty years, she might still claim she had done the correct action for the occasion. It was a sink or swim philosophy, a way of thinking that had become the normal state for Marilyn.

“You will wear the camera packs for individual filming and not remove them for any reason.”

Cal looked at Cynthia and crossed his eyes with a small shrug of his head towards the representative. She gave a short bark of laughter, only to close her mouth and sit back in her seat when Marilyn turned and stared at her daughter.

Watching his wife, Cal tried not to think of how many times in the past year he considered divorce. Just as bad was the memory of how many times his own children had suggested the same extreme solution to the problem his wife now posed.

He saw a frailty in his wife that he was thinking other people could not perceive. Marilyn now wore clothes with long sleeves, clothes that hid the scars on her forearms. Four parallel scars that required a new bandage every few weeks. Once he found a razor blade in the bathroom garbage can, the edge stained with blood. At night, when Marilyn slept, she held her arm above her head. That was when he first saw the damage his wife was inflicting upon herself. The damage was a symptom of an inner turmoil so intense it demanded a physical letting. A few trips to a college library supplied the needed psychological information, but damn few answers to the problem. He had to ask himself if he had anything to do with Marilyn reaching this point of abnormal behavior. He tried to understand what was happening, where and when he had gone down the twisted path to where his wife tried to rid herself of pain with a razor blade.

Who could he tell? The way Marilyn was behaving, it was likely she would claim he did the damage to her. Obviously, he had some part to play in the way she was now destroying herself; he just could not see what he had done.

“The ‘Scared to Death” show is not liable for any accidents that may occur during filming…”