Mar 13, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
My husband is in between gigs right now. 
If you are married to a man in the film business, that means he is home, making phone calls, having lunch with his friends who are either working (short lunches) or aren’t working (long lunches). Henry loves it during these times, because he gets even more walks, ball throwing and playing tuggy than he normally does. If husband doesn’t get another gig in the next few weeks, we will invariably go through the “I’m never going to work again!” thing I can totally relate to. I feel the same way whenever I finish any project.
I’m in my little room with the door shut, but I can hear husband and Henry at the front door heading out. I hope they do some running for both their sake.
I’ve been trying for years to get my husband to start exercising. I mean serious exercising. “Hire a blonde trainer with big boobs!” said a practical friend. I have some misgivings about the big blonde idea, given that my last novel was about a woman who basically replaced herself with a younger—yes much larger busted—version of herself and lost her old life.
Do I want to lose my life?
Yes, right at the moment I do. But I also know these feelings pass. That’s the great thing about being a grown up, even a reluctant one. Feelings pass.
I also know that the reason I have to exercise is related to the fact that I had a sad and traumatic childhood and wasn’t allowed to work any of it out in my body as one must do, if trauma is to be processed and gotten rid of. I was a swimmer, and even set a record back in the dark ages, but my mother made me quit when I got my period, which rather put a damper on my athletic career. It also happened with high jumping, broad jumping, and all track and field related activities. I’ve remembered all this because recently I’ve started jump roping again. And jump roping is so hard your whole life passes before you, like it’s supposed to right before you die. It’s almost like being on the couch getting shrunk, only one is jumping. This is especially enjoyable for me because I do a lot of yoga and one is constantly admonished not to be thinking during yoga. But I can do whatever I damn well please while jump roping because just to get through a couple of hundred jumps is huge, at least for me it’s huge.
Probably if yoga was a mandatory practice in all schools and boys and girls were taught to breathe and stretch there would be less crime, better grades and the sexes would not, from an early age, be so polarized. For years I’ve wanted to write a novel where the yoga teachers and body workers were at the top tier of the wage earners, and the arms dealers, big biz power brokers were scraping to make a living. What would the world look like, in such a scenario?
I have no idea, which is why I haven’t been able to write that novel.
I have promised not to hurl myself onto the gender inequality bandwagon yet again, but when I was growing up, boys were encouraged to exercise their demons (and their sex drives) via organized sports. And girls were told to go put their feet up when they got their period and given cramp pills. I remember those yellow cramp pills to this day. My mother and I used to call them daffodils. They had a downer, an upper and a pain killer. Daffodils indeed. We always had a big bottle of daffodils in the kitchen. Probably my brother took them too.
Thank God some things have changed. Still, and this is a big still, these days, adolescent boys are encouraged to sit still while the pharmaceutical industry is making zillions off the ADHD thing. And girls while “allowed” to exercise without appearing un-lady-like are somehow subconsciously still being discouraged from speaking out and doing well at school. The statistics back me up.
Boys sit still. Girls shut up. It’s a no win situation for everyone. A weird world we live in. If I didn’t know better, I’d think this is some kind of giant mind control experiment. But who is behind this? Or is it just more of the same old, same old?
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Mar 5, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
I almost bought a dress today. I was on my way to yoga. I spied it in the window of a small shop on Montana that was having a 75% off sale and thought it had possibilities. But when I went back after class, (having wiped myself down carefully in the loo post class) and tried the thing on, it was a no-go. On me, that schmatta cried out for binoculars, old Birkenstocks, and maybe some hat purchased at a sidewalk sale of a camping store. When I told this to the proprietor of the shop, she really lost her cool and did a deep guffaw confirming that I was right.
Not that I have anything against bird watching, I watch birds all the time, but I don’t want to look like a birdwatcher.
I don’t like dresses. I don’t feel comfortable in dresses; I don’t think I look right in dresses. Though I do own one sort of dress that I adore, and wear it only sparingly because I don’t want it to wear out. It’s not really a dress, but a long stripe t-shirt that falls exactly right. My dear friend Lydia gave it to me after I admired hers. It’s from Muji, that Japanese store, and she sent it to me in the mail from England wrapped around a picture of her darling daughter Martha, at age about 13 months, when she was still very bald and baby-like. I keep Martha’s picture on my altar and Lydia’s t-shirt dress on my best silk hanger. They are two of my favorite things.
Driving home from yoga, I thought about the dress issue. Why do I eschew them?
When you wear a dress, you are vulnerable. The wind can blow it up, you can fall down, some creep can come up behind you late at night when you are out walking your dog, and unless there are black tights underneath, like it or not, there you are in your underpants.
It happened to me my first day living in New York as a young woman. I went out on the street in a pretty skirt and blouse, and wham, the first guy I encountered grabbed my tits and stuck his hand up my skirt.
Thank God, he didn’t get more than a feel.
In case readers are interested, I do not wear the pants in my relationship with my husband. I do not wear the pants, and never did, in my relationship with my son. And I certainly don’t wear the pants in my relationship with my little dog, Henry. Men boss me around all the time. My husband has been trying for years to get me to clothe myself in a more feminine mien. His latest war with me has been over yoga pants that bag in the ass. He’s thrust his credit card at me on numerous occasions. “For the love of God,” he said. “Go out and buy yourself some yoga pants that don’t bag in the ass.”
Nothing I like better than a pair of baggy ass pants.
Mothers have to watch out for the welfare of their little boys. Of course they do. There are creeps out there who want nothing more than their equally vulnerable flesh.
But sorority girls are not getting sorority boys drunk, giving them drugs and raping them on college campuses. There is no culture of rape perpetrated by a league of women on vulnerable men.
People are always messing with girls. Think about who gets raped in Congo. Married off before puberty in certain Middle Eastern countries, and divested of their pleasure centers (isn’t the term lady parts, just so tacky?). And, how can I not think of a certain segment of the male population (with the cooperation of their female cappos), who are trying to control the goings on underneath the skirts of women here in this country.
It’s always been clear to me that when you wear a skirt you are asking for trouble. The kind of trouble that you don’t get into if you just wear pants all the time.
Though there are the exceptions. I’m thinking of this very strange man I used to hand my husband’s shirts over to every week. I purchased a hundred bucks worth of discounted dry cleaning cards because I felt sorry for the door-to-door salesman. This was years and years ago. It’s still a family joke, those dry cleaning cards I got talked into. The man who ran the dry cleaning establishment and was always behind the counter was bald; he had some kind of scalp condition. He was overweight and he had a Marine Corps tattoo on his forearm. This creature had on a flowered dress every time I went in there to use up my dry cleaning cards. His thick white hairy legs stuck out from under the dress. Think of Popeye The Sailor Man with dandruff, a hundred extra pounds, wearing a dress–and you’ve got that guy behind the counter. But of course, being a big burly man, no one was going to mess with him. Myself, I was scared to death of him.
But show me a woman and I’ll show you someone who once upon a time was tried to take advantage of whilst she was wearing a skirt.
I am overstating the issue. And understating it. And the truth lies somewhere in the middle. In the meantime, I’ll zip it up, and keep on wearing pants.
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Feb 26, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
I really liked Patricia Arquette’s acceptance speech about equal pay for women. She reminded me of Jane Fonda in the old days, using the Oscars as a platform for her political agenda. And that’s a good thing. If the U.S. falls behind the other civilized nations in happiness, health care, child care, literacy, to mention a few, we still make some of the best movies and people all over the world watch the Oscars.
Gender inequality really is a big issue.
It’s something I think about especially this time of year when the Girl Scouts are out selling those horrible cookies nobody should be eating. I was a Scout myself, before I was kicked out of the troupe for swearing. I don’t remember the repercussions. My father was already dead, and my mother had a lot to worry about with three kids, her own failing health and a shrinking bank balance. Maybe she just shrugged it off when the scout leader called her and told her I had a “potty mouth.” That’s not why I don’t like girl scout cookies, I don’t like them because the ingredients are awful. If you’re going to eat sugar at least do so in a more salubrious manner, and give girls something better to do than stand on street corners or go door to door selling crap that makes one fat and sluggish. I bet no boy was ever kicked out of scouts for having a potty mouth.
The expression, “potty mouth” is really filthy, isn’t it? Isn’t “saying the “F” word,” a lot cleaner than saying, “you have a potty mouth.” UGH!
My first experience with gender inequality had already happened by the time I was five or six. My brother and I were sitting on this grassy slope in front of the house, spitting and swearing. We were having a wonderful time seeing who could lay the wad the farthest and who could devise the most complicated litany of swear words. It all came to a halt when I felt this iron fist on my shoulder, and my mother dragged me back to the house and into the little powder room with the tiny sink and actually washed my mouth out with Ivory soap. To my brother she did nothing. Boys got to say what they wanted to say with no nasty consequences. I was too young to understand that this was the way the world treated little girls across the board, even in free, open places. I just thought as usual my brother was getting the preferential treatment.
I didn’t complain. But I didn’t stop swearing either. In fact, I probably started swearing more. And then a few years later I went to convent school. Girls who go to convent school are known to be wild and to swear.
When I read recently, people who swear have higher IQ’s, I felt vindicated, though how in the world can someone measure intelligence in that way? Does that mean repression lowers IQ? Are people who aren’t swearing, also censoring their inner vocabulary? What if you are so well-trained, you can’t be angry and hostile in the privacy of your own mind? I think this is why girls are taught—more than boys– not to be angry, not to show their hostile feelings, not to swear as boys do. Girls, all the studies show, start out much smarter than boys, but by high school, even now, girls test lower, certainly in math and the sciences. This is, I sense, somehow linked to the swearing issue.
At any rate, the notion of people censoring little girls, makes me f’ing nuts!
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Feb 20, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
The flu was enlightening. At the height of it, I was actually hallucinating, reminding me of being young and taking all sorts of mind bending drugs. I was trying out the holistic method, which is to let the illness burn itself out and, as a by-product, kill off free radicals. By the time I stumbled over to the Motion Picture Clinic on Day 3, I was at 102 and felt considerably more lucid than the day before, when our old bird Manulita materialized and began talking to me. In my febrile state she was bright green with purple eyes, but I still knew it was Manulita.
My son named her, it was one of those charming made up names children seize on. She was grey with little orange markings, a pointed head and bright bright eyes. Her wings were clipped when we brought her home with special instructions on how to repeat the process (“It’s just like cutting your fingernails!” they said at the pet store, but none of us believed that line). We bought her a huge black cage that cost five times what she did, and parked her in one corner of the dining room.
I took her out first. And I remember this feeling of EEEK, it’s a claw curling around my finger, but soon it was okay. I’d stroke her little grey back and we would walk around the house together. My son, then maybe seven, did the same thing. She was quite responsive. She’d do this bird thing with her little head, bobbing it back and forth, and let out with her crazy piercing shriek, that seemed so big and important coming from such a tiny little thing that weighed in ounces not pounds.
A bird isn’t much of a pet, but a bird is better than no pet at all, and soon she was a member of the household.
We talked to her. We let her fly around the house. We took her back East with us one summer in a special little case we put under the seat and while there she lived in a second hand cage we picked up at the dump.
Back in LA at the end of the summer, she began circling the horrible fixture (a combo of ye old lantern festooned with fake plastic crystals) that hung above the dining room table. My first week there, I removed the plastic crystals but when our landlord, old Bud Riley, spied on us (which he was always doing) he made me put them back.
Then, one evening, during a miraculous reprieve from the cutting room, while we were having a rare family dinner, she flew out of her cage and up to the lantern thing, and took a dump on the table below.
My son and I exchanged glances. Since I was the taller of the two back then, I got on a chair, reached up and urged the little grey creature on my finger, put her back in the cage, and shut the door.
My husband began muttering about psittacosis and other bird transmitted plagues.
But of course, as soon as my son would arrive home from school, he’d open Manulita’s cage door and once again she’d be flying around the house and shrieking.
My husband found some bird shit somewhere else.
Around this time, his mother came for her yearly visit. She left the front door open one sunny morning and Manulita flew away.
I have fond memories of my mother-in-law who was in her way, quite a bird too. She felt, “perfectly ghastly” about leaving the door open, and offered to go with me to the pet store and get another grey thing with feathers before her grandson came home from school.
I didn’t think that was such a good idea given the current power struggle. I was still hoping we were going to get out of there and find a place where we could get a dog.
We walked to the corner; my mother-in-law wanted some cash. When we drew closer to the machine, I heard a familiar cry. And there she was, Manulita, waiting for me at the cash machine on 20th and Wilshire. She hopped up on my finger and we walked home.
I thought this momentous finding of the bird must mean money. Why would she be waiting at the cash machine?
But as the days and weeks passed, the hope for windfall did not appear. What did appear was more bird shit.
It’s hard to live with a prisoner behind bars in your own house. But my husband had a point. Bird shit was unaesthetic—not to mention unhygienic—we decided not to clip her wings but to keep her shut up in her cage. We bought her toys, we bought her snacks to hang on the side of the cage, but she didn’t like being shut up, she kept losing feathers, and she wasn’t shrieking her mad, whacked out bird cry. Clearly she was depressed.
My son turned nine. His feet were already bigger than my feet. He and my husband began to squabble in a way that was new.
One day when there was no school, after breakfast he went to Manulita’s cage, opened the door, put her on his finger and walked outside.
Manulita fluttered a little on his finger, but stayed there.
Fascinated, I stood at the open door and watched them. “You can go,” my son told her. “You have wings and you can fly away.”
She didn’t do anything at all except to flutter her wings a little. Finally, he took her over to the bush in front of the living room window and put her in one of its branches.
I was afraid to go anywhere in case Manulita needed something. My son didn’t go anywhere either, but once in a while he’d go outside and check to see if she had left her perch in the bush.
Around dusk, a visiting delegation of birds arrived. One dozen, two dozen even. They seemed to know what they were doing when they surrounded Manulita and all flew away together.
My husband was really upset when he found out what happened. “How could you do that?” he said. “You should have stopped him!”
Should I have?
Better free or behind bars?
Free! Definitely free. We were both outside and saw her fly away without a backward glance at Riley-ville, or at us.
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Feb 13, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
I have that dreadful flu that’s plaguing so many innocent victims with racking coughs, high fever, and at one point I was hallucinating. So I’ll be in bed for Valentines Day, in the guest room, with a box of tissues popping Tamiflu. And it promised to be the most eventful Valentines Day in years.
It was to begin at dawn with the opening of the Frank Lloyd Wright Hollyhock house that’s been closed for forty years and is now open for 24 hours to certain cognoscenti, my friend Kady being one of those. Then home to do the normal Farmer’s Market shopping, and then out again, like a mad person, to the 11 o’ clock showing for the opening of the dirty grey movie. The minute I said “Yes”–to my friend who adored the books and had to be there for the movie–part of me said, “No.” Why did I say “Yes?” I’ll miss Carolina’s yoga class. But, I like pleasing my friends. I’ve never been to a porn flick, and someone else–I forget who–told me creative types are supposed to do one new thing a week. This was my new thing! D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller wrote the dirtiest books I’ve ever read, so I’m not exactly a spokeswoman for the prevailing zeitgeist. And since I’m trying to tell the truth here, I skipped over most of Tropic of Capricorn. The same thing happened with that book about phone sex that had the great opening line, “What are you wearing?” The book was very well written, but I didn’t want to spoil my admiration for the writer by getting to the hard core. I still love DH Lawrence, but dear DH was never about porno but love. And feeling and sensation. Porno is tiring and effortful.
The movie Boogie Nights gave me the absolute willies. I don’t know what’s creepier, a movie like Boogie Nights that’s cloaked in ART with a capital F, as my husband would say; (those huge, sinister phalluses came to me in nightmares for weeks!) or a movie like the dirty grey thing, that I don’t somehow think is going to be portrayed as art, but I’m sure would also give me the willies. I think it’s a romance novel with whips and chains, which is pretty scary in my book.
Plath hit the nail on the head when she proclaimed, “Every woman adores a fascist, the boot in the face…” I think she killed herself not long after she wrote Daddy. Sure she was crazy, she had the flu in fact, or was getting over the flu and it was a bad one that year too. But she zeroed in on something so basic, so absolutely true about the nature of being a woman and it killed her. But she didn’t dress it up with fancy camera angles and consumer goods. And from what I have read, the dirty movie opening on Saturday and the books, are as much about consumer goods as they are about anything else.
I’m thinking too of the very early Bond movies, the real Bond movies with Sean Connery, who is unbelievably offensive not to mention sadistic. And women were panting over it—my very young self included. When my husband gave our son the movies and he and his friends would sit in the living room watching Connery slapping around Pussy Galore, my grown up self was absolutely horrified, but God the boys loved it! Someone pointed out that the James Bond series were the first consumer goods driven novels.
Today we are so used to the constant interplay between expensive goods and sex we don’t think about it anymore. Sex and Italian high heels are one and the same; Sex and diamond rings are one and the same; Sex and real estate are one and the same.
Sex and consumer items are not the same. They are as different from each other as night is from day. Or pure lust is from pure love.
I have to go back to bed now. I’d love to hear from fans of the movie-telling me I am so wrong, and I don’t get it. Really, I would. In the meantime, Happy Valentines Day.
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Feb 11, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
It’s getting on Valentines Day and I miss Fred Segal. While I’m not a fashionista, much of a shopper, or even a lover of bastions of the rich and stylish, it was my go-to place for Valentines and everything else too. Fred Segal was two and a half blocks from my psychotherapist’s office, five blocks from the ocean and three blocks from the movie theater. Talk about location, location, location!
There’s still the Fred Segal Annex across the street, with the healthy restaurant, some three hundred dollar T-shirts, and jeans that costs even more. The real Fred Segal was across the street, and it’s been gone since the summer. The owners of the property sold the land and sold out all the small merchants who had boutiques in the cool and wacky bazaar in Santa Monica that was unlike any store I’ve ever been to. The storeowners had exactly one month’s notice.
Not that one couldn’t find the same overpriced stuff at Barney’s or Neiman Marcus–one can, and more of it. But Fred Segal was a strange and wonderful place that had among other things, the best women’s pajamas, the best women’s hats and scarves and the nicest men’s shirts—and the best sale that went on for days where you could always find the aforementioned stuff at 75% off if you waited long enough and were just a little bit lucky.
My husband knew I liked Fred Segal and every birthday there it would be, the familiar box from Fred Segal containing the nearly-same nightgown that was too big in the bust and skintight everywhere else. I’m rather thin and I have no idea who could fit into the nightgowns he’d bring home and smilingly present other than a life size Barbie Doll. Still, I will miss the yearly ritual of taking Barbie’s nightgown back and getting a fresh new pair of Fred Segal PJs.
Fred Segal as I mentioned is still there. I bought a birthday present there a couple of months ago, and got a vegetable juice on the way out. But it is by no means what it used to be.
When my friend Lisa would come to town, she would always say, “Let’s go to George Segal.” And we would.
It had eye glasses, lingerie, men’s stuff, girlie girl stuff, necklaces, earrings and you could always go and get a make-over from one of the cosmetic people. I used to plop myself on one of the stools and say, “Ok, do me over and sell me a bunch of crap. Are you sure your brushes are clean?” They’d reassure me. And a half an hour later I’d be a different person, or so I thought.
Now, it’s shuttered up. They are going to tear the place down and put in another Trader Joe’s and a parking garage. Probably a Whole Foods too. What’s the world coming to? Everything is starting to look exactly the same. And Fred Segal, that quirky place with eccentricities, is now like so many other things–just a fond memory.
Images drawn by the most wonderful, Aimee Levy.
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Feb 9, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
I can’t stop thinking about this pig I met today at around noon on Montana Avenue as I was heading toward lunchtime yoga.
He’s the same pig I’ve seen ambling down the center on San Vicente that begins at the ocean, and sweeps up with a wide grassy boulevard studded with flaming trees in the Spring, and runners all year long. His owner says it is a commonplace for drivers to screech to a halt, fly toward him and the pig, and he regrets he’s been the cause of several accidents.
His name is Rocky, the pig that is. I was late for class and I didn’t have time to ascertain the name of the guy who was walking this cloven hoof creature (or find out if the pig had pig shoes). Rocky is very beautiful, just plain gorgeous. I’d forgotten my phone, so I don’t have a picture of Rocky either. His owner had him tied around his very thick neck, and he was walking really nicely, like some kind of fat strange looking dog. The owner doled out bits of popcorn to keep him going. I wondered what Henry would have made of him.
He was such an amiable looking creature, all clean and tidy and not in some low, filthy trough waiting to be slaughtered. That’s the kind of pig one usually gets to see. That’s the kind of pig people refer to–as in, “You’re such a pig,” “You’re fat as a pig!” “What a pig you’ve made of yourself!” “He/she is happy as a pig in shit!” And, of course, the Yiddish for pig, “Vat a chazzer!” And so on. Then there are the sexual slurs associated with piggery, as in, “He wanted to pork her,” (she usually doesn’t want to “pork” him). The MPAA doesn’t think “pork” as filthy as the “F” word. And I adamantly disagree. Say the “F” word once and it’s an R rating just for that. I will spare readers a further digression on how much violence is allowed in a movie before the R rating sets in.
The farmer, Salvador Iacono in East Hampton, owned the only other pig I ever met. He was in a trough getting fattened up. Mr. I. raised the pig and slaughtered him after Christmas. Only his select customers were offered the knuckles and the bacon, though never the hams. The hams were for his family.
What I’m thinking about is the troughs and the slurs. In some way, you have to justify this killing of such a beautiful, sentient, obviously intelligent beast. You feed it garbage, you put it in a pile of mud and you make fun of it. Then, if you are not all that fastidious, it isn’t such a terrible thing to eat it, is it? I.B. Singer (my favorite writer a lot of the time), a lifelong vegetarian and someone who lost family and friends in the Holocaust, pointed out, “For the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”
One would never eat a dog, not in this country one wouldn’t. One would have the ASPCA at the front door faster than you can say, ‘doggy for dinner.’ What’s the difference between dog and pig and cow and lamb? Not much. Not in my book anyway.
The copywriter who came up with “The other white meat” referring of course to pig—is brilliant. It belies the fact that pig is really fatty meat. And a big beautiful warm-blooded creature. They make it sound like eating pig is like eating chicken (which when you come down to it, isn’t so benign either).
I haven’t eaten pig in a very long time. It was the first meat I gave up, and the one I think I liked the best. Some Hebrew scholars believe that the admonition against eating pork has to do with the fact that the sweet meat of the pig is the meat that most resembles in its taste, human flesh. That’s not why I gave up eating pork. I can’t remember why; it was just an instinctual move on my part. But now that I think of it, I must have put it together–the pig in the trough at the farm in East Hampton and its knuckle (ham hock in my book) I used in a soup I made. It was a fabulous old-fashioned green split pea soup with carrots and this artisan pig meat. I didn’t have an immersion blender then. It was messier and more time consuming to make soup without the magic wand immersion blender I’ve grown so dependent on.
I’m not going to lie and say that a good ham hock is not the best thing that can happen to a pot of peas or beans. It tastes way better with the pig meat, I remember, all these years later. I also remember that I met that pig and then I ate him. Never again!
Now would my new obsession, Rocky, eat me if he was hungry? Of course he would! Won’t a pig eat anything? Still, I was very glad today when I met this beautiful sweet creature walking down a fancy shopping street, that I long ago lost the desire for pork.
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Feb 4, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
It was hot, the Santa Ana’s were blowing and I was having a bad hair day. I told a new haircutter to just “Get rid of it!” Now, whenever I look in the mirror I see my mother staring back at me. I can’t escape her. Why did I do this? It happens every time I cut my hair short.
Poor Mother died so long ago, she never got to meet my husband or my son. She never met our bird, or our cat and she never met Henry. “You sleep with your dog?” she’d hiss. “How tawdry!”
Once in a while she’d decide my brother (because he didn’t have a father) needed a dog. Never mind my sister and I who didn’t have a father either. Once in a while, a dog would appear for a couple of weeks, then just as mysteriously, disappear. I would be the only one who would bond with the animal. Her remedy for anything from a headache to a broken heart was, depending on the time of day, a cigarette, a strong black coffee, or a scotch and soda and some pills. We had yellow pills, we had orange pills, we had black pills, and she took a lot of red pills when she couldn’t get to sleep from the rainbow of daytime pills. When in doubt: take a pill. What a role model!
Still, I loved her. She was funny, she was sarcastic. We had a lot of books in the house. And records. She gave me Oscar Wilde, Beethoven, Bach, Scarlatti, the Bronte sisters, and many other influential others. She was spoiled rotten, however. When she didn’t get her way, she took to her bed with the fancy monogrammed sheets. And stayed there until she did. I always worried she was going to die as she was always threatening to do (and eventually did do). I adored her, and was also worried about what would happen when each of us then had to go live with my one of the Uncles and their wives. In my case, my guardian Uncle’s wife didn’t want me. I overheard her talking to my Uncle Earl, “Why did you agree to take Mary? Carol wouldn’t want her upstairs.”
Carol, her daughter and my cousin, was actually really nice, much nicer to me, in fact, than my own older sister. All my cousins were rich and Carol was in my mind, the richest. She had her own upstairs with a bedroom, a sitting room and a gorgeous bathroom. We were the poor relations. Still, I didn’t want to live there nice as she was. So, I would always bring Mama trays of food and beverages when she was in bed. When she wasn’t at her store, she was usually in bed. We had one of those elaborate bed trays you see in movies staring Ida Lupino in satin mules and many other accoutrements of the upper class—but alas no moolah. My mother’s bed tray tilted up for reading.
No, mother in the mirror is not a comforting sight. But I see my mother’s face other places too: if a friend says something mean to me, there she is, my mother. She tells me I’m too skinny, she tells me my hair looks like a Puerto Rican. (To my knowledge I never met a Puerto Rican until I moved to New York City and when I did I was totally thrilled to look like that. Puerto Rican women are gorgeous!)
If I can bring myself to actually drive on the freeway and I’m part of that frenetic speeding along up and down the hills and valleys of Southern California, there she is, my mom. As in, I’m about to die and go see my mother. I don’t have much in common with my mother, and that’s a conscious thing, as I have tried my whole life not to be like her. But I do have her phobia about driving on the freeway; it’s one of the few things I haven’t been able to shrink away, though when I was doing hypnosis, the problem did get better. Not driving on the freeway when you live in L.A. is rather limiting, though I have two other friends (both from New York) who feel exactly as I do.
When I watch Downton Abbey on Sunday night, I see my mom. She’s the haughty Dowager Duchess, played by Maggie Smith. My mother would have liked to have been the ditzy Elizabeth McGovern character married to the idiot Lord who won’t change his ways. My mother would have loved being married to a Lord and living in some cold dungeon filled with ancestral belongings. She never understood why Lady Antonia Fraser left her Lord for a common Jewish playwright who wrote such nasty plays. (Among her many other neuroses, my mother was humiliated by anything Jewish and until I met my husband I felt the same way too). A personal maid, breakfast in bed, the Church of England and silver, now that’s the hot ticket.
I think about one of the many episodes in which she was about to die in the hospital and some visiting Rabbi caught wind of the fact that an actual Jewess was in the midst. There weren’t too many of them in our town. He came to her beside, and muttered some Hebrew prayers and I believe he even sang some songs. She’s dying I thought, maybe she’ll derive some comfort from religion. But no, Ma gave me the high sign; as in get him the f—out of here. The day before, when she heard that the handsome Methodist minister was on the floor, she sat up from her torpor and called for lipstick and bed jacket.
Oscar Wilde once remarked that all women become their mothers, that is their tragedy. No man does, that is his.
I haven’t become her—yet. And that is my happy ending. She wasn’t kind, she wasn’t warm, she wasn’t fuzzy or supportive, and luckily my hair grows really fast. And, in a month or so I can stop cringing and asking my husband if I look like my mother. He knows to answer, “Absolutely not!”
In the meantime, there’s still enough to put in a tie on top of my head Woody Woodpecker style.
I can just hear her saying, “Why are you doing that with your hair?”
Wonderful drawing by: Aimee Levy
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Feb 2, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
Confession: I have never watched a football game.
I attended an LSU football game a thousand years ago in high school when I was on a date with someone my brother fixed me up with, but alas, I was not a part of the screaming multitude. I don’t know who is playing today. I don’t know the names of the teams. They are as indistinguishable to me as the names of the baseball and basketball teams, though philosophically and aesthetically, baseball and basketball are more appealing than football. And so is soccer. I don’t get football at all. Why are these people shrieking over these poor guys who, like gladiators and boxers, have to risk life and limb for all these out-of–shape, chip-eating, beer-swilling fans? Unlike the gladiators, they get good pay for getting beaten up, concussed, and pummeled and that’s fine in my book. To me Jerry Sandusky is a natural byproduct of the shibboleth known as American football.
In spite of all this, Super Bowl Sunday is the greatest! Nobody at the Whole Foods, nobody at Trader Joe’s. Nobody anywhere. Except for these thunderous roars that emit from open windows when one walks by. Nothing is stirring, not even a mouse. We are planning to go eat sushi at the busiest sushi bar in Little Osaka because we know it will be empty. It takes a 7-point earthquake or Super Bowl Sunday to clear the streets in Los Angeles. But every year it’s the same. By 3:25 PST nothing on Olympic, nothing on Wilshire. Nothing on the 10- or the 405.
My husband, God bless him, may not hate Super Bowl Sunday but he is sublimely indifferent. I just went upstairs and asked him who was playing and what time does the game start. He has no idea. Though now that I have grabbed the Sports Pages for the first time in my life, about five seconds ago, I am now in the know.
Right before we turn on Downtown Abbey this evening I plan to turn to him and say, “How about them Patriots?” And, I know he will think this is hilarious.
I am enormously grateful to be married to my husband on Super Bowl Sunday.
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Jan 29, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
Home is where one starts from. And for a long time, Riley-ville was home. In honor of that, today, Henry and I walked by where our old house used to be on 20th Street in Santa Monica. Henry never lived there, but my son spent some of his childhood there and a good deal of his adolescence. And it seemed like it really was the roach motel. We checked in when we came from New York, but we could never check out no matter how I tried. I’m sure if that developer hadn’t paid us thirty large to move, and torn the place down, we’d still be there, freezing our asses off. If you think Los Angeles is warm in the winter, try living through one without heat–where there is so little juice from the ancient wiring system that space heaters blow up and the fuses conk out daily, sometimes hourly.
Riley-ville was a small Spanish two-story built sometime in the twenties. My husband insisted on it. After all, it was a good solution to our problems. It was cheap, in the right school district, the walls were white, and it didn’t have cottage cheese on the ceiling, and the floors were hardwood. You can’t imagine how hard such a place is to find in Southern California. It was meant to be a temporary asylum on our way to becoming homeowners. But that didn’t happen either. I took pencil and paper the other day, and tried to figure out how much money we have lost by paying rent all these years, missing out on the various dream times to buy real estate on the Westside of Los Angeles, and the resulting figure, even if I drastically understate things is staggering. Never mind having a real home.
My son named it Riley-ville. And the name just stuck.
Bud Riley owned the place. He was a giant, bald headed man who I can see now, was probably somewhere on the spectrum. He had a slow, halting, somewhat menacing way of speaking and really nasty b.o. My husband defended him calling him “the salt of the earth.” Bud’s father had built the house, and he had grown up in it. Consequently, the house was sacred ground. No dogs were allowed, though we had promised our son when we moved from New York he could have a dog. Even when my mother-in-law went over there, with her checkbook and her Seven Sisters drawl to pay him off, Bud said we couldn’t have one.
“Impossible man!” she proclaimed afterwards. And she was right.
Eventually Bud consented to us having a cat. But though we loved her, Elgar was not a nice cat; she never sat on one’s lap, she never purred except if she was eating, and she brought in more rats than you can possibly imagine. Dead rats, freezing cold. Yes Riley-ville was like the gulag, a punishing place, a place where one was living out a sentence, rather than living a life. Some mornings it was so cold, we had to eat breakfast out. To this day, I am reviling myself about my son and the dog he never got to have growing up.
A dog would have meant so much. When I walked by with Henry, the memories didn’t seem so harsh. I hadn’t made so many mistakes, it didn’t seem we were so lonely and helpless. A dog would have been warm and cuddly when we desperately needed warm and cuddly. Why didn’t I simply get us a dog and tell that old bald man on the spectrum to “throw us out?” Why didn’t I stand up to my husband? We wouldn’t have been on the street. In fact, we had the money to change our circumstances anytime. What was the mental block that was embodied in that house that’s now the site of an anodyne garden condo made of fake brick and with ye olde lanterns on the front?
Me, I suppose.
I was scared. I was living in the past (the past of my childhood) where I genuinely could not ask for anything without being tortured with the punishment of shame. “You know I would give anything in the world to give you that, don’t you?” my accomplished actress of a mother would say, conditioning me early to spare her. In fact, I lived in horror of being anything other than completely self-sufficient. I wanted things for our son and got things for our son, but I couldn’t get the big one we both needed: to get out of Riley-ville to someplace warm with a dog.
When old Bud Riley finally bit the radish and his heirs sold the place, we got out. But by then, my son was in college. We moved up the street to a “luxury” condo just below Wilshire. The thirty large helped with that. The place had closets, high-end bathrooms, even a powder room with a lurid gold lame wallpaper, that nobody entered except the cat. I rented it because of the eat-in kitchen with stainless steel appliances and cabinets up the wazoo. It’s the best kitchen I’ve ever had. And, in many ways, I wish we still lived there.
On my son’s first visit to the new place, fresh from customs at LAX, (he’d been studying in one of the former Soviet Block countries, something I believe Riley-ville prepared him for) he looked me squarely in the face and said, “If you can get my father to move in here you can do anything.”
And in fact, the night we moved in, my husband was practically foaming at the mouth. “This is the worst night of my life,” he lamented. “I can’t believe we’re going to live here! It’s so tacky!”
And it was tacky. Wonderfully, joyfully tacky and warm.
We should have bought that place, too. We had to move out because the owners sold it. One recently sold for 400 large more than what they were asking just a few years ago. Yes I keep a masochistic record of our losses in real estate.
That’s the trouble with the past. You can’t change it, though it changes you in ways you never could imagine. Someone else, Hartley I think, said, “The past is another country, they do things differently there.”
When I stop wishing that I had done things differently, then maybe like the teachers tell us at yoga, I’ll start living in the present and be free.
But maybe not.
Still, miraculously as soon as we got out of that meat-locker, things did start to change and get better. Maybe it was the energy of the place; maybe I found my voice and started asking for stuff I want.
Though I still want my son to have had that dog. I can’t imagine ever letting that go. To this day, to this very minute, I can taste it, I want it so badly. I want a time machine. I want my three wishes, that I never got as a child. I want to see his little face all lit up with the joy of his very first puppy. I want it when he had his crooked little grin without front teeth; I want it when he had braces, and then, his first little trace of mustache.
Of course that little puppy would be dead by now, unless he was one of those miracle dogs you see on the cover of the National Enquirer. One hundred seventy-five year old dog still alive in California! Right alongside old Bill, still cheating on his wife….
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