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Novels by Mary Marcus
New on the Blog
There Will Be Blood
For the past month or so I’ve been taking this class called “Mindfulness Boot Camp” which is an insane amount of fun. Eight or ten grownups are in a gym size room working their way through various resistance and weight training exercises. Yesterday we climbed up the wall on ropes, did the spider crawl the width of a gym sized room, jumped rope, did weighted hula hoop, and lots of squats and things with resistance bands for legs and arms. In both classes there were some very fit men in their forties, some surprisingly fit overweight girls in their twenties, a couple of old bags in decent shape like I am, and of course the instructor who is ripped within an inch of his life. He participates along with us, all the while shouting out encouraging bits like, “Finish strong!” I have left the class each week, tired and sweaty and realizing how much I need to play hard, something that was drilled into me not to do as a young woman growing up in the south—I can only pray the south of today is significantly different—but you never know. Look how long it took them to take down a few moldering statues of slave loving generals. My particular athletic career (track and field and especially swimming at which I excelled) was cut short by the arrival of my period somewhere around the age of twelve. Even though I had an older sister and a mother, several aunts, a grandmother and at least three close girlfriends, I remember knowing so little about the whole thing, that I announced to my...Early Into Vice
A thousand years ago, when I was fifteen, I had a secret vice which was to “borrow” my mothers Pontiac Bonneville and drive out to the small landing strip that called itself the Greater Shreveport Airport. I’d park the car, go inside to the newsstand and there, I would purchase a Baby Ruth and a copy of the National Enquirer, sit down in the airport’s waiting room, eat my candy bar and read the sleazy newspaper that wasn’t allowed in my house. A nurse who had once been in residence when my mother was ill had stacks of them. This publication was as off limits to me as Playboy magazine, which I also tried secretly to look at. And once was discovered and taken home and spanked by my mother who was picking up her Dexedrine and sleeping pills at the pharmacist, whilst I was perusing the dirty magazines waiting for her. Trashy magazines, trashy newspapers, “dirty” novels like Lolita, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Couples were all banned in my childhood home—I remember because I tried to get to them all at various stages of my growing up. Imagine a curious pubescent today skulking toward Updike or Nabokov? The parent of such a child would post of his or her little genius on Facebook and Instagram. But back then, sex was dirty. And trashy magazines were contraband. Baby Abducted By Aliens Dog Lives To Be 200 Grandmother Strangles Bank Robber I loved all these headlines as I loved the crunch of the Baby Ruth. I think it’s interesting that the candy I always chose was not my favorite which was...Dark Winds of Sisterhood
I started this when the first reports came in about Harvey. It’s now a couple of weeks later, and Florida is under water. Harvey isn’t tearing through Houston anymore, and both my son and I have made inquiries and learned my big sister and her house are safe and dry. I’m not thinking about her non-stop as I was for days. One of her friends responded to an email I wrote, “I hope you connect, she hasn’t been herself for a while.” Herself? I almost wrote back, “Did she go off on you too?” But I didn’t. My big sister lives very close to Rice University and the splendid Rothko Chapel. When the first reports came out, I thought, if they say the Rothko Chapel is underwater, then she’s underwater too. Once in a while, I go on FB and look at the two pictures of her. We didn’t look so much alike when we were younger, but like long married people, we’ve grown more alike as time goes on. Ironic, because as adults we’ve spent almost no time together. Either a continent separated us, we were at war, which was most of the time, or at peace, which is how it’s been for the past few decades or so when we’ve had absolutely nothing to do with one another: not a phone call on either one of our birthdays, our parents yahzeit, an email, a snail mail, a Jewish New Year card, a valentine, though I’ve wondered as no doubt she has too, what the other one will do when one of us passes. Do I go...
The New Me
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