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Novels by Mary Marcus
New on the Blog
E Train
A big crowd of us was waiting for the E train in Jamaica a couple of days ago. They’d opened the doors, unlocked the turnstiles and we poured in diverted from the Long Island Railroad. Though I have passed through Queens a couple of hundred times or more throughout the years, other than JFK, I have only stood on solid ground in Queens three times that I can remember: two funerals and one bar mitzvah. People were grumbling. I stood next to a tall handsome middle-aged man with a very expensive haircut who was truly pissed. “I could have taken a limo,” he said looking around him with contempt. “An hour!” I heard someone else cry out indignantly. Jamaica, which is a few stops away from Penn Station if you are riding the railroad, is a long way to the city if you are taking the E Train in. And here it was… The E. We crammed our way in. I saw the handsome man shove someone out of a seat and sit himself down, scowling. When the door closed, I was standing with a group around a pole, holding on. Six of us: myself, three younger women, in their twenties all chatting with a boy-man, a little pudgy with baggy jeans and very large feet. He was mostly talking to someone behind me. The boy had the sweetest face, beatific really. When I looked at him and smiled, he gave me a little windshield wiper wave, as children do. I wondered which of the women was his mother. It looked more likely that they were older sisters. I...Saccharophobia
I fell off the sugar wagon in September, after a two-year hiatus. Not in any kind of bing-y way. Yet, to this very minute, I feel the siren call of cane and fructose that doesn’t really happen when you avoid the stuff and limit your consumption to fruit, and not too much dried fruit either, and the natural sort that comes in yoghurt, kefir, milk, and all lactose products. It started at my friend Mae’s wedding in September. A big piece of wedding cake, not ordinary white and gluey, her and John’s was spice cake with raisins and nuts and a beautiful white icing. Months later, I can still recall that cake which was proffered after the ceremony with a cold glass of good champagne (more sugar, alcohol and sugar—whoopee!). Next came a piece of iced gingerbread imported from home by my German friend, Andrea! Eaten with a hot cup of earl grey on a cold afternoon. Paradise! But alas, once you get that sweet taste of cane or fructose, your mind’s pleasure centers want more. And more. Tell me about it. I used to smoke. It was a years long battle to get that monkey off my back. And sugar is the same: dope, a signal to the nervous system and the pleasure centers to go into zing mode. Soothe me! Feed me! Once you get the taste, it’s hell to turn off. I’m guessing it’s like booze if booze is your thing, and thank God it’s not mine. I want to shovel the stuff in my system. And if you’re skinny like I am, everyone looks at...Sad About Susan
I read this morning in the NYT that Robert Durst; a.k.a. Bobby went on trial today for the murder of my former sort-of friend Susan Berman. She and I must have been more simpatico than I knew. A couple of years ago, when my publisher told me I should start blogging, the very first one I wrote was about Susan. That was before the HBO mini series wherein Durst all but admitted his culpability. Though not before the movie that came out that was more about Durst and his relationship with his wife who disappeared and whose body has never shown up. Susan would love all this attention. She would be totally comfortable with all eyes on her. She probably should have been an actress not a writer; she came alive when all eyes were focused on her. It said in the article in the last years of her life she was down on her luck and out of work. And that was the phase when I knew her. She had already blown the money she inherited from her father the gangster; and the book deal and the movie projects. She was living in some house without heat in Benedict Canyon, one I never saw, though during our brief friendship she often came to my house to dinner. She was writing WOM-JEPS, as she called them that paid by the word.WOM-JEPS is an acronym for Women In Jeopardy. I read one of them, the heroine whose father was a dead gangster, as Susan’ father had been, was running away from someone who was trying to murder her. Was that...
The New Me
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