Real World/Made Up World

Jul 26, 2017 | Blog - Mary Marcus

I write this from my desk at the Sewanee Writers Conference at the University of the South.  My room is ugly as all dorm rooms are; the bed is uncomfortable, the springs have a way of jabbing my back like a sharp elbow late at night when I’m trying to calm down and settle in from the day’s stimulations. Truly, despite the heat that weighs down like a heavy blanket and the torpor that comes from 95 % percent humidity, it’s one of the liveliest places I’ve ever been. I’m blissfully happy to have this ugly room with no roommate and my own bathroom because my suite mate never showed up!  I keep waiting for her to descend—like the sword of Damocles she’s hovering over my life here:  she could happen at any moment!

In the meantime, the fourth floor of St. Luke’s on my side is the cool side. On the other side, the men and women are sending away to Amazon for fans. Myself, I’m sleeping under a blanket with several sets of sheets on top; they’ve run out of extra blankets.

It’s Sunday, the quiet day, though there was a lecture in the morning by the great Tim O’Brien and one last night by him too.  Everyday some great poet writer or playwright gets up on stage and it’s so inspiring. Everyone here is a writer, everyone here profoundly cares about the written word, the spoken word, and the imagined word, the process of writing, the approach to writing. Every single minute it’s writing this, writing that. I realized today though, I haven’t done any sort of writing since I arrived here.  At writers conferences one doesn’t shut oneself up in one’s room to write.  

Jericho Brown

I’ve been hanging out a lot with the poets, one of the young really impressive ones is a dude named Jericho Brown from my hometown, Shreveport, Louisiana. Like me, he knows you can’t go home again. (Jericho pictured above.)

Talking to strangers is the name of the game. I flunked geometry, and don’t read maps very well, but I’m an expert at talking to strangers.  A lot of writers are like that. Which is how I happened to leave campus today for the first time since I arrived here last Tuesday.  Someone at my table was going to go to the local flea market and wanted some company.

“I’d love to go,” I said.

This is rural Tennessee.  The minute you drive out of the immaculate campus with the stone buildings and the perfectly manicured lawns and the famous writers and the students of the famous writers, you are in a different world. The county that includes the University of the South where the writer’s conference is located happens to be the poorest one in Tennessee.

We parked the car and headed toward the flea market, a hot and dusty looking compound of booths packed with real junk and covered with corrugated metal roofs. This was nothing like the flea markets I once in a while attend in LA and New York. Here there were grimy Barbies for 10 cents. Romance novels with broken spines, and yes confederate flags waving proudly.  Here the people were poor, and probably every last one of the stall-keepers were supporters of Trump.  These people, so many of them morbidly obese and unhealthy looking, were the people who were really going to suffer most under the present administration. The very ones who had voted  45 into office.

I happened on a homemade knife stand. I sifted through and looked for something my husband—who loves knives—would find acceptable.  The proprietor of the stand, like me, was a writer. He handed me a pamphlet he had penned The Claims of Jesus of Nazareth. And when I looked at it, he began to tell me about how Jesus wanted to save me.

Mary Marcus, topknot, mary marcus fiction, hair, short hair, mother,

I was transported back to my childhood, when my best friend Peggy Mayfield was assigned to save my soul in vacation bible school. She’d been told in Sunday school because I’m Jewish I was going to hell. Probably the writer of the pamphlet would think I was going to hell too.

Hell couldn’t be much hotter than that miserable flea market somewhere in the sticks outside Sewanee, Tennessee.

I left the stand, and found my friend from the conference bargaining for a pair of cowboy boots, totally elated. She was crowing about them all the way home. I was sort of depressed actually. Encounters in the real world often have that effect on me.  Presently as we drove through the stone portals of the University of the South, my spirit lifted. Yes, I’ll take Sewanee and the imaginary world over the real world any day.

And be eternally grateful that I can.

Illustration by the fabulous Aimee Levy

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Zen and the Art of Dry Cleaning

Jul 7, 2017 | Blog - Mary Marcus

I’m heading off to the Sewanee Literary Conference in a week or so. In honor of that, I went through my shirts and decided to opt for Browns iron and fold and card boarding. Browns is the most expensive, but also the most impeccable dry cleaner and shirt place you can imagine.

Mary Marcus, topknot, mary marcus fiction, hair, short hair, mother,

A few noteworthy facts about Browns. I once took a little schmatte in there and the dry cleaning bill cost more than the dress itself! A  favorite cashmere sweater with paint spilled all over it was also offered up to the proprietress, someone who could be a social secretary to a socialite, or the socialite herself. Her hair is super neat, her diamonds are real (as well they should be with those prices) and her chin is always lifted just a little bit higher than yours or mine. She reminds me of a female Jeeves. And like Jeeves, you can tell she’s highly intelligent, world-wise, cannier than most of her clients and up on the protocol of whatever the occasion calls for. People go there and get their wedding dresses embalmed.  Movie stars send their personal assistants to drop off their crap.  When you are inside, it’s like a library or the bank used to be, there’s a hushed quality, one would not raise one’s voice in Browns. The time I went in with the paint stained cashmere, I was a little ashamed. I took it out of my shopping bag and put it down on the counter.

“Do you think you can do anything with this?” I asked softly.

She took it up in her perfectly manicured hands ran it this way and declared, “Why not?”

The bill was huge, but there wasn’t a stain left on the striped cashmere. And afterwards the sweater seemed like new.

Today, when Henry and I stood at the counter, the proprietress was wearing an Art Deco diamond lavaliere.  And a beautiful starched cotton blouse. The kind with darts and a stand up color. She reminded me of the ladies I used to know back in Shreveport, mothers of my friends, customers of my mother when she had her store. My mother would have liked it, if I had been one of those local ladies, married to some prosperous someone or other, writing an occasional book but mostly socializing, playing bridge, reading best sellers…

I took out my shirts:  my striped be-spoke that used to belong to Esteban Vicente. When the painter died, his wife who called me one of her daughters didn’t give me a picture as I had half-way hoped, but a few of his shirts. I love them all and save them for special occasions. The one I’m taking to Sewanee I call “my famous artist shirt.”

I took out a few more and handed them over, and finally the last one: some cheapo lavender linen thing, no doubt made by slave labor, but I love the color.  The proprietress fingered the shirt; her lips sort of curled.

“Linen,” she declared resentfully. “The minute you put it on, it wrinkles.”

I nodded. Looking down, I saw Henry had settled onto the mat in front of the counter in his dog version of the Sphinx Pose, front and back paws out, belly down.

“You don’t wear linen, I take it?”

I was very aware, just then, of my wrinkled shirt, jean shorts, held up by a raggedy ass belt;  my thin white legs, bright sneakers, stained socks.   Henry was still in Sphinx Pose.  How I envied my dog’s perpetual good looks and invincible style!

“Of course, not!” she replied.

I met her eyes: “As to be expected of the proprietress of the best dry cleaning establishment on earth!”

That made her smile.

I decided not to leave the linen, or another one that had a little stain on the collar she couldn’t promise to remove, though she suggested perhaps dry cleaning it first then laundering.

How much does it cost to do that? I once posed such a question to the person who takes the New York Times obit by phone.  “Madam,” he declared. “If you have to ask, you shouldn’t be calling the New York Times!”

“A week from today, next Thursday for your shirts?”

“That’d be great! Thanks!”

Henry got to his feet in his effortless way, shook himself off and we headed out into the sunlight.

Illustration by the fabulous Aimee Levy

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