Dec 30, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
Today is Henry’s fourth birthday. I wish I could buy him a steak or a hamburger or a hot dog or something meaty he would adore, but Henry is one of those persnickety allergic white dogs who has to eat a very strict and limited diet, otherwise he scratches down to the skin and looks like hamburger meat himself. God, it’s awful if he goes off his pitiful little diet. I used to cook for Henry: fresh meat, veggies, and I’d give him flax seed oil. Now, he just eats this canned single ingredient crap that he just loves and the espresso cup full of the dog cereal that he also just loves and with which I bribe him. And he’s perfect. Thank God for the vet who told me to take him off the healthy and nutritious diet I was giving him and convinced me to put him on the canned crap.
I got Henry because I always wanted a dog, my whole life, and never had one, other than the dogs my mother would bring home once in a while for my brother because he had no father and would promptly give away once the dog did something unseemly in the house as dogs are want to do. Neiman, the cocker spaniel, Flipper, the boxer, Count JoJo, the miniature poodle, Coleen, the dachshund (whom my sister called dog do), they all made brief tenures chez nous and they all departed not very long after they arrived. I loved them all.
My son and I longed for a dog when he was growing up, and when he was punished in school for skipping (which happened more than I care to discuss) he would always opt for working at the pound to be near the pups. And once he brought home a picture he had taken there of the dog he wanted with all his heart but our horrible landlord whom I’ve written about before, wouldn’t let us have him. FUCK HIM. And curse his memory. I’m glad he’s dead. But enough of that. I’m over all that as of 2016. Bud Riley villain of my early years in LA, I let thee go….at least I hope I do.
Anyway, my son grew up dog-less and left home. We moved to a dog friendly place and then when my son’s cat died, my shrink who is a devout dog-a-phile, told me it was time I grew up and got a dog.
The first dog I brought home was from a rescue place I’d been told about that operated out of the back of a clothing store on Montana in Santa Monica. I had requested a small dog, one I could carry with me between LA and New York, and so it came to pass that I got a call one day, and the doggie rescue person told me she had a perfect little poodle for me and I should come and get her. I got in the car and did just that.
She was a sweet little white thing and she had come from a terrible home and her name, God help her, turned out to be Mary. Why on earth would anyone, even a rescue person who is bored already with the naming of dogs, name a dog Mary?
Mary wasn’t “my dog” and I ended up taking her back with a huge donation to the pet rescue place after a couple of days. It took me nearly a year to get over the experience and to this day I wake up in the middle of the night and worry about Mary. Would I have kept her if she hadn’t had the same bloody name as I do? And if she hadn’t come from a terrible place where she was abused reminding me of things I’d like to forget? I have no idea. All I know is that she broke my heart, and every time I looked at her I wanted to cry. Poor Mary.
Just around the time my shrink was reminding me that I had always wanted a dog, I reconnected with Nodie Williams who comes from Shreveport and also went to the convent I went to: St. Vincent’s home for wayward girls. Nodie raises Jack Russells, at Frayed Knot Farm in Arkansas. If you ever want a Jack Russell call Nodie. She said she had a little guy named Seamus, who was the runt of his litter and had a very sweet nature. I sent Nodie a check, she started calling Seamus “Henry”, and I proceeded to be scared out of my mind for the next weeks, until I got down to Arkansas and met Henry, my perfect little pup, whose been by my side ever since.
Actually Henry isn’t perfect. He’s a maniac. He barks for no good reason, he snips at children, once in a while he raises his leg at the front door, but I’ve never met a better little doggie or one who is a better match for me and my husband. And Nodie was right. He’s unbelievably sweet… when he wants to be, he’s a perfect little angel.
Henry started out in a horrible little dog cage known as “the crate”, then we axed the crate, he took over a chiropractic pillow that was supposed to cure my neck, and then of course the thing happened that we swore would never happen, he sleeps in the bed with us. Right between us in fact.
Sometimes in the middle of the night, when I reach out to pat Henry, I’ll find myself holding hands with my husband who has also reached out to do the same: find Henry.
He’s our great solace, our funny little dog child, our ferocious little fellow and the fucking best dog in the world.
Would I trade him for a well behaved dog? No. Yes. Sometimes. But actually no. Henry is my beast, and I’m his person. And that’s that.
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Dec 15, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
Maybe my washing machine was just fed up with all the loads it has been churning out during the recent rodent crises—maybe (and this really freaks me out) the mice ate something vital—I shimmied myself between the shelf above the washing machine and the machine itself, poked my head behind and saw, yes, more mouse shit. I’ve yet to figure out how to get behind there. I guess I’ll drop a trap there, perhaps with a fishing pole.
This morning when I was running the first load of the day, at 7 a.m. right after I came in from walking Henry, a terrible noise erupted from the machine. Think of the biggest imbalance noise with ten pairs of sneakers and multiply that by ten and you’ll have an idea of the noise that I heard coming from the machine. Like the invasion of Afghanistan. I turned it off, opened the door and smoke was billowing out, and the terrible stench of burnt rubber filled my nostrils.
That was the good part.
The bad part is Sears Customer Service. And the home repair phone queue, where a computer has just told me that they now have a brand new computer that understands full sentences. Naturally, the sophisticated computer did not understand my carefully modulated sentence. So, now I’m in the all too familiar hell of being in line with the call volume “unusually high.” And the computer voice telling me over and over that if I visit them online I’ll have better results.
Why oh why am I in every phone queue with unusually high call volume? I’ll tell you why… Because there are not enough outsourced phone representatives, even in Mumbai or Manila where that’s a good job and “big company” doesn’t have to pay living wage, never mind benefits. I will go even farther and speculate that no one responsible for foisting this dishonest, unethical way of doing business with its customers has ever had to wait through a call line; blood pressure rising, nerves tingling with hatred, kicking and shrieking. Or had to endure being put on hold where one is hounded every five seconds with the reminder that “your business is very important to us.” Never mind, the horrible spirit-crushing background musak. Musak. Perhaps that was the real beginning of the end. A portent no one recognized.
Having visited India some years ago, I have nothing but pity for the poor men and women who have to politely put up with being yelled at by Americans day in and day out. Does anybody do anything BUT yell at the souls who politely and firmly read from their scripts and listen as we shriek at them? And who must by the standards of their country consider themselves not only lucky but also privileged.
I haven’t visited the Philippines but I’m sure I would feel the same: pity for the people. And guilt when I shriek at them.
Yet what am I to do?
I’m holding for Mumbai, as I type this. It’s been now forty minutes. And when someone finally gets on, it’s going to be ugly. I’m going to yell, and the individual at the other end is going to calmly, implacably read from the script.
We are all so inured to the whole corrupt system where we know that if something breaks, the best thing to do is throw it out and buy another cheap-shit-badly-made replacement and the sooner the better.
Anything, anything is better than being on hold waiting for Mumbai, or wherever it is that I’m calling.
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Dec 8, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
I left the back door open a couple of weeks ago and now much to my disgust and horror, we have a mouse, or two mice, or God forbid, a pregnant mouse who will hatch more little mice behind the sofa or in one of the closets, or behind the washer dryer, or up on the ledge above the kitchen sink. I’ve found those revolting little half moons of rodent shit in all of the aforementioned places in the past few days. Also, he/she/they have torn through one of my little cloth bags with their horrible little teeth. Now all the fruit has to go in the fridge. Because I found little teeth-marks in the apples. My husband and I both hate cold fruit.
We can’t put out those hideous traps because Henry could get himself hurt or traumatized though not as traumatized as I feel even thinking about those little critters. And speaking of Henry, why isn’t he doing something about this? Isn’t he supposed to take care of this situation? I certainly can’t, I don’t have the nerves, the sang froid, the lack of squeamishness it takes to deal with this. My husband who is only appearing late at night, due to the TV show he is working on, can do the manly thing, if he were around more. In fact, the last time he went mouse hunting, I think he rather enjoyed himself. I hovered in the other room when, with rubber gloves and in his underpants and wearing his eyeglasses he’d go first thing in the morning to check the trap he’d set out. And within days the culprit would be assassinated. And the mouse shit, gone. The only time I ever came face to face with a mouse was one who got in the kitchen garbage can some years ago, he/she/ had crawled down, and when I went to go put a fresh bag in, there it was its little face, its little peep, its little tail, ears and so on. I took it outside and let it scamper off, what was I to do?
Today, I went to the farmer’s market and discussed the situation with the large man in a caftan and beads who sells lavender and potpourri. He solved the ant and moth situation some time ago.
“Baby,” he said. “You got to get you some mint oil.” It was very costly, this mint oil; it comes in a little amber bottle that was just like the bottles that coke came in. I was tempted to ask him if he sold something else, as he was mumbling, “They run the fuck away from the mint.”
Still and all, I don’t know why I’m so afraid of them, why other than the fact that mouse shit is fairly revolting, unhygienic, not to mention hazardous to one’s health, am I so frightened of something so small, so cute in certain circles, someone named Mickey, (whom I always hated). Or even Amos? Which is my dear son’s name, and also the name of the mouse in Amos and Boris, one of the great children’s tales: Amos, as in, a mouse.
What did a mouse ever do to me?
I can stand on my head; I can stand on my hands, walk after dark in tunnels under freeways, stay by myself in the woods, but not confront a mouse?
I don’t get it.
Is there –yet another—trauma in my past connected to the sight of a mouse? Or is this phobia, something genetic, a musophobic gene I was born with?
One of my all time favorite short stories, by the master, I.B. Singer, involves a man named Herman, his pet mouse Hulda, and his woman visitor, Rose, who saves his life during a bout of the flu and also saves the life of Herman’s pet mouse. It sounds very corny and cartoony, but The Letter Writer is one of the best short stories ever written. And these past days, as I’ve searched hither and yon for mouse shit, I’ve tried to think of Herman, the letter writer, who loved the mouse, and eventually the woman who saved the mouse from starving to death. In the pivotal scene of the story, it’s the middle of the night; Herman awakens after many days of near death. The mouse Hulda appears and Rose, Herman’s visitor, sets out a bowl of milk and they watch Hulda drink. This beautiful story ends on this revelatory moment.
No such revelatory moment exists here with my mouse and me. I hope mint oil works, or my husband comes home and sets out the trap and I don’t have to deal with it in any way, shape or form.
And oh how I wish, or should I say, OY how I wish, (this being Chanukah) that the mouse was scared of me or even better, just plain scared shitless.
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Nov 25, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
1. I am extremely grateful to the turkey. It’s the one time of year I eat meat. After Thanksgiving is over, I always take the carcass and make the soup. I eat that with gusto, too. As well as a sandwich or two in between. Then the rest of the year I go back to being a pain-in-the-ass crypto vegetarian.
I learned how to cook turkey when one year Aline, my mother’s housekeeper, went AWOL on Thanksgiving. And my mother was running around screaming that company was coming and she didn’t know how to deal with the dead white bird.
I’m grateful I rose to the occasion, stuffed the turkey, cooked it according to what it said in the cookbook, and that it came out well. I made the gravy too because Aline taught me how. She had a little jar, like a leftover peanut butter jar, she put flour and water in. She’d dump a little in the pan drippings, and with her spoon (I use a whisk) she transformed the juices into gravy. Too greasy? She’d throw in a little lemon, a toss of Tabasco, some bottled sauce, and voila! gravy. I do a variation on this theme to this day.
2. I am grateful to the New York Times for putting out the word that washing the turkey just spreads the germs. I hated washing the turkey.
3. I am grateful to Joe Lubart, a very good cook who taught me the Madeira trick with stuffing. Most people moisten stuffing with water, maybe canned broth; I moisten with a good bottle of Madeira or Sherry a la Joe Lubart.
4. I am also grateful to my friend Valerie Prager who told me you don’t have to squeeze every fucking piece of the dried bread as I was brought up to do. Just dump a judicious amount of the liquid on the dry bread and vegetables.
This saves hours. And many scratches on the hand.
5. I am grateful to the French for their bottled chestnuts—extremely expensive—but truly marvelous and also saves me from scoring the fresh chestnuts, roasting them and peeling them. Vive la France!
6. Finally, I am grateful for a very fond memory from my family of origin. It was Shreveport, Louisiana. We were having Thanksgiving. The table was really pretty. My mother had invited new friends—Christians—whom she wanted to impress—and she had on some hostess gown. I can see her to this second in her hostess gown. My sister is there, my grandma is there and so is my brother. We’ve all just sat down.
My mother’s new friends are smiling. Everybody is still, and the afternoon light is filtering through the sheer curtains in the dining room.
“Ruth,” says one of our guests, “will you lead us in prayer.”
My mother’s mouth drops. I can hear her going, ah, shit… Any second I expect her to swoon and have to be carried off to the emergency room.
Clever Ma though passes the buck. She turns to me. “Mary always says the prayer in our family.”
Everyone looks at me. I have never prayed aloud in my life. But I say something. Whatever comes to mind. I’m quite young. I don’t have much poise; I certainly have no religious poise. But I come up with something.
And like my first turkey, I hit the ball out of the park.
My family is so excited that I’ve pulled this off, they start clapping. The Christians are looking astonished. Is this something the Jews do, clap after praying?
They clap and they clap. It is the one pristine memory I have of my family’s absolute approbation.
One of the Christians said, “Amen!”
Then we ate and that was that.
7. My son isn’t coming home for thanksgiving as he usually does. He hasn’t said where he’s going and I haven’t asked. He’s on jury duty in Riverhead, New York and they don’t give the jurors the Wednesday or Friday off. It makes me immeasurably sad and ungrateful that he won’t be here to eat my stuffing that he loves, and admonish me as he always does, that I should have gotten the heritage turkey the one with more dark meat.
Nor, am I grateful that we live in a world where there are so many people who are hungry, Homeless, country less. Etc. etc. etc.
Let’s all try to do something to remedy the above by next Thanksgiving.
In the meantime, Happy 2015 Thanksgiving!
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Nov 23, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
A friend of mine whom I will call “A” fell in love with a man she met on J date. And they began their fine romance the old fashioned way, by talking to one another. Getting to know each other they never Skyped, or did Facetime –this was old-fashioned talking. With the added zest of texting. I was too polite to ask if they had phone sex, so I can only vouch for the fact that she seemed smooth, serene and her smile was pure Mona Lisa.
Being the long married person I am, (I was married in another century!) virtual love affairs interest me. I’m also, I have to confess, writing a novel on this very subject of love in the age of connectivity.
Anyway, he lived in the Midwest. A lives in LA. He claimed to be an investment person. And she was able to do a search (one of those paid ones) that showed a very impressive earner.
And he called her every morning before he went to work and she went to work. And he called her every evening before they went to bed in their different time zones. They said “goodnight, I love you.” This went on for weeks and weeks!
She showed me his picture. And wow, was he cute. He was a grey haired middle-aged guy with a lantern jaw and an Hermes belt buckle. He looked like an ad for Ralph Lauren clothing. The kind with the chic fatherly person impeccably turned out and a white white smile. He was widowed. (Though I didn’t tell her, I’ve always been suspicious of men whose wives died first. Murder, I always think, actual or figurative.) Anyway, no ugly divorce. No unrelenting alimony payments. And even better: No children. He was an only child as she was. It sounded like a match made in internet heaven. She was so happy my friend. In fact I’d never seen her this happy! Certainly not with her last two flesh and blood relationships.
I didn’t quite believe the entire story, that he hadn’t had the urge to go out on a date in the ten-year interregnum period between the death of his wife and when he spotted my friend on J date. My friend is a good-looking fifty something woman. He claimed to be exactly her age. He claimed to want to a woman exactly his age. He wanted commitment. And he demanded right away she remove her JDate profile so no one else could have her.
When she told him it was her birthday, he sent a present. One of those trendy gold watches that weigh the whole arm down.
She wanted love. And he wanted love. They shared love too.
She felt like he understood her in a way that on one ever had before.
She wanted the fairy tale we all want.
I wanted it for her.
And, of course,
I feel badly that I encouraged her in this. When we walked the dogs, she would tell me all about it; I’d sing some stupid songs, the dogs were jumping around, excited because we were excited…
And then a couple of weeks later, he asked her to borrow money, he was stranded somewhere. This supposed rich guy, stockbroker, and his credit cards weren’t working for some reason.
And he turned mean on her.
It took her a while to get it. She was so attached to this picture she had painted of her ideal man in such loving detail, she was loath to give it up.
“If he’s a criminal, I could love a criminal. I went out with an investment banker for years. Isn’t he a criminal? Aren’t we all criminals?”
“Yes, yes, I said, because I got it. “Just don’t’ send him money.”
“I was thinking not the whole amount (he had asked for 5 grand) but maybe 500. I mean this could be a relationship worth keeping. I’d hate to lose it over 500 dollars.”
“Ok,” but it is not going to stop there.”
And so after much soul searching, she didn’t send him a dime.
And he called her some names and never called her again.
And now she’s at a loss. And she misses him the way she would miss a real boyfriend, perhaps more. Mr. X was her very own creation one she had designed (with the help of a con artist) in such loving detail.
If I were writing this as a short story, I’d do it a la Chekov where the con man falls in love with his prey.
Is there a moral to the actual story? Sure beware of con artists you meet online.
But beware of your own ability to create “The One.”
The One is related to mommy and daddy and what they didn’t give you.
The One is related to you and the childish part of you that still believes the world is going to cooperate with your desires.
A lot of men are doing on line sex.
And a lot of women, like my friend, are doing on line fantasy.
Are they two sides of the same coin? Or just the same old battle of the sexes, 21st Century style?
P.S. she sold the watch on EBay and made a couple of hundred bucks.
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Nov 13, 2015 | Blog - Mary Marcus
There are quite a few little old ladies in my ‘hood who attended high school at Manzanar. Bambi, who lives across the street from me, who is about four foot eleven and reminds me so much of my grandmother, was even named Bambi while she was attending high school behind the barbed wire fence.
Bambi the Disney movie premiered in 1942. The same year Manzanar was opened. Bambi says she doesn’t remember what her real name is.
Little Osaka is what our neighborhood is called because its denizens, as opposed to those in Little Tokyo, fared from Osaka. You get to know your neighbors in Little Osaka; many of us have dogs, many of us are walking either East (toward Sawtelle and the restaurants and Japanese market) or West toward Ralph’s, the big supermarket chain that’s two blocks away.
The first time I met Bambi we got in a fight. She was struggling with her Ralph’s shopping bags at the corner light and wouldn’t let me help her. I pleaded with her. It made me nuts watching her lug, then place down her heavy bags every few steps.
“You’ll get home a lot faster, if you let me help you!”
“No,” she smiled stubbornly with her very prominent teeth. “I’m in no rush.”
I’m guessing Bambi is ninety. Her skin is a little wizened but basically un-lined. Her hair is silvery grey-blue and she wears a cardigan that’s almost exactly the same color, no matter how hot it is. She’s, as I mentioned, strong enough to carry shopping bags. And as I found out today she even has a part-time job three days a week. She does paperwork of some sort for a plumbing company on Sawtelle where she has worked for years.
She has four children and she can’t remember how many grandchildren. But nobody ever seems to come around. They live in different states, different time zones. Sometimes she doesn’t even remember their names. Is there something wrong that a little old lady lives so alone? Without apparent need for very much except to live in her own manner?
“Do you miss your children?” I asked her recently. “Do you wish they lived near?”
“No,” she answered. And I believe her.
Every day at about five o’ clock (she’ll start earlier now, I’m guessing with the very short days) Bambi walks the three blocks to Ralph’s for a chocolate doughnut–one she takes home and has with a glass of milk. This is, she explains, her little treat to herself for making it through the day.
With all the non-stop haranguing about what to eat to achieve healthy old age, you find out the secret is a daily dose of fried dough in hydrogenated fat.
The truth is Bambi’s longevity and physical strength have to do with the fact that, even in L.A., she has never driven a car. She walks or takes the bus. In fact my own grandma was the same.
Grandma lived on chocolate, cheap sherry and ground round she made the butcher grind in front of her. She lived across the street from us in a little studio and wasn’t invited to dinner all that often.
I fight the impulse to take Bambi in and feed her and talk to her to make it up to my own grandma for putting her in that nursing home, Virginia Hall, all those years ago. I just did a search and it’s still there. Dementia Assisted Living in Shreveport, Louisiana. Bambi won’t let me help her schlep her bags home from the market, but Grandma would have let me save her. In fact, she begged me to save her.
True, she was going nuts—an old boyfriend of mine found her wandering around in her nightgown looking for me at some God-awful time of night. And of course, true, I was nineteen, my mother should have taken charge instead of putting me in charge with the explicit instruction to “find a decent home.”
I dutifully went round to all the nursing homes in town with Ralph Nader’s list of red flags: the smell of urine, dopey looks on the patients’ faces, patients strapped in their chairs watching TV.
But the sad truth is I found the best of those places, moved Grandma in, and went back to college. The next time I saw Grandma she didn’t know me. She even went on to pat my head when I put it in her lap, and to tell me that I was such a pretty girl, and why was I crying? I remember that her legs couldn’t move.
My grandma is not Bambi and Bambi isn’t Grandma.
But even if I live to that ripe old age of either one of them, I’ll never forget her blank doped-up eyes or forgive myself for what I did.
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