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Novels by Mary Marcus
New on the Blog
My Gratitude List
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...The Nice Jewish Man Who Wasn’t
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...Bambi/Grandma
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...
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