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Novels by Mary Marcus
New on the Blog
Mother In The Mirror
It was hot, the Santa Ana’s were blowing and I was having a bad hair day. I told a new haircutter to just “Get rid of it!” Now, whenever I look in the mirror I see my mother staring back at me. I can’t escape her. Why did I do this? It happens every time I cut my hair short. Poor Mother died so long ago, she never got to meet my husband or my son. She never met our bird, or our cat and she never met Henry. “You sleep with your dog?” she’d hiss. “How tawdry!” Once in a while she’d decide my brother (because he didn’t have a father) needed a dog. Never mind my sister and I who didn’t have a father either. Once in a while, a dog would appear for a couple of weeks, then just as mysteriously, disappear. I would be the only one who would bond with the animal. Her remedy for anything from a headache to a broken heart was, depending on the time of day, a cigarette, a strong black coffee, or a scotch and soda and some pills. We had yellow pills, we had orange pills, we had black pills, and she took a lot of red pills when she couldn’t get to sleep from the rainbow of daytime pills. When in doubt: take a pill. What a role model! Still, I loved her. She was funny, she was sarcastic. We had a lot of books in the house. And records. She gave me Oscar Wilde, Beethoven, Bach, Scarlatti, the Bronte sisters, and many other influential others. She was spoiled rotten, however. When she didn’t get her way, she took to her bed with the...Super Bowl Sunday and Marital Bliss
Confession: I have never watched a football game. I attended an LSU football game a thousand years ago in high school when I was on a date with someone my brother fixed me up with, but alas, I was not a part of the screaming multitude. I don’t know who is playing today. I don’t know the names of the teams. They are as indistinguishable to me as the names of the baseball and basketball teams, though philosophically and aesthetically, baseball and basketball are more appealing than football. And so is soccer. I don’t get football at all. Why are these people shrieking over these poor guys who, like gladiators and boxers, have to risk life and limb for all these out-of–shape, chip-eating, beer-swilling fans? Unlike the gladiators, they get good pay for getting beaten up, concussed, and pummeled and that’s fine in my book. To me Jerry Sandusky is a natural byproduct of the shibboleth known as American football. In spite of all this, Super Bowl Sunday is the greatest! Nobody at the Whole Foods, nobody at Trader Joe’s. Nobody anywhere. Except for these thunderous roars that emit from open windows when one walks by. Nothing is stirring, not even a mouse. We are planning to go eat sushi at the busiest sushi bar in Little Osaka because we know it will be empty. It takes a 7-point earthquake or Super Bowl Sunday to clear the streets in Los Angeles. But every year it’s the same. By 3:25 PST nothing on Olympic, nothing on Wilshire. Nothing on the 10- or the 405. My husband, God bless him, may not hate Super Bowl Sunday but he is sublimely indifferent. I just went upstairs and asked him who was...Riley-ville Redux
Home is where one starts from. And for a long time, Riley-ville was home. In honor of that, today, Henry and I walked by where our old house used to be on 20th Street in Santa Monica. Henry never lived there, but my son spent some of his childhood there and a good deal of his adolescence. And it seemed like it really was the roach motel. We checked in when we came from New York, but we could never check out no matter how I tried. I’m sure if that developer hadn’t paid us thirty large to move, and torn the place down, we’d still be there, freezing our asses off. If you think Los Angeles is warm in the winter, try living through one without heat–where there is so little juice from the ancient wiring system that space heaters blow up and the fuses conk out daily, sometimes hourly. Riley-ville was a small Spanish two-story built sometime in the twenties. My husband insisted on it. After all, it was a good solution to our problems. It was cheap, in the right school district, the walls were white, and it didn’t have cottage cheese on the ceiling, and the floors were hardwood. You can’t imagine how hard such a place is to find in Southern California. It was meant to be a temporary asylum on our way to becoming homeowners. But that didn’t happen either. I took pencil and paper the other day, and tried to figure out how much money we have lost by paying rent all these years, missing out on the various dream times to...
The New Me
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