Linda Rosenkrantz - Talk

MARSHA: Oh, I’d much rather make it with McGeorge Bundy, just to be able to whisper the name McGeorge.

EMILY: Baby Jane Holzer or Tuesday Weld?

MARSHA: What ever happened to Baby Jane? Sinatra or Belmondo?

EMILY: Belmondo. Up to very recently it would have been Frank, but he’s gone just a little too far, the mafioso.

MARSHA: Yeah. Robert Trout or Walter Cronkite?

EMILY: Robert Trout. Cardinal Spellman or Menasha Skulnik?

MARSHA: That’s disgusting. I’m not going to answer.

EMILY: Bobby or Teddy?

MARSHA: I think Teddy.

EMILY: No, Bobby, definitely.

MARSHA: Which of your two brothers?

EMILY: David. Your father or Henry Geldzahler?

MARSHA: Henry! Yay!

EMILY: You know this game can push you into a whole new feeling about people.

MARSHA: You’re right — I can hardly wait until I see Henry again.

EMILY: Who else is around?

MARSHA: Hedda or Louella?

EMILY: Whichever is still alive.

MARSHA: Goebbels or Goering?

EMILY: The fat one.

MARSHA: Huntley or Brinkley?

EMILY: Brinkley.

MARSHA: Jules or Jim?

EMILY: Jim.

MARSHA: Funny, I thought you would have picked Jules.

MARSHA: I had this image all through my childhood that my mother was a saint. She never raised her voice, she never hit me, she was a complete goody-goody. One day I was standing on my canopied bed in the Bronx — my mother had made me a beautiful princess’s room and I had this very high bed with white ruffles on top. Now you know I was a model child — the only time I ever was bad was when I’d ask for glasses of water and sing and dance to avoid going to sleep and this one night I must have been particularly rambunctious. Finally my mother really got angry. She came in and said Marsha, you are a little stinker. Well! You can’t imagine what it meant for me to hear that vile obscenity come out of my mother’s pure mouth. It shot the whole image to hell. I started to cry and weep and scream. She tried to wiggle out of it by saying she just meant I smelled because I didn’t take a bath that night, and that stinker was a perfectly good English word — but I knew it wasn’t.

EMILY: She meant you were a bitch or a bastard, isn’t that what she meant?

MARSHA: Yeah, and I never got over it.

EMILY: No kidding. It’s interesting, but God almighty, it’s really not much in terms of traumas.

MARSHA: Sorry, that’s all I have to offer. It was a very big thing to me, believe it or not, because of this incorruptible image I had of her. She never raised her voice to my father, she was just this gentle, giving, loving, flowing indulgent mother with flesh like silk.

EMILY: I don’t remember my mother raising her voice either. Flesh like silk?

MARSHA: Satin, old-fashioned satin. Probably I’m remembering her nightgowns. But I used to get the creeps, her skin was so soft and smooth — like marble — I thought there was something wrong with her. She never shaved her legs, under her arms, she had no hair.

EMILY: Really? Sounds like a Chinese.

MARSHA: My grandfather is the same way.

EMILY: What about your sister? Does Rochelle have hair under her arms?

MARSHA: She’s hairy with eyebrows that grow all over. In fact when she was about six and getting a little fuzz, I used to constantly tell her how hairy she was.

EMILY: You were so jealous of her!

MARSHA: I made her feel disgusting — that was one of her lifelong traumas. I think I was jealous of her, but I would lie to myself and say what bothered me was that we just didn’t have much in common, she wasn’t the type of person I liked to be with, she was phony. But I wasn’t jealous , of course not — I just didn’t happen to care for her personality. That was when she was about three. Because don’t forget she had suddenly appeared after twelve years of my only child-dom, this pishy little kid who could do everything I couldn’t do, not only manual things with her hands and athletics, but she could talk to people, she wasn’t shy. I mean all she did was get born and two minutes later she’s doing all the banes of my existence, flushing mice down the toilet and everything else.

EMILY: I bet she couldn’t do it now. I have a story about my mother too. I had this best friend named Judi who had a fantastic wardrobe. Of course all my friends always wore beautiful clothes and I had nothing, because my mother spent my clothes allowance on herself.

MARSHA: Nice mommy.

EMILY: Very nice mommy. I didn’t know about it until one day a friend of my sister’s went into my mother’s closet. I was a small little girl of ten and my sister was very very tall. I was wearing her hand-me-down skirts — half the skirt was a hem.

MARSHA: Why didn’t your mother cut some of it off?

EMILY: Because she didn’t give a shit. When I tried on clothes, everything looked good on me, according to my mother. Naturally. So anyway this girl took one look at my mother’s closet and she said what’s going on? Look at the Christian Dior suits and the Pauline Trigère dresses and the Bergdorf Goodman shoes, piles upon piles.

MARSHA: You mean you never looked in your mother’s closet?

EMILY: Who knows at ten years old what’s good and what’s not? So here my mother has fifteen thousand basic black dresses, basic black suits and basic black shoes, all from the best places. She has two mink coats and a Persian lamb coat, a gray fox, all these crazy coats, while I’m going around with the skirts with the hems. So anyway, my friend Judi and I were going to a dance. I had to go stag, I had nothing to wear, so she lent me a blouse. I loved this blouse so much I could have died. I wore it and I got ink on it.

MARSHA: Ink at a party?

EMILY: Somehow, wherever I wore it, I got ink on it. I was desperate. And of course I could never turn to my mother with any problem. I was so guilty and felt so terrible about it, I put it into the laundry. It came out still with the spot, so I hid it in my closet. My mother found it and she said how did you get ink on Judi’s blouse?

MARSHA: She knew it was borrowed?

EMILY: Of course. I gave her a long song and dance and then I broke down, I told her the truth. She said that is a lie . She called Althea in, the maid. Althea, did you find these spots in the laundry? Oh no, ma’am, it was clean as a mother-fucker’s ass, as clean as clean could be. The two of them against me. Tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth, and she started smacking me across the fucking face until finally I broke down and told her what she wanted to hear, which was a lie.

MARSHA: What was the point?

EMILY: She didn’t want me lying to her. No lies. My mother was a very big liar.

MARSHA: How come you went stag without a date?

EMILY: I was the wallflower of all time.

MARSHA: I was a terrible wallflower. With my glasses and my curly permanented hair.

EMILY: But you were very pretty.

MARSHA: Yeah, but don’t forget when you see pictures of me at that age I have my glasses off. I have a couple at home with the glasses on.

EMILY: Those don’t go in the album.

MARSHA: Those don’t go in any album. I was always pretty, but what I did to myself with the shyness and everything else was unbelievable, I mean I was so gangly and awkward. And you know that I used to bandage my foot.

EMILY: What do you mean you bandaged your foot?

MARSHA: I used to put a bandage around my ankle and tell people I hurt my foot because I was afraid to dance.

EMILY: You mean you always went to parties with the bandage? Didn’t people begin to wonder about it?

MARSHA: I only did it a couple of times. And there was this one story — I don’t know why it sticks in my mind — but there was a boy in my class named Bradley Greenberg who had a crush on me, glasses and all, and he had a whole gang of boys living in his building who called themselves the Handlers. They were called the Handlers because their names were Harvey, Alan, Norman, Danny, Lester, Ernie, Ray and Sheldon, and that’s what their initials spelled out.