Linda Rosenkrantz - Talk

EMILY: You remember all those names?

MARSHA: Sure do. When I’m eighty, I’ll remember them. They were all gorgeous. I was fourteen and they were seventeen and I kept telling Bradley Greenberg that I wanted to go out with them.

EMILY: But he wasn’t a member — his name started with B.

MARSHA: He idolized them. And he quoted them to me saying fifteen was the bottom of the barrel — they would never go out with anyone fourteen. So I was put in my place, at the bottom of the barrel. Finally I got to be fifteen and one of them condescended to go out with me, Lester. We had a long romance, we went out every Saturday night for a month and a half. He was short and pudgy.

EMILY: I thought they were all gorgeous.

MARSHA: All except Lester. Anyway, one time my friend was baby-sitting at a woman named Mrs. Bespaloff’s. How many years ago was this? Seventeen years ago, and I still remember the woman’s name. So we went over there, I had my foot bandaged on the chance there might be a little dancing to the Frank Sinatra records, and the boys kept putting the lights off. Those boys loved to kiss.

EMILY: Was Mrs. Bespaloff there?

MARSHA: Of course not, we were baby-sitting with her kids. Then something happened, I don’t remember what, but I got terrified, I guess I was terrified of the necking. And somehow or other I found myself on the couch with Lester, and I was sitting on my hands.

EMILY: Why?

MARSHA: I don’t know, but the word got out that I sat on my hands and it was passed around from Handler to Handler and they all made jokes about Marsha who sat on her hands. I didn’t go out much after that.

EMILY: I love these stories.

MARSHA: I have another horrible one that was really traumatic. You know I grew up in this slummy section of the Bronx. My mother was fanatically clean, but in spite of it, because the woman upstairs was a slob, we had cockroaches in hordes. And mice. Cockroaches, as you may know, are afraid of the light. They start to play around when it’s dark. And we had a white, what do you call that material that tables used to be made of? Old-fashioned kitchen tables?

EMILY: Formica.

MARSHA: No, before it was invented. Metal! A white metal table! Well, one night I came in with my boyfriend Marty Halpern and the white table was black, it was completely covered with bugs. I screamed.

EMILY: Marshie, I would have gone out of my mind.

MARSHA: Also my mother would make me take the soda bottles back to the candy store for the deposit, and before I went, I’d have to turn them over and dump out the bugs so I wouldn’t be embarrassed in the store. One time when I was standing at the kitchen sink washing my hair a mouse ran over my foot. Another night I was baby-sitting with my sister, I had had a fight with my boyfriend Marty Halpern, we weren’t seeing each other, so I was alone doing my homework when suddenly a fuse blew. The lights went out and I knew, in a matter of minutes, it would be the cotillion ball of the cockroaches and the mice. I was petrified. I couldn’t leave the goddamned kid, this brat who was ruining my life anyway. I couldn’t leave her alone. It was about twelve o’clock. I looked out the window and just luckily, there was Marty Halpern coming home from a date. I completely swallowed my pride, I didn’t give a damn, and I screamed out the window you have to come up, just stay with me, bring me a flashlight. So he came. And then this crazy embarrassing thing happened, one of these things you can remember for thirty years and the other person didn’t even notice? When he came in, he put his jacket on the back of the chair I later sat down in, and when he finally was leaving, he came over to me, and I thought he wanted to make up, be my boyfriend again, marry me, but he was just going for the jacket. It was the most humiliating moment of my life. And he didn’t even know what I was thinking.

EMILY: Did you put your arms around him or anything?

MARSHA: No, I just started to get a warm feeling. I was so naive. I was fifteen and we used to neck at the door every night and he would get a hard-on? I used to think it was his wallet that had somehow worked its way over, I thought he had very peculiar pockets. Until I was twenty-five years old, I thought it was his wallet.

EMILY: Maybe it was his wallet. What did Tim say? Is he coming over?

MARSHA: Yeah, I can’t believe he’s really coming back after what I did to him last night. I thought he’d be furious.

EMILY: Do you understand why you threw him out?

MARSHA: Of course I do — it was all about Merrill Johnston, it was the first time I’ve ever seen my doctor with a woman. I was much more jealous of that than of Tim Cullen and his little lip-reading flirtation with another girl, but he was the only one around to attack.

EMILY: You know it’s interesting, talking about last night, that story you told before about your goody-goody image of your mother, it’s interesting because it upsets you so much when I get drunk and everything. Did you ever analyze that?

MARSHA: I just don’t think it’s nice.

EMILY: You don’t think it’s nice. Precisely.

MARSHA: Emily, don’t try to make it into a thing of mine. Everybody gets as upset.

EMILY: Joan doesn’t.

MARSHA: Joan is an alcoholic, you can’t take her as a criterion. Do you get upset when she drinks?

EMILY: Very upset.

MARSHA: There you are, because you’re normal. How would you feel if I did what you did last night, if I didn’t recognize you when I got drunk and behaved that way? Would you think it was a peculiarity of yours if you got upset?

EMILY: No, but I’m not sure how upset I would get.

MARSHA: Believe me, you’d get fantastically upset if you saw someone as sick as you. It was incredible. You did not know who I was.

EMILY: Did Tim get upset?

MARSHA: He was ready to leave you on the beach. Everybody was. I had to fight them to go get you — even Vinnie, and then you treated me like your jailer, you told me to leave you alone.

EMILY: Did I really?

MARSHA: That’s what infuriates me, that you don’t even remember. I really can’t take it, Emily.

EMILY: There’s no reason why you should. I don’t think I’m going to be coming out for a while, Marshie. Maybe I’ll take Sick Joan and we’ll go to Woods Hole for a little rest cure — the two sickies.

MARSHA: I think maybe you should.

VINCENT: Do you have any bread?

MARSHA: Only white.

VINCENT: What kind would you want with clams? Don’t you know the Italian color way of eating? White and white and white: the white wines and white clams and white bread, it’s gorgeous. Were you sitting out here when I pulled up?

MARSHA: I was hovering by the door, I was afraid something happened to you. You took such an inordinate length of time.

VINCENT: You told me to drive slowly, I went purposely slow so you wouldn’t be nervous.

MARSHA: Well I was. I felt like I was waiting for my daddy.

VINCENT: What time did your father used to get home from work?

MARSHA: About six-thirty.

VINCENT: Mine got home at seven-thirty. That’s too late for a young kid to wait up.

MARSHA: Didn’t he work in the neighborhood?

VINCENT: No, but it’s funny, he worked not far from the hospital he died in.

MARSHA: That was near your house.

VINCENT: No it wasn’t. Brooklyn is an enormous long place, it’s a big graveyard.

MARSHA: Don’t eat that black stuff, the foreskin. Peel it back as if you were giving it a bris.

VINCENT: You know when I was sixteen, my mother was dead and I made a New Year’s dinner for a girl at my house. I made her this, but she couldn’t eat it.