{"id":5054,"date":"2013-12-13T17:47:20","date_gmt":"2013-12-13T22:47:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=5054"},"modified":"2013-12-23T00:24:02","modified_gmt":"2013-12-23T05:24:02","slug":"marcia-steve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.silkentent.com\/Trees\/?p=5054","title":{"rendered":"Marcia & Steve"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This piece was begun on the date given, Dec. 13, but not posted until Dec. 23. It was sunny with a high in the 60s today. Odd to remember the snow such a short time ago.)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

December 13, 2013
\nFriday<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Isabel made a living out of transforming the molehills of her life into mountains.<\/em><\/span>
\n \u00e2\u20ac\u201d Suzanne Rivecca, b. 1970s<\/span>
\n American fiction writer<\/span>
\n from “Look, Ma, I’m Breathing,” short story in Death is Not an Option<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"holi13badge-snowflake\"<\/span><\/a>I live in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a hundred miles west of Philadelphia. We are getting some winter weather this weekend, set to start tomorrow afternoon. The forecast map used by the local newspaper describes the coming snow as “disruptive.” My niece, who lives about 40 miles south of here, anticipates being snowed in. The only problem she sees with this, she told us via Facebook, is that her upstairs neighbors will be snowed in as well, and they “communicate exclusively through yelling, screaming, sobbing, and stomping their feet.”<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I read the first part of the story quoted above this morning, having left off my plan to read the remaining stories in A Literary Christmas<\/em><\/span><\/a>. Although I knew that the selections in that anthology would not be “dreadful outpourings of hypocritical mush and treacle,” they were so much the opposite that I dreaded picking up the book each morning. I read about the awful moment a child discovers that there is, indeed, no Santa Claus and a night school teacher’s chagrin at the inappropriate gift his earnest, well-meaning students offer him, this one so thick with dialogue meant to imitate the language difficulties the immigrant students are trying to overcome that it was nearly unreadable.<\/span><\/p>\n

So I turned to Suzanne Rivecca’s collection Death is Not an Option: Stories<\/em>. I’d been introduced to her work\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>via “Philanthropy,” included in Best American Short Stories 2013<\/em>. I was so drawn to the voice and to Rivecca’s subject matter, “confused young women fleeing Catholic pasts,” as Booklist<\/em> puts it, that I got the whole collection from the library.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the story I read this morning, Isabel is a young woman who has to deliver the second part of a two book deal. Her first book was a memoir recanting the childhood tales she told about receiving visions of the Virgin Mary. She is having difficulty both with the notoriety her first book garnered and with coming up with an idea for a second. Her uncertainty takes place in the context of her seeking a new apartment from a landlord who appears to be not just a little odd, but dangerous.<\/span><\/p>\n

I wish I’d kept a diary when I lived in two furnished rooms on Walnut Street in Harrisburg, from August of 1970 until late in May of 1971. I did start one, on a snow day in February. “Outside my window it’s like black and white tv.” I remember that line in particular. Like all of the personal writing I did before 1983, I abandoned the effort and destroyed the evidence because, as I have said somewhere, the writing either was too honest, or not honest enough. And if that one line is any indication, it was also terrible.<\/span><\/p>\n

What I have kept, however, is memories, of the textures and the odors and the sounds that made up my world. And of the people who occupied the other four apartments in a carved-up single family fin-de-si\u00c3\u00a8cle<\/em> house just over the city line about a mile east of the capitol building, beside Harrisburg’s jewel of a public park. The first floor had Bob and Jane, an unmarried couple who didn’t like to call attention to themselves because they were occupying the place as an illegal sublet (thus they endured the water that sometimes leaked from my shower onto their bed); Terry, a single man who invited me in once to show me how to defeat the landlord’s control of the heat (freeze water in Dixie cups and put them on top of the thermostat); and two men who lived in what had been the porch, enclosed behind glass block, whom I never saw in the nine months I lived there, although I would hear their cars come and go, their door open and shut.<\/span><\/p>\n

Marcia and Steve had the other half of the second floor, two rooms beside mine that were their living room and kitchen, and their bedroom and bath in the half-story attic above my bedroom. I thought of them immediately when my niece described her neighbors. Maybe everyone, at some point in their young adulthood, lives beside these people.<\/span><\/p>\n

I don’t know how long Marcia and Steve had been a couple, but I know they had not been married very long. They’d eloped to West Virginia about a month before I met them, because you could get married in just one day there, instead of the three days Pennsylvania required between marriage license application and ceremony. It had taken twelve hours anyway, for driving there, for blood tests, and for finding a JP. I can’t remember which of them told me the story, but I do remember thinking that it said something about the marriage if recounting the wedding day was full of complaints about the heat, and the distance, and the curious souls they encountered in the hick town they chose for their nuptials.<\/span><\/p>\n

They had the “yelling, screaming, sobbing, and stomping of feet” routines all down pat. They argued about money (its lack), about flirting (his), and about the high cost of herbal concoctions and chiropractic treatments for conditions that didn’t seem to improve (hers). Two or three times a week they would have epic screaming matches, calling each other all manner of ugly names. There might even have been some punching or slapping. Then it would get very quiet. After a few minutes, there would be some foot stomping up the stairs, then a groaning of springs and of persons, and then thump thump thump<\/em> as their bed traveled across the floor above mine.<\/span><\/p>\n

In late winter, Steve brought home a tropical fish that cost $15. (My rent in those days was $90 a month.) He threw it into a bowl that they kept on the second shelf of the book case where their television was. “If it dies, we’re eating it for dinner,” Marcia said. Not long afterward, she brought home a kitten, part of a litter a co-worker at the bank was unloading. One day, I came up the stairs after school, stopped beside their open door to get out my keys, and spied the kitten, taller and steadier than when it first arrived, about to scoop the fish out. I shooed it away. I never saw the cat or the fish again.<\/span><\/p>\n

Another time, after the weather had warmed up, I came home one afternoon to find Steve in the driveway working on his car. “Come here! Come here! I want to show you something!” I got into the passenger seat, reluctantly \u00e2\u20ac\u201d the guy was kind of creepy and had been somewhat flirtatious (see above). “I worked on this all afternoon!” he said. (I have no recollection of what, if anything, he actually did for a living.) His project had been the installation on the hood of the car of windshield fluid dispensers that looked like little boys peeing. The fluid squirted up onto the window right in front of your face. AND \u00e2\u20ac\u201d this he was most proud of \u00e2\u20ac\u201d he had found clear fluid to which he had added yellow food color.<\/span><\/p>\n

When I moved in May, he said he was sorry to see me go. He asked for my new address and phone number. I said the phone hadn’t been installed yet. I also said I wasn’t quite sure of the address. The building was owned by a friend of my father’s, and I just knew where it was. I don’t know if he believed me.<\/span><\/p>\n

If Marcia and Steve are still together \u00e2\u20ac\u201d something I highly doubt \u00e2\u20ac\u201d they’d be married 43 years, going on 44. I no longer remember Steve’s last name. The business Marcia’s parents had, a campground, has been given over to development. I think of them now. I’m certainly writing better stuff than I was then, and my interpersonal skills are better developed. I hope it’s the same for them, no matter what paths they have taken.<\/span><\/p>\n

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