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.
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.