MARSHA: It is. I don’t know where to store everything, Em.
EMILY: You definitely need a larger apartment.
MARSHA: Did I tell you my sister’s my new best friend?
EMILY: Is she really?
MARSHA: Sweet as sugar. She dragged all over town with me today, on buses, on foot, little pregnant baby. You know the saddest thing? The other night, when I was getting dressed at her house, she sat on the bed watching me like a little girl watching her older teenage sister. And there she was with a baby in her belly.
EMILY: Yeah, but you know babies in bellies don’t mean anything. As you well know, my Marshie, babies in bellies don’t mean very much at all. Is your sister bright?
MARSHA: I don’t know.
EMILY: She has a lot of the qualities of bright people, she’s sort of cynical and bored, negative, quick, but I’ve never heard any sustained thoughts come out of her head. What am I supposed to do about Joan now?
MARSHA: I don’t know, get rid of her, tell her we decided to go to the movies and she can’t come.
EMILY: Yeah. This chicken has a very Jewish smell. My mother used to make fricassee with meatballs thrown into it.
MARSHA: My mother did too, only with a brown sauce.
EMILY: That’s what this is — brown sauce. If you want me to throw in the meatballs, I will. I think I’m getting a maid. My apartment is so clean right now, so meticulous, it’s so neat and beautiful, just like this, it’s in exactly this kind of shape. But I don’t have time to keep it that way.
MARSHA: Who does?
EMILY: Nobody. I don’t want to shit away my evenings anymore, Marshie, I’m feeling extremely positive about life. Tiny little meatballs she used to put in. You know how many years it’s been since she put in those tiny meatballs?
MARSHA: Maybe she still does.
EMILY: My mother’s madly in love with me these days. I was going with my doctor today through the fantasies I have about being a star. You want to hear them? They’re so sad. I come out onto the stage, and all of a sudden this big hot wet black womb full of love, this theatre, bursts into applause. And who’s in the audience? You’re there, all my friends are, all the friends who love me and think I’m brilliant and talented but basically a flunky failure, they’re all in the audience. Michael’s in the audience, Nathan’s in the audience, my mother’s in the audience, the whole family scene is out there in the audience. Guess who isn’t?
MARSHA: Sick Joan?
EMILY: My doctor, he’s not in the audience. Why should he be? After all, I only have a limited amount of tickets for opening night. I was describing to him the nature of my present life being amorphous and plastic and without form and he said but it has great form; your masochism is its shape. And it’s true, my dollar-a-day allowance, my twenty-seven-dollar-a-month rent and my stealing, my incredibly impoverished sense of self have been so neatly and compactly worked into my mental bloodstream, it’s unbelievable. Before the summer, Marshie, I felt I was what my masochism was, that was the only identity I had, the fact that I was a loser. I had no hope. I never told you, but I was very suicidal. And you have to admit I had a lot of good company, a lot of sick people to keep me happy and on the swing. Pushing to the left was Sick Joan and pushing me to the right was that gorgeous series of deprived and risky men, Nathan, Michael, Philippe. I’m glad it’s over, Marsh. You know something? You look just like a little girl right now.
MARSHA: Tim Cullen said I look pretty in yellow. First compliment he’s given me since last February.
EMILY: What does he know?
MARSHA: He knows I look pretty in yellow.
EMILY: You do, it happens that you look very well in yellow, I wouldn’t shit you. Guess what color the sauce of the fricassee is?
MARSHA: Yellow.
EMILY: Completely brown, brown as a witch’s tit.
MARSHA: Oh lordy, here we go again. You know when I went to my doctor today, I told him how sick I think I am.
EMILY: Why?
MARSHA: Because I have no feelings, or at least I don’t come into contact with them, they’re all buried. It’s funny because I thought I was going to go in and tell him I had had such a constructive summer of working and studying myself and this and that. Instead all I did was qvetch about what a horrible person I emerged as on the tapes and how all the three of us talk about is sex and food and yet how I felt we were the only people who communicate in the whole world, blablabla. He said it must be very isolating.
EMILY: What must be isolating?
MARSHA: Just having you and Vinnie as people I can talk to.
EMILY: What’s this thing about not having any feelings?
MARSHA: Well, he asked me what I would feel like if I got married and had to give up Vince, and I said I wouldn’t feel anything.
EMILY: You told him what happened with Nathan Fass, didn’t you?
MARSHA: Yeah, but I blocked most of it out, I couldn’t remember the details. I had already told him on the beach anyway. I did say if I don’t care about Vinnie, who ultimately is the closest person in the world to me, who do I care about?
EMILY: He is? He’s closer to you than me?
MARSHA: In a way, yeah. He is a man. I mean you both are close, but actually, I think in terms of influence, he’s more important in my life.
EMILY: You were with him a lot more this summer.
MARSHA: Let’s not compare; you’re both terribly close to me.
EMILY: Yeah, okay.
MARSHA: But in the end, do I really give a shit about either of you? Do I give a shit about anything? I don’t think I do. I had just described the feeling I had for Tim, getting so overwhelmed with emotion when he forgave me, and Merrill Johnston said what was that, just sham feeling? I said I brought it up because it was so rare for me to have such a big feeling. I said maybe it’s because I spend my time with people like Sick Joan, who goes to a psychotic extreme, and Emily, who goes to a neurotic extreme of feeling, feeling, feeling; maybe only by comparison with them don’t I feel.
EMILY: You definitely have a problem with feeling.
MARSHA: That’s a pretty big problem.
EMILY: I think it’s very healthy that you’re worried about this.
MARSHA: Then after telling him I had no feelings, I came home and burst into tears.
EMILY: Darling, we know that you have feelings, you’re a very complicated person. But you did have a very positive summer in certain respects.
MARSHA: The whole purpose of the summer was to write a book.
EMILY: And you did that.
MARSHA: I wrote the book and everything I missed in the summer as well as everything I gained was because of it. I set the summer up so that I could be out of bed at seven o’clock every morning. I set it up so I wouldn’t meet a lot of distracting people, even though he admitted there weren’t any people to meet.