Center of Things

1 TIME "Most of life is wasted time." john berryman "I read poetry to save time." marilyn monroe "The distinction between past, present and future is only an illusion, even if a stubborn one." albert einstein Marie was early. And when Marie was early, she agonized. During the first five minutes, she simply couldn't believe the fact that she was early yet again. Then she began hating herself. It started with hating herself for being early, but she soon moved on to hating herself for having dropped out of graduate school, for not being married, for being partially deaf in one ear, for writing for a tabloid, for being already thirty-nine years old, for having straight hair, for not having children, for never finishing the philosophy of science paper she had been working on for nearly fifteen years, for being five feet eleven and three-quarters inches tall. When Marie could no longer bear her checklist of miseries, she started calculating the number of hours, to date, she had wasted by being early, and, based on those numbers and her life expectancy, how many more she would waste in the future. According to Marco, hers was an uncommon case of reaction formation to the very common fear of abandonment. He had explained to her that most people react to the fear of abandonment associated with time appointments by being late themselves. Or they counter the fear by being compulsively on time. "But you, Marie," he had said, "anticipate the fear, as if by creating the same conditions earlier in time you can cancel out what you expect to occur later on. It is beautifully symmetrical, perfectly logical." It seemed grossly illogical to Marie, who continued to add up the hours of her wasted life on a bar napkin at the Ear Inn. She worked as a researcher and reporter for the Gotham City Star, Manhattan's only remaining evening tabloid, and one of her duties for the paper was to gather material for the advancer file, which contained the obituaries of people not yet dead. She had come to the bar in a similar capacitybut this time she would also be writing the story herself. Marco called her obituary work a kind of literary pre-necrophilia and a prime example of her neurotic need to anticipate abandonment. Just the day before, Nora Mars, the 1960s glamour queen and actress, had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and was in a coma. Despite her relative youthshe was sixty-twoand her otherwise excellent health, she was by all medical accounts unlikely to recover. News of the tragedy had devastated Marie. Since Marie was about ten years old, Nora Mars had been her most revered idol. Nora Mars was the girl next door gone awry, in both looks and attitudeshe had white-blond hair and a peaches-and-cream complexion, but her slanted green eyes made her look like some exotic hybrid. ("My mother passed over the postman for the Chinese laundryman," she had once notoriously told the press.) Her atypical beauty and hard-edged innocence combined to form Marie's teenage idea of female perfection. Growing up, Marie had fantasized about being any number of movie stars she had come to know by watching endless hours of late night television. Before her parents were divorced, when she was eight, television had been allowed for only one hour on Saturday mornings. But after her father left, her mother stopped caring so much about rules, and Marie, over the following years, more than made up for her early childhood deprivation. The television set was on from the time she got home from school until she left again the next morning. She was a devotee of The 4 O'Clock Movie, The Million Dollar Movie, Movie Playhouse, Late Nite at the Movies, and The Late Late Late Movie. By high school she had few friends and rarely went out except to the movies, accompanied by her yoMcPhee, Jenny is the author of 'Center of Things' with ISBN 9780385500777 and ISBN 0385500777.