As I slowly move my way around Shady Hill, I’m finding that the people in these stories seem to be very lonely. They’ve gotten what they think they wanted, and suddenly it’s all a “careful what you wish for” reality. ‘The Trouble Of Marcie Flint’ is a story about Marcie Flint and how she drives her husband out of the house they live in. In his absence, Marcie creates a lie for her neighbors benefit (strange to have to do that, I don’t even know my neighbors’ first names, one neighbor who sleeps seventy-five feet from where I do, didn’t speak to me for five years, not even a wave hello), and she thinks that what they think is important. But they have problems of their own. It’s something literate: the town of Shady Hill doesn’t have a library. Excuses are made and when Marcie decides to take up with another neighbor to fight this injustice, she ends up taking it too far. She’s alone, and looking for something to do. Which is where her trouble grows like a weed.
Meanwhile her husband is aboard a steamer ship, having left Shady Hill (with the idea of staying away for six weeks), and is recounting the problems at home. He recognizes the beauty of his home, and his friends and remembers swimming in the Townsends’ pool where he saw a brassiere that had been tossed into a tree above the pool, he imagines the screams, long since past, the thought of the person the bra belonged to being carried away on the wind. Cheever develops with this narrative track as a kind of undercurrent of suburbia, the other end of the telescope, like it’s all some kind of flashback with a strange soundtrack. Memories are what get us through our days, but Cheever uses these memories to create a kind of false present, where the past is cherished.
By the time Charlie and Marcie pass like ships in the night, we learn that their children have been poisoned and Charlie is desperate to find a cure. Marcie and Charlie are absent-minded towards their children, a Cheever trick, borrowed by Rick Moody in Ice Storm (kids having sex in the basement after school, Mom upstairs with the neighbor…screwing him, basically once they are old enough to eat and go potty on their own they are no longer looked after). By the time Marcie is confronted with her original sin – the seemingly banal library scandal – she is at her wit’s end. Finally, a neighbor lectures her on the finer points of a meatball, and it’s not exactly what you think.
-JR
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