Marcy Who Stole My Story

In fourth grade Marcy stole my story. Our school principal took this crime very seriously. I was embarrassed because I viewed the theft as the highest compliment. I had a fan. I could always write another story. But a fan, now that was hard to come by.

My story was a sci-fi about a snowball fight on Mars. It was long and took up many pages of fourth-grade writing paper. My teacher asked me to read my story aloud to the class, which I did. Within the hour, it went missing from my desk. My teacher had everyone search the classroom for it. It didn’t turn up. As we filed past her at the door to the classroom and said good-bye for the day, her eagle eye caught sight of a thick bulge beneath the cover of Marcy’s math book. It was my story, folded in half and neatly tucked away.

Marcy’s life intersected with mine many times while I was growing up in the 1960s. I sometimes thought of her as my opposite. I was privileged and she was disadvantaged. She would have been surprised to discover how much I thought about her. When I thought about her, I wondered why I got so lucky and why she didn’t. I had a lively, functional, fun, and smart family. Dad made a solid middle class income and we owned our home. My parents were both college-educated. I was well-loved and all my needs were met. Marcy came from a large blended family with a dozen or more siblings and step-siblings and half-siblings from an assortment of parents. Her mother’s current husband, Marcy’s stepfather, either didn’t work or didn’t make much money when he did work. Marcy had shabby clothes, often came to school dirty and unfed, and lived “across the tracks” in a rented apartment.

Once, when we were in Brownie Scouts together, Marcy was reprimanded for eating the Easter candy we were using to fill baskets for “the poor kids.” It would probably be safe to say that she ate the candy because she was hungry. The irony of the situation, i.e., Marcy making up Easter baskets for “the poor kids,” was not lost on me, even though I was only about seven years old at the time.

I never befriended Marcy. We lived in different worlds and I didn’t have any idea what I would ever say to her if I were to talk with her. She existed on the margins of my luminous life. A shadow. A reminder that the world was not a fair or just place and that not all children were loved.

In the eighth grade, Marcy and I were in the same physical education (P.E.) class. In February, Marcy started to sit out of P.E. She had a written note from the school nurse excusing her from strenuous activity. Curious, I asked some of the other girls if they knew why Marcy was out. That was how I learned that Marcy was pregnant. I don’t think she completed the eighth grade, and I don’t remember ever seeing her again after that year.

Perhaps Marcy was raped or the victim of incest in that dysfunctional, chaotic, weird household of hers. I have often wondered what became of her. I wouldn’t know if she was smart or talented or particularly good at anything. I wouldn’t know if she survived, stayed sane, or went crazy. I think, from knowing her as a child, that she never had a chance. Maybe she got a chance as an adult, some subsequent lucky break that I never knew about.

Here’s the peculiar part of my relationship to Marcy. I envied her. Lucky me, with all the world in my basket, I envied Marcy. I envied her the knowledge she had about life. I felt stupid and hopelessly innocent next to her. I imagined that she was wise beyond her years, that she would always have more of importance to write about than I, that she had earned the right to sing the blues in a way that I never would. I envied her potential to make a difference in the lives of others because she had walked in the shoes and was authentic in her suffering. I imagined it would take me years and years to know the things she knew.

I didn’t want Marcy’s life. Her life terrified me. I admired Marcy for getting up in the morning, walking through the day, and surviving in a life she did not deserve in a universe so random and potentially brutal that little girls were raped for no reason and went hungry even though they had never done anything wrong. All these years later, as an adult and a writer, I know better than to envy Marcy anything. I only hope she lived, kept her sanity, made a bearable life, and perhaps found peace.