The just-out-of-reach epiphany: "The Inversion of Marcia" by Thomas Bolt

This story nearly ended my attempt to analyze all the stories in the 2018 O.Henry anthology. It's a very long short story at 45 pages. This makes it difficult to read all in one sitting, which is the advantage short stories usually give to the would-be analyst. One problem I had was my ignorance of Italian geography. The entire story is about an Italian vacation a Connecticut family takes, apparently over Christmas break, and I was a little lost. Actually, the family itself is often lost, driving through the same arch over and over again as they try to get back to their villa, or asking whether the body of water they can see from their villa is the Gulf of Naples or the Mediterranean Sea (it's the Tyrrhenian Sea).

The three girls who form the nucleus of the story are helped out by maps, so I'm going to provide one here. The first half of their trip, they stay near the archaeological site in Cuma. From the villa, they strike out on trips to nearby Naples, Pompeii, and one now mostly inactive volcano.

The family mostly follows its planned itinerary: "We were going to Pozzuoli and Pompeii--both close by, out there in the dark somewhere; then back to Naples to see more churches and museums, shop, and eat more amazing food; then north for a bit; and back to Connecticut." This second part of the trip, the "north for a bit," centers on Siena. I won't provide a map of this part, because geographical specifics aren't as important. At some point near the end of the trip, the girls get lost and have no idea where they are, and neither does the reader.

Bildungsroman of an empath

This is a coming-of-age story, and not just for the point-of-view character, Mary. It's also about the growing up of the two older girls/young women Mary is with. These are Marcia, her older sister and the character the title comes from, and Alicia, the college-aged girl who was supposed to be their baby-sitter while the parents went off on their own for excursions, but who is herself more in need of supervision than the girls are.

It's Alicia who gets the conflict rolling through her bad influence on Marcia. The "inversion" of Marcia is partly a joke based on an Italian billboard Alicia and Marcia have seen, but it also refers to the change in Marcia's behavior Alicia has caused. Marcia is dressing like Alicia--literally, because she is actually wearing Alicia's clothes and makeup. More to the point, the two are having a romantic relationship right under the noses of Marcia and Mary's parents. For Alicia, being with another woman is probably something experimental, part of her college self-exploration, since the two girls also apparently engage in a threesome with an older, married Italian man at one point.

Mary is fourteen or maybe fifteen. She's smart, and so she's beginning to become aware of some of the big philosophical issues life throws at us. These include:

1. The fact that we're all going to die. The villa in Cuma is right by an archaeological site where people dig up the remains of societies buried under their feet. Right outside the window of the villa, Mary can see see an orange grove that "followed the shape of the amphitheater buried underneath." The very ground Mary's family is spending its vacation on is a living palimpsest where humans have simply erased the civilizations of the past and are writing a new story on the same page where the old one once was. The roads they drive on are just new roads on top of the old ones: "This road had older roads underneath; people had lived here, lied to each other here, cried, prayed, fought, spoken languages no one living even knew, and died, and now we were here: just for a second, it was our turn."

Because of this realization, Mary flirts with nihilism from time to time.  "...how do most things turn out? They all end here: grandparents, parents, kids, whole families, nothing left but old buttons and bones. Skeletons in boxes, dressed in rotten clothing long out of style. Atoms and the void." Her nihilism is helped along by her realization that her parents are unhappy, a realization made worse by Marcia's exaggerated interpretation of how bad it is. Mary also feels isolated because she is ignored while Marcia and Alicia are infatuated with each other.

2. The paradox of the future being both finite and limited. Mary reads a lot of old books by philosophers and historians while she's in the villa. She's particularly interested in Diodorus Cronus, whose "master argument" had to do with whether one should consider something that might happen in the future as either false or true here in the present. Diodorus's view, that everything that does happen does so because it must necessarily happen, seems to be a proposition that limits future possibilities. We may imagine there are infinite forking paths to the future, but really, the future is already laid out by present reality.

Mary combines her thinking about the future with her sudden realization of universal mortality, and she is worried she will not be able to pick a future worthy of her "second" of life on Earth. She worries about how she will develop in the near future, pointedly thinking that when she goes to college she will become like Alicia, "socializing chaotically while ideas slid by like roadside scenery."

Mary's basic stance with regard to a future is a sense of unreadiness. Her father recognizes this, and he also recognizes how isolated Mary feels being around two girls who do feel ready--whether they are or not. As she considers all the things she might do with her life, Mary finds herself preferring to wait rather than to go find the answers: "Somewhere a girl my age was practicing her sport with a serious trainer. Somewhere millions of strangers were doing billions of things I'd never know about. And, in the mirror, a girl who was me and no one else stood waiting for something to happen."

3. Being perceptive about others can, paradoxically, make one cruel rather than kind. Mary boasts to herself at one point that it is possible to know what a kiss will feel like without even kissing the person. This leads her to muse that people are actually rather "defenseless," because she can read them like an open book.

Two of the more perceptive people in the book, Alicia and "Milt," the creepy man who tries to have sex with Mary when she is unbelievably left alone with him, are not particularly kind in their application of their perceptiveness. Alicia uses a love letter from someone who was vulnerable enough to tell her his feelings as a joke to entertain Marcia, while Alicia herself has written a terribly sweet and vulnerable good-bye letter to a former lover. Milt just uses his perceptiveness to try to pry further into the lives of Alicia and Mary. Much worse, he is perceptive enough to notice Mary is more "ready" to be a sexually realized grown-up than she knows she is, and he tries to take advantage.

Mary finds, however, the value in being kind and not using her perceptiveness to pry further than needed, protecting the dignity of those around her. When she sees her sister and Alicia making out in a cemetery late in the story, she thinks to herself that it "was none of my business: really."

So what is Mary's epiphany?

If this is a bildungsroman, or a coming-of-age story, and it very much seems to be, that would mean we, the readers, should expect the main character to have come to some realization that prepares her for adulthood. Mary needs, in other words, to move from "waiting" to "ready."

Partly, this is forced upon her by a world that sees her as ready even before she does. She goes off driving on her own. She learns to work a corkscrew. She drinks wine. Alicia is the first to notice the changes, but it's Milt who really forces her to realize that life is telling her, "Ready or not, here I come."

One option that is offering itself to Mary throughout is the option that Alicia has chosen, which is to be either cynical or nihilistic about life. That's the lesson Marcia has picked up, and she expresses it, trying to be clever, when Mary asks why she doesn't drink her coffee with milk and sugar anymore: "I like espresso; it's bitter, like my heart."

It's an enticing option. Alicia carries around a book that, like the Sibyl whose cave the girls go to see, seems to offer oracular answers: "She had this little philosophy book that proved that whatever you thought (though she had no idea what that might be) was wrong." Alicia's first name even turns out to actually be Mary, as the real Mary finds out when she goes snooping through Alicia's things. It seems, in many ways, like the two are a lot alike and so Mary is going to end up like Alicia.

Mary is, in fact, drawn to Alicia, but it's when Alicia tries to play this to her advantage that the spell begins to break. Alicia tries to convince Mary not to tell her parents when she finds Alicia, Marcia, and the older man all naked in bed together. Alicia uses Mary's "readiness," which Alicia sees more than Mary, to stun Mary into silence. Alicia kisses Mary: "She leaned in like an actor in a film and gave me a long, soft kiss on the lips. The kiss went on and on, as if we weren't both girls, as if--Oh."

That "Oh," which is standing on its own line by itself in the original, is the real epiphany. It even comes with an "Oh" to let you know that we've arrived at "Eureka!" Mary doesn't realize it's an epiphany just then. She's mostly undone by the kiss for a few days, dreaming of her and Alicia living together as unhappily as her parents one day. Alicia, in her I-could-take-it-or-leave-it way, acts as though it means nothing, but Mary allows herself to "taste traces of that kiss" all night.

How is this an epiphany? It teaches Mary humility. Earlier, she'd boasted that she could guess what a kiss with someone would be like before she even did it, but Alicia has proven her completely wrong. Mary is smart, but she doesn't know all the answers, and to act like she does would rob her of the answers she might otherwise find. Mary sees Alicia sometimes adopting this humility: "As a reader she seemed completely different--serious and at ease. She read as if she slowly took things in without rejecting or accepting anything right away. If she could really do that, she was wonderful." But Mary is able to make it more fully part of her character.

Two animals that act as spirit guides

Just before Milt attacks her, Mary is still stuck in neutral, worrying about possible future paths:

Once something has happened, sure, its having happened stays true. But all the things that have failed (so far) to happen are not untrue, or not untrue yet. You have to come to a definite end before you can say: Well, here's the list of things that never happened; their possibility was always just an illusion. Ah! Just thinking about it (or trying to) was like swimming underwater, straining to hold your breath till you touch the wall. And what if the things that hadn't happened (yet) but might were not for that reason unreal or false, but only balanced in some unknowable state of potential? The pre-real. The ready. 

And it's here that Milt comes after her and she is forced to act. She's not unlike the wild boar that nearly ends the story. At two points, her family has eaten wild boar and pronounced it delicious. But the three girls accidentally are caught in the middle of a boar hunt in which the boar goes from being an afterthought to a very real entity with preferences and agency. It nearly gores Alicia, but Mary is able to climb up on a crypt (yes, they are in a graveyard) to escape it.

Wise, and also apparently delicious

Mary's strategy of waiting has been somewhat vindicated. You can both wait and be ready. Taking on the future doesn't have to mean trying every possible path in order to keep infinite options open, the way Alicia has tried to cope. It can mean waiting for your opportunity. When Milt forced action on her, she was ready, like the wild boar, to run for her life. The boar probably didn't get away, but Mary did.

The second animal that symbolizes her enlightenment is the octopus. Mary imagines it "undulating out there in the dark, moving exactly like the water at first, then suddenly not as it reaches for prety, all of its suckers flared." It is both waiting and ready.

Denoument

There is a short falling action as Mary returns to Connecticut after winter break. Mary's life has gone back to normal, but she is changed, and is adjusting to her new understanding. She is gentle toward Alicia, who has been "proven wrong" after her failure to cope with the boar. She thinks Alicia's magical philosophy book may have been partly right, at least in how it asked certain questions rather than forcing a set of answers.

That's how Mary views her epiphany. There is no definite lesson she has learned, but she has grown in understanding, and "when you understand a thing it's yours, even when it stays a little bit out of reach." She is no longer apprehensive about the future and strangled by all the choices. "It's like knowing that something quite important is already mine," she thinks, "but having no idea how to get to it. Or anyhow how to wait." She is ready to get on with the future, looking forward to it, because life has shown her that the time for waiting is past for now. Mary concludes with "Let's get on the road."

Personal reactions

It is very hard to get me to like a short story this long, because it seems to me to be taking liberties, trying to take advantage of being called a short story while still indulging in novel-length choices. There were probably very few tough edit-outs that had to be made in writing this; it all went in. Still, after two readings, what won me over was the gentleness and compassion shown for each of the characters (except maybe Milt). We all have our second in the sun, and we're all equally lost trying to find our way through the future with no map. We may not like everyone we are on the road with and we might find their answers to the same questions we face ultimately to be silly ones, but we can still learn from them. The resolution of the Mary-Marcia relationship is that Mary realizes they aren't alike, but Mary will still "treat her as an adult and expect the same, which means we don't talk a lot unless there's a reason." That sounds kind of rough, but it's actually a little bit humane. For people with family members who drive them crazy, which is everyone, it might be the best strategy for putting past bitterness behind and getting on with the travels ahead.