Marrying Friends

Marrying Friends is the latest collection of stories by award-winning author Mary Rechner. Unlike other short story collections that are thematically linked, Rechner has crafted this book with a progression of stories linked by a recurring cast of characters who float in and out of each tale just as naturally as they might enter, leave, and re-enter each others’ lives. In a successful novel-in-stories, each individual story is capable of standing on its own. And as the tales of the characters, their settings, and themes get strung together, the collection gathers momentum, finally becoming a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In Marrying Friends, Rechner gives us this kind of deftly-crafted and emotionally intense book.

At the center of this collection is Therese, mother to an adopted son, Aleksandar, and wife to Mark. The book opens with the story, “The Playwright Sits Next to Her Sister.” In it, we meet Therese seated next to her sister, Lisa, in a theatre, waiting for the curtain to go up on Lisa’s latest off-off-Broadway play. In these five short pages, we learn through Lisa’s point of view that Therese’s life is considered a success while she herself struggles—with finding a partner, with controlling her drinking, with finding recognition for her work—and her efforts never really gain traction. “Lisa was trying to make something, prove something, do something. Therese was a mountain or the sun, admired for existing.” (p. 8) This opener hints at dysfunction, and the line that Therese utters as the curtain goes up on the play prepares us that more revelations are coming. “‘Oh boy,’ said Therese, crossing and uncrossing her glossy bare legs. ‘Here we go.’” (p. 9)

And what arrives is tragedy. The next story, “The Loop Trail,” picks up in a funeral home. Drug-addicted Mark has died of an overdose, and Therese’s grief is complicated by guilt over her infidelities and the fact she is pregnant with another man’s child at the time of Mark’s death. The stories that follow show how the lives of everyone in Therese’s orbit—her parents and sister, her in-laws, and the wide circle of high school friends she and Mark have grown up with—are similarly messy and overly complicated.

As everyone spirals in the wake of Mark’s death, Lisa withdraws in order to pull herself together. When she returns from drying out in Vermont, she is returning to family and friends also attempting to set the world back on its axis. Therese has decided to marry Jude because she wants a family for her two children and he is dependable, although it’s not certain that this marriage will be any more stable than her last. In the final story, a newly clear-eyed Lisa seems to recognize this as she takes a step back from the wedding day mayhem and reports it all as if it is a play’s script she is writing. “You still look back and feel raw and embarrassed, but you find yourself seeing your mother or father or brother or sister’s point of view, find yourself looking at their images or even your own with tenderness, and in so doing see some detail, a chin, or collarbone, or hip, for which you feel new sympathy.” (p. 202)

Every time I put this book down, the opening lines of Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” played in my head. I imagined Long Islanders Therese and Mark might have been friends or neighbors of that song’s Long Island couple, Brenda and Eddie, and similar in the sense that the lives they ended up with had gotten so far away from what they intended when they began their early, naïve journey together. In one story after the next, Rechner exposes foibles and deconstructs any notion of perfect families or marriages or friendships. At the same time, she reveals the human instinct to continue striving for something close to perfect. Or at least to settle for putting our lives back together somehow, even if what gets cobbled together continues to be a glorious mess.