Rainy day

Marissa Bancroft - Basement

"Rainy day"

It was a rainy day. Marissa didn't particularly mind the rain, but she wasn't about to go outside dancing and singing in it either. She appreciated the refreshing lull around the neighborhood. What was depressing and distressing to some, she found pleasant and tranquil. It was the perfect day to stay inside and look through the basement window as the rain drops plopped on the muddied puddles.

She stretched out on her futon with an inviting tale from William Faulker. Her recent readings had turned southwards, a direction she had never traveled, and she was fascinated. All her life, she had grown up under the might weight of the New England establishment. Baltimore was about as far south as her family had ever traveled - anything farther might as well have been the depths of hell.

The southern landscape was riveting. As the fall chill descended over Washington heights, enshrouded in a mist of Chesapeake rain, Marissa escaped into a Deep South fantasy. Piney woods, lonely highways, and endless fields of cotton and peanuts. This to her was freedom. Freedom from the stresses of the Mid-Atlantic. Freedom from her poverty and her suffering. Freedom from her cuthroat Yankee background.

Of course, it wasn't all for fun. Marissa would not be caught doing anything at least midly productive. The Faulker was a reading assignment for her American Literature class at Johns Hopkins University. She was an English major - pre-med, of course; she would always be tied to financial ambitions - drudging her way through afternoon and evening classes. She loved reading, writing, and most of all, talking about reading and writing - too bad she didn't exactly have too many Faulker scholars around Washington Heights.

Faulker's stream-of-conciousness, riveting her eager soul, sent Marissa's thoughts into a frenzy. After a a full morning of monotonous grocery-bagging at Manny's, her subconcious finally found an outlet to empty its memories. She gradually drifted into events from earlier that day:

She had left her apartment that morning with her face forward, chest held high, eyes straight ahead. Her posture, however, was overshadowed by the man walking beside her. Kevin Lansing, from near the top floor, exploded down the sidewalk with the fire of a madman. Eyes blodshot, sweating and pale, Kevin shocked Marissa's passive morning mentality. She didn't second guess him, though. She, too, was on a mission. Excitement and frills could wait for later - as in post-college, post-kids, post-career life. That's all that lay ahead of her in her mind.

It was a few moments later when she saw Lola Fontaine. Slightly awkward and spritely, Marissa thought she was sweet, in only a mildly condescending way. She had an alluring attractiveness - kind of skanky, kind of cute - that always perplexed Marissa. She had grown up accustomed to the perfectly-manicured-and-always-well-presented New England bombshells. This sort of blue-collar beauty always fascinated her. Along with the South, she had begun to respect a world beyond the white picket fences and fresh green grass of Connecticut. Or maybe that was just her coping mechanism.

Marissa was in Baltimore, rejected by her family, her friends, and the whole society she once held dear. But it didn't matter to her, at least on the surface. As long as she had Faulker and Kevin and Lola to brighten her rainy day - and she had begun to appreciate the little things in life - she could survive any situation. Back to Faulker, she found the descent of the Compton family strinkingly familiar - but she was too busy to care.