Closing the Factory
By Mary Jo Murphy
It's really all a matter of facts.
Like the fact that he can tell brown M&M's from red or yellow or green ones in a blind taste test. The fact that the palmetto tree prospers in his native South Carolina. That he had agoldfish named E. That his favorite painting is ``Starry Night'' and his favorite quarterback Kenny ``The Snake'' Stabler.
All facts.
But now that he plans to marry Her, what are you supposed to do with all these facts? His facts. Facts which, taken together, define him and no other. The 347,856 facts that took you two years, 10 months and 24 days to accumulate.
He didn't take his facts with him when he left.
A love is more than the sum of its facts, but when your love leaves, the fact remains that his facts remain. Ex post facts. And with all due gratitude for the legacy, what possible use do you have for the fact that he wears support knee socks to bed to keep his calves from cramping while he sleeps?
Should you give them to Her. Gather the lot of them into a giant beribboned bundle and send them to Her? She hasn't known him long, couldn't possibly have amassed a set of his facts to rival yours. Wouldn't she be interested in the fact that his Hebrew name means wolf? Or that wolves mate for life?
You hesitate. His facts were hard-won. For every one he presented to you -- on a silver platter or wrapped in a pretty package or even matter-of-factly -- there were those you pilfered from him, cajoled out of him, bartered for, bribed him into surrendering or stumbled on quite by accident. There are, among them, sad facts and glad facts, peculiar facts and mysterious facts, funny facts and curious facts, smart facts and stupid facts, sweet facts and absurd facts. All facts are not created equal, but you prized the collecting as well as the collections.
You will let Her gather Her own. Besides, a number of his facts are doubtless obsolete. Or perhaps there are facts that were all along fictions. Even if she did want them, would she care for them the way you did? Take them out and dust them off? And then wrap them in tissue again and store them away?
You wonder what he did with your facts. Men are adept at handling facts. Facts, to them, are RBI's and ERA's. If it won't fit on the back of a baseball card it isn't a fact, it's a circumstance, and circumstances don't hang around long, they're just passing through; what they do when he's finished with them is their business. He probably has some sort of fact compactor or factuum cleaner. Your facts might long ago have been ground up or sucked away, like so many eggshells and coffee grounds and dust bunnies.
Your facts.
That some of them may have fallen into Her hands is unsettling; that facts once cherished by him might by now be objects of mirth or derision.
You'll take precautions next time. You'll change your facts. You'll tell them you really do like lima beans and pierced ears, cruise-control buttons and Republican appointees to the Supreme Court. You will not have your facts defiled.
You have been accused of living in a world of fantasy, but in fact it's a world of facts. Forgetting them might seem the obvious course. But your memory is wholly uncooperative. All those hippocampi and neural engrams are good at what they do, which has something to do with retaining facts.
Anyway, it'd be damned inconvenient to forget all of his facts. If you forgot his birthday, you'd have a heck of a time trying to get cash out of your automatic teller machine.
Published in the Daily News Magazine, 1988
