Marvin's Story

The first time I laid eyes on him, he was sitting outside the third floor trash chute. I’m not sure if I could classify our initial rendezvous as love at first sight, but there was certainly an undeniable, irrepressible attraction. With his droopy ears two sizes too big for his head, black, glossy eyes, pale white hair, and what would become his infamous lopsided smile, I was completely captivated and charmed. Who cared if he had uneven blush permanently tattooed to the sides of his cheeks?

My own cheeks were just as flushed as his, the product of careening down Mill Street at a deadly six miles an hour sitting atop an oversized dolly pushed by a Boy I hardly ever see around anymore. Still running on a euphoric high from an overdose of, what I assumed at the time, perfection. I was eighteen. I was returning from a summer living the high life in an up-and-coming foreign city. I was coming back to a tight knit group of friends that I loved like a second family. I was falling fast for a Boy who, after a long summer romance conducted through exchanges of words and letters, finally appeared to be as crazy for me as I had always been for him. He was helping me move into what were arguably the poshest rooming arrangements by the Charles River. I was starting my second year at the best university that money could ever hope to pay for, for free. I was officially beginning my studies in a concentration I was truly intellectually passionate about. I was beginning a budding career as a journalist for several student publications. To top it all off, I had recently acquired a new Longchamp bag.

In short, my life was perfectly aligned the moment I laid eyes on Marvin. Except, at that point, his wasn’t Marvin yet. He was the nameless, mysterious overgrown bear sitting in the third floor hallway, blocking the way of my push-cart dolly.
“Whose is this?” I asked, assuming he was just part of another person’s trousseau-in-transit, “Do you have a name, you fluffy little thing?”

“Who cares, he’s scary looking! Stop talking to it!” condemned the Boy, pushing to move me past the bear as quickly as possible as if it was infected with swine flu. It was instantaneous hate at first sight between the two of them, and the Boy would continue to bash on the bear for what little time we still had together. In fact, months afterwards, long after our life courses no longer ran tangent to one another, I would wonder if a deep, dark part of me kept Marvin around out of spite, just because I knew how much he detested Marvin.

The bear was still there at the end of the day. Each time as I ran through the same hallway and past him, I would inadvertently come up with a new name for him. Sir Hugs-a-lot. Snugglekins. Mr.Fluffles. Lord McFluff. The grand list of names goes on. Finally, dusk set and no one had moved him, meaning, in unspoken college code, that the previous owners were relinquishing their claim to him, and he was up for grabs. I felt so sorry for the him; what in the world could it have possibly done to deserve abandonment? So, like a little girl sneaking stray dogs into her garage at winter, I decided that I had to open my apartment door to the bear and give him a proper name.
Surprisingly, he fit fine sitting on a university-issued office chair we had in our living room. I want to say that this also meant he look like he belonged in the room as well; that wasn’t the case. No matter how I positioned him, he still seemed awkward, with his drooping head and lopsided grin that fell to one side, as if the very ground he was positioned on was uneven.

Marvin also became a divide amongst the human inhabitants of the room as well. Bay, my East Coast WASP-y twin, fell as hard as I did for our newest roommate, immediately throwing her arms around him. My other two roommates weren’t as enthusiastic; both assumed that there had to be something wrong with a bear abandoned by a trash chute and immediately assumed that the poor bear must be carrying some venereal disease. After all, why would anyone throw out a perfectly good bear unless it had been abused? The half-smile and the uneven blush proved it; don’t get too close to that thing, Anna, it’s an evil bear.

Shaken a bit and offended that my newest “baby” (that was what the bear had become to me by then, for I liked to romanticize myself as the Angelina Jolie to underprivileged stuffed animals) hadn’t received the warm welcome I thought it deserved, I turned my attention to coming up with a proper name for him. What’s in a name, after all, but an prophecy waiting to be fufilled?

The name for this bear then, had to be special as well. Nothing I came up with while bypassing him in the hallway seem to fit. Finally, Bay decided that the artificial glow on his cheeks reminded him of Marvin from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The moniker suited him well; the Marvin in the book was a depressed, suicidal robot who ends up a hero. The bear admittedly looked a bit suicidal himself, the more and more we looked at the lopsided head with the half-smile, the sadder and sadder Marvin looked. I bestowed the name Marvin to the bear hoping that, like his namesake, Marvin would be able to overcome his sad past, whatever it entailed, and find some meaning. Besides, he looked like a Marvin. So Marvin it was.

Unfortunately, Marvin would sit neglected for the next few months, as my roommates were soon all afraid to touch him on account of Marvin’s mysterious past. Within weeks, they even had me half-convinced that Marvin might just be carrying an STD in his fur. We don’t know where he’s been, what he’s seen, or what’s been done to him, my roommates claimed, we can’t touch him till we know that he’s clean. Surely no one would abandon a clean bear that has been well maintained, they argued, there must be something horribly wrong with him. Unfortunately, a bear of his size and stature couldn’t fit in the washing machine, and he couldn’t be dry-cleaned unless we gutted him out, something I refused to let them do. So, on account of speculation about his past, he didn’t earn the adoration and affection that would usually accompany something as furry as Marvin was.

I, on the other hand, the only one in the room who didn’t fear touching Marvin, couldn’t shower him with the attention he rightfully deserved. I ended up spending the majority of the next few months watching as each part of my so-called “perfect life” come crashing down ablaze. My fault for flying too high, I thought, I’m not meant to have it all. And so while I wallowed and wasted in my own mess, Marvin remained a mess a well, he was little better than how I found him, and he still looked sad and dejected.

Finally, one day, after I had hit my low point and was finally moving in an increasing slope, I looked over at Marvin and realized that his lopsided smile could easily be fixed by a slight tug of a string. Magically, the bear practically everyone had lost hope for began to look like the carefree cuddly creature I know he once must have been. My roommates began looking at him with a new sense of respect, and even though they still wouldn’t touch him, they began to admit that the little guy didn’t look half-bad.

Since then, things have been looking up for the both of us. For example, a few weeks ago, I accompanied Marvin to his first playdate in a long while, where he was charmed by a brown bear in Lowell. I don’t know if this one was going to be “it” for the two, but I could definitely sense undeniable chemistry. This, I hopw, won’t be one bear who would suddenly abandon Marvin out in the cold and break his little fuzzy heart. I, on the other hand, made a successful one-woman attempt to cook an entire thanksgiving dinner from scratch for fifteen. Marvin and I then reflected on the success of my little lunch party over a cup of tea.

Recently, I found a tag buried on the underside of Marvin which informed me that Marvin was born sometime in 1990, the same year I was, making him almost two decades old. I looked into his large, black plastic eyes and wondered what they could have possibly seen in the past twenty years. What stories could my furry friend tell me if he could talk? Would I look at him the same way if I knew where he had been?
It didn’t matter, though. Regardless of his past, I love Marvin fully and unconditionally as he is, in the here and now. I suppose if I could look into his past, I could understand how Marvin became the dolled up, lopsided bear I found next to the trash chute at the beginning of the year, but what did it matter? In no way could Marvin’s past possibly define his future, a future I hoped I would be part of for many, many more chapters to come.