Static

by

Cate Kennedy

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Static makes teaching easy.
Marie is Anthony’s wife; she’s a lawyer whom Anthony describes as an “immaculate blonde” but also “cold and stick-thin.” The couple doesn’t have a particularly happy marriage, primarily because Marie has become controlling and emotionally closed-off over the years. Throughout the story, Marie is preoccupied with creating the perfect Christmas meal for their family, intent on replicating the same picture-perfect, affluent lifestyle she sees advertised in her many magazines. She has a precise idea of what she wants her and Anthony’s life to look like, and she gets upset when things don’t go her way—when she thinks their new sofa is the wrong shade of taupe, for instance, or when conceiving a baby is taking longer than she wants it to. This fixation on perfection and control leads Marie to freeze Anthony out, leaving him to wonder whose side Marie will take when his mother criticizes him. At one point, he even questions if Marie loves him at all. Near the end of the story, Anthony has an epiphany that he doesn’t want to have a child with Marie—or, it’s implied, to be with her at all. In this way, Marie’s artificially “trained” persona and high expectations backfire, as these qualities result in a lack of communication and intimacy that destroys the couple’s relationship.

Marie Quotes in Static

The Static quotes below are all either spoken by Marie or refer to Marie. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Family, Marriage, and Dissatisfaction Theme Icon
).
Static Quotes

Anthony listens to the asthmatic wheeze of the leather chair his father’s just vacated, sucking back air into itself as if desperate for breath, the only noise in the room for a few seconds. In the deoxygenated silence, he feels what he thinks of as Evil Rays, like something in one of his old comics, jagged lightning bolts shooting across the room. They’re crackling from the fingertips of the archenemies seated on either side of him. Take that, Ice Maiden! No, you take THAT, Bitch Crone!

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie, Anthony’s Mother, Frank
Page Number: 205-206
Explanation and Analysis:

She flashes him a smile as she heads for the door. The ghost of an old smile, one he misses; she’s trained herself not to do it because it shows the tooth she’s convinced is crooked. He’s told her he loves that tooth, but she just rolls her eyes. In every one of their wedding photos, stored over there in the handtooled leather albums, she has on the other smile, the trained one—lips closed and chin raised like a model of cool serenity, a perfected study of herself. But somewhere in a drawer, Anthony has an old photo of her, pulling off her mask and snorkel at the Great Barrier Reef, just out of the water and her grin broad and unselfconscious. Years ago.

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie, Anthony’s Mother
Page Number: 211-212
Explanation and Analysis:

She used to call him Ant. He can’t put his finger on when it started being Anthony. It was like his attention had waned momentarily, and then there it was, a new name and a new smile, to go with the new granite-topped Italianate kitchen bench and the whole brand spanking new house. He’d closed his eyes signing the mortgage on the house, suffering a brief swooping dizzy spell of nauseated disbelief, and he thinks of that title document now stacked away in some bank vault somewhere, his signature slumping below the dotted line like a failing ECG.

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie
Page Number: 214-215
Explanation and Analysis:

Anthony stands tilting the camera a few millimetres back and forth, mesmerised, as the group arranges itself before him. The pixellated image oscillates, scanning and reading the shifts of light and shade. One moment he sees his sister, overweight and worn and dowdy in her Target outfit, frumpy beside the immaculate blonde Marie, who outshines them all. The next he sees Margaret, kind and comfortable, touching Ian’s arm and smiling warmly, with Marie pale and cold and stick-thin, face grimaced into a close-mouthed rictus. Back and forth the shimmering image goes; how she sees them and how they see her, this life and that life, with Anthony in the middle, trying to hold the camera steady and depress the button for autofocus at the same moment.

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie, Margaret, Ian
Page Number: 216
Explanation and Analysis:

How to broach it with Margaret, how to offer? Tell her he never uses the one in the bedroom? Yeah, tell her it’s been sitting in the guest bedroom gathering dust, be great if she could take it off his hands. A loan. As long as they’d like it. His fault for buying the gadget. Anthony has to squeeze his hands together between his knees to stop himself grabbing Tom and hugging him as hard as he can. A thin boy. Too troubled for a ten-year-old. Reading out those stupid knock-knock jokes at the table, trying his best to do just what's expected of him, to decipher all those signals and stand in the firing line of all those deadly rays.

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie, Anthony’s Mother, Tom, Margaret, Ian
Page Number: 218
Explanation and Analysis:

[…] Anthony’s praying for her to just shut up for a minute, just one fucking minute for once in her life, but she can't, of course, she has to start in on how he’s got to look after it because it cost a lot of money and he can’t take it to school, it’s just to be played with at his house, and she accepts Tom’s muted kiss on the cheek without even looking at him, not really, because what she wants are babies, she only likes them when they're babies, by the time they’re Tom’s and Hannah’s age they’ve learned to be wary and submissive and not to trust her, and who can blame them?

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie, Anthony’s Mother, Tom, Hannah
Page Number: 218-219
Explanation and Analysis:

Anthony squeezes his hands between his knees again and looks over at Marie clasping her gift basket of toiletries. He thinks of the kilometres she tries to cover each night on that stationary bike, the endless net surfing she’s done on sperm motility and ovarian cysts, like someone gathering evidence for a case they have to win. Does she love him? She lets him see her in the morning without makeup, does that count?

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie
Page Number: 219
Explanation and Analysis:

He watches as Marie takes the sifter and starts dusting the pies with icing sugar and something dislodges in him with a delicate gush of pressure, something shifts to let bright sound in.

He watches her wrists flex, the air going out of him, certain, all of a sudden, that nothing of him will ever take root inside that thin, tightly wound body, nothing. Tom’s voice comes through the handset again. Clear as a bell now, the clearest thing he's ever heard.

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie, Tom
Related Symbols: Static
Page Number: 222
Explanation and Analysis:

But he finds, in the luxury of those seconds, that he can’t take his eyes off the cacti in their pots. They don't seem to have grown an inch since they were planted there at the advice of the landscaper six long months ago. Totally unchanged. Zero care.

Anthony puts the handset down onto the stones and gazes at the plants, so steely and barbed and implacable, something that even neglect and drought put together can't seem to kill. He reaches out with a fascinated finger to press a curved spike, hard, against the cushion of skin. He just wants to see a dot of hot, red blood well reliably up, as if he needs proof that such things are real.

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie
Related Symbols: Static
Page Number: 223-224
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Static LitChart as a printable PDF.
Static PDF

Marie Quotes in Static

The Static quotes below are all either spoken by Marie or refer to Marie. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Family, Marriage, and Dissatisfaction Theme Icon
).
Static Quotes

Anthony listens to the asthmatic wheeze of the leather chair his father’s just vacated, sucking back air into itself as if desperate for breath, the only noise in the room for a few seconds. In the deoxygenated silence, he feels what he thinks of as Evil Rays, like something in one of his old comics, jagged lightning bolts shooting across the room. They’re crackling from the fingertips of the archenemies seated on either side of him. Take that, Ice Maiden! No, you take THAT, Bitch Crone!

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie, Anthony’s Mother, Frank
Page Number: 205-206
Explanation and Analysis:

She flashes him a smile as she heads for the door. The ghost of an old smile, one he misses; she’s trained herself not to do it because it shows the tooth she’s convinced is crooked. He’s told her he loves that tooth, but she just rolls her eyes. In every one of their wedding photos, stored over there in the handtooled leather albums, she has on the other smile, the trained one—lips closed and chin raised like a model of cool serenity, a perfected study of herself. But somewhere in a drawer, Anthony has an old photo of her, pulling off her mask and snorkel at the Great Barrier Reef, just out of the water and her grin broad and unselfconscious. Years ago.

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie, Anthony’s Mother
Page Number: 211-212
Explanation and Analysis:

She used to call him Ant. He can’t put his finger on when it started being Anthony. It was like his attention had waned momentarily, and then there it was, a new name and a new smile, to go with the new granite-topped Italianate kitchen bench and the whole brand spanking new house. He’d closed his eyes signing the mortgage on the house, suffering a brief swooping dizzy spell of nauseated disbelief, and he thinks of that title document now stacked away in some bank vault somewhere, his signature slumping below the dotted line like a failing ECG.

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie
Page Number: 214-215
Explanation and Analysis:

Anthony stands tilting the camera a few millimetres back and forth, mesmerised, as the group arranges itself before him. The pixellated image oscillates, scanning and reading the shifts of light and shade. One moment he sees his sister, overweight and worn and dowdy in her Target outfit, frumpy beside the immaculate blonde Marie, who outshines them all. The next he sees Margaret, kind and comfortable, touching Ian’s arm and smiling warmly, with Marie pale and cold and stick-thin, face grimaced into a close-mouthed rictus. Back and forth the shimmering image goes; how she sees them and how they see her, this life and that life, with Anthony in the middle, trying to hold the camera steady and depress the button for autofocus at the same moment.

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie, Margaret, Ian
Page Number: 216
Explanation and Analysis:

How to broach it with Margaret, how to offer? Tell her he never uses the one in the bedroom? Yeah, tell her it’s been sitting in the guest bedroom gathering dust, be great if she could take it off his hands. A loan. As long as they’d like it. His fault for buying the gadget. Anthony has to squeeze his hands together between his knees to stop himself grabbing Tom and hugging him as hard as he can. A thin boy. Too troubled for a ten-year-old. Reading out those stupid knock-knock jokes at the table, trying his best to do just what's expected of him, to decipher all those signals and stand in the firing line of all those deadly rays.

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie, Anthony’s Mother, Tom, Margaret, Ian
Page Number: 218
Explanation and Analysis:

[…] Anthony’s praying for her to just shut up for a minute, just one fucking minute for once in her life, but she can't, of course, she has to start in on how he’s got to look after it because it cost a lot of money and he can’t take it to school, it’s just to be played with at his house, and she accepts Tom’s muted kiss on the cheek without even looking at him, not really, because what she wants are babies, she only likes them when they're babies, by the time they’re Tom’s and Hannah’s age they’ve learned to be wary and submissive and not to trust her, and who can blame them?

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie, Anthony’s Mother, Tom, Hannah
Page Number: 218-219
Explanation and Analysis:

Anthony squeezes his hands between his knees again and looks over at Marie clasping her gift basket of toiletries. He thinks of the kilometres she tries to cover each night on that stationary bike, the endless net surfing she’s done on sperm motility and ovarian cysts, like someone gathering evidence for a case they have to win. Does she love him? She lets him see her in the morning without makeup, does that count?

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie
Page Number: 219
Explanation and Analysis:

He watches as Marie takes the sifter and starts dusting the pies with icing sugar and something dislodges in him with a delicate gush of pressure, something shifts to let bright sound in.

He watches her wrists flex, the air going out of him, certain, all of a sudden, that nothing of him will ever take root inside that thin, tightly wound body, nothing. Tom’s voice comes through the handset again. Clear as a bell now, the clearest thing he's ever heard.

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie, Tom
Related Symbols: Static
Page Number: 222
Explanation and Analysis:

But he finds, in the luxury of those seconds, that he can’t take his eyes off the cacti in their pots. They don't seem to have grown an inch since they were planted there at the advice of the landscaper six long months ago. Totally unchanged. Zero care.

Anthony puts the handset down onto the stones and gazes at the plants, so steely and barbed and implacable, something that even neglect and drought put together can't seem to kill. He reaches out with a fascinated finger to press a curved spike, hard, against the cushion of skin. He just wants to see a dot of hot, red blood well reliably up, as if he needs proof that such things are real.

Related Characters: Anthony, Marie
Related Symbols: Static
Page Number: 223-224
Explanation and Analysis: