Pamela Erens

A mother and daughter watch movies together -- and sometimes the daughter sees more than she can understand.

Originally published in Redivider, volume 52, number 2.


My mother was in her bra and a gauzy skirt, sitting in the dark looking straight ahead, the only light the light of the old projector, which went tick tick tick tick, to me a comforting sound, a regular sound. She was showing me things. Every day I came home from school and she called me into the dark living room where she was sitting, to show me things on the canvas screen that unrolled upward like the map of the world in my ninth-grade classroom. She wore her bra, and a small diamond on her pinky. About the bra she said: “It's always too hot in this apartment.” About the diamond she said, “The ring your father got me is too showy, I like this one better.” She showed me Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett up the stairs, Jeanne Moreau jumping into the Seine, Harvey Keitel grabbing terrified Alice. “What are you crying for?” she asked. “It's only a movie.” Sometimes, to be sure, it was comedy time: Chaplin, Danny Kaye, Harold Lloyd hanging from the top of a skyscraper. Her graduate school dissertation was on film comedy; no, it was on images of Jews in film; no, it was on the liberated woman in contemporary cinema. I lost track, didn't care, I just wanted to see kissing and sometimes to cry.

One time she said, “Watch this,” and paused the strip of film as it passed under the bright projector bulb. Dustin Hoffman in the swimming pool began to shimmer, to stretch, his edges glowed, now yellow, now orange, and then Dustin Hoffman began to melt. What was the bright California pool water and what was him? No matter: a bright flame shot up the screen and swallowed them both. Celluloid flakes blew burning from the projector and spun to the carpet. I stamped them out with my clogs. Smell of the caramels I made once on the stove. My mother leaned over and flicked off the projector. “Beautiful,” she said.

****

I roller-skated on the city sidewalks, the harsh vibration of metal on concrete grinding up into my ears, sparking out my fingertips, my arms outstretched as I pretended to be blown about by the wind, an unmarried woman. Always the risk of catching in a gap between paving stones and I did, toppled right next to the whizzing traffic on Sheridan Road, my hands scraped, my knees worse. “Never put on a Band-Aid, it has to air out,” was my mother's theory. “Don't wash it, it needs a few germs.” The odor this time not of chocolate chips but of cigarettes as I limped through the door. Two women on the screen, very large and close, only their faces and their breasts showing, one woman with her head thrown back, her eyes squeezed shut, tears leaking from them. The other one's long hair falling in her face, that face shiny with sweat, her jaw clenched. “You home already?” asked my mother above the flutey soundtrack. She brought the cigarette to her lips, inhaled, held it close. Her head was a dark oval, her stubby ponytail was slipping loose. The ash of her cigarette was very long. I took it out of her hands, tapped it over her coffee saucer, handed it back to her. “Have a seat,” she said. We watched the screen together. I thought the women were in pain, I thought they were hurting each other. “I wonder,” said my mother, but she didn't say what she wondered.

****

My father ate dinner at the office, came home after I was asleep, then slept while I left in the dark to catch the bus to school. He made buckets and buckets of money. It was to him we owed the crystal chandelier from Austria, the great stone hearth carved with lions, the wrought-iron balconies, the massive upholstered furniture I was not to sit on. My mother brought metal folding chairs instead, placed them to the side of the projector. “Give me a simple, practical chair,” she said. “Give me chairs you can move from place to place.” “Why?” I demanded, suspicious. I was always on the lookout for hints of departure, flight. “Where would you need to take them?”

“That heavy shit gets me down,” she said, waving her hand at the sofa set. She lit a cigarette. More and more she was smoking now. “We should just put a hammock in here, over by the ... the ...”

“Ficus,” I informed her. Recently she'd been talking to the plant. I heard her. She said, “How the hell are you this morning?” and “What are you so happy about?” But she forgot to water, and the leaves of the ficus yellowed and fell to the carpet. Carlotta was always bending on her swollen legs, picking them up.

“Let's go,” said my mother. She shut the drapes, shut away the boats winking on the spring lake, the tiny figures picking their way through the dirty sand. Jeanne Moreau wore a high-necked blouse and button-up boots. It was 1912, before the First World War. She pressed Jim's foot under the table. She dressed up as boy, with a boy's dirty face and cloth cap, and went out on the street, strutting. Her mouth was as beautiful as anything I'd ever seen. Those full lips, those big teeth. I waited for her to laugh. Jules said something that insulted her and she answered him by jumping into the Seine. Her head went under the water. My mother leaned forward. I leaned forward. I watched the screen and my mother at the same time. The glowing tip of my mother's cigarette was so close to her cheek that I was afraid she would burn herself. Jim raced down the embankment and put out his hand to save Jeanne Moreau, while Jules ineffectually dangled a scarf. Frightened, penitent, they hustled her into a waiting cab, took her home. Jules was the weak one, the one whose sadness always showed on his face; I liked him best.

My mother stood up, her shadow huge against the screen. She turned off the projector. “French women know how to punish a man,” she said wistfully.

“Aren't we going to see the rest?” I cried.

She turned her wrist. It was my watch on it; she'd left hers somewhere. “Symphony,” she said.

“Screw that,” I told her.

She took a drag on her cigarette, coughed. She never stopped me when I got mouthy.

“Who are you going with?” I wanted to know.

“I'll tell you right now what happens,” she said. She stubbed out the cigarette. “She marries Jules, sleeps with Jim, and kills herself at the end. Actually, she kills Jim, too.”

****

Harvey Keitel smashed through a glass door, grabbed Alice by the throat, shouted, “Goddamn it, don't tell me what to do!” Blows on film were to me the same as real blows; I lifted my arms to ward them off.

The phone rang, and kept on ringing. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty times. At last I went to answer it. “Cecilia?” my father said.

“No, it's me.”

“Put your mother on the phone.”

Through the open door to the living room I could see her profile in the dark: the hair she was growing longer and leaving loose now, the points of her thin shoulders. She hunched over the legal pad, engrossed. Sometimes in the dark her pen went off the pad and she wrote on her skirt. “She's busy right now,” I told him, but he answered that she wasn't as damn busy as all that.

“Just a minute.” I put my hand over the receiver and counted slowly to one hundred. Then I took away my hand and said, “I looked for her all over but she isn't home.”

****

My mother let me hold the Super 8 camera, black and heavy, and taught me how to put the cartridge in, how to aim the camera and shoot. She was taking a unit on film production, she had to learn all the tricks. She wrote a script and made Carlotta play the thief. In my father's winter cap, pulled low over her eyes, in her white maid's uniform and thick-soled shoes, Carlotta hobbled in and stole a diamond ring, my mother's engagement ring, which was lying carelessly on the glass coffee table. The lady of the house, my mother, entered in an emerald-green cocktail dress, spotted the naked table, then clutched her head extravagantly, mouthing Os of distress. She held up a hand-lettered sign that said, “WITH MY CLOAK OF INVISIBILITY I WILL FIND THE THIEF!” She draped a linen tablecloth around her shoulders and I stopped the camera the way she'd instructed me to. Away she strode from the scene, long legs flashing through the slits in the green sheath. She could look like a queen when she put some clothes on. “Now again,” she said, and I filmed the empty space where she had been. When we watched it later it looked like magic, like she'd vanished into thin air. There one minute, gone the next. All her scripts were the same: people disappearing, appearing, disappearing again.

****

How could he...? I asked. How could she...? Why did they have to...? Sometimes I invented happier endings for the things we saw, and believed in my versions for a while.

And my mother answered: “How would I know? Do I look like Martin Scorcese/Mike Nichols/Francis Ford Coppola?”

My mother had questions, too, hunched over her typewriter in the breakfast room, stained napkins pushed to one side. On the wall was a photograph of the room, the table set with colorful plates and bowls that now were mostly chipped or lost, and a big vase full of daisies. The photograph had been in House Beautiful back when my mother liked to buy things and make the rooms look pretty.

“How do you spell intentional?” Fathom? Uproarious? Interrogated?

I answered anything she wanted me to. The long breakfast room table vibrated under the typewriter, I could hardly hear for the hum.

Those sheets in the typewriter, with their X-outs and rough spots where my mother had overused the eraser! I saw them later as pages in bound journals, and in books. I ran my finger over the smooth pages; I could not believe their perfection.

****

Waves froze on the winter lake and snow blew into tall drifts against the picket fences along the beach. My mother was wearing a gold bathing suit top and straw flip-flops. When her coffee was done she ran her finger around the cup's inside and sucked away the last brown drops. “Yum,” she said. It was four p.m. and the sun was nearly at the horizon. The lake might as well have been an ocean, you couldn’t see the shore on the other side. Was it Michigan out there, or Canada?

It was sunny by the pool where Jon Voigt sat in his wheelchair, paralyzed below the waist, talking to Jane Fonda's husband about which one of them she would choose. My mother's hair was beginning to look like Jane Fonda's, cloudlike and not exactly brushed. She smelled like she had just woken up. The soundtrack was all my favorites: Hey, girl, what's that sound.... Born to be wild.... Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday.... Jon Voigt put his mouth between Jane's legs and made her cry with pleasure. Jane's husband, Bruce Dern, had crazy eyes and a bayonet. He went to the beach, took off all his clothes and his wedding ring, and disappeared helpfully into the ocean.

The screen went white and the last of the film flap-flapped against the takeup reel.

“She would have chosen him anyway,” I said, meaning Jon Voigt. I’d fallen in love with Jon Voigt. I loved his long blond hair and his damaged patience. If he were mine I would push his wheelchair from place to place. I would never have to worry about him going anywhere.

The projector lit the sheen of sweat at the back of my mother’s neck, behind her ears.

“The things you don't know,” she said.

I opened my mouth to sass her, to dare her to name them. Whatever they were, I would show no surprise. They would all be things I’d already seen in a movie.

Instead I turned off the projector, and the film clicked slowly to a stop. For a moment we sat quietly, watching the dark screen. A passing plane shook the cold windows. The day was coming, I figured, when my mother would tell me what I didn’t know, whether I wanted her to or not. She’d tell me in elaborate detail, showing me more than I ever wanted to see. I didn’t intend for that day to be today. Slowly I raised the chandelier light until it flooded the room.