I can still see Ronnie sitting cross-legged on her grandmother’s brocade sofa when I came home after being fired from the café, eating a bowl of popcorn, watching a film on the small TV on the floor, a Hal Hartley film she’d watch over and over, Henry Fool. It was the only film she owned. When I told her, she threw her head back and laughed, a throaty, acidic peal that I rejoiced in hearing, probably because it was so rare. For other times she was so moody, silent, as was I, us circling each other. It was one of those moments. Of complete fuck, what are we going to do now?
In our own ways we were used to stretches of unemployment while waiting to find something, of even waiting then for weeks until we got our first paycheck. That’s why I preferred to work for tips. We were both intimate with payday loans. We weren’t getting help. Both of us had strained relationships with our families. We got by on three dollars a day. Sometimes we would eat cereal all day. I can see us, sitting on the stoop in the second place we lived together, on Damen, eating Lucky Charms out of a box. The addicts that loitered outside. The three yippy little dogs who lived upstairs. We would dream murderous thoughts about them. Ronnie would take a broom and bang on the ceiling. I guess we both cracked. Maybe we didn’t break up with each other. We broke up with that place.
* * *
Although I knew that this would not be my certain fate. I felt sure in some way I could escape from it. I was still quite young when I knew Ronnie, in my early twenties. Now I’m the same age she was when I last knew her. Yet I am not broke anymore. Not desperate. My spouse with his academic library post. In most places we’ve lived I had regular gigs teaching. My bachelor uncle, my father’s identical twin, left me a small inheritance two years ago when he died, rather agonizingly, of liver cancer. Like Virginia Woolf’s aunt. Yet I need to find work soon. I cannot find teaching work, women and gender studies curriculums being slashed in North Carolina. So still circling, circling around. Going back to apply to “girl” jobs.
Yesterday I donned my new black-and-gold silk dress, quite ladylike at the knees, and my sandaled heels, in order to go for a job interview at Duke University for a part-time administrative assistant position for a famous professor in the literature department. The office dowagers spoke about him in hushed tones, as they did all of their scholars (I figured out it was the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman). I wonder what it would be like to be treated with such respect. The woman in charge eyed my four-inch heels as I clomped up the stairs, in the un-air-conditioned hallway.
I didn’t get the position. I didn’t even get called back for a second interview. There is a sort of voluptuousness, I think, about almost permanently occupying this realm of failure.
The gnawingness of being perennially unemployed. The occasional seizure of despair. Especially when one cannot write. This vast feeling of emptiness, like a choke hold.
* * *
I didn’t think Ronnie was a decade older than me when we met. She still looked like a girl, in her thrift knee-length skirts and her porcelain skin and her high-pitched, whispery voice. At first I thought of her as cheerful—well, we were all supposed to act cheerful, up, smiley, in such environs. She still had a girlish figure, because she didn’t eat, because we didn’t eat then, we couldn’t afford it, not really—we ate what they fed us if we worked in the food industry, usually on discount. If we paid for food, then we would have no money for coffee or vintage dresses or makeup, which we usually didn’t anyway.
She would buy the most beautiful makeup—almost period pieces—pink puffs for powder, the most feminine little containers. I can still see her when she was going out at night, on a date, grooming herself elaborately. The way she’d hit the puff against her face.
I think someone like her had to remain a girl. She still worked “girl” jobs—bar girl, coffee girl, cigarette girl, etc. It keeps you, in a way, young. At least for a while.
Girls like Wanda and Ronnie were dependent on their looks to get by, even though they really didn’t get by. Dependent on some man to take interest in them and buy them dinner, maybe help them out with groceries.
Wanda still had her looks. White trash but still white. White, blonde, blue-eyed. With the right clothes she could be the American girl.
* * *
In her review of Wanda, Pauline Kael calls the character Wanda a slut several times. Kael was fond of the word. In the same essay in The New Yorker, she also calls Elaine May’s character in Mikey and Nicky a slut. I wonder how Barbara Loden registered the shocks when she read the review. Wanda is “an attractive girl but such a sad, ignorant slut that there’s nowhere for her and the picture to go but down . . .” She also writes that Wanda is “too numb to be a competent hooker.” I don’t think Kael really got how Loden was showing her character being pulled slowly through life, drifting into situations. She has no money. She has no real place to stay. She must fuck these men to get by. She finds herself, the next day, squinty-eyed in a strange bed.
* * *
After the factory incident, Wanda is picked up at a bar by a balding salesman in a bad suit. When he buys her a beer, she holds her face in one hand, pours it, not even registering him. The next scene she’s naked in bed, sleeping; he is dressing quickly, trying to leave. When she wakes up and sees him, she dresses hurriedly as well, pulling on her sad holey underwear, running out after him, her hair now a ponytail on top of her head. Wanda’s hair is a recurring absurdity in the film. In the first scenes, her hair is wrapped up in a scarf in curlers. But then when we finally see it down, her hair is pin-straight and fine, and all she can manage is that ponytail. Mr. Dennis, the petty criminal she falls in with who has quixotic dreams of grand larceny, demands that she fix her hair. What would I do with it? she asks, in her way. A hat or something, he demands. When he gives her money, she buys a silly headband decorated with plastic daisies at Woolworth’s.
The businessman tries to shake her off at an ice cream stand, speeding away as she’s ordering. Handed the cone, she stares out at the highway. She sets off walking. She wanders into a department store, staring at the mannequins behind the glass wearing outfits she cannot afford.
Ronnie would window-shop at night, walking down Damen Avenue in Bucktown past the storefront boutiques after they had closed. Cheaper that way, she would say. Like Agnès Varda’s pop-star blonde Cléo, played by Corinne Marchand, in Cléo from 5 to 7, trying on hats. Except she cannot afford anything.
Wanda is more like the drifter played by Sandrine Bonnaire in Varda’s later Vagabond, in the French Sans toit ni loi (“without roof or law”). Wanda wanders into a Mexican cinema, only to fall asleep and, upon waking up, find her wallet gone.
Then she walks, unknowingly, into the midst of a robbery. The man she will call Mr. Dennis throughout the film is behind the bar when she walks in, an unseen man tied up at his feet. Mr. Dennis is played as a twitchy loose cannon by Michael Higgins, who also plays the brother of the Elia Kazan stand-in in Kazan’s autobiographical film The Arrangement, a send-up of his early relationship with Loden. She is bold for the first time in the film. She eats the potato chips in the bowl and asks for something to drink. She startles him. He clumsily pours her a glass of beer. “You want to know what happened to me? Someone stole all of my money,” she tells him, unaware of the irony of her appeal. She asks him for a comb, which he, still startled, pulls out of his front pocket, nervously looking at the door. She pulls it through her bangs—such a clumsy, childlike gesture.
Later we will of course see them naked in bed. He freaks out at her when she touches him. “I don’t like friendly people.” He brusquely tells her to get up and get dressed and get hamburgers, with exacting directions. He’s violent and abusive and impenetrable. He makes her pick the onions off of his hamburger. She does it because he tells her to.
She eats sloppily too—the potato chips, the spaghetti at the diner he later takes her to. He is impatient, paternalistic. “Wipe your mouth, will you?” She obeys.
I write in my notebook when I rewatch this scene: �
�THE GIRL IS A HOT MESS.” I also write: “THIS ESSAY IS A HOT MESS.”
The draft is chaos. The draft is a form of disaster.
* * *
For some reason it is excruciating forcing myself to rewatch Wanda for this essay, even though it is one of my favorite films. I procrastinated over watching it for days. Something to do with empathy.
I think I felt suffocated from intense waves of empathy while waiting tables at the Hollywood. I met more Wandas there too, women rather brutalized by life. My fellow waitresses supporting too many family members, the ones who got abortions and had to go to work the same day, the one who came to work with bruises because her boyfriend beat her up. The old ladies I’d work that afternoon shift with—one had terrible emphysema but still fiercely held on to her menthols; she once was hospitalized and still had to scramble to cover her shift. She was the mother of another waitress there who worked the lucrative early-bird shift, whose teenage daughter had been missing for some time—she showed me a photo of her staring from a poster, blonde like her, not as hard yet. Lost. The other waitress on that afternoon shift lived alone, would slowly shuffle home afterwards, with her liter of Pepsi and her plastic bag of videos from the Blockbuster that she’d watch at home. She was friends with the diabetic lady who would sit at the counter spooning up her hot chocolate.
* * *
The rest of the film leads up to the bank robbery Mr. Dennis plans that inevitably will fail. They embark on a strange road trip odyssey in a stolen car, including stopping at a fake catacombs/tourist trap for Mr. Dennis to visit his elderly father. Mr. Dennis has Wanda read out loud from the newspaper article about the bar robbery as he drives. She slowly picks at the text like a young child, then the slow realization. “Hey, what are you trying to get me into,” she freaks out, pushes the newspaper at him. He has no patience for this display of willfulness. “Get out—” He opens the door. Yet her flicker of resistance has gone out. We only see it once again, at the end, when she fights against a soldier on leave who is trying to rape her. “I didn’t do anything,” she pouts. She stays. She doesn’t have anywhere else to go.
* * *
An incongruous moment of Wanda that I love: Mr. Dennis, in a gesture that can either be described as gross or touching, and maybe both (the beauty of this film is how many moments cut across these two concepts), lays his meaty, sweaty hand on Wanda’s thigh while they are driving on the highway. He palms her thigh and she lets him. How Hollywood taut and tan that thigh is. A burst of autobiography. In reality Barbara Loden was the much younger wife to this much more famous man.
The orphaned misfit meeting the married director twenty-three years her senior while a dancing girl at the Copacabana nightclub in NYC. Like something out of that Marilyn Monroe film Bus Stop.
In the film, Mr. Dennis is the harsh director; Wanda is his actress. He instructs her not to wear makeup. To only wear dresses—throwing her newly purchased slacks out onto the highway as Wanda stares at them wistfully. He directs her for her role in the robbery, where they plan to hold a bank executive hostage in his house—she is in costume as a pregnant woman needing to make a phone call as she knocks on his door. Throughout she lets him. It is as if she has been looking for someone to tell her what to do.
* * *
On YouTube there is a video of Barbara Loden on The Mike Douglas Show, when Yoko Ono and John Lennon cohosted. She is promoting Wanda. She narrates, in her quiet, self-effacing way, that she met the famous couple at the Cannes Film Festival. Here she has long shiny gorgeous hair; she is wearing knee-high boots over white jeans and a brown flowy peasant top. (I keep on pausing and trying to figure out whether these are the same white jeans worn in Wanda.) She is a bit reserved, which she discusses with the famous couple, their mutual shyness.
One of the first things Mike Douglas asks, after noting positive attention to Wanda, the critic’s prize it won at the Venice Film Festival: “Does your husband have anything to do, does he stick his toes in anywhere, when you’re filmmaking?” She handles it politely. “We help each other.” “How does he feel about you making your own films, Barbara?” “Well, umm, he was the one who made me do it. It never entered my mind to make a film. I had no ambition that way.” The North Carolina accent comes out. She sounds, suddenly, so much like Wanda. She repeats: “He made me do it. He forced me.”
Barbara Loden lived under her husband’s shadow for years, until she broke out when she made Wanda. After that, she began to be more confident in her identity as a filmmaker.
Kazan was upset that she had abandoned her role as a housewife. He had actually begun divorce proceedings, until she found a lump in her breast. She was to die eight years later at the age of forty-eight.
He writes in his autobiography, “When I first met her, she had little choice but to depend on her sexual appeal. But after Wanda she no longer needed to be that way, no longer wore clothes that dramatised her lure, no longer came on as a frail, uncertain woman who depended on men who had the power . . . I realised I was losing her, but I was also losing interest in her struggle . . . She was careless about managing the house, let it fall apart, and I am an old-fashioned man.” A mirroring of the court scene in Wanda, the grievances of Wanda’s husband.
Later, he still claimed that he wrote the screenplay to Wanda himself.
* * *
The most intimate moment in the film is when Wanda and Mr. Dennis are sitting on the car in a field, eating and drinking beer. He puts his coat on her. He looks at her. He asks her why she doesn’t dress herself up nicely. She tells him she doesn’t have any money to get new clothes. “I don’t have anything, never did have anything, never will have anything,” she says quickly, lightly, eating delicately. “Stupid,” he says to her. “I’m stupid,” she says, shrugging. “You don’t want anything, you won’t have anything. You don’t have anything, you’re nothing, you may as well be dead,” he lectures her. “Well, I guess I’m dead then,” she says. He gets mad at her. She shrugs and doesn’t make eye contact. In the next scene he’s given her money to buy clothes.
This scene reminds me so much of Ronnie. The same lilting voice. Her being so immobilized at times by the uselessness of her fate. Learned helplessness. The going inwards.
In truth Ronnie and I were both depressives. And by that I mean we wanted to have contact with other people, but often found fatiguing the casual, accepted exchange. Social encounters both made us feel somehow unseen, and then drained, so we were more likely to go inwards. This made us revolt, in different ways.
That eternal question “What do you do?” We could not answer in any way that explained things properly. For what we did did not define us. Although we did not actually know what did define us. Ronnie especially would become enraged at that question. I witnessed this at the occasional social gatherings we went to together. She would often retort something snippy. “I am a professional Ronnie.” That was her line. I was still so nice all the time then. I couldn’t imagine how someone could be not nice. I was always so embarrassed, but also impressed, that she could transcend niceness. In some ways she reminded me of my prickly, secretive mother I loved so intensely. There was a connection there. One year my mother invited Ronnie home for Easter. I don’t think Ronnie ever forgot that kindness. I can still see her across the room at my mother’s wake, sitting alone on that island of an ottoman at the suburban funeral home, dabbing her eyes with tissues. She must have read about it in the newspaper. As I said, we’d been out of touch for some time.
I think in some ways I thought of my observations of Ronnie as a sort of film in which I could reconstruct my mother’s mythical secretary days, her eating tomato sauce on crackers while being a struggling single mother to my half sister, living poor on Chicago’s west side until my father saved her, setting her up in rather mundane lower-middle-class suburbia. She always said that when my father asked her to marry him he assured her she didn’t have to work anymore. Although of course she worked—scrubbing kitchen floors at 5 AM on her ha
nds and knees. When courting her, he’d bring her heads of lettuce and sticks of salami.
I always thought that the only escape for Ronnie—and this is terrible—was marriage. She wanted to settle down, I think. To be taken care of. At that point in her life that was Ronnie’s only option, or so it seemed to me then. She only went to that one year of community college. She didn’t have money for more school. She didn’t really understand how to use a computer, even though she once dragged home an ancient yellowing PC to try to get it to work, set it on her grandmother’s Formica kitchen table. She was tired of temporary dead-end jobs. She didn’t want to work like that any longer.
* * *
I don’t know why people call them salad days. None of us ate salads then.
At the diner the waitresses had to prepare the salads. We were supposed to put on plastic gloves. We would be sitting around the corner of the counter, chain-smoking and playing go fish and looking at catalogues of china figurines that all the mom waitresses were crazy about. Then we’d have to prepare a little shitty iceberg salad, slathering on the ranch dressing.
* * *
Nobody—nothing. A cipher. The consummate actress shifting identities to please. “I used to be a lot like that,” Loden told the Los Angeles Times in 1971, adding: “I had no identity of my own. I just became whatever I thought people wanted me to become.”
* * *
There was that time Ronnie fell in love with the scholar of postmodern fiction who was much older than she was, who resembled something like a well-oiled mole—I didn’t get the appeal, except that he was an adult who owned his own place. I think perhaps it was about the idea of him more than anything—what he represented, how he could potentially change her fate. How loving him could be a career in a way. While he was away for the summer, she shut herself up in her bedroom and read all of the big massive tomes of the postmodern novelist whom he specialized in. As if she could get closer to him through the object of his obsession.
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