by Mark Foss
— I think …
— Joseph tore down the bus shelter. Why?
— How are you feeling, finding Joseph like that?
— How long will you stay?
We lose the connection. This is why I never ask. It makes her feel I don’t want her around when the opposite is true.
COME DAWN, ROX and I will emerge from our separate rooms with the awkwardness of long-time penpals who finally meet in the flesh. In the light of day, our half-voiced intimacies from the night before will retreat into the shadows. At breakfast, she will stare into her dippy egg and trace parallel lines with her spoon on the vinyl placemat. I will offer toothpicks of buttered toast to pry open the unspoken truths about Candy that quiver on Rox’s lips. If nothing emerges, I will speak of my discovery of Mickey Nailand, and gauge her reaction. She has already let slip her secret life with Joseph, and the moment is ripe for all she knows to pour out. Like the Jack Nicholson character in A Few Good Men, she is dying to divulge the truth about her transgression.
Do you or do you not know anything about Candy’s disappearance?
You’re goddamned right I do!
There’ll be no accusations from me. I’ll show her there’s nothing more to be gained from silence, either for her or Candy. Tease her a little, and the pride Rox takes in her long subterfuge will spill out in fits of nervous laughter. Keep my hands free to catch the lighter dishes before the deep and jagged tremor in her voice pushes them off the edge of the table. I will bear her no malice, so relieved at having my theories confirmed. Rox may well know of Candy’s reaction to my blog, and even her estimated time of arrival at the Wasteland. There is no telling what the morning may bring.
21
OUR LIPS REMAIN SEALED FROM habitual reticence and the congealing effects of the morning oatmeal. We make our way up the dusty road, bandanas covering our mouths and noses like outlaws from the Old West about to stick up a bank. Staring ahead at the vast frontier, Rox and I are hidden from sheriffs and deputies and even from ourselves. I am worried about missing Candy’s arrival, back at the Wasteland. If I asked, maybe Rox would have reassuring words for me. But if she knows nothing, I will be no further ahead and my spirit will be crushed. So I don’t share Mickey Nailand, Molly O, or the blog with her. We continue our dance of non-disclosure, and I wonder if she feels as I do — empowered and imprisoned by silence. There’s something to be said for the comfort of inertia.
I’ve packed a bottle of mosquito repellant for the return journey, along with a flashlight. Right now there’s enough light to sidestep the rocks that have sprung up overnight. Unlikely there will be cars, but if the wind picks up it will cause a blinding sandstorm. I have thrown a couple of old windbreakers with the reflective decal “Bring Me Back Alive” into my knapsack and we will drape them over our shoulders, Batman-style, as they’re too small to wear. Ridiculous, yes, but I no longer fear ridicule.
HOSS AND I wore our windbreakers the length of the driveway, then stashed them in the bus shelter. It was worth having them bring us back dead not to have safety decals clash with our costumes. The frisson of disobedience made me feel two years older.
There were only four houses on the road, spread over two miles, each with a driveway that took ten minutes to traverse. We trundled along with our plastic pumpkin containers, collecting our goodies, returning after two hours to empty our haul on the kitchen table. Rox’s family gave out miniature bags of chips. The Sandersons, who had horses, gave out candy-flavoured necklaces or suckers. We never knew the names of the people in the last house, which had a real cemetery on the property. Every year they gave apples, which Joseph insisted we throw away for fear of needles, pins, and razor blades. While Hoss gave up on them after three Halloweens, I went back one last time, thinking that year it would be different. I was like Charlie Brown in his annual attempt to kick the football, convinced this was the year that Lucy wouldn’t pull it away at the last second. I was dressed as a ghost, a single sheet draped over my head with holes cut for my eyes, nose, and mouth. With no peripheral vision, and my ears covered with the sheet, I could block out the cemetery. It was different that time. Instead of an apple, I got a rock.
Joseph sent us to take Candy around, when she was old enough. Despite her name, she only liked the dressing-up part. Of course she never yelled out “Trick or Treat,” just stared down the neighbours until they dished out. Soon enough she ditched her brothers for Rox. Hoss was happy to see her go. Then he too went out with his friends. Pirate, ghoul, warlock, I was at heart a lone superhero, keeping a keen eye on the girls from the shadows.
THERE'S A PHOTOGRAPH of Candy lying on the roof of Rox’s bus shelter, chin resting on her folded hands. The shack has been freshly painted, a base of green with a single white daisy on a stem flowering to the roof, just under Candy’s face. It is the girls’ handiwork, this shack, inside and out. Wild vines growing up the side and across the entrance have overtaken the painted stem. The daisy has faded, its petals fallen one by one. She loves me, she loves me not. Rox takes a small hatchet from her bag, and hacks away at the growth. With trepidation, I enter this private girls’ space where who knows what went on. Even with the west-facing window, the interior is dark. Rox shoos away my flashlight, retrieving a candle and matches from her bag. She hands it to them, standing in the shadows while I examine the script on the walls. I half expect hieroglyphics or ancient runes, but find instead the clear and confident strokes of Candy’s cursive. Here, not twenty minutes from the Wasteland, my sister has installed a time capsule in plain sight. Her words are not faded after years beneath pine floorboards, but are etched firmly in black ink on white walls — even if the nib of her thin marker occasionally bumped against the grain in the particle board. The wall I saved for her in our own shelter, apparently, wasn’t good enough.
I long to discover emotional outbursts, explanations, getaway plans. Under the faint light of the candle, a shout-out of silent film actresses emerges, topped by Marlene Dietrich. It gives way to quotations from Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath, whose dark and acerbic moods are inscribed with a particularly heavy hand on the wall. This is Candy by proxy. Stand-ins and body doubles substituting for the real thing. I pour over the words, hoping to find her between thousands of swirling lines that snake through the letters. This insidious tangle of weeds seems determined to choke the life out of what Candy left behind. It leaves me gasping. Would someone in cahoots with my sister have carried out such a vengeful act? Rox has been in the dark all this time, as much as I have. Is this what she is trying to tell me? A lifetime of suffering and confusion, a heart rendered inert by rage and hurt, beating only to mark empty days. The thought is too much to bear. How will Rox react to the news that I’ve discovered Candy, that, through my blog, she will find her way home.
Rox and I return to the Wasteland in darkness, slowly, to shield our candles. I think of Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia¸ how the man in a long dark coat tries two or three times to cross the empty natural pool with his flame intact. His feet slapping in the puddles, he protects the flame with his bare hand, sometimes with his coat, as if his life depends on it. When he finally succeeds, he plants the candle carefully on the edge of the pool and then collapses, his purpose served. If I reach the Wasteland with my flame intact, Candy will be there, a conviction that sustains me during the painstakingly slow march back home. I don’t know what Rox is thinking.
22
THE FUNERAL HOME WON'T BUGDE until it hears from the official executor, never mind that Joseph has prepaid for cremation. What if Hoss returns to Toronto in an elevated state of bliss without checking voicemail? The only upside is it gives more time for Candy to discover my blog, read the veiled reference to Joseph’s passing, and hit the road back to the Wasteland. Arriving, if the Gods are willing, before the funeral.
It almost sounds possible.
Rox drags me into an indoor flea market where she is drawn immediately to the vendor with vintage clothes. I flip through binders of black and white stills
from the golden age of Hollywood, lingering over a classic image of Harold Lloyd dangling from the arms of a clock in Safety Last! Was he trying to hold on, or to stop time? Rox and I have managed to freeze-frame our lives, although the external world hasn’t noticed. The store where she once replaced fallen scoops of ice cream has become a tattoo parlour. No second chances on offer there.
I SCAN FOR comments on my blog, for a hint Candy has understood. If I thought spraying my screen with lemon juice would help, I would do it. Candy wants to gain the upper hand by not announcing herself in advance. This would be the sister I know, always looking for an edge of control, the element of surprise.
Rox examines the labels of the All My Children tapes for an eventful episode, while I break out the Hungry Man Dinners. We have enough frozen food to hunker down here for a few weeks, if Candy is delayed. The goings-on at Pine Valley enthrall us for hours until we doze off on the couch. We’re wrapped under the crocheted afghan, its web-like squares sticky with the honey-bourbon residue from my chicken strips and the spiced rum barbecue sauce from her popcorn chicken. I wake at four in the morning, alone. Family intrigue in Pine Valley continues, but feels empty without Rox’s acerbic commentary.
Is Rox still here? The vibrations coming from Candy’s room and that shake the paintings in the hall fill me with warmth. Rox is snoring on the cot, the empty bed overhead. It’s comforting to know she has not barricaded the door. In my own bed, I grip both sides of the frame for safety, my head filled with images of Stuart Chandler’s art gallery, Joseph and Mary in the field, my first lost brother Adam, me hanging from the minute hand of a clock.
IN THE MORNING Rox’s cot is empty, but I dare not enter the room. I feel the same way standing at the entrance to my own bedroom in Montreal after Rox has left — a powerful sense that I do not belong here, so much so that I would grab clothes quickly from my dresser and closet, and leave the environment untouched.
Today I step across the threshold. A faint breeze wafts in through the open window competing with heat rays from the noonday sun, neither enough to mask Rox’s country-girl scent. The sheets have been thrown back, partially draped over the bed above; the pillow holds the impression of her head; the knickknacks, jewellery, and old schoolwork on Candy’s dresser are out of place, shifted by the night’s vibrations. I manage to collapse onto Candy’s bed. I sit there, my bare feet tucked under Rox’s blanket. From this position, I see the edge of Candy’s dresser and the floorboard that hides Phebe’s time capsule.
Rox appears in the doorway with one towel wrapped around her body and another draped across her shoulders to catch the last drips from her hair. In the moment before she notices me, her body is uncharacteristically relaxed. She fairly floats into the room. Then our eyes meet, and her body tenses up so tightly the towel goes slack, and she has to pull it tightly around her. I am intruding into what has always been a private space for her and Candy; she is physically vulnerable. For the briefest of moments, I’m disappointed the figure is not Candy, although I’m pleased to see Rox still here, even if I blush at seeing so much of her skin.
My sister would not have worn a towel. Just as Hoss’s voice has never changed, Candy never lost her sense of childlike innocence about her body. I would often leave my bedroom only to stumble upon her nude in the hall. I came to dread these moments, and the inevitable flushing of my face. She seemed to take no notice of my presence, but for someone with such a keen sense of fashion, and an uncanny ability to draw people’s gaze, she might have been conducting an experiment. At what precise moment would a nude body become naked? And when does a brother decide he shouldn’t look? After all those sex scenes as Molly O, maybe Candy has grown self-conscious about her naked body. Prudish, even. Or I have. She needs to be held in medium shot, wrapped in shadow and framed obliquely before she is comfortable without clothes.
Rox drops her eyes to the floor and turns her head, wishing no doubt to disappear into the cubby hole with Phebe’s daguerreotype. I look the other way, and angle out of the room without a word. In As You Desire Me, a stranger convinces Greta Garbo she’s been suffering from amnesia. No one is sure of the truth. I could write a dictionary for all the words Rox and I don’t say.
Our brunch is almost festive; Rox breaks out an open box of Aunt Jemima. As she flicks water in the pan to test it, I quietly check my blog again, pretending to protect the screen against the splatter rather than from Rox’s gaze.
All through my early home life, Rox and Candy never sat down for breakfast; they preferred to slip out the door with an apple or a banana. Now Rox and I face off at the table with a plateful of pancakes.
— I’m sorry about Joseph. I don’t know if I’ve said.
— He liked to think we were long-lost relatives of Cary Grant. But you know that. You spoke to him. You wrote. You visited.
— He loved you.
— When people die in winter, they have to wait until the ground thaws before they bury them. At least they used to. In summer, it’s the body they have to keep cold.
— You told Hoss about Joseph, right? He’ll be here soon. Then you can get on with it. I’m sick of living in limbo.
— All it takes is a signature to put me in charge. I can pretend to be him.
— I should go. I’m restless.
— Joseph would want you here.
— Would have wanted. You’ve been saying that a lot. I worry.
— Hoss is into this group called Momentous Moments. They have eliminated the past and future tense from their lexicon. All now, all the time.
— Hoss loves you, too.
— We’re strangers. Ever since …
— You need to stick together. The two of you.
— The three of us.
Rox doesn’t answer, unsure, perhaps, if I mean her or Candy. I’m not sure either.
We both press our pancakes firmly into deep pools of syrup on our plates, the silence broken only by the scrape of our forks against porcelain as we hit bottom.
Molly O
The Seductive cinema of Mickey Nailand
Home Films Suppositions About Me
Musing aloud on the Dynamic Duo
Posted by LJ
Bergman with Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullman. Fassbinder with Ingrid Caven and Hannah Schygulla. Godard with Anna Karina and Anne Wiazemsky. Truffaut with Nathalie Baye and Fanny Ardant. Allen with Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow.
But for Nailand, only Molly O.
Molly O appears in all of Nailand’s fifteen films, and her presence grows more charismatic, more powerful, and more indispensable with each work. There is a palpable power struggle in place — not just between the two as characters in a scenario, but between the director and “his” actress. Through sheer force of intelligence, wit, and sensuality, Molly O gives the films their edge — their very essence. She may well be the creative genius, not Nailand.
His first film, Dyn Amic, is less homage to Stephen Dwoskin’s Dyn Amo than a fawning tribute — it is painfully clear Nailand has nothing new to offer about the voyeuristic power struggle between stripper and patron. Even the presence of Molly O can’t save his debut from being derivative. Nailand might have ended his career right there, before it began, but he breaks new ground by adapting and reinventing the films of Mary Pickford.
As a co-founder of United Artists, Pickford was the most powerful woman of early Hollywood, and yet she still played traditional roles. Surely it is Molly O — not Mickey Nailand — who wants to pay homage to this pioneer of the silent screen, to comment on the gender and cinematic conventions that held Pickford in place, and to adopt a cinema of the erotic that was both breathless and Brechtian.
Given the banality of his upbringing in Shepardsville, I wonder if Mickey Nailand could have developed such an original cinematic language without a muse. Was she or wasn’t she? Only Molly O knows for sure.
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23
WE SIT IN THE WICKER rocking chairs on the front step, Rox sketching gypsies from
memory, me keeping my eyes peeled. An old habit. All those years, sitting on the porch after school before entering the empty house. Not wanting to face the void. Convinced if I stare long and hard enough Mary will reappear around the bend. And then Candy.
JOSEPH DID NOT permit us to watch Mary’s cremation, so I invented my own versions. Sometimes local authorities burst in to arrest the funeral director. No, he protests, it was Joseph Grant, the grieving widower, who supplied the used coffin. It went unsold at his auction house last week. I imagine the chauffeur in Burnt Offerings, who grins so malevolently at the child during his mother’s funeral, and I start to sweat and shake.
I WAKE WITH a shiver, neither the sun nor Rox in sight. Her scent lingers. She can’t have gone far. Small comfort. Her absence reminds me Joseph is gone permanently. I imagine him, waiting impatiently in the mortuary, wondering why it’s taking so long for his final ride into the sunset. I’ll give Hoss another day to finish his retreat, check his messages. Candy I give three. All his children.
I find Rox in the garage running her finger along the plastic tarp that covers the Steenbeck.
— I should go.
— You remember the film the two of you did?
— The three of us.
— Hoss will be here soon. We’ll get things straightened out by sundown.
— That’s a line from a vampire movie.
— Star Trek: TNG. Hoss could tell you the Stardate.
— You’re always quoting. Why don’t you speak for yourself?
— I like what other people say better.
— Been here too long.
— You have a better place to be?
— Going, going, gone.
All I want is to pick up Chinese, watch another eight hours of All My Children with her, drop plum sauce on the afghan. Rox snaps up the knapsack at her feet.