by Dana Spiotta
“You look great,” Meadow said with a narrow smile.
“You haven’t even looked at me, you phony bastard,” Carrie said and shook her head. Meadow smiled more broadly now. Carrie got up and turned sideways. Meadow looked her up and down.
“You do look very healthy and glowing and so on,” Meadow said. Carrie nodded at her. “Quieter too, huh? Peaceful? Content?”
Carrie snorted. “Yes, and smugly self-satisfied. Open doors for me, give me the right of way. I am my own reason, people. Because I am manufacturing a person in my freaking body, what are you up to?” Carrie said.
“Seriously, though, the maternal vibe is off the charts.”
The waitress came by. Meadow ordered a glass of wine and Carrie ordered a cranberry juice and club soda. The waitress brought the drinks and a basket of bread. Carrie took a piece and buttered it. She missed having wine, a little, but she liked that she could eat with near impunity, which she hadn’t let herself do since she was maybe six years old.
“How’s Will doing?” Meadow asked.
“Will is good,” Carrie said. “Did I tell you he applied to a bunch of creative-writing MFA programs?”
“I think so. I didn’t realize he wanted to write fiction. Or is it poetry?”
Will had been having a hard time. When he turned forty, he decided a change was needed. He was tired of rallying his bandmates and sick of working as a waiter in a neighborhood restaurant. He was always a good songwriter, and then he started writing short stories as well. One day he came home very excited and told her what he had finally realized about himself. He believed it was a great idea for him to attend a fiction program. Somewhere funded so he could be paid to write for a few years. Carrie honestly found his stories wild and quite funny, and she supported the plan. But secretly she was hoping he wouldn’t get in—she didn’t want to move to Iowa City or Charlottesville or Syracuse. God, no. In fact she couldn’t. They would have to be apart for three years. So deep down she rooted against him getting in, which was selfish and awful of her. He applied to all the top MFA programs, and in the end he was rejected by all of them although he was wait-listed at Michigan and at UVA. There was a time, not that long ago, when she would have gladly confessed all this to Meadow. But things were different now. She felt protective of her life with Will and maybe she didn’t want Meadow to know that she felt the way she did.
“Fiction. His stories are excellent,” Carrie said. “Funny and dark, with lots of language jokes.”
“Like puns?” Meadow said with a rueful lift of an eyebrow.
“No, not fucking puns!”
Meadow smiled.
“Like Mad Libs,” Carrie said, and this made Meadow laugh hard enough to choke a little on her wine. “No, you know, like making fun of jargon, crashing various language systems together for absurd effect, or exaggerating them, like New Age motivational speakers or corporate execs. Like that.”
Meadow nodded and looked at her food. She wasn’t eating much, more pushing the food around the plate. She caught the waiter’s eye and ordered another glass of wine.
“Anyway, he didn’t get in anywhere. Those idiots. So he will be Mr. Mom for a while.”
“Lucky Will.”
“Yeah.”
Meadow drank her wine and looked around the room.
“So how are your folks?” Carrie said.
“Great. They said they saw you at your screening of WACs in LA. They loved it, thought it was very smart and funny.”
“Yes! It was sweet of them to come.” Carrie waited for Meadow to say more, to say she had seen the film, but she found something to stare at in the space behind Carrie, her mind clearly somewhere else. “What about you, Meadow? How’s it going?”
Meadow looked at her, the narrow smile again. “Not great, Carrie.”
“Is it that stupid article?”
Meadow waved her hand as if to say “over it.” But clearly she wasn’t. She stared into the space beyond Carrie’s shoulder again.
“It was stupid and pretty outrageous what they said about you. They would never call Errol Morris a goddamned handmaiden.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Why don’t you ever call me?” Carrie could hear the scold in her voice.
“I’ve been very busy, crazy. I want to make this movie about Sarah Mills. She’s serving a life sentence for arson, and I think she’s innocent. But I have to put it together. Figure out how to approach it. Because everyone seems to hate my work now.”
“That’s not true. You are so respected.”
Meadow shook her head. Then she sighed. “Everything is so easy for you, an unbroken line,” Meadow said.
“Really? It appears that way, maybe,” Carrie said. She couldn’t really argue that she hadn’t been lucky. She worked hard, but things often broke her way. She knew that.
“And you have everything you’ve ever wanted,” Meadow said, nodding at her belly. “Films. Family. Everything.”
“Okay, listen up. Things aren’t as uncomplicated as they seem. Should I tell you about my life?”
Meadow shook her head.
“For instance, I’m about to have a baby and my husband doesn’t seem to want to sleep with me anymore, and I’m pretty sure he is having an affair.” Carrie hadn’t ever formed those words before, much less spoken them. She started to cry. Meadow looked away from her. “I am trying to finish this film, I am having a baby. I’ve had a very hard time.”
“I’m sorry Will is being a dick, but I’m not surprised. Every marriage is like that, isn’t it? At a certain point?”
“God! Why are you so unsympathetic to me?” Meadow smiled as if this were a joke. Carrie felt herself getting really angry at her. “You told that reporter you haven’t seen my movie. Even if it were true, don’t you think it hurts me to read that?” In the same New York article, Carrie had read that Meadow said this:
“Most films just flatter their audience. Make them feel good about their moral compass. Reduce things. There are clear bad guys with a veneer of complication to lend it some sophistication.” When asked if she felt that was true about her friend Carrie Wexler’s new black comedy, WACs, she shook her head. “I haven’t seen it. So I can’t say.”
Carrie knew that the journalist had baited Meadow. But still it hurt. Meadow said nothing. She just looked at her hands. Meadow had sent Carrie a short, faintly positive email about her previous film. That’s the most Carrie expected of Meadow as far as Carrie’s films were concerned, and even that hadn’t happened for this one.
“And you barely return my calls,” Carrie said. “Is it something that I’ve done or what? I want to help you if I can, you know.”
Meadow looked up at her, and her eyes were red. She said nothing. She wiped her eyes.
Carrie felt her anger melt to something else. She raced to figure out what she could do to soften the world for Meadow, make her happy somehow.
“I can help you make the movie about Sarah Mills. Your movie your way. With my production company. Let me help you.”
Meadow shrugged. Took a sip of wine. “I honestly don’t want what you have.”
“When did you become like this?” Carrie said.
“I don’t know.” Meadow shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m not a good person.” Meadow’s face crunched up and she put a hand over her mouth. Carrie had hardly ever seen Meadow cry.
“Jesus. Are you kidding? You’re not different from everyone else, you know. Some good, some bad.”
“Maybe that’s why I make movies about people who have done terrible things. An apologist for moral deformities. ‘Handmaiden to Monsters.’ I don’t even mind so much that I’m not good. I would just hate not to know it, to think otherwise. That seems important.”
Carrie put her hand on Meadow’s arm. Meadow was still lean and hard, but now Carrie felt the ha
rdness in a different way.
“That’s one of the insights in your work. No one is pure anything. Bad people are still human.”
Meadow pulled out a cigarette. Carrie eyed it. “Of course I won’t light up.” Meadow laughed bitterly. “The thing is, that’s precisely what I’m talking about. If everyone is good and bad, if everything is complicated, then nothing matters. But I also don’t think the answer is to just give people what they want, tell them what they already know. If people cheer at your films, what are you doing?”
“You’re being ridiculous. You’re just trying to push me away.”
“I’m sorry. It isn’t just you. There’s something sickening in what we all do. There is so much ego in it, and the rest is a veneer of something beyond self. A flimsy pretense that this isn’t just self-aggrandizement. It is really an advertisement for my own intelligence and quality.”
Carrie had seen Meadow do versions of this in the past. She was a woman of extreme positions. Her renunciations. This time Meadow seemed more desperate than Carrie had seen before, more rattled. Meadow kept the unlit cigarette in her mouth.
“I have to go. I am just fucked up with everything.”
“Don’t go,” Carrie said. But Meadow was up and gone.
* * *
Later that evening Meadow called to say she was sorry. Sorry she hadn’t seen Carrie’s last film, and sorry Meadow was so hard on Carrie when really she was angry at herself.
“I know,” Carrie said. She loved Meadow, and it would never change. She would find a way to the feeling she felt most comfortable with no matter what. The bad marriage made it all the more dire that her lifelong friend not leave her too. She would insist on the friendship, on the “best” friendship, no matter how shabbily Meadow treated her. Aren’t friends allowed to accept each other on any terms? Unlike a marriage, which must be fulfilling and a goddamn mutual miracle, a friendship could be twisted and one-sided and make no sense at all, but if it had years and years behind it, the friendship could not be discarded. It was too late to change her devotion to Meadow, even if Carrie hardly ever felt it returned lately.
Meadow said she did want to do the film about Sarah, who had been in jail for twenty years—since she was eighteen. “Good,” Carrie said. Meadow told her Sarah was in jail for the arson deaths of two people, her boyfriend and her daughter. But the evidence—that accelerant was found at the scene—was falsified by a corrupt DA. Sarah had confessed and pled guilty to something she didn’t do. Maybe she could even help Sarah, who knows? Make the case for her innocence. Meadow wanted it to make some difference in Sarah’s life. Not just use her, but help her. Carrie agreed to help produce the film.
After she got off the phone, Carrie wanted to make herself a grilled cheese sandwich. Will was out at band practice and she couldn’t sleep. Carrie buttered the bread on the inside and out, layered in the cheese slices and fried it in a pan. She ate the sandwich with a bowl of thick-cut potato chips. When she was done, she ate a piece of carrot cake. The more she ate, the more she wanted to eat. She knew she would feel gross afterward, her flesh already pressing against her pants, her growing stomach and thighs. But it calmed her and she needed to sleep. Later as she lay in the king-sized bed, she felt more alone than usual.
* * *
Meadow began work on the Sarah Mills film, and almost immediately it fell apart. No one else knew about the Sarah Mills film because the Sarah Mills film was aborted.
Meadow brought Kyle, who was now her friendly ex-boyfriend, as her crew, and they planned to film Sarah at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. It would be their first conversation in person, and Meadow wanted Sarah to tell her story so Meadow could get an idea of what to film next. Although she was doing postproduction on her own movie, Carrie thought she would come for the first day of filming. She wanted to meet Sarah and give Meadow some support.
Carrie rode in the car with Meadow and Kyle up to the Bedford Hills prison. It was oddly situated, tucked next to wealthy Westchester towns, which made Carrie wonder how that ever happened, but maybe a women’s prison wasn’t as disturbing to the locals as a male prison. It also surprised her that so much of it was outdoors. They went through the initial security, which was elaborate even though they had prior approval to bring their equipment in. Carrie had a twinge of anxiety as they ran the hand-wand metal detector around and under her pregnant belly. She knew, and repeated to herself, that low-frequency electromagnetic fields were safe for pregnant women. After the meticulous searches they were stamped with an infrared number and then escorted through open-air passages lined by chain-link fences. At the top were gleaming spirals of razor wire. Then they ran their hands under a light to show their numbers, went through another security check, and were finally led to an open room that looked more like an elementary school classroom than the prison visiting rooms she had seen in the movies. One wall of the room was all windows. It was a sunny day, and the bright light warmed the room. At the back was a play area for the children of the inmates. A colorful mural of various animals was painted above the toys piled in boxes. The center of the room had brown laminate tables and purple plastic molded chairs. No bulletproof glass or bars between inmates and visitors. On the near wall, next to the guard’s high desk, was a long row of vending machines.
“It’s not what I expected,” Carrie whispered to Meadow.
“It looks low-security, but that is for the comfort of the visitors. Every one of these women gets strip-searched after each visit. Can you imagine how humiliating that is? Even the elderly, honor-block inmates.”
Sarah was already sitting at their appointed table when they arrived. She had a dog with her. Sarah ran an in-prison program in which inmates train dogs to aid the blind and also to work as therapy animals for people with PTSD. The unleashed dog sat obediently at her feet, and Sarah sometimes put her hand on his head or whispered to him. Meadow had told Carrie that Sarah earned her BA and a master’s in animal science while she was in prison.
Over several phone conversations, Meadow had given Carrie the background on Sarah’s case, and why Meadow found it so intriguing.
“I briefly dated this lawyer who works with the Justice Campaign, which is—”
“I know what it is. They use DNA evidence to vacate false convictions,” Carrie said.
“Right, but also they reexamine evidence with current technology. In this case, fire engineering experts. Also they look at cases where the only evidence is a convenient confession, that sort of thing.”
“She was very young,” Carrie said.
“Yes, barely eighteen. She confessed to the arson charge and pled guilty. She is serving a seventy-five-years-to-life sentence, which means she can’t even be considered for parole until 2054. Her public defender was incompetent, the DA was possibly corrupt.” Carrie noticed that the DA was described as corrupt the first time, but now Meadow had qualified it with that “possibly.”
“But the real reason she was, uh, discarded was because she was a big drug user, and she had a sordid and documented sex life, so she obviously was guilty.”
“Why would she confess if she didn’t do it?”
“Ha! Do you know how many people have confessed to murdering Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia killing? Sixty. No joke.”
“Really?”
“It isn’t hard to get people to confess to anything, believe me. We are highly suggestible creatures.”
Sarah was exactly what Carrie expected: she was a small, pretty woman. Despite her green smock and baggy green pants, you could see she still had a shapely body. In the photos from the paper twenty years earlier, she looked young and sexy despite the fact that she was being led to court. Everyone noticed her beauty, and it seemed to work against her.
Meadow sat across from her at the table. She wanted Kyle to film them in a two-shot, in profile. She said that people have what is called a camera-perspective bias when only t
he suspect is shown in videotapes of interrogations. They are perceived as guilty, while if the interrogator and his questioning are also shown, the bias disappears. So Meadow wanted herself in the frame. She wanted Sarah to look at her and not into the camera. Carrie sat behind Meadow but out of the camera’s frame. She could see Sarah directly as she spoke, the same as Meadow saw her.
“Do you think you can begin by telling us what happened that night twenty years ago?” Meadow asked.
“Yes. I haven’t spoken to anyone about it in a long time. But I have made my peace and I am ready.”
Sarah smiled placidly at Meadow, and then looked down at her hands on the table. She spoke slowly and deliberately.
“I was eighteen. Living with my daughter, Crystalynn, who was two, and Jason, my boyfriend. It was a snowy December night, two weeks before Christmas. I had put Crystalynn to bed after dinner, and by midnight, Jason and I were really gone. We had done a lot of pills and we’d been drinking. I had to get that way to make the videos you heard about, the sex ones.”
She stopped and looked up at Meadow.
“I heard about those. You filmed some homemade sex videos to make money, right? Can you tell me about that?”
Carrie could not help but think that when Meadow constructed her film, she would make much of intercutting clips of badly lit, wavy-lined vintage porn video.
“The videos were not just sex. Other stuff. I’d be blindfolded, and he’d do things to me. At first I didn’t want to make the videos, but it was good money and we always needed the money. It started out, the blindfold, because I was shy about being videotaped, and I had this stupid idea that if I was blindfolded, no one could see me. I knew that wasn’t true, but it felt okay then. If he blindfolded me, and especially if he tied my hands, then I didn’t mind being filmed. But the truth was that I started to really like it, the blindfold, I was into that, you know, feeling like it was out of my control. When you can’t see or move, everything feels different, more intense. I tried not to think about who would watch the videos. But I did like the sex. The police called it rough sex. ‘Rough sex videos.’ Which wasn’t true. Jason didn’t hurt me at all in the videos. It was play. But when we weren’t having sex, he did hurt me sometimes when he was angry—shoved me and pushed me, never punching but still hurting. That was what the police said was my motivation. He shoved me down the stairs that night, and my leg was badly bruised.”