Third Girl from the Left

by Martha Southgate

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “You go on to sleep now.” She got up and left but paused to look at me again before she went out. “I love you, Tam.”

  “I love you too, Mama.”

  I probably didn’t fall asleep for an hour after that, holding the words in my mouth, hearing them hum in my ears. I could count on one hand the number of times she’d ever said them.

  Not long after this, Mama took me to see She’s Gotta Have It. Typical. The movie is filled with absolutely explicit sex, adult jokes, adult concerns, a rape scene—why wouldn’t you take an eleven-year-old? I never questioned her decisions about movies, and after Raging Bull when I was five I stopped being frightened by them. Movies were what we did, so I learned to enjoy whatever we saw. I’m grateful now. If I’d been afraid during She’s Gotta Have It, I never would have learned what I did. If I’d been trying to understand what all the grownups were laughing at, I never would have been able to study the speed of the editing during the men-are-dogs montage. If I’d allowed myself to have any feelings at all when Jamie attacks Nola near the film’s ending, I might not have been struck by the beauty of the lighting when Nola sits in her bed surrounded by candles. If I’d given in to my embarrassment as all the lovers in the movie took their clothes off and licked each other in slow (or fast) motion, I wouldn’t have been able to admire the full-color ballet in the middle (yeah, it looks ridiculous now, but oh, I thought it was so beautiful then). I was young, but I knew something was going on. I could not have articulated it, but the energy, all the heart that went into making that movie, leapt off the screen, unassailable. All those black peopie the point of the movie, not the sidekicks or the dupes or just plain absent. I’d never seen that before. Well, that’s not true. I’d seen it in my mother’s old movies, but they were so . . . I didn’t know the word. They weren’t alive the way this film was. I couldn’t articulate it then, but now I know what the difference was. In my mother’s movies, no one paid the slightest attention to craft. Everything was just thrown at the lens as fast as possible. Beauty had no place there. Neither did reality. Speed was the only virtue. But there was something in She’s Gotta Have It that was just plain true. I could tell by all the excited, recognizing laughter of the grownups. And it was beautiful. I could hear it in my mother’s laughter. And as Nola sashayed down what I later learned was the Fulton Mall in Brooklyn, hips swinging, Jamie following right behind her, my mother squeezed my hand. Yeah, I knew something was going on. I asked for a video camera, but I didn’t get it until a year later, for my twelfth birthday. It must have taken her that long either to get the money together or decide I wasn’t getting over this.

  I started out filming everything. I tried to create images like those I saw. As you can imagine, this didn’t work out right away. But I kept trying. And my moviegoing got a little crazed. Before, I mostly went with Mama to see whatever she wanted. But now I was reading books of film history the way the girls at my school read Seventeen. I started making requests—well, more like demands. It wasn’t a problem, though. My mother would take me to anything. We went to any old revival that I asked her to go to. I saw Mean Streets, Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Godfather— everything good from the 1970s—by the time I was sixteen. I made my mother take me to the library every week for more and more complex books about filmmaking. I started wearing a baseball cap my every waking hour. I railed at the limitations of natural light. My mother rolled her eyes, convinced I was a changeling.

  When I was twelve, most days I came home after school not to our apartment but to Miss Tillie’s house. Miss Tillie was an elderly neighbor who watched me and four other children after school for a few dollars an hour. Boring was not the word for it. It was a desert of tedium that I traversed each afternoon without complaint only because I knew that my mother and Sheila needed me not to mind, and though I never would have admitted it I was a little frightened to stay home by myself. Miss Tillie’s smelled like a thousand cats and all the various sweet potions and sprays and failed deodorizers that she had used over the years to make it seem as though there weren’t a thousand cats. I spent as much time as possible in the backyard, as did the other children she watched, Tracey, Shakira, LaTasha, and Darnell (the only boy). They were all younger than me, eight and nine years old. They always had runny noses and never wanted to do anything out back except fill their lungs with life-giving, cat-free oxygen so that they could go back inside to watch television. Once I got my video camera, they blossomed, in my mind, into the perfect cast for my first feature. Miss Tillie didn’t care what we did as long as we didn’t draw blood or break anything. And her backyard, overgrown and full of fruit trees run rampant, was ideal for my script, The Jungle Chase. So with Angela and Miss Tillie’s permission (and the amused permission of the other children’s parents), shooting began on March 15, 1988.

  Tracey and LaTasha had to hide behind a hydrangea bush for the first scene. Darnell and Shakira were supposed to chase them. I was forced to referee my first actor’s dispute when they fought over who would wear the pith helmet I had picked up at a yard sale. There was only one, which I had thought might be a problem, but I also thought that it gave a nice touch of authenticity to the scene. In the end, I made like a director and decreed that Darnell could wear the hat in the first scene and Shakira would wear it in the second. This led to some pouting from Shakira, but I bought her off with the promise of an extra close-up and two Milky Ways, to be paid the next day. Tracey and LaTasha were inhabitants of a tribe of people who were unaware of the existence of humans beyond their jungle (I had seen a PBS special about a tribe like this, and I was dazzled by the idea).

  Darnell spoke first. “Look there, I think I see some of the elusive members of the Hantomami tribe” was what he was supposed to say. What he said was, “I want to wear the hat for both scenes.” I turned off the camera, furious. “Look, Darnell, we’ve gotta share the hat. It’s the only one we have. You getting to wear it now, right?”

  “Yeah, but I like it. I want to be like Indiana Jones, where it never comes off.”

  “Well, this isn’t Indiana Jones,” I said. I felt tears, sharp and vital, at the back of my eyes, but I’d be damned before anyone got to see them.

  “Well, I’m not going to be in your stupid movie, then. I’m gonna go watch cartoons. Come on, y’all. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is on anyway.” They all followed Darnell into the house, LaTasha throwing a quick apologetic look my way.

  I stood clutching my bulky camera at my side, staring at the space where my cast had stood. Being a director was going to be considerably harder than I had imagined. But there had been that crystalline moment when I was looking through the camera, and LaTasha and Tracey were still, clutching each other’s hands. The light filtered through LaTasha’s hair and it looked as though it was lit from within. The image was under my control. I could make them look as beautiful or as ugly as I wanted to. My heart hammered behind my breastbone, and then they dropped hands and the moment was gone. But I’d held them in my hands for that minute. And they were perfect. I sighed and followed everyone into the house, my heart slowing as I walked. I felt a little better when I remembered that I had my copy of Spike Lee’s Gotta Have It with me. I thought maybe I’d read that.

  This story makes me sound like a real film geek. Here’s a secret: most filmmakers are kind of geeky, even if well dressed. I include myself in that, of course. For all the cultural currency of the job, most of it is an incredible obsession with ridiculous amounts of detail, an ability to watch the same thing over and over and over and over without the slightest lessening of interest, very neat handwriting, and a love of machinery. Look under Steven Spielberg’s cap, and behind the dollar signs, and what do you see? A lonely suburban kid with thick glasses and a bad haircut who sat in the back of the classroom, doodling in a notebook. And Spike? My man Spike? Do you think anyone that short, wearing those glasses, with those skinny, skinny legs, ever—I mean ever—had a date at Morehouse? You do the math. But we see th
ings. Other things. The elongated, odd angle of Anthony Perkins’s neck in that scene in Psycho as he leans over the desk to talk to the private detective played by Martin Balsam. Or the glow of the boxing ring in Raging Bull, that the soft gray against the knife-edge black against the pure white of the floor in the foreground. Or those hayfields of light in Days of Heaven. I wanted to be one of the company who saw things, even if they were a bunch of nerdy guys.

  But I was only twelve. And black. And a girl. A girl not much like the other girls in my middle school. And you know that’s never good. West Hollywood Middle School in 1988 was in the grip of what was left of Flashdance fever. All the girls had enormous hair and sweatshirts falling off of one shoulder and leg warmers covering tight Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. They chewed a lot of gum and thought Scott Baio was the cutest. We weren’t separated by money. Most of the other kids’ parents had jobs like my mama’s and Sheila’s; they were the valet parkers, the hospital workers, the waiters and waitresses, the hotel clerks. Like my mama, they were gonna be something else once, a long time ago maybe. But not anymore. Part of the problem was that I was one of very few black kids in the school; it was mostly white and Hispanic. Whether it was race or just my stubborn difference, I don’t know. But they wouldn’t leave me alone.

  I talked to my mother about it only once. It hadn’t been a particularly bad day—it was just the day I couldn’t take any more. It was just the day I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and my head up. Mama picked me up from Miss Tillie’s in the little orange Volkswagen that she and Sheila had owned since before I was born. My chest was tight from the sobs squeezed beneath my ribs. They leapt out of me as soon as I got into the car. I didn’t even push aside the gum wrappers and pot seeds and rolling papers that always littered the front seat. I sat on them. My head was on fire.

  “Baby, what is it? Somebody do something to you at Miss Tillie’s today?” My mother got out a cigarette quickly. She always did that when I needed something. I grew up with the smell of smoke in my hair. I still kind of like it. I hitched and sobbed and snuffled a few times and finally choked out the story of how Toni Evans and Diana Perez had knocked over my lunch tray not once but twice and said my mama was a dyke and I must be too until it became apparent that I simply wasn’t going to be allowed to eat lunch and so I was starving and if I cried in front of them they’d be even meaner and the teacher wouldn’t do anything and I was so hungry and why were they so mean. Why were they so mean? I couldn’t stop crying.

  My mother took a long pull on her cigarette and stared out the window. “Baby, I don’t know. I don’t half know why people act the way they do.” She touched the back of my neck tentatively. “But I know you can’t let them get you down. You can’t let them stop you. I kept going toward what I wanted ’til I just had to stop. Just had to. You hardheaded, just like me. I never did fit into Tulsa, not for one minute. But I just stood it until I could leave. You gonna have to stand it too.” She took another long drag. I was silent. “Sheila and me. I don’t know. We . . . She’s always been there for me, since before you were born. If that makes me a dyke, then maybe I am, even though I see these people on TV sometimes and I can’t hardly say I’m like them. I’m not. We’ve just got each other and we do what we can. That’s the best we can do.” She blew some smoke rings and smiled a little. “You used to love when I did that. But you’re growing up. I wish I could make it easier for you. But I can’t. Can’t always get what you want in this life. But you gotta live it the best way you know how anyways. You know?” I nodded. “Just flip them girl’s trays first next time you see them. They’ll leave you alone after that. Listen,” she said suddenly, “this is kind of perfect, but Sheila’s gotta work late, and they’re showing The Breakfast Club down at the dollar show at the Pavilion. Wanna go? Just you and me. Girls night out.”

  I took a deep breath. The Breakfast Club, which we’d seen three times when it first came out, was one of our favorites. We even agreed about its virtues, which was rare. She hadn’t helped me figure out what to do. She never did. It’d be nice to sit next to her in the dark with a big old bucket of popcorn, though. I always loved the feel of her leg next to mine. “Sure, Mama. That’d be great.”

  “Great. I’ll get you a hot dog too. You must be starving. Those little bitches.”

  I looked out the window. “Yeah, Mama. I am pretty hungry.” The lights outside were just beginning to pierce the dusk all around us. I wondered if I had the nerve to flip over Toni Evans’s lunch tray. I thought about Ally Sheedy. “That’d be good.” Beside me, my mother smoked and drove. Just the two of us, going to the movies.

  24

  EVER SINCE TAM WAS LITTLE, SHE HAD POSSESSED the ability to get under Angela’s skin like nobody’s business. She was the kind of a kid who wanted to know everything, for one thing. Everything that Angela didn’t know how to answer. How things worked, where her daddy was, what was going on with Sheila, why Angela wasn’t in movies anymore. “Hell, I don’t know” was Angela’s answer to most of these questions. And she felt the weight of each word. Hell. It was hell. It was hell not knowing. It was hell never understanding why she didn’t get what she wanted when so many women who were not as pretty, not as willing, not as keen, got to make it in the pictures. It was hell once she decided to have the baby and came back to Sheila and they stood over the crib at night, together, looking at the wailing bundle inside and trying to figure out what in God’s name was going on. “Look, Angie. I gotta be at the club at eight. I gotta get some sleep. You figure out what to do,” said Sheila. Then she walked out of the room and went to bed. And Angela didn’t know. Couldn’t Sheila see that she didn’t know? She rocked, she walked, she gave bottles and burped, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t and there was no logic to it. Tamara, her beautiful, maddening little Tamara, was impervious to logic. She was just a baby.

  Things got better after Sheila quit the club. She came home late one morning, saw Angela on the sofa with the baby, sat down heavily next to them, and said, “You know those old bags at the club that you see still squeezing into that goddamn costume, and we used to say, ‘Oh man, that’s pathetic, don’t let that happen to me.’ Well, I’m just about there. Time to move on. Ain’t no movie stars around here.” Angela, still in her bathrobe at 10:00 A.M., unshowered and covered with spit-up, had to agree.

  They never said what they were doing. They never decided what they were doing. They just did it. That was how they’d always lived. They got in bed together every night, sleeping spoonstyle, got up together every day. Sheila paid rent and managed things until Tam was old enough for daycare, and then Angela got a job too, but they never said, This is a family. We are each other’s loves. We belong with these other women we’ve been hearing about, these lesbians. They both kept going out on dates with men at first—guys at the advertising agency where Angela first worked and then later at the doctor’s office, and guys at the rental car office where Sheila landed. But then those same guys would meet the other woman and hear about the daughter and gradually put one and one and one together and hit the road. Neither Sheila nor Angela really minded. They had each other. And Tam kept getting bigger. Eventually, they stopped giving their numbers out.

  Rafe called one night when Tam was about ten. She was already asleep, thank God. Angela was laid out on the sofa half watching The Trouble with Angels, which she’d rented out of sentiment. Sheila was out with a friend. She nearly dropped the phone at the sound of his voice. “Rafe? Rafe? What the hell?”

  “It’s me, Angie. I know it’s been a long time. How you been?”

  “I been all right. Well . . . yeah. I’m OK. How’d you get this number?”

  “You’re still listed, sweetheart. I just . . . I just haven’t had the nerve to call before now. Are you still in the business?”

  Angela laughed shortly. “Me? No, no I’m not still in the business. The business got sick of us. Didn’t you notice?”

  Rafe laughed too. “I surely did. I own a little store down on
Crenshaw now. Health food, vitamins, stuff like that. Trying to help people get healthy.”

  “Really?” Her hand spun in the hair at the back of her head. “Yeah. It’s good. It’s a good life.” He paused. “Listen, Angie. I know things didn’t end . . . well. They didn’t end well. But I think about that baby every day. What . . . what happened?”

  “Well, she ain’t a baby anymore.” Angela couldn’t breathe properly, but she got the words out. “She’s asleep in the other room. She’s ten now. Her name’s Tamara.”

  “Tamara,” he breathed. “That’s beautiful. Tamara.”

  They were both silent for a few long moments. Finally Rafe spoke. “And what about you? Are you . . . is Sheila still around?”

  “Yes. She’s still around. We’re . . . we’re still friends.”

  “Friends like you were before?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. Why did she feel so funny?

  “Well . . . that’s all right. I . . . I thought you would be. You two were always kind of special together. The prettiest girls in show biz.” He laughed thinly. “Really, girl, I wish you all the best. I don’t . . . Could I meet her some time?”

  Angela’s hand froze in her hair. “Who?”

  “Tamara.”

  “You want to meet her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ten years go by, and then you want to meet her?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Uh, no, my brother. Not this way. I don’t think that’s a good idea. Not at all.”

  Rafe backed down immediately. “Well . . . I guess I ain’t been there. Can’t expect you to be happy about having me trying to jump in at this point. But I’m gonna give you my phone number and address and all. You keep it. And when she wants to know. You tell her that she can come to me if she wants to.” He stopped. When he spoke again, his voice was ragged with tears. “I’d like to meet my daughter.” He gave her the information. She wrote it down. She put it away in the box where she kept special things. She went to bed with Sheila that night without a word. But she didn’t forget the way his voice broke when he said “my daughter,” either. So she kept the number. Every time Tamara asked about him, she said something like, “I met him through the business, but he’s gone now.” Then she’d stop talking. Sometimes she thought about the way he used to look at her, the way he used to touch her. He was the only man she’d ever really loved, but it turned out that a man’s love wasn’t what she needed. Sometimes she thought she ought to tell Tamara that. Or at least tell her that she knew where he was. She might want to know. So she thought about it. Sometimes.