by Rachel Cline
“What do you mean I wasn’t doing anything with it?” Annabeth repeated. Her face was so red she felt that it might melt and slide off—and she was yelling. She never yelled. “Don’t you have secrets you’d rather not see in a movie? Parts of your life you wouldn’t want to share?”
Laura shrugged. “I don’t share them then, do I?”
Annabeth swallowed. She wanted to point out all the things she knew about Laura that she could tell the world if she wanted to, but even the whole thing about Greg and the radio was dubious. She’d never even had the nerve to ask what the deal was with Laura’s ethnicity, which parent was Asian, if she was really Jewish, anything. And lying about her age was hardly shameful.
While she was trying to come up with a response, Laura turned and went upstairs.
On the ride home, Annabeth thought David was driving erratically. She felt like a turtle without its shell and, moreover, like the guy driving the shell wanted to kill her. As they merged onto the 101 South, she saw that her hands were clenched. She wanted to tell him what had happened at Laura’s, but she still wasn’t sure herself. Laura’s remarks had stung as much as the insults her mother had sometimes flung at her: worthless, ridiculous, a fool. “She said I wasn’t an artist,” said Annabeth.
It might have been the worst thing a person could say, in their warped little corner of the universe. People like them didn’t live in Los Angeles for the weather, after all; they came because they believed in the transformative power of an individual vision. It was preposterous but it was the whole point, even for David. The entertainment business was the only hope they had of ever participating, of belonging, of being in on the joke. He’d always thought that Annabeth understood the irony of wanting all that from a bloated, corrupt profiteering business, but the more she talked about her sense of having been lied to and stolen from, the more he realized she had actually bought into the fantasy of Hollywood the way that only an out-of-towner really could.
It was dark by the time they got there, but in the last mile or so of the Santa Monica Freeway, Annabeth caught sight of the tall palm trees at the end of David’s former street. Silhouetted against the almost metallic blue of the early-evening sky, they still looked enchanted to her. “Prove me wrong,” she’d told him that night—but she’d done her own proving.
She made a decision, that night, to go home—all the way home to Duluth. There was nothing rational about this decision, but there was very little left that was rational about Annabeth at that point. She’d spent most of the drive back from Laura’s staring at David’s rubber-thong-clad feet and wondering how she had ever convinced herself that sleeping with him was a good idea. No one in her family had feet like that. Her own feet were bony and attenuated, with high arches and long second toes—aristocratic, her father had told her once. David’s feet were crude. What kind of grown man paraded around in flip-flops?
The next morning, she woke up at five and crept into the living room to call Northwest and book a flight. David was asleep, but gradually he became aware of Annabeth quietly opening drawers and rustling in closets in search of warm clothes. She answered his questions in monosyllables, and it wasn’t until he asked whether she had a reservation and heard her say, “At noon” that he began to argue in earnest.
“I don’t understand. You hate it there. What are you going to do all day?”
“I need to figure things out.”
“In northern Minnesota, in October?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Why not?”
The answer was because he had never left home himself, but she didn’t say it. She didn’t have to.
Part 5
WINTER
31
It was her first trip home in seven years and, as she probably should have anticipated, the house on Basswood Avenue seemed much smaller when she saw it. This was both because of the usual reverse-telescope perspective of time and because so many new houses had appeared in its vicinity. When Annabeth was growing up, their house had been at the edge of town, surrounded by woodland. ShopKo had first arrived in the neighborhood while she was away at college; most of the subdivisions were newer than that. She couldn’t imagine who lived in them, but they seemed to contain families, and Annabeth felt a pang over this. Would her own childhood have seemed pleasant if there had been other kids around? Maybe. On the other hand, the presence of “normal” neighbors might have been all the more isolating. What could she possibly have had in common with the kids who lived in those monstrosities?
“The McMansions,” said her mother, noticing how Annabeth was craning her neck. “Didn’t I tell you about them?”
“Maybe. When?” She was still wondering how on earth her mother had adopted the term McMansions, which—with McEverythingelse—had crossed over from hiphop slang to generalized hipster use only fairly recently in Annabeth’s world.
“About three years ago, I guess.”
“Are they nice?” She meant the inhabitants. Her mother understood this.
“Nice enough,” said Eva, pulling up the gravel driveway in front of the squat, white clapboard house that, to her daughter, seemed to be screaming, “Paint me!”
“I’ll get the bag,” said Annabeth as her mother popped the trunk.
She’d flown into Minneapolis to get the cheaper fare, but the trade-off had been a four-hour drive home in which she’d found that she barely recognized her mother. Eva was just sixty, with a burnished, cheekbony face more Finn than Swede; her eye sockets and midsection were the only parts of her that seemed to show her age. Meanwhile her interests, the names of her friends, and even her taste in clothing were barely recognizable. She was wearing Levi’s! The dour tax preparer of Annabeth’s youth had become a cosmopolitan-looking retiree who said “McMansions,” had taken ceramics, and kept in her ancient blue Volvo a stainless steel coffee thermos of the sort sold by Starbucks.
They entered the house through the kitchen—as everyone always had—and though there was nothing in the oven, the air still smelled faintly of pot roast and onions, and marzipan, with just the slightest undertone of sour drain. In the wake of those smells, an army of memories marched into Annabeth’s heart and started jabbing vigorously with their bayonets. There were so many, and they were so jumbled, that she could barely distinguish between dinnertime quarrels (overwhelming tone: rancor) and Sunday morning silences (surprising safety and warmth). The African violets on the windowsill reminded her of every sink full of dishes she had used as an excuse to stay out of the dining room. The astounding persistence of the ancient Norge refrigerator, with its rounded edges and latched closure, recalled to her the difficulty of quietly opening the thing late at night, and of the frequency with which her mother would then appear even when Annabeth thought she had succeeded in so doing. It occurred to her—seeing her mother bending to get out two bottles of beer almost as soon as she’d removed her coat—that the sound of the refrigerator opening had not been the cause of those visits, after all. Maybe her mother had just wanted an excuse to sit with the only other female on the premises when the house was quiet, when the chores were done. Annabeth took the beer from her mother’s hand and tossed down a cold gulp. That took care of the aching in her throat, anyway.
Annabeth thought nothing of the four o’clock beer. In fact, she liked the tacit understanding that they both needed one. She’d always appreciated her mother’s easygoing attitude toward alcohol. Annabeth and Jeff had occasionally been served small amounts of beer or wine from the time they were twelve or thirteen. (It seemed “very European” at the time. Eva also insisted on serving dinner at seven, while everyone else in the entire town seemed to have it at six, if not five-thirty.) Her reaction to her husband’s occasional binges had been fairly sanguine too—there had been no hiding of bottles and threatening to leave. Their fights were never about Gus’s drinking, only about his disappearances. In the years since he’d left them, however, Eva had taken up where Gus had left off. Not that she had any conscious
sense of completing her husband’s mission of dissolution—it was just that when her rage over his final departure at last gave way to loneliness, she discovered that his preferred drink, rye whiskey, almost hit the spot.
At dinner, Annabeth watched her mother put away two large tumblers of rye and soda without apparent mishap. After Eva poured her third round, Annabeth allowed herself to say, “I didn’t know you liked that stuff.”
Eva shrugged almost goofily. “They say menopause does things to your sense of taste,” she said.
Annabeth told herself she had come home to “take refuge and regroup.” This had seemed like a perfectly reasonable goal before her departure and had even held up as she sat on the airplane, halfheartedly watching the terrible movie Car 54, Where Are You? But after two days in Duluth, she could no longer imagine what she had meant by “refuge.” It was getting cold outside; she no longer owned any truly warm clothing. She had planned to spend her time on the couch, working her way down the shelf of books that had soothed her when she was young—Dickens, Brontë, Grimm, Grahame—but she found that her mother now used the living room for watching videotapes most evenings and, stranger still, that the movies Eva was watching were the ones Annabeth had fallen in love with in film school and during her early years in Los Angeles. (She had filled her occasional letters home with observations about cinema in lieu of more problematic information about boyfriends, money, and depression.) Eva had taken her daughter’s critical assessments entirely seriously, however—something Annabeth herself had never done.
“I think you’re right about Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore,” she said at breakfast one morning later that week, apropos of nothing. “It seems like the work of a different person than Mean Streets or Taxi Driver.”
“I know,” said Annabeth, dumbfounded. She knew she should have engaged in a discussion of some sort, but she didn’t know how. And when she tried to pick it up again at dinner, the game had changed,
“Is it true that Jodie Foster is a lesbian?” asked Eva.
“Jesus, Mom, how should I know?”
“Well, aren’t you one?”
Annabeth blinked helplessly. She was speechless, but the question seemed to demand an answer—even if the person asking it was as potted as a plant. Eva pressed her advantage: “You never mention any boyfriends.”
“I don’t think I’ve mentioned any girlfriends, either.”
“So you have them.” Eva said this with a defeated tone, beginning already to dramatically mourn her tragic loss of a daughter, or her unborn grandchildren, or something…
“Mom, I’m not a lesbian. David? You’ve heard me talk about David. He’s my boyfriend. We’ve been living together for a year and a half.”
“He sounds like a fag when he answers the phone,” said Eva. Annabeth didn’t know where to go with that. The urge to argue was defeated by her underlying sense that calling David her boyfriend was, at best, disingenuous.
The next night, while they were playing Scrabble and Eva was taking her usual eternity to engineer a devastating, multiscoring, close-to-vowelless play, Annabeth found her gaze drifting toward Jeff’s college graduation photograph, which sat on a shelf across the room and was badly in need of dusting. Still, there was no equivalent picture of Annabeth anywhere in the house.
“Jeff looks like Dad in that picture, doesn’t he?”
Eva didn’t look up from her tiles. “I suppose he does.” She then laid DINGY across the top of LOBE and LEAK to create both GLOBE and YE, for a total of twenty-seven points.
“You’re unbeatable,” said Annabeth.
Eva looked up with a strangely vulnerable expression on her face. “I was beaten a long time ago,” she said.
“Well, if you were, which I sincerely doubt is the whole story, it certainly isn’t my fault.”
“No…” Eva answered, turning the board around to face her daughter.
The complete story of Gus Jensen’s disappearance had been her mother’s tragic secret. Of course we all know what really happened, Eva used to say. But Annabeth didn’t. All she knew was that one day her father left and never came back, but what day, or where he went, or why had always been unknowable and unaskable, as blank as the wild-card Scrabble tile. The secret remained a mystery, and why it was a mystery also remained a secret. It might have been funny if she could have heard herself say it but, as a feeling in the pit of her stomach, it was just bitter and sad. There was no way on earth she could spell a word into the maze her mother had laid before her.
“Remember how you used to pretend that Dad was coming home anytime?”
“I wasn’t pretending.”
Foiled, Annabeth waited for more from her mother. Nothing was forthcoming. Finally she decided to strike back with her own sad story: “You know, a few months ago I got fired from the best job I ever had. My big break, and I blew it.”
Eva scowled, but Annabeth had her attention. “But getting fired wasn’t even the fucked-up part. Because when I finally saw it—the movie I’d been cutting?—the director had added a bunch of scenes she’d stolen from me, childhood memories…” Annabeth waited for a reaction, but Eva just looked puzzled.
“How can someone steal your memories?”
“She used them without asking me. Isn’t that stealing, in your book? I thought you’d be outraged.”
“I still don’t understand. Hadn’t you read the script?” Annabeth’s lungs felt spongy, her heart small and hard. She had expected to be accused of treachery, to be raged at and excoriated and then, ultimately, forgiven. Instead, she was being humored… She tried to refocus on her Scrabble tiles.
“What sort of ‘scenes’ did she use, exactly?” Eva asked.
“What difference does it make?”
“Well, I just wondered if I was in any of them.”
“Well then, Mom, you can relax.”
Annabeth played the rest of her tiles hastily and badly. She was as angry at Laura as she’d ever been, angrier maybe, but this time she knew that the only possible remedy was to walk away.
That night, she lay awake for a long time, listening to a blizzard. When she finally fell asleep, she dreamed that she was recutting the scene in Cutter’s Way that she and Laura had watched together in Lone Pine. In the dream version, Annabeth herself was the drunk Maureen, but Jeff Bridges’s character was played by Laura, and the smug, handsome-sounding voice of her husband, Greg, seemed to narrate as she leaned in to kiss Annabeth. Annabeth knew she was supposed to duck the kiss and reach for the bottle instead; only in the dream, she didn’t. She just sat there and felt herself being kissed by the wrong mouth, the tongue meaty and smelling of whiskey. Still dreaming, Annabeth tapped the Avid keys that would stop the playback and correct the scene, but it just kept reverting to the same form. She used to frequently have dreams of this type, but this was the first of its kind where she was a player in the intractable footage in addition to being the editor whose job it was to make it cut.
In Los Angeles, it was raining. El Niño, the baby, was throwing a fit. David couldn’t remember ever before being so bombarded, either with rain or with technical explanations about the trade winds and the thermocline of the eastern Pacific. The house on Nowita seemed to spring new leaks each day, each hour sometimes. At first he kept up with them, even going so far as to buy big blue buckets at Smart & Final Iris, but as the weeks wore on, he found himself retreating. Mildew had begun to blossom somewhere in the storage room, and he was allergic. He knew he should call the landlord, he knew he shouldn’t continue to lie there in the gloomy bedroom with his nose stopped up, but he couldn’t figure out what to do without Annabeth. Nor could he admit to himself that Annabeth was probably never coming back.
He had his own El Niño theory, having to do with the recent earthquake, global warming, and the slow drift of atmospheric residue from the incinerated oil fields in Kuwait. As he lay in bed during the many mornings when he should have been asleep, waiting for some hope or sign of Annabeth’s return, or at very least
a phone call, he began to imagine a rather nightmarish personification of “the baby,” and to hate the thing. The baby had taken away his girlfriend, his shelter, his sunshine, and his health, and all he had left to moor him were the occasional disembodied voices that came in on the request line during the dark, eerie winter mornings. He somehow drifted to the studios and back, but lying there in bed he began to wonder who would notice or care if he didn’t. His foot had finally healed, but now the injury seemed to have relocated itself inside him somewhere. He could sometimes taste it in the back of his mouth. Annabeth had called exactly twice, sounding sardonic but chatty. Her mother still considered long-distance calling a luxury, she said. She never spoke about her plans, and he never asked. Instead, they talked about the weather.
Annabeth suspected that David was exaggerating the leaks and the dampness to elicit her pity. She could hear that he was suffering, but she told herself the problem was his sinuses, and it was his own fault if he wouldn’t take care of himself. She couldn’t do it for him; she had never been able to. He wanted too much.
32
Eight weeks after its premiere, Trouble Doll had done better than Laura had feared and not nearly as well as she had hoped: good reviews, poor distribution. Her opportunities to influence either outcome had now passed—only her disastrous financial position and limping marriage to attend to…which was why she was at yoga, lying supine in what was supposed to have been a thoughtless state: shavasana, corpse pose. It was cheaper than getting a massage and a facial and usually made her feel almost as good. She’d chosen the class on the basis of schedule rather than teacher, however, and had been disappointed by ninety minutes in which there had been a lot of breathing exercises and nothing that really caused her to break a sweat. It was a small group (the regulars were people who couldn’t hack a “real” class, she decided) and so the teacher, a pretty, soft-spoken woman named Sarah, had been able to pay a good deal of attention to Laura: she’d pulled back her hips in downward-facing dog, repositioned her torso in triangle pose, and gently pulled and released her head just moments earlier, in final relaxation. It was that last gesture, in fact, that seemed to have awakened a train of thought about Annabeth, who had performed many such small strategic adjustments on Laura’s movie. Eventually Annabeth would realize, Laura hoped, that her childhood memories had made the movie better in the same way her clever cuts and careful pacing had done. Like a strand of pearls, a movie gains luster from everyone who touches it, and Annabeth’s fingerprints were all over Trouble Doll. Someday, she’d get over it and be proud.