Chuckerman Makes a Movie

by Francie Arenson Dickman

  Now my father joined the conversation. “I didn’t realize Mormons had flings.”

  Peter, the head of the US Attorney’s office in Chicago, a man with an answer to everything, said, “What else is polygamy if not a permanent fling?”

  “This is all wasted conversation, anyway,” Marcy said. “She’s converting.”

  “To what?” Rachel asked.

  “Judaism,” Estie answered as she pulled off the cheese from her pizza and handed it to Ryan—another reliable part of the dinner routine.

  “She’s not really converting,” I said. “She’s just taking conversion classes.”

  “Who bothers to take conversion classes if they aren’t going to convert?” my mother asked.

  “The classes are just research for a movie,” I explained.

  “Isn’t that like fraud?” Rachel said.

  For reasons having more to do with my relationship with Rachel than with Laurel, I felt the need to prove that Laurel wasn’t acting in bad faith. I shared some of what Laurel had told me during our conversation in Union Square Park—that the rabbi, a former student of hers, had suggested she sit in on his classes and participate to any extent she deemed helpful to understanding the character of the gay son’s boyfriend in the movie she was writing. “She made clear she wasn’t going to take her research as far as the Mikvah,” I said. “But she’s now six months into the process, she has a Passover under her belt, and she’s tossing around the concept of keeping kosher. The rabbi is also teaching her Yiddish on the side,” I added to bolster my case.

  My mother squealed. The news of the conversion combined with Schindler’s List was as glorious to her as the meringue and apple pies Estie and Ryan were now pulling from the freezer.

  Marcy got up to help them with the pies and motioned for me to follow. “Yiddish, apparently, isn’t all he’s teaching her on the side,” she whispered.

  “What do you mean?” I whispered back. Meanwhile, the conversation was still going on over the phone. I heard my mother comment that even if Laurel didn’t convert, she obviously felt some affiliation, since she used Schindler’s List as a teaching tool.

  Marcy shrugged. “That’s the rumor, that’s all I’m saying. It’s not my place to say anything more.” She picked up the now sliced pies and handed them to me. “But when I told you to stay away, there was a reason.”

  “She kissed me,” I reminded her as we headed back to the table and Rachel said, “I still think it’s odd to use Schindler’s List as a teaching tool.”

  “If I were teaching the class, I’d use Steven Spielberg, too,” Marcy said.

  “I’d use the Coen Brothers,” Broc interjected. “I’d have shown The Big Lebowski.”

  I laughed. So did Peter.

  My mother ignored us. “Marcy is right. If this girl teaches at NYU, I’m sure she knows what she’s doing. Anyway, at least now you’ve seen a clip of Schindler’s List. I’m just happy about that.”

  Irritated by the news that the Mormon Rodeo might be sleeping with the rabbi, I decided to jump on Rachel’s bandwagon. “It’s not like Steven Spielberg only made one movie. She could have picked a clip from E.T.—or Jaws, even.”

  At the mention of Jaws, my nephews in Chicago started to make the shark noise. Na-na. Na-na. I heard Rachel tell them to be quiet and my father ask my mother, “Why is he taking a film-writing class in the first place?”

  “You guys are reading too much into this,” Marcy countered. “Laurel showed Schindler because it was the best movie for what she wanted to teach. Mormons just aren’t as emotional as Jews. Plus, she had a rough childhood.”

  “Who didn’t?” Rachel countered.

  “Oh please, yours was a cakewalk,” my mother told her. For once, Rachel did not argue. We all knew that my mother, raised by Grandma B, felt she’d cornered the market on rough childhoods.

  “Forgive me for changing the subject,” my father chimed in, “but David, why do you want to get involved with a girl with a screwy past?”

  “You got involved with me, didn’t you?” my mother said.

  “I’m not involved with her. We kissed once. I haven’t even spoken to her since.”

  “You should be ashamed of yourself,” my mother said. “How could you not follow up after she extended herself like that?”

  “Extended herself?” I said. “Showing the new kid in class where the gym is. That’s extending oneself. Foisting yourself onto another human being is assault.”

  “Don’t be insensitive, David. She put herself out there. That takes courage.”

  “Insensitive? Oscar Schindler was insensitive. I was ambushed.”

  “I don’t understand what her rough childhood has to do with her decision to use Schindler’s List,” Rachel said.

  “I’ll tell you, if you will all shut up long enough to listen.” Marcy put down her fork, rubbed her hands over the apron she wears even when she doesn’t cook the meal, and raised a finger into the air. “Number one. Laurel grew up on a farm with an abusive dad. Her skin is thick. She can look at Schindler’s List and just see the mechanics of it, the progression of the scenes or whatever.”

  “Sequencing,” I corrected.

  “Well look at you, all up on the film lingo,” Rachel said. “Maybe you actually like this woman.”

  “Is there a number two?” my father asked. At the mention of number two, the kids started to laugh.

  “Yes, actually,” Marcy said. “There is.” She put her hand back into the air and raised an additional finger. “Number two. The Holocaust is probably not as shocking to her since her expectations of humanity are so low.”

  “Clearly,” Peter said. “She’s willing to date David.”

  “We’re not dating,” I said again, though no one was listening. They were laughing.

  “I’m not kidding. Again, I don’t know her that well, but it doesn’t seem to take much to make Laurel happy,” Marcy answered. “All she wants is the basics. A roof over her head. A good family—”

  “Well then, you better not tell her about us,” my dad said.

  “Too late,” Ryan answered. “The movie David is writing is about us.”

  “What’s there to write about us?” Rachel asked.

  “It’s about Florida,” Ryan said.

  “Who’s playing me?” my mother asked.

  “You’re actually writing a movie?” Peter asked.

  “How about Debra Messing?” my mother continued, mostly to herself. “I love Debra Messing.”

  “Not really,” I responded to Peter. “Just scenes.”

  Or, in this case, a sequence.

  THE ESTELLE LIBERATION SEQUENCE MORNING AFTER SLIP’S SENTENCING. INT. APARTMENT 1812

  I think we’ll kick things off with David waking up, just as I did the day after Slip’s sentencing, to an apartment filled with solemnity. I remember that things got rolling early that morning, like always, just as you’d expect in a tiny space filled with insomniacs.

  Initial talk of the day usually concerned the movies caught at odd hours of the night—The African Queen, All About Eve. But talk was different that morning. I remember waking to the low whisper of voices—my father’s and my grandmother’s. The minute I heard the whispers, I knew something was up. As I might have already mentioned, whispering was as unheard of in Imperial Towers Building 100 as leaving leftovers at a restaurant. It just wasn’t done.

  Mornings were generally filled with screaming. My grandparents (and everyone else’s) belonged to the breakfast club at the Rascal House, the world’s most famous deli, visited by folks from near and far. We had to be up and out of our apartment by seven each morning in order to take advantage of all that a Rascal House Breakfast Club membership had to offer, which was mainly the privilege of bypassing the line between six thirty and seven thirty for immediate seating. Membership was the equivalent of a get-out-of-jail-free card.

  So every day, we were woken by hollers from Slip and my father to get up, get dressed, and get into the car fo
r breakfast. Then they’d issue follow-up calls of “move it” to my sisters, who were not as good as me at popping out of bed in the morning and not as willing as me to go to the Rascal in their pajamas.

  No wake-up calls came that morning. Instead, as the camera opens on the sitting room, I will lie in bed and strain my ears to hear what the whispering is about. Then the audience will see me kick my sisters. “Listen,” I’ll say.

  They’ll kick me back and mutter, “Shut up, Davy.”

  At this, I will slip through the partition to find my father sitting in a dining room chair, my grandmother next to him, my mother on the pullout sofa.

  “Did you guys stay here all night?” I remember asking, as their positions seemed remarkably unchanged from the night before.

  “Get your clothes on,” my father barked.

  “Where’s Papa?” I asked. Neither my grandma nor my mother had gotten dressed, so I didn’t feel any sense of urgency.

  “He’s at the Rascal.”

  “Alone?” This was a first.

  “He went early today. He was hungry.”

  I remember that the clock above the pullout sofa said it was six forty-five. I wondered how early “early” was.

  “All the fighting and everything,” I offered. “He probably worked up a real appetite.”

  In the movie, my mother will chuckle from her bed. My grandma will roll her eyes, an acknowledgment of the absurdity of the circumstance rather than a look of annoyance, and my dad will repeat the command to get dressed, with the addendum to get my sisters out of bed and dressed, too.

  “Are we going to meet Papa at the Rascal?”

  My father will shake his head no and return to lecturing my grandma in undertones, leaving me to get dressed and wonder from where our next meal will come.

  CUT TO: THE BAGEL BAR. At this point, the director will cut so seamlessly from the living room of Apartment 1812 to the waiting area of The Bagel Bar Delicatessen that the audience will barely realize the change of location, but for the strangers and giant pastry case now in our midst. The Bagel Bar, an age-old, barebones establishment in Miami Gardens, not unlike the 3 Woos in its bland decor, was our natural fallback for when we missed breakfast club hours at the Rascal, or when my mother felt like chopped herring, because no one’s herring could hold a candle to the Bagel Bar’s. (These words, naturally, were my mother’s, not my own. I was and still am a bacon-and-eggs kind of guy.)

  “If I ever again set eyes on your grandfather, I’ll strangle him to death,” my grandma will declare as we wait for our table to be set.

  We’ll be seated around eight o’clock, as indicated by the knife and fork hands on the Bagel Bar’s tea-pot clock, which will come into focus as the audience hears my father begin to explain to us that Eileen refused to give in on Slip’s expulsion. “So it seems,” he’ll say as a waitress shoves paper cups of water in front of each of us, “Slip can’t play cards for the rest of the season. Unless we find some way to change her mind.”

  Rachel will shake her head. “How embarrassing.” Rachel’s only interest was the family reputation and how this latest to-do would impact her own wheeling and dealing in the game room. The character of Rachel will be played by one of those wunderkind teens, the ones who can act, sing, and walk a tightrope by the age of three—a little perfectionist, albeit with a gargantuan nose.

  “How can you say that?” The script will direct my father to look at Rachel with dismay while my grandma winks—another subtle show of understanding. My mother will be too busy doctoring her coffee to react.

  “C’mon, Dad,” Rachel will say. “You can’t pretend that this situation is not humiliating. Everyone in the building is talking about us.”

  “I don’t care what everyone in the building is doing. For one lousy minute, let’s try and think about somebody else besides ourselves. Let’s think about what this predicament means for your grandmother and grandfather.” And off my father will go on his favorite type of lecture, the “let’s think” lecture.

  The second phase of the lecture, the acceptance phase, coincides with the arrival of our meals, and so in the movie, as the camera closes in on the central visual object of this scene—my mother’s mound of herring—the audience will hear my father drone on with a tortuous monologue that I will have to make up, because I don’t recall the original. I’d tuned it out, as I imagine the audience might do as well.

  “We must recognize the crossroads that Slip and Estelle now find themselves at, with life having thrown them a curveball. It may not seem significant to us, and may even seem funny”—this line he’ll direct at the laughing sisters—“but at their age, with routine being such a big part of getting by day-to-day, the fact that Slip has nothing to do with himself, nowhere to go, is detrimental to the well-being of our grandparents’ happiness and, for that matter, their health.”

  “Let’s not get carried away.” My mother, as she chews, will say something to this effect.

  My grandma will agree. “I feel just fine,” she’ll assure us. “My health is good, and you kids are not to worry. Let’s have a jelly donut.” She’ll rub her stomach and point in the direction of the pastry case. She eyed the jelly donuts every time we came in the Bagel Bar.

  “Bad idea,” my father will say, as he always did.

  My grandma will shrug her shoulders, letting us know that she’d tried. To me, she’ll whisper—and the camera will capture it—“One day I’m gonna get my hands on one of those donuts, Davy. You just wait and see.”

  I remember studying her as she spoke, trying to evaluate who to believe regarding the status of her health. Who knows how old Estelle looked objectively. In calendar years she was seventy, younger than my father is today. But through my young eyes, she looked ancient. Her skin hung loose on her neck. Her eyes watered regardless of her mood, and her “stomach troubles,” as she called them, kept her away from jelly donuts and dependent on cortisone, which I knew from my father wreaked havoc on the body. Could banning Slip from his card room really play with my grandma’s lifespan? From the perspective of someone to whom it seemed dicey that she would live to finish her bagel, this outcome seemed possible. I was concerned, so I listened to the rest of my father’s speech, which was in essence a call to action:

  “Let’s all do what we can during our days left in Florida to help keep Slip busy so his irascibleness doesn’t bleed over, and let’s all help keep Estelle occupied in her usual ways. Does everyone understand?”

  We’ll nod our heads. Mine will nod the most. I was on board. If I could do anything to extend my grandparents’ lives—for any amount of time, but certainly through the duration of our visit—I was up to the task.

  Marcy’s head will tip slowly and with a little groove, as if “Jive Talkin’” was still playing in her head—which, probably, it was.

  Fourteen-year-old Rachel, savvy enough to see that we could never save our grandparents from themselves, will give a single nod and a sarcastic thumbs-up. “Whatever you say, Doc.”

  “Good,” my father will answer, happy to have even a half-hearted consensus. “In the meantime,” he’ll finish, “I’ll work behind the scenes to see what kind of strings might be pulled to get Slip back into the card room.”

  From here we’ll cut seamlessly again, but I’m not sure where we’ll go. At this point, I’d be better off with a director than me calling the shots. Maybe I’ll bring in Steven Spielberg, as clearly he is not only the master of the sequence but of capturing throngs of Jews flooding out of their apartments, fighting for survival. At the risk of offending my fellow Jews, I have to say that the scene on the Imperial Towers pool deck every morning and the Ghetto Liquidation scene are not without commonality. As I think about it, perhaps I’ve never been able to bring myself to see Schindler’s List because it touches too close to home.

  Based on the BASIC CAMERA SHOTS poster that hangs in Laurel’s classroom next to the poster on SCREENPLAY DEFINITIONS, I should start with a wide lens in order to get a view of
the Intracoastal surrounding the pool deck. Maybe an aerial shot’s the way to go. An aerial will give us the Intracoastal with its boats and the 163rd Street Bridge, as well as the pool deck and the building. We’ll see the pool, the shuffleboard courts, and the dance floor. We’ll see the hundreds of yellow lounge chairs covered in the same number of yellow towels. We’ll see the movement of people. We’ll miss the smell of the suntan oil, but we’ll hear the howl of the wind.

  The placement of the buildings in relation to each other and the Intracoastal created a wind tunnel so that even when the weather was perfectly pleasant, we felt like we were on the heels of a hurricane. When you understand the wind you understand, too, why all the women wrapped their hair in scarves, brightly colored things, and why, when the aerial view comes in for a landing—I’m sure there’s a technical term for this, I’ll have to ask Laurel—the audience will see a disproportionate number of sunbathers crowded into the wind-blocked corner in which we stuffed ourselves each day, every day, for sunbathing, sitting, and smoking.

  Every once in a while, someone would actually move from a chaise—like my Grandma Estelle, who was a big pool deck walker. At least she was while we were visiting, most likely because my father was a big nag about it. “You gotta do it,” he’d remind her. “You gotta get the blood flowing.” Because he was a dentist, close enough to a doctor to satisfy my grandma, she listened. And she walked. In heeled sandals, nylons, and slacks, and with a two-ton purse dangling from her arm, she did her circles around the deck. Usually slowly (more due to her outfit than her age), and with stops to pull Kleenex from her purse to dry her eyes or wonder about an interesting boat waiting to pass under the bridge.

  On this day, the morning of the Bagel Bar, she walked for hours, with each of us taking turns accompanying her. I was, on the totem pole of walking accompaniment, her most frequent partner. I wasn’t in it for the exercise but for the childhood stories my grandma would tell while we walked.

  As the camera comes to rest on Davy and Grandma Estelle walking and talking, perhaps the narrator will explain that it was Tuesday, the day of the week that Estelle usually went to the Marco Polo, this colossal hotel with a neon sign that lit Collins Avenue for miles. Every week Slip drove Estelle to the Marco Polo, where she met her friend Ruth in the lobby to play duplicate bridge. Every Tuesday evening at dinner, Estelle recounted to my mother, hand by hand, how things had played out.