“I think it might be about more than two old people,” Laurel said. “Even if it’s about a bunch of old people, it doesn’t seem to me that—”
She told me to stop talking. Then she walked to the blackboard and scrawled a word. Bildungsroman. She asked if anyone had heard of it before.
“Is it Yiddish?” I asked.
Laurel rolled her eyes while Rhonda spouted off that the word was German, coined by a man named Karl Morgenstern in the late 1800s. Laurel thanked her and then explained that the term Bildungsroman described a story characterized by the growing up of a stunted person who is pushed by a childhood event to go on a journey until the light bulb goes on one day and he gets it.
“Gets what?” Don asked.
“Gets what it takes to be a grown-up in the real world,” Laurel said. “It’s a fancy word for a Coming of Age.”
“How can a guy who’s this immature write a Coming of Age?” Candy demanded.
“I’m not,” I said. “It’s a Parallel Journey.”
Don gave me an elbow in the side for my quick comeback, and Laurel gave Candy and me warnings. One more snide comment out of either of us and we would be asked to leave. Clearly, I was getting no special treatment in the classroom.
The couples club, however, was. When their turn came, Helene revealed that they were having creative differences over whether their film, now called Not Totally the Titanic, was an Adventure or a Journey. Susan felt that the story was a Journey. The rest of the group disagreed, and no one would relent.
After five minutes of bickering, Laurel asked them to form a circle with their desks. She pulled up a chair to mediate and told the rest of us to take out our notebooks. “You are going to spend the remainder of class doing an exercise that will help you get the feel for the trajectory of various types of movies. You can spend your time testing how well your individual stories fit into an outline for the type of movie you are writing, or you can pick any of the story types listed on the handout and write a new outline for it.” She asked Candy to distribute the handouts. “Who knows,” Laurel said to the room as she took a seat next to Susan, “maybe you’ll get an idea for another great story.”
I accepted my paper without glancing at Candy. I barely glanced at the handout, either. The last thing I needed was another great story idea, and I was unconcerned with whether mine fit into an arc. So, ignoring the worksheet, I opened my notebook and began to sketch my next scene.
GRANDMA ESTELLE’S FIRST DRIVING LESSON, I wrote at the top of the page. I hadn’t planned to include a shot of my grandma’s first driving lesson. I was headed straight to the Introduction of Lucille Garlovsky. However, now that I was writing a Parallel Journey, I figured my next scene should open with one. So, I drew a line down the center of the page and on one side of it I drew a picture of Grandma Estelle and my folks skidding down Collins Avenue toward the Publix parking lot in our rental car. On the other, I drew Slip, my sisters, and myself racing down Collins to the Rascal House in the Caddy. Then, for clarification, I wrote, SPLIT SCREEN. VIRTUALLY THE SAME SCENE IN BOTH SCREENS. EARLY MORNING, COLLINS AVENUE
Of course, a split screen wasn’t necessary here. Publix and the Rascal House were only a shopping center apart, one just north of Imperial Towers, the other just south, close enough to be shot on a single screen. But I decided—for no other reason than to outdo Candy—to go with the split.
I added identical palm trees and balls of sun on each side of the paper. Then I made musical notes escaping from the windows of both cars, because I was also going to throw in music. Laurel had taken me to see Road to Perdition a few nights earlier—my first movie in years, perhaps my first drama since Saturday Night Fever. I’d protested, but she’d promised I’d like it because it had similarities to my movie, like father figures, gangsters, and cars. As we took our seats and she ripped open a bag of licorice with her teeth, she told me to watch the movie as a film writer, not just an audience member. “Pay attention to what makes it work and incorporate those things into your own project,” she advised. I was doing just that, which was why my film would now be featuring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman, as well as a high-class soundtrack, though nothing as bagpipey as in Road to Perdition. I was thinking more along the lines of “My Life” by Billy Joel.
I did my best to depict my mother convulsing on the floor of the rental car as my grandmother, going five miles an hour, hugged her head to the windshield and her tires to every inch of yellow line. I crossed out the musical notes coming from her car after deciding that the radio was probably not playing. My grandma didn’t need any outside distraction. Then I doodled oversized smiles onto the faces of the kids in the Caddy. On the other side of the page, in bubbles next to my father in the passenger’s seat, I added the instructions he gently issued to my grandma above my mother’s laughter.
“Relax your grip, Ma.”
“A little bit more on the accelerator, Ma.”
“Ma, open your eyes.”
According to Melman lore, the “open your eyes” remark pushed my mother’s bladder over the edge, and her wet pants brought an immediate end to the morning’s driving lesson. So I decided to FADE OUT on my mother strewn across the floor of the rental car’s back seat and FADE IN on my father talking to Slip in the kitchen of Apartment 1812, where the parallel journeys came to identical ends.
I flipped my page and began a quick sketch of the kitchenette, of the small round table tucked into the corner, my father and Slip seated at it. I labeled it: MORNING. INT. APARTMENT 1812. TENSION MOUNTS AT THE KITCHEN TABLE.
Tension was mounting, too, around the couples club circle. Susan was now admitting that long before this class exercise, she’d stumbled on a new project idea. “I’ve been tossing around the concept of a twilight years Rom/Com about old high school sweethearts who reunite decades later in the hospital, where their respective spouses are recovering from hip replacement surgery, she told Laurel. “I think I’d like to sever ties with the Not Totally the Titanic crew to pursue this story.”
The entire class now turned to watch the group. Tears began to stream down Susan’s face.
“I commend you for your bravery—and for daring to go where no Rom/Com has gone before,” Laurel told Susan as Helene handed her Kleenex left over from Schindler’s List.
Don was griping that this whole thing—the movie, the class—had been Susan’s idea. “We all signed on to help you rise out of the haze of Harold’s death,” he said, “and now you’re leaving us high and dry.”
Laurel glanced over at me and saw me staring at the couples club meltdown.
“Keep your eyes on your own work, Mr. Melman.”
I told her no one’s eyes were on their own work.
“It’s okay if he listens,” Susan said, but then she began to cry again, and I decided that I’d actually prefer to be back in Apartment 1812. I picked up my pen and put down my head.
I drew the doggie bag of bagels that sat on the kitchen table. We always brought home the extra bagels and rolls from breakfast and every other meal, but I remember my father accepting the bag of bread from Slip that morning like he’d never seen anything so delicious.
In the movie, he’ll say, “Thank you, I wasn’t sure I’d live to eat again,” like he means it. In this same earnest way, he will also say, “There’s gonna be an afternoon lesson, too. We’ll need two a day to get her up to snuff.”
“You ain’t getting her ready for the races,” my grandfather will reply. His fingers will push an ace-of-spades ashtray back and forth on the table.
I added the ashtray to my drawing. Then cigars. Then smoke.
They were able to speak freely because my grandmother was soaking her feet in the bathtub. Word was that her sandals had pressed awkwardly into the accelerator and against her feet as she drove. She was blaming the sandals for her poor performance.
In the movie, my father will slather cream cheese onto a bagel as he says, “Twice a day will ready her for just the ordinary road.” He’ll pau
se to take a bite, then add, “It’s going to be an uphill climb. She doesn’t come by it naturally.”
“Naturally?” Slip will chuckle and puff a bunch of air through his pursed lips. “She didn’t come by it naturally when she was twenty. What makes you think it’ll be any different at sixty-eight?”
My father will shrug. “Well, maybe lessons will do some good.”
My grandfather will shake his head. “You don’t get it, Allen. Driving just ain’t in her.”
I understood what my grandfather was saying. Rachel had been taking piano lessons for about five years at this point, and even Mr. Tavollis, the teacher, called her Lead Hands. My grand-father’s confidence, however, surprised me. Driving seemed easier than playing the piano.
I added to my sketch three kids—two girls and a boy—dressed in bathing suits and standing in the doorway to the kitchen, since by this time, say nine o’clock, my sisters and I were suited up and waiting to go down to the pool. I also attempted a rendering of Marcy’s white hat with the orange plastic sun shield hanging from the sides and the red propeller on top.
I remember shouting as we stood there, “Can someone please take us downstairs? Mom’s not ready yet.”
Confirmation came from the hall bathroom. “Can you please take them down today? I need a little more time. I’m washing out my pants and underwear.”
As everyone assembles for the trip downstairs, the narrator will explain that his mother often washed clothes in the bathroom sink. She hated doing the laundry in Imperial Towers 100. The laundry room was communal, which meant you not only had to schlep your baskets to the basement, you also had to pay to use the machines. Four quarters per load, plus my mother paid an additional twenty-five cents to me to stand guard for the duration of the wash because residents had no problem pulling someone else’s load mid-cycle to accommodate their own.
As I’d explained to Laurel at Macy’s the other day, the culture of Imperial Towers 100 was dog-eat-dog. Neither civility nor mercy existed. It was like Lord of the Flies with old people.
Who knows why the place was so rough and tumble. My theory is that the survival instinct that led the Jews to claw their way through the deserts of Egypt and the doors of Ellis Island no longer served a function. Instead it had, like a sociological lupus, turned folks against each other.
Which was why my sisters and I liked to do the initial pool visit of the day together. Grabbing those chaises, enough for your whole party, and marking them with your respective monogrammed towels was like going to battle, and we felt power in numbers.
I began to sketch the chaos on the pool deck: grandmothers hell-bent on assuring their kids a nice vacation and young girls hell-bent on going home with a tan pulling and tugging at chairs the same way that Laurel and I saw them tugging on wedding dresses at the annual Macy’s bridal gown sample sale. Now that I thought about it, my experience with Laurel in Macy’s and the scene on the pool deck were nothing if not Parallel Journeys. I might have pointed out this realization to Laurel now, had she not been so embedded in Susan’s breakdown.
“They have Vera Wang up there,” Laurel had said to me as we walked into Macy’s. She’d nodded upwards, five or six floors so, in the direction of violent screaming and yelling.
“They must be holding her hostage,” I’d replied, though I knew what she meant. Luckily, we were heading in the opposite direction of the bridal frenzy. Housewares was in the bottom of the massive store.
“Her dresses, fool,” she said. “Everyone wants her dresses.” She went on to say that she, too, wanted to get married in one of those dresses, like a real New Yorker, except she didn’t want to pay full price. “You know what I mean?” she asked.
I choked on my blueberry smoothie. The whole reason I liked her, the secret of our relationship success, was that she wasn’t like a real New Yorker. And what Laurel didn’t understand, like my father didn’t understand about my grandma’s ability to drive, was that she just didn’t have it in her. “You mean to tell me that every person who wears a Vera Wang dress is a real New Yorker?” I asked. Then I took a page from Marcy’s playbook: “Where were you the day they taught Venn diagrams?”
By this time, we’d found our aisle and Laurel was lowering two boxes to the floor for examination. “I don’t know, Chuckerman,” she said as she lowered herself after them. “I was probably absent that day.”
“You know, Venn diagrams. The circles. Some intersect. Some don’t. Subsets.” I drew in the air, trying to explain. I had a circle of girls from Utah and another of real New Yorkers, the kind I knew from Imperial Towers Building 100, the kind who tugged on pool chairs, the kind whose grandchildren were probably the ones six floors above us, tugging on Vera Wang. “Most of the Imperial Towers 100 women were widows for a reason. They pulled and tugged their husbands to death. The two circles don’t intersect.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She yanked open one of the boxes to have a closer look.
“I’m saying that there cannot possibly be any overlap between the circle of real New Yorkers and the circle of Mormons with eight siblings, two horses, and a homemade daisy bathrobe in the closet. You can wear Vera Wang ’til the cows come home and you still won’t be a real New Yorker. It’s not in your genes.” To punctuate my point, I gave a long slurp on the last bits of my smoothie.
Laurel looked up from the boxes and smiled wide. “That’s quite a theory, Chuckerman. Let’s make sure I understand. Are you saying that our circles cannot overlap or that you don’t want them to overlap?”
“Both,” I told her. “I wouldn’t want the circles to overlap, but luckily, overlap in our case is genetically impossible.”
Laurel stood. “And you wouldn’t want them to overlap—by, say, me converting to Judaism—because if I converted and we stayed together in some crazy, hypothetical world, I’d eventually end up killing you?”
“Cause of death would be more of a gradual erosion of spirit than murder in the first degree, but yes, that’s the basic gist. I’ve seen it happen. Which is why I’m so happy that my circle and yours do not overlap. Our relationship is working because we have nothing in common. Aside, now, from this machine,” I kicked the box containing the Krups 888 Cafe Centro Time 10-Cup Coffee/Espresso Machine.
She did her single eyebrow raise, something I’ve never been able to do, and pushed on the brim of my Cubs hat. “Trust me, Chuckerman, you never have to worry about me being anything like you.”
I nodded, confident that I had made myself clear, and went on to buy the machine and then the moccasins.
However, when I ran the Vera Wang incident by Rachel later that day, she told me I was wrong. “A woman can transform herself into anything she wants, depending on what she wants. Genetics have nothing to do with it,” she informed me. “As far as women are concerned, you never can be sure who you are dealing with.” From her prosecutor’s office in Chicago, she suggested I proceed with caution. “It could be,” she continued, as I stared at the Krups Caffe Centro on my counter, “that she’s one of those who’s just pretending to be all natural, all T-shirt and jeans, until she lures you in and the ring appears.” She gave one of her long, closing-argument, nail-in-the-coffin pauses. “You may be on a slippery slope to Lucille Garlovsky.”
This is the way the Melmans express affection. We devil’s advocate. Second-guess. Rain on each other’s parades.
I told her slippery slopes didn’t matter. “I’m only concerned with who Laurel is now. By the time she transforms in the way you are talking about, she’ll be long gone.”
Rachel told me to mark her words.
I told her she was wrong.
As I sat in class and watched the Mormon Rodeo throw a foot on her chair and a hand on her hip and rasp to Susan that life without Harold would give her opportunities to discover new creative, emotional, and sexual sides, I couldn’t help but think of Rachel’s warning about transformations, slippery slopes, and the dangers of dealing with women. Which led me, sudde
nly and seamlessly, back to not just my movie but also the scene I’d originally planned to start off with: The Introduction of Lucille Garlovsky.
CHAPTER 10:
Introducing Lucille
I ended up writing the Lucille scene a few days after class at the Grey Dog Cafe, a crowded NYU hangout with tiny tables and fabulous food. I’d never have pegged a place of such utter action as a solid writing spot, but Laurel convinced me otherwise. She explained that she’d written her previous script there—Deep in the Heart of Daisy, a drama detailing the life Laurel’s mother would have had if she’d had the courage to leave her husband.
“She marries a real estate developer and relocates to an estate in the Ojai Valley. A life of love and leisure,” Laurel explained as we walked down Broadway toward the Grey Dog. “It’s a Spiritual Journey story.” She winked.
I’d been fixated on story types since her last class. At the end of it, Laurel had told Susan, as part of her pep talk, that a person is never too old to come of age. She told Susan to give herself the freedom to grow, adding, “I say we call it your second coming.”
Don responded with, “I say we call it horse shit.”
I didn’t disagree with Don, but still, I’d taken to labeling the kind of stories we all were living. Broc, according to the picture he’d painted at lunch, was living a Horror or maybe a Tragedy. Share was living a Rags to Riches. I couldn’t decide if Laurel was on a Spiritual Journey or, as Rachel would contend, a Quest. But wasn’t everyone’s story in some way a Quest? Weren’t we all trying to attain or achieve something or someone? Marcy, a woman who didn’t set goals and lived according to whim, was on a Quest to find me a wife and kids. Even I, a person accused of having no interest in personal growth, was on a Quest to acquire a new client and to live a life free of major illness, entanglement, or catastrophe.
“Deep in the Heart of Daisy sounds to me like a Quest,” I now told Laurel.
“Spiritual Journey,” Laurel repeated, explaining that the focus was on the main character’s self-discovery.
Chuckerman Makes a Movie Page 15