Regardless, New Line Cinema apparently had optioned the script for a decent amount of money, which was why Laurel believed the Grey Dog gave “good pages.”
The Grey Dog also gave Laurel good service. They knew her like the Reebok Club knows me, and so she was allowed to sit and write as long as she wanted—which, that Saturday, was hours. She was preparing final changes to her suicide script, currently entitled Mormons Don’t Die. I, left with nothing better to do, analyzed the food and the crowd while jeopardizing my life by downing a club sandwich (copious amounts of turkey, a side of Thousand Island dressing, and buttered rye). Eventually, with nothing better left to do, I wrote. I decided to sketch this scene out in words rather than images. It would be a perfect one, I thought, for Estie’s table read.
THE INTRODUCTION OF LUCILLE GARLOVSKY
The scene will open on the pool deck, where our arrival will be met by a group of my father’s dental patients.
“Dr. Melman,” they’ll holler, smiling and waving like genuinely pleasant people. The audience will see faces they recognize from around our dining room table: Ida from 27, Gloria from 14, Jean from 22, and Lil Sharp, who, everyone knew because she was always complaining about the noise coming from the game room, lived on the Lobby Level.
The narrator will explain that everyone in this group was in desperate need of dental work. They were motivated by pain rather than principle, and their plan to get Slip back into the card room will eventually reflect this lack of moral compass.
“Hello, ladies,” my father will call out as the zealous flow of sunbathers carries us past the patients.
Jean from 22 will speak first: “Allen, we’ve got another approach. We were playing too fair and square yesterday.” She had a voice as rough as the Bronx that carried beautifully over the howl of the wind and the hysteria of the crowd.
Next, Gloria from 14: “Got to fight fire with fire.”
Again, Jean from 22: “It won’t take long to explain. You’ll get back to your family soon enough.”
Who knows what else they said, as we were by now caught up in battle, tossing towels and tubes of Bain du Soleil at empty chaises to claim them. In the movie, other folks will tell the ladies to shut up, and my father will say to Slip, “For people with teeth trouble, their mouths never stop moving. I can see why you like the card room.”
“Do me a favor, Allen,” my grandfather will say, putting a hand on my father’s shoulders. “Tell all them babes to go tan their fannies.”
My sisters and their friends, already lumped onto a single chair, will break into fits of laughter and throw around the phrase for the rest of the day.
“Why would I do that?” my father will answer. “They mean well. They’re just trying to help.”
“We don’t need any help,” Slip will tell him. He’ll point to an ashtray a couple of tables over and ask if I can grab it for him.
As I climb over a row of lounge chairs to reach it, my father will say, “I beg your pardon? We don’t need help? I think Ma would disagree.” He’ll shake his head in disbelief and help me down from the chairs as I return and hand the filthy black plastic tray to Slip. “By anyone’s account,” he’ll add, “you are up to your ears in trouble.”
Slip will chuckle as he sets the ashtray on a table and sits himself in the chaise next to it. Then he’ll look up into the sun and sigh like he’s poolside in paradise. “Trouble? Are you kidding me? I’ve never been better.” He’ll pull a cigar out of his shirt pocket. “Even if they let me back into the card room, I may not go.” His hand will slap the chaise holding Marcy and Rachel. “This is the life. Right here.”
“You’re talking nonsense,” my father will tell Slip. He’ll toss his baseball cap on a chair in frustration and flash a fake smile at the dental patients. He’ll signal with his finger that he’ll be with them in a minute.
“You want to talk nonsense, go have a word with your following over there.” As Slip speaks, he’ll peel his cigar out of its plastic.
My father will stretch his sore back—the onset, I see now, of a bad case of arthritis. Then, with a shake of his head, he’ll walk toward his patients.
But the scene will continue, as it did that day, with me and Slip. I remember he pulled a lighter out of his pants pocket before he said, “Your father’s too goddamn loyal.” Then he tried to get a flame to hold long enough to light his cigar, but the wind wasn’t cooperating.
I sat on the chair next to him, as far away as possible from my sisters, their friends, and their conversation about how old you had to be to use a tampon, and asked, “What do you mean?” I hadn’t realized that you could overdo it in the loyalty department.
“Have you heard the expression ‘loyal to a fault’?” my grandfather asked me.
I shook my head no. They were quick shakes, as I hated to admit ignorance to my grandfather.
He threw me a towel and instructed me to hold it over his body like a fort so he could light his cigar without disruption and lecture me. “Let me put it to you this way, Davy boy. Too much of a good thing ain’t no good neither.” He pushed away the towel and took a puff. “You get where I’m coming from?”
In terms of cookies or TV, I did. But I’d never applied the concept to character traits. Especially ones that my parents, my father especially, were always talking up.
“No, not really,” I said under my breath. I stared in the direction of my father and his people. He had people for a reason. His arm looped around Ida from 27. Lil Sharp tossed her head like a teenager. Jean from 22 laughed and put her crown back into her change purse. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but based on the way my father’s head nodded and his hands waved, I knew he was telling them not to worry, he’d take care of everything. He hollered over to us that he was going with the group to track down Gladys Greenberg and Eileen to make another appeal. Whether or not this was too much loyalty, I didn’t know. But I didn’t see a downside.
Slip, on the other hand, saw things differently. “He’s a dentist. Not a keeper of world peace. At some point, a guy’s gotta start looking out for number one. That’s all them ladies are doing. They don’t give a shit about me or your father. All they care about is getting something for nothing.” To make clear what the ladies were after, he smiled wide and banged the end of his cigar into his teeth. Then he took a long puff and inhaled deeply as I jammed my hands between the yellow strips of plastic that ran across my chaise. I didn’t know what else to do.
Generally Slip didn’t issue more than a sound bite at a time, but today, he kept on going. “Take it from me, Davy boy, a man can’t let himself be taken advantage of like that. He’s got to be willing to make a few enemies. Because if you’re not willing to make enemies, how the hell are you supposed to know who your friends are?”
His question was a good one. I still have no answer. Making enemies has never been my strong suit (although I seem to be making strides with my film colleague, Candy).
“He’s only trying to help you get back to playing cards,” I said.
“He’s wasting his time,” he said. Lifting his hips up from the chair, he reached in his pocket and pulled out a handful of change. He began to pick out the quarters. “If I felt like it, I could muscle my way back in that card room in two minutes. But I’m happy here. So let’s relax. Things like this have a way of working themselves out naturally.” He gave my chair a friendly kick and, without skipping another beat, moved on to making quarters appear from behind the ears of all the kids around us.
It was then that Lucille made her entrance. The script will capture the moment with the fanfare of all caps: LUCILLE GARLOVSKY BUSTS THROUGH THE GLASS DOORS TO THE DECK.
Suddenly, the magic tricks ended and, it seemed, another kind of magic began. Did I understand this then? Did the “loose cannon” remark float back into my head? No, don’t be silly. I was ten and upset that I couldn’t figure out the coin thing.
Rachel has always claimed that she understood. She probably did, but she didn’t s
ay anything at the time. Like the rest of us, she just stared. As will the audience, because the sight of Lucille (played by Susan Sarandon or maybe an aged-up Catherine Zeta-Jones) will, as Laurel likes to say, hijack the screen.
Unlike the rest of the women, who either left their hair a natural gray or dyed it yellow, Lucille’s was jet black. It was thick. It was long.
Also unlike the other women, who came to the pool in frumpy cover-ups they rarely removed or in slacks like my Grandma Estelle, Lucille Garlovsky strutted onto the deck every morning in a brightly colored, high-cut suit and heels.
Legend had it she arrived on the deck every day, hurricane or shine, at the same time, which was about fifteen minutes after the melee from the lounge chairs quieted and everyone was reclined and free to stare. She always gave the door a tremendous fling, so it opened to it fullest, gave the group a voluptuous, “So how are we all this morning?” and then, when she’d gotten front and center, separated the handles of her rope and began to jump.
I never paid Lucille much attention, other than as a signal, like the rising of the sun, that the day was officially underway and it was permissible to go into the pool. Never, that is, until that morning.
“Well, well, will you look at what the cat dragged in,” Lucille will announce in place of her usual greeting. “To what do we girls owe this honor?” She’ll say “awna” instead of honor, but we’ll understand. She’ll stand, arms akimbo, hip out to the side. With her still-folded rope, she’ll tap Slip’s knee. “So you think you’re gonna join our crowd now, Slippy boy?” She’ll laugh.
Laughter will come, too, from the ladies. At least a dozen women will be watching, including my Grandma B and Aunt BoBo. One of the women will holler, “You tell him, Lucille.”
Slip will smile, clearly enjoying being the center of attention, the object of the head cheerleader’s affection. I, too, will sit in awe, my head bobbing up and down.
“Beggars can’t be choosers, Lucille,” my grandfather will respond. Then he’ll wink at her and put his cigar in his mouth.
“Always with the wisecracks, aren’t you?” she’ll say.
The cigar will come back out. “I’m just telling it like it is.”
“Well, since you’re so honest, I guess you can stay.” Lucille will tap the rope on Slip’s head. “As long as you promise not to beat the crap out of any of us.”
At this, the script will direct the women to hoot with laughter and Slip to take the rope out of Lucille’s hand and wave it in front of her.
“Watch your language, Ms. Garlovsky,” he’ll say. “I got my kids with me.”
Lucille will look my way and tousle my hair. Laurel likes to do this too. “You’ve got fabulous curls, kiddo. Wear it long and you’ll never have trouble with the girls.” She’ll give a quick wink. “You can take that to the bank.”
At this point in the movie, the actor who plays me should be replaced by a mannequin, because that’s what I’d become. I didn’t move. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I’ll tell you, as a celebrity fragrance man, I meet stars all of the time. Yet never in my professional career have I been as bowled over as I was by my encounter that morning with Lucille Garlovsky. Whether the feeling came from proximity to the legendary widow herself or to the breasts that poured over the top of her suit, I’m not sure. What I do know is that I—borrowing my mother’s litmus test of love—heard bells.
Consequently, I didn’t notice, like Rachel did, that Lucille’s toes were painted the same red as her lips and that both lips and toes matched her suit. And I didn’t notice, like Marcy did, that the handles on her jump rope had LUCILLE painted on them in pink nail polish. When Marcy also observed that the skin on Lucille’s knees looked like a lizard’s at lunch that day, however, I realized that I had noticed that.
The camera will follow us upstairs for lunch, and so the audience will see my mother tell Marcy, “Be nice. It will happen to you one day.”
“No it won’t,” Marcy will answer. She’ll snort, her natural reaction to any preposterous suggestion.
My mother will move away from the counter, where she’s been making peanut butter sandwiches out of leftover breakfast rolls. She will then throw her forty-something leg onto the kitchen table.
Borrowing from Laurel’s BASIC CAMERA SHOTS poster, I’ll use a CUT-IN shot here, so the camera zooms in on the leg amid the sandwiches and follows my mother’s fingers as she points to veins and other apparent eyesores I’d never noticed prior to this demonstration.
“Do you think my legs looked like this when I was your age?” she’ll demand. “I got news for you. My legs are halfway to Lucille’s, and yours are on the road to mine.” She’ll mutter, as she still does today, about the ravages of time. Then she’ll pull her leg down and instruct us to appreciate our youth while we’re young.
Marcy and I—more interested in the leg lift than the lesson—will laugh, but Rachel will make a face like she’s seen the devil.
“I pray to God I never get lizard legs,” she’ll say, stretching the skin down around her thigh, looking for signs of things to come. “I pray, I pray.” It’s a prayer she’s attempting to answer herself today with regular use of cellulite creams and a refusal to consume sugar or animal products.
My mother will try to give her a head’s up on this. “I don’t think God’s going to answer that prayer.”
“Why not?” Rachel will ask.
“Because he’s too busy,” I’ll offer.
“Or maybe he likes lizard legs,” Marcy will suggest. “Maybe God has lizard legs.”
Unlike Rachel, my mother never had any dietary restrictions and always waited faithfully through lunch, hovering like a seagull over the Intracoastal, for any morsel we left behind. Her pride was never too big and no crumb was ever too small.
She’ll pick up a piece of Marcy’s crust. “You are who you are. You get what you get. The trick is to like your skin whether it holds up or not.”
“Like Lucille,” Marcy will say. “She wouldn’t jump rope in lizard skin unless she liked it.”
“And she wouldn’t flirt, either,” Rachel will whisper.
She and Marcy will laugh. My face will redden beyond my sunburn. To me the word “flirt” was synonymous with my limited knowledge of sex.
“What does that mean?” my mother will ask.
As my mother enjoys her scraps, Rachel will tell her everything that transpired between Slip and Lucille that morning, including “flirting.” Rachel will speak the word slowly and with excessive enunciation as she bites the string from the hood of her bathing suit cover-up.
At this point, I bolted down the hallway. Be it about the birds and the bees or my grandfather and Lucille, I did not intend to discuss this topic or even witness it being discussed. From the hallway floor a few steps from the kitchen, I was able to hear the evil but not see it. And what I heard was my mother spitting out her sandwich when Marcy offered up, “Grandma B says Lucille’s itching to have an affair.”
As tantalizing a remark as this was, I must pause to explain that my sisters’ story was as much news to me as it was to my mother. Earlier that morning, the minute after Lucille had messed my hair, I’d headed for the pool, never to return until I saw my mother hanging over the balcony waving a dish towel—the well-established signal for families with poolside exposure that lunch was ready.
Of course, in the movie, the audience already will have seen this activity unfold. They’ll have seen the boy head to the pool. They’ll have seen the mother call for lunch. They will not have seen the flirting between Slip and Lucille, because I don’t think I can bear to write it.
But they will eventually see the boy who plays me hiding in the hallway on his hands and knees, listening intently to the conversation about the flirting, which will go something like:
“Grandma B said what?”
“She said that Lucille wants to have, you know . . . an affair.”
My mother will put down her plate and take a seat. “Marcy, take your
head out of the box of cookies. Do you know what that means?”
I, for one, having no idea, will crawl closer to the kitchen, still not wanting to be a party to the conversation but sure that I’d better grasp its gist.
I’ll see first that Marcy has stacked her finger with Salernos. (I remember they looked good.)
“I know what it means,” she’ll assure my mother.
My mother will signal with her hand for Marcy to cough up some sort of definition.
Marcy will comply. “It’s when you go on a date with someone else even though you are married.” She’ll stick a full cookie in her mouth, as if to formalize that she has hit the nail on the head.
“No, idiot,” Rachel will say. “It’s when you kiss someone even though they’re married. It’s cheating.”
“Well either way,” Marcy will say, “it should be called an unfair instead of an affair.”
“Yes, it should.” My mother will pull Marcy’s ponytail—which, I remember noticing, was the same color as the butter cookies.
“Well,” Rachel will say, “Lucille can have one because she’s a widow and she’s bored.”
“How do you know she’s bored?” my mother will ask.
We could always tell when my mother was trying to not laugh in our faces; she’d push her tongue through the little space between her front teeth. The script will direct the actress who plays Paula Melman to do so now.
“Grandma B,” Rachel will say.
“Grandma B told you this?”
“No,” Marcy will admit. “She told Aunt BoBo, but we could hear.”
I will lie on the carpet, predicting my mother’s response: “You should not be listening in on other people’s conversations.”
Her words will come just like that, but then she will cough and continue, unable to help herself, “Did Aunt BoBo answer Grandma B?”
Rachel and Marcy will look at each other. Silence.
My mother will ask again.
Rachel, still chewing on the string, will nod her head yes.
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