Chuckerman Makes a Movie

by Francie Arenson Dickman

Her glass didn’t lift. “Well,” she said, picking through our basket of popcorn—a stalling tactic, I see now, “I’m going to have to get a new apartment.”

  “I’m going to help you find one,” I said. My glass, the glass of an idiot, was still raised.

  “You’re welcome to, David. If you’re willing to go to Los Angeles.”

  I felt my mouth open on its own. Slowly, I moved my beer to my lips to make the gape less obvious.

  “That’s the thing: They want my script but they also want me to adapt a few others. They want me to move to LA.” As I took a drink, she said, “I have another week to decide.”

  She timed her bombshell really well, Laurel did, so that she finished as the song—“Happy Days Are Here Again”—crescendoed. The piano was going gangbusters. The crowd was belting out the chorus.

  “Do you think I should take the deal?” she hollered. “Or do you think I should stay?”

  I set my glass down, taking the time to center it perfectly on my black-and-red cardboard coaster. Hadn’t I known it was going to eventually come down to this? I was so busy wondering about what to do about the Cadillac, I hadn’t considered what to do about Laurel. From the get-go, from the first time I’d set foot in Drama for the First-Time Film Writer, I’d been headed toward this day. But the road to this moment, the moment of truth, had not been a straight shot, and it had been muddled by so many smaller issues that I hadn’t expected it to actually happen. I knew perfectly well what Laurel wanted me to say: “Stay, Laurel, stay here, forget the offer. We’ll get married.” Go ahead, I told myself. Say it. But I couldn’t. “Do you want the job?” I asked instead.

  A long pause followed my question, during which the room applauded and Laurel and I sat in silence. Then, as the impersonator moved on to “People,” Laurel said, “Do you want me to want the job?”

  I answered her truthfully, with an “I don’t know.” Except, I didn’t say this—I shrugged it. It was the ambivalent shrug of a guy who felt he was asking his girl to chose between his life and her own—not, as Laurel claimed moments later as we stood on the sidewalk outside the bar and she screamed at me, the shrug of a guy with commitment problems, or of a guy who wasn’t sure he was in love.

  “Your sister warned me not to get involved with you,” she said. “I should have listened. You are thirty-five and never married. Right there, a red flag. A flag I should have paid attention to.” She quieted down as a few people passed. She shook her head and whispered to herself, “When will I learn?”

  Then, after a beat, she switched gears and started to rant. “We’ve been dating for five months. You’re thirty-five years old. You took me back. You said you love me. You went to my yoga class, which I thought proved you love me, because why else would a guy as closed-minded and inflexible as you go to yoga. And if you love me,” she hollered, while I put my hands on her shoulders to try to calm her down, “you should want me to stay.” She pushed away my arms. I’d never seen this side of her—the angry, explosive side.

  “You seem so good,” she went on, staring up at me, stomping the cowboy boots at the beginning of each sentence like a human exclamation point. “Your family seems so normal. Well, not normal, but you know, close. You are successful and sweet; you take such good care of your niece and nephew. Why are you so scared to have your own family? What happened to you as a child?”

  I stared at her. She was crying. Her hair was messed. She looked pretty. She was pretty. She was smart. She was successful. She was sexy. She wasn’t funny funny. But she thought I was. What was wrong with me?

  “I don’t know,” I told her. I stared at the ground. As I lined up the tips of my Nikes with the crack on the sidewalk, I said, “I don’t want to screw it up. Melmans don’t leave, they don’t get divorced. They make it work, they stick it out. It seems to me that if you are going to take that kind of leap of faith, you’d better be damn sure going in.”

  “Wake up, David. If you are waiting to be damn sure before you get married, you’ll be waiting a long time—too long for me.” With that, she headed into the street to hail a cab.

  I did not follow her, but I did call out, “That’s the same thing my sister said when she told me to take your class. That I needed to wake up and smell the coffee. You can’t say I didn’t try. My script is almost done and lord knows my apartment reeks of coffee.”

  “One thing has nothing to do with the other.” She flagged down a taxi and pulled her hood over her head. “You can write movies about your car and your childhood all day long and you still won’t know for certain whether I’m the one for you.”

  In the days following our street fight, as I finished my movie and thought about Laurel’s words, I tried to answer the question myself. My movie-writing experience had shed no light on whether I was ready to move on and get married, or what made a marriage work, or whether Laurel was the one for me. If I said yes and told her to stay and asked her to get married, where would we be in forty years? Getting by like my grandparents, simply due the grace of God and a well-structured routine? I had no idea.

  What I did take away was that my movie was about Estelle as much as it was about Slip. Even though the car belonged to Slip, the story belonged to Estelle. The title of my movie, if I started over, would not be Slip Gets a Caddy but Estelle Finds Her Way. Yes, the Caddy symbolized my grandfather, but what it honored was Estelle and her longing for a little Women’s Lib. Laurel had that, and I wasn’t sure I had it in me to ask her to waste it. Yes, if our marriage didn’t work, we could always get a divorce, but Laurel would not get back this opportunity in Los Angeles.

  If I could talk to Estelle now, or if I could go back to that day we walked on the pool deck, I knew just what I’d ask her. If she’d had the chance to move to Los Angeles and make it big as a dancer, would she still have chosen bootlegging with Slip? And if she’d gone to LA, would she have still craved, some forty years down the road, the joyride and the donut?

  I didn’t know what she would have answered but I could hear what she’d say to Laurel: “Love matters a little, honey, but luck matters more. So whether you get married or not, I think you should secure your own driver’s license right away.”

  THE SCENE AT THE SCENE

  PARKING GARAGE. BACKSEAT OF MELMANS’ RENTAL CAR

  “This is not what I meant when I told you to stay cool.”

  I was lying in the backseat of the rental car when I heard Slip’s voice. The paramedics had laid me across the long leather seat after I’d dropped. Marcy, who’d been standing next to me, came to my rescue (or, as she claimed, saved my life) by screaming, as she will in the movie, “Davy died! Or maybe he fainted. Someone please help.”

  Luckily, the scene was heavy on paramedics waiting around for my grandma to emerge. If you are going to faint, I recommend this scenario. Instantaneously, apparently, I was whisked into the arms of a rescue worker. I also backhandedly became somewhat of a hero because due to my loss of consciousness, Grandma Estelle became willing to exit the Cadillac.

  When I came to, I was lying with a damp rag on my forehead and Marcy was kneeling next to me watching the activity out of the back window.

  “You’re alive!” she exclaimed. She smiled and clapped as my eyes opened. “Stay still,” she ordered, and then gave me a blow-by-blow account of what I’d missed—the taping off of the area, the arrival of the tow truck, and the silencing of the sirens, which I somehow hadn’t noticed until she mentioned it.

  “Uh-oh,” she said next. “Slip’s here.”

  Several minutes after this, he stuck his head in our door and made his remark to me about staying cool. To Marcy he said, “What did I tell you? Doesn’t look like we needed to go toasting your grandmother any bagels.”

  “How do you know she’s not hungry?” Marcy asked.

  “Cause it seems that while we were combing the streets, she went and took herself out to breakfast. A big, fancy spread at the Bagel Bar.” He shook his shoulders up and down as he spoke, in rhythm with his word
s. A physical show of fancy. Then he leaned back and pulled his cigar from the roof of the car, where he’d stuck it before poking his head into the rental.

  “Sit up,” he told me.

  I did.

  Slip pulled the towel from my forehead. I remember how neat he looked. His pale blue sweater, his white slacks, his boat shoes. Perhaps he’d been planning for another day on the deck. His thin body rested against the doorframe of the rental car. He looked around, his face devoid of expression.

  Then he motioned with his finger for us to get out of the car. “Breathe the fresh air,” he said as he puffed his cigar. “Take a look around.”

  So I looked again, as the audience will as well. They will see, as I did, much order restored. They will see Eileen and my father speaking to a cop, all of them motioning in the direction of the car and the missing wall so that dialogue will not be necessary for the understanding of their conversation.

  They will see Grandma Estelle sitting on a gurney surrounded by a paramedic, who will be taking her blood pressure; Rachel, who will be holding her hand; and my mother, who will be talking to her in between bites of leftover bagel, which she will be dipping into the container of chopped herring. Again, no dialogue will be needed.

  In the middle, between the cops and the gurney, will be the tow truck.

  “What’s it doing?” Marcy will ask.

  Slip will explain that the tow truck driver is waiting for the folks who own the cars parked behind ours to move them so the tow truck can get in at the right angle to do its business with his car.

  At this point, the camera will, as we did, scrutinize the Caddy. The back half will still sparkle with its new and splendid glory—a stark and sickening contrast to the front half.

  For a second, there was silence.

  Then, there was Marcy. “Are you mad?” she asked Slip without turning her head from the window. I thought she was brave to ask this question, because I was sure I already knew the answer.

  Slip scrunched up his eyes and pulled the cigar from his mouth, which turned up at the ends in a slow-motion smile. His wrinkles—thousands, it seemed—pulled tight across his skin. Behind his silver-framed glasses, his eyes began to shimmer.

  “At who?” He smiled real big.

  “Grandma,” Marcy answered. Her tone said, “duh.”

  “Your grandma certainly did a number this time, didn’t she?” Slip looked down at us.

  We nodded in agreement. Marcy laughed. Relief was in her voice, as if she already understood what Slip would say next.

  “I ain’t mad.” Slip shook his head. “What the hell do I got to be mad at?” He chomped on the cigar for a moment before he went on. “If I got a bone to pick with anyone, it’s with the crew over there.” He pointed in the direction of my father, Eileen, and Franklin. “If they’d had the sense not to go scaring the crap out of my wife, we’d be looking at a whole different scenario now, wouldn’t we?” As he spoke, he began to wander in the direction of the damage.

  I watched his hand slip slowly along the hood of the car. It moved, as he did, toward the hole in the wall. There, at the spot where the car met the wall, my grandfather stopped and for a while he stood looking out to the water, his face invisible to me, his thoughts impossible to know.

  The sight of Slip and his banged-up Cadillac was almost as traumatic as the sight of Grandma Estelle, who was now seated in the back of the ambulance. She rested upright, covered in a heavy grey blanket. Her Adidas dangled from beneath it and her purse headed in the direction of Grandma B, who stood at the open doors, her arms outstretched.

  “I assure you, Estelle, you’ll be better off without it,” she said, taking the purse into her hands. “One less thing you have to worry about getting stolen.” She also assured her that she’d be by the hospital each day with books and decent food, and that she’d watch after Slip, who by now was with us at the back of the ambulance.

  As Grandma B talked, I stood behind her and stared. As I

  stared, Slip kneed me in the rear end. I didn’t see it coming, and I don’t know if anyone else saw him, but the audience will. I’ve never admitted this to anyone—that a force other than my own emotions, instincts, or courage pushed me toward the ambulance doors.

  I took a breath before I let myself look inside at the tubes and machines—the separators, as I saw them, between life and death. The paramedic who was tending to my grandma smiled at me, and then my grandma did too. “It doesn’t look like I did so good with the lessons, Davy,” she said.

  “The driving was probably a bad idea in the first place,” I told her.

  “Don’t be silly,” she assured me. “Driving was a great idea. I would have been just fine had no one come following after me.” She rolled her eyes in my father’s direction.

  “Stop talking,” my father told my grandma. “Save your energy.”

  “I won’t be gone long,” my grandma assured me. “Keep an eye on you-know-who for me.” She winked and nodded toward Slip.

  I nodded and tried to not cry. “Can I be the one to keep your purse?” This gesture surprised me as much as Slip’s kick in my butt.

  “Davy, that’s the best idea I’ve heard in a long time. There’s no one I’d rather have guarding my belongings,” Estelle answered, motioning for Grandma B to hand over the goods to me. I took the bag, and as I did Estelle called to me, “Come close.”

  Leery as I was about entering an ambulance, I climbed up and sat alongside her.

  “Davy,” she whispered, “if you look inside—not inside my wallet but in the lining of my bag—you’ll find some money hidden away for a rainy day. Or another Depression. Find the money and tell your father to take you for Adidas on my behalf.”

  I smiled at her. “Okay.”

  “Don’t forget.”

  I promised her I wouldn’t forget and I never did, although I never spent her money. Oh, I dug around in the purse to see where the cash was hidden alright, and I gathered up the loose quarters and dimes and put them in her change purse where they belonged, but that was all.

  After I returned to the ground, Marcy and Rachel came up to me, wanting to know what the secret was, but I didn’t tell them. To this day, I’ve only told Estie and Ryan—and now, of course, my audience.

  As Grandma B told me to move away from the ambulance, Estelle touched her hand to her pink lips and then threw a kiss to me like she was tossing a baseball. She laughed and said, “Catch!”

  I pulled an arm out from under her purse and blew one back to her. I think that was the first kiss I’d ever blown.

  Then the doors to the ambulance closed and my father stepped closer. “Don’t worry,” he said. “She’s just going in for observation. We’re just making sure everything’s okay.”

  Everything was okay. Estelle stayed in the hospital for three days, longer than we’d expected but less time than the Cadillac spent at the mechanic’s. In fact, we left Florida before the Cadillac returned to the garage. Not until the following season would I see it again, and when I did, there would be no sign that the car was any worse for the wear, although Slip swore that its emblem tipped slightly to the right and the transmission was never quite the same.

  The same could be said of Estelle, who’d been diagnosed with a heart condition that would have to be watched but was not supposed to interfere with her regular activities or lifespan. Though she’d have to cancel this year’s New Year’s Eve vaudeville review.

  Slip’s card room privileges were restored—perhaps not the day of the crash but during that trip, because I remember sitting next to him during the annual New Year’s Eve poker game. I didn’t play. Poker confused me, and since it was New Year’s, the stakes were too high for my twenty-five-cent blood. But I was happy simply sitting next to my grandfather again and watching him do his thing.

  “Make sure he doesn’t lay a hand on anyone,” my grandmother had directed me early in the evening. Specifically, I was charged with making sure he didn’t go so far as to even look at Big
Sid.

  To the best of the collective recollection of my family, Slip’s card room expulsion was never formally lifted. He just returned. As if the damage to his Cadillac had been punishment enough. As if God were acting in the best interest of Estelle. Or, most likely, as if the attention of Eileen, Gladys Greenberg, and the Condo Association (not to be confused with God) had moved on to a subsequent and more heinous wrong-doing in Imperial Towers 100—in the form of damage to the building itself by a resident who’d been unlicensed to drive.

  As for the end of the movie, I’m not sure. Endings, it seems, are not my forte. I suppose we’ll put the camera on Davy in his New Year’s Eve best, sitting next to Slip in the card room. We’ll see him stand up to leave, and his grandfather ruffle his hair as he goes. We’ll follow him into the Ladies’ Card Room, where we’ll see all the women wearing Happy New Year’s hats as they study their cards. Among them will be Estelle, who will look up, see Davy, and beam. She’ll offer him a seat next to hers, which he will decline with a shake of his head. She’ll offer him her New Year’s hat, which he also will decline with a laugh. We’ll see him give Estelle a hug and we’ll hear Lucille Garlovsky, at the next table, say, “Trust me, Estelle, he’s gonna be a real heartbreaker one day,” as he walks out the door.

  As he heads down the long hallway, the screaming from the game room will charge through the air, almost suffocating “Stayin’ Alive,” which is also blasting in there.

  His thin body will strut to the elevator, feeling pretty good. He’ll get on an open car, and we’ll watch the doors shut behind him. Perhaps we’ll see, as the car carries him on his way, the numbers above the elevator door light up one by one, starting with two and gradually closing in, blurring, so that as we get to nine and then ten, one number seems to blend into the next, until nothing is really clear at all.

  CHAPTER 19:

  The End

  Laurel and I didn’t talk for four days after our fight. They were four uncomfortable days for me, primarily because I’m not the kind of person who stops talking during a conflict. I am the other kind. As you well know by now, around-the-clock discourse is what I’m used to.