“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point, Mother? What difference does it make to you whether I have money or not?”
“The point is that you never tell me anything! I’m your mother!”
Margaret looks at her shrieking mother, whose cheeks have erupted in hot red spots of fury, and finally lets petulance get the better of her. “You really want to know?” she asks, bristling under her mother’s completely unfathomable—unfair!—attack. “Okay. Fine. I’m behind on some credit card payments, Mom. I owe some money and I’m trying to find a way to pay it back and I thought getting a job while I’m here would help.” She watches her mother’s face as it flickers rapidly with surprise and then concern and then dismay. “Snatch didn’t exactly work out the way I thought it would. Is that what you wanted to hear? Does that make you happy?”
Apparently not. Janice has narrowed her eyes and is shaking her head furiously, as if by refusing the truth she might make it go away entirely. Her fingernails sink deeply into her own flesh. “Oh, God, Margaret,” she says. “Not now. Why?”
“Why? You think I did this on purpose?”
“You blame me, Margaret, but it’s you. You. Yes, you.” Janice points her finger at Margaret, jabs it forward with each “you.” The finger wobbles in midair. “You spoiled it. This entire …mess, it’s your fault. With Lizzie, and James, and Noreen. With everything.” Margaret listens, baffled, to her mother’s incoherent babbling. Lizzie? James? What the hell do they have to do with anything? Janice stops suddenly and takes a breath, as if to calm herself. And then she blurts, as her eyes fill with tears: “And you weren’t even sorry.” Janice blinks rapidly, then turns and flees the kitchen.
Margaret stares at the chicken leg, lying forlornly in the middle of a dinner plate. She is too upset to move. What mess is her mother talking about? The lawsuit? The credit card debt? The divorce? Does she really believe that Margaret is somehow at fault for that? For a moment, she considers chasing her mother down to tell her about her confrontation with Paul—I gave it all up, for you!—just to see the stunned look of guilt on Janice’s face. No, she thinks. Let her find out on her own, and then she’ll really feel terrible. Mostly, she wishes she could erase the whole afternoon, regrets that she ever defended her mother to her father, regrets that she ever offered to help her mother in the first place. What was she thinking? She should have taken her father’s $200,000, paid off her bills, and just left town so that her parents could duke it out by themselves. Despite the divorce, she thinks bitterly, her parents still have this in common: Nothing she does will ever be good enough for either of them. To hell with them both.
Margaret walks the chicken to the sink, dumps it down the garbage disposal, and hits the switch. The disposal clatters and grinds to a halt as the chicken bones destroy the rotor. Then she turns, grabs her purse, and walks straight back out the kitchen door.
In the driveway she passes Lizzie, returning home from God-knows-where. Lizzie pivots around and follows Margaret toward her car. “Where are you going?” she pleads. “Can I come? Puhleeeze?”
“No!” Margaret snaps. As she marches past her sister, she gets a glimpse of Lizzie’s wounded face and knows that she’s hurt her feelings, but she’s just not in the mood to deal with her needy sister. The engine of her Honda is still warm when she climbs in the front seat and putters back out the driveway.
margaret can remember when the cineplex 13 was built on the main street of downtown Santa Rita, when she was in junior high school. It had seemed to her an adolescent Xanadu. Parents dropped their kids off here on the weekend, secure in the fact that they would be safe within its concrete confines. They weren’t aware that the college dropouts running the ticket counter would happily sell R-rated movie tickets to PG-age kids, for a two-dollar bribe. Or that Captain Cork’s, across the street, sold booze to underaged kids, who snuck it into the theater in their backpacks. On Friday nights, at the café tables, preteen girls would bat their eyelashes from behind their extra-large Diet Cokes (spiked with spiced rum) at boys who blithely ignored them, enraptured instead by the stand of video games just off the reception. The last row of Theater 11 was where, it was rumored, half of her class had gone to second base.
The Thirteen has not aged well. The lobby is dark and cavernous and smells like rancid grease. Spiders suck flies dry in dusty corners. The rug dates the place, with its eighties-era pattern of green triangles and pink squiggles now mottled by years of dirty sneakers and spilled soda to a uniform shade of gray-brown. The neon letters spelling out the names of the beverages for sale—Sprite, Coke, Jolt Cola—flicker erratically. The Frogger video game she once played while waiting for her mother to pick her up has been replaced by a game called Death Metal: Blood Match that screeches and hiccups in the corner of the lobby.
“Whamoovee,” says the teenage girl from behind the glass of the ticket counter. Margaret looks up at the marquee, ready to pick a film at random. Anything that will keep her away from the house and her mother for a few hours. Hell, maybe she’ll spend the rest of the summer here, slipping from movie to movie, sleeping through the matinees, living on salted popcorn, hiding out from the collection agencies.
She scans the list of titles, considering the dismal offerings, and then freezes. There, in Theater 11, is Thruster. For a minute, she thinks she must be hallucinating it. It’s out already? She turns around to look at the movie posters lining the wall, and her heart begins to palpitate. There is Bart’s face, three times its normal size, staring back at Margaret. He is wearing wraparound sunglasses with a Ferrari reflected in the lenses and is wielding a subatomic machine gun. “One man. One machine. One bloody road to revenge,” reads the caption.
“Whamoovee,” repeats the girl in the glass box, as the people in line behind Margaret begin to grumble.
“Thruster,” blurts Margaret, before she can think better of it.
“Starts in ten minutes.” Margaret takes the ticket and stares at it. Then she looks across the street to the Captain Cork’s liquor store. She knows what she’ll need to make it through.
eleven minutes later, margaret settles into one of the last seats in the theater just as the opening credits roll, a pint of tequila wedged in her purse. She sits between a bearded man who looks to have slept there since the last showing and a college-age couple feeding each other popcorn from a bucket the size of a spaghetti pot. The springs in the seat are broken, and the velvet has worn down to the netting underneath, but Margaret is already too absorbed in what she sees on the screen to really notice. There he is, staring back at her, twenty feet high. He sits behind the wheel of a jet-black Ferrari, racing through a desert landscape, a barely legal blond vixen—Ysabelle van Lumis—in the passenger seat. She can see every pore on his nose.
“Jesus,” she whispers at the screen, just to vent some of the pressure that is building up inside her.
“Sssssshhhh,” says the woman sitting next to her.
Margaret pulls the bottle of tequila out of her purse. She takes a swig, not even bothering to hide it. It makes her eyes water. The woman sitting next to her clicks her tongue loudly.
“Jesus Christ,” Margaret says again, just because it feels so good to be losing it in public, and takes another swig.
The plot is, as always with these movies, not the point. Bart, a former truck driver–poet turned undercover FBI agent, must infiltrate a ring of European jewel thieves by competing in the Le Mans and in the process falls in love with a gorgeous Frenchwoman (Ysabelle, with a deplorable accent) who turns out to be the ring-leader of the thieves. In between, abundant car crashes, countless gun battles, five fistfights, and one exploding skyscraper. Of course, Ysabelle has to be saved three times, usually while wearing scraps of lingerie. Is it less offensive than Fahrenheit 88? Only marginally. In her head, Margaret composes a screed against it, a Snatch editorial about the absence of strong female action heroes.
This, at least, is what Margaret does between swigs of tequila. Mostly
she fixates on Bart’s face, noticing that the “look” he was practicing in front of the mirror all those years—left-eye squint, combined with contemplative smile—is, actually, quite effective. He comes off as simultaneously fuckable and totally unapproachable. She thinks of jumping up and pointing at the screen and screaming, “Look! That was my boyfriend. My boyfriend!” Why did they break up again? She can’t remember. It must have been something trivial, something silly. It was the biggest mistake of her life. Her heart thumps in time to the gunfire pulsing from the end of Bart’s AK-47.
When Bart kisses Ysabelle on-screen, she closes her eyes and feels hot all over, remembering what it felt like to hang on to him as she rode on his motorcycle. The second time he kisses Ysabelle, though, the back of her throat tightens unpleasantly as she fights off a tear. The third time, when the two of them shed their clothes (Ysabelle’s breasts are phenomenal) and hop into bed, she is just pissed. The asshole probably cheated on her while he was on location, she realizes belatedly; that’s why he came back and dumped her.
“Fucker,” she says to the screen as Ysabelle emits a banshee cry, her blond hair flying wildly around her bucking body. She drinks again. “You weren’t that great a lay.”
The woman sitting next to her shifts to the far side of her seat.
“Shut the hell up,” says the man on her other side, who is now leaning forward, examining all four yards of Ysabelle van Lumis’s exposed mammaries.
On the screen, Bart seems unreal, as distant to her as a glossy two-dimensional picture of a celebrity in a magazine. The icon he had always wanted to be. How did he do that? What did he have that she didn’t? What was the intangible thing all her friends—Josephine, Alexis, Claire, even her father—embodied that had somehow allowed them to find success so quickly, whereas she had not? They made it look so easy. She finds it hard to imagine that they wanted it more than she did, or that they worked harder, or sacrificed more, or were that much more talented than she was. (Or were they?) Perhaps, instead of caring so much about principles, about credibility, about being right, she should have put Paris Hilton on the cover of Snatch and started a shopping column.
Maybe the only way to make it anymore is to give up and sell out.
As she sits in the dark, this new consciousness makes her terribly anxious, as if a prior awareness of this fact might somehow have made a profound difference in her life. Because the truth is, as disposable as Bart’s movie is, she knows she is jealous that he has made it and she has not; that he has achieved his dream and that she doesn’t even know what her dream is anymore. What if she had taken the $200,000? Would she really have started Snatch again? She thinks of the last issue—vibrator reviews, for God’s sake—and suddenly sees how insular and shrill and single-minded her magazine had become. How, in a word, tiresome.
By the time the movie ends Margaret is emotionally depleted and very tipsy. She stumbles out of the theater, thinking that maybe she will just take a nap in the back seat of her car before she drives home. Stopping at the water fountain, she slurps greedily at the tepid water, trying to ignore the pale green lump of gum stuck to the drain. The water tastes of rust, but she’s so thirsty she doesn’t care.
“Margaret?” she hears a voice behind her say. “Is that you, Margaret Miller?”
She turns to see a small round woman in track pants and a yellow polo shirt, hair cut in a matronly shag that frames a squat pug nose. The woman has the pink plump cheeks of the well fed and manicured and shampooed. Behind her is an equally small man in penny loafers and a “Sand Hill Cart Races Runner Up” sweatshirt that doesn’t quite disguise his premature paunch.
The woman places herself just inches from Margaret’s face and beams, her expression not wavering from its pure childlike joy even as Margaret continues to wrinkle her brow in confusion. “Remember me? Kelly Maxfield? From your class at Millard Fillmore?”
“Oh,” says Margaret weakly. Her first thought is that she can’t believe that this woman is her age. Has Kelly aged prematurely or is Margaret simply stunted? Margaret has a dim recollection of a plump girl in her class who matched the color of her shoelaces to her socks. Pleasant if forgettable. The same girl, she now recalls, that her mother has been nagging her to get in touch with for the last month. “Wow.”
“I can’t believe it’s been ten years! We missed you at the reunion, you know,” Kelly says. She grabs the arm of the man standing next to her, who smiles vaguely. “This is my husband, Duncan. Duncan, this is Margaret; she was—I’m serious here—the smartest girl in my high school. Everyone used to try to cheat off her tests.” She looks at Margaret with bright eyes and laughs. “Of course, I never did. Which is probably why I ended up at San Jose State instead of Stanford.”
Margaret smiles faintly. “So, what are you doing these days, Kelly?”
“I’m a publicist. Do you know of Maxfield & Associates? Of course you wouldn’t have unless you were in the industry. But anyway, that’s me. High-tech PR. Mostly I do social networking and wireless and big pharma.” She grimaces. “Oh! I should have said before, great news about your father’s IPO! I’ve been tracking it. You must be thrilled.”
This is not the word Margaret would have chosen, but she holds her tongue. Despite her mother’s tirade this afternoon, Margaret is silenced by an understanding of how much it would mortify Janice if the family drama ended up in the paper. And publicists aren’t to be trusted with discretion. Los Angeles was lousy with publicists, pretty young celebrity parasites with their botoxed brows and carb-free diets who made their living lying to the papers. Bart had a publicist, a girl named Bunny who called Margaret “Meredith” and specialized in getting items planted in Teen People.
“Absolutely,” Margaret lies. “We’re just thrilled.”
“Tell him I say hello. I saw him at a conference this spring,” Kelly continues. “Though I’m actually on maternity leave right now. We just had our first baby—Audrey, four months old. Pretty difficult to think about the wi-fi market when I’ve got a baby grabbing for my boob—pardon me, but it’s the truth—every twenty minutes. Thank God we found a nanny so that we could get out and have some mommy-daddy time, isn’t that right?” She squeezes Duncan’s hand and Duncan shakes his head briefly, as if trying to focus, and smiles again. He looks like he hasn’t slept in months. “We were dying to see a movie. Didn’t you love it? Thruster?”
“It was great,” manages Margaret.
“I’m such a fan of Ysabelle van Lumis. And that guy Bartholo mew Whatshisface? What a hunk. I’m a sucker for a British accent. Sorry, Duncan!” She pokes him in the ribs with a French-manicured finger. Duncan doesn’t seem to notice; he looks like he’s sleeping standing upright.
“Actually,” says Margaret. And then—the words seem to fall out of her mouth without her even thinking about it—“Bart’s my boyfriend.”
“Ha ha—no, he’s mine! I called him first!” Kelly says. Then, seeing the pained expression on Margaret’s face: “You’re serious?”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” she belatedly demurs.
Kelly’s eyes go big. “I mean…wow, Margaret. That’s just amazing. I had no idea. You’re dating a movie star!”
“Yeah, well,” says Margaret awkwardly. She eyes the exit behind Kelly’s shoulder, wondering if she can make a run for it without looking like a total moron.
“Look at you, living the glamorous life! I’d heard you were in L.A. And here I was just going on and on about myself. So sorry; I do that sometimes, you know? They say it’s such a bad thing for a publicist to do. We’re supposed to be zip-lipped. Wow. Bartholomew Whatshisface. I swear—Duncan, everyone always said that Margaret was going to be someone, and we were right…. But, wait, why are you seeing the movie here? You must have seen it before, right? Oh, gosh—did you go to the premiere?”
“Um…” Kelly stands there waiting for Margaret to say something. Margaret, backed into a corner, hopes that if she says nothing, Kelly will shut up and move on.
Kelly has
no such plans. “I want to hear all about what the interesting people do in L.A. I mean, what are you doing? I recall that my mom said that your mom had told her you were some kind of famous writer or something? You were working for some women’s magazine, right? Was it Vogue? Elle? I’m so sorry, I can’t remember.”
“Well,” begins Margaret. She sees an entire alternate reality materialize in her imagination: the award-winning magazine leading to a six-figure book deal; the fulsome profile in the pages of the New York Times Magazine; the couture dress worn on the red carpet of the Golden Globes, Bart on her arm; the sleek midcentury modern home in the Hills; the breezy, happy family vacations on St. Bart’s, to which she is able to treat her adoring parents and sister as a Christmas present. It’s suddenly too exhausting to contemplate lying anymore.
“Oh, Christ,” she says, realizing belatedly that she is actually very drunk after all. “Here’s the deal. Bart dumped me months ago, and I owe him twelve thousand dollars. My magazine—which, let’s face it, was an outdated idea even when I started it—just went under, and never had more than fifteen thousand readers anyway. I’m a failed feminist academic, which I realize is something of a redundancy, and I’ve got a half dozen credit card companies after me. Did I mention I had to move back in with my parents? My father just called me a loser and tried to bribe me to testify against my mother, who, in turn, disapproves of everything I do. The only remaining person with the slightest modicum of respect for me is my fourteen-year-old sister, who doesn’t know any better. Yet.”
“Oh,” says Kelly, and her hand clutches at her chest in a little spasm of surprise. “I’m so sorry. That’s just terrible.”
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