Copy Link
Add to Bookmark
Report
anada459
, ____, ( 27/10/01 anada459 ,
/ \ ,_____ (--|_\_,,_, _ _| _ __________ ,-.______ _,---._ __ _/ \
/ \+------ _| ) | |(_|(_|(_|_ .net------/ )----.-' `./-/ \
/ / ( |__, ( ( ,' `/ /|
\ / \ `-" \'\ / |
\ / "Dovetail" `. , \ \ / |
Y-------- ----------/`. ,'-`----Y |
/ by Infernal ( ; mEoW!@/| '
i________________________________________________| ,-. ,-'_______/ | /
| | | ( * | /
|____________________ Anada is cat-friendly! __) |__\ `.___________|/
`--' `--'
He sits in the collapsible lawn chair behind the minivan, waiting for
the movie to start. His fingers are dusted with a light coating of potato
chip crumbs, which he wipes on his pants leg before reaching over to put a
hand on her arm. She looks over at him, smiling sheepishly, thanking him
for coming to the drive-in with her. “I'm sorry about the kids coming,” she
shrugs, clearly embarrassed, clearly uncomfortable. He finds her
awkwardness endearing, her light blush cute, but let's be honest ñ he isn't
thrilled about the kids, one hers, one a friend, coming along. They're on
the roof of the minivan, snickering through blue-lipped mouthfuls of slushie
and that uniquely shitty, fake-tasting pizza sold only in school cafeterias
and drive-in movie concession stands, the stuff with the little standing
puddles of oil like lakes on its cheese surface. Snickering at mom and a
boy (is that your new BOY-friend? Are you DA-ting?), snickering at each
other, at themselves, at being nine, which is to say about nothing we can
know or remember.
The sun begins to disappear and the previews come on, bursts of the
feel-good movie themes of the summer crackling through the AM speakers
of the minivan. His hand is still on her arm, and he feels magnanimous
ñ not upset about the kids' presence, and if not in love with this perfectly
okay girl at his left, then definitely madly in like with her. The air has
cooled off, and a breeze is drying the humid sweat of earlier and bringing
the hay scent of the field next to the drive-in. Kids are running around
other minivans in endless relays, and several overweight, mustachioed,
florid men with orange vests wielding flashlights are trudging around the
grounds of the drive-in, making van people move to the back and car people
move to the front, and telling the people in the back row not to turn around
and watch the movie behind them in the back half of the lot, or risk getting
kicked off the premises.
He takes his hand off her arm and rubs the back of her neck, and she
squints and smiles. He's twenty minutes and a million and a half miles
away from his own life, and immersed in a scenario totally unknown to
him, yet somehow as familiar as the crack of a bat on the first day of
spring, or the notebook smell of a new school year. A clean, content,
low-watt, comfort-food kind of scenario, far from the empty calories and
blinding flashes of his normal Friday night routine. People in this
scenario went to bed instead of passing out, and they woke up before the
sun hit its zenith, surrounded by pillows and not beer cans. They would
never take two days off work and drive across the state to see a band in
this scenario. They wouldn't sit up all night on a work night painting or
writing, or having delirious sex with a semisensate stranger from the bar.
One of the kids pokes her head over the lip of the back of the van,
checking on the grownups, asking for some Sun Chips. He reaches down
and hands up the bag, trying to remember which kid is hers and which kid
is the friend.
The movie starts, and he glances at the people to the right and to
the left of his little group. Couples with kids, one on a picnic blanket,
eating sandwiches and drinking Caffeine Free Dr. Peppers through the straws
with the bendy joints in them ñ the youngest boy scrunching and unscrunching
his straw like an accordion. The other group sits on the lip of a pickup
truck, the husband leaning back and resting his weight on his hands, arms
corded with muscles earned from hard work, a daughter already asleep with
her head resting on one of his blue-jeaned legs. The wife sits Indian
style, eyes darting from the screen to the son and daughter running around
the truck, paying no attention to the movie at all, slapping up plumes of
dust with bare feet.
He can't concentrate on the movie. He wants to soak up every nuance
of this foreign country, this alien landscape, this place he denied himself
entry to a dozen years and a thousand little decisions ago. He feels
like he felt at his high school reunion; like some benevolent double
agent, infiltrating and scouting, waiting for the inevitable whistle to
blow and for someone to find him out and send him back to the world he
knows. He feels like a tourist.
She asks if he's doing all right, and he smiles and says yes. If she
was his wife or even more than a casual date, he'd lean over and kiss her
on the mouth right now, a quick and friendly kiss, suitable for in front of
the kids, maybe just a quarter of a second longer than a peck, as a hint of
what could happen later when the family is back behind the safety of the
walls of its home, the kids are tucked away, and the grownups have a few
moments alone to slip between clean sheets in an air-conditioned, tastefully
appointed bedroom, free from the time clock for a few simple hours, able to
enjoy some low-watt, content, comfort-food intimacy, no sparks or empty
calories or blinding flashes, but satisfaction, contentment, and the
simplicity of spooning and sleeping off the week's cares.
They are not that close, but he takes a calculated risk and brushes a
stray lock of hair away from her face, his fingertips skimming her forehead.
She smiles at his smile, and then one of the kids pops her head over the top
of the van again and says she has to go to the bathroom. He looks up as she
asks the kid “didn't I tell you to go before the movie started?” She smiles
and shrugs again, and he stands up and puts his hands out to the kid,
offering to help her down from the roof of the minivan. Pleased at the
attention, the kid all but jumps, and he catches her and puts her down on
the ground with a small grunt of exertion. Mother and child head off, hand
in hand, to the concession stand and the bathroom, and he leans back in his
collapsible lawn chair and tries to watch the movie.
(The last time he went to a movie it was with two people from the
bar, and they all stashed bottles of beer in long overcoat pockets, careful
not to let the bottles clink as they bought their tickets with straight
faces and shuffled into one of the umpteen rooms of the multiplex. One
of the others dropped a beer bottle halfway through the movie, and it
clanked loudly as it rolled down under all the seats, picking up speed
as it caromed down the sloped floor, to hit the front wall with a loud
clunk, drowned out by the laughter of the other moviegoers. No one came
and threw them out, though.)
She is back with the kid, and he stands up to help the kid back up
onto the minivan roof, where she rolls over on top of her friend and begins
roughhousing. The other kid immediately pipes up that she has to go to
the bathroom too, causing a groan of frustration from his date. He just
smiles and holds up a hand, and says he's got to go too, so he'll take
the kid. He helps her down and, with a smile from her as she sits back
down in her collapsible lawn chair, he heads to the brightly-lit concession
stand with this stranger in tow. He offers to hold her hand and she just
gives him a withering nine-year-old look.
He gets to the concession stand, which is almost empty of people,
since the movie just started. One kid is playing a pinball game, and a
gaggle of teenage girls is flirting with the boy selling nachos and pizza
and corn dogs. He points his charge toward the ladies room, on the right,
and he heads left, where an old pissy smell, like the privies at a
campground, wafts over, canceling out the mummy dust funk of a building
closed up and locked seven months of the year, and the scalded grease
reek of the concession stand food. He walks into an unnaturally bright
room with buzzing fluorescent lights, and he steps up to a urinal whose
flusher is running continuously, gurgling as it sends a small cascade
endlessly down the rust-rimed drain.
While he's pissing, he shakes his head to clear it from a sudden bout
of lightheadedness. He is thinking of the millions of small steps that it
takes to get to where anyone is in life, and how, like an unwieldy ship
at sea, once a course is charted by those tiny movements, the drift takes
on a life of its own, the arc and angle of a life lived become ruled by
forward motion and inertia. From its launching at birth, the outcomes and
paths taken can vary so widely as to be a world apart from some equally
likely outcome. He is trying to remember when and where he ended up on the
course he's on now, without calculation or much in the way of planning,
without forward vision or a map to guide. He can not see how he could ever
end up near his date, or the people he sees around him here, even if he
tried to change direction now and devoted what remained of his life to
steering himself closer to their courses. The gulf is so huge, but it was
made that way by so many small adjustments, an infinite number of tiny
decisions ñ and what if any one of those decisions had, like a rock in the
spokes, deflected him and made a minute change of angle that sent him
somewhere entirely different?
He flushes and runs his hands under the tap quickly, drying them on
his pants rather than chancing the blackened towel hanging from the wall.
He leaves and stands looking at the teenage girls at the food counter,
waiting for the little girl to come out of the ladies room. When she
does, he pretends he doesn't see her at first, even when she is standing
right next to him. Finally, in mock exasperation, she stomps her foot
and makes a blubbery, spitty exclamation ñ “phuh!” ñ and, cackling, he
scoops her up and plops her on his shoulders. She squeals, and he
walks, jouncing her, back out of the building, ducking when they get to
the door.
He galumphs her back across the lot, glancing up at the screen,
hearing loud and soft snippets of the soundtrack from the open car windows
all around him. He nods at men in sleeveless shirts sipping beers and sodas
on their tailgates or lawn chairs, or on the trunks of their cars. Finally,
he sees the minivan, and he quickens the pace, the little girl on his
shoulders squealing and giggling and hanging on to his ears for balance.
He leans over and she clambers onto the roof of the minivan, causing
her friend to cry “I didn't get a horsey ride back from the bathroom!” He
can't believe how winded he is by this minor exertion, and he plops into
the collapsible lawn chair with a sigh. She looks over at him, her eyes
crinkling in a bit of a smile, and he smiles back, both faces lit with
the low-watt punch-drunkenness of a long week of keeping things running
smoothly. She leans over and kisses him on the mouth, lingering just a
little bit longer than a peck, and he arches an eyebrow as she pulls away.
She gives him their secret smile in return, the one they taught each other
when they were dating, and lowers her eyelids sexily. They've been fighting
recently, and tonight is to be when they make up, and remember why they
liked each other in the first place. He feels a lump in his throat and
looks away, at the screen, at a movie he has no chance now of keeping track
of, overwhelmed as he sometimes is by the simplest and gravest of emotions.
He is distracted by the clink of glass on gravel, and he looks up to
the car ahead of them, in the back row of smaller cars, just before his
front line of minivans and pickup trucks. A group of three friends is
drinking beer they snuck in, and one has just dropped his bottle on the
ground. All three are guffawing, pushing each other and swigging from other
bottles with lithe, easy abandon. One of them, a guy with greasy hair and
tattoos on both arms, grabs the dropped bottle and opens it abruptly,
pointing it at one of the others ñ a girl with a black crop-top and a
pierced navel ñ so that when the shaken-up beer is let loose, it sprays on
her. She squeals and throws what looks, in the failing light, like a
handful of potato chips at him and calls him some obscene name, laughing.
He glances to his left, where she is watching the movie now, and then
back to the group ahead of them. He wonders about empty calories and
blinding flashes, about passing out in the arms of a semisensate stranger,
about doors he has closed off in his life that he was never even aware of
until long after he'd passed them. He touches the safe, low-watt warmth of
her arm beside him, and he is grateful for it, but he sees the lithe limbs
and dangling cigarettes, the lips and lashes and harsh laughter ahead of
him, and he wonders. He glances up at the owl-eyed girls on the roof of the
minivan, enraptured by the movie, and he thinks about the millions of small
steps that it takes to get to where anyone is in life, and how the arc and
angle of a life lived become ruled by forward motion and inertia.
/\___/\ ____________________________________________________________ /\___/\
\ -.- / \ -.- /
`-.^.-' (c) 2001 Anada e'zine by Infernal `-.^.-'
/"\ ________________________________________________________________ /"\
