Zoetrope: All-Story Extra

Lorrie is eight, in the fourth-grade. Her hair, blown from its previous neat bows, tangles into knots and houses several small twigs. Today, she walks beside the ghost of her mother. Lorrie's nails are petal-pink. The windows of the houses beside the sidewalk mirror her face. She stares at the reflection girl's small brown eyes and wild hair and marvels at the lack of reflection where her mother stands. She places her hands to her face and stares at the little pink half-moons against her flesh.

"Do you want to see a movie?" Beverly asks. They are five blocks from the theater, a short walk past the houses on Turnaker.

"Yes," Lorrie says. A green paper star from school reading "Tolerance" still sticks to her shirt. "Tolerance," she recites, "is the ability to recognize and respect the opinions, practices, or beliefs of others." She steps away from the window and scowls. Her scuffed shoes tap on the sidewalk. Tap. Tap. Tap.

She peeks down at her socks, stained with mustard from the lunch-time hot-dog, then glances up at her mother who is clean in the honey muslin dress, wearing her fine Italian pumps. Her mother is perfect, always looks tidy, and never spills messes on herself. Her French-Canadian grandmother, Jacquèline, on the other hand, looks like someone stole her suitcase and dressed her at the thrift-store for an emergency trip. The only things she keeps up are her nails, immaculate nails, long dragon-sloping nails. She has a mean, pickle-eating face and her skin is old as parchment. Lorrie remembers her teacher defining the word "ancient" as "not belonging to this time." Grandmother Jacquèline is ancient; soon her skin will give out and she will crumble like an old cookie.

"Shall we go to the park first?" her mother asks. Beverly has beautiful bow-shaped lips that never need gloss. She looks graceful, rifling her hand through her dark hair. At thirty, she's slender and shapely. Men often looked at her before the accident and smiled. Her mother never smiled back.

"Yes," Lorrie replies. Abruptly, they cross the street and walk in the opposite direction. The neighbors on the Carlson's porch gossip among themselves. Beverly gives Lorrie a worried look. Lorrie stares at the hem of the honey muslin dress, which follows the outline of her mother's beautiful legs soundlessly. It was always her mother's favorite dress.

Beverly looks sad today. Perhaps she remembers the way it felt to be a normal family. Or maybe she sees, like Lorrie does, the crane pulling the family car from the river, the shouts from Mr. Robert, or the wan faces of the Shirley sisters in their twin red parkas. Lorrie remembers those few hours in detail, especially the way it felt to rub gritty sleep from her eyes as Grandma Jacquèline drove them to the bridge.

"Mother, why won't you talk to them?"

"Because I picked you."

"But it would be nice if they could hear you."

"I told you. They can't."

"Grandma Jacquèline doesn't believe me when I tell her we go places. She says, `I'm sure you'll have fun with your little friend Sally. Do you need anything else? I'm on the phone.'" Lorrie crinkles her face while she says this, trying to resemble her grandmother's pruned face and sharp voice.

"That's the way your father's family is," her mother says, ruffling Lorrie's hair. "Honey, you're eight. She doesn't have the first clue what to do with you, and you don't like to play mahjongg or poker with her friends."

"She stays upstairs a lot."

"That's because she's old."

"And I hate her wig."

"She can't help it if her hair is thin," her mother says, smiling her amused smile.

"She can help it," Lorrie argues half-heartedly, trying to out-do herself and make her mother smile again. "She doesn't need to have that big bushy mop on her head. No one should have a full head of clown-red hair at sixty-five anyway."

"She's French-Canadian," her mother says, then like an afterthought, "Showy. The whole family was showy."

"I don't like her," Lorrie tells her. "She ignores me and smokes in the house. Father never smoked in the house."

"She's set in her ways, I know. But I don't know what to tell you. Let's sing a song. What do you want to try today? A lullaby? A musical?"

"Neither," Lorrie says.

"All right," Beverly says, putting a silent-hushing finger to her lips then changing the subject, "let's do cartwheels in the park." When they arrive at the park, her mother takes off at a run and turns a series of cartwheels. When flipping onto her hands, the honey skirt falls towards her face and her underpants show. Lorrie looks at the delicate lace edging. She turns a few cartwheels herself, but hers are clumsy, not erect and flat like her mother's. "It's such a relief," Beverly shouts, "never to worry if your underpants show--never worry about underpants at all." She flips her dress up again, holds it up high, and turns in each direction; her blue eyes stare out amusedly above the hem. "Look at my underwear!" she shouts, "Ha ha! None of them can see it. It is great to never worry about anybody or anything--when you get older, you'll know what I mean. I feel so free. I can step on Mrs. Day's flowerbeds. I can say what I want. I don't have to care about anybody but you and me--it could be you and me forever and I wouldn't care." Her mother looks around with a satisfied air.

Tired of waiting for the right time, Lorrie asks, "Why didn't father come back?" She knows the right time will never come and wants to ask her mother now, while she's happy and might answer truthfully.

"He couldn't."

"You're lying. You came back."

"They make promises, Lorrie. They make it seem like it's so fast before your loved ones will join you. The place between here and there is dark--it's difficult to step into."

"Dark like what?"

"Like the absence of light--like a void, or a vacuum."

"Where do you go on the other side? What does it look like? Is there a heaven?"

"Shhh. What time is it?" Beverly says, placing her hands over her ears as if a jarring voice speaks inside her.

"Don't you have a watch?"

"It doesn't work."

"Mine says 1:45."

"We should go! If we want to catch the picture, we should go." Her mother takes off at a run. A stiff breeze blows through the trees. Her mother's skirt is a still shadow traveling with the outline of her legs, oblivious to the weather. Lorrie's culottes ride up around her thighs, and the wind at her back is chill. "Come on, let's go!" Beverly shouts, still running. "Or we'll miss it."

Lorrie sprints across the park. Her shoes are flatter than her mother's and her legs are long. The mock-race ends two minutes later at the theater marquis. The scent of popcorn leaks from the front door. Lorrie thinks of the little hot kernels exploding to fluffy lightness and wonders if that's the way of death and if her mother is somehow holding her strange burnt kernel together. Maybe her mother's ghost-body is like the fine husk of the kernel without the corn; like the ones people pick from their teeth and wipe from the bottom of the bowl, the ones that are brittle and shallow, holding nothing but themselves.

"One ticket please," Lorrie says, but she picks a row that has two adjacent seats. The movie is sad. She and her mother cry. She cries because so many things are coming to her, like the way her mother used to tuck her in or the times she sat on her father's thin shoulders and how he toted her around for hours. She cries because the movie is conveniently sad enough to cry to. She watches her mother watch her. Maybe her mother can tell that Lorrie is so much sadder than the movie is, or maybe she's just looking at her again.

Lorrie places her fingertip on the tear falling from her mother's right eye, on the cheek closest to her, and does so without turning her head. It will not be absorbed or moved by her touch, but continues falling.

The movie, Lorrie discovers, is about a little girl who runs away from home and gets lost in the woods. Lorrie puts her hand on the armrest between them. She looks at her mother's watch, an old wind-up antique with rounded face and delicate sculpted band. Diamond chips are embedded at the quarter-hours. The time reads 3:23. She remembers the clock in her grandmother's car read 3:20 a.m. when they got in the car for the trip to the bridge.

She looks at the screen. In the movie, the big forest ranger has almost found the girl. She is hiding in the bushes, thinking he's a bear. Who cares, and what a dumb girl, Lorrie thinks. But, aha, there is a bear about to maul the girl, and the forest ranger comes up behind him and shoots a tranquilizer at his leg. Lorrie shifts to get comfortable.

"Stop fidgeting," her mother whispers. Normally at the movies, Lorrie places her arm down first and waits for her mother to place her hand lightly on Lorrie's wrist. When she does so this time, Lorrie doesn't feel the weight of her fingers, but senses her presence.

"Was this when you died?" she asks, reaching into her mother's seat to point at the watch face. Her mother's wrist, resting gingerly in her lap, rises with a jolt.

"Don't say that."

"Is this the time of the wreck?"

"Hush, Lorrie. Tell me you love me."

"I love you, mother."

"I love you, too."

"Mother, why don't you look like you did when you drowned? Why don't you have the mark of the dash on your forehead? The bruise on your left shoulder?

"Watch the movie," Beverly says, and starts bawling again. It's lucky no one but Lorrie can hear her, but it's also terrible.

"I can't mother. I want to know."

"I appear how you remember me."

Lorrie stares at her mother until the small gash appears on her forehead, the bruise appears, and her body is riddled with gooseflesh. There are actually a series of bruises, that are oblong and flat like fingertips. She suddenly looks like a weak, little bird. Lorrie closes her eyes and remembers her mother's beautiful hair, beautiful face, beautiful eyes. Her mother returns as she was.

When they leave, it's 4:40 p.m., and they run the few blocks toward home. The little girl in the movie survived, of course. Tap. Tap. Tap. Lorrie's feet move quickly across the ground. The girl in the movie wasn't even handicapped or scarred for life. That's a disappointment, like how people get shot at in the movies and never seem to get hit. Actually, good-looking people don't get hit. Ugly people always do. And cars in the movies never seem to crash unless the bad-guy is in them. In the movies, people's mothers don't usually die either, unless they have cancer.

"Let's walk and be late," Lorrie says, slowing down. "Or let's go to the park again."

Beverly slows and walks briskly beside her. "I don't want you to get in trouble," she says. They walk up her street amidst the fallen purple blooms of the dogwood trees. Lorrie picks up two huge handfuls and crushes them into a tight wad as she reaches the house. The place of death is dark, she thinks, I'm sure of it.

"Lorrie? Lor-rie?" her grandmother calls from the balcony. The house smells like chicken and apple strudel.

"Coming, grandma," Lorrie shouts.

"There's a TV dinner for you on the counter. Just heat it up again."

They enter the house. Her grandmother, wearing a fuschia sweater and a pair of navy slacks, meets them in the hallway. On her head is the poker hat she wears to play cards. She hugs Lorrie in a quick cool clutch then coughs her smoker's cough. Her grandma's friends are already over because she's wearing her dentures, which she sometimes leaves on the table when she walks around the house. "What's that you've got in your hands," she asks.

"Flowers," Lorrie says.

"Put them on the phone-table, dear." Lorrie drops the crushed corpses onto the mahogany. The places where they were smashed have deep purple creases. This is the way a flower bleeds, Lorrie thinks, but the color of creased skin is never red.

"Lorrie, you destroyed them," her grandmother says. "Throw them away."

"Chris's mother sure looks like your father," Beverly says.

"Her nose?"

"No, her eyes."

"What nose?" her grandmother asks.

"Mother says your eyes look like Chris's," Lorrie says.

The grandmother grabs Lorrie by the shoulders, as if in her sudden seizing she can trap her own emotion. "Why do you call him Chris now?" she asks, staring at Lorrie. "You call him `father' if you must and, if you can help it, try not to--"

"Speak of the newly dead," Beverly says.

"Speak of the recently deceased," Jacquèline seems to agree, speaking tiredly. When she's tired or agitated her slight French-Canadian accent becomes pronounced. Lorrie could turn on the television and her grandmother could talk to Pepe le Pieu.

"Can you hear her?" Lorrie asks Jacquèline.

"Who?"

"No," Beverly says. "She can't."

The phone rings in the kitchen. Lorrie and her mother follow Jacquèline in. Beverly sashays around, in sudden bright spirits, spiraling on the tile floor then performing the first 10 steps of a Spanish dance, including the claps. Then she holds her skirt up around her eyes and looks close at Lorrie's grandmother like she is examining a crazy person. "Hello, Bijoux house, this is Jacquèline Bijoux. Hello, Ms. Perkins. Oh, yes." Jacquèline speaks with an unhappy tone. Beverly says, "Boo!" experimentally. No reaction. "Yes. I know--I know she's a bright child. She must be pretending. Mmmmhmmm, an imaginary friend."

"I shouldn't go to school with you again," Beverly says, slumping into a dinette chair. Then she whispers confidentially, "I think you're in trouble."

Jacquèline nods, "That's right. I'll talk to her. Yes, I said I would. What do you expect? A child can't lose her parents and have no probl--" Jacquèline shoos Lorrie from the kitchen. "Go play in your room, dear. Grand-mère Jacquie needs to talk on the phone."

"Can I go upstairs instead?"

"Yes," Jacquèline says, pushing her along with her free hand, then continuing in a low urgent voice, "and expect her to have no problems whatsoever. I'll talk to her tonight. A child that's orphaned needs to believe she has a mother. Losing Bev and Christophe hasn't been easy on any of us."

"Bev!" her mother exclaims heatedly, picking up a dead dogwood bloom and dropping it on the floor. "I hate when she calls me `Bev'!" She sweeps the rest of the blooms from the table with her palm. A shower of purple colors the still air.

"Yes, so sudden. I'll have to talk to her tonight. Yes, Ms. Perkins. I will. Thanks for the call."

Lorrie hears the phone hang up and sprints up the stairs. Erma and Maureen, her grandma's old-lady friends, are seated at the table glaring at each other. "Hello Erma, Maureen," she says politely, though panting and out of breath.

"Hello, Lorrie."

The room they sit in smells like mothballs from recently unboxed polyester and the stale smoke of her grandmother's Benson and Hedges. May air comes in through a crack in the window. Maureen eats nuts from the glass dishes hurriedly, filling her cheeks like a chipmunk. What a pig she is, Lorrie thinks.

Erma, who always seems lost at these games, gazes away from Maureen, out to the balcony. Three glasses of her grandmother's cheap red wine sit beside them. Erma's is almost empty. "It was a shame about your mother," Erma tells Lorrie. "I always liked her, even when she was dating that Gallagher boy, before Chris." Erma stretches her thin arms above her head and lets her eyes settle lightly on Lorrie's face. Her skin is flushed and words blend together. "I remember when she was sixteen and came in the store looking for condoms for her friend Bethany from Detroit; then later she dropped the Gallagher boy and found your father. Though, truthfully, Chris never treated her that well. All that running around." Erma pauses. "I did like that girl," she says, then affirmatively, "yes, I did."

Beverly's eyes fill with tears. "Good old Erma," her mother says. "You should never have stayed here. You should have left when you had the chance."

"I probably shouldn't be saying this," Erma tells Lorrie in a wine-scented whisper.

"Don't tell her," Maureen says.

"You can come to stay at my house anytime. Okay?"

"Okay," Lorrie says.

"I mean it," Erma says urgently, trying to settle her watery glance on Lorrie's eyes securely.

"It's Christophe that we miss," Maureen interrupts, "not the girl."

"It is not," Erma says, gazing out the window.

"Yes, it is."

Erma tells the window in a tight voice, "If he wasn't a philandering, job losing, lousy, good-for-nothing..." Lorries mother nods along, but Lorrie turns to face the wall, hoping to block the voices.

"Don't forget whose house you're in, Erma," Maureen says. "Heavens, have you drank that whole glass already? Lorrie, be a dear and fill up Erma's glass. Erma get a hold of yourself--you're upsetting the child."

"I think I've had quite enough of the games today and I'm going home." Erma says, picking up her blue duster and placing it over her arm. She stares at the pictures along the wall and puts her thumb over Chris's face to look at one of him and Beverly. "She was a beautiful girl," she concludes, then looks over at Lorrie as if to gauge the resemblance. Erma shakes her head sadly and pats Lorrie on the back. "Remember what I told you."

"Vache!" Maureen says under her breath.

Jacquie appears at the doorway. "Erma? Where are you going?"

"Home," Erma says pushing past her.

"We can't play with two. What point is there in that?" Erma makes her slow progress down the stairs and Maureen stuffs her face with nuts. She looks at Jacquèline, grabs another handful, and stands up.

"I should be going then, too," Maureen says, waiting half a moment for a confirmation. Jacquèline rubs her forehead with two fingers and nods.

"Erma was always the nice one," Beverly says. "Maureen is just like--oh never mind. Another French-Canadian friend."

Jacquèline comes over and grips Lorrie's forearms. "Now you made my friends go away. You scared them off." Her face quivers.

"I did not. Maureen was intolerant of Erma."

"What do you know of intolerance? What? I am being told by an eight-year-old girl of intolerance."

"Tolerance," Lorrie recites, "is the ability to recognize and respect the opinions, practices, or beliefs of others."

"Very good, Lorrie," Beverly says.

"Thank you, mother."

"Who are you talking to?" Jacquèline demands. "Your mother is gone. Dead. Never to return Comprends-tu? Who are you talking to? Mon dieu!" Lorrie can tell that she would like nothing better than to launch into a long tirade in French--but that Lorrie would understand very little, so she knows she won't bother.

"You are a mean old woman!" Beverly shouts, suddenly looking frenzied. "Leave my daughter alone." Beverly walks to Jacquèline haughtily, plucks the wig from her head, and drops it on the floor like a roach. Jacquèline's mouth gapes open. The thin blond of her normal hair is a sheer yellow bathing cap.

"Ça va," Jacquèline says, near disintegrating into tears. "Your mother is here? Fine. Ask her this. What year did Philippe and I get married?"

"1942," Beverly says, "but after you were pregnant."

"1942," Lorrie repeats, "after you were pregnant."

"She told you that before she died."

"She did not."

"And on our wedding night," Beverly interrupts, "tell her, Lorrie! Chris got very drunk. He broke your glass vase with the blue birds at the edge, started an argument with me, then left in his car. The car crashed into a tree along the highway and he wrecked it. You made sure to have the towing company tow the car before people could see it. You simply bought him another of the same model and make to avoid embarrassment."

The old woman pales. "What happened?" she asks, "What happened the night Christophe died?"

Beverly begins crying and shouting. "You are terrible. You are insane." Lorrie repeats her, word for word. "You called me a whore, a half-spic whore and accused me of cheating on Christophe. You told him you found a man's cardigan in my car. Chris believed you because he always believed you, but you lied and he, with his implacable cold look walked me silently out to the car and spat in my face. It never mattered to you that he was the one with the infidelities, the countless infidelities--some right under my nose. In the back shed. In the sitting room."

"It was the way of my times," Grandma Jacquie sputters. "It was--"

"Then he drove me home, yelling at me and demanding I prove I didn't cheat. You kept Lorrie over-night so we could `work-it-out.' I cried. I was exhausted. I told him I had no patience for his idiocy, and he started to veer back and forth over the lanes on the bridge."

Jaqueline covers her ears. "That's enough, Beverly."

"Then he hit one side of the bridge and the car spun over the edge. The car went nose-down. His legs were crushed beneath the wheel. The seat had rocked forward and pinned him beneath it. There were five cracks in the windshield, like a star. I said, `Let's get out of here,' but he couldn't budge. He began to cry like a baby, `Don't go. Don't leave me here to die.' I couldn't open the door because it would let the water in too quickly, so we waited as it poured through the cracks in the windshield. Water rose to our waists. I shook from nerves, but had undone my seatbelt and was going to swim for the bank. I couldn't save him. The water was freezing. I thought about Lorrie being left with you, old woman. I was desperate. I tried to push open the door but it would barely move... then Chris's hand came down on my shoulder and held me there. He gave me his calculating look. He held me there until we drowned. Is that enough for you?"

Jacquèline places her hand to her chest as though it pains her. She stares at Lorrie and sinks to her knees on the floor. "It can't be," she says. "You are a mean child trying to kill me. If your mother were here, she'd be kind enough to make your life easier by leaving you alone. She'd leave you alone because she loved you and knew she would cause you to live in madness. If she loved you, she would leave you to live as you've always lived--talking to real people."

"Mother," Lorrie says, watching Beverly's feet leave the ground. "Where are you going?" Her mother looks at Lorrie.

"She doesn't exist, Lorrie," Jacquèline says, gaining firmness in her convictions.

Beverly opens her perfect pale arms and puts them around Lorrie. Lorrie puts her arms around Beverly's waist, but Jacquèline interferes, overwhelms Beverly's corn-kernel-thin ghost-body to displace her. Lorrie feels wrapped in her old bones. Jacquèline clings to Lorrie like she can't get close enough. "I just tried to be decent," she says. Lorrie can smell her stale breath and it makes her sick.

"Mother," Lorrie calls out, pulling away from Jacquèline. "Mother!"

Lorrie closes her eyes, and she can feel Beverly's essence all around her. She smiles and holds her arms up as though she were holding her mother's normal body or a soft wind. "Don't leave," she whispers. "Don't ever leave."

Jacquèline collapses flat on the floor. "Call an ambulance, Lorrie," Beverly says.

Lorrie walks downstairs to the phone in the kitchen and dials. When she returns, her mother weeps. "I felt her. I felt her go by me," Beverly says. "They'll be too late." She places her hands over her ears.

Lorrie leans over her grandmother's still form. She puts her fingers on her grandmother's cool neck and breathes deeply. "It's just you and me now," Lorrie says, but she turns and her mother has also vanished. Nothing stands in the place where she stood. The room is as vast and empty as the universe wrapping its black sky around a single, barely visible star.

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