Driver's Education (15 page)

“Oh. Ha. Oh, Finn. I think we're pretty far beyond that.”

•  •  •

It's quiet, almost. There's some dog barking somewhere. And then that bark turns to human yelling, and then grunting, swift blunt kicks, and
then crumpled whimpering, and then music, something loud, then more barking, more yelling, grunting, kicking, crumpled heart-wrenching whimpers, in that pattern a million times over. I listen, holding my breath. I try to discriminate between the different voices, human and canine. I try to decide how far away they are, counting short seconds after hearing thunder.

“Is this it?” Randal rocks on his heels. We're both drunk. So drunk. The hour-old scotch draining the wetness from our mouths.

“Shh.”

“But—there's nothing here.”

The plot of land where my granddad and the Rev built their house of records is now empty. The few buildings that do surround it are brick and look desolate and heavy, like hangovers. When I step from the curb to the sidewalk and then onto the earth there are weeds that are too tall, and there are gnats, making laps around my neck, my ears.

The wind's starving. It blows weakly, pushing just hard enough to move the leaves of these giant oaks overhead. Slices of light from the streetlamps above us shift, following patternless tracks. I trace the lot's perimeter with the camera. I follow the lines of its overgrown boundaries, zooming in on the blades of grass so many times until the world exists solely as spotted green pixels. I expect to be trembling, but I'm actually deathly still. The only change, I realize, is that I've quite suddenly become hot. Human-torch hot.

Randal jogs to the middle of the space and the streetlamps light up his forehead and his shoulders.

I keep filming for my granddad. I go from an extreme wide shot to a long shot; I cut away to the buildings that surround the empty lot so he'll have a sense of context and place. So he can imagine where things might've stood.

“I mean, you didn't think anything would actually be here, though, right? It's not as though you
believe
that story.”

He says again: “Because there's nothing here.”

1964: Unbelieving, Part 1

By Colin A. McPhee

When I turned sixteen, Earl asked me if I'd like to work at the Avalon.

It was on a Sunday afternoon, and during the previous week my father had been gone on one of his itinerant wanderings, as he so often was. I had just finished watching
The Night of the Iguana
for the second time, and I can recall leaning against the ticket booth, weighing the options of what to do with the weekend's last precious hours.

“You spend enough time here as it is,” Earl said. “You might as well get paid for it.”

Fittingly, Earl had aged cinematically since the theater first opened. The grooves and wrinkles that pleated his cheeks were so pronounced that they seemed to be a trick of makeup or lighting—not normal wear. The grey in his hair so suddenly thick that it had to have been painted on, dyed. When he spoke, he pulled absently at a Twainish mustache he only very rarely trimmed.

“What would you have me do?” I asked.

He shrugged, and his too-short arms fell to his stretched sides. “Whatever you'd like. You know this place better than most folks who already work here.”

“Give me some options.”

“Ushering. Ticket sales. The projector.”

Behind me, a customer counted out $1.25 for a ticket to the evening show and the wind whistled in the waning light. On at least ten separate occasions Earl had offered to give me a tour of the theater's projection room (Earl being a man who knew very much, though very much about only one thing, that thing being how movies worked), and each time I had declined. Until that day, the closest I had ever been to the projection room was the second row of the theater's balcony, from which I would periodically turn back to stare into the machine's wraithy white light.

At that point, I was beginning to parse out why I was spending so much time at the cinema. In the films I found an escape from the realities that boiled near the back of my brain. My father's absence, my mother's death—her indirect suicide. I wanted to believe, fervently so, that movies—my refuge—lacked the mechanical, banal explanations that so accurately explained those ghosts.

“How about the concession stand,” I said.

I bargained for a wage of $1.75 per hour and we set a schedule consisting primarily of nights and weekends—and our house, where I was born and where my mother died, sat mostly empty and alone. I'd return there in the evenings, after the Avalon's last showing, and after listening to the echoes of locks tumbling shut, I'd search for signs that my father had been home. Fingerprints in the dust that clothed the kitchen table. Dissected newspapers. Overturned pages of my script. His ratty hat, his smell.

More and more, though, it was becoming just me. I'd brush my teeth in the bathroom at the top of the stairs, where my mother used to lock herself away. I'd lock my bedroom door when I slept at night. I'd leave the house to itself, to its conversing sounds.

•  •  •

The girl who worked at the concession stand with me was named Clare Murkowski. She was a year older than me, and at first I thought I recognized her in a vague, unsure way from the high school I attended, where I had very few friends and wanted even fewer. She had shoulder-length hair the color of coffee beans and a stark face: Faith Domergue in
Vendetta,
minus a quarter of the softness in the mouth and nose. Our shifts were nearly identical, save an hour or two on Sunday, when she often had
to leave to babysit an eight-year-old half sister who was a result of her mother's second marriage.

“It's strange,” she told me as she loaded corn kernels into a giant steel drum. “Only sharing part of something with someone.”

I said, “But isn't that exactly what sharing is?” and Clare ate a kernel raw, sucking away the oil before crunching it between her molars.

“She doesn't look a thing like me. She's supposedly my sister—”

“Half sister.”

“And she doesn't look a thing like me. She looks like my stepfather.”

“Well, that's not the part you share.”

I was wiping dust from the menu that hung on the stand's back wall while Clare slipped behind me, her boyish hips gliding alongside the glass candy display. She began positioning boxes of Milk Duds and Junior Mints in stacks, and then in perfect rows.

“I know you from somewhere,” she said. “You go to Hackley?”

“Sleepy Hollow.”

“Then that's not it.”

“Maybe,” I said, “we have the same mother.”

It was the first Friday afternoon that I had worked, and as I'd learn in coming weeks, Friday afternoons were a dismally slow time for the Avalon. No one attended matinees at the end of the workweek, and the evening show didn't start until 8:00, which meant the audience wouldn't start trickling into the theater until 7:15. And so we passed those arid hours doing precisely what we were doing then: cleaning surfaces that didn't need to be cleaned, building skyscrapers with boxes of candy that'd already been neatly arranged, popping enough popcorn to fill one of the lumbering buses that we'd watch pass on Saw Mill Road. Listening to Earl as he instructed us,
Never ask if that'll be all
—
always say, “Will that be a large?”

“You smoke?” Clare had fanned out the Milk Duds in a spoked half circle, peacock's feathers. She tilted her head and chewed at the ends of her dark hair as she regarded the new design.

“Sure,” I said, though the truth was that I didn't; I didn't but often I'd imagine, very vividly, that I did.

Clare gave Earl a wave as we passed through the lobby's two grand doors, the brass lions that served as their handles now a little tarnished, a little rusted. And because the theater was empty, and because Earl's white head was buried in yesterday's newspaper, he waved back. A shooing away.

“You're doing it wrong,” she told me when I'd choked my way through half the cigarette.

“What do you mean I'm doing it wrong?” I shifted the cigarette from the base of my fingers to between the two middle knuckles; I brought it to a different corner of my mouth. “It's smoking. You can't do it wrong.”

“You can,” Clare said. She leaned against the theater's brick wall and crossed her feet at the ankles. She held one elbow and let the cigarette dangle from a drooped wrist. “And you are.”

There was a popping blast from a Chevy that pulled away from the curb where we stood, and we fanned the exhaust away from our faces. Clare explained, “There are seventeen different ways to smoke.”

“Seventeen.”

“Rita Hayworth,” she said, “will hold the cigarette at the very end of the filter, and only with the very tips of her fingers. When she's not smoking it, she'll keep it chin level.” Clare demonstrated and the smoke pooled between her lips.

She continued, “Now, Bette Davis. She grips it a little higher up. And sometimes—sometimes she'll rest her thumb against the butt. Then, when she exhales, it's like she kisses the air.” Clare puckered her lips and the smoke flew forward in a straight, steady stream. She added, “But none of this is helpful to you. You don't want to be smoking like Rita Hayworth or Bette Davis or Jayne Mansfield. For you we need Richard Burton or Paul Newman. People who know how to brood—which, incidentally, you can do in twelve different ways.”

With a thin gold lighter she relit my cigarette, which had extinguished. She gripped both my shoulders and rotated me until my back was against the brick wall.
Tilt your head,
she told me, and I did.
No
—
not down, up. Lift your chin up
. She flipped the collar of the grey dinner jacket we were both required to wear, creasing the fabric until the wool lapel
scratched my jaw line.
Hold it with three fingers
—
no, not like that. Pinch it between your thumb and middle finger. Good. Now, rest your pointer finger on the filter.

She took my wrist, which was rigid, still like a mannequin, and she lifted the cigarette to my mouth.

“Good.”

“And who is this?”

“Steve McQueen.”

When we'd finished outside and had taken up our posts behind the concession stand, Clare produced a journal of white lined paper bound in red cardboard, the top half of which was missing. On the bottom half she'd written in clean block letters: HOW TO DO THINGS RIGHT. She flipped three-quarters of the way through the notebook, which was alphabetized, until she reached S—SMOKING, 17 WAYS.

“I'm sure there are more,” she said, thrusting the book into my hands. “But these seventeen are the best.”

There were names—the five she mentioned outside, and then twelve more. In addition, each entry included a year, a movie, and a paragraph description. So:

RITA HAYWORTH. 1946.
GILDA.
Hold it at the end and with the tips. Don't blow out smoke until you have to. Best if your hair's down. And red.

I thumbed through the journal, stopping at random intervals, while Clare shoveled popcorn into a yellow box for the first customer we'd had in hours. I leaned against a counter stacked with paper cups and napkins, and I read.

S—SMILING. 29 WAYS.

S—SLAPPING A MAN. 8 WAYS (and counting).

T—TYING SOMEONE UP. 11 WAYS.

D—DRINKING A BEER (bottled). 6 WAYS.

D—DRINKING A BEER (in a glass). 2 WAYS.

K—KISSING. 4 WAYS.

L—LAUGHING. 13 WAYS.

F—FALLING IN LOVE. 9 WAYS.

C—CRYING. 319 WAYS.

We added to Clare's list over that summer. When our shifts had ended, we'd sit in the balcony's front row, our arms hooked over the brass rail, and we'd study the movies for new ways of doing things, iterations of movements we'd already memorized, and we'd scribble them in her journal, in the dark.

“I've never seen Rex Harrison wear a hat like that,” I'd lean over and whisper to her.

“Write it down.”

But there were also new things we saw: whole actions that Clare had missed that we wrote on new sheets of paper that were then stapled into the journal with great care devoted to keeping the alphabetical order intact. Between S—SHAVING and S—SLEEPING:

S—SHOOTING A LOADED HANDGUN. 37 WAYS.

She had a way with the Avalon's customers. Almost without fail, she could get someone to commit to a larger soda, a bigger bucket of popcorn. She'd say, How the West Was Won
spans fifty years, you know. I think that necessitates a large.
Or:
You'll get thirsty watching Conrad Birdie do all that hip thrusting—you're going to want as much soda as you can handle.
They'd smile at her—strangely at first, but then graciously, as if they'd been let in on some secret; they'd agree to whatever she was pitching as they dug in their wallets for an extra quarter.

I don't know if Clare thought she was pretty. She was, but not very; she wasn't unpretty, either. That summer she and I had both cultivated a very distinct and schooled sense of what pretty was, on the WAYS TO BE PRETTY page, and during discreet moments when it seemed like no one was watching, when she was waiting for the customer who was
digging through her purse, or when I was cleaning the candy counter, I'd catch glimpses of her fixing herself. Of her looking at a magazine spread of Tina Louise or Pamela Green and cocking her head just so. Moving her hair and tucking it back on the other side. Pushing out her lips. Pulling them back in and shaking her head
no, no
.

Increasingly, I wrote pages of my script at the concession stand, during the downtime between showings, instead of in my father's room. The paper would often be stained with butter and grease, with chocolate fingerprints—but still, each night I'd slip them into the same drawer where the rest of the endless manuscript lived, breathed, ballooned. Still trapped behind a screen, the boy grew older: his hair darkened and his voice deepened; his body stretched and his shoulders filled out. When he celebrated his sixteenth birthday, he'd sailed a dozen seas. He'd ridden into a million sunsets.