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Palace Theater
- University of Pittsburgh Press
- Chapter
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Palace theater n those years before television, the first movie i saw there—it was Cinderella—sent me screaming up the aisle, the huge mice with their sharp teeth looming over me, my mother chasing after me. Later, i learned to love what i’d feared. the dark more real than daylight, even the scariest ones—The Creature From the Black Lagoon, Them—that made me hide my eyes and crouch under the torn leather seats. it wasn’t much of a palace, those ripped seats, the floor sticky with spilled sodas, its faintly urinous odor, but in the dark doris day whispered to rock hudson on a Princess phone, her voice breathy with secrets, and grace Kelly and Cary grant careened in a little car down a steep hill, a place called the french riviera behind them, so fake it looked real. in the dark every road was a road out of there. i don’t remember what the movie was that day, it could’ve been anything. nothing was real but her father waiting for us in the dark of the Palace theater after school. the red stitching on his shirt said “august,” his name. he smelled of gasoline. outside it was May. i was eight. he sat between us, put my hand in his lap, something slick and soft as a mouse. i didn’t move. i’d been taught to obey the parent, especially the father, to move softly around his anger or else he wouldn’t come at night to save me when the dark pressed in and the bad man hid underneath my bed. once i had read in a newspaper at breakfast at the kitchen table—i was a precocious reader— a story that said a girl was raped. i asked my mother what that meant, to be raped, but i pronounced it wrong, pronounced it as though it were wrapped, like a present, or rapt, like awe. i don’t remember her explanation. i wasn’t sure if this was the same thing, but later, at home, i was sick. Sitting on the toilet i told my mother what had happened, begged her not to tell anyone, especially my father. i don’t remember what she said, if she said, it wasn’t your fault, you didn’t do anything wrong, said, he shouldn’t have done that. We never spoke of it again. years later, after she was dead, after [44.198.180.108] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:52 GMT) the Palace theater had long been torn down, i asked my father if she’d told him. yes, he said, she told me. i asked him why they didn’t do something. She told me you didn’t want us to, he said. So they obeyed. as if i were the parent. ...