The Body of Brooklyn

Movies Are a Mother to Me

...................................................................... MoviesAreaMothertoMe apologies to Loudon Wainwright III Did he have a mother? . . . How many people are sepulchred in us? — Edward Dahlberg, Because I Was Flesh t’s a hot summer afternoon in Brooklyn, circa 1965, and my mother and I have just been to the hardware store, Doody’s, which never failed to charm me both with its variety of products — everything from lumber and appliances, to hinges, tools, small metal whatchamacallits that seemed to have some astonishingly esoteric uses — and of course for its excremental name. The latter usually took center stage when my brother and I were in the car; it required fraternal goofiness; otherwise, it was too familiar for a titter, much like that other absurd name of my youth: Stephen Lipshitz, the hunchback of David A. Boody Junior High. These names, I might add, along with that of my least favorite uncle — Hyman Pergament — have always seemed to me near the top of the “You know names can be changed” scale. Before I slide into essayistic nominalism , let me tell you I liked the smell of wood, a dramatically clean tonic of a smell. And I liked hot hot days because they promised dramatic thunderstorms. I was a veritable little drama queen of the senses. I had my mother to myself this day. We returned from the hardware store and the air was as heavy as air gets — when it seems one is carrying it from place to place only to lay it on top of another heavy layer of air that one must carry someplace else, as though we were trying to build castles in the air with cinder blocks or were the grain to the air’s millstone. I rolled down our porch awning, the creaky sound of metal and old dry fabric, as the sky darkened and then darkened some more. My mother was in the kitchen cooking Friday supper, and nothing could be wrong with chopped liver on its way. I remember the light I inside the kitchen as orangy. I kept turning back and forth from the dark day, thunder just starting its distant warning, to my mother and her quiet bustle. Once she caught my eye and turned away. The thunder came closer. And then it all burst apart. The sky flashed on the dark day as if a cosmic light switch were clicking on and off, and rain came down in sheets for five minutes. Memory, you know; it might have been seven. And they might have been buckets. I might have been seven or eleven — memory’s roll of the dice. The rain stopped but the day stayed dark, and the sidewalks steamed, and the only thing that hadn’t changed was the orange light with my mother moving inside it. I think about this memory frequently before I go to sleep, I run it as a memory film, as if to tell myself that everything’s okay, to give myself the lie that rescued moments are reclaimed, though I know that, in the words of James Agee, they cannot ever tell me who I am. Faye Dunaway’s slow, convulsive death at the end of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde— as though petit mort were the sound machine-guns make — has haunted me for thirty-five years. I walked out of a summer matinee, a bit excited and sad because of the slow-mo shoot-emMovies Are a Mother to Me 87 My mother is sometimes a movie to me. up ending. I wanted Bonnie and Clyde to live, and I thought, in my eleven-year-old way, that this violent scene was inexpressibly sad, and pretty neat, thoughts to that effect. I was waiting for my mother to pick me up. And I was sure that I wasn’t sure how I could tell her this and be allowed to go to this kind of movie again. Some part of me was urging me not to say a word. I always had a habit of telling my mother things that I later became embarrassed about. As when I admitted that Honor Blackman was more beautiful than she after I sawGoldfinger and fell in love with Pussy Galore. I thought I needed to be honest since it was always our mother-son mantra, something like call and response, that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. This queasy relationship to intimacy...