Photo by Zach Vessels on Unsplash
(On 8 January 1999, Disney announced a recall of the home video version of their 1977 animated feature The Rescuers because it contained an “objectionable background image.”)
There were no mirrors in the hotel room. Looking back, that’s probably why it took so long. It’s hard to remember what you looked like years ago, because you always imagine it so much better than it was. I only remembered the air, the smell. The carpet and the floral print of the comforters on the two Queen beds. I remembered being in a body. It was younger. It was naked.
These days I am only naked in the shower. Even after I get out, I reach so quickly for the towel so that I don’t have to look. There is a mirror in the bathroom, and even when it’s foggy, I can see the shape of me. If I keep my eyes on the ceiling until the towel is wrapped and tucked, then the truth won’t matter. I hop into my underwear blind. I put on a bra like I’m cleaning a gun. Well-trained. Precise.
After one such drill, some afternoon, my child waited outside the door, his ear pressed to the wood. I had promised him a trip to the video rental place. I liked the boy behind the counter. He was polite, and I was at an age where politeness was a virtue. Finding it in young people was like a gift I hadn’t expected to get, wrapped neatly with a little card. Surprise! You won’t scowl today.
I bumped his head with the door, but he was old enough not to cry every time something hurt, so all he did was stumble back, still smiling.
“Can we go now?”
I rolled my eyes as if I hadn’t been like him. Deep into my twenties, even. Impatient, as if I was running out of time. Urgency is wasted there. There was no rush.
“Give me a minute,” I told him. “Get your shoes on.”
I heard the stretching and pressing of velcro as I had one last sip of the lukewarm coffee I’d left on the kitchen counter.
We always went to the video rental place, under the guise that my child would pick out a different movie than usual. Like he would not head straight for the third shelf, the R section under children’s movies, which seemed to me like the only reason he had learned the alphabet. The Rescuers was his favorite. It was the only thing in the world. Sometimes he pretended to be a mouse. He wanted two of them, as pets. He loved it, and I hated it, but he was the child, so I paid for the VHS every time, never purchasing it outright, refusing to have it in my home like it was a cursed object. I wasted money on The Rescuers like I wasted money on throw pillows and plastic jewelry and dates with men who wouldn’t or couldn’t pay.
I didn’t hate it for the plot, the animation, the voices. It was objectively charming, and it taught my child good lessons I lacked the capacity to teach him myself. It kept him quiet for over an hour. I had suffered worse things, like pushing him out of my body with all the beauty of lancing a cyst. I had endured parent-teacher conferences, which, for a kindergarten student, were reminders of the importance of bathing.
The film was a form of suffering because of the Feeling. I had begun to call it that in my head, having no other way of describing it, and no one else to describe it to. The Feeling was lightheaded, the Feeling was terror in my chest that made me clutch it as if dying. I Felt naked again, and like I had to look at it. I Felt young but only because being young meant being scared.
Forty-ish minutes in, the excitement building, my child on the edge of the couch subtly mouthing the memorized dialogue, the Feeling came. The world was the same but not right. Twenty, thirty times I watched this movie, and always the Feeling came during the same scene. The two rescuing mice, zooming past in a square sardine box, the nervous husband clutching at the sides, the free-spirited wife thrilled by the speed of it. The nausea reminded me of pregnancy, of drunkenness, of yellow light and swift regret. One time, I really did throw up. My child stayed stuck to the couch cushions.
Despite this, I kept watching it. Hoping the Feeling wouldn’t come. I didn’t watch it with him every time, but I had little else to do, little else to care about and no other hair to stroke or kisses to give.
Weeks had passed since I last had the Feeling, when we arrived home from the video store. I wasn’t thinking about it. I was thinking about how much wine was left in the fridge and if I had enough cash left over for delivery so that I wouldn’t have to stand up anymore, my feet raw from a day of work.
I washed dishes while we waited for pizza. My child watched The Rescuers in the living room. When there came a knock at the door, he shouted.
“Mom!” As if giving birth had deafened me.
I went to the door, counting the cash, and my child ran by me, slurring in his high voice, as children do, about having to go to the bathroom. I paid the delivery boy, who looked very much like all delivery boys, just as the video rental clerk looked very much like all video rental clerks. When I returned to the living room to set the pizza box down on the coffee table, I looked at the frozen, shivering screen, paused at the 38-minute mark. Beneath the buzzing of the picture, between the lines of ancient static, I saw her.
Skin tanned like summer. Tits wide but reasonable. They sag, but only because they’re supposed to. In real life, they aren’t round, even when you’re sixteen. She has no stomach to speak of. Her face is a dark blur shaped vaguely like a wolf. The Feeling cut deeper than it had before. In a room with so many windows, none of them felt like mirrors. My child opened the pizza box. The smell dulled the Feeling and replaced it with a growling hunger.
He reached for the remote. I put my hand on his.
“Wait,” I told him, still staring at the shaky image of the naked woman. “Go play in your room.”
“But mom--”
“Just go.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.” The old parent-trick, the one I hated, then hated more in retrospect,
and then finally, clung to as my last lifeline. He left in tiny stomps, a slice of pizza folded in his two little hands.
I pushed the coffee table closer to the couch and then took my own slice. I knelt in front of the television, squinting like that might make it clearer. Remembering the remote, I groped behind me for it, first getting a palmful of cheese and grease. When I did have the remote, I tracked the tape forward, frame-by-frame. Almost instantly, she was gone. I gasped.
“No--”
I tracked it backwards to see her again. She looked like she was posing, but pretending not to. An actress. Maybe a hooker. Maybe all hookers were actresses, because they kind of had to be. I went forwards, watched her disappear, and then, a few frames later, saw her again, at the top of the screen, just as perfect and tan and naked and awkward as she’d been before. I ran a finger down her flat stomach.
She was in a hotel room with no mirrors. She was standing before a man with a Polaroid, giggling drunk. Just out of frame, on the bedside table, the most expensive champagne she’d ever drank. Based on her experience, this was not very much money. Her hair was different then. Now it was in a tight ponytail, ensuring its thinning. It fell out in the shower all the time. The only time she was naked.
But she had been naked then, and had loved it. The man behind the Polaroid had goaded her into the photos.
“I wanna remember the way you look right now,” he’d said. “I ain’t gonna show it to anybody, babe.”
She believed him, because she was so hungry for love. He took ten pictures of her body and then they tumbled onto the floral bed. No mirrors in which she could watch herself bounce and flail.
He was a big deal in the movies. Kids movies, which was weird because of how he fucked. Not shy, not sweet. Wild like a porn director, or one of those independent ones that always shows people’s privates but it’s art instead of porn. I didn’t know how they defined the difference. But he worked in kids movies. Drunk, he’d told me about this one they were animating about mice or something stupid.
“That sounds fucking stupid,” I’d said. We did it rough after that. He was angry.
He wasn’t the one that made the child. That man was someone who didn’t get angry, and it pissed me off that he didn’t get angry, because I needed someone to be angry at me, and then I
had a child, and children are always angry at their mothers. I raised him alone on VHS rentals and the Feeling.
I let my child back out of his bedroom and watched the rest of the movie beside him on the couch, curled like a fetus beneath a wool blanket, searching for myself again. More parts of me. Other photos. I wondered if, in any of them, I was smiling.
When the credits began, my child reached for the remote.
“Wait, honey,” I told him. He shrugged and retreated back to his bedroom, and I stayed glued to the television, looking for familiar names. Who had he been? Some Robert, some Richard. Something that sounded right on a man in an expensive suit, holding a cigar between two fingers with much more care and gentleness than he could handle a young woman’s body. Something that looked good in the yellow light of a mirrorless hotel room only ever rented by the hour.
I bought a copy of The Rescuers from the department store, along with a small CRT television with a built-in VCR player for my child to keep in his room. He watched it that night, lights off, nothing but the flashing of technicolor frames leaking through the crack beneath the door.
Aaron J. Muller is a transgender author from Kingston, NY. He has been published by Owl Canyon Press, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Inverted Syntax. In January 2021, he will begin the Bennington College MFA program in fiction.