Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Miriam was complaining. "Every once in a great while, your father will agree to go to a movie that I want to see." Harvey didn't look up from reading the Times. He seems to read the paper primarily so that he could announce random factoids like "Giuliani turned sixty-three today!" or "There's a national shortage of radishes!" It's never completely clear, to his wife or his sons, if he hears her and pretends not to, or if he is so distracted and shut down that he doesn't hear her at all, even though he's only a few feet away at the head of the table. After fifty years of marriage, it is his prerogative and their routine. Neal and Frank, at their parents’ apartment for dinner, were grateful he wasn't doing the crossword because that always ignites an argument about who started, who finished, and who snatched it from who.
She went on, "We disagree about every movie we see."
"You do not!" Frank and Neal said in unison. They smiled at each other, but knew not to laugh. When they come to their parents for dinner, little disagreements, mild jabs, anything, can turn things tense – theirs is a family of seethers, not screamers – the room suddenly hot and stuffy.
Frank, ever the explainer, said, "You agree on almost everything. Most of the time, you have the same overall reaction, positive or negative, to movies, TV, whatever, but … you also need to find something to disagree about, for sport. You need to debate small differences, invisible to the rest of us, that you see in some tiny nuanced moment. But that's not disagreeing. It is, I don't know, agreeing, but in a way that people agree when they've been married so long."
"Brilliant," Neal said sarcastically. "You should definitely talk less. When you’re about to say something insightful, try not saying it." Neal was wearing an expensive and well-tailored suit, having been in court all day, and this somehow gave his critique more weight. Over the years, Neal, a successful litigator, had established a reputation for good-natured seriousness, even gravitas. He loved it when Frank stuck his foot in his mouth. It is a longstanding family joke that whenever Frank speaks, it’s a fifty-fifty proposition that he’ll say something inappropriate. An otherwise observant and sensitive person, inexplicably oblivious to how he comes across to others, Frank had many times offended people with his blunt honesty or casually harsh judgments that betrayed a tone-deafness for the everyday standards of polite conversation. His family is used to it and mostly laughs it off. By taking the conversation in this direction, Neal has put the focus on Frank’s penchant for unseemly pronouncements, thereby derailing their mother's predictable offense at the actual substance of what was said.
Neal, as if speaking to the jury, continued, "Why don't we hear a little bit about the movies they’ve disagreed about," and to their mother, "Well, Mom, let’s have it. Give us an example."
"We disagreed about Goodfellas."
"That was a great movie," Harvey said without looking up. All three turned toward him, half-surprised he was still here, let alone listening. In contrast to Neal, his appearance offered no hint of gravitas. He was wearing a V-neck t-shirt that had a small spot of gravy from the meat loaf visible just above his heart.
"See, that's a perfect example," Miriam replied, waving her lit cigarette like a baton. She was wearing one of Harvey’s light blue buttoned down shirts with her black stretch pants. She was barefoot. "I hated that movie because the woman who plays Joe Pesci's mother, you know, in that scene when they're eating spaghetti before killing somebody who’s stuffed in the trunk? She wouldn’t have been so accommodating to those glorified lowlife gangsters. It makes the mother either oblivious or complicit, the butt of the joke, and I resent it. Why does it have to be that way?"
Neal was stunned. "Are you kidding? That scene was what, two minutes? The movie was almost three hours long. Your whole opinion is based on that one scene?" He loosened his tie.
Frank had changed before he came over, and was in a dark green t-shirt, black jeans, and sneakers. "Ma, what's so hard to understand? You’re nice to me and Neal. I mean, here we are eating meat loaf and string beans, and we have two bodies in the trunk."
"Ha ha. What can I say? It ruined it for me."
Frank realized this made a crazy kind of sense. Since he began writing movie reviews for a small local newspaper, he talked to his mother about the movies all the time, just to see what she thought. Everything she ever said about movies she'd seen – or plays or TV or novels, for that matter – always related back to the portrayal of the mother. She would always say something like "A mother would never do that", or "Of course, they blame everything on the mother." Frank could usually find a little comic gem to include in his columns. He grabbed a carrot from the salad plate and put it to his mouth like a microphone. "There you have it folks, Miriam gives a big thumbs-down to Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. This has been 'A Mother's Guide to the Movies.' Tune in next week when she'll …"
"Knock it off," Miriam said.
A few weeks later, as Frank sat across the kitchen table from his mother, he was reminded that he had begun to see his aging parents as increasingly frail and unable to deal with the persistent difficulties of life in New York. “Ma, do you and Dad ever think about leaving the City, going someplace like Florida or Arizona, getting out of the Northeast?”
“Why Florida, Frank, so I can hang out with your friend, what's-her-name, the one from high school, Florence Ruskin the slut?”
“Ma! Knock it off! First, she’s Neal’s friend, not mine. And her name is just Florence Ruskin, not Florence Ruskin the Slut. You're talking about stuff that happened, what, thirty years ago? More? Let it go already. And I wasn’t thinking of her when I suggested Florida. Wait, I wasn’t even suggesting Florida! I was just asking what you and Pop think about living in the City, which can be difficult for …” he decided to jump, “For people your age. Do you ever think about it?”
“People my age? I can’t believe you’d say that to your very own mother. You think you’re so smart. I’ll have you know I’ve got another twenty-five years to go. More! And I’m not moving to God’s waiting room filled with old people preparing to die. Not on your life!”
“Ma! Can’t you just have a conversation? How about this, do you ever think of moving to a place with a warm climate, no snow or sleet or gloom of night? Get some exercise out in the sun that’s more than running to catch the bus so that you can cram in with a thousand sweaty assholes, half of whom are picking your pocket and the other half are feeling you up.” Frank wondered why he was saying this. He loved the City.
“But I love the City,” said Miriam. “I’ll never leave. I mean look at the options. Florida, forget it, too many old people. Arizona, the smart ones are fascists and the dumb ones are rednecks. The South? Give me a break. Jew haters, every one of ‘em. And California, they’re all nuts, I mean, totally bonkers.”
“Ma, you’re totally bonkers. Do you expect me to buy this ‘I love the City’ crap? I mean, have you been listening to yourself these past few years? The crowds are terrible, everything’s so expensive, you hate the people who live in this building, even the ones who are your friends, you get sore when you have to walk too far, you’re sore from standing on the buses, you hate to go to restaurants or museums because of the lines, … and don’t get me started about the snow. It goes on and on. How can you say you love the City? You love the idea of the City, but you actually hate living here!” Frank knew it was pointless. If there was one thing he agreed with his mother about, it was that she would never leave. Neither would his father, who if anything, was more cemented in than she was.
“Are you trying to get rid of me Frank? Is that why you want me to move thousands of miles away? Well it won’t be that easy, I’m here for the long haul, however long a haul I have left. So there.”
“Fine, Ma, fine. Let’s change the subject. So, when are you moving?” Before she could object, Frank added, “Just kidding. Seen any good movies lately?” His deadline for this week’s review was approaching.
“Yes, your father and I watched some stupid action comedy on cable last night, where a suburban housewife has amnesia, and it turns out that she used to be a CIA assassin or something. It’s with that tall odd looking one, I forget her name.”
“Geena Davis, Mom. That movie is called The Long Kiss Goodnight.” Frank knew the movie and perked up. He couldn’t use anything she might say for his column because the movie came out a few years ago, but maybe he’d tuck it away for a DVD review later. “What’d you think?”
“Pretty stupid, really, although I have to say I liked the idea of her dispatching all those bad guys. Guns, knives, karate, the works. They were Russian KGB goons, all shaved heads and cartoon accents, and she kills three of them with one hand while she’s loading her kids into the station wagon with the other. I wish she would have killed her husband, that worthless drip.”
Frank loved this. He would draw her out, see how over the top she would get, without making her think he was mocking her. This was always the hard part. “Do you think the movie is making some sort of comment about being a mother today, you know, the Super Mom who can do it all?”
“That’s the problem with women today, they need that reassurance. They need Geena What's-Her-Name to make them feel good about themselves. Back then we knew we were Super Moms. We took care of the house, we took care of the kids, we shopped, we cleaned, and a lot of us had jobs. It was so easy for the husbands. We did everything.” Revisionist history, thought Frank. His mother did not have a job outside the home once she had kids.
“So, Ma, let me get this straight. This movie is a fantasy that today’s women need to bolster their self-esteem, so they can conquer their anxiety and do it all? And women of your generation didn’t need such reassurance, because they were fully confident about their Super Mom abilities? Am I getting you right?”
“That’s right, Frank.” She would stick to this story if only because she had said it.
“That’s not the standard feminist analysis of the last fifty years, you know?”
“Well I’m not your standard feminist, Frank. You should know that by now.”
They both turned to the sound of the key in the door. Miriam stood up, and said, “Watch, I’m twice the secret agent Geena Davis is,” and grabbed the French knife off the counter and threw it right at Harvey as he walked into the kitchen from the foyer.
Harvey ducked nonchalantly, giving the impression that this happens every night, and the knife bounced off the wall behind him and dropped to the floor. Miriam was visibly disappointed that it didn’t stick in the wood with a boing.
“Hi, honey, I’m home,” Harvey said with no expression whatsoever.
Alan Brickman works with nonprofit organizations on strategic planning and program evaluation. Raised in New York, educated in Massachusetts, he now lives in New Orleans with his 17-year old border collie Jasper, and neither of them can imagine living anywhere else. Alan's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Literary Heist, Variety Pack, SPANK the CARP, Evening Street Press, Sisyphus Magazine, and October Hill Magazine, among others. He can be reached at alanbrickman13@gmail.com.