Driver's Education (6 page)

But then, right as Earl had finished his speech, a girl from the crowd, an almost-pretty young thing with cropped dark hair, gasped and pointed.

She yelled, “What the—”

The crowd gazed past Earl and into the lobby's center, where the boy had suddenly materialized under the glows and shadows of the theater's lights and pillars. He was still holding his popcorn, and he ate the kernels casually, nonchalantly, as he stared back at the crowd. He scuffed his heels against the red carpet as he leaned against a pillar as thick as a sycamore. The manager tugged at the tails of his coat; his eyes narrowed and he shouted to his staff, “Get that boy!”

The two ushers stormed into the lobby and reached for the boy's heels, his hips, his shoulders, his head, but whenever they caught hold of him he'd vanish at once (as it happens, on that evening everything was
at once
). It was a tired and half-witted bout, and when it was over they'd be left with nothing more than locks of his greased hair.

“But how'd he get in there?” someone asked the woman.

“No one knows.”

“And where is he now?” the mother asked.

“In there, somewhere,” she said, pointing past the heads milling in front of us to the theater's entrance.

A father whispered up to a son, who was sitting on his shoulders, “I bet he snuck in through the back door. Always sneak in through the back door.”

•  •  •

When the snow started, they let us in. They hadn't found the boy, but Earl, the lobby manager, told us that in all likelihood he'd disappeared—crawled back to wherever it was he'd come from.

The picture shown at the Avalon that night was
The Tender Trap,
with Frank Sinatra and Debbie Reynolds; it was the first picture ever shown at the Avalon, and also the first picture I had ever seen. People shifted uncomfortably at first, afraid of where the boy lurked, of what intruder stalked beneath their seats. I sat still, though. I was nestled between my parents, my knees pulled to my chest, as the projection flickered and filled the screen. I held my breath as Edward R. Murrow introduced the prologue, a short science fiction piece called
From the Earth to the Moon
. I kept it held through the footage of the rocket blasting away from earth, through the prologue's conclusion and the film's actual beginning, Sinatra cycling through Lola Albright, Carolyn Jones, Jarma Lewis.

“Breathe, Colin,” my mother pressed her lips to my ear and whispered.

But I couldn't—or, I must have, but nothing more than quick gasps, and only when I absolutely had to. I was afraid that if I made any larger action—my chest rising as my lungs filled with air, or falling as I exhaled—something awful would happen. The screen would tear down its center and the lights would suddenly turn on. I had the vague sense that I was witnessing some sort of magic—or not magic, but some kind of wonderful trickery—and I had the churning fear that if I made any sudden movement the veil would be yanked away and I'd see how the parts were put together, how the gears turned into themselves. How it was made.

“Really, sweetheart,” she said again. “You're going to pass out.”

I didn't, though. I wheezed my way through it. Conscious. And when the curtain fell and Earl the Lobby Manager stepped onstage to thank us, the first audience, I looked away from the screen and into my mother's lap.

As my family and the audience filed out of the theater, I saw the boy—though, to this day, I'm absolutely positive that I was the only one who did. Somehow he'd succeeded at hiding, undetected, in the second-to-last row of seats in the orchestra section. His hair wasn't long, or greasy, but cropped short, hugging the space around his ears. His cheeks were darkened, freckled with dirt like the woman said, but he still wore the V-neck sweater that was standard in the town. He was my age—eight—and he looked at me curiously as I paused, his eyebrows arching as feet shuffled past him.

I almost said something then, a standard greeting:
Hello, how goes it, were you able to breathe?
But my father pressed a hand to the small of my back. He took my wrist and told me to keep walking. I watched the boy as he shrank away between two seats and my mother kissed me on the top of my head.

As we drove home that evening, I sat in our Buick's backseat and recreated each of the film's scenes in my mind. Charlie meeting Julie Gillis at that fateful audition. Joe pouring out his love for Sylvia. I didn't realize the permanence of the thing, I gather now. I thought the trickery was a one-time deal: that once an ending was happy, once the good guy had won, once we'd all gotten up and left, the trickery would dissipate swiftly. A picture wasn't a picture, but instead something more fragile: a sand castle caught in a wave's backwash. So as we wove through Westchester's empty streets I schemed: I found ways to burn those images into my mind, to file them away in slots where they could be archived, retrieved, relived.

“Well I loved it,” my mother said. But then, she would've—she'd never met a movie she didn't like.

“I mostly did,” my father answered. I can still picture him saying it—the way the streetlamps cut through the fog and bounced off the sly tilt of his smile.

“What wasn't to like?”

“How about the ending?”

My mother twisted in her seat so she faced him completely. “But he married her! They got married!” she said, touching his wrist. “Charlie and Julie!”

My father said, “But who wants a girl like that?”

She laughed, first quietly and then with great heart. She kept her fingers pressed lightly to his wrist. Said, “Oh, Ali.”

When we returned home that evening, they danced alone, without music, in a darkened living room, which they often did, while I lay on my bed, projecting scenes of rockets blasting away from earth on the ceiling with my mind.

•  •  •

We went to the Avalon to see a movie on every Friday of 1956, and each time there were two constants: my father never liked the endings, and I always saw the boy.

First: a note regarding my father and endings. From what I can gather, and from what I can remember, the man had never liked them. They were either too short or too long; the protagonist was either too brave or not brave enough; he either deserved the girl or he didn't; whoever was telling the story had always gotten it terribly and irrevocably wrong.

This revisionist streak ran deep in my father from as early as I can remember. Before she'd given up on God completely in November of that same year, my mother would wearily insist that my father read Bible stories to me each evening—and the frustration was there, too. Eve ate the apple, causing her and Adam to be banished from Eden—but not before Adam fried up the serpent for dinner, using its skin to fashion a pair of scaled loafers. Noah populated his ark with two of every species of God's creation, and as he poured down rain for forty days and forty nights, Noah taught them all to do circus tricks. Dogs jumped through hoops; elephants tiptoed on their hind legs; bears wore skirts and danced to polka music.

Moses split the Red Sea and then promptly invited the Jews to go body surfing on the ensuing walls of waves.

“Ali,” my mother would say, her head slipped through the door of my room. “Knock that off. Tell him the truth.” I'd pull the sheets up to my chin.

My father would answer, “If we're going to bore him with all this nonsense, he may as well learn something from it.”

Nothing changed when we began frequenting the Avalon. Endings were always rewritten, always reconceived. In
Giant,
after Bick tells Jett that he's not even worth hitting, he should've taken the wine in the man's cellar, instead of demolishing the shelves and the bottles they held. In
Lust for Life,
when art and passion and agony eventually cause van Gogh to commit suicide—
My God,
my father would say,
if painting makes you that mad, why not throw in the towel and open up a hardware store?
In
Casablanca,
my father would've hatched a plan so he could have it both ways. In
The Ten Commandments,
he took issue with at least three of those stone-chiseled rules.

At the time, I relished in my father's imagination—the way he could retie knots that already seemed so perfectly fastened. I'd listen to his version of stories, and then I'd rescript them, recast them, reshoot them in my mind; I'd project them onto the same ceiling in my room. But then, this was when I was eight years old. Well before I knew the difference between a storyteller and a liar. Well before I knew on which side of that delineation my father fell.

•  •  •

And now, the boy: sometimes he'd be ducking into one of the theater's dark enclaves—the rounded space, for example, behind a five-foot-tall urn that stood to the left of the theater's grand staircase. I'd see his eyes dart from around the urn's concave edges, scanning the lobby for ushers, for Earl. His fingers would click along the porcelain as he surveyed the room. And from where I stood, between the thighs of my mother and my father at the concession stand, I could almost hear the dull tapping. I'd release my mother's hand, and as my father searched his pockets for cash I'd creep over to the urn, biting my upper lip as I peeked behind it. Always, though—always the boy would be gone.

Other times I'd see him in the actual theater. He'd be sitting calmly, in plain sight, his chin resting on the seat in front of him. Sometimes he'd be near the back of the orchestra; sometimes he'd be near the front of the balcony. He'd look halfway calm—or, at the very least calmer than he appeared when I spotted him in the lobby: his hands wouldn't fidget, and his gaze was stoic and focused. Still, even in those quieter moments,
there was something wild about him—something unwritten, untamed. I'd look forward to where he sat near the screen, or I'd crane my neck back so I could spy him in the balcony, and I'd catch the whiteness of his eyes, which seemed too bright. Impossibly white. Technicolor white.

He was always alone.

From what I can recall, it was only when the house lights dimmed that he seemed fully at ease, when he seemed to inhabit his own skin completely. As the rest of the audience dissolved in the theater's enfolding darkness, as I held my breath and my chest burned, he became some breed of fantastic: you could feel him on the back of your neck, in the spot where your shoulder blades pinch together. His presence was so striking that when the show stopped and the curtain fell and I began breathing normally again, I'd instantly turn to look at him—but whatever had felt so remarkable in the dark would've ceased by then. He'd be by himself and shrunken, lodged awkwardly between normal and mysterious.

We grew together that year, the boy and I. On the first Friday of March I came to the theater with Band-Aids on both my elbows and a gash under my left eye—war wounds from a particularly bad run-in with a bicycle. Under the Avalon's meteoric neon sign, I noted that he bore the same scrapes and cuts. At the end of April, when the weather had finally turned warm enough for my mother to allow me to wear shorts in the evening, the boy arrived at the theater with the same grass stains on both his knees. That summer, as my hair grew long and the sun teased out the blond from the russet—so did it for his. On Thursdays I'd bruise myself, intentionally, to see if his skin would bloom with the same purples and greens—always, it did.

The whole thing was at once comforting and beguiling—comforting in the fact that there existed this version of myself who seemed to inhabit a world that I was desperate to understand, beguiling in that we dealt in each other's secrets even though we'd never spoken. Until November.

•  •  •

What happened that month was this: my mother stopped coming to the movies.

At first it was a simple thing not meriting explanation. On the first
Friday of the month, I waited in our family's Buick, which was parked in the driveway. It was windy, and the sycamore that stood over the garage rained down yellow, orange, red. My parents were taking longer than usual to join me, and as I worried that we might miss the seven o'clock showing, my father emerged from the front door, alone.

Once he'd sat down in the driver's seat and shut the door, I asked, “Where's Mom?”

“She's not coming tonight.” He started the car and said, “You want to sit up front?”

I told him no, I didn't.

At the Avalon, we orbited around each other gracelessly, terribly unbalanced. A triangle with two points; dual parts of a trilogy. I was either standing too near to him or too far away. At the concession stand, my father ordered three boxes of popcorn, only to send the third one back. Two people behind us, the boy looked on.

We left a seat between us. It wasn't a decision that was discussed or plotted. Rather, it simply happened, with a tacit sense of necessity. Just how in the car the seat next to my father's was hers, so was the case with the middle seat at the Avalon. Still, I remember how my father looked at me from across the vacant space seconds before the lights dimmed. I remember the dullness in his eyes, the awkward way he shifted his body as he tried to lay a hand on my shoulder, how he couldn't quite reach his elbow around the high-backed seats.

The next week, my mother was absent again. And the week after that, and the week after that. She'd already seen
High Society,
my father told me, one day while I was at school and he was at work. Or she wouldn't be able to stomach
A Kiss Before Dying,
as she'd never been a fan of Joanne Woodward. She'd suddenly and inexplicably taken up bridge. My father did this, though: he wove up elaborate excuses to tell me, to tell himself, and neither of us ever believed them.

On the fourth Friday of November, the picture was
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
and while I assume my father was displeased with the ending, neither of us spoke about it afterward. Before we left the theater, while my father talked to Earl, I excused myself to the bathroom—where,
incidentally, I saw the boy. Except for the two of us it was empty, and when I entered he stood before a sink, rubbing soap into his hands. In the mirror he watched me as I passed behind him to the urinal, as I unzipped my pants and stood awkwardly on my feet's outside edges. He ran the water hot until steam began pooling in the sink's basin.