She sits
in her armchair with the navy blue jumper across her lap, plucking the clogged
wool of its popcorn and dropping the fibred confection into a wastebasket at
her feet.
In
its entirety the situation was a source of wonder, the reactions of both her
daughters unfathomable: the wall of cynicism affected by her eldest so gently
dismantled by the movie’s deformed little alien contrasting with that initial
genuine passivity of her younger sister.
Sister (pulling cigarette lighter from
dashboard): Hey lookit! I’m E.T. “Phone home. Phone home.”
and waving the thing around so close to
her, and her driving, she could feel the heat radiating from the glowing
electric coil.
Mother: Will you put that down, PUT IT
DOWN NOW! That was just inches from my face. Now put it back. If you don’t put
it back I’ll stop th-
remembering
the very real sense of panic folding her in should anything happen to those
girls as she drove them all home from the movie.
Infected
with her daughter’s enthusiastic response she had gone with her husband the
following night and found herself little more than bemused by the whole, the
very clarity of its mechanism creating an impenetrable surface, although in his
own dislocation her husband had identified in part with its themes of foreignness
and involuntary exile.
She
hears him now clamber from the bath upstairs.
Their
reactions so different, her previous criticism of the oldest girl’s hollow
adoption of nihilistic teenage poses doubles back blunt in light of this
recognised capacity in herself for something similar.
She
postpones the jumper to the chair arm, patting her empty knees for some comfort
in a known source.
Mother:
Judas, come on Judas, come over here, come on
and
the dog now alongside, his tail thumping dust from out the chair as she strokes
his smooth black flank.
A
recent trip into the city had given rise to fresh elements of concern. While
none of them had made any immediate connection between the movie and the toy,
her youngest daughter’s affection for it had been instant: a fat little brown
vinyl amorphousness their purchase of which, they were assured, was the first
since delivery, other children having passed it over as cold and ugly, even
frightening with its smile pulled and stitched into its face.
Tonight
she had returned to the movie on its re-release, stood freezing in the queue
for too long, ache1 before she became ache1 this time
desperately excited with her own now ever-present E.T. dangling from her little
mittened fists, and then buried there next to her beneath the paper bucket of
popcorn with the lights going down.
The
hairdryer’s buzz and waver in the room above prompts her out into the kitchen,
filling and flipping on the kettle to fix them both some coffee. As heat slowly
sighs into the water she wonders at how little logic exists in her daughter’s
response, to see the movie on account of her toy when most everyone else would
see the movie first, then buy the doll or whichever one of the
slew of E.T. playthings still constipating the stores took their fancy.
It
isn’t just embarrassment about the evening’s drama, moreso a fascination with both
girls, trying now to exert some mathematics upon the whole, to quantify emotion
and time and age and finalise an equation that will somehow connect her again
to her daughters, and the movie.
Father:
She’s sleeping. Her head’s still swollen really badly and it’s really starting
to discolour now but at least she’s asleep. Thanks
as she
gives him the coffee and he drinks and she is not there, struggling elsewhere
to throw a sheet across the body of an unhealthy spaceman castaway, his
chalksick skin translucent and vulnerable as a newborn bird.
Her
equation fills up with zeroes on the wrong side and will not balance.
