by Dana Spiotta
How would it go? Jelly knew, just as she knew so many things without ever experiencing them. The knowing seemed to come from her senses, her fingertips and her skin. She knew that if she met Jack, he would be disappointed even if she were beautiful in the common sense of “beautiful.” Common is an interesting word. It could be comforting when you mean what we all have in common. But it also means ordinary; it means something we have all seen many times and can find easily. So a common sense of beauty is agreed upon by all but also dull in a way. Still his disappointment would come out of something human and inescapable: the failure of the actual to meet the contours of the imaginary. As he listened to the words he heard come across the line and into his ear, he imagined the mouth saying them. Even more so, as he spoke into the receiver, he imagined a face listening, and an expression on that face. Maybe it was made of an actress on the TV from the night before plus a barely remembered photo of his mother when she was very young and a girl with long hair and bare tan legs that he glimpsed at the beach. But there was no talking without imagining. And once imagining preceded the actual, there was no escaping disappointment, was there?
What about Jelly? Would Jelly feel disappointment with Jack, when he showed up sweaty, old, smelling of breath mints and cigarettes? It never occurred to her to think this way. She would be so focused on him that her own feelings wouldn’t matter. She would feel disappointed if he felt disappointed. She would hear it in his voice, and she would feel herself lose everything, all the perfect, exquisite moments that she had made with him.
“I want to see you,” Jack had said. “I need to see you.”
“I know. I know. Okay,” Jelly said. “I will send you some pictures.”
Of course she was right to send Lynn’s photos; she needed to make things last just a little longer. But she cried, because for a minute it might have gone a different way.
JELLY
The alarm went off, and Jelly stared into the murky early morning light. It was the day she was supposed to get on the plane to California, a 9:00 a.m. flight. She hadn’t packed, but she thought about it. She really did. Last night he laughed on the phone, excited, and she would never have let him go this far if she was sure she wasn’t going to go. Last night, after a glass of wine, she laughed too and imagined being with him at last. But as they said good night and hung up, she knew.
She hit the button on the alarm, pulled the comforter up over her head, and heaved a long breath into the dark, warm air.
CARRIE HAS A WEDDING
Meadow came an hour late to Carrie and Will’s rehearsal dinner. As toasts were being made, she slipped quietly into the empty seat next to Carrie with a smile. Later, Will made a face when Carrie explained traffic, parking, picking up the dress. (Meadow wore a silk suit to the rehearsal dinner but had agreed to wear a dress to the wedding. Meadow never wore dresses, but she would do it for Carrie.)
“At least she showed up,” he said.
“Of course she showed up,” Carrie said, slightly annoyed. She knew he was only being protective of her, but she couldn’t help feeling protective of Meadow.
“And she didn’t make it to your screening even though you gave her a month’s notice.”
Carrie’s thesis project—a short called Girl School—had been selected for a film festival as part of the shorts program, but Meadow was not able to attend. The night before, she left a message on Carrie’s answering machine. Will rolled his eyes as they listened to Meadow apologize, but Carrie knew that he read Meadow wrong, that Meadow was in deep in her upstate world. Editing. Or researching and filming. Meadow disappeared into a frenzy of work. “You went to her screening,” Will said, and although that was true, Carrie felt she should have visited Meadow more often; she hadn’t managed to in a long time. How long since they had seen each other? A year? No, nine months. But now Meadow had come down for Carrie’s wedding; she was the maid of honor and, although she showed up late to the rehearsal dinner, she appeared perfectly on time to the wedding, with her angular sidekick Kyle holding an arm around her waist as though he might lose her in the crowd. Early in the evening, Carrie whispered to Will that she wondered how long Kyle would stay in the picture. Surely he would soon exceed Meadow’s usual short expiration date? Will snorted in agreement, and she immediately regretted saying what she said. She actually liked Kyle. And Meadow. So why? Often her comments were harsher than she intended, meaner. And she wished she could unsay them.
Although neither she nor Will were Polish, they had their reception in a Polish wedding emporium in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where they received a discount for getting married during Lent (when no Polish couples wanted to have a wedding). They did everything themselves, getting some of their friends to donate help instead of giving gifts: flowers, invitations, photography. Even so, it all cost more than Carrie had hoped. She resolved to enjoy herself and the tacky perfection of the mirrored wallpaper stippled with gold and the giant bride and groom thrones strewn with dingy net and worn white ribbons. Each table had bottles of Polish vodka on it, and when they first saw the bottles, Carrie joked to Meadow that it would be a drunken marathon like the Polish wedding in The Deer Hunter.
“Russian. Russian wedding,” Meadow said.
“As long as no one lifts me in a chair,” Carrie said.
“The close-up of the wine spilling on the white dress was not exactly an example of subtle foreshadowing,” Meadow said.
“I liked it.”
Meadow shrugged. “I liked it too,” she said. “And it captured the desperate hope of a wedding, how underlined in futility it is.”
“Said the maid of honor to the bride,” Carrie said.
“C’mon. I don’t mean you and Will. You and Will are great.”
Meadow was Carrie’s entire wedding party, and Carrie had requested she wear some kind of blue dress. Meadow wore a long vintage blue sleeveless silk slip-style dress with a black evening jacket that made her look even taller and leaner than usual. Carrie wore a mutton-sleeved size-ten wedding gown that she had starved herself to fit into, and secretly she worried that Meadow’s thin body would make her look fat, but then she willed herself not to think such things.
After the wedding and the dinner and the cake, after the first dance and the thrown garter, things began to wind down and the band played the kitschy pop songs Will had requested for the end of the reception. Will danced flamboyantly with Carrie, then Will danced with Meadow, and Carrie danced with Kyle, who spun her around with mock seriousness. Kyle’s appeal became more apparent to her as the night went on. But the last two songs Carrie danced with Meadow as the boys sat on the sidelines drinking together. At eleven the band—also friends of the groom—had to go to another gig and the allotted five hours at the emporium were done. The wedding was over, and Carrie thought it was both too long and too short for her. After months of planning, it seemed like some difficulty overcome and accomplished, and she was relieved it was over. Which also made it seem like the lamest party ever, stingy rather than carefree. But that is what they could afford, five hours (with her mother and father helping, and Will’s parents, but no one could pay much). They still ended up exceeding their planned budget and spending most of their savings.
Earlier in the evening, at the start of the reception, Meadow had handed Carrie an envelope from Meadow’s father. Meadow’s parents couldn’t attend the wedding, but they sent a check for five thousand dollars to help with Carrie and Will’s costs. Carrie started to cry, but Meadow ordered her to stop or her makeup would run. Carrie sat in her throne next to Will, drinking champagne, and felt very lucky.
After the reception was over, Carrie said goodbye to Meadow and her lovely boy, and she grabbed Will’s hand. They took a cab back to their apartment with all their gifts. Carrie couldn’t wait to get out of her dress, out of her shoes, out of the control-top hose. Barefoot in her silk slip, she went into the kitchen and grabbed the phone. She ordered a pizza for de
livery.
“I’m starving,” she said.
“What about all the food at the wedding?” Will said. “All those pierogi and the suckling pig.”
“I couldn’t eat! I was too excited and my dress was too tight,” Carrie said.
“Me too,” Will said. “My dress was too tight.” And he slapped his belly as he undid his belt.
“Will you still love me after I eat too much pizza?”
“Yes.”
“If I become fat?” Carrie asked as she put her arms around him. He put his hands on her hips.
“Of course.”
“If I become enormously fat?”
“Yes, but is that part of the plan?”
Carrie laughed and shrugged. She leaned down and pulled a bottle of rosé champagne from the refrigerator and handed it to Will. He began to peel at the foil capsule and then began tugging hard on the cork. Carrie took it from him and placed a kitchen towel over the top and gently twisted the cork until it came loose with a low pop. She handed him the open bottle and picked up the glasses. “I can’t believe Meadow’s father gave us so much money,” Carrie said.
“He has a lot of money to give,” Will said.
“Of course. But it was so generous of them.”
“Meadow must have a big trust fund—”
“So generous,” Carrie said, and held up her glass.
Will poured the champagne fast and the glasses overflowed a little. Carrie said, “Whoa!” and tried to catch the overflow with her tongue and started laughing. They sat on the floor, looking at the gifts and cards. They ate half a pizza and drank most of the champagne. All at once, Carrie felt completely exhausted. They went to bed the way they usually did, and they didn’t have wedding-night sex. Just before Carrie fell asleep, she worried that one day she would look back at not having wedding-night sex as a bad omen, like that drop of blood on the wedding dress in The Deer Hunter. She thought, briefly, I have to tell Meadow that, about the omen. Then she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
CINEMA TRUTH
After the success of Portrait of Deke, Meadow applied for various grants, “borrowed” money from her father to pay some expenses, and cobbled together enough money to make two new movies, Kent State: Recovered and Play Truman. Around the same time she tried to make a third film, which she abandoned in the early stages.
Kent State: Recovered (1992)
A few years earlier, during Meadow’s first spring in Gloversville, she had read in the paper about the fifteenth anniversary of the Kent State shootings. She had cut the article out and put it on her studio wall. It fascinated her ever since. What a thing, students shot at by the National Guard, students killed and then that photograph of the dead student and the girl on one knee beside him. Young people now didn’t think or talk about it, but Meadow had kept thinking about it. There wasn’t film, though, of the shootings. Unlike other famous acts of violence, this one did not have an amateur with a handheld to give us a grainy glimpse to watch over and over. Still, Meadow had some ideas. Maybe there was a way.
First she had the idea to track down the girl in the photograph—Mary Ann Vecchio. Meadow could easily imagine her as a compelling subject. Here was one moment in her life, a moment of anguish, and then it comes to define her life. She is kneeling in the quad by a dead college student, crying out to the world. She is a runaway, a flower child in pursuit of a college boy she liked, Jeffrey Miller. Her face has anguish, yes, but also, with her arms outstretched, an expression of disbelief, almost a plea. Mary Ann can’t believe this happened, students shot for protesting, right in front of her, in the United States. This was supposed to happen in other countries and on TV. We were supposed to watch and say tsk tsk, should we help these poor people? Instead the whole world watched us. Everyone felt that way, and so the photograph became a pieta for American purity. But the next morning she is just a girl again. She is fourteen, and this will be the thing people note about her for the rest of her life. Not because she was there, but because she was photographed. The photo will win a Pulitzer Prize. Because of the photograph, Jeffrey Miller is the most famous of the four dead students at Kent State. The photo is carried in papers around the world. Governor Claude Kirk of Florida will label the girl a Communist sympathizer. She is pictured on her knees, in her genuine anguish, on t-shirts. Her parents will sue people for a share of the proceeds. She will try to move on, but the photo will affect her life for years to come. Not to her face, but at the edges of her. When she leaves her kid’s PTA meeting, a parent will lean over to another parent and whisper, “You know who she is, don’t you?”
The parent shakes her head.
“She is the girl in the photograph at Kent State. The girl on her knees, the crying girl.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Crazy, huh?” And they will smile in awe: a piece of history right in their lives with them. Maybe eventually Mary Ann will decide not to tell anyone about the photograph. She will keep it a secret from the people in her life. She is not ashamed, but she doesn’t want it to be so important, so defining. She wants room for other ideas about her, other selves. She remembers the day vividly, though. She loved the boy who was killed. You don’t forget seeing someone shot right in front of you, and then die as you kneel over him. They are there, protesting the invasion of Cambodia, doing what they think is right, and then, instead of going off to smoke a joint and make out in his dorm room, Jeffrey is bleeding on the pavement, a facedown deadness all over him. The event—not the photo of the event—did change who she was, did mark her for years to come.
Meadow wanted to track down and interview the girl in the famous photograph, but she discovered that it already had been done. Some TV show had the idea—the obvious, ordinary idea—to get the girl and the photographer together for a reunion.
Meadow decided to interview other people about the day. She wanted students, but she also wanted the National Guardsmen—the young men the same age as the students—who fired into the crowd.
Meadow would interview everyone in a plain room, a static space. She hated documentaries that showed people in their living rooms. Your thoughts became about interior design and psychology. She wanted eyes on faces, and she wanted a deliberate frame. A sameness, a feeling of isolation. After shooting some interviews, she realized that Deke was unusual; looking directly into the lens of a camera felt unnatural to some people. They needed a face. If she stood next to the camera, they seemed to look shiftily off to the side. Her solution came from Tokyo Story, the Yasujirō Ozu film she had watched at the Nuart. Ozu used a “tatami shot” in which he filmed his actors from a low angle, looking up from a fixed camera. She tried it, and she stood behind and slightly above the camera as she listened to the interviewees. This gave the approximate illusion of a direct gaze, although the seated people often appeared to look into a space just above camera, which made everyone look thoughtful rather than shifty.
Meadow used a tiny crew, including Kyle, who had begun as her assistant and then almost immediately became her boyfriend. He was a student in the film program at Columbia, and Meadow thought he was brilliant. He looked like a younger, Bengali version of Deke: black hair worn long, lean-muscled and small of stature, sharp angles to cheeks and jaw. When Kyle smiled or laughed, Meadow always felt distracted by his sudden flash of white straight teeth and she wanted to make him laugh even more.
She took her tiny crew to various locales after she phoned and wrote to witnesses and participants. That was what she called them, participants. She had to admit she was drawn to the National Guardsmen—young men on the wrong side of history even before that day. When a group of soldiers fire, everyone in the group must feel guilty yet no one is responsible. That is the point, clearly, of firing as a group. She wondered how that wore as the years went by. She wanted to prick them a little in a room and film them spilling their secrets out. She imagined it might be good for them, cathartic. She started
in the Gloversville library with the microfiche, getting the names of the people there. The student witnesses were quoted in the papers.
“Can I film you telling your experience of that day?” and sometimes they said yes. Other times she would have to gently persuade them. As she expected, the National Guard people were the most reluctant. They were the shooters, after all.
“I just want to hear all sides of the story. How it felt to be so frightened. The danger, the rocks thrown.”
“But I don’t feel that way. I can’t believe we shot. There was an order to fire, or at least we thought there was. We all did it, but I can’t believe it. Those dead kids,” he said. He was spilling already. This was no good. She wanted that on film, not on the phone.
“Okay, so let me film you and you can tell me, okay?” she said, holding him off. “Just tell me the story so we know some National Guardsmen feel pain about it. Regret.” And she knew he would. He would be glad to because there is a particular joy in telling the darkest truth about what you did. In letting yourself say out loud, “I did this terrible thing.” It is out of you and in the world. We are all desperate to get it out of us instead of waiting for it to be discovered. The waiting contaminates a life, wakes a man in the middle of the night. Meadow knew everyone had in them this compulsion to confess, was born with it: guilt and the need to tell all. She shot hours of footage. She let people digress, tell their life stories, even sit speechless for minutes. She was shooting blind, discovering things as she went along.
But unlike the filming of Deke, there was sometimes something inert about these people talking to the camera. Some people’s faces, no matter what they are saying, are inert. Maybe it was the tone of voice? They often had a rehearsed feel, as though they had practiced in the shower for this very moment. They had been asked these questions many times before. They’d had years to make a narrative of what happened. What could she do to make it feel less distant? She went through archived footage for things to show during some of the stories and in between some of the talking. Meadow considered reenactments. Brief moments from the past, a cinematic séance conjured by speech. She did not want the feeling of cheesy tabloid docudramas, the “dramatic reenactments” of Paul Revere’s ride that she remembered from educational TV. And if she just showed photographs as people spoke, zooming in and out, she thought it would look like third-grade film strips. But she kind of liked film strips and the way they made you dwell on a photo until it almost moved. There were plenty of photographs from before and after and during. She could, maybe, animate the photos somehow. She could use stop-action animation to take elements in the photos and alter them slightly until people in the photographs seemed to move. It was enactment, and it was not real. It was a manipulation. She fudged it further by taking a camera on campus and meticulously re-creating—in grainy Super 8, amateur film—the feeling of campus that day. Meadow even used actors, but only very briefly and only in flickers. An arm moving, a person kneeling to shoot in a uniform. It wasn’t, of course, re-creating that day in 1970. The “real” feeling came from using film that reminded us of that day. So her reenactments used the materials—the look—of the collective memory. The photographs had long overwritten the feeling of 1970 in people’s minds. It was what you saw looking at photos in Life magazine. She had the grainy Super 8 blown up to 16 mm. She took close-ups of maps of the campus, of rifles being fired in a kind of dreamily lit studio space, as if the film were showing the consciousness of each speaker as he spoke. And, in very short glimpses, she used the manipulated photo animations. When she edited it all together, it added great drama and reality to what was being said by the participants. It came to life.
