Third Girl from the Left

by Martha Southgate

  27

  THE LAST DAY OF SHOOTING MY THESIS, EVERYBODY was late, and Evan, a second-year who’d been doing the lights for me, had trouble setting up, and Colin ran through his lens check really fast, and my actors Sherry and Raymond had an argument over some dumb-ass thing, and we were losing the light. I thought my head would explode. Evan desperately screwed the base into the heavy light once more. He swore nonstop. I struggled to hold it for him as he tried again to mount it properly. My arms shook. Sherry and Raymond sat anxiously on the curb, trying not to look panicked and not succeeding. Finally, Evan let go and the light was steady on the stand. “OK, OK, places, everybody.” I lowered my screaming arms, hoping I could stop shaking. “OK, let’s do this. You ready, Sherry, Ray? Give it all you got.” Sherry did an actressy head roll and up-and-down of her shoulders. Raymond just looked at me coolly. I looked through the viewfinder. It looked all right. “Action!” I yelled. Colin started the film. Sherry and Ray started. Sherry messed up halfway through. I reassured them and started again. The sun continued its gradual descent. “Once more. We can do it once more.” They made it through the scene this time. They were not brilliant. They weren’t even good. But the light was gone and I was at the end. We were done. After we stowed the equipment, we all went out for a beer and I tried not to act as glum as I felt. I got very drunk. I wouldn’t let Colin come home with me. He didn’t try very hard to get me to change my mind.

  I got home at 3:00 A.M. I picked up the phone and called Mama. I got the machine: her and Sheila in chorus. “You know what to do. So do it.” So goddamn cutesy. They were so goddamn old. Why did they have that cutesy message? “It’s me, Mama. Everything’s all fucked up. This movie sucks. Why’d I do this, anyway? Mama? Mama?” I hung up. I couldn’t stand how pathetic I sounded. I knew she wouldn’t call me, back anyway. She never did. Whenever we spoke, it was on my dime. She always said she was happy to hear from me, but it was on my dime. And don’t let me call when I was sad. That never worked. She’d just say to go see a goddamn movie. I wanted to call Colin, but I didn’t dare. I got in bed with Spike Lee’s Gotta Have It. I pressed it close to my face. The paper smelled old. Some of the pages were about to come out. Did Spike ever feel this way? I moved the book away from my face a little so I wouldn’t ruin it with my tears.

  I woke up to a hangover and the unbelievable knowledge that it wasn’t over yet. Now I had to look at my footage (no dailies for us broke-ass film students). I groaned and put my head under the pillow. Could Spike ever have felt this crappy? Ever? I passed out again and didn’t get up until noon.

  I dragged myself to campus that afternoon feeling slightly better. I mean, I was done after all. I had something in the can. It was a beautiful, crisp clear winter day. There were cinnamon scones, my favorite, at Starbucks. Life might be worth living after all. I took my film into the screening room, set it up, and started it.

  At first I thought it was some kind of mistake. I squinted. I fiddled with the projector. I stopped it and started it again. I put on another reel. But there it was. Every single goddamn shot. The entire movie. Colin, my lover, my fucking rich-boy boyfriend who could hire a real director of photography because he was so motherfucking rich, had shot the entire film out of focus. I watched to the end. All the footage. Not only were the silences between the actors long and stupid and awkward and the magic-hour shot completely unusable, but the whole thing was out of focus. Not a lot. But enough that this thing would never, ever, ever be accepted into a festival. There was nothing I could do. I was helpless. I started crying like I never have before. Like my life was ending. I howled and cried until I couldn’t anymore. And then I called him. You can imagine what I said. I don’t even want to repeat it. I called him every name in the book. I was out of my mind. When he could finally speak, his voice was shattered. He said, “I am really, really sorry about the film. You’ll never know how much. But you know what? I just can’t deal with you anymore. I’m not gonna be sorry I have money. I’m not gonna be sorry my parents love me. For Christ’s sake, I’m sorry I messed up your film, but you don’t have to take out your whole goddamn life on me.” Then he hung up. And I stood in the hallway alone, holding a crushed coffee cup. I was finished crying.

  28

  IT’S NOT EVEN WORTH GOING INTO THE REST OF THE gory details. I recut the thing so I could graduate; I can’t bear to watch it. But they did give me a degree. I started writing a new script and I kept thinking about how frightened I’d been the whole time I’d been shooting. I couldn’t finish. Colin’s film looked magnificent, and he got this very big deal American Film Institute grant and moved to Harlem and e-mailed me his phone number and we were done. I kept his number. And I missed the way we knew things about each other.

  I tried for a while. I applied for grants. I worked PA on raggedy straight-to-video crap. I watched white boy after white boy get the grants, the deals; I watched them not be scared. And when I went to the alumni career office and saw the ad for a second camera assistant on Law and Order I went for it. I was tired of eating ramen noodles and thinking about how I couldn’t write and applying for grants I didn’t get and working for free and sleeping alone and thinking about the out-of-focus piece of shit that was my only film.

  Smash cut. Eight months later. I’m twenty-nine. I’m standing next to the Central Park Reservoir, holding a cup of coffee. I’m bored. The show is shot in an intensely boring style and we were doing the open in which the people who have nothing to do with the rest of the episode are talking about something that has nothing to do with the rest of the episode and they’re about to find the body that sets the plot in motion and even the director is bored, clutching his coffee as if it would save him. I carried stuff. Heavy stuff. Wires and batteries and reels of film. That’s what I did. That was my function. The day crawled by. Just like every other interminable day.

  When I got home from work, my roommate, Lakshmi, was sitting on the couch, watching cartoons. She has a weakness for Bugs Bunny that I had indulged last Christmas with a Looney Tunes boxed set. She said it was the best gift anyone had ever gotten her. She barely looked up when I came in. She was already wearing her expensive black pants and white shirt for work; she’s working on a novel and waiting tables at a fancy Midtown restaurant to earn money. She often didn’t go to work until after I came home.

  “Your mother called,” she said.

  “My mother?”

  “Yeah, your mother. She said it was important and that you should call back.”

  I sighed. “She probably can’t find her lighter.”

  Lakshmi laughed. She’d heard me rant and rave enough about my mother. “You should still call her back, though. She sounded upset.”

  I went to my bedroom, feeling wronged, and called. I was afraid really; Mama didn’t call unless something was happening. Her voice when she answered was harsh and bristly, like she’d been smoking more than usual. Guess she hadn’t lost her lighter after all.

  “Hi, Tam.”

  “Hi, Mama. You called? Lakshmi said it was important.”

  “Lakshmi. What kind of name is that again?”

  “It’s Indian, Mama. Her parents are from New Delhi.”

  “Oh yeah. I forgot.”

  We had this same conversation every time Lakshmi’s name came up. “What’s going on, Mama?”

  A pause while she inhaled. “Listen, Tam, I . . . do you remember when your grandfather died?”

  “I remember you telling me about it. I remember we didn’t go to the funeral or anything.” I knew I sounded petulant, but I couldn’t help it.

  She exhaled sharply. “Well, my mama . . . your grandmother, fell and broke her hip in Tulsa and my sister, Jolene, called, and I want to go this time. I . . . she’s the last parent I got. They think she’s gonna be OK, but I need to go out and see to her.” Pause. Another deep drag. “And I want you to come with me. It’s time you met your grandmother.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, Tam.”

 
; “Mama, why you want me to go with you now?”

  She was quiet for a long moment. “I don’t know, baby. It don’t . . . I’m not sure I was right not to go before. You got a right . . . you ought to meet your people. My mama ought to meet you.”

  “Jesus, all right. Jesus. How . . . I . . . I’ve gotta get a plane ticket to Tulsa. And I can’t get away until Friday. Is that soon enough?”

  “Soon’s you can do it, baby. Sheila can’t get off work—”

  “You weren’t really gonna bring her anyway, were you?”

  Mama acted as if I simply hadn’t spoken. “I’m going out to Tulsa tomorrow. You get there when you can and let me know when you’re getting there. I’ll pick you up. You got my cell number, right, Tam?”

  “Right.”

  I stared across the room at the still from Sweet Smell of Success that I had pinned on the wall. I’d had it for years. Mama never understood it: “That’s such an old movie, Tam. Wouldn’t think somebody your age would like it. It’s not even in color.” In the photograph, Burt Lancaster is holding Tony Curtis’s tie, threateningly. They are looking straight at each other. Burt is in charge. Tony’s along for the ride, no choice about what to do, just hoping to curry favor. I sighed. I shoved the heels of my hands into my eyes for a moment. Then I walked over to my computer and started looking up plane fares.

  I went to my boss the next day and told him what had happened. He just stared at me. Then he said, “Listen, you’re a second AC on a network show. Do you know how many people would kill for this job?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know we’re in the middle of the season here.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “So what do you think my answer’s gonna be?”

  I looked at him. He was such a cliché. He even had this giant unlit cigar in his mouth and was wearing a stupid flannel shirt. “I think your answer is going to be no. But I’m going anyway.” And I turned around and left. Goodbye, Law and Order. Just like that.

  I hadn’t seen my mother in a year. Even though once I started working on the show, I could afford it, I kept telling her I couldn’t. I couldn’t get it together to see her, even when I missed LA’s smooth, sunny openness. We talked on the phone when I remembered to call. I listened to my friends’ tales of interfering mothers with amazement and, I’ll admit, a little envy. What would it be like to have something to push against? Mama met me at the Tulsa airport. As usual, she glowed. She was wearing a tight white miniskirt that most women past twenty-two couldn’t have pulled off, a low-cut red satin blouse and big Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s sunglasses. Her hair was in a blond-streaked chignon; she’d had a weave since I saw her last. I felt as wide as a barn door and about as attractive as I struggled up to her, hefting my army green backpack and my camera bag. “Hi, Mama.” I kissed her on the cheek.

  “Hi, baby. Good Lord, is that backpack all you could find to pack your things in?”

  “Yes, Mama. It’s cheap, and all I needed was some jeans and shorts and stuff.”

  “And that camera.”

  “Yeah, Mama.”

  She sucked her teeth briefly. “Well, you still could have had some kind of suitcase. You don’t have to look like you just fell off a truck,” she said.

  “Mama, is there any way we could skip this? Or at least wait until I’m in the car to start? Jesus Christ.”

  “Don’t take the name of the Lord in vain.”

  “Jesus Christ, Mama, where’s your car?”

  “No need to yell, baby. It’s just this way. This airport’s way smaller than LAX.” She paused and I imagined the drag she’d take right then if she’d been allowed to smoke in the terminal. The smooth Bette Davisness of it. The calculated closing of her eyes against the smoke. “Whole damn town’s way smaller than LAX.” She sighed. “Come on, Tam. Let’s go on to the house.”

  I looked out the window as she drove, still too mad to talk. Smoke wafted out her side window the way it always did when she was at the wheel. I hadn’t been in a car with her in a very long time. I remembered the way the sun spilled through the haze onto the wide streets of LA and how small and constricted New York seemed to me when I first moved there. Well, not small. Big yet cramped, like a Great Dane in a ten-pound potato sack. In LA, the room outside seems to spill on forever; the road never ends. In New York, I’d just as soon walk.

  Tulsa wasn’t like either place. After we got off the highways and into the downtown, it was small and there were more buildings, but it still felt like the country. There were aging, dusty pickups parked in the diagonal spaces in front of a strip of stores. Some of them had gun racks. I spotted more than one old man wearing overalls. Most of the people were white. The sunlight was brighter, unfiltered by smog; the buildings were tall but not assertive and almost noisy like the ones in New York that insisted you think about them when you looked up. “Was it like this when you were a kid, Mama?”

  “Like what?” she said, eyeing the light as though willing it to change.

  “You know . . . It’s real different from LA.”

  Mama laughed, that special short bark that she reserved for only my most ridiculous comments. “Yeah. It’s different all right. You gonna be learning a lot I never taught you, baby. An awful lot. I hoped I’d never come back here,” she said. “Or if I did, I’d be wearing furs and folks’d be wanting my autograph. Something like that.” I looked out the window again. We were driving past a worn-looking black marble memorial. It was sort of like the Vietnam Vets one, but not quite. I looked back at my mother. She gazed steadily ahead.

  29

  WE DROVE MAYBE ANOTHER TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES, until we’d left the city well behind and were out in an area of densely packed tract houses, each one uglier than the last. Finally we pulled up at one with two pink flamingos in the yard. My mother turned off the engine, lit another cigarette, and said, “We’re staying with my sister, Jolene. She . . . she’s been wanting to meet you for a long time. My brother, Otis, will be by later.”

  “What?” I could think of no other words.

  “I know all this is a lot to take in, but I had my reasons, baby. And they all real eager to meet you.” Were staying with my aunt and uncle? What? I said it again. “What?”

  “Come on in and meet them. You’ll see.” Then suddenly she said, “Bring your camera on in.” She’d never suggested I take my camera anywhere. What was still the only word in my mind as I walked around to the trunk she popped and got my camera out of its bag. It didn’t use film, like the cameras in school, but was a little digital video camera that I had bought with my first Law and Order paycheck. I looked at the lens, made sure I had a cassette in, and said, “OK, let’s go.” And so we walked up to the door. My mother rang the bell. The weight in my hand was comforting.

  The woman who opened the door was my mother without the gleam. Her hair was pulled back into a nondescript ponytail, split-endy and too often relaxed. It’s a look you see on the subways, when women have done too much to their hair and it’s just given up. She outweighed my mother by about thirty pounds and was wearing a shirt and pants that screamed Kmart, but they were clearly sisters. Same mannerisms, almost the same face, one round, one angular. My mother came from somewhere. Imagine that. I stood a half step behind her the way I used to as a child, afraid to be introduced. “Tam, come on out here. You grown now,” Mama said impatiently. “Jolene, this is Tamara. I think the last time you saw her, she was just a lump in my belly.”

  Jolene smiled broadly, revealing the same strong white teeth as my mother and me (dentists always ask if I’ve had braces). “Well. Well. I’d never have thought it. Come on in here, girl. Come on in.” She extended her arms to embrace me.

  I was taller than she was. Over her shoulder as her wide, soft arms encircled me, I could see that the living room was a pink and purple wonder, nearly every flat surface festooned with those little African-American angel dolls that I’d always seen advertised in Essence and thought no one bought. There must h
ave been fifty of them. It smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and rose-scented Airwick. She stood back and regarded me, as Mama, out of the spotlight, fidgeted. “Well, your grandma’s gonna be glad to see you. Never got to see Angie’s baby before.” She threw Mama a dirty look. “She’s gonna be right pleased.” Her voice hummed in my ears like honey. She looked down. “What’s that you got there?”

  “A camera,” I said. “I like to make videos.” Not I’m a filmmaker, what we all said in school, what I used to always say.

  “Well, why don’t you take a little video of me and your mama. This is a historic occasion.” She reached out and took my mother’s arm, pulling her in, and we all walked into the living room, where every piece of furniture had plastic covers. My mother and her sister sat down next to each other. “This girl ain’t set foot back here in close to thirty years. We don’t even know what all you all do out there in LA.”

  I looked down into the monitor. My mother and aunt shrunk to the size of the small screen. “I live in New York now”—I paused—“Aunt Jolene.” The words felt fractured in my mouth. I’d never called anyone “aunt” before. Sheila was always just Sheila. “I am not nobody’s auntie,” she would say. “Least of all yours. Me and your mama look like sisters?”

  “Do you? All the way up there? Now ain’t that something? What you do up there?” Aunt Jolene’s voice sung in my ears. The camera made its small metallic breathings. No point getting all into that now. I said what was easiest. “I work on a TV show.”

  “You do? Which one?”

  “Law and Order.”