it is nearly dusk when margaret arrives back at the house, still flush with adrenaline from her confrontation. Maybe she didn’t return bearing the flag of surrender as she’d naïvely imagined, but she feels like she’s won some kind of victory, one she is eager to share with her mother. She imagines Janice’s grateful surprise at her loyalty, and the moments of tender approbation that will follow. Her stomach churns with acid. Margaret thinks it’s excitement until she realizes that she has not eaten a thing since the bowl of cornflakes she had for breakfast.
“Mom?” she calls out as she walks through the side door and into the kitchen. There is no response. Margaret opens the refrigerator and confronts a wall of Tupperware containers. Each translucent brick is labeled with masking tape in her mother’s spiky hand: “Carrot-Ginger Soup 7/25,” “Smoked Salmon Frittata 7/23,” “Lemon Chicken 7/26,” “Shrimp Fra Diavola 7/24.”
Margaret removes the containers of chicken and soup and turns to deposit them on the kitchen counter. She slams right into Janice, who has materialized just a few inches behind her. The soup container clatters to the floor.
“God, you scared me,” Margaret blurts as she retrieves the Tupperware. In the white glow from the refrigerator’s light she can see that the emotional trauma of the last month has taken a real toll on her mother. Janice’s skin is pasty, her face thin, her eyes bloodshot and feline. There are red channels on her forearms that look like fingernail marks. “Mom, you look terrible. Are you even sleeping at all anymore? Have you considered taking Ambien or something?”
“We need to talk,” says Janice.
“Can I tell you about my afternoon first?” says Margaret. She peels back the lid of a container, removes a chicken leg, and takes a bite, smearing cold, fatty meat across her chin. She feels like the conquering warrior, marching in to claim the hand of the princess. She turned down $200,000! Sacrificed her own well-being for her mother, in the ultimate display of filial love! Margaret radiates warmth toward her mom—
the two of them against the world
—and turns her face up as if to catch that love reflected back at her. Together they will solve all their problems—Janice’s
and
Margaret’s!
“Not now,” says Janice. She reaches out and takes the chicken leg from Margaret’s hand, marches over to the kitchen cabinet, and deposits the meat on a plate. She walks back to where Margaret stands, puts the plate down on the kitchen counter, and hands Margaret a fork and napkin. “I was at the Gossetts’ last night. And I saw what happened to Sadie.”
Margaret again sees the floppy gray dog arcing through the air, and closes her eyes against the image. “Oh,” she says. “Yes. That.”
“I don’t think you understand,” says Janice. She takes a wobbly breath and claws at the skin of her forearm with a stiff hand. “I don’t think you understand what you have done. The magnitude of it.”
Margaret wipes the grease off her chin with the napkin, nervous—
the cat out of the bag
—but also confused by her mother’s histrionics. “The magnitude? Aren’t you being a little melodramatic? I took a temporary job doing some dog walking, to make a little cash. The dog got in a small accident. I felt terrible about it, but there wasn’t much I could do.”
“You don’t understand,” says Janice, and Margaret recoils from the fury in her mother’s voice. “You nearly killed the neighbors’ dog. Noreen Gossett’s dog. You have no idea how much Noreen loves that dog. And you didn’t tell me! Everything would have been fine if you’d told me! I would have dealt with it earlier and everything would have been okay. How could you be so irresponsible?”
Margaret tries to make sense of the encounter she is having, but can’t. It’s just a
dog,
she thinks. Her mother doesn’t even
like
dogs. She crumples the napkin in her hand and heaves it toward the garbage can. It lands in the middle of the kitchen floor. “You’re not making any sense, Mother. The dog is fine. Just a few broken bones. There’s no need to act like I just triggered Armageddon. I apologized to Noreen Gossett. What else could I do? I wasn’t the one driving the car.”
Janice marches over, picks the discarded napkin up off the floor, and examines it, as if it is evidence, before placing it carefully in the can. “I’ll have you know that I had to write Noreen Gossett a three-thousand-dollar check to pay for that dog’s hospital bills.”
“Three thousand dollars? For a vet bill? God, that’s insane. That’s more than my rent for two months,” Margaret says, but internally she is wincing: She’s been bailed out by her mommy? She thought she’d already battled that mortification today, stared it in the face and won, but this time it’s too late. It’s done, and her humiliation is complete. The recognition of her own incompetence chokes her, like the tight pink leather collar on that horrid half-dead dog. “Is that what this is about? Because I will reimburse you.”
“Why did you take a job walking the Gossetts’ dog?”
“Does that really matter?”
“Honestly, I have the feeling that you don’t have enough money to pay for even a decent pair of clean underwear. But how would I ever know?”
Margaret impulsively lifts the skirt of her dress, revealing a wall of white panty with blue lace trim. Janice quickly turns her head away, clearly terrified that she is about to glimpse a flash of her daughter’s raw pubes. The sight of her mother’s distaste makes Margaret feel sick. “They’re clean,” she says bitterly. “Don’t worry about me getting in any traffic accidents.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What
is
the point, Mother? What difference does it make to you whether I have money or not?”
“The point is that you never tell me
anything
! I’m your
mother
!”
Margaret looks at her shrieking mother, whose cheeks have erupted in hot red spots of fury, and finally lets petulance get the better of her. “You really want to know?” she asks, bristling under her mother’s completely unfathomable—
unfair!
—attack. “Okay.
Fine.
I’m behind on some credit card payments, Mom. I owe some money and I’m trying to find a way to pay it back and I thought getting a job while I’m here would help.” She watches her mother’s face as it flickers rapidly with surprise and then concern and then dismay. “
Snatch
didn’t exactly work out the way I thought it would. Is that what you wanted to hear? Does that make you happy?”
Apparently not. Janice has narrowed her eyes and is shaking her head furiously, as if by refusing the truth she might make it go away entirely. Her fingernails sink deeply into her own flesh. “Oh, God, Margaret,” she says. “Not now. Why?”
“
Why?
You think I did this on purpose?”
“You blame me, Margaret, but it’s you. You. Yes, you.” Janice points her finger at Margaret, jabs it forward with each “you.” The finger wobbles in midair. “You spoiled it. This entire
…mess,
it’s your fault. With Lizzie, and James, and Noreen. With
everything.
” Margaret listens, baffled, to her mother’s incoherent babbling. Lizzie? James? What the hell do they have to do with anything? Janice stops suddenly and takes a breath, as if to calm herself. And then she blurts, as her eyes fill with tears: “And you weren’t even
sorry.
” Janice blinks rapidly, then turns and flees the kitchen.
Margaret stares at the chicken leg, lying forlornly in the middle of a dinner plate. She is too upset to move. What mess is her mother talking about? The lawsuit? The credit card debt? The
divorce
? Does she really believe that Margaret is somehow at fault for that? For a moment, she considers chasing her mother down to tell her about her confrontation with Paul—
I gave it all up, for you!
—just to see the stunned look of guilt on Janice’s face.
No,
she thinks.
Let her find out on her own, and then she’ll
really
feel terrible.
Mostly, she wishes she could erase the whole afternoon, regrets that she ever defended her mother to her father, regrets that she ever offered to help her mother in the first place. What was she thinking? She should have taken her father’s $200,000, paid off her bills, and just left town so that her parents could duke it out by themselves. Despite the divorce, she thinks bitterly, her parents still have this in common: Nothing she does will ever be good enough for either of them. To hell with them both.
Margaret walks the chicken to the sink, dumps it down the garbage disposal, and hits the switch. The disposal clatters and grinds to a halt as the chicken bones destroy the rotor. Then she turns, grabs her purse, and walks straight back out the kitchen door.
In the driveway she passes Lizzie, returning home from God-knows-where. Lizzie pivots around and follows Margaret toward her car. “Where are you going?” she pleads. “Can I come? Puhleeeze?”
“No!” Margaret snaps. As she marches past her sister, she gets a glimpse of Lizzie’s wounded face and knows that she’s hurt her feelings, but she’s just not in the mood to deal with her needy sister. The engine of her Honda is still warm when she climbs in the front seat and putters back out the driveway.
margaret can remember when the cineplex 13 was built on the main street of downtown Santa Rita, when she was in junior high school. It had seemed to her an adolescent Xanadu. Parents dropped their kids off here on the weekend, secure in the fact that they would be safe within its concrete confines. They weren’t aware that the college dropouts running the ticket counter would happily sell R-rated movie tickets to PG-age kids, for a two-dollar bribe. Or that Captain Cork’s, across the street, sold booze to underaged kids, who snuck it into the theater in their backpacks. On Friday nights, at the café tables, preteen girls would bat their eyelashes from behind their extra-large Diet Cokes (spiked with spiced rum) at boys who blithely ignored them, enraptured instead by the stand of video games just off the reception. The last row of Theater 11 was where, it was rumored, half of her class had gone to second base.
The Thirteen has not aged well. The lobby is dark and cavernous and smells like rancid grease. Spiders suck flies dry in dusty corners. The rug dates the place, with its eighties-era pattern of green triangles and pink squiggles now mottled by years of dirty sneakers and spilled soda to a uniform shade of gray-brown. The neon letters spelling out the names of the beverages for sale—Sprite, Coke, Jolt Cola—flicker erratically. The Frogger video game she once played while waiting for her mother to pick her up has been replaced by a game called Death Metal: Blood Match that screeches and hiccups in the corner of the lobby.
“Whamoovee,” says the teenage girl from behind the glass of the ticket counter. Margaret looks up at the marquee, ready to pick a film at random. Anything that will keep her away from the house and her mother for a few hours. Hell, maybe she’ll spend the rest of the summer here, slipping from movie to movie, sleeping through the matinees, living on salted popcorn, hiding out from the collection agencies.
She scans the list of titles, considering the dismal offerings, and then freezes. There, in Theater 11, is
Thruster.
For a minute, she thinks she must be hallucinating it. It’s out already? She turns around to look at the movie posters lining the wall, and her heart begins to palpitate. There is Bart’s face, three times its normal size, staring back at Margaret. He is wearing wraparound sunglasses with a Ferrari reflected in the lenses and is wielding a subatomic machine gun. “One man. One machine. One bloody road to revenge,” reads the caption.
“Whamoovee,” repeats the girl in the glass box, as the people in line behind Margaret begin to grumble.
“Thruster,”
blurts Margaret, before she can think better of it.
“Starts in ten minutes.” Margaret takes the ticket and stares at it. Then she looks across the street to the Captain Cork’s liquor store. She knows what she’ll need to make it through.
eleven minutes later, margaret settles into one of the last seats in the theater just as the opening credits roll, a pint of tequila wedged in her purse. She sits between a bearded man who looks to have slept there since the last showing and a college-age couple feeding each other popcorn from a bucket the size of a spaghetti pot. The springs in the seat are broken, and the velvet has worn down to the netting underneath, but Margaret is already too absorbed in what she sees on the screen to really notice. There he is, staring back at her, twenty feet high. He sits behind the wheel of a jet-black Ferrari, racing through a desert landscape, a barely legal blond vixen—Ysabelle van Lumis—in the passenger seat. She can see every pore on his nose.
“Jesus,” she whispers at the screen, just to vent some of the pressure that is building up inside her.
“Sssssshhhh,” says the woman sitting next to her.
Margaret pulls the bottle of tequila out of her purse. She takes a swig, not even bothering to hide it. It makes her eyes water. The woman sitting next to her clicks her tongue loudly.
“Jesus Christ,” Margaret says again, just because it feels so good to be losing it in public, and takes another swig.
The plot is, as always with these movies, not the point. Bart, a former truck driver–poet turned undercover FBI agent, must infiltrate a ring of European jewel thieves by competing in the Le Mans and in the process falls in love with a gorgeous Frenchwoman (Ysabelle, with a deplorable accent) who turns out to be the ring-leader of the thieves. In between, abundant car crashes, countless gun battles, five fistfights, and one exploding skyscraper. Of course, Ysabelle has to be saved three times, usually while wearing scraps of lingerie. Is it less offensive than
Fahrenheit 88
? Only marginally. In her head, Margaret composes a screed against it, a
Snatch
editorial about the absence of strong female action heroes.
This, at least, is what Margaret does between swigs of tequila. Mostly she fixates on Bart’s face, noticing that the “look” he was practicing in front of the mirror all those years—left-eye squint, combined with contemplative smile—is, actually, quite effective. He comes off as simultaneously fuckable and totally unapproachable. She thinks of jumping up and pointing at the screen and screaming, “Look! That was my boyfriend.
My
boyfriend!” Why did they break up again? She can’t remember. It must have been something trivial, something silly. It was the biggest mistake of her life. Her heart thumps in time to the gunfire pulsing from the end of Bart’s AK-47.