Franny and Caroline, sitting with their father, were joined in the darkness by a single improbable thought: Would it have been worse to see a film of their actual childhood? There was the summer that Bert had the Super 8 and stalked them like Antonioni as they ran through the sprinklers and weaved their bikes in and out of the frame. Holly swirled a hula hoop around the straight pole of her hips. Albie jumped in front of her, pulling off his shirt. The sound of Bert’s voice came from the other side of the camera, barking at them to do something interesting, but they were being children, and so, in retrospect, they were fascinating. Maybe that film still existed in a box in her mother’s attic or somewhere in the bottom of a file cabinet in Bert’s garage. Franny could try to find it the next time she was in Virginia and thread the tape into a projector. That way they could see the real Cal running again and erase the memory of this sullen boy who played him. A film of life would definitely be better than this, even if there had been a camera behind them every minute recording the entire disaster of childhood, all the worst moments preserved, it would still have been better than having to watch these strangers making some half-assed attempt to replicate their lives. Holly and Jeanette had been collapsed into a single girl who was neither Holly nor Jeanette but some horrible changeling who stamped her foot and slammed the door when she argued. When had Holly or Jeanette ever done anything like that? But of course the child actors weren’t trying to play real children. They wouldn’t have known that the book had anything to do with real people, and anyway, they wouldn’t have read the book. So was the movie excruciating to watch because nothing was right, or was it excruciating to watch because, impossibly, some things were? Every now and then there was a flash of familiarity in the minute cruelties the two families exchanged.
“It isn’t you,” Leo had said when she finished reading the book. “It isn’t any of you.” He was sitting in the second bedroom he used as an office in their apartment in Chicago, the little apartment they had before there was money. He held her in his lap and stroked her hair while she cried. She had made a terrible error in judgement and he had turned it into something permanent and beautiful. That was the nail in the tire. Or not even that. Not her reading it, not his writing it, but a day all the way back in Iowa when Leo, brushing his teeth while Franny was in the shower, had spit out his toothpaste, pulled back the curtain just a bit, and said, “I’ve been thinking about that story you told me about your stepbrother.”
What she had thought at that moment, naked in the water, the shampoo running down her neck, was that Leo Posen had listened to her, that he had found Cal’s death worthy of his further reflection. He reached into the water, ran his finger in a circle around her small soapy breast.
What she hadn’t thought of in the shower was that one day she would be fifty-two and have to watch the outcome of her smiling acquiescence play out on a screen. Cal’s character wasn’t dead yet, that was waiting up ahead. Albie’s character had been drugged a couple of times by the other children, the character who was Caroline had slapped and pinched the character who was Franny every time the camera panned in their direction, and the movie wasn’t even about the children. It was about the mother of one family and the father of the other and how they looked at each other at night from across the driveway. The character who was Franny’s mother pushed her hand repeatedly through her long blond hair while staring off into the distance, proof that she struggled with the weight of her infidelity. She wore blue surgical scrubs that seemed to have been tailored to her pretty figure. The mother in the movie was pulled in so many directions: the hospital, her children, her neighbor who was her lover, his wife who was her friend. Only her hapless husband seemed to ask nothing of her. He moved along the edges of the screen, picking up the children’s dishes as she cut a line through the center of the kitchen. She was being called away again.
“Enough,” Fix howled. He pushed himself halfway up to standing, as if he meant to walk out of the theater on his own, but his feet were still on the paddles. Caroline shot from her seat, catching him just as he pitched forward into the wide open space in front of handicapped seating, breaking his fall with her body. They were clambering around in the darkness, each with a knee and both hands on the sticky floor. Franny had her arms around her father’s chest but he was thrashing, fighting her off.
“I can get up!” he said.
The collective eyes of the movie theater fell upon them. No one hushed them. Up on the screen the scene had changed. Now Cal’s character was running down the street past the neighbors’ houses in the middle of the day, his brother running behind him, trying to catch up. There was for that moment enough light that the patrons could see the noise was coming from an old man in a wheelchair. There were two women trying to help him up. No one knew that they were the movie.
“Get out of here,” Fix said, his voice keening. “Get out!” They had him back in his seat but his legs were still twisted. He kicked at Franny but she got his feet back on the paddles. Caroline got behind the chair and Franny grabbed their purses. They were not exactly running with their father but they were going as fast as they could. Franny raced ahead and held open the door to the long, carpeted hallway, and then they were through the lobby, past the crazy neon rainbow pulsing above the popcorn stand, past the teenaged ticket-takers in their brown polyester vests. Bang! They burst through the glass double doors and out into the unbearable flood of sunlight.
“Fuck that!” Fix screamed at the parking lot. A mother with two children was crossing towards them but then stopped, reconsidered, and went the other way. Franny laughed and then buried her face in her hands. Caroline bent from the waist, putting her head on the curve of her father’s shoulder.
“Happy birthday, Dad,” she said. She gave him a small kiss on the neck.
“Fuck that,” Fix said again, this time discouraged.
“Yeah,” Franny said, and rubbed his other shoulder. “Fuck that.”
After the movie they went to the beach. Franny and Fix were against it. They said they were tired and wanted to go home, but Caroline was the one who was driving the car.
“I will not allow that to be my memory of Dad’s birthday,” she said, tapping at the accelerator to remind them what the car was capable of, what she was capable of. “I want to wipe that movie off my eyeballs. We’re going to go look at the ocean.”
“Turn on Altamont,” he said. His voice half-vanished, as if the roar of his invective to the movie theater parking lot was all he had left.
“Do you think we might kill him, going to the beach now?” Franny said to Caroline.
Fix smiled. “That’s how I want to go. I want to die at the beach with my girls. We could call Joe Mike to come out and give me last rites.”
“Joe Mike’s not a priest anymore,” Caroline said.
“He’d do it for me.”
It was harder getting their father out of the car the second time. He wasn’t as able to help them, but Franny and Caroline managed. Caroline had, of course, been right about the beach. Almost all of the days in Santa Monica were beautiful, and this one, by virtue of the fact that it was no longer playing out in a movie theater, was more beautiful than most. Fix had a permanent handicapped placard for the Crown Victoria and they got a magnificent parking space when no parking spaces were available.
“Writing out a two-hundred-dollar ticket to some able-bodied asshole in a handicapped spot.” Fix shook his head. “That is a pleasure you’ll never know.”
Franny pushed the chair down the sidewalk blown over with sand. They took it all in: the gulls and the waves, the bikini-clad girls, the boys in board shorts, the lifeguard in his wooden tower watching over them like a god. Young people so beautiful they should have been making commercials for tanning lotion or ever-lasting youth played volleyball with no one watching. People ran with their dogs or ate sno-cones or stretched out on brightly patterned towels the size of bed sheets and baked.
“Don’t you wonder who all these people are?” Caroline marveled. “It’s Thursday. Doesn’t anyone have a job?”
“They’re celebrating my birthday,” Fix said. “I gave them all the day off.”
“Why aren’t those kids in school?” Caroline looked at a half dozen children with buckets beavering away on the rearrangement of sand.
“Do you remember when I used to bring you girls to the beach?” Fix said.
“Every year,” Franny said.
Fix looked out at the waves, at the tiny figures of men skating the water on bright-yellow boards. “I don’t see any girls out there,” Fix said.
“The girls are lying on their towels,” Franny said.
Fix shook his head. “That isn’t right. I would have taught you to surf. If you had lived out here with me I would have taught you to surf.”
Caroline reached out and combed back her father’s hair with her fingers. All she had ever wanted when she was young was to live with her father and no one would let her. “You didn’t know how to surf.”
Fix nodded slowly to the waves, taking it all into account. “I wasn’t a good swimmer,” he said.
They watched a boy with a pink-and-red dragon kite that raced straight up, spun in wild circles, and then plummeted down. They watched two girls in bikinis roller-blade past them, their long legs nearly brushing Fix’s knees.
“Your mother wasn’t like that,” Fix said, his eyes still on the surfers.