“That doesn’t make it any less romantic,” she says, beaming. She’s wearing a blue silk robe, and she looks tiny inside it, lost in the folds of fabric. All the chemo she went through this spring—a course so intensive she was in the hospital for over a month—seems to have shrunk her. But it worked, and now, whenever someone remarks on how much weight she’s lost, Nana only grins. “Must’ve been a whole lot of cancer in there.”
It rattles Mae sometimes to hear her joke about it; she knows how close they were to losing her. When Mae was little, some of the kids at school used to ask whether she missed having a mother, and she was always quick to bite their heads off: “I have two dads,” she’d say, eyes blazing. “And I bet they’re both better than yours.”
But that was only half the truth. The other half was that she had Nana.
Every Sunday, they’d drive down to have brunch in her sunny brownstone on the Upper West Side. The place was cluttered with a lifetime of knickknacks, but whenever Mae asked about anything in particular, Nana’s answers were always short on details. “I’ve lived a big life on a small island,” she’d say. “You can’t expect me to remember every piece of flotsam and jetsam.”
It wasn’t the things you’d expect that made her so important to Mae. Her dads were perfectly capable of helping her pick out clothes or teaching her about the birds and the bees. It was more about drinking tea on Nana’s window seat and watching old black-and-white movies together and listening to stories about her past. It didn’t matter that they were sometimes hard to believe. (“There’s no way she had cocktails with JFK,” Pop would say, exasperated.) That wasn’t the point. The point was that she was there at all.
It was like having an extra sun in their orbit, an inexhaustible source of warmth and energy. They were a constellation of their own, Mae and Pop and Dad, but knowing Nana was there on the edges made their little universe feel complete.
Now Nana’s eyes are bright as she peers at Mae over a mug of coffee. “Go enjoy your date. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that a girl your age should be out having adventures.”
“But not too many adventures,” Dad chimes in as Mae grabs her bag and heads for the door. She gives them a wave over her shoulder.
“I’ll be back later.”
“But not too much later,” he calls out behind her.
Outside, she cuts through the neighbor’s yard and then winds her way through a few side streets until she reaches the edge of town. She can see Garrett waiting outside the cheese shop, busy with his phone. When he looks up, with his messy hair and thousand-watt smile, she feels a tug of regret that this will all be over soon. It’s not like the way her best friend, Priyanka, described it when her boyfriend, Alex, left for Duke last week: like their souls were being ripped apart. Mae’s summer with Garrett has been a mixture of arguing and making out, all of it passionate, but none of it having very much to do with souls.
“Hey,” he says, giving her a kiss as they begin to walk. “How’d it go?”
“What?”
“The film. I thought you were gonna watch it.”
“Oh,” she says flatly. “Yeah. It didn’t help.”
“Really? Still no idea what went wrong?”
“Nope. And the not knowing is basically killing me.”
Garrett stops and turns to her. “What if I watch?”
“No way,” Mae says, continuing past him. “Not a chance.”
“But I’m a film critic.”
She rolls her eyes. “Having a Twitter account doesn’t make you a film critic.”
“Fine, but I will be someday,” he says, jogging to catch up to her. “So I can give you an honest opinion. And you already trust my taste, so—”
Now it’s Mae’s turn to come to a stop. “I don’t, actually. You have terrible taste. Everything you like is overwrought and pretentious. Plus, all your favorite directors are men, which really sucks.”
“That’s not my fault,” he says, but there’s a spark in his eyes, because he loves a good debate. They both do. “It’s the industry’s. Besides, it could be a good thing that we have different tastes.” He pauses. “Obviously, the admissions board did.”
She glares at him, and he holds up both hands.
“All I’m saying is that you need answers, and I have opinions.”
They’re nearly to the river now, picking their way down the hill toward the maple tree where they’ve spent the better half of the summer bickering about movies and kissing until their lips were swollen. When they get to the bottom, Garrett drops down in their usual spot, but Mae remains standing. She fishes her phone out of her back pocket and pulls up the video file.
“Here,” she says, holding it out to him.
“Really?” he says as he takes it. To Mae, it feels like handing over a tiny piece of herself.
Be gentle, she wants to say, but she doesn’t, because she’s tougher than that.
The film is eighteen minutes long, and Mae can’t bear to sit there while he watches, so she walks along the edge of the muddy river until it’s time to circle back again. Garrett’s head is still bent over the phone, but he looks up when she sits beside him, his expression hard to read.
“Well?” she asks, sounding much too casual.
“Technically speaking,” he says, “I think it’s brilliant.”
Mae frowns at him. “Meaning?”
“You’re an awesome filmmaker,” he says, his face serious. “I don’t know how you managed some of those camera angles. And that transition near the end? You’re really, really talented, and this is really, really impressive.”
She can feel the next word coming as surely as if he’d already spoken it. “But?”
“You want me to be honest?”
“I do,” Mae says, her mouth dry.
Garrett’s forehead creases. “Well, it’s just…it’s kind of impersonal.”
“Impersonal?” she repeats, caught off guard. She’d been prepared for a thousand other criticisms. But impersonal definitely wasn’t one of them.
Of all the films she’s ever made, this one is closest to her own life. Someone else did the acting—a girl from school who’d been the star of every play and was eager to use it for her audition reel—but the rest of it was Mae, her story laid out for anyone who wanted to see.
“It’s about a girl with two dads who lives in the Hudson Valley,” she says to Garrett, an edge to her voice. “What could be more personal than that?”
“I know it’s about you,” he says. “That’s really obvious. The problem is that it doesn’t feel like you.”
“Well,” she says stiffly, “maybe you don’t actually know me.”
Garrett looks surprised. “Maybe I don’t. But that’s not really my fault, is it?”
Mae almost wants to laugh, but it gets stuck in her throat. Nobody has ever accused her of being mysterious before. In fact, she’s never had a problem speaking her mind. When she was eight, she showed up at a town hall held by her congressman and gave an impassioned speech in defense of gay marriage. When it was finally legalized in the state of New York, she sent him a postcard that read No thanks to you. Once, she broke up a fight between two boys on the street and ended up with a black eye of her own. And every so often, she likes to wander into the comments section of her favorite film channel and write impassioned rebuttals to all the idiots who feel threatened by female remakes of their childhood favorites.
She is not exactly a wallflower.
Garrett squints at her, trying to figure out his next move. “Come on, Mae. We both know you’re not the best at—”
“What?” she demands.
He hesitates, then shrugs. “Letting people in.”
“That’s not true.”
“See?” he says. “If you can’t even allow yourself to be introspective in this conversation, how are you ever gonna do it in your films?”
There’s a hint of arrogance in his face as he says this, and for a second, Mae can see what her dads have been talking about all summer. But then his expression softens again, and he reaches for her hand, and she steels herself for whatever he’s going to say next, which is probably that she really shouldn’t be steeling herself against anything at all.
“You’re obviously super talented. But the difference between a good film and a great one has nothing to do with jump cuts and cool techniques. It’s about showing people who you are.”