I gesture. She jogs out of the room, returns with a nurse holding a clipboard, who leans in to adjust the morphine.
I have been in the hospital for five weeks. Our first Hollingsworth pay installment is months away; all our savings are going to pay the rent on our empty studio in New York. Here, my room has a window view onto the parking lot and, beyond that, the green: lots of sharp, low shrubbery, patches of soil that peter out into sand at the margins. When the window is open the smell is rich, bacony; I pantomime the question to Mel, making a frying pan motion only she would understand. “Salt,” she says. “Ocean’s not far.”
I close my eyes. When I open them, there’s a new, rosy glow to the room’s edges. The morphine is taking over. I feel myself sliding toward sleep, relieved that Mel is here. I want to keep her in the room with me for as long as I can.
“Lite-Brite,” I say.
She chuckles to herself. Removes a small nail clipper from her jacket pocket, worries it over her thumb. “She wants to hear the Lite-Brite story,” she mutters.
The Lite-Brite story is the part of Nashville Combat that really gets to people. It was posted on YouTube to promote the movie; it’s the scene people send to their friends, and when it’s shown in theaters, the crowd erupts. Mel had her way with the scene, reverting to the twitching, trip-wire expressions of the opening credits. And the tones: bombastic, intense. The fruit of the hours Mel spent nerding out over her color key game, a massive shade chart occupying the screen of her desktop Mac, aiming for that grainy, ghostly seventies neon, the look of K-tel record sleeves and ColecoVision graphics. After all, isn’t that the future we envision for ourselves: all brighter colors and dramatic graphics, everything at its ultimate zenith?
It’s still best, however, to hear Mel tell the story herself.
“Say it as a full sentence,” she prompts.
I take a deep breath, start it slow, trying to imagine every letter. “Tell the story.”
The clippers snick-snick. “Okay. So Nanny—that’s Mom’s mom—got me a Lite-Brite for Christmas, right? It was awesome. I can still remember what the plastic smelled like, pulling it out of the box. Nanny wasn’t around much when I was older. She and Mom had a falling-out over Mom taking her clothes off for money, because Nanny was a born-again Christian. In some ways. All my older cousins, their parents worked all the time or were just fuckups who had dropped them at Nanny’s and took off. So they were always running around her place and she was constantly yelling, Don’t you tetch my grape juice or You tetch my grape juice what’s in the fridge and I’ll smack you black and blue.”
I giggle, my legs twinging. She’s getting to the part I love.
She finishes with her nails, steps down to the edge of my bed. Takes hold of my foot and begins, gingerly, to trim the big toe. It’s an odd feeling: her hands warm, that cool, unsheathing sensation of nails trimming off. I wouldn’t expect it to be soothing, but it is.
“It was actually boxed wine. Like this big, generic thing of boxed wine. If there’s one thing that improves the blood of Christ, it’s having a mugful during Donahue, right?” Mel palms my clippings into the trash can. “Anyway. I had just learned to read, and I could write, a little. My cousin Arnie taught me to write the word fuck. He said that fuck was the worst thing you could say to someone. So I started leaving little messages for Mom in the Lite-Brite.”
“Like what?”
In the movie, Mel’s mom is canoodling with her boyfriend on the couch when, out of the corner of the frame, a small, yellow-haired Mel slowly rears her head, holding a Lite-Brite, the marquee rising into view: FUCK YOU MOMMY.
It hurts to laugh, but I do anyway.
“Yeah. Or FUCK OFF MOMMY. Or, you know, BUTT. Once, the word FART. I was a kid of super-classical tastes.”
I laugh harder. I knock my oxygen tubes loose. Mel leans over and readjusts them. Goes to work on my other foot.
“She never saw them, though. Not until this one night when this guy she had over saw it all lit up and laughed himself stupid. But because he liked it, because he thought it was funny, she liked it. Which wholly and completely took the fun out of it. Which was when I quit.”
“Sad,” I say.
“What. That she didn’t care, or that I quit?”
I hold my hands out, waggle them: both.
“Yeah. Well.” Her grin fades down to something small, reflective. She tosses the last of the nail clippings away. Tucks the blanket in around my feet.