MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO: Bette’s choice. She was around six. Coop came over for this one, because he loved Hayao Miyazaki, the filmmaker. He taught everyone how to pronounce the director’s name. The freakiest, most beautiful cartoon I had ever seen, full of colors and creatures, and it wasn’t all happy-go-lucky. It was about death and friendship and dark magic. Pretty sure this was when Bette discovered she might be from another planet. Every day for a month after she saw it, she wore Totoro ears she made out of construction paper, and stretched all her shirts out by putting pillows under them, chanting, “Totoro! Totoro!” One day I came home from school and found Coop in the front yard with her, prancing around, his shirt also stuffed with pillows.
THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG: My choice. (Well, Davy’s choice. At this point, I had discovered no one wanted to watch the political documentaries I liked.) We actually didn’t end up watching the whole movie, because Davy insisted on watching the song “Almost There” over and over, which annoyed Bette and Harrison so much that they hid the DVD one night after Davy fell asleep. Even now, as she’s doing something like coloring or filling out a worksheet from school, she’ll sing, over and over to herself, “People come from everywhere because I’m almost there, people come from everywhere because I’m almost there, people come from everywhere because I’m almost there…” I asked her once if she wanted to learn the rest of the song, or at least the right lyrics. “Nope!” she said.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: Mom’s choice. It was just me and her, because Dad had taken the kids up to Grandma and Grandpa’s house in New Hampshire. We had just found out I had Niemann-Pick, and we didn’t know what it meant, really, or how long I would be seeing the geneticist. We snuggled on the couch and ate my favorite snack in the world that we almost never got, dark chocolate almonds. We laughed the most at Mrs. Bennet, how obsessed she was with marrying off her daughters like they were cattle, how nervous and nagging and silly the character was.
When it was over, and Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy had finally kissed and gotten married, I told her, “I’m glad you’re my mom. Not someone like that.”
Mom had wrapped her arms around me and held my head to her chest. “I’m glad you’re my daughter,” she said.
“Even if I’m sick?” I asked.
“Especially because you’re sick,” she had said, the vibrations of her voice soaking into my cheek. “I don’t think anyone less strong would be able to handle it.”
“Thanks, Mom,” I said, and burrowed deeper.
“My first baby,” she had said, and kissed the top of my head.
I remember it so well.
If nights like last night are going to happen again, it makes me glad I’m recording all this. Movie night isn’t just staring at a screen, it is also laughing, and crying, and fighting, and snuggling.
And I’m glad I’m writing the good and the bad. I’m glad I didn’t delete anything. What about all the moments that surround the good things? If you can only remember your aspirations, you will have no idea how you got from point A to point B.
That’s the reason why I’m writing to you, I guess, as opposed to just taking a bunch of pictures. A picture can only go so deep. What about the before and the after? What about everything that didn’t fit in the frame?
What about everything?
Life is not just a series of triumphs.
I wonder how many movie nights I missed for studying, or debate, or just complaining. I don’t want to miss any more.
LUCID DREAMING
Days look like this: Mom creaks open my door and I open my eyes and it takes me a second for everything to come into focus, a sort of heavy wet cloth draping my vision because if I don’t take a pill before I fall asleep, I wake up with shooting pains, so I sleep well, almost too well. But then Mom leans over me to open the curtains, smelling like tea tree oil like she always has, and like basil, always like basil in the summer, because she picks thick clumps of it from our yard to put in her omelets and on the sandwiches she takes to work.
I stand at my dresser with a cup of yogurt (because I’m not supposed to have an empty stomach) and swallow eleven pills.
Dad comes in—Dad’s smell is Mitchum deodorant, like an old-fashioned mint smell—and gives me a kiss on the cheek.
Smells make things more clear than anything. So after the smells hit me, everything begins to make sense.
Harry gets picked up by one friend or another to go to camp or to go play video games.
Bette and Davy sometimes go to the Linds’, sometimes they stay and Mrs. Lind comes over with lunch, sometimes Coop comes over with lunch (but never stays or says anything, maybe because Stuart is there and last time we really talked, he said all those mean things), sometimes a random on-call nurse comes over when no one can come, who mostly just sits in our living room and plays on her phone. Sometimes Mom takes me into town with her, and I stay in the waiting room until her shift is over, reading or watching Lord of the Rings on my laptop.
Sometimes I go with Stuart to the reading room at one of the bigger libraries on Dartmouth’s campus, which Mom and Dad let me do because it’s close enough to Mom’s work at the Dartmouth Medical Center. Stuart and I like to share a big leather chair on the balcony while he reads what he’s reading and I read what I’m reading.