In the Beauty of the Lilies (26 page)

But then after the little birthday-card-and-stationery store, which had a children’s-book section at the back (but not
books as bright and interesting as the comic books at Pursey’s or the Big Little Books in Kresge’s, beyond the socks and underpants section), and the shop that always had a dusty bride’s white dress in the window and a bouquet of cloth flowers and cardboard wedding cake, Essie arrived at the movie house. Already a line was forming and as she got in it and looked around she saw some third-graders she knew and a bunch of very bad fourth-grade boys, but nobody else as small as herself. Momma had been right, and she felt all watery and guilty down in under her dress. She shouldn’t be here. The very bad boys were snorting and shoving among themselves and she was terrified they would notice her. She tried to hide between two women, one fat and one skinny, who were talking over her head about the uppity colored people, now that they had a boxing champion again and four of those rapists, it was shocking, had been released from jail down in Alabama. “Next thing,” the skinny one said, “we’ll be giving the niggers the whole country to cut each other up in,” and the fat one hummed so it looked like she agreed, though Essie could tell she wouldn’t have put it exactly like that. But then the line began to move and the nice old frazzled lady in the ticket booth took her dime and gave her a raspberry-colored ticket with a kindly smile and inside the lit theatre Essie found a seat over on the side, where it looked like nobody would sit near her and she could eat the box of gumdrops she had bought with Momma’s extra nickel in peace. As the lights dimmed and the last people hurried to their seats she felt her aloneness here tremblingly, like one time on the beach below Port Penn she had looked around and couldn’t find her family among all the bodies in bathing suits, everybody looking the same with white legs and arms and black bodies. She longed to be back in the bright greenhouse
with Momma, who sat surrounded by spools of ribbon in shiny colors.

But then in a sliding gush of the special Disney music Mickey Mouse burst on the screen, those yellow rays coming out from his head with its round black ears and funny sharp widow’s cap, and Essie felt safe. She liked Mickey cartoons better than ones with Donald Duck; there was less hitting and angry squawking. She had trouble understanding what Donald was quacking, though Eddie Bacheller could do a good imitation at recess, squinching his mouth shut and getting all red in the face. Mickey though he walked through life alone (like her today, to the Saturday movie) had tender feelings, picking those nice flowers like little platters for Minnie with her blushes and big shoes, and there were even little children, baby Mickeys crawling among the funny round furniture wearing gowns with the ends sewn shut like ghost costumes, with a patched place where their tails came out. She remembered when baby Danny wore nighties somewhat like that but his little feet always showed. Even when there was Pegleg Pete in the cartoons he wasn’t really evil, you could tell by his ears, he was just gruff and growly and didn’t always shave, like Mr. Horley at the post office. From the pointy ears Pegleg Pete was a cat but from their floppy ones all his henchmen were dogs: that was strange. Today’s cartoon was about hunting moose and there was a sadness and cruelty about hunting living things that kept Essie from laughing as much as she wanted to. From getting the
Mickey Mouse Magazine
she knew that by Christmas a full-length cartoon about Snow White was going to come to the theatres but she wasn’t sure she wanted to see it if it was too scary, if it had a witch in it as bad as the Big Bad Wolf. Some of these cartoons got into your thoughts deeper than real actors could do. What she
loved about cartoons was the jingly-jangly swooping music that hurried things along, that entered straight into your excitement so you didn’t even hear it except when you deliberately listened.

At the edges of the screen’s rectangle curves appeared and the circle got smaller and smaller and pinched everything shut and it was over with a final comical toot. The travelogue in Sepiatone was about beautiful Thailand where they had fatbellied Buddhas of solid gold and girls with long black hair darker than her own, in dresses slit up the side and glistening like Christmas paper, and canals with boats woven like Easter baskets floating on them. The newsreel with that great serious voice booming above everything, like God’s—even though it sounded scolding, you knew it cared for you—showed running soldiers and explosions in Spain and China and a bridge in San Francisco and a tunnel in New York opening and that stupid Hitler with his tiny mustache saying something angrily you couldn’t understand, worse than Donald Duck, and that Joe Louis the women were talking about knocking down a white man in a square ring like a movie screen on its back. The screen showed a factory with men putting cars together as fast as machines and the great voice said how Ford Motors had turned out its twenty-five millionth automobile and then another factory had things like triangular spools in it spinning and the voice said that Du Pont Industries had developed a new miracle thread called nylon that would make the silk produced by worms obsolete. This was right here in Delaware and it made Essie feel proud and loyal. The previews showed Napoleon in one movie and a hurricane in another but she knew Momma and Daddy would want to go to a sappy one about a man and a woman always fighting and then it turning out they loved each other,
starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. Essie would look over and see her parents holding hands and be humiliated.

By the time the main feature came on she had eaten all her gumdrops, their insides rubbery under the crackling crust of sugar grains. She must remember to brush her teeth an extra minute tonight, otherwise she would wind up with teeth you take out at night and put in a glass like Grandpa Sifford; he showed her one time with a sly kind of pride. When the teeth were in the water they looked larger. This was as frightening as the crumbling face in
Lost Horizon
. One kind of movie she never wanted to see was a horror movie: when the previews came on showing this big man with fine black lips and nuts holding his head together and lightning flashing behind the castle or the creepy big house like the house up on Willow Street before Daddy’s Aunt Esther died and they sold it, Essie would slouch way down in the seat and clamp her eyes shut. But now she sat upright, imitating Deanna Durbin’s nice fearless posture, and let
One Hundred Men and a Girl
flow through her. Being alone was like being alone on the deck of a great dark ship slowly moving through an unseen sea. She was in ecstasy. The movie made you laugh and thrill. Though what the girl heroine attempted seemed impossible, persuading this great conductor (who really
was
a great conductor in real life, playing himself), you knew it was possible. “Fairy tales never come true,” the movie father, Adolphe Menjou, told Deanna Durbin, but when Mischa Auer looked up from the piano keyboard with his frizzy hair on fire in the light and listened to her sing, this cold rod of certainty like smooth metal went through you and you knew every dream of hers would come true, through the power of her pure singing: she put her elbows up on the piano edge and opened her smiling mouth and out came these amazing silvery trills, as Essie
floated forward on the great slightly slanting deck above the unseen black sea. She loved being alone in the movies; she could see and hear better, without her parents’ hands and breathing distracting her, she could better gather the movie to her own being. When she got home she must ask Momma to get singing lessons for her, so she could open her mouth and have that thrilling pure icy sound fly out of her face, beneath the little hair ribbon Deanna Durbin wore.

Outside the Roxie, the day had gone on being Saturday. Days were so long she couldn’t see how people could ever get old, the future was so far away. This day’s grayness was several notches darker, and just as she had hoped the sidewalk was speckled with the start of a hesitant rain. Essie loved the feeling of rain: sometimes when it was falling outside and chuckling in the gutter she would crouch there where her window above the radiator was open enough to admit the tingle of it, the woolly smell of it like a big soft not very dangerous animal turning around outside, while she was safe inside. It was not raining enough that she needed to dart from doorway to doorway; she walked along with her head high like Mr. Josephs said, dreaming, enjoying her awareness of the day, the way it had jumped ahead two hours while she was hidden in the movie house. One of the sensations she loved was being hidden, crouching where legs and voices would go by with nobody knowing she was there. People seemed larger and less predictable, spied on. In a way, you were always hidden, inside your head. Her impression of danger glinting along Rodney Street was gone now. The people on the street seemed large and stupid, like cows bunching up the way they do in a corner of a field. Fat motherly women were shaking bandanas out of their pocketbooks to protect their marcelled waves and one or two men had put up black umbrellas they
had been carrying. The movie was inside her like a craggy landscape in shades of silvery gray, with deeps down to black and a feeling of dizzyness. In their shining, with their swift-talking barking voices and sharp snapping movements as if by pairs of scissors, the movies took you to an edge but left you safe, all shadows sealed shut inside a happy ending, and sent you out into a Saturday where the actual people bumbled along like shapeless animals, blobs against the daylight that puzzled your eyes. These crags and chasms of danger existed in real life, because people you knew, or almost knew, fell into them—the seventh-grade boy who drowned last year down near Port Penn, a couple Aunt Esther and Uncle Peter knew who crashed their car against a thick old elm after leaving a roadhouse, and in her own family tree the other, older Aunt Esther and the dead grandfather. He was like a ripped corner in the rectangle her grandparents made and at times when she thought of him a bright kindliness like salt or fine sugar seemed to pour out of him into her, urging her on, feeding the silvery song inside her. Her feelings of God came from him.

She almost didn’t like movies because of the way they scared you. Even in the funniest of them, somewhere, the chase got so fast somebody could be killed, or the thin man began to hit the fat man really hard. The real world was more muffled than that; there were policemen to get you safe across East Rodney Street at elementary school and teachers inside to keep the mean boys from doing more than pulling your pigtail. At times the movies seemed so out of control and dangerous Momma and Daddy put her between them to quiet her wriggling. Her favorite pictures were those with women who just skimmed along over everything—the one who ice-skated in a sparkly dress and kind of crown and had
more dimples than Momma and the one who was always dancing with the skinny man in the tuxedo. She wore dresses that were mountains of ruffles and big snakes of ostrich feathers that came up and covered her chin and no matter how fast he was making her move and twirl on the slippery ballroom floor her eyes stayed level and calm and warm like lamps inside her head: the skinny man with his long chin and little white bow tie amused her. They loved each other but didn’t always know it.

Several of the grown-ups along the street looked familiar and smiled down but she was hurrying now to get herself home. Your body is your only one and has a very thin skin over lots of blood going around and around like clock hands only faster. Where little Danny fell and cut his forehead open she could see a white scar that would never go away. If you made a bad enough mistake even if it wasn’t your fault it would last forever. Her second front teeth had come in and if she fell and chipped one she would never be beautiful; it would be like Miss Reeves’s blue nose. The doorway of the long brick building next to the Oddfellows was halfway open and she could smell tobacco and hear men’s voices grating and gnashing together, the pool balls clicking through it all, and before moving into the narrow space next to the windowless wall she checked to see that there was nobody behind her or waiting for her at the other end with a knife. Pirates in movies had curved swords and Arabs had ones even more curved but the swords were straight in
The Prisoner of Zenda
, where the same mustached man as in
Lost Horizon
was this time talked into pretending to be a king somewhere, a lazy king like the English one who went and quit because of some lady from Baltimore, which is how the two little girls became princesses next in line.

But there was nothing at the end of the passageway but Fishery Way, with its tin trash barrels grooved like the pillars at the bank, and a farmer’s cart creaking and clopping by with a load of watermelons. Essie liked the way watermelon tasted but didn’t like how the seeds stuck to your blouse and how your fingers stayed sticky. She ran the distance to the greenhouse, half because the rain was getting worse and half for the joy of running. Momma was inside working, and even with the rain it was brighter inside than anywhere else. Rain tapped now, every drop loud, on the slanting glass, and the warm long sheltered space inside, with dirt for a floor, seemed trembling in all its leaves, as if the plants could hear the rain and wanted to be up in it. Grandpa was moving pots of baby plants growing from slips to other tables and he let her help, carrying one little clay pot at a time, until she got bored and one bumped and spilled when she was thinking about a moment in the movie, where all the faces in an audience are turned to the heroine like flowers in rows. Momma was up at the front desk making up a bouquet of roses and ferns and wrapping it in a paper cone for some man going out on a Saturday date and Grandma was hiding in the back room spraying something awful and brown on plants to kill aphids and thrips and mites and mealybugs. “Ooh,” said Essie, “Grandma, what’s that awful, awful stuff? It smells like old cigarettes.”

“That’s nicotine tea, Esther.” She always called her “Esther,” unlike anybody else. It was a secret between them, Essie’s right to her own grown-up name. “I make it from old cigarettes and cigar stubs.” In a Maxwell House coffee can she had brewed a black-brown water with tobacco crumbs floating in it. “Don’t breathe in, dear. And keep your fingers out. It’s poison.”