The Animators(125)

“Hey. Irrefutable Love was yours. Mel facilitated in development, but that was your idea.” I start to protest. She holds up her hand. “This is how we need to start seeing your track record, Sharon. Get in the trenches and get to work, and you’ll surprise yourself by how much of this you can handle on your own. When you’re ready. You’ll know when you are.”

She mixes the screwdrivers, hands me mine, and turns toward the sink, where she starts to scrub our plates. She hands me a drying rag. She knows I am afraid. “You and Mel were moving toward this anyway,” she says. “This is what happens. People grow up. Do you remember what we talked about, before your mom came to stay with you?”

“When I flashed my beaver at the policeman?”

“We talked about your needing to be present,” she says. “Starting this project up and sticking to it will be a big part of that.”

At that moment, Danny walks in through the front door. Donnie reaches out and squeezes my arm before greeting him with a hug. She always liked Danny, from the very beginning.

—

I spread the sketches out on the kitchen table and examine them, one by one. What was Mel trying to make? Of all the stories I had ever envisioned for myself, I never saw us as a story. I never saw us ending. But she had. What was this story? How did it end?

There are storyboards of me at work on Irrefutable Love—looking at the Cintiq, an expression of total absorption on my face, and in the background Mel watching me. There are perspectives of Mel leaving the studio, looking through the windows from the street at my figure craned over the drafting table. This is a different Mel than the one I saw and heard in the home we shared together—this is a raw Mel, quiet, sad, a Mel who saw more than I ever thought she did. A Mel who circled me, looking for a way inside.

Finally, a single sketch of Mel, packing a box. She has drawn the essentials going in: alarm clock. Coffee grinder. Her charcoals. This is the box you pack when you are leaving for good, when you need to make as much fit as possible. I’m in the background, but I’m a shadow. Already a ghost with no face.

—

The Civil War show is titled General Malaise. The test episode passes approval with the network and we are given the green light for a six-episode season. Brecky gets us office space on Twenty-seventh near Madison, one of those Flatiron corridor streets that goes dark and empty after ten P.M. “I’m promoting you to the head of the art department,” Brecky says. “You get your own department. You’re the boss now.”

My first decision as executive animation producer is to hire Ryan and Tatum as my head storyboard revisionists, my second-in-commands. With their help, we hire my very first staff of storyboard artists—Luke, Marlon, Dave, Jay, all fresh from SVA. These are young, young guys. Two of them have twirly mustaches, until Jay shaves his off. They all wear a revolving selection of bright sneakers and large watches and can do swift, scary things on their phones. They don’t remember Reagan and they don’t remember what a dial tone sounds like. They’re the new generation. They scare the hell out of me.

They are bros; I am not their bro. I am their (guh) mother figure. “It’s true,” Brecky says. “We are in that age range now. Whether or not we’d be fit mothers for anyone.”

I’m hanging out the office window, a Doral from a pack Mom left at the old apartment smoldering in my hand. “Fuck that shit. They already have mothers they don’t listen to. Can’t I just be a benevolent authority figure?”

“You can be whatever you want,” she says. “This is your department.”

But the boys don’t scare me nearly as much as Caitlyn, our color key artist and the sole woman on staff, all of twenty-four years old. When Tatum introduces me to her, he says, “Caitlyn’s parents grounded her for watching Custodial Knifefight when she was in middle school. She’s a huge fan of yours.”

Caitlyn blushes wildly. I lean over and shake her hand. Tell Tatum, “Stop embarrassing her, shitfit.”

She smiles tightly at me. Says low, “Call me Cate. Please.”

The older I get, the more the memory of how my head roiled and heated and spat from about age fourteen to thirty fades: becomes a little more brittle, a little more distant, and hence more dangerous. But I remember enough to look at Cate and feel a little sorry for her. She is the lone woman’s voice in what I’m sure will become a big, senseless sausage party, which makes her even more nerve-wracking to be around. One look over her shoulder tells me how good she is, already a pro. You could destroy us all, I think, and you don’t even know it yet.

I’m easily a decade older than everyone else in this room. This, I imagine, is what makes them listen to me. I fall into the boss role while willfully expending as little effort as possible. More days than not, I wear Danny’s old sweaters, or baggy flannel shirts that trail almost to my knees.

I clock in at nine. Heft my bag on my shoulder at five-thirty and address the room: “See ya, nerds.” And I go home.

The kids stick around after hours, like kids do, with that fire in their bellies. I encourage them to do it, to use the workstations and the large Cintiqs in the off-hours (though they all have their own smaller versions now, the size of iPads, something they can slip into their fancy leather portage bags and take back to Williamsburg with them). They all have their passion projects and they all pull them out at six with fixed, singular expressions on their faces, overflowing cups of coffee in their hands, getting ready to work a night shift of their own design. They have the glazed, immutable gazes of those in love.