The Animators(33)

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.

In the movie, there’s a short follow-up scene to this story—the next morning Mel’s mom crawls out of bed, sees the Lite-Brite, and in a face-twisting fit of rage, she throws it out the window, where it is quickly claimed by the trailer park’s feral cat pack. Mel’s mother has absolute murder in her eyes during the cut. It’s weird and abrupt, as a scene; amid all the noise, it is governed by a pregnant sort of silence.

It always made me wince a little, seeing these parts. But Mel doesn’t change, watching her mom destroy her Lite-Brite over and over. Sometimes she laughs. The joke is our default, even when it feels like we’re beyond the point of making them.

—

The first time I try to walk on my own with the twin beams in the Exercise Room, I shit my pants.

First I’m upright, straining, putting weight on my right arm in exactly the fashion I’ve been warned against, and then the gates release and it’s over. The nurses know right away. “Okay,” they say, “okay.” I’m hustled back to my room to be changed.

I keep my eyes closed while an orderly lays me down and undresses me. I try to picture myself somewhere else, my humiliation as distant object. It’s at least the tenth time this week someone has seen my vagina without the intention of having sex with it.

I tried not to cry when they removed my catheter, after I woke up. It didn’t work. It doesn’t work when I’m being changed, either.

—

I am brought a copy of this month’s Animator’s Digest. They did an interview with us right before the panel discussion. We are photographed in the studio, Mel in oversized flannel and Docs, nineties-style, feet cocked up on the desk, a pencil between her teeth. I am positioned behind her to hide my gut chub and double chin. The version of me who could walk and talk and feed herself, who could cry with both sides of her face.

I keep thinking about that picture as the MRI takes me into the tube, its machinery sliding me into the dark. Mel Vaught and Sharon Kisses in their studio, Brooklyn, NY.

Our Kotex commercial airs the same week the article is released. We were hired to design something “pad-centric” when Nashville Combat was in postproduction and we were subsisting on lentils and six-packs of PBR. We were instructed to steal some thunder from tampon usage with a “fun, lighthearted spot” showcasing the company’s new Super Light Close-to-You sanitary napkin. “Isn’t that a Carpenters song?” Mel said after they approached us.

We like to work backward, usually starting with a character’s essence—the look, the feel, the sound. The shit they’d say. The way they walk—is it a swagger? A tiptoe? A duck shuffle? Do they have an inner-ear infection, a bum knee? Only then, when they have a body, do they make it to the lightboard. Some imagine themselves quickly, with slippery ease; they cannot wait to be born. Others, not at all. This is a tough one, because it’s a thing—or, moreover, a product—we have been hired to sell.