The Animators(93)

The room starts to spin. Sounds soften—only my mother, stationary, remains clear. She was searching for the worst thing to say, and she found it. Overshot her mark, even.

It’s a moment before I can speak. “I’ll tell you something that’ll make you a lot sorrier,” I yell. “If what you said is true, I just spent the last three months fucking my half brother.”

She lets out a sound. Covers her mouth.

“That’s right. I fucked someone I might be related to. That’s my going-back-to-Kentucky story. So thanks for that.”

“I think I’m gonna be sick,” she whimpers.

“That makes two of us.” I grab my bag off the floor. “Thank you for finally owning up to this. I’m going to need to shower in bleach before I can get this day off of me.”

She hunches her shoulders, starts to warble again. “I’m so sorry,” she says.

“Stop. You are no one’s victim here.” I point at her, make sure she’s looking at me. “Don’t ever contact me again. Do you hear me? Ever.”

I stick my head in the living room. “Mel. Let’s go.”

Mel speeds past me with our luggage. “Right. See you, Mrs. Kisses.”





IRREFUTABLE LOVE


We drive to New York, the only place left for us to go: east, then north. Before we know it, we’re on the other side, that long strip of Pennsylvania that is prelude to I-95, where the trip is more destination than origin.

On the way there, I keep Mel’s flipbook in my hand. I watch myself grow up and empty out, over and over. I stare at myself in the rearview mirror. Do I look like Red? No. Do I look like Shauna? No.

I turn to Mel. “Do I look like—”

“Absolutely not. You do not look like Teddy. Stop asking.”

We stop at a Love’s in the Lehigh Valley. I stare into the restroom mirror, my mother’s voice in my head. There’s a very particular malaise that comes from being screamed at, when someone names you something terrible in an absolute fury—like something green and vital inside you has wilted. If she is just now calling me a bitch, a mistake, she must have felt this way for years. It was an ultimate judgment. I cannot pretend that it does not matter.

We cross the Verrazano-Narrows at midnight, power plants glowing in the dark, and up the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway. Moisture runs down my face. It hurts, seeing that cold, radiant skyline. We coast back into the city.

—

We get the last installment of the Hollingsworth money and go to work cleaning the studio, filled with cigarette butts and half-empty beers and the stink of twenty-two-year-old dudes. It’s numbly satisfying, having something to do.

Once we’ve made the place spotless, I am tapped. My mind is a frayed wire—no sparks, no heat. Everything—our cork wall for the storyboard, our drafting tables—is primed for work, except for me. “I don’t know if I can do it,” I say, curling up on the couch in a fetal position.

Mel squints at me, biting her lip. “We’ve already got a chunk, you know,” she says. “It’s not like we’re starting from scratch.”

I cover my head with my hands.

The next morning, she finds me on the couch again. I’m watching the trunk scene on my laptop: the soundless fluidity of my face, Teddy’s hands. The quick slice of movement as the trunk is opened—how it seems fast yet deliberate, done with just the right amount of gravity. Mel was in peak form in Louisville. Maybe me too. The work is immaculate. No one walk or nose-scratch or cigarette flick like any other.

Mel flops down on the floor and laces her hands behind her head. Peers up at me, mouth screwed to one side.

Says, “Did I tell you about that article I read?”

She begins to tell me of a dancer she’s read about who works almost exclusively with falling. The dances she choreographs are built of leaps from upper platforms and edges—the swoop, the plummet, the dive, the pitch. Dancers trained for the company have to first buck their natural fear of falling, correcting the body’s self-protective horror of giving itself over to gravity. A fall is a fall, no matter how deliberate; it will never fail to stop your heart.

To practice, the dancers assume a plank position, as if readying themselves for a push-up, and then lift their arms, letting their bodies collapse to the ground. “It’s a controlled fall,” Mel says. “It hurts, but it trains you to deal with the fear so you don’t start hyperventilating when you dive off a ledge. It’s your body going against instinct.”

“It’s smacking your face into the floor.”

“You’re not afraid to walk, are you?” she says. “Every step you take is like a little fall. You’re just so used to it that the fear’s not there.”

I give her my best durr face. Point to my cane, propped up by the door.

She rolls her eyes and climbs up. “Let’s try it. Come on.”

I slump over. Look at her through my hair.

“Come on, Kisses. Do it. Make sweet love to the motion. Become one with it.”

I know what she’s trying to do. I also know she won’t leave me alone until I do it with her.

And that’s how we both come to be on the floor, in plank positions, side by side. “Okay,” she says. “One. Two. Three.”

Nothing happens.