The Impossible Fortress(39)
We took our time walking back. Rush hour traffic was inching along Market Street and the sidewalks were full of commuters. The temperature was creeping up into the eighties, and the businessmen all carried their sports coats draped over their arms. Halfway back, we passed the Regal, Wetbridge’s tiny one-screen movie house. A large marquee announced the current film, but the Regal rarely had enough letters to spell the complete title, so the owners resorted to abbreviations and weird phonetic spellings. In the past year, they’d screened CROKODYL DUNDY, LITTL SHP OV HORRS, and FERRS BLLR DAY OUGH. Sometimes the challenge of deciphering the title could be more entertaining than the actual movie. Today the marquee promised: SME KND OV WNDRFL.
“Some Kind of Wonderful,” Mary said.
I’d never heard of it. “Do you want to go?”
“I’ve seen it three times,” she explained.
“Oh.”
“But I would totally go again. It’s awesome.”
I hurried home for a quick dinner, but I was too nervous to eat very much. Mom studied my plate with concern. It wasn’t like me to leave meat loaf untouched. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“What are you doing tonight?”
“Going to the movies.”
“With Alf and Clark?”
“With Mary,” I said.
She didn’t say anything, just nodded, like I went to movies with girls all the time. I took a shower, put on my best Bugle Boy pants with an Ocean Pacific button-down. When I finally came out of the bathroom, I found a crisp twenty-dollar bill on my dresser. No note, no explanation. I went out to the living room to thank my mother, but she had already left for work.
I walked back to the Regal—I didn’t want to bike over, I worried the bike would make me seem like a little kid—and found Mary standing under the marquee. She was dressed in the same T-shirt and skirt she’d worn earlier. Suddenly I felt silly for dressing up.
“You look nice,” she said.
“I got pizza on my other shirt,” I explained. “These were my only clean clothes.”
“Let’s get our tickets,” she said.
The Regal was a small brick building that dated back to the vaudeville era; now it was just a second-run movie theater facing stiff competition from VCRs, cable television, and shopping mall multiplexes. The owner was rumored to be more than a hundred years old. She single-handedly sold the tickets, served up cold popcorn and watery Cokes, operated the projector, and famously refused to admit any latecomers. In flagrant defiance of the Wetbridge fire code (not to mention common sense), she locked the doors at the start of every film to prevent kids from sneaking inside without paying. Everyone I knew called her the Sea Hag because of her hump-backed posture and sharp tongue, but Mary greeted her at the box office window like an old friend. “Hello, Mrs. Beckenbauer,” she said. “How was your trip to the optometrist?”
The Sea Hag peered through the smudged Plexiglas and smiled. I’d never seen the Sea Hag smile at anyone. Until that moment, I wasn’t even convinced she had teeth. “This is the third time he dilated my eyes,” she said, blinking furiously. “Look at my pupils! They’re like quarters!”
Mary turned to me. “This is my friend Will.”
The Sea Hag studied me with her enormous quarter-size pupils. I’d been to the Regal dozens of times, but she didn’t recognize me. “It’s very nice to meet you, Will. You kids are going to like this picture, it’s a good one.” We tried to pay for our tickets but she refused to take our money; instead she passed us a pack of gummy bears, on the house. “Popcorn’s ready in a minute, if you’re interested.”
There were a lot of people still waiting to pay, so Mary and I moved along into the theater. “She’s in our store every day,” Mary explained. “Pack of Virginia Slims and a Wall Street Journal. She and my mom used to talk for hours.”
“Do you know everyone working in this town?”
“Pretty much.”
The Regal Theater had a classic old-timey sort of beauty. There was a red velvet curtain, an orchestra pit, and boxed seats for distinguished guests, and the walls were adorned with portraits of silver screen movie stars: Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Fred Astaire. It wasn’t Carnegie Hall, but if you were a fourteen-year-old growing up in Wetbridge in 1987, you could almost believe the experience was classy.
The theater was only half full, and we had no trouble finding good seats in the middle. As we took our seats, a girl across the aisle made eye contact with Mary and offered a flat “hello.” She was seated with a man and woman, presumably her parents. They were busy talking and didn’t look over.
“Hello,” Mary said.
The girl abruptly looked away, choosing to stare at the curtain rather than continue the conversation.
“Friend of yours?” I asked.
“Used to be,” Mary said with a shrug. “Her name’s Sharon Boyd. We were best friends growing up, but then she sort of ditched me.”
“What happened?”
“High school, I guess.” She shrugged again. “If you want to know the truth, I don’t have a lot of friends right now.”
This seemed hard to believe. Everyone at the store loved Mary. There were a half-dozen regulars who stopped in daily for newspapers or cigarettes and they always asked how Mary was feeling—as if her mother’s death was two days ago and not two years ago. “You have tons of friends. We just got free movie tickets, didn’t we?”