The Memory Book(50)
Hey, it’s movie night and it’s my turn to choose but Bette keeps saying it’s her turn which is just NOT TRUE so fine we’re watching Toy Story 3
grandma took me and harry and bette to that one when it came out i think it was my brithday
it was my birthday and we got cupcakes from lou’s and i remember we went to the movie and even thogu harry and bette liked it i did not
mom keeps saying what are you writing
non of your buiesness
We’re watching Toy Story 3? It’s my turn to choose.
They keep saying it’s beette’s turn but it’s not it’s either mine or harry’s that’s not how it goes
they started the movie
grandma took me and bette and harry to toy story 3 last year on my birthday and we bought cupcakes at lou’s and snuck them into the theeter in gramma’s purse
WHOA there’s this little girl here
She’s very cute
they tell me to put away this computer and watch the movie but i don’t want to i don’t like toy story 3
who’s this little girl
i asked her who she was and she started to cry i’m sorry
they’re telling me to pt this away
oh i know her
i think she is one of bette’s friends from preschool
she’s crying
no thanks id rather type
no thanks id rather type
i dont know that little girl
HOW IT WAS SUPPOSED TO GO
Last night I fell prey to one of the standard symptoms of dementia: reverting to the age I was when our movie night tradition first began, or maybe before that. Short-term memory gone, diving deep in the subconscious, I was a kid again. A kid who had not yet met her youngest sister, Davienne.
Poor, sweet baby Davy. When I snapped out of it, and Mom and Dad told me what happened, I held her and rocked her and told her that of course I remembered her, of course, of course. It was just that I was feeling sick, and my brain wasn’t working right.
She understood after a while. To make it up to her, I let her put stickers all over me.
Movie night started when I was eleven, Mom was pregnant with Davy. It was the first year we got a TV. Mom and Dad have always held the belief that staring at screens was bad for kids. That’s why I had to save up all my own birthday and Christmas money to buy this laptop, and why my parents still only carry flip phones. (Grandma and Grandpa bought me a smartphone last spring because they knew I used it to look things up for debate.) Anyway, it’s pretty understandable why they gave in. Three kids and a soon-to-be infant, two full-time jobs, and no options for a babysitter in a five-hundred-person town.
The ones I remember:
WALL-E: Harrison’s choice. First movie night ever. Dad accidentally burned the pizza but Mom ate it anyway. In fact, Mom was hugely pregnant and ate the whole thing herself. Mom and Dad were asleep by the end of the movie so Harrison and I started the DVD over from the beginning. When they woke up at midnight, they were astounded at how long the movie was. To this day they still think WALL-E is four hours long, with no dialogue, just robots beeping at each other, and will never let us watch it.
STAR WARS EP. 1: A few years later, I’m pretty sure Davy was two or three. It was Dad’s turn to pick, and he was excited to “encounter contemporary efforts at the classic science fiction franchise.” When Jar Jar Binks started talking, he grumbled, “What is this racist bullshit?” and all of us pretended like we didn’t hear him at first, but then Mom started laughing, and Davy yelled, “Bullshit!” Harry laughed so hard he cried.
MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO: Bette’s choice. She was around six. Coop came over for this one, because he loved Hayao Miyazaki, the filmmaker. He taught everyone how to pronounce the director’s name. The freakiest, most beautiful cartoon I had ever seen, full of colors and creatures, and it wasn’t all happy-go-lucky. It was about death and friendship and dark magic. Pretty sure this was when Bette discovered she might be from another planet. Every day for a month after she saw it, she wore Totoro ears she made out of construction paper, and stretched all her shirts out by putting pillows under them, chanting, “Totoro! Totoro!” One day I came home from school and found Coop in the front yard with her, prancing around, his shirt also stuffed with pillows.
THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG: My choice. (Well, Davy’s choice. At this point, I had discovered no one wanted to watch the political documentaries I liked.) We actually didn’t end up watching the whole movie, because Davy insisted on watching the song “Almost There” over and over, which annoyed Bette and Harrison so much that they hid the DVD one night after Davy fell asleep. Even now, as she’s doing something like coloring or filling out a worksheet from school, she’ll sing, over and over to herself, “People come from everywhere because I’m almost there, people come from everywhere because I’m almost there, people come from everywhere because I’m almost there…” I asked her once if she wanted to learn the rest of the song, or at least the right lyrics. “Nope!” she said.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE: Mom’s choice. It was just me and her, because Dad had taken the kids up to Grandma and Grandpa’s house in New Hampshire. We had just found out I had Niemann-Pick, and we didn’t know what it meant, really, or how long I would be seeing the geneticist. We snuggled on the couch and ate my favorite snack in the world that we almost never got, dark chocolate almonds. We laughed the most at Mrs. Bennet, how obsessed she was with marrying off her daughters like they were cattle, how nervous and nagging and silly the character was.