The Last Chairlift

9. MOVIES, GIRLFRIENDS, FOREIGNNESS, OUTLIERS

Most of the musicals in the 1950s and 1960s were safe for children. I remember seeing Singin’ in the Rain with my mother, mainly because I recall her saying she would have liked to teach Debbie Reynolds how to ski. I was about ten. I was confused by my mom’s remark, because there was no skiing (only singing and dancing) in the movie.

“Debbie may not be a very experienced dancer,” my mother explained, “but I can tell she’s a good athlete—that’s all I mean.” My mom liked Gene Kelly, too.

“Because he’s handsome?” I asked her.

“Because he can dance!” Little Ray exclaimed. “He’s handsome enough, sweetie, but not the kind of handsome you’re going to be.” (Not small enough, I guessed.)

The year before, my mother and I had seen An American in Paris together. “I think you look a little like Leslie Caron,” I told my mom.

“I don’t, sweetie!” she exclaimed, kissing me. “But thank you.”

I saw other musicals in the 1950s and 1960s—I don’t remember with whom. Brigadoon, Carousel, Oklahoma! I didn’t see these fifties musicals with a date. I was too young or out of it to go with a date. West Side Story was later, in 1961. I was nineteen—I might have had a date, but I don’t remember taking anyone to see that movie.

“You could’ve been with one of your unfortunate girlfriends—you know, one of the early ones,” Nora reminded me. “On second thought, not the overweight one—she wouldn’t have fit in a theater seat,” Nora went on. “Didn’t Sally get stuck in a shower? Nana told me the shower door had to be removed to get her out.”

“I didn’t take Sally to West Side Story,” I said.

“I can’t see the clubfooted one having much fun at a musical—poor Rose wouldn’t have enjoyed the dancing,” Nora said.

“Rose wasn’t clubfooted—she just limped, and she was prone to muscle spasms,” I said.

“Rose had more like a lurch than a limp, as I remember it,” Nora pointed out. “She fell down the attic stairs, didn’t she?” I just nodded. Nora moved on—to Caroline, who was very strong. Caroline had injured her knee playing field hockey; when we dated, she was on crutches. I’m sure I never took Caroline to a movie theater. She was broad-shouldered and very tall, and her crutches were very long; something awkward would have happened.

Nora moved on to Maud, who was also very tall—a tall and thin cross-country runner. Maud had fallen and broken her arm; her arm was in a cast when we were going out. I knew my mother had told Nora about Maud. My mom referred to Maud as “the virgin.” Maud and I had remained friends.

“I didn’t know Maud was a virgin,” I told Nora, as I had told my mom. Nora knew Maud and I were friends.

“I know about first-timers,” Nora told me. “I’ve been with girls who haven’t done it. You don’t have any idea what’ll happen when they do it. But I’ve never been with a girl in a cast,” Nora admitted. She paused. “Your mother said Maud clubbed you with her cast—she said Maud beat the shit out of you,” Nora told me.

“Maud got me mostly in my face. She never meant to hurt me,” I explained. “Maud was just flailing around. She was basically out of control with a cast on her arm.”

“I can picture it,” Nora assured me. “It could happen to anyone.” She paused again. “I guess the only good thing—I mean, about those musicals in the fifties and sixties—is that they were safe for virgins.”

“I didn’t take Maud to West Side Story,” I said.

“I don’t blame you,” Nora immediately said. “With her cast, Maud wasn’t safe to take anywhere!”

“I never took Sophie to a musical, either,” I volunteered quietly.

“Jesus Mary Josephine—poor Sophie!” Nora exclaimed. “She was your first writer girlfriend, wasn’t she?”

“My first writer girlfriend,” I repeated sadly.

“All the bleeding!” Nora cried. “It never stopped, did it? A writer who has her period all the time—that’s got to be depressing!”

“Sophie was never in the mood for a musical,” I admitted.

“The story of a nonstop bleeder is not likely to be adapted as a musical,” Nora pointed out. “Fibroids, the musical! I don’t see it happening.”

“My mom still talks about the wear and tear on the washing machine, all our sheets and towels—occasionally, even our pillowcases,” I told Nora.

“You know Ray still calls Sophie ‘the bleeder,’ don’t you?” Nora asked me.

“I know, Nora.”

“Your mom’s not into musicals, is she?” Nora asked me, at last changing the subject from my unfortunate girlfriends—if only “the early ones,” as Nora had called them.

“No, Ray doesn’t give a hoot about musicals,” I said.

My mom was a Hitchcock fan. She loved Westerns and war movies, too. My grandmother and Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha were enthralled by the “big-band sound”; my mother wasn’t. While Nana and my aunts were watching The Glenn Miller Story and The Benny Goodman Story, my mom and I saw (and loved) High Noon, Stalag 17, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, The Searchers, and The Bridge on the River Kwai.

My mother and I were sad when James Dean was killed in a car crash in 1955—“He was barely ten years older than you!” my mom exclaimed, hugging me. But regarding James Dean’s movies, Little Ray was equivocal. “I wouldn’t watch East of Eden or Giant again—Rebel Without a Cause, sure,” my mom said.

Ray liked adventure movies. King Solomon’s Mines may have been the first film of that kind we saw together. (Was I eight? I can’t remember.) My mother liked love and war—I mean, together. I might have been nine when we watched The African Queen. I’m guessing I would have been ten or eleven when we saw From Here to Eternity, which Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha proclaimed was “completely inappropriate.”

Going back to Westerns: my mom liked but was upset by Bad Day at Black Rock. “I like Spencer Tracy better when he’s got both arms,” was all she said.

We hated The Robe and The Ten Commandments. (We agreed that biblical epics were too predictable.) We loved Marilyn Monroe. We held hands during Bus Stop and Some Like It Hot. We both defended Marilyn’s singing in River of No Return. “Breathless is just who she is!” my mother declared. Marilyn’s death would hit us harder than James Dean’s.

I’m not a fan of science-fiction films, but my mom and I liked watching them together—both the good ones, like The War of the Worlds, and the terrible ones for teenagers necking in drive-ins, like Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Blob, and The Wasp Woman. When my mother and I went to drive-in movies in the summers, we would cuddle together like the teenagers on dates. “How completely inappropriate!” my dependably disapproving aunts said, yet again.

Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha had a hissy fit over The Graduate—all because the Dustin Hoffman character is a “college kid” who has an affair with the middle-aged Mrs. Robinson (the Anne Bancroft character) and with Mrs. Robinson’s daughter. I would have been twenty-five or twenty-six at the time of The Graduate—Nora was already in her thirties. It was 1967, but Abigail and Martha were in a tizzy at the very idea of a movie about an older woman who has sex with a younger man.

“A mere boy!” Aunt Abigail had lamented.

“It should be a crime!” Aunt Martha had chimed in.

“He’s a college grad—he’s not a college kid,” Nora pointed out.

“I don’t see what’s wrong with it, even if the boy is a high school kid—not if he likes it!” my mother exclaimed.

Yet my mom, who adored Billy Wilder, the Austrian-born director, thought Audrey Hepburn was too young to have anything to do with the aging Gary Cooper in Love in the Afternoon—this was in 1957. My mother loved Audrey Hepburn. So did I. When my friends at Exeter said my mom reminded them of Audrey Hepburn, I was embarrassed. I knew their thoughts about Audrey were likely to be comparable to my own. Audrey wasn’t the motherly type to me.

All my mom said when we saw Sabrina—Billy Wilder again, in 1954—was that Humphrey Bogart and William Holden were “miscast.” She must have meant that those old farts were too old to be in a romantic comedy with Audrey Hepburn. Little Ray’s disapproval of older men with younger women didn’t apply to an older woman, “even if the boy is a high school kid—not if he likes it!” As Nora always insisted, Little Ray was her own person.

My grandmother loved those British comedies in the fifties—The Lavender Hill Mob and The Ladykillers—but Little Ray didn’t. My mom was hesitant to travel abroad. She left the United States reluctantly, even in movies.

As much as she liked John Wayne, she didn’t like him when he went to Ireland—even in a film. All she said about The Quiet Man was: “John Wayne needs to be in the saddle—I mean, in a Western.” She believed Westerns were better when they were made by Americans. She liked Clint Eastwood, but she didn’t like those Sergio Leone movies: A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. When I reminded her that one of her favorite Westerns had been directed by an Austrian—Fred Zinnemann directed High Noon—Little Ray said something I’m still trying to understand. “Sweetie, Fred Zinnemann was one of the fortunate Jews who left Europe early. They left all their foreignness behind.” But what about those Austrian ski instructors?

“All their foreignness?” I asked her. My mom had been coached by Sepp Ruschp, who’d learned from Hannes Schneider. Weren’t the ski schools at Stowe and Cranmore Mountain teaching the Arlberg technique? Many skiers my mom admired were foreign.

“Oh, you know what I mean, sweetie!” my mother exclaimed, but I didn’t understand her.

By the 1960s, I was paying attention to the directors of the films I liked, but my mom was so American in her tastes—or in her prejudices—that I couldn’t convince her to like Tony Richardson. I loved The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. I went to see it a second time. I couldn’t wait to take my mother to see it.

“Well, Adam, I know you like running,” she said, “and I guess this is what they call ‘social realism,’ which I think you like, too.” That was disappointing, but I tried again; I took her to see Tom Jones, a different kind of Tony Richardson. No running, and not as intent on social realism—I mean, not intended to be realistic to eighteenth-century England.

“Well, sweetie, I guess you like how bawdy this movie is,” my mom said. “But were people ever into sex this much, even in England?”

“Do you mean, in the eighteenth century?” I asked her. “Do you mean, were people full of lust back then?”

“I said ever—I mean, it’s not believable to be into sex this much!” my mother declared.

“When it comes to sex, my mom is more of a Brewster girl than you think she is,” I told Nora.

“When it comes to being stubborn, maybe,” Nora replied. “When it comes to sex, Ray is not a Brewster girl, Adam,” Nora insisted.

And she wasn’t surprised by Little Ray’s lukewarm response to Paul Newman. “I thought my mother liked handsome—at least, she uses the word a lot,” I complained to Nora. My mom and I had seen The Hustler, Hud, and Cool Hand Luke together.

“I’ll bet you think Paul Newman is handsome,” I said to my mother, after all three films.

Each time, Little Ray said the same thing: “Too much testosterone.”

“That’s not weird. That sounds right to me—and it’s just like Ray, not to give a shit about testosterone,” Nora said. Here was my grandmother’s theme, albeit worded more coarsely.

It happened that Nora and I and Little Ray saw The Old Man and the Sea together. Given what my mom had said about Spencer Tracy, I expected her to like him as a two-armed fisherman this time, even though he was three years older. But my mother fell asleep at the beginning of the film.

“Does she often sleep in movies?” Nora whispered in my ear.

“Never,” I whispered back. We watched my mom (sound asleep) as closely as we watched The Old Man and the Sea. I hated Hemingway—I mean, reading him. I already knew the fishing story, but Nora hadn’t read it.

“I was on the sharks’ side, the whole way,” Nora said at the end. “And you slept the whole way, Ray,” Nora told my mother.

“Did I?” my mom asked, in her innocent-sounding way. “Well, there must have been something more interesting happening in my sleep,” was all she said.

After the film, Nora said that Ray looked as if she was “on the sharks’ side—even in her sleep.” Nora and I found the subject of my mother, sleeping soundly through a movie, more engrossing than The Old Man and the Sea.

I’ve forgotten where we were—Nora, my mom, and I—when we saw True Grit together. It was the end of the sixties. John Wayne was back in the saddle, where my mother believed he belonged. I guess Hollywood thought John Wayne belonged back in the saddle, too, because they would give Wayne his first and only Oscar for his role as the one-eyed, potbellied marshal.

At the end of True Grit, Little Ray gave Nora and me a glimpse of her seemingly obdurate nationalism. Keep in mind that I was almost thirty and Nora was already in her mid-thirties. Nixon had been elected the year before, the same year as the My Lai massacre; both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had been killed; and the protests against the Vietnam War were rising. A year later, the Ohio National Guard would shoot and kill those college students at Kent State. Nora and I weren’t feeling particularly nationalistic.

“You see?” my mom said to Nora and me, in her little-girl way. We were among the moviegoers leaving the theater, at the conclusion of True Grit.

“See what, Ray?” Nora asked.

“John Wayne is old and fat, and he’s lost an eye,” my mother explained, “but he comes off better than he did in Ireland.”

“You don’t like Ireland, Ray?” Nora asked.

“I don’t think about Ireland one way or another,” my mom answered. “I have no desire to go there, or anywhere else that’s foreign. I like staying here, in America. So should John Wayne.” But I knew she loved Austria, home of the Arlberg technique.

“Ray doesn’t like anything foreign,” I explained to Nora. “Except for skiers,” I added. “Ray likes Toni Sailer and Toni Matt and Sepp Ruschp and Hannes Schneider—they’re foreign, but they’re Austrian. I guess foreignness in movies is another matter.” I paused. I looked at Little Ray, to see how she liked listening about herself in the third person, before I spoke to her. “You don’t like foreign films—in particular, the ones with subtitles—do you?” I asked my mother.

“I don’t go to the movies to read, sweetie,” my mom told me.

“You don’t like to read anything!” I pointed out to her.

“I have read and will read everything you write, Adam—everything you show me,” my mother told me, kissing my cheek.

“But, Ray, the movies with subtitles are the ones with good sex,” Nora said.

“I don’t go to the movies to get good sex!” my mom exclaimed; she laughed, kissing Nora on the cheek. Little Ray had to stand on her toes; she needed to put her arms around Nora’s neck to steady herself. On tiptoe, my mother was barely tall enough to kiss Nora’s cheek, and I’m guessing Nora bent down to help her. “My dear, dear Nora,” Little Ray said. “Not everything is about sex!”

At our age, this was a hard concept for Nora and me to grasp. We knew my mom’s aversion to foreignness didn’t signify an aversion to sex. On the contrary, Nora and I knew my mother was very selective about sex—she was very particular about it—but Little Ray wasn’t averse to it. Maybe her aversion to foreignness was more American than sexual, because my mom was decidedly a sexual outlier. Little Ray and Nora struck me as very comfortable in the outlier role.

Once, when I struggled to say all this to Nora, it came out a little tortured. “The first foreign-language films I saw made me like reading a movie,” I told Nora. “They made me love all movies with subtitles. Having to read those films made me feel I was writing them, or that I could write movies. It was as if foreign films were made for me,” was the way I said it to Nora, who was unimpressed.

Nora shrugged. “That’s just who you are, Adam,” my older cousin said. “There’s a foreignness inside you—beginning with where you come from. The foreignness is in you—that’s just who you are. You and me and Ray—we’re outliers.”

Outliers like going to the movies—we can see in the dark. Outliers are looking for other outliers. If you see an outlier on the screen, it’s exciting. If you can’t find one in the film, it’s exciting in another way. When you leave the theater, you’re even more of an outlier than you knew.