Chapter 6 #3
“You’re playful.”
“When I’m around you.”
I felt stunned. One of my favorite things about being with James was that his speech asserted reality, revealing dimensions of personality previously unknown to me. I was playful, I thought. I made him playful.
Turning this shiny piece of information in my head, I was totally unprepared for the main scene of the film, the performance of the song “Slipping Through My Fingers.” Sophie frowns in the mirror before her wedding.
Soon she will marry her fiancé and leave the island, and her mother, for good.
Donna watches her daughter with a knowing smile, as if she can already see Sophie the bride, not Sophie the girl.
Still, it’s the girl Donna sings about: the girl waving absentmindedly in the morning, the girl’s sleepy eyes and private mind.
“The feeling that I’m losing her forever,” Donna laments, “and without really entering her world.”
I could stomach most of this, but when Sophie entered the frame, I had to try hard not to cry.
I pictured curling up in Donna’s lap like I’d never leave her and then having no choice but to go.
The moment mother and daughter launched into verse together, I had to look away, the beauty of it obscene.
With wet eyes and faces seismic with emotion, they sang to the mirror, and each other, for the final time.
The combination of their simmering voices and golden limbs felt sacrilegious.
They were making visible a divine love that ordinary people did not understand nor deserve at all to witness.
I felt guilty watching them, like I was peeking behind the curtain of heaven before dying.
I glanced at James. He was looking at his phone.
“Hey,” I said.
He raised his head. “Sorry, it was my mom.”
This was the worst thing he could’ve said.
“She sent me some money,” he said. “To take you to dinner. Her treat.”
“Why would she send you money? You already have money.”
“It’s a gift. You’re our guest.”
I didn’t know how to communicate my violent disappointment that James had zoned out during the most important scene. You’re being abnormal, I thought to myself, while declaring aloud, “I don’t want to watch anymore.”
“Are you joking?”
“No.”
“Really, Katie? Come on, I’ve put it away, let’s finish.”
“No,” I repeated, while somewhere in the back of my head, a voice—Lou’s voice—told me to calm down.
I could hear her so clearly: Katie, you’re being a psycho.
I looked at James’s face, decided it wasn’t wounded enough, and ignored her.
“You don’t understand this movie. You think it’s camp. We might as well stop now.”
“No, I’m enjoying it. I want to see how it ends.”
“In a big, gay, chaotic wedding, just like you fucking predicted.”
“What the fuck?” James looked bewildered, like he couldn’t believe the argument involved him. “Why are you shouting?”
A tangle of fury unspooled inside me. “I’m not,” I said. “I’m just not in the mood anymore. It has nothing to do with you.”
“You’re being childish, can I say that? If I’ve done something wrong, tell me. I can fix it.”
“There’s nothing you can do.”
“If that’s your attitude.”
I hadn’t expected for him to call me out and it felt terrible, completely foreign. I wanted to yank open the door and just start running, but I wouldn’t know where to go. Instead, I went upstairs. James didn’t follow.
In the bedroom, Silver lay in the fetal position at the foot of the bed.
Seeing me, she sat up. I could tell from her pitying expression that she’d heard everything.
I curled up next to her. Her eyes were soft: she felt sorry for me.
I let myself cry, knowing that I was acting selfish and strange, but feeling gravely maligned all the same.
I wondered if Silver ever felt like running away, whether she knew the difference between this room and the world.
But, of course, she didn’t need to know.
She belonged everywhere and knew nothing and every day, someone would kneel and feed her.
Silver put her nose to mine, sniffed, and then opened her mouth, licking at the snot that had crawled down my lip.
Her tongue was cold and grooved, like the rim of a coin.
I imagined that each lick scrubbed off bits of my pores and features, my face slowly becoming unidentifiable, smooth. That calmed me.
I met her eyes. She blinked. Dots of gunk sat gathered in the inner corners. I’d read about how obsessively cats liked to clean themselves; her eyes were the one place she couldn’t lick but needed to most. I experienced a rush of protectiveness for her and reached for her face. She flinched.
“Calm down, I won’t hurt you,” I said in a hushed voice.
I licked my thumb and rubbed it gently over her eyes.
She accepted this. Then she dipped her head toward mine and began to lick my eyes, too, the outer corners and the bags, where my tears trickled.
We kept on in the dark until my eyes were dry and hers were clean.