Chapter 6 #3
The rest of the evening is a blur; journalists and filmmakers and executives all want to talk to Susan about the documentary and what she’s going to work on next. She tries to give Eliza as much credit as possible. After all, the film wouldn’t exist without Eliza.
But occasionally she indulges in letting herself feel proud.
There are some things in the documentary that couldn’t have come from anyone but her: the soundtrack, the way they recreated the indie aesthetic of the aughts.
The story is Eliza’s but the look and feel and sound of the way it’s told came from Susan.
The texture, as they say in the industry.
Toward the end of the night, she runs into Eliza in the bathroom. Eliza is fixing her makeup in the mirror.
Susan leans against the next sink, watching as Eliza reapplies lipstick the color of an overripe cherry. “I miss your blue Juicy Tube,” Susan says.
“Honestly, so do I,” Eliza replies, smacking her lips and holding the lipstick out to Susan. It says TOM FORD on it. “Do you want some?”
“Ha ha,” Susan says. “No.”
“Hey,” Eliza says, her voice shifting into something softer, more vulnerable as she drops her lipstick into her bag. “Isn’t it kind of amazing that we’re here?”
“It is.”
“Do you ever think about everything we’ve been through? Like, all the ways we’ve loved each other?”
“Yeah,” Susan says. “But not as much as I used to.”
“Same,” Eliza says, though it sounds like a lie. Susan lets her have it.
Instead, Susan says, “I wanted to ask you something.”
“Shoot.”
“I guess I was just wondering … what happens now?”
When Eliza grins at her, there’s a small fleck of red lipstick on her front tooth. “Whatever you want,” she says.
When the documentary airs on Max, Susan and Jonny screen it together at Susan’s house.
Mostly, though, they plan to watch their laptops, carefully monitoring the social conversation around it.
There’s a bowl of popcorn between them, a case of beer on the coffee table, and a vase of pink tulips on the bookshelf with a card that says, For my friend Susan. I miss you all the time and I’m so excited to watch you bloom. Love, Mia.
At 9 PM, the key art pops up on the Max app—it’s a photo of Eliza as a sulky teen that she unearthed for marketing purposes. With shaking hands, Susan clicks on it and then she turns the volume up.
There’s been a little bit of buzz leading up to the launch, especially because of the rave review Drew published. They spend the next hour in quiet anticipation, looking back and forth from the TV to their laptops. Susan compulsively hits refresh every thirty seconds.
Forty-five minutes later, Jonny gasps.
“Fuck, we’re trending,” he shouts.
Susan looks. They are.
She and Jonny start reading out posts to each other. Under #screentime, there are hundreds of people saying:
I’ve never felt more seen
Not the point but I am so ready for an indie sleaze revival
Wow. Millennial adolescence has NEVER been more accurately portrayed.
Does anyone know if Liz Cook is single?
By the time the doc is over, #screentime is the number one hashtag in the US.
The accounts Susan made for the film on Instagram and TikTok are growing exponentially.
Each time she refreshes the profiles, there are thousands of new followers.
Memes are already being made, stills from the movie screenshotted and captioned, taking on a new life.
Susan’s phone starts going off. She has sixty-two text messages. People from all corners of her life wanting to tell her they watched it. Sixty-three. Sixty-four. Sixty-five.
“You fucking did it,” Jonny screams. “It’s a hit.” He pulls Susan up off the couch and together they begin to twirl around her living room. He’s singing her name over and over to the tune of the national anthem.
Hearing the commotion, Cashew comes bounding out of the bedroom and tackles Susan to the ground. She lies there, letting the dog lick her face, laughing until she weeps.
Jonny lies down next to her, and the three of them hold each other.
Cashew noses her way into Jonny’s armpit, sniffing loudly. He lifts his arm to make room for her.
“That’s right, you little freak,” he coos to the dog. “That’s the smell of success.”
By the end of the week, Susan has general meetings lined up with every major studio in Hollywood.
“You need a manager,” Heather texts her. “I’ll send you some names.”
Susan calls her parents to tell them about how well the documentary did, but when her mom picks up, all Susan’s able to say is “Hi” before her mom launches into a monologue complaining about their new doctor.
Susan insisted they find a specialist after her dad had another bad fall while her mom was out, lying on the floor for hours alone.
She’ll do anything to keep them out of a shitty, sterile nursing home, though she often worries about them all alone in their house, where the stove could be left on overnight or their medications forgotten.
There doesn’t seem to be a right way to go about caring for aging parents, though the one thing she can help with is their finances.
Susan pays for the out-of-network care and is glad to.
The second Trump presidency tanked whatever financial gains they made in the stock market during his first term, as Susan predicted, though she tries not to hold it over them.
There are more pressing things to be on them about, not least of which is what she now understands as the well-worn path of boomers who started off as granola hippies, veered too hard into the all-natural lifestyle until they became anti-vaxxers, and then found a perfect spokesperson in RFK Jr. They entertain her when she gives them shit for it.
Finally, her mom says, “Were you calling about something specific?”
“No, Mom,” she says. “Just missing you and wanted to say hi.”
“Well, how’s California?”
Susan hesitates, unsure how to describe this hot, dusty place and the way it has wrapped itself around her like the morning glory vines taking over her yard, rocking her in gentle earthquakes.
Her mom interrupts her silence: “Honey, maybe someday you’ll learn this, but part of being a parent is accepting that your kid will eventually leave you.
But damn if I don’t wish you coulda chosen some place closer. ”
Lately, Susan has been remembering bits and pieces of songs her mother used to sing to her when she couldn’t sleep.
She googles the fragmented lyrics as they come to her, as though their origins might tell her something about her mother, something about herself.
Many are Joni Mitchell but others seem to belong to no one, perhaps made up on the spot just to soothe her.
She finds herself singing these made-up songs to herself around the house, each bar transporting her back in time to when she was small enough to fit in her mother’s lap, held tight and close.
With three thousand miles between them, it’s easier to believe this tender version of her mom is the real one, instead of the person on the other end of the line, though in her better moments she also understands both are her mother.
“I know,” she says. “I’m sorry it’s so far.”
There’s a rustling sound. “Your dad wants to say hi.”
“Put him on.”
“Hi, sweetie.” Her dad’s warm, deep voice fills her ear. “Rebecca, give us some privacy, would ya?” he shouts at Susan’s mom.
Then he says, “Honey, your mom isn’t ready to talk to you about it, but we loved your movie.”
Susan has been crying a lot this week and isn’t surprised when her eyes fill with tears again. She’s just so raw, like she’s been flipped inside out. “You watched it?”
“Of course we did. It’s hard, you know. She blames herself for not knowing what it was like for you as a kid. All that new technology, we just never learned it, which meant we didn’t know how it was affecting you.”
“I was okay, though,” Susan says, not wanting them to have to worry about her, not now. “It was harder for other girls. I was pretty good about setting boundaries, I think. I was lucky. I had really good parents.”
She can hear his smile through her phone. “You shoulda heard us clapping and hollering when your name came on the screen.”
“Really?” she asks, though she can easily picture it: two gray-haired pears in twin reclining chairs, cheering in the TV’s glow.
“Really. My daughter, the big movie producer. You can’t imagine how proud we are of you.”
Susan makes a sound that’s somewhere between a laugh and a sob. “Thanks, Dad. That means a lot.”
A few days later, sitting on an Adirondack chair in her backyard watching the sycamore trees bend in the breeze, Susan decides it’s time to download the dating apps again.