American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,62

holding hands; she watches the children playing in the parks, the mothers lounging on picnic blankets, occasionally intervening in some spat; she watches the children sit on the porches as their mothers read them stories from their rockers before returning inside when it’s dark. A single window fills with golden light, the bedtime rituals are completed, and then it winks out.

Night-night.

As Mona watches, the old pain in her arm and stomach returns.

Did Momma have that with me? Mona wonders. Did I? Could I have ever had such a thing?

Put it away. Push it all away.

You are empty. Empty.

Mona asks, and asks, and asks. But she gets no answers. At first she suspects the entire town is hiding something from her. But after a while, she begins to believe them: they really don’t remember her mother’s time here. Was her mother here in secret? Did she live under another name? Was it something to do with Coburn? They cannot say.

Despite this, Mona’s first weeks in Wink are some of the most pleasurable ones she’s ever had. The afternoons are so beautiful they almost hurt. She has never wanted to shed her life and start anew as much as she does here. She almost wants to give up finding out more about her mother. But then she finds the cans of film in the attic.

It’s real film, motion picture film, spools and spools of ghostly amber images. She has to find an old-school projector to view it, but this isn’t hard to find in Wink, where the stores keep plenty of old appliances. She has to go through a tutorial to figure out how to feed the film through the projector (a marvelously complicated process), but when she figures it out she returns home, shuts all the curtains and doors, feeds the film in, and turns the projector on.

There’s a whir, and a blob of dancing colored light appears on the living room wall. She fiddles with the knobs to get it to resolve into distinct shapes, and soon faces and hands emerge from the colorful fog.

What the camera is projecting is a room. This room, in fact, this very living room in this house, and it’s not empty, but full of people. It’s some kind of holiday party, one set during the summer—on the Fourth of July, probably, judging by the red-white-and-blue cake—and everyone in attendance is about the same age, around thirty or so. The men all wear open-throated shirts with blue or brown sports coats, and the women wear incredibly bright dresses, so bright they look like Christmas ornaments. The air is thick with smoke, everyone has a glass of punch, and they all laugh as they walk in and out of the French doors in the back. Some of them wave to the camera, or squint irritably when the cameraman turns its blazing light on them. There is no sound, so the images are accompanied only by the rattle and whir of the projector.

One man calls across the porch to the backyard. Mona can see a woman turn and say something, but she’s far away and out of focus. The man (to Mona he looks like a professional golfer) says something again, louder, and the woman shouts a response so loudly she practically bends double. Mona feels certain she’s just witnessed the “What?… WHAT?” exchange that has to happen once at nearly every big party. The golfer, giving up, waves to the woman, and she comes trotting in, moving very gracefully in such huge high heels.

It is Mona’s mother, Laura Alvarez herself, wearing an amazing red dress, and she is undoubtedly the life of the party. A silent cheer goes up among all the attendees when she strides through the French doors, and she laughs, embarrassed but gleeful, her fingers fluttering to her chest to calm her heart. And as she laughs, something in Mona breaks, and she begins crying as the ghost of her mother smiles at her from the wall.

This is all just not fair. It’s wrong—no, it’s just fucking rude—for Mona to see her mother living a happy life among all these happy people. The blurry woman laughing on her wall has no idea that just ahead of her lie years of madness spent in dark rooms, and somewhere in one of those rooms will be a child who can’t understand why every sight seems to make her mother weep.

Suddenly Mona hates them all. She hates her pleasant neighbors in Wink, she hates the sound