Going
anywhere with my family is a major event. There are only four of us, but the
potential for hilarity and disaster looms large. While most families are the
worst kind of inside joke - the kind where everyone's sure something's funny
but no one can explain it to anyone else - our family's hijinks seem to bear up
well under retelling. To wit:
On
Boxing Day we decided to take in a film. My Week With Marilyn. The theatre was the AMC 20 at Kennedy Commons, one of
those typical firebomb strip malls for which suburban Ontario is famous. All
the stores are of the Big Box variety, and surely this is the world's only
parking lot with its own set of traffic lights. (As in to direct traffic within the parking lot. Four ways, two
lanes each way.)
As luck
would have it, a person in a motorized wheelchair eschewed the generous
sidewalks and was moving upstream just as we turned into the parking lot's
multi-lane entrance, causing my father to exclaim with the kind of piteous and
disbelieving opprobrium that only he can muster.
"Oh
for crying I don't believe that's just holy Christ."
Conversation
on the drive over was light but focused on whether my parents were eligible for
the theatre's senior discount. My father is a man who knows his limitations -
and has courage enough to admit these - so the decision was taken that my
mother would buy the tickets and thus deal with any potential 'Are we seniors
or not?' fiasco. "You're much better at that stuff than I am", my
father humbly confessed.
As it
happens, my mother does have superior abilities when it comes to making
arrangements and otherwise getting things organized. (She takes extraordinary
pride, for example, in her ability to pack a suitcase or the trunk of our car
to 'within an inch of its life'.) Clearly, however, mother is used to dealing
with just herself and my father, and the added complexity of my sister and I
needing tickets - definitely not seniors' tickets - stretched her
organizational memory to its limits: she approached the wicket and recited,
trance-like, "Two seniors, one student and one adult, please. Oh, and we
have cards." My mother thrust three loyalty cards at the cashier and
breathed a sigh of relief at having discharged her duty without forgetting
anyone's ticket or price status or the opportunity to accumulate loyalty
points.
(My
father, by the way, always keeps a respectful distance during these exchanges -
currently standing about six feet away, in front of an unattended wicket -
either because he doesn't want my mother to feel like he's supervising or he
really can't handle the stress.)
After an
appropriate pause the young girl cashier asked, with one helluva straight face,
"What show would you like to see?"
"Oh!"
exclaimed my mother. Mortified. "Ah..." [Looking sideways at my
father, who has become fascinated with a small sign attached to the wicket
glass in front of him.]
"My
Week With Marilyn." I decided to shoulder some of the burden.
"Honey,
that sign says seniors are people over 60, so we get the discount." My
father joined us in the queue and delivered his report.
"Yes,
dear, I told the lady already, it's all taken care of."
"The
sign says the discount applies only during the day," my father elaborated
his findings, "but I wonder if that also includes the night?"
We are
buying tickets to the 3.40PM show.
As my
mother collects our tickets a young man at the next wicket is describing the show he'd like to see to
the cashier. "Was there a film that was released yesterday? With
extraterrestrials? They come down like this..." He's gesturing with his
hands how the ETs come down as we walk away and into the theatre.
***
Concessions:
mother remains in charge of orders. As we approach the front of the queue my
father whispers in her ear that he'd like a large popcorn and a large Coke.
Then he moves to take up his perimeter but remembers just in time to lunge back
in and whisper to my mother - just as she's
about to give his order to the cashier - "...and butter."
"What?"
My mother's focus, shot to hell.
"Oh,
it says you get your own..." My father wanders off to investigate the
butter station, which is indeed self-serve.
"Honey,
our theatre's that way". My mother points in the opposite direction.
"No,
I know that." My father
clarifies his intentions. "I'm just going to see the butter, which it says
is over here."
"Hi."
My mother addresses the cashier and gives our order. "And we have
cards." She fans our three AMC loyalty cards meaningfully before the till.
It occurs to me that neither my sister nor I live at home anymore, so at least
one of those cards is dubious. No matter, though, as the cashier shrugs off my
mother's Royal Flush of accumulated discount. "Sorry, those are only good
at the Box Office."
"What
did he say?" My father has sidled-up after successfully reconnoitering the
self-serve butter.
My
mother repeats the cashier.
"What
does that mean?" My father's a
corporate lawyer and so knows a defined term when he hears one.
"It's
the place where we bought the tickets."
"Oh."
***
The film
is very good. Michele Williams plays the lead, brilliantly. Her Marilyn teeters
between innocence and delusion, for most of the film balanced precisely,
exquisitely in between. Beguiling even to herself. It's a compelling
performance that's strangely apposite to at least our foursome in the
next-to-last row.
***
We
emerge from the theatre at dusk, the western sky bands of blue getting lighter
towards the horizon. A brilliant new moon hangs low, the polished edge of a
tarnished silver dollar. We stand together and admire the indifferent beauty
shining down over six concrete apartment towers, eighteen lanes of highway
traffic, what my mother estimates as “the busiest Chapter's book store in the
city”, and a red-roofed Casey's Bar & Grill that probably seats 150 but in
the Kennedy Commons looks like an outhouse with (of course) it's own parking
lot.
For
almost a minute nobody says anything, just squints against the sodium glare of
streetlights and listens to the white noise of highway traffic. Then we turn,
all together, and walk away from the theatre with the kind of fearlessness and
certainty that only lifelong suburban residents can summon while trying to
remember where somebody parked.
