“Mrs. Aberant,” she bravely said. “I’m so glad to finally meet you.”
My poor disfigured pants-suited mother, confronting the vision of that sky-blue cocktail dress: Anabel could never forgive her for what she did, but eventually I could. Something resembling a condescending smile appeared on her bloated face. She released Anabel’s hand and looked down at Nola, who was dressed in punky black. “And you are…?”
“The depressive friend,” Nola said. “Pay me no mind.”
Anabel had wanted to make a good impression on my mother; she just needed a modicum of coaxing out of her shyness. None was forthcoming. My mother turned away and told me she wanted to change her clothes before dinner.
“You need to talk to Anabel,” I said.
“Maybe another time.”
“Mom. Please.”
Anabel had sat down again, her eyes wide with injured disbelief.
“I’m sorry I’m not at my best,” my mother said.
“She came all the way over here to meet you. You can’t just walk away.”
I was appealing to her sense of propriety, but she was too sweaty and miserable to heed it. I gestured to Anabel to join us, but she ignored me. I followed my mother out into the hallway.
“Just tell me how to get back to my room,” she said. “You stay at your nice party. I’m so happy to have met Mr. and Mrs. Hackett. They’re fine, interesting, responsible people.”
“Anabel is extremely important to me,” I said, trembling.
“Yes, I can see she’s quite pretty. But so much older than you.”
“She’s two years older.”
“She looks so much older, sweetie.”
Half blind with hatred and shame, I led my mother outside and over to her room. By the time I got back to the party, Anabel and Nola were gone — a relief, since I was hardly in a mood to defend my mother. At dinner with the Hacketts, my mother’s face was an unreferred-to elephantine presence, and I refused to say a word to her directly. Afterward, in the humid shade of the Locust Walk, I informed her that I couldn’t spend the evening with her, because Anabel’s thesis project was being screened at Tyler at nine thirty. I’d dreaded telling her this, but now I was glad to.
“I’m sorry your mother is such an embarrassment,” she said. “This dumb condition of mine is ruining everything.”
“Mom, you’re not embarrassing me. I just wish you could have talked to Anabel.”
“I can’t stand having you angry at me. It’s the worst thing in the world for me. Do you want me to come and see her movie with you?”
“No.”
“If she means so much to you that you won’t even speak to me at dinner, maybe I should go.”
“No.”
“Why not? Is her movie immoral? You know I can’t stand nudity or gutter language.”
“No,” I said, “it’s just not going to make sense to you. It’s about the visual properties of film as a purely expressive medium.”
“I love a good movie.”
Both of us must have known she’d loathe Anabel’s work, but I managed to persuade myself to give her a second chance. “Just promise you’ll be nice to her,” I said. “She’s worked all year on this, and artists are sensitive. You have to be really, really nice.”
Anabel’s project was titled, at my suggestion, “A River of Meat.” She’d wanted to call it “Unfinished #8,” because in her view the film wasn’t quite finished, because she never quite finished anything, because she got bored and moved on to the next artistic challenge. I told her that only she would know that her film wasn’t finished. She’d obtained two short 16 mm film clips, one of a cow being bolt-gunned in the head in a slaughterhouse, the other of Miss Kansas being crowned Miss America 1966, and she’d labored for the better part of a year to reprint and hand-doctor and intercut the two clips. Her favorite filmmakers were Agnès Varda and Robert Bresson, but her project owed more to the hypnotic musical tapestries of Steve Reich. She alternated a single frame with its negative one to one, one to two, two to one, two to two, and so on, and she introduced other rhythmic variations by reversing the frames, rotating them by ninety degrees, running them backward, and hand-coloring the frames with red ink. The resulting twenty-four-minute film was radically repellent, a full-scale assault on the visual cortex, but you could also see genius in it if you looked at it right.
My mother’s all-time favorite movie was Doctor Zhivago. During the last minutes of the screening, I could hear her muttering angrily. When the lights came up, she hurried to the door.
“I’ll just wait outside,” she said when I caught up with her.
“You need to say something nice to Anabel first.”
“What can I say? That is the most horrible, disgusting thing I’ve seen in my entire life.”
“A little nicer than that would be good.”
“If that’s art, then there is something wrong with art.”
A wave of anger came over me.
“You know what?” I said. “Just tell her that. Tell her you hated it.”
“I’m not the only person who would hate it.”
“Mom, it’s fine. She’s not going to be surprised.”
“Do you think it’s art?”
“Definitely. I think it’s amazing.”
Down at the front of the screening room, Anabel was standing with Nola, not looking at us, some terrible scene with me no doubt brewing inside her. The few students and professors in the audience had fled for their lives. My mother spoke to me in a low voice.
“I don’t even recognize you, Tom, you’ve changed so much in the last six months. I’m very disturbed by what’s happened to you. I’m disturbed by a person who would make a movie like that. I’m disturbed that she’s the reason you suddenly quit the fine job you worked so hard to get, and you’re not pursuing your graduate studies.”
I, for my part, was disturbed by my mother’s steroidal ugliness. My life was lovely Anabel, and I could only hate the bloat-faced, slit-eyed person who questioned it. My love and my hatred felt indistinguishable; each seemed to follow logically from the other. But I was still a dutiful son, and I would have taken my mother back to Penn if Anabel hadn’t come stalking up the aisle.
“That was great,” I said to her. “It’s amazing to see it on the big screen.”
She was glaring at my mother. “What did you think?”
“I don’t know what to say,” my mother said, frightened.
Anabel, her shyness now dispelled by moral outrage, laughed at her and turned to me. “Are you coming with us?”
“I should probably take my mom home.”
Anabel flared her long nostrils.
“I can meet you later,” I said. “I don’t want her taking the train by herself.”
“And she couldn’t possibly take a cab.”
“I’ve got like eight dollars on me.”
“She has no money?”
“She didn’t bring her purse. She has this idea about Philly.”
“Right. All those scary black people.”
It was wrong to be talking about my mother as if she weren’t there, but she’d wronged Anabel first. Anabel stalked back down the aisle, opened her knapsack, and returned with a pair of twenty-dollar bills. What do they say at NA meetings? The thing you promise yourself you’ll never go so low as to do for drugs is the very thing you end up doing? I would have said that it was bad in eight different ways to take money from Anabel and hand it to my mother, but that’s what I did. Then I called a cab and waited with her in silence in front of President’s Hall.