Wicked Boy (72)

(making up movies and books to fit my narrative as always)

—

"Yeah."

Ezra sits back with an exhale, flicking through the outputs until he finds his DVD player and settles on a movie already inserted.

"Since I'm tryin' to find you a favorite."  He nods toward the screen.  It flickers brightly, the tinny sound of an old production company's logo, and then in green Egmont font,  "Classic."

The Lily Pond

"...Classic, as in your favorite?"

Ezra tuts, sliding back against the armrest and offering me the space to stretch out, and I follow his movement on the opposing side.

"Scared of havin' good taste?"

Our knees touch, our feet on the floor, but we turn toward each other.  It's unconventional and sort of uncomfortable, but I take the quilt he throws at me and slump beneath it.

I hate to admit that I'm curious to see whatever Ezra could call a favorite.  I wonder what it will feel like this time, a neon glow and winter night or spring and magnolia trees.

The question answers itself.

The opening theme is faint and palliative, and my eyes threaten to close as the title wanes into the picture of a healthy, well-watered meadow. It looks like summer, the grainy pinks and yellows of flowers swaying.

A woman walks across it, dressed in sage green — her long summer dress swaying at her hips. She's barefoot, with dirt on her heels, on the hem of her dress, and on her hands. The camera follows that - then a blue thread tied around her waist. It sways as the wind picks up, a flock of birds passes over, and the meadow ends at the edge of a yard.

The woman stops in front of an aging patio and sighs with utter vexation,

Lily. Leave your Papa alone.  He doesn't have time for that.

There's an older man crouched outside the stoop of the stairs, weighted regard on the little pond outside the porch, smoking a cigarette.  The smoke gathers beside him, and he pokes at a lilypad with a twig, moving it, and scrutinizes whatever is underneath.

He's not doing anything.  Why can't we play?

A very young girl clings to his back, climbing his loose shirt without any grace.  She's wearing a frilly jumpsuit, blue with big sunflowers, and has her black hair pulled back in two braids.  Her face is round, ruddy with heat, and she squints at the camera like she doesn't know she's meant to pretend it isn't there. I blink tiredly.

Stop that.  Where are your shoes?

"I've been there," Ezra says, breaking past the daze of near-sleep.  "My aunt took me."

Where are your shoes, Mama?

I turn my head, and my regard rests on Ezra, but then I quickly haul my gaze away, staring instead at the screen.

"... To that house?"

"Yeah." He nods, "I was a kid, though. Maybe six years old." then shrugs,

"What for?"

"You know how kids are. I was obsessed."

"You were obsessed with...?"

"With the pond."

"... The pond?"  I feel my lips lilt with affection.  I imagine him at six, with no motorcycle and not an ounce of an enigma to his name, starry-eyed over something so uncomplicated.  My knees knock into him as I press up on my elbows. "Why's that?"

"Donno.  The dad — he spends so much time just lookin' at it.  Thinkin'.  I thought it had to be special."  He scratches beneath his chin and snorts, gaze drifting to me.  He smiles slightly at my unmistakable interest, "Maybe under that lily pad."

There's something deprecative in his voice — distinct in his eyes.  But it's fleeting, like a dream — because he's sharing a memory that feels substantial and unguarded, the music is soft, and the narrator on the screen begins to speak.

And suddenly, the warmth is lost to a weary, grim voice.

... Some children only seek to punish the parent who damaged them.  Well, I hated both, though I brooded over my mother's carelessness less often.   Several say my mother did nothing, and that's half-true.  She allowed it all, after all.  Allowing is the same as condoning - and the same as doing nothing in a circumstance like this.

Most don't appreciate that about me. I don't care to argue. The fact of the matter is, my mother loathed me just as considerably as my father did, so I hated them both in turn. And I often thought of retribution, whether divine or by my own hands. I yearned for them to feel as unloved as I.

I squint, eyes on the scenes that don't quite match the words — but then do.  Like Ezra told me, in film, a lot is said through expressions.

Cozy nostalgia is displaced by an uneasy sensation of emptiness and tiptoeing across creaky, wooden floorboards.  The protagonist and her empty brown eyes, well, she feels more like a phantom that plagues her parent's home than a daughter that lives beside a flowering meadow and lily-covered pond.

My summers were filled with quietness, and every winter, the pond froze over.  The blossoms wilted, and like Demeter, my father would descend into a mood that scoured deep - as if he thought he was bottomless to any knife blade he wielded.  This is the only time he spoke to me, each word as cold and callous as January air.  So like the little mortals and their frosted fields, I longed for affection like barley and fruit — and before I learned how to live, I starved and wished starving on others.

I watch the little girl spend three summers at different ages until she becomes a teen, looking out into the distance. Her face is void of shadows, and the sun on her skin glistens gold, radiating youth.  But her gaze is grave.  My shoulders slump as they begin to ache, and I lean back against the armrest.

I wanted to know what was in that pond.  But I refused to look.  Would I find my father staring back at me, knowing that I cry, even on these days of flowering blooms, a full stomach, and twittering birds?

Would I then be endowed with the wisdom that this despair was my father's gift?  A cruel inheritance?

Is ignorance a crutch that may slip out from underneath me?

I ask this often.

I tell myself that I can reject my father, but still, he lives in that pond, which lives in every memory.  Ignorance or not, that pond swallowed my father's love for me.  It has no compassion for me.  Summer, winter, and even in spring:

I shed enough tears to fill it.

One day, I will look it in the eye, and drown his gift inside it. I will force my mother to witness the murder of my generational grief.

My eyes feel hot, nose tingling in that way that says I'll make a fool of myself if I don't say something.  So I clear my throat and ask,

"... Was it special?"

Ezra shifts as if he has to think about it.

"What?"

"That pond. What you saw. Was it special?"

"Nah.  Just water and little bug-eyed fish.  Ticked me off."  He shakes his head with a chuckle, but his eyes never leave the screen.  His jaw jumps with a thought, a clench of his teeth, and he adds — almost reluctantly, "... But, I still think about it.  Maybe it was some sorta lesson."

I don't know what emotion comes with his admission.  I think I'm too tired and off-kilter with the dialogue to understand.

"If you still think about it..."  I shrug the feeling off.  I pull the quilt up to my chin, arms across my ribs beneath it, like I can hide from it,  "Sounds like it was special. You must have seen something she didn't get to see."

The protagonist lingers around the pond, but true to her words, she never looks at it.

Lily sits by her aging father with a book, her paint, and her coffee every morning.  But she won't face the water. After he dies, she sits next to that hated pond, and so do her children. They laugh and play, and sometimes, her gaze has that same — sad heaviness.

She becomes quiet when she's alone.

But she doesn't look.

"She knew better," Ezra says. "I was six."

Exhaustion and nuanced understanding bring with them a bizarre, disjointed thought.

"... Why didn't she just cover it?" I mumble, distracted by Ezra, the screen, and sleep that threatens to fill my head instead. "That way, it's gone."

Why does she sit next to it? Bring the people she loves beside it?

"'Cause, it won't change that it was there."

I nod. I think of the scar on my back from my father's belt that I can't fully reach. I think of the times I would lay on the bathroom floor with my mother, counting her fluttering lashes, withstanding her sour breath and the lingering stench of liquor.

I haven't learned to live with it.  I look at the memory, the raised skin, from time to time, and I cover it.

I hated myself more than my father could and hurt myself more than he would ever be able to, and in that way — I understood the desire to do so.

When I lay on the bathroom floor drunk, sick, and alone, sometimes I understood my mother.  Sometimes I didn't.  But I didn't let go of the bottle.

So maybe they are my pond, and without choice or acknowledgment, they were always there. But I was always looking, searching, and wondering why.  For that very reason, or perhaps a form of masochism, I think of the silent father in the film. I don't think he thought of his daughter when he stared into that water. But the daughter would've thought of him and why he didn't love her.

My stomach balls itself into a child-like disappointment.

"But if she understood, then...."

I trail off.

My argument is lost to the lump in my throat.

"It wasn't the kid's fault.  So why should she look?"

Ezra glances at me.  He seems rather fierce like this, the same way he looked when he said,

...Wouldn't ya' love to make him feel small?

"Pond or no pond.  Sad or not.  It's not on her to understand him."  Ezra's eyes drift back to the screen. "I only think about the pond because I think - six was the last time. That I would've wanted to see under that lily pad. And I saw it. And it wasn't worth it."

I nod even though he isn't looking.  My chest lightens, and instead of thinking of the girl as a ghost, I think of her as herself — and this is her life at every stage.  Lily the enraged daughter, Lily the healing academic, the artist and a devout reader — the yawning bookkeeper, the unsure mother with shaking hands, the thick-skinned grandmother.

Lily lets her loved ones near a wound nearly as large as her patio and shows them how she lives with it, but she doesn't spend her life crouched with a twig, prodding and scrutinizing the waters, and neglecting everything she's turned her back to.

It feels like — a tall tale.  Genuine in the parts where she's angry and despairing, delivering line after line of retaliation and unfairness.  Then it becomes more alien to me as she progresses, and I relate less and less the happier she becomes.

"... Are you a lot like Lily?"  I ask.  Maybe I wouldn't if I wasn't so tired — if Ezra hadn't chosen to show me a film so weighted.

"Not a bit."

I didn't know which answer to expect, so I'm not surprised.  We sit in stillness for a while longer, watching Lily dance with her grandchildren, teaching them to swim and catch minnows, to garden and paint.  My eyes close as my body slacks against the cushion,

"Well.  I'm going to be like her."

I say it aloud, just so someone else can hear it too.