By Janice Daugharty

 

 

 

We were on our way to see GONE WITH THE WIND at the Ritz theatre

 

in Valdosta. Not my first time going to the movies; I'd been to the

 

drive-in, in Jasper, Florida--my sisters and I on back of our daddy's

 

pickup, hiding from the night wind beneath patchwork quilts. Thirty

 

miles, round trip, ripping open the pinewoods and crashing a state

 

line. Through the pickup's rear and front rectangles of bug-spattered

 

glass, between my parents' heads and shoulders, like busts of local

 

heroes, I had viewed THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM, starring Frank

 

Sinatra; and SAMSON AND DELILAH, starring some no-name actors from

 

many of the other drive-in movies; lots of cowboy and Indian films.

 

The same gray cowboys would shoot from behind the same gray rocks and

 

the same no-color redmen would tilt like trees from the same gray

 

cliffs. Many of these same westerns I had already seen at summer tent

 

shows in my home town of Statenville, Georgia.

 

But this time we were going to the Ritz in my cousin Fannie's

 

car (just a car; in the fifties brands didn't count for diddly). She

 

had two sets of children, a girl and a boy practically grown and four

 

younger ones, ranging in ages from four to twelve--our double second

 

cousins. My mother, in the front seat with Fannie, had five head in

 

the back seat, along with all four of Fannie's second set of children-

 

 

 

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-offspring of home-body women and go-getter men. Passionate about

 

kin, our first-cousin daddies and our first-cousin mothers seemed to

 

expect from us cousins the same kind of tolerance meted out to

 

sisters and brothers. You didn't have to love each other, just get

 

along.

 

Nine bodies deep, in the back seat, the older ones forming the

 

bottom tier, I don't recall the dense press of sweaty flesh, I don't

 

recall the fussing or fidgeting. I don't recall thinking that this

 

movie would be special, would change what I thought I knew at eight

 

into what I would know I hadn't known when we left home. But I sensed

 

that the two housewives in the front seat expected for themselves

 

just that. And this movie would not be about knowing, it would be

 

about feeling I had somehow tapped into that grownup realm of

 

feelings, in which children believe they've heard some secret, but in

 

truth have only felt some shift from solid to squishy in the

 

realization that adults have lives apart from their children's. Or

 

was it simply that on that day my mother's wide red smile was redder,

 

and Fannie who never wore lipstick was now wearing pink?

 

Soon, my spot shifted to the floorboard hump, surrounded by

 

sixteen kicking feet, and I was peering between adult heads again,

 

through the windshield at the blue sky with white clouds scrolling up

 

in pretty scenes.

 

At the glitzy blue front of the Ritz, we passed from openness

 

and daylight into a closed and darkened world. Wine carpets and

 

draperies, and strangers that made us seek out the hands of the very

 

people we had so thoroughly hated throughout the smothery thirty-

 

minute drive to Valdosta. The conditioned air was loaded with smells

 

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of popcorn and cola syrup. Color, music, motion on the giant screen,

 

and our mothers now strangers too, silent and spellbound and

 

unavailable for help or favors. For instance, when we stood in the

 

seats and they folded up and we became trapped between the bottom and

 

the back, we had to either help each other out or stand pinned there

 

and wait for one of the ushers to pass along the aisle. Shortly

 

before, the same two women had fixed our hair, straightened our

 

socks, and warned us to use the restroom before the movie started,

 

hang to their dress tails along the aisle, sit still in our seats, and

 

not beg for popcorn. Thirty minutes later, after Scarlet met Rhett at

 

a barbeque where women were supposed to look good and not eat, our

 

dazed mothers, who could see the very thoughts inside our heads, were

 

fishing change from their pocketbooks and ordering us to scram. Three

 

times they sent the big kids to take the little kids to the restroom,

 

and three times they sent us for popcorn and Coca Colas, all around.

 

The change in their pocketbooks seemed to spawn--no problem if we

 

dropped a nickel or two and they rolled along the downgrade of tacky

 

concrete. On the last trip up the dim familiar aisle, which had been

 

so dark and alien when we first came in, where on the left a hazy

 

beam shot over the heads of other mothers and children, somehow

 

magically appliquéing those Southerners with honeyed accents onto the

 

big screen, and I turned around and saw Rhett kiss Scarlett with her

 

neck craned painfully as if somebody had yanked back on her hair.

 

Hours later, which seemed like years because Atlanta had burned

 

and Scarlet had changed boyfriends and dresses so many times, we were

 

on the way home, and the two women from the theatre were our mothers

 

again. I was seated on the floorboard hump among the sixteen kicking

 

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feet, two minus shoes now. Staring between the two adult heads and

 

through the windshield at the blue sky and the white clouds scrolling

 

up in scenes that were no match for the Technicolor world I'd lately

 

lived in. The sky would never be as blue, the clouds as white; there

 

was no music to make me feel mellow or cover over the fussing and

 

fidgeting of double second cousins. Suddenly, I believed that our

 

mothers were different, but in ways I couldn't name. It was an end or

 

beginning of the world feeling. And I had changed: I had just heard a

 

handsome man say damn.