Like a Movie

Email to Linda Beaver —

There was a story in my dreams last night that played like a movie. I want to write it down, and since you were one of the actors, it seems only fair to make you read it—I mean let you read it.

A small, poor family came into possession of a beautiful baby girl—through adoption, I think, though this was never stated. They were now four: the mother, played by Linda Beaver; the father, played by William R. Beaver; the son, played by Thomas W. Beaver; and the baby, played by no one in particular.

The baby was the delight of their difficult, disappointing lives, and it brought sunshine into their dull, cramped home. The three had something to smile about now, and there were jokes and affectionate teasing all day long, and all evening, where before there had been surliness and grumbling and a sort of competition for the position of the one with the most to bear.

Then their joy turned sour. The baby developed a sleeping sickness. It would sleep more and more hours of the day, and was soon sleeping all but one hour ouit of 24. The family felt it was their usual luck again. Everything that started out good for them went bad. The used car they finally managed to buy turned out to be a lemon, needing repairs they couldn’t afford, and ended up sitting in their front yard, unusable, raising a bed of weeds around itself, making things less pleasant for them than before they had spent their entire savings on it. When one of them got a job, the company would shortly afterwards go out of business or move to another town. Everything they bought for the house was used or cheap, with a stain or tear or wobble or something of that sort. Everything in their lives was a broken, poorly mended, or just plain cheap and crummy version of its kind, and this baby that had seemed to them the first really beautiful and perfect thing to come their way had proven defective, too. 

Without the baby’s gurgles and smiles and little hand claspings, without it’s spells of distress that called on their reserves of funny voices and bits of song and miming and so forth, the family slipped back into its natural state of grumpiness, self-pity and fighting, almost as if they had never had that little time of joy. If anything, they were more sour than before.

Then the problem got worse. The baby fell asleep one day and never woke up. The family’s one bright flame had died. Like the car, it was now just a troubling presence to be dealt with. 

The family cooked up a scheme. They would take the body of the child into public, recreating a family date they had given themselves once when the baby was still healthy and bright-faced and full of a baby’s lovely noises. Back when their baby had made them rich people, of a sort, because when they walked through the town, they had finally seen faces smiling their direction, and even looks of envy—and people who had only given them cursory passing nods before, without making eye contact, now tilted their heads and showed pleading eyes and asked if they could see the baby. They had received compliments! The baby had made them citizens of their town.

They would duplicate one of those perfect outings, to demonsrate to the town that their baby was still cared for and loved—but suffering a little from some vague but trivial childhood illness: building up the grounds for an alibi, you see.

They bundled up the tiny corpse and went to a little movie house they had taken the baby to once. As expected, the owner there, an unmarried woman of middle age, was delighted to see them back, and made for the baby with all the gusto and melting tones of a person who loves nothing more than a little human child and has never had (and never would have) one of her own.

“No, no, she’s got a cold, and she’s sleeping,” whispered Linda strongly. “We wanted to get her out in the sun. Let’s let her have her nap under her blanket.”

“Oh, the poor little angel,” said the matron of the movie house. “You folks enjoy the movie. Maybe I’ll get to see her pink little face after.”

The family shuffled and grumbled into the theatre, shoving one another along and sniping about any little annoyance they could find. They were a miserable little tribe, but it was a misery they were long familiar with, and they hardly noticed the scene they made, the discomfort and disapproval they aroused not for their plain, patched clothes—though that was part of it, too—but for the sourness and noise they emanated.

When the movie was over, and when the family had once again evaded the movie matron’s desire to view and fondle, they began their grumbling, shoving way home. But inwardly they were feeling...not quite happiness, but relief. They had successfully laid the groundwork of their plan.

But as they were walking, a security guard from the theatre caught up with them and asked to see the baby’s face. Something had aroused his suspicions. He was outside his jurisdiction—was no longer within the confines or front-entrance area of the movie house—but in his capacity as a concerned human, he believed himself authorized to intervene. In full truth, he would not have felt so authorized had the family been a typical one, and indeed not if it had been a wealthy one. But because they were poor, any inhibitions he felt about inserting himself into other people’s business were reduced almost to nothing. Indeed, the opposite was true. He was animated by a kind of restless righteousness, an irresistible urge to insert himself into these people’s business. “I don’t think that child is well,” he said. “I need to see its face.”

The family reacted indignantly, loudly. The noise attracted a policeman. When he had heard both sides a little, but mostly that of the security guard, he said, “Let’s settle this. Let me see the baby’s face.” Now the family put on their innocent faces—wide eyes and plain expressions, almost like people who hardly understood the command they’d been given.

Then they scattered and ran. But the two enforcers of law pursued them, and the policeman caught up with the mother, and pulled the baby from her grasp. He pulled back the blanket and saw the lifeless face. He leaned his hear close to the slack mouth. He pressed the little chest.

“This baby’s dead,” he announced to the crowd that was gathering. “Look here, everybody! Watch!” Whereupon he dropped the body to the ground like a sack of flour. There were gasps all around, but no response from the little corpse. “Look at this,” said the policeman, and he gave the bundle a kick. There was no squeal of pain from the corpse, but a little whimper of grief from the mother, and a collective sigh of resignation—of confession, almost—from the father and brother.

And then a surprising thing happened. The baby woke up! It woke up crying. For a few moments, it’s family was speechless with disbelief. Then they were shouting again—indignant—outraged—foulmouthed—and the two enforcers of law simply babbled their apologies, and gave one another looks of sympathy.

And then we cut to the future. We see the family stoically bearing their long sieges at the cradle, waiting for their littlest member to awaken again. We see the moments of reunion and celebration when the child has once again stirred, rejoining the world with a wail or—more often—a face of wide-eyed surprise, followed by the laughter of seeing beloved faces again.

We see the child as a little girl now, running from room to room in a dress that flies up around her—like the skirts of a hovercraft, a dress of blue silk (or whatever poor people buy instead of silk) a sort or incarnation of blue sky brought indoors and lighting up the drab surroundings.

We see a girl almost in her teen years sweeping a floor of that same house, but somehow not so drab anymore—most of its clutter gone, things arranged neatly, a pretty thing here and there for no reason except to attract the eye, and reward it. The girl is singing, and her admiring parents are listening. They look at one another, sharing a moment of remembering and comparing and gratefulness.

We see the teenaged girl and her brother in the living room, he speaking in his habitual droll monotone, she almost flinging herself off the sofa in laughter, and the boy taking that moment when no one is looking to smile proudly. And then the girl suddently stretching and yawning, and lying down on the floor for a nap.

And then we see a young woman, waking up from a deep sleep in the middle of a day, her face wide-eyed with surprise, and then a smile breaking across her face as she sees the poor, simple room she is in. And she walks carefully from her bedroom to the living room, still getting her bearings, to find her family waiting for her, in the company of a young man.

“You came while I was sleeping,” she says.

“I didn’t mind waiting,” he replies, regarding her with an intensity that is both intimate an amazed, as if he has seen her a thousand times before but is also still seeing her for the first time.

She takes the young man’s arm and pulls herself to him. She turns the two of them to face the three timid people who have been waiting nervously in their own living room, “Mama, Papa, Peter,” she says, “this is John. And John, this is Mama, Papa, and Peter, the angels who made a girl.”