CATHY ULRICH

THE GIRL FROM THE MOVIE DOESN’T CRY

The girl from the movie comes home and we are all happy to see her, except we know she won’t talk to us now that she has been in a movie. We want to tell her how we all loved her in the movie, how when the hero smiled at her we smiled too, we hoped for their happiness. We want to tell her she was so authentic, we want to tell her we believed.

The girl from the movie comes home because her father is dying. He is older than the other fathers. We remember from when we were all children together how he seemed like elephant knees and cracking leather, how the thin wisps of hair on his head were like strands of spiderweb clinging there. When he bent to lift the girl from the movie, he always said my back, my back, and sometimes he was joking and sometimes he wasn’t.

After the girl from the movie gets off the train, she stops at the diner for a black cherry soda, drinks it at the counter, tucks her backpack between her feet, sits bowlegged. She leaves a dollar as tip, tucked under the empty glass.

When the girl from the movie gets home, her mother is waiting at the door of their house. It is like a scene from a movie, we think, and wonder if the girl from the movie thinks so too. The girl from the movie goes inside with her mother, the door falling shut behind them, and we cannot see the two of them in there with the dying father, but we play scenes of it in our heads. We see the girl from the movie reach out and smooth the whisper-web of her dying father’s hair; we see her lower lip tremble, her eyes fill with tears. We see her say daddy, we see her say daddy, I’m here, I’m home.

Our town is a small town. It has a good side of the tracks and the wrong side of the tracks. The girl from the movie lived on the wrong side of the tracks, the girl from the movie smoked cigarettes on school property in thrift store jean jackets and feathered bangs. She was always throwing her head back like someone about to laugh, except now we know she was looking at the sky, she was dreaming of the places she would go.

We retrace the girl from the movie’s steps while her father is dying. We wonder why she stopped at the diner for a black cherry soda before going home — was there some significance? Was she simply thirsty? Her character in the movie was a waitress, her character in the movie wore a white apron and had sad eyes and those feathered bangs we all remembered.

There was a screening of the movie at the local theater. Everyone came. Her parents were given seats of honor at the front of the packed theater, and we saw them arching their necks to look up and up at the screen. Afterward we all shook their hands and said how talented she was, how she had done us all proud, and her father coughed into a handkerchief — delicately, we thought when he did it, delicately, almost like a woman — and we didn’t know then, but he was already beginning to die.

The girl from the movie’s parents didn’t meet the way ours all did, in school hallways, at teetering-stool bars. They wrote letters across continents and oceans to each other, actual handwritten letters, licked envelope backs, declared their love in rows of stamps, and the old father spent all his money bringing his young bride from overseas, so that when she arrived all he had was that little house on the wrong side of the tracks.

We go across the tracks at night the way we used to do when we were young and sneaking to see our bad-boy lovers, our girls on the side. We dim our headlights, drive by moonlight and flickering streetlamps. We brush past the little house like ghost whales. We imagine the girl from the movie is inside, we imagine she is in her old bedroom, we imagine she is looking at the sky. Our engines catch when we slow to look, and we press the gas pedals down and speed away in the dark, till we have felt that familiar bump-and-bump under our wheels, till we are back on the good side of town, turn on the headlights again, wave to our neighbors as they pass.

The girl from the movie doesn’t leave the house much. We see her when her mother sends her to the grocery store, sniffing a papaya, setting it back down. We grip the handles of our carts tightly, we say how is your father doing and the girl from the movie looks at us the way her waitress looked at the woman the hero leaves her for, in a clinical, measuring way, and then lets the corners of her mouth rise into a sort of unhappy smile. She says as well as can be expected and, later, we learn she bought the papaya and two gallons of milk and a copy of the magazine that has been sitting in the rack all these years, the one with her face in a small box on the cover.

We want to ask the girl from the movie about her waitress. We want to ask if she was based on a real person, someone from here maybe, someone who would shyly tuck her hair behind her left ear with butterfly fingers, something we have never seen the girl from the movie do in real life.

The truth is we weren’t friends with the girl from the movie. The truth is our parents whispered about her mother — mail-order bride, they said — and her old father who worked at the smelting plant in the neighboring town, whose fingernails were always dirty. The girl from the movie sat in the back of our classrooms, always sat in the back, and she stretched out her legs, smelled like cigarettes and nutmeg. She ate lunches out of rustling paper bags at a table with other wrong-side-of-the-tracks girls and, on prom night, she stayed home alone.

We like to think there was an old movie on television that night, that her face was lit by the glow of Garbo, Dietrich, Shearer, some forgotten goddess, that she decided then, that she made up her mind, that she knew, that it was fate.

At night, when we drive past that little house on the wrong side of the tracks, we see a flickering of light from inside, and we think the girl from the movie could be watching television with her mother, watching one of those old movies together, sharing a bowl of buttered popcorn, but it could just as easily be a lamp in need of a new bulb.

There isn’t a funeral when the girl from the movie’s father dies. There is a small notice in the weekly paper and a photo of him in his youth, and in the arch of his eyebrow, we see the hint of his daughter’s face. We mail sympathy cards to the little house, we address the girl from the movie and the mother by name, we write loss, we write condolences, we write sincerely. After a week, thank you notes arrive in our mailboxes with tiny neat printing that we can’t tell if it belongs to the mother or the girl from the movie. We rub our thumb tips over the words, we try to connect with the soul within them, we wait for the front door of the little house to open, we wait for the girl from the movie to leave, again to leave.

We wanted a funeral. We wanted the girl from the movie in mourning, wanted cheap mascara-tinted tears streaming down her face, wanted stifled sobs and clutching hands, wanted a disconsolate slumping of her spine in the front pew when the minister began the eulogy. We wanted an open casket, ostentatious flower arrangements from her Hollywood friends, little memorial programs that we would take home to keep, that we could say to anyone who asked, yes, we were there, we wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

The old father comes out of the funeral home in a cardboard box that the mother carries to the car where her daughter is waiting. It is the same car they have always had, the same one we remember the girl from the movie stepping out of in front of school, throwing her backpack over one shoulder, turning and waving to her father before he drove away, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

We wanted to see the girl from the movie cry. She never has, that we know. She didn’t cry when her prom date left her home all that night, sitting in a stiff-skirted thrift store dress that her mother had resewn the rough hem; didn’t cry when she saw him the next week at school holding hands with the neighborhood girl he took instead; didn’t cry when the physics teacher caught her smoking under the bleachers, ripped the pack out of her hand and threw it on the ground, and later we saw her on her hands and knees there, picking up the loose cigarettes and tucking them into the pockets of her jean jacket. She didn’t cry in the movie either; when the hero left her for the other woman — and we were supposed to root for the other woman and her perfectly blonde hair, soft-cupped chin, but how could we, how could anyone — she smiled in a sad way, she wished them well, she said I’m so happy for you.

In the second to last scene of the movie, we say goodbye to her character. She is pulling her apron off, folding it neatly, setting it atop one of the counter stools, giving it a spin as she walks out of the diner. We don’t see her face in the scene, we only see the brave set of her shoulders, the tremble of her butterfly hands. We see her walk out of the diner the way she walked out of our town, without looking back.

When the girl from the movie leaves town after her father’s death, she kisses her mother on the side of her face at the door to the little house. We think she has done this for us, played out this last scene so we could view it, so we could be her audience. She slings her backpack over one shoulder, she starts her trek to the train station. We think she is carrying a piece of her father with her, maybe a portion of his ashes in a plastic sandwich bag, maybe his oversized watch on her thin wrist. We think of course she must have something, she couldn’t leave without taking something.

If we left, we say, we would take something.

We are there when she boards the train, not like the first time she left, slipping out before school was done for the day, that same backpack slung over her shoulder. We didn’t know she was leaving for good, except one of us saw her when he looked out the classroom window, stepping out the side door into the alley. He said she threw back her head, one last time, the way she did. He said he couldn’t hear it, but he thought that, this time, she finally laughed.

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CATHY ULRICH LIKES BLACK CHERRY SODA THE BEST. HER WORK HAS BEEN PUBLISHED IN VARIOUS LITERARY JOURNALS, INCLUDING SPLONK, FLASH FROG AND ADROIT.