The Children(72)

They’d watch two or three movies at a stretch. Films unpinned from time and chosen seemingly at random: Poltergeist, Some Like It Hot, The Conversation, all running together into one long celluloid dream. Westerns, musicals, and Barbara Stanwyck drew the biggest turnout. But the day Guinevere remembered best was the day they watched E.T.

It was summer. Hot gusts came in from the lobby, striping the theater’s chilled air. The movie opened on a Star Wars sky, tilting down slowly to a Vermont-ish skyline of pines. Ennis squeezed her hand when the spaceship showed.

She barely noticed. For two hours her eyes stayed wide, gulping the light, the everything. Elliott and his siblings, their house full of toys and TV. The sunny suburb that deepened at night into a chiaroscuro of silver and black. And their mother. Sweeping in and out in her business clothes, with her working woman’s gait.

For most of the movie, hers was the only adult face you saw. The story existed inside a closed kingdom of children, overseen by a benevolent mother. Her love brooked no nonsense and was expressed without undue tenderness. It simply was, as sturdy and obvious as a brick.

And her hair was so pretty. Blonde like Guinevere’s, soft at the nape.

“Come on, Guin.” Her brother said it gently when the lights came up.

She stood, blinking, and shambled out into the mild surprise of blue evening. She felt weightless as a spacewalker. On the sidewalk gravity began, slowly, to return. She felt the tug of the Farmhouse, the weight of the falling night.

Watching other lives burning brightly onscreen made her own seem so negotiable, like a lucid dream. Maybe it was Edith’s dream. And Guinevere couldn’t change a damned thing about it.

Everyone wonders what it’s like to be you.

If her own life were a movie it would start like this.

First: nothing. A black screen. Then, rising piece by piece from the dark, a curious soundtrack.

Footsteps. The creak of a stair. A coffeepot’s percolating sputter. The percussion of a mint-green Olivetti. And beneath it all, a rushing sound. Inescapable. You could mistake it for a faucet, the ocean, rain.

The picture fades in so slowly it seems at first like an optical illusion. Then there it is, the source of the sea sound: the woods. Moving, hissing, seen from above. In their midst, surrounded by trees on all sides, a house.

Cut to its interior. Empty cupboards, ragged skylines of book stacks and dirty glasses. Dead fly floating in an inch of clotted wine. The walls, floors, ceilings are all made of wood, cozy as a cradle.

Then, in montage, the movie’s major players. A short-haired woman smoking, typing, staring out the window. A bearded man running a brush over a canvas, a palm over his subject’s naked thigh. Two children on a dirty picnic blanket beneath uneven sun. The girl writes longhand in a notebook while the boy sketches a whippoorwill. You don’t hear their voices yet.

The camera doesn’t glide, it jumps place to place like a nervous eye. That crawling chorus of hissing, typing, creaking, footsteps, sputtering coffee rises to a fever pitch and—cuts out.

Exterior shot: the house at night. Three stories high, stuck like a fallen game piece to the grass. Bright on the bottom and dark up top, music muffled against the windows.

Start at the tree line. Slow pan over the grass, figures coming into focus, windows a low-lit peep show. Closer, close enough to touch, then you’re on the other side, in the thick of it, music throbbing and the air dense with sweat and tobacco.

The guests are gallery types in fitted black. Publishing people two ticks overdressed. A pair of pretty local girls, eyeliner and denim and the last rounded traces of baby fat. Sliding among the grown-ups are the children from before. The writing girl, the sketching boy. They’re famous, sort of, but they know how to be invisible.

They move through the house’s first floor. The boy flicks his thumb over the wheel of a lighter, a habit so engrained he has a callus, a fleck of black burn at its center.

He took the lighter from the pocket of someone’s coat. He and his sister take lots of things from lots of pockets. Pills and keys and a red-stone ring, folded sketches and dirty photographs. Once a rubber-banded curl of smeary fives and ones that smelled of bacon grease. She calls it pocket shopping. He calls it the tithe.

Their father, the painter, is propped in the window seat with one of the locals, making her laugh. His big hand on her knobby knee, Welsh accent thickening like porridge. She wears baggy clothes that erase her shape. But a painting of her sits on an easel in his studio, so the children know she has heavy teardrop breasts, a mole above her belly button, and dark blonde pubic hair.

Their mother hasn’t seen this painting. Nor is she witness to her husband’s flirtations. She’s sitting in the kitchen in deep and secretive conference with her editor. That charmed circle has airtight borders. Nobody tries to join them.

The girl reaches for her brother’s hand, passes into it a pebbled leather wallet. He nods at her, the faintest bump of his chin, then slips away to hide it.

And while he’s gone, while her mother smokes and broods and is flattered, and her father draws the curtain across the window seat to conceal himself and his model, a man reaches out and pulls the girl into his lap.

Nobody sees it. He’s sitting in a high upholstered chair, and all around them people’s backs are turned. They’re as good as alone. The man is handsome, very, in a way that makes her think obliquely of a bag of cherry candy. Teeth grinding through sugar layers, that tooth-rot ache. His beard is black, his eyes a strange hazel.