The first time Antonia put the plan in motion, it went off without a hitch. She walked to the movie house and waited for a family with children to buy their tickets, stood close to them, and as they got them and left, she slipped her money through the window and got a ticket too.
“Are you alone?” the man in the booth asked her. She shook her head and pointed to the group that had just gotten their tickets and was heading to the concession stand to buy snacks.
“I’m with them,” she said clearly, trying to look older than she was. “My mom lets me buy my own ticket.” He nodded and smiled at her.
“Enjoy the movie,” was all he said, as she went to buy popcorn. It was a Disney film and nothing anyone would object to. She entered the dark theater and wondered if she would see her mother on the screen. It was the main reason she had come, although she liked movies too. Judith used to take her once in a while.
She didn’t see her mother on the screen, but she enjoyed the movie, and she felt very grown up going to the movies alone. And it had all gone so smoothly, better than she’d hoped. When she got home she told Mrs. Schmidt how much fun she had had “at my friend’s.” The kind old German woman was happy for her, and sorry for her without a mother and with a father who was never home. Antonia had no family life at all, and no affection from anyone, no one to love her. Her father ignored her all the time.
Eventually, it became Antonia’s Saturday afternoon routine. She always found a family she could slide in next to at the movie theater and buy her ticket. They began to recognize her in the ticket booth, but the movies were always suitable on Saturday afternoons and they never stopped her. They turned a blind eye when they suspected she was alone. She had favorite actors and actresses, and she enjoyed some films more than others. In the darkened movie house, she entered a world that transported her. She liked best the movies about families, and where people loved one another, and were happy in the end. The underlying theme for her was always hoping to see her mother on the screen, but the experience was enjoyable even though she never did.
She floated home afterward, still enthralled by what she’d seen. Being at the movies was her own private world of fantasy, and she looked forward to it all week. Sometimes she wrote stories that she thought would make good movies, and imagined which actors should star in them. Her stories were simple and always had happy endings, eventually the themes got more intricate, and she submitted them in school when she had a writing assignment and usually got an A. And when the teacher asked everyone one day what they wanted to do when they grew up, she answered that she wanted to write movies. It was the most unusual answer the teacher had had that day, and she asked Antonia if her father made movies, and she shook her head.
“He owns companies that make things, like hula hoops and other stuff. My mom is an actress.”
“Don’t you want to be an actress one day?” the teacher asked her, and Antonia shook her head with a defiant look.
“No, I’d rather write the stories for them,” she said, and the teacher went on to the others who wanted to be doctors and nurses and policemen, two of them wanted to be firemen and one wanted to be a teacher. Antonia was the only child in her class who wanted to write screenplays. The teacher mentioned it to Brandon, when he came to a parent-teacher conference a few weeks later. The teacher thought it was a very creative career goal, and said that Antonia had talent with writing. Brandon looked startled, and his face hardened when the teacher mentioned Antonia’s mother being an actress. He made no comment, and asked Antonia about it at breakfast the next day.
“Why do you want to write screenplays?” he asked with a puzzled look, and she didn’t answer, afraid of his anger at her. She hadn’t seen her mother in two years, and in his heart of hearts, he always hoped that Antonia would forget her, and not idealize her in some way. She fantasized sometimes that she would write a movie for her mother to star in one day, but she knew not to say it to him. He got angry whenever the subject of her mother came up, or even her name. She could see it in his eyes and the way his face tightened up. He hated it when Antonia mentioned her mother, so she didn’t. There was no point getting him angry at her. He never said it, but she was a constant reminder of a union with a woman he had come to hate. He despised everything Fabienne had done, her blatant narcissism, and the fact that she had walked out on them without a backward glance. All he knew about her now was what he had found out at the time of their divorce.
She was living in L.A. with an actor then, and was working at a bar while she tried to get a part in a movie, and hadn’t succeeded. At thirty-four, she was a little old to be discovered as an ingénue. Brandon knew it was never going to happen, and maybe she had given up her dream by now, but he had no way of knowing. She had relinquished her parental rights in the divorce, and had no claim on Antonia, and had never contacted her. She was only her biological mother, not a mother in fact anymore. And much of the time, he was an absentee father. He had his own life to lead, and his businesses to run. There were the women he dated, a constantly revolving assortment of women he enjoyed for a short time, and then he moved on, having promised them nothing, and attached to none of them.