Optimistic fit.

 Optimistic fit. 

“Maggie read your last post,” Roz was saying. “She wants to know where the ‘up with women’ is in Reflection in a Golden Eye. Is it with the ‘feeble-minded’ Leonora, as McCullers calls her? Or is it with poor, sickly, neurotic Mrs. Major Langdon, Alison?”
      “Right,” I found myself answering, not knowing what else to say.
     “Right what?”
     “Tell Maggie she’s right,” I said, thinking I had lucked on as good an answer as any.
      “You can tell her,” Roz looked at me, looked away, and looked back. I was looking at her; then I looked down.
     “Well, when I see her,” I said, thinking that by then it might cease to be an issue.
     “Good. That would be about five minutes from now,” Roz said.

“Gosh,” I said. “Sorry. I’m off to the bathroom. It may be a while.”
     Maggie is one of those people who like to think they are full of themselves and it needs to overflow onto others. To her credit, she is not. Full of herself is a role she plays and rather badly, laughing at how she’s been miscast. At least, that’s my sense of her. She blusters forward until a breeze sifts back, and it stops her.
     Her first words — since she arrived not in five minutes but in less than one, and I was not in the bathroom. I wasn’t even on the stairs: “Hey! I thought you liked Carson McCullers?”
     “I do,” I said. “Even more than the prophet Nahum.”
     “God!” Maggie said. “I tried. I really did. ‘Vengeance is mine!’ says your vengeful God. ‘Let’s bash those baby Ninevites’ brains against a rock.’ God!” She took a breath; she blew it out. “God!” she said a third time. Then, “What’s on for you today, Tedster?”
     I shrugged. Tedster? I was thinking. God! I shrugged and looked down.
     “You don’t want to come to Seeville with Roz and me?”
     “No,” I said. “Thank you.”
     “Right answer,” Roz said. And they were gone.

“Uncle Albert and I are going to watch the movie,” I said to the door. “Sure you don’t want to stay for that?”

Uncle Albert and Aunt Liz
through a golden eye.

I stuck my head around his door. “Uncle Albert,” I said. “I’m going to watch a movie. Do you want to?”
     “What is it?” he said.
     “It has Liz Taylor in it.”
     “I met her. In the mid-sixties. Wearing a burqa for some reason. She wasn’t one to explain. In Italy.”

The movie raises McCullers’ Captain to Major and her Major to Lt. Col. for some reason. Can Brando not play Capt. Penderton? Did Brian Keith refuse to play a mere major?
     Otherwise, the music is awful. I have long been longing for a button on my TV remote that could retain the sounds of all goings-on on the field of play and mute the announcers. It would have been useful here. To keep the dialogue and the ambient sound — the birds chirping, doors opening and closing, footsteps, hoofbeats, air moving, and the rest — and shut off the dreadful music that seems to think we can’t see what is going on or, if we can, we don’t know how to react to it: We’re not apprehensive enough, dammit.
     I am. I don’t need to walk around with plugs in my ears, Amy Winehouse moaning “Back to Black,” with The Beatles breaking in with “Here Comes the Sun” when I’m seized with the rare optimistic fit. What I do need, Roz says from time to time, is fewer fits, more just plain optimism. Or better, hope.
     And just as often as she says it, I remind her that I don’t want hope but love. And I am right about few things, but about this I am. (You really need to click on the link to read the denouement. - Ed.)

                                                                            03.29.23