• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 110 0

it got better. And now it was time to check on the progress it had made without me. I printed it out and put it on my desk. I left the room and came back in, pretending I was a snoopy housesitter; sometimes this helps make me want to read my own work. What have we here? I said to myself, peeking at the first page and then slyly glancing over my shoulder. By page two I was me again, but I kept going. By the last page I was in a panic. The break had had the wrong effect. The PennySaver sellers were so moving to me, so lifelike and realistic, that my script – the entire fiction, including Paw Paw and the talking moon – now seemed totally boring by comparison. I had no new thoughts about how to approach Jason’s scenes, and I had somehow lost the parts I thought I’d solved. Despair was gathering. Only it didn’t feel like the sentence Despair was gathering; it wasn’t impressively dramatic like dark clouds before a thunderstorm. It was pathetic and tedious, like a person you don’t want to be around.

If I’d been Sophie, my character in the movie, I would have had an affair at this point. Not out of passion, but simply to hand myself over to someone else, like a child. But even in the movie this doesn’t really work out. And so I thought, as I often do, about the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indiana is faced with what looks like thin air, a void – and he steps into it. He does it expecting he will die but knowing he has no choice. Then, impossibly, instead of falling, his foot lands on something solid. It turns out there is actually an invisible bridge across the void. It was there all along.

Indiana’s predicaments are always life-or-death, so the daring move is obvious – it’s the one that will make the audience scream, “Don’t do it, Indiana!” My stakes were much lower. I could give up on the interviews and finish the script, or I could continue meeting strangers, believing that they would eventually lead me to the thing I needed to learn in order to finish the script. The audience probably didn’t care much one way or the other; nothing would make them scream, “Don’t do it, Miranda!” But I decided that Indiana would not sit down at the computer. He would ignore the voices that told him he was just a procrastinator and he would pick up the phone and call Matilda, who was selling Care Bears for two to four dollars each.

Matilda didn’t know we were meeting at such a pivotal moment, and I didn’t tell her. I just listened, as usual, and tried to feel the reality of her life, living with her husband, brother, son, and tiny puppy. She wore a pretty dress and had the confidence but not the face of a pretty woman. Her husband was regal and a bit dashing, occasionally passing through the living room with a polite nod. We sat on her couch, next to a pile of laundry, and discussed the bears.

Matilda:

We collect them. I go to the swap meets, yard sales. But my special collection is over there, the Precious Moments. That’s mine.

Miranda:

What do you like about those ones?

Matilda:

Well, maybe their eyes.

Miranda:

They’re kind of sad-looking. They kind of look like they’re crying.

I wondered if I was projecting. But Matilda nodded in agreement.

Matilda:

They’re tender.

Miranda:

And do you make decent money from selling them?

Matilda:

Oh yeah.

Miranda:

What kinds of people buy them?

Matilda:

Well, most are American, Japanese... because Hispanics, you know – they don’t spend money on collections.

Miranda:

Where are you from originally?

Matilda:

Cuba. I’m from Cuba.

Miranda:

When did you move to the US?

Matilda:

In December 1971. I was fourteen.

Miranda:

And what’s been the happiest time in your life so far?

Matilda:

When I was living in my country.

Miranda:

In Cuba?

Matilda:

Yeah.

Matilda showed me around her house. The garage had been converted into a bedroom. Converted isn’t really the right word – all of the furnishings of a bedroom had been moved in, but it still had the automatic door that rolled up, and a cement floor. This was the master bedroom,