We were in the Frozen section of Fat Kat Foods when I first saw Hannah Schneider, two days after our arrival in Stockton.
I was standing by our shopping cart, waiting for Dad to choose which flavor of ice cream he preferred.
“America’s greatest revelation was not the atom bomb, not Fundamentalism, not fat farms, not Elvis, not even the quite astute observation that gentlemen prefer blondes, but the great heights to which she has propelled ice cream,” Dad was fond of commenting while standing with the freezer door open and inspecting every flavor of Ben and Jerry’s, oblivious to the customers swarming around him, waiting for him to move.
As he scrutinized the cartons on the shelves like a scientist engaged in creating an accurate DNA profile from a hair root, I became aware of a woman standing at the far end of the aisle.
She was dark haired, thin as a riding crop. Dressed in funeral attire, a black suit with black 1980s stilettos (more dagger than shoe), she looked incongruous, bleached in the neon lights and achey tunes of Fat Kat Foods. It was obvious, however, in the way she examined the back of the box of frozen peas that she liked being incongruous, the lone Bombshell slinking into a Norman Rockwell, the ostrich amongst buffalo. She exuded that mix of satisfaction and self-consciousness of beautiful women used to being looked at, which made me sort of hate her.
I’d long decided to hold in contempt all people who believed themselves to be the subject of everyone else’s ESTABLISHING SHOT, BOOM SHOT, REACTION SHOT, CLOSE-UP or CHOKER, probably because I couldn’t imagine myself turning up on anyone’s storyboard, not even my own. At the same time, I (and the man staring at her with his mouth in an O holding a Lean Cuisine) couldn’t help but shout, “Quiet on the set!” and “Roll ’em!” because, even at this distance, she was unbelievably stunning and strange, and as Dad was famous for quoting in one of his Bourbon Moods, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’”
She returned the peas to the freezer and began to walk toward us.
“New York Super Fudge or Phish Food?” asked Dad.
Her heels stabbed the floor. I didn’t want to stare, so I made an unconvincing attempt to examine the nutritional content of various popsicles.
Dad didn’t see her. “There’s always Half Baked, I suppose,” he was saying. “Oh, look. Makin’ Whoopie Pie. I believe that’s a new one, though I’m not sure how I feel about marshmallow with what, devil’s food. Seems a bit overwrought.”
As she passed, she glanced at Dad gazing into the freezer. When she looked at me, she smiled.
She had an elegant sort of romantic, bone-sculpted face, one that took well to both shadows and light, even at their extremes. And she was older than I’d realized, somewhere in her late thirties. Most extraordinary though was the air of a Chateau Marmont bungalow about her, a sense of RKO, which I’d never before witnessed in person, only while Dad and I watched Jezebel into the early hours of the morning. Yes, within her carriage and deliberate steps like a metronome (now retreating behind the display of potato chips) was a little bit of the Paramount lot, a little neat scotch and air kisses at Ciro’s. I felt, when she opened her mouth, she wouldn’t utter the crumbly speech of modernity, but would use moist words like beau, top drawer and sound (only occasionally ring-a-ding-ding), and when she considered a person, took in him/her, she would place those nearly extinct personality traits — Character, Reputation, Integrity and Class — above all others.
Not that she wasn’t real. She was. There were hairs out of place, a quiver of white lint on her skirt. I simply felt somewhere, at some time, she’d been the toast of something. And a confident, even aggressive look in her eyes, made me certain she was planning a comeback.
“I’m thinking Heath Bar Crunch. What do you think? Blue?”
If her appearance in my life had amounted only to that single, Hitchcock cameo, I still think I would have remembered her, perhaps not in the same detail I remembered the ninety-five-degree summer night I watched Gone with the Wind for the first time at the Lancelot Dreamsweep Drive-in and Dad found it necessary to provide ongoing commentary on which constellations were visible (“There’s Andromeda”), not only while Scarlett took on Sherman and when she got sick on the carrot but even when Rhett said he didn’t give a damn.
As the oily hand of Fate would have it, I’d only wait twenty-four hours to see her again, this time in a speaking role.
School began in three days and Dad, in keeping with his recent Open-a-New-Window persona, insisted on spending the afternoon at Blue Crest Mall in the Adolescent Department of Stickley’s, urging me to try on various articles of Back-2-School clothing and soliciting the fashion expertise of one Ms. Camille Luthers (see “Curly Coated Retriever,” Dictionary of Dogs, Vol. 1). Camille was Adolescent Department Manager, who not only had worked in Adolescent for the last eight years but knew which Stickley styles were de rigueur this season due to her own esteemed daughter around my age named Cinnamon.
Ms. Luthers, on a pair of green pants, which resembled those worn by Mao’s Liberation Army, size 2: “These look like they’d suit you perfectly.” She eagerly pressed the hanger against my waist and stared at me in the mirror with her head tilted, as if hearing a high-pitched noise. “They suit Cinnamon perfectly too. I just got her a pair and she lives in them. Can’t get her to take them off.”
Ms. Luthers, on a boxy white button-down shirt, which resembled those worn by the Bolsheviks when they stormed the Winter Palace, size 0: “Now this is you, too. Cinnamon has one of these in every color. She’s around your size. Bird boned. Everyone thinks she’s anorexic, but she’s not and a lot of her peers get jealous living on fruit and bagels just to squeeze into a size 12.”
After Dad and I left the Adolescent Department of Stickley’s with most of Cinnamon’s rebel wardrobe, we made our way to Surely Shoos on Mercy Avenue in North Stockton, per Ms. Luthers’ helpful tip-off.
“I believe these are right up Cinnamon’s alley,” said Dad, holding up a large black platform shoe.
“No,” I said.
“Thank God. I can safely say Chanel’s rolling in her grave.”
“Humphrey Bogart wore platform shoes throughout the filming of Casablanca,” someone said.
I turned, expecting to see a mother circling Dad like a Hooded Vulture eyeing carrion, but it wasn’t.
It was she, the woman from Fat Kat Foods.
She was tall, wearing skintight jeans, a tailored tweed jacket, and large black sunglasses on her head. Her dark brown hair hung idly around her face.
“Though he wasn’t Einstein or Truman,” she said, “I don’t think history would be the same without him. Especially if he had to look up at Ingrid Bergman and say, ‘Here’s looking at you, kid.’”
Her voice was wonderful, a flu voice.
“You aren’t from around here, are you?” she asked Dad.
He stared at her blankly.
The phenomenon of Dad interacting with a beautiful woman was always an odd, sort of uninspired chemical experiment. Most of the time there was no reaction. Other times, Dad and the woman might appear to react vigorously, producing heat, light, and gas. But at the end, there was never a functional product like plastics or glassware, only a foul stench.
“No,” said Dad. “We’re not.”
“You’ve just moved down here?”
“Yes.” He smiled, though it didn’t do a fig leaf’s job of hiding his desire to end the conversation.