Period Piece
O.K. So it really didn’t make sense to take Leah to a movie, especially not a period romance spoken in verse using archaic Elizabethan English. Not only did it not make sense, one might even consider it cruel, making a deaf girl sit through a two-hour movie that was mainly experienced, and understood, through its sounds—maybe not as bad as taking her to a symphony but close. That’s more or less what the snotty high school girls two rows behind were whispering back and forth, though in language much more petty and mean. Thank goodness Leah couldn’t hear.
But Brooke didn’t care if it made no sense or might be judged by outsiders as selfish, even cruel. She was fed up with the August heat and humidity and boring long days at the pool with the water too hot to give any relief, or their futile attempts to find some hint of cool beneath the porch’s paddle fan or in the shadiest corner of the den. It was a hopeless search. And she was growing bitchy under the strain. She liked that newest word, bitchy—well, not new exactly but one she’d only recently grown brave enough to use, around Leah anyway and some of her friends from school. She even liked the attitude the word carried with it, a hard-edged insensitive sensitivity. She’d catch her friends off-guard with the word, then quietly excuse her crabbiness in the wake of their shock—I know I’m being bitchy (pause to let the surprise sink in) but he shouldn’t have said that!
But being bitchy for effect or release was one thing, being more or less permanently so to the point of growing weary of your own bitchiness was another matter altogether. And that’s what it had come to. She couldn’t bear to be around her own peevishness. She had to escape herself.
Besides, she’d been wanting to see Romeo and Juliet since it came out over a year ago. But on that first go round, with the theaters full and everyone talking about it and the theme song playing on the radio, Brooke had made a big mistake in declining repeated opportunities and invitations to see the film in hopes that a certain someone—in this case, Frank—would catch her overt hints and invite her to go to the movie with him. Needless to say, that didn’t happen (how many disappointments was she doomed to endure at the hands of clueless boys!). And then the movie had left town and she was maybe the only one on the whole earth who hadn’t shed tears to its tragic tale.
Well, one of two, though how could Leah be expected to cry over a movie she couldn’t hear and a star-crossed romance she couldn’t understand? But no matter that—the movie was back in town, showing in a matinee at the budget theater within a walking distance of tolerable sweatiness if they stayed on the shady side of the street. She was going this time. And since Leah was in her charge, Leah was going too, however senseless the endeavor for her. She could close her eyes and take a nap if she got bored or frustrated with the bewildering actions on the screen.
Leah loved the summer and never felt uncomfortable in the heat. Most children are more tolerant of the heat than adults, but Leah was exceptional even among children. She never perspired and didn’t show the slightest discomfort even in the oppressive heat and humidity that settled over the region in August. So when Brooke grabbed her hand and said they were going somewhere “to get a breath of cool,” she set aside the book she was reading, The Moonstone, on the porch’s swing and followed but couldn’t for the life of her understand her sister’s sense of urgency.
And now she was cold in the dark and drafty theater. During the previews she started shivering so violently her teeth chattered. That noise prompted another round of whispers from the girls two rows back. After rubbing Leah’s shoulders and bare thighs below her shorts failed to stop the shivering, Brooke signaled for Leah to stay put then stood in a huff and raced out to the lobby. She asked first the ticket taker then the ticket seller if they had a blanket for her sister. The two, both pimply high-school dorks (neither of whom she knew, thank God!) seemed more interested in looking down her tanktop than finding Leah a blanket, shook their heads. Brooke began to think she was doomed never to see Romeo and Juliet and started to ask if she could get her $1.98 back when the woman behind the snack counter waved her over and handed her a dark red wool blanket. “It’s from when my daughter used to come to matinees. She was always so cold.” Brooke noted the past tense and the woman’s sad tone but said only “My sister thanks you; I’ll return it after the movie” then hurried toward the theater doors. The leering ticket taker made her wait as he paused before unclipping the end of the velvet railing from its brass post. She shook her head and deftly stepped to one side and jumped over the railing.
“You can’t do that,” he blurted.
But she had. She strode through the doors and into the theater without looking back, daring him to follow. He didn’t.
The big screen was blank then showed the words now for our feature presentation. Brooke quickly tucked the blanket around Leah, totally covering her body so that only her face and blond hair showed above the wool. She laughed at the sight—that radiant face floating above the dark blanket and seat. “You look like a ghost,” she whispered.
Leah’s teeth chattered one last time.
Someone said in a stage whisper “Or a skeleton” followed by muffled laughter.
Brooke ignored the comment and was glad Leah couldn’t hear. She slouched down into her seat. The movie started. Maybe now everyone else would shut up and leave them alone.
Contrary to Brooke’s assumption, Leah experienced the movie in profound complexity though in a manner far different from that of her sister clutching the armrests tightly and hanging on every word from the luscious lips of the dreamy couple. Though touched by the ethereal beauty of the teenaged stars, released from the stranglehold of their lyrical phrasing and equally seductive and sad background music, Leah was able to observe the story from a perch of detachment that granted insight beyond her years. The scenery was as breathtaking as the lovers—the city streets, the countryside, the ballroom, the garden, the bedchambers: grand yet serene and finally indifferent backdrops to the tragic events played out upon them. The characters—every last one of them—exhibited the flashing flaw of narcissistic self-indulgence to match the flamboyance of their costumes. Sure, Leah’s lip-reading missed some of the words, mainly those that were spoken off camera and shone to break on this or that rapt and shining face (usually Romeo’s, both shining and vapid); and she puzzled over a few of the archaic words she could read (what meant thou to these eyes oh fair for “wherefore”?—by the middle of the movie she was thinking in Shakespearean rhythm and rhyme!). But those missed words had nothing to do with her confusion about the motives underlying the steady stream of bad choices. These lovers were not doomed by fate, as they and later their survivors wished to believe; they were doomed by their own self-absorption, by their feckless (Leah loved that word, gleaned from a Welty story) and fickle hearts. She could see how one would be tempted to forgive Juliet this shortcoming, so young and innocent and pure was she. But Juliet too knew the rules of right behavior and chose to ignore them in favor of short-term gratification with no long-term resolution. Leah could not for the life of her understand the force behind such folly. She ended sympathizing most with the Nurse who, though marked by plenty of ditziness, at least cared for another above herself and paid a high price for that love and witness.
But of course Leah couldn’t explain all this, or any of it, to her sister as they emerged into the blazing day after returning the blanket and hiding in the crowd (why’d Brooke do that?) to avoid brushing past the male attendants. She didn’t have the language to share it with Brooke, didn’t have the language or experience to decipher it within herself. And even if she had, Brooke wouldn’t have understood.
“Wasn’t he just heavenly?” Brooke asked and then swooned, and not from the heat, in answer to her own question.
Leah grinned but not in recollection of Leonard Whiting’s perfect features.
“He’s so much more beautiful than his pictures!” She had some of those pictures, cut out of her teen magazines, posted on the bulletin board in her room. Now she had something eve
n better, clear in her mind at least for the moment. “Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art though, Romeo?” She clutched her hands up under her chin and fell backward into Leah’s side.
Leah expected the swoon (Brooke was a great one for telegraphing her grand gestures—otherwise why do them?) and steadied her sister enough to keep her from falling.
Brooke caught her balance and ran ahead, launched into two perfect cartwheels on the shimmering sidewalk.
Leah didn’t know wherefore Romeo was, but she well knew where Romeo’s heartthrob face had lodged and saw the immediate effects. Now if she could only figure out why.
That evening, after the passing of a raucous late-day thunderstorm and the resulting relief from the heat, they were sitting cross-legged in their baby-doll pajamas on Brooke’s bed with her windows open on the vibrant night. Brooke was drawing endless variations of arrow-pierced hearts in her Billy scrapbook resurrected from under the bed. It mattered little that the original focus of that scrapbook was long forgotten if not gone (they rode the bus together and he was in Youth Group at church). The spell that notebook was under—it fairly reeked of romantic