Fried - Nellcott Is My Darling

Nellcott Is My Darling

Golda Fried

copyright Golda Fried, 2005

First edition

This epub edition published in 2010. Electronic ISBN 978 1 77056 163 2.

Published with the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the
Ontario Arts Council. We also acknowledge the Government of Ontario
through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit Program and the
Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry
Development Program.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA
CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Fried, Golda, 1972
Nellcott is my darling / Golda Fried.

ISBN 1-55245-151-8

I. Title.

PS8561.R4915N45 2005 C813.54 C2005-901690-6

I dont think Im ever going to figure it out.

Elliott Smith

Alice sat in one of the hard plastic chairs in the lecture hall at McGill University; only when the lights went out did she feel comfortable. The movie started. No commercials. No previews. Just a faraway sound.

She was wearing black and a worn leather jacket that she thought was a moss green but other people had told her it was brown.

The movie came on. It was The Graduate.

She was just starting her Bachelor of Arts degree.

She loved the sixties though it was the early nineties now. Katharine Ross in the movie had straight long dark hair. Alice had long hair that was mostly curly and got frizzy in the rain. She liked Julie Christie hair and Ali MacGraw hair.

In the darkness, she could laugh out loud and sound like a duck.

In the movie, there was a shot where the camera zoomed from Dustin Hoffmans face to a monkey and Alice laughed again. Watching people was like watching monkeys at the zoo. Dustin Hoffman was driving around like a maniac with sideburns. She loved it.

She wondered if the day would come when a guy would drive up to her door panicked and she would smile because she knew their love was solid.

The Film Society showed movies for a dollar four nights a week from Wednesday to Saturday and Alice had been to every one that first week.

Movies made her forget that she was a virgin still. That she was only pretending to be an adult. That she still had so far to go.

Her room at the dorm was a closet at the end of the hall and was extremely white. It smelled like fresh paint. She was not good at decorating. Other girls on her floor brought lampshades that matched their bedspreads and their wastepaper baskets.

She ripped a photo of David Lynch, the movie director, out of a People magazine and taped it to the wall. In the photo, David Lynch was standing on the ground diagonally. It was impossible to stand like that. She looked at the photo lying on her bed with her head cocked to the side. Maybe it was possible.

It was a utilitarian room: a single bed, with a mattress that looked lumpy and had blue stripes going down it. A desk by the window with a view of a tree. A wooden dresser with a funky smell. The tiniest fridge by the closet, a fridge for a few cans of pop at best.

She took out a memo pad from her knapsack and wrote: sheets.

She plugged in her ghetto blaster but, for the first time, she didnt immediately put rock music on. She listened for new sounds.

Alice had come all the way from Toronto to go to school in Montreal. She couldnt believe her parents had let her go.

Her mom had cried as Alice was packing her duffel bag like she was going off to war. My baby, my baby, my baby, her mom said.

Her mom was a romantic. She always waved at the door to loved ones until they were completely out of sight.

She said to Alice, I bet you get a boyfriend right away. I bet you cant live without one.

Alice looked at her mom strangely. It was a weird thing to say. Alice had never had a boyfriend. She was quiet and had worn her dads baggy sweaters to high school.

I dont think so, Mom, is what she said.

When her mom was mad, her dad would disappear until her mood changed. Her dad would raise his eyebrows so his eyes would pop out, his cheer-up face. His far-sighted glasses magnified his eyes so they looked even bigger. He was like one of Alices stuffed animals with googly eyes. Her mom would eventually smile and Alice would breathe normally again.

Her dad had walked into the bedroom carrying what looked like a dead animal. Here, you can have my parka for those wintry days. He put the coat in her arms. It weighed a ton. He was always trying to give her his things.

Alice said, This parka takes up a whole duffel bag by itself.

James McGill, James McGill. We are all the sons of James McGill, he cheered and did a little dance. He had gone to McGill. Maybe that was why she was allowed to go.

Im a daughter, Alice said, exasperated.

Her dad looked at her a minute and said, You are? Okay, and smiled on. Lets see what else I can give you. You want to take this pen? He held out a pen in front of her nose that was advertising someones insurance business. She took the pen.

Take this too, her mom said. It was a baby-blue plastic laundry basket. Alice placed her ghetto blaster in it. Its a laundry basket. Her mom looked worried.

Alice was a quiet sort. She had eccentric grandmothers to live up to and had never done her own laundry.

Now here she was, going to some nook and cranny in a Student Centre in Montreal; Alice felt like a little teacup full of fear.

The Film Society was on the third level of the Student Centre, past the yearbook committee, past the drama club, past the washrooms. The Film Society was on its way out.

She stood in the doorway gazing in. Kids had always said she had a staring problem.

The room was white with no movie posters. It had one metal cabinet with books on film theory from the sixties. There was a stack of phone books on the floor and a couple of bright orange seventies-looking chairs.

There was also a guy with a bike helmet on who was banging around in the cabinet. He said his name was William. He had been in the Film Society last year.

She wanted to go in and put her knapsack down; it was full of her new textbooks and weighed a ton. It was navy and had the big red and white McGill crest on it. Her dad had bought it for her when they checked the campus out together the year before.

Film Society elections are on Friday. Come back, William said, sizing her up.

What are the positions? she stammered.

President, publicity, events coordinator, accountant and secretary. But forget about president. Im going to be that.

Secretary, she thought. I could probably do that. She stood in the doorway hooking her thumbs under the straps of the knapsack like she couldnt leave.

Okay, come back Friday, he said.

When Alice was little, her dad used to rent a film projector from the North York Fairview Library for her birthday parties. The films would be scary: pirates with rotting teeth who chased after children. One movie was an animated version of a child going to Hell. Her dad would unfold the screen up on the stand like a magic trick. He would let her clip the film before the projector ate it. Then she would watch the film go through the projector from the side of the machine. She would see her dad in front of the projector light, big as a mountain, waving his arm and saying, All the kids on the sleeping bags.

Alice was in love with the orange chairs in the Film Society room. They made her feel like she was at a birthday party in a kids playroom with plastic furniture or at least in the seventies, which had better fashion. She couldnt wait to be back there.