I also knew that my father did not know how to cope with the simple practical difficulties of daily living (let alone emotional ones). Beneath the walled-over surface of our suburban life in one of Tucson’s drearier new subdivisions loomed chasms of potential disasters. My father panicked if a light bulb needed replacing. How many people did it take to hang a small picture in our family? Three. My mother to find the nails, the hammer, the pencil, the ruler, me to hold them and hand each to my father upon request, and my father (with much discussion, shaking, and gentlemanly swearing) to measure, make a tiny mark on the wall with the pencil, and finally (oh the moment of no-going-back) to hit the head of the nail with the head of the hammer, in hopes (oh, how we hoped) that it wouldn’t hit his thumb. These were problems in our house, challenges. A toilet, the washing machine overflowing — crises.

Beneath the walled-over surface of our suburban life in one of Tucson’s drearier new subdivisions loomed chasms
of potential disasters.

Perhaps, I began unconsciously to reason after seeing The African Queen, if you paired up with a man who could fix things, even if he had bad manners, even if he took ungentlemanly swigs straight from bottles, he could keep you afloat. I knew the waters out there were dangerous. Maybe this would be better than a prince. Certainly more practical. In Arizona, I had seen no castles.

The man I married at nineteen lured me initially through his singing, although not from a theater’s speakers, but from behind the pulpit at a wedding, where he was the hired tenor and I was one of a thousand guests. His voice rang through the arches of the Episcopal church: “Oh Perfect Love,” he sang. But his practical know-how made him just as alluring. Made him safe. He could fix anything, and seemed to like doing so. Besides, his big chest, and even at twenty-two, his big tummy, made him pillowy, easy to lean on. He could take care of light fixtures, dripping faucets, and much more. In fact, he was big enough, a former football player, to take on two wicked witches at once and win.

During the sixties, movies became as exciting as everything else that infused our suddenly speeded up, psychedelically flavored lives. Blow-Up: we began to question the reality of what we actually saw — how did we know what we thought we saw existed, could we trust our senses? My husband even liked that one so much we saw it twice — we had never seen pantyhose before, let alone watch them pulled off. Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? Another serious “film” (as opposed to a crass, bourgeois “movie”), one I could talk over with fellow English majors. Film as literature? A kind of art? Better than ever.

… how did we know what we thought we saw existed, could we trust our senses?

Now, of course, films, movies, flicks — they’re an embarrassment of riches. Hanging a picture in our house is not an activity fraught with tension as it was for us with Daddy, although Steve and I do tend to put off household repairs until we can no longer endure the skylight’s dripping leak or the toilet’s post-flush gurgling. But living with a film critic means that I see most of the year’s worthwhile movies, and usually before most people know they are in town.

During the first months Steve and I lived together, I even succumbed to his urgings to go with him to morning screenings — the ones reserved only for the critics. I am not an early — or a rapid — riser. Seeing a movie before afternoon I find unnerving. Unlike Steve, who grew up in Brooklyn, I did not cut my milk teeth on the movies; as a kid I could not walk a few blocks, or even take the bus, to Saturday morning showings. For me, the theater before noon is surreal, the vacant parking lot haunting, as if everyone else knows something we don’t and has evacuated the area. Even inside the multiplex, I find the emptiness disturbing, as if we’ve shown up on the wrong day for a party. Sometimes the projectionist must be as sleepy as I am, because occasionally a reel will be inserted upside down. Once, after trying to adjust to seeing the actors’ eyes below their mouths, I left Steve and the other local critics and walked out of the auditorium. I was hungry and bored. How long till the next reel, and would it be inserted right side up? I walked into the next room. Down the aisle, yellow lights lining the sides like miniature runway lights. Up close to the screen — across, then back up to the hallway again, in and out of all twelve silent theaters. Like gates at an airport at three o’clock in the morning. With no movies coloring the screens, each destination looked identical. Blank.

I decided that particular morning screening would be my last, though I did make an exception to my new rule when I had a chance to join the critics for The Pianist. The other film reviewers were already there. One of them, paunchy and shuffling, garrulously voices his opinions, which he flatly records in one of the neighborhood weeklies. He has no patience with subtitles or subtleties. Sighs, wheezes, doesn’t like anything too sad. Life’s bad enough, he says. Often he falls asleep, and snores, loudly. He likes to sit next to Steve. Three quarters of the way through Polanski’s film I reached for a tissue, and crumbled half a dozen into damp shreds by the final credits. Steve and I waited for the others to leave before we ventured to look at each other. I was glad we had seen this story of tenuous survival in World-War-Two-torn Warsaw in relative privacy, rather than surrounded by a crowd of folks redeeming their free passes and bolstered by barrels of soft drinks, popcorn, platters of nachos, and cell phones: “I’m in the movie, can’t talk now, can I call you later, well, maybe you’re right, maybe we should invite Tiffany to the party, I mean, like, Roger would be pissed if we didn’t, can you call her, oh okay, hey, I gotta go, call you later.”