1
The Sunshine, a tiny theater that shows old movies for two-dollar tickets, is located, as all my favorite places are, in a strip mall.
I love strip malls. I love how you can tell when they were built based on the architecture and the fonts on all the signs. I love it when all the signs are in different fonts, but also when all the signs are the same font. I love it when the big sign by the street is really old but they just leave it there, year after year, even as the businesses shutter and turn over and change. I love the retro, neon signs all along old Route 66, of course, but even more so, I love the weird stuff. Like there’s this one strip mall in the Heights that used to have a bowling alley in it, and even though the bowling alley isn’t there anymore, the sign is still shaped like a giant red bowling pin, next to a giant red bowling ball. I love that it now says “Staples” and “Guitar Center” inside that giant bowling pin, and underneath, it says “Hot Pink Thai Cuisine” and “Southwest Financial,” and I also love that the words Hot Pink are written in purple, not pink.
Albuquerque is full of strip malls—it’s mostly strip malls, it’s a sparkling grid of strip malls beneath a vast, open sky, blue and orange and dusty pink; strip malls with offices and storefronts and restaurants, vacant or shiny new, little brown low-slung buildings with bright murals splashed across their sides, carpeting the high desert from the Sandia Mountains to the Rio Grande and from the river to the horizon where the sun sets over the Three Sisters; strip malls as far as the eye can see, mirroring each other from across wide streets, lined with cactus, evergreen, and mesquite, all coursing between them like capillaries in the lungs, like veins, asphalt crumbling and cracking under temperature swings, blistering dry heat, numbing cold, crumbling, freshly paved, crumbling, neighborhood by neighborhood, and year by year.
The Sunshine Theater’s marquee glows in the center heart of its strip. It shares a parking lot with Famous Pho restaurant, a Supercuts, Salazar’s Taqueria y Carniceria, Milly and Manny’s Comic Books & Boba Tea, and a titty bar called the Prickly Pear where all the dumbasses at school think it’s funny to say they saw your mom last night. The Sunshine Theater is our most sacred, holy place—my best friend, Esmé, and me, who make a pilgrimage to this particular strip mall every day after school as soon as the last bell rings.
When we hop into Esmé’s car in the school parking lot, I automatically subtract an hour from the dashboard clock she never bothers to change. Her grandpa left this car to her when he died. It’s an old man’s car, huge, boat-like, and smells like stale cigars, but it suits her, and she keeps his rosary and his Virgin Mary of Guadalupe air freshener hanging on the rearview mirror, thanking him every time she narrowly avoids a tree, or a curb, or another car.
“Señor Josh was in rare form today,” I say, flipping down the mirror to confirm how rough I look after seven plus hours being run through the meat grinder of the public education system. I do, indeed, look like I got hit by an overcrowded bus. “He didn’t even shave.”
“I know!” Esmé says, turning west, away from the mountains, which are lined with newly yellowing trees at the crest. “He looks like he’s going through it. What do you think is going on with him? It’s only October.”
Our Spanish teacher is this white guy whose name is not Josh, but we think it’s funny to call him Señor Josh because he looks like Josh from Blue’s Clues, if Josh from Blue’s Clues was white. Which is funny because Josh from Blue’s Clues is, of course, Filipino, like me, and Señor Josh at school is white, and Esmé is Chicana, and her dad’s side of the family has lived here for hundreds of years since before New Mexico was even called New Mexico, and there we are, in Spanish I together, because according to Esmé she’s a “no sabo” kid, conjugating verbs from an extremely old textbook that includes vosotros, and every time we ask Señor Josh about it he just says, don’t worry about that column, you’ll never use it, which pisses off Esmé, who said why does Señor Josh get to be the arbiter of what we will use and what we won’t use? But then I said one less column of verbs to worry about is fine with me, and anyway I think he just meant that it’s a Spain thing and maybe an Argentina thing? So why bother? And Esmé said it was the you that pissed her off, and the never, he said you’ll never use it. It was the implication.
It’s true that it’s exhausting to spend your whole day trying to decode these little implications. Which is why by the time 3:00 p.m. hits, I’m basically catatonic from all the inane human interaction I’ve been subjected to at school and I can’t wait to sit in the darkness at the Sunshine Theater, in my favorite strip mall, and not say a a word to anyone for at least ninety minutes. But, since Esmé’s driving, and I’m in her passenger seat, it’s like her job is to drive us to the Sunshine and it’s my job to be the in-flight entertainment, not that either one of us has ever been on a plane before. If we ever do fly on a plane together, maybe we’ll watch a movie instead, but until then, in her grandpa’s car, every day, I try to make Esmé laugh. When she laughs, it’s like I’ve earned my spot in that seat somehow.
Esmé Mares is my only friend. Nobody else likes me at school, probably because I barely say anything at all and then when I finally do it’s weird or mean or both, and it’s probably also about a movie that nobody else has seen, but Esmé likes me, because she laughs at those things. So even though it takes every scrap of energy I have left, when I’m sitting in her passenger seat, I pull out my best observations about Señor Josh, who seems to be in need of a Zoloft refill because his unshaven jaw today was giving blob, and Noah Bradford, who I hate, who said he saw our trig teacher at the Prickly Pear when no he fucking didn’t and I told him so, and my sister’s friends from the track team who all did their hair in identical ponytails today because of some dopey spirit thing we’re supposed to care about, and how the Hot Silent Sophomore switched to using a blue Pilot G2 pen in AP World History making him even more elite than we thought previously, until the fifteen-minute drive across town is complete and we’re safely swinging into the parking lot of the Sunshine.
“WATCH OUT!” I say.
Esmé has almost clipped our friend Mr. Marco, the movie proprietor, returning to this post with his afternoon coffee from the adjacent strip mall, which houses Chismosas Tattoos, a Golden Pride Fried Chicken and Burritos, Monologue Coffee, and two empty storefronts that used to be a Blockbuster and a Hollywood Video, respectively, their signs remaining despite their windows being boarded up for years.
Mr. Marco did not get his coffee at Monologue, which has vegan donuts in the glass pastry case and oat milk in the mini fridge by the paper straws—he got his coffee at Golden Pride Fried Chicken and Burritos for a dollar. He takes it black.
“Sorry, Mr. Marco!” Esmé calls out the window.
His coffee sloshes onto the pavement and he swats at the back of her car with his newspaper.
“Thanks, Abuelito,” she murmurs in the direction of her grandfather’s rosary, blowing cigarette smoke out of her driver’s side window and tucking us safely into her preferred parking spot.
She stabs the butt into the ashtray. I wish she wouldn’t smoke. My mom smokes and I feel like because of that when I see people smoking it doesn’t look cool to me the way I think it’s supposed to. It looks sad.
The marquee over the door boasts only two movies this week, their titles stacked on top of each other in such a way that they are scrambled and unreadable, but we were here yesterday, so we know that GLENGARRY GLEN GIRL FUNNY ROSS is actually Glengarry Glen Ross and Funny Girl, respectively. There’s never any real rhyme or reason, from what we can tell, to the movies that old Mr. Marco chooses to screen at the Sunshine. It seems like he just goes off vibes, which is what I like about him. He does whatever he wants. It’s his place.
Mom gets mad at me every time I say Mr. Marco is old. He’s at least as old as my lola, which I guess is not super old, but Mr. Marco seems super old to me, in his big glasses frames that look like they haven’t changed since the premiere of one or both the films he’s screening this week, and his old man sweater, which is actually cool and I’d wear it if I found it at Savers.
My mom gets mad at me for dressing “ugly,” like today, which isn’t even that bad, just a T-shirt and sweatpants. Mom gets mad at me for a lot of things, like “terrorizing” Mr. Marco at the Sunshine every day.
He accepts our crumpled-up dollar bills and quarters and dimes with an eye roll—he loves us—and pushes two red-striped bags of popcorn across the chipped plastic countertop without us having to ask for them.
“Looks like we might get some weather tonight,” I say.
Mr. Marco keeps a notebook next to the register where he logs the daily precipitation from a rain gauge he keeps in the planter out front. The daily precipitation is usually zero.
“Looks like,” he grunts, turning back to this crossword puzzle.
“Let me know if you get stuck on five across,” I say. “I’ll give you a hint.”
He grunts.
Esmé uses a straw inserted into the popcorn to make sure the fake butter is adequately distributed throughout the bag because she’s a genius.
“Girls, not so much!” Mr. Marco calls out to us. “You’ll get a hole in your stomach lining.”
“For legal reasons, we’ll pretend we didn’t hear you say that,” I say.
We take our usual seats, in the middle of the theater, with no problem as there are only two other people present, a couple who sits down in the front row for some reason.
The outsides of the popcorn bags are soon slick with oily fingerprints. With our feet propped up on the seats in front of us, we shovel palmfuls into our mouths while we roast the movie trailers for sentimental movies about dogs, like they have souls, the couple down in the front row having a whisper fight, like we can’t hear them, and the way Mr. Marco said he wanted to switch to real butter, like we want that. Like we care. As always, we’re clutching cramping stomachs by the time the lights dim, we should have shared, we groan, as if we should know by now.
Then the whole world fades to black.
Because we’ve already seen Glengarry Glen Ross, we’re seeing the other movie, Funny Girl. It’s the story of Fanny Brice, a young girl living in New York City in ye old- timey times, except she’s a young Barbra Streisand looking very much like it’s 1968 when the movie came out, per the opening credits. I know that Esmé is loving her eyeliner and she’s going to try to replicate it tomorrow and possibly even try to replicate it on me even though she’s going to look like a Chicana Barbra Streisand and I’m going to look like I have two bruised eye sockets because that’s how I always look in makeup. It just doesn’t sit right on me.
Fanny Brice is a funny girl who wants to be on the stage even if it means auditioning for the chorus when she can’t dance because she just knows she’s a star.
The joke seems to be that somebody who looks like her could never be a star even though she’s the most beautiful woman on screen and maybe quite literally the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, so I don’t get it. It’s probably racism because she’s Jewish.
That eyeliner, and the lighting. She looks amazing.
“They just don’t make movies like this anymore,” I whisper in an old-timey-radio, mid-Atlantic-adjacent accent, and Esmé laughs.
Esmé laughs a lot at movies, and she cries sometimes, too. I feel like movies give people permission to feel things that they don’t always let themselves feel in regular life, but I still can’t cry at them. I never cry at the right times, only when I really, really don’t want to.
Esmé grabs my arm when she laughs really hard at one of Fanny’s jokes and I start eating her popcorn once I finish mine, even though I’ll get a hole in my stomach lining, and even I almost cry when Fanny’s dream comes true but it doesn’t feel like she thought it would—and somehow, somehow, the two hours and thirty-five minutes are done and the credits are rolling and I feel like my molecules have been rearranged.
It feels so weird, every time, when we step through the exit door after the movie is over, and our eyes adjust to reality. What time is it, what day? Not to be all Nicole Kidman about it, but I love that about the movies. About this place. It’s a time machine. It’s a portal. It’s not home, it’s not school, it’s a space in between. Esmé’s car feels like that, too, and as we talk about the movie the whole way home, our sentences overlapping, the desert and the mountains a blur outside the window, strip malls, strip malls, Esmé laughing and smacking the steering wheel as I make my dumb jokes about Barbra Streisand’s eyeliner and the jumbled marquee and how GLENGARRY GLEN GIRL FUNNY ROSS would be a bittersweet tale about a bunch of real estate agents trying to close an audition in the chorus line, it feels possible that things will always be this way. If I can just keep her laughing.
2
YOU’RE NOT A CHORUS GIRL, Fanny Brice’s friend told her when he saw what she could do onstage. You’re a comic.
But why was Fanny Brice funny?
The movie doesn’t go too much into it, it focuses a lot on the romance storyline instead, but I feel like it must have something to do with her mother. Her mother and her friend Mrs. Strakosh, who told Fanny that she was fine for a regular girl but not beautiful enough to be a star.
When your mother says stuff like that to you in front of all her friends while they play cards in a Brooklyn saloon, you kind of have to say something funny, don’t you, to take the heat off you? But then she ran straight into the heat of a different spotlight. At least it’s one she chose, she was saying.
Lucky for me, I have developed a solid method for when I need to redirect my mother’s heat, which is to focus her attention instead on my little sister, Ali.
Ali’s side of our bedroom, at our mom’s apartment, is a mess. Which is annoying because everyone assumes I’m the messy one, just because Ali always looks so together, and I look, well, how I look. Not that I care what everyone assumes. Most people, famously, are stupid, and they are even dumber in groups. It’s been studied.
It’s an ungodly hour to be awake right now, but I have to get to school early for detention, because schools are institutions designed to punish you for not being stupid enough to comply perfectly with all the stupid rules they invent.
When I trip over a pile of Ali’s dirty clothes in the dark, all her perfect, stupid, matchy-matchy clothes, I scream silently at her sleeping form.
YOU’VE NEVER EVEN HAD DETENTION, HAVE YOU?
She lets out a little cherubic sigh, our tuxedo cat curled up beneath her arm, and I briefly consider sweeping her hoard of body sprays and moisturizers and various other sundry potions, which are completely covering what is supposed to be our desk for doing homework, but she has now claimed as her getting ready station, onto the floor. Instead of doing that, I scoop her dirty clothes off the floor and shove them in the laundry hamper.
We’ve shared a room our whole lives, or, I guess, just Ali’s whole life. My reign as an only child totaled a mere eighteen months, so it kind of just feels like she’s always been there. Long before our parents divorced and Mom moved us all into this apartment, we’ve been elbowing each other for space in front of the mirror before school. In our room, when we were kids, it used to be that her stuffed animals were everywhere, staring at me. Now it’s clothes. Ali’s side of the closet has been slowly, steadily encroaching on my side for the last several years. Track team jerseys, little flowery dresses that slip off the hangers and onto the floor, and piles and piles of the same pair of jeans over and over, even though Ali swears up and down that each one is actually a distinct wash. Even the walls are papered with her posters, they seem to multiply overnight.
And I let them. I let them because at Dad’s new house, with Dad’s new wife, she’s not allowed to leave her stuff everywhere. There, Ali acts like a guest, neatly unpacking her many hair products from her duffel bag when we arrive, and then dutifully packing them up when we leave. And she doesn’t complain, or ask if she can store her mousse or her leave-in conditioner or her double-barrel curling iron there. Not even a brush. She does this because she just somehow knows that it’s not our house.
And it’s kind of breaking my heart.
That’s why it always works to redirect Mom’s heat on me to Ali. Any conversation radiating in the direction of my unwashed hair or my unplucked eyebrows or my too-baggy clothes can be derailed by a strategically deployed Mommy. I’m worried about Ali. Because Ali is the baby. Ali is so sweet. Ali is so sensitive. Watch her for me, Mom pleads, my insufficiencies always forgotten in the face of my utility. I’m there to watch Ali, so I do.
Our bedroom at Mom’s apartment still feels like our old bedroom, sometimes, right before I open my eyes in the morning. The one we shared growing up. But then when it isn’t, when my vision rights itself, I get this pang, like I want to go home, and it stays with me throughout the day. I’m zoning out in Physics but then suddenly, pang, when the last bell rings, pang, and I walk to meet Esmé at her car in the parking lot, pang. I want to go home.
But the thing about wanting to go home is that you can’t. What even is home? A place that isn’t there anymore, a place that, sometimes, feels like you invented it, that you can go back to only when your eyes are closed, when you’ve slipped into that space between sleep and waking. Someone’s fingertips are at the crown of your head. You’re wearing warm socks. The sharp smell of garlic and onions browning in the kitchen. The sound of people who love each other laughing easily together in the other room. There’s nothing that you have to do. There’s nothing that you need to say. Your stuff is everywhere. It’s always been there and it will always be there.
Copyright © 2024 by Shannon C. F. Rogers
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