Lois Metzger: A Trick of the Light

Mom: “She’s eighty-six.” (Or seven, or eight.) “If she’s hurt—”

Dad: “The pharmacy’s right in the building—next to the beauty parlor. She gets her hair done every day, doesn’t she? The ankle doesn’t stop her then. What about the time she thought her brooch was stolen and she wanted you to question the neighbors?”

Mom: “Well. I didn’t have to do that.”

Dad: “Only because you found it before you had to go door-to-door and interrogate the other little old ladies. What’d she want you to do, slam them up against a wall, shine a light in their eyes?”

Mom: “She’s my mother. How can I say no to her?”

Dad: “By saying no, that’s how.” Good point. “She makes you crazy. I’m just trying to spare you the insanity.”

Mom: “I’d like to say no to her. But… I can’t.”

Mike was always surprised by how helpless his mom was when it came to her own mother. She’s a professional organizer, but she was totally out of her depth here.

Another time Grandma Celia swore she saw a mouse in her room. Mike’s mom has a phobia about mice, which is why they got a cat, Mighty Joe Young (Mike named him after a kindhearted gorilla in another old stop-motion movie). Mike went with his mom up to Grandma Celia’s and looked everywhere for the mouse. When they couldn’t find it, Grandma Celia didn’t seem all that surprised; she just shrugged and said, “Maybe there was no mouse…. It must have been a trick of the light.”

Mike knew, then, there had never been a mouse.

If I had to pick, I’d say Mike’s dad is the better of the two. Not that he deserves a World’s Best Dad coffee mug, but he doesn’t talk Mike’s ear off and he gives Mike a lot of room. Mike’s mom is a different story.

When Mike was in second grade, his teacher—Ms. Jackson? Ms. Johnson? Mike’s memories are sometimes spotty—called his mom and said Mike didn’t have any friends because nobody understood what he was saying. Mike sat by himself, she said, popping CDs into a CD player so he didn’t have to talk to anyone: “He’s our little disc jockey.” Mike’s mom went into overdrive, researching like crazy, interviewing doctors. She got Mike’s hearing tested and it was fine—Mike raised his finger to show that he heard all the little beeps and tones he was supposed to hear. She took Mike to several speech therapists before getting a diagnosis of lazy lip syndrome, which meant he wasn’t putting enough air into his speech, or some such nonsense. Doctors aren’t to be taken seriously. A lazy lip? It’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.

Three whole years of speech therapy followed, closely supervised by his mom—enunciation exercises, word repetitions (bus, ball, boy, pants, party, private), looking in the mirror and watching his mouth while reciting something everybody knows, like the Pledge of Allegiance. Even now, though Mike is supposedly cured, he can be hard to understand when he gets tired or scared, and people often ask him to repeat himself or speak up. Even his parents don’t always understand him. Except for Tamio, Mike thinks, who always understands him. But I’m not sure Tamio ever really understood Mike. Not deep down, where it counts. The way I do.

Tamio says he and Mike are like unrelated twins. But they’re not. Not psychologically, emotionally, or even physically. Tamio is half Japanese, half Jewish, with thick, black hair that goes halfway down his back. Mike has hair and eyes the color of a paper bag. Mike is the taller of the two, but Tamio’s in good shape—that’s the biggest physiccepgest physal difference between them. Lately Mike’s been eating a lot, mostly junk food, and sitting around the house. His belly is starting to stick out over his shorts and he gets winded easily. It’s disheartening that Mike has gotten to this point. That he’s become so lifeless. Even with his height, Mike feels almost invisible next to Tamio.

Mike met Tamio on his first morning of sixth grade in Belle Heights Middle School. Mike sat at his desk, drawing a Cyclops with two heads.

Tamio: “What is that?”

Mike: “It’s a Cyclops with two heads.” He waited for Tamio to find him weird and walk away.

But Tamio stayed where he was. “That’s an improvement over the usual variety. This one would have depth perception. Pretty badass.” He nodded. “Did you ever see The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad ?”

Mike: “I love that movie!”

What followed was an endless discussion of stop-motion animation and its god, Ray Harryhausen, who learned the craft from Willis O’Brien, the creator of King Kong.

What is stop-motion? I’ve heard it more times than I want to remember. That is a problem with memory: sometimes you forget what you wish you hadn’t; other times you can’t forget something you’d prefer to be rid of.

Stop-motion is using cinematic techniques to create the illusion of movement in an inanimate object. First you make a small model of a giant creature, such as, in the case of King Kong, an eighteen-inch-tall gorilla. You film a frame, walk to the gorilla, move the gorilla a fraction, walk back to the camera, film the next frame, then walk back to the gorilla, move the gorilla again, walk back to the camera, film the next frame, and repeat this over and over and over. Because there are twenty-four frames for one second of film, you have to move the gorilla twenty-four times for only one second of stop-motion animation. All that incessant handling is why the fur—without hair spray, apparently—moves around so much.

I wonder if on some level Mike feels eternally grateful to Ray Harryhausen for bringing him a friend. I suspect, also, that Mike feels grateful to Tamio, who apparently gave up the chance to be everybody’s best friend by sticking with Mike.

Tamio is content with Mike the way he is. He once told Mike, “There’s a lot of assholes out there—kids who are mean, kids who lie, kids who brag all the time. You’re the least assholey kid I know.”

What a waste, for Mike to settle for that.

BY THE TIME MIKE GETS HOME, HE’S PRETTY NEARLY convinced himself he didn’t hear me at all. This doesn’t surprise or discourage me—two steps forward, one step back.

He finds his mom in a panic.

Mom (shouting): “I can’t find my book!”

She keeps all her work in a big binder, which she calls her book. It’s got clients’ names, appointments, billing information.

Mike: “Where’d you see it last?”

Mom: “If I could remember that, do you think I’d be in this situation?”

Mike: “Just asking. That thing’s as big as a phone book.”

Mom: “Well, it’s still missing! I’ve been scouring the place for an hour. Where is it?”

Mike leans down to pet Mighty Joe Young, who runs away. He’s black with a little dribble of white on his chin. It makes him look like he never washes his face, even though that’s practically all he does.

Mom: “I can’t believe this. If I don’t find that book… I’ve got a client in an hour… at least I think I do.”

Mike knows this isn’t like her. She always has her day’s schedule memorized and is never late.

Mike: “I’ll help you find it, okay?”

She doesn’t even say thanks.

Mike’s house has two bedrooms upstairs, plus a small room his dad uses as a home office. It’s the first place Mike decides to look. The door is closed and he knocks.

Dad (from inside): “Yeah?”

Mike: “Can I come in?”

Dad (pause): “Sure.”

Mike opens the door and almost doesn’t recognize his own father. What’s different? Mike is reminded of those trick photographs that appear in magazines side by side—at first they seem identical, but if you look closely you can spot ten differences.