Steve Martin - Shopgirl

“So how’re you doin’ out there?” Her father sits in the easiest chair in the living room, and Mirabelle sits on the sofa, verging on relaxed.

“I’m fine, I’m still working at Neiman’s.”

“How’s your art coming along?” Dan never sees her endeavors in art as frivolous, and as much as is possible for him, gets it.

“I’m drawing, Daddy. I’ve even sold some.”

“Really? That’s great, that’s just great. What do they sell for?”

“The last one brought six hundred dollars, split with the gallery.”

Mirabelle’s mother brings a tray of Cokes into the room and just catches her daughter’s modestly expressed boast. She looks askance at her, as if to say, “Can that possibly be true?” For some reason she feels the need to fake naïveté about this art thing that Mirabelle is doing. She pretends she doesn’t get the preoccupation with it, that it is all beyond her understanding. The source of this self-deception is a mysterious and arbitrary decision to place certain arenas outside her realm of understanding, like the man of the house being simply unable to comprehend how to wash and dry dishes. The woman who had become a firewall of protection around her family when it was threatened now feels the need to play dumb.

The three talk on, then Dad suggests the family take a walk around the neighborhood, which they do. He leads her by certain houses so he can call out to neighbors and show off his daughter, and Mirabelle becomes the daughter she was to him prior to the revelation of his affair. She hangs back behind her dad. Her pose becomes awkward, her voice weakens, she shyly says hello to familiar neighbors, and none of what she has seen and experienced in California is present in her demeanor. Catherine stands by, in wife mode, and Mirabelle looks at her and wonders where her own deep eroticism could possibly have come from.

After the family dinner, with her brother’s wife Ella making it five, Mirabelle goes to her room and sits on the bed amid the relics of her childhood. Her mother’s discarded sewing machine has been stowed in the room, and there are a few stray cardboard storage boxes stuffed into her closet, but otherwise everything is the same. A clock radio from the seventies, predigital, sits on her bedside table, in exactly the same spot it occupied when Jimmy Carter was president. The books that Mirabelle dove into when she wanted to vanish from the family are still in perfect order on her painted wicker bookshelf. The yellow glow from the incandescent overhead light washes over everything, and it, too, is familiar. Although she feels she is a stranger in the house, she is not a stranger in this room. This room is her own, and it is the only place where she knows exactly who she is, and whom she is fighting against, and she would like to remain in it forever.

She opens one of the storage boxes – cardboard drawers in cardboard chests – and sees piles of old tax forms, long past any purpose of being saved, a few ledgers, and some rolled-up Christmas wrapping. She kneels down, brushing dust off the floor, and slides open the lower drawer. A folded sweater and more financial flotsam. She sees an array of photos tucked inside another antique ledger. She picks it up and the photos spill onto the bottom of the box. She sifts through them and sees Christmas pictures of herself at five years old, riding on her father’s neck. He is all smiles and clowning, her brother is nearby with a space weapon, and Mom is probably taking the picture. But the mystery for Mirabelle is, what happened? Why did her father stop loving her?

Mirabelle lies back on her bed holding the photos like a gin hand. Each one is a ticket to the past; each reveals a moment, not only in the faces but in the furniture and other objects in the background. She remembers that rocker, she remembers that magazine, she remembers that porcelain souvenir from Monticello. She stares into these photos, enters them. She knows that even though the same people and the same furniture are outside her door, the photo cannot be re-created, reposed, and snapped again, not without reaching through time. Everything is present but untouchable. This melancholy stays with her until sleep, and she loves being held by it, but she cannot figure out why these photos are so powerful beyond their obvious nostalgic tug.

The next day, she and her dad take a walk in the woods. In Vermont, no matter in which direction you go, you end up in the woods, so they go straight out their own backyard. The snow is crunchy and manageable. Mirabelle wears her mom’s parka, which makes her look like someone has inflated her. Dad is all man in a furry vest and plaid shirt and lambskin jacket. After the “how’s Mom” discussion in which little is said and nothing is answered, Mirabelle produces from her pocket the photographs, and hands them to him.

“I found these last night. Remember these?” She laughs as she presents them, to indicate their harmlessness.

After reaching clumsily for his glasses, which are inconveniently stashed under layers of insulation, Dan looks at the photos.

“Uh-huh.” This is not the response Mirabelle is looking for. She had hoped for a smile or chuckle or flicker of some memory of pleasure.

“We were giggly,” probes Mirabelle.

“Yeah, it looks like we are having a lot of fun.”

He hands the photos back to her. She cringes at his disconnection from the events in the pictures.

Mirabelle suddenly knows why the photos have such a powerful effect on her. She wants to be there again. She wants to be in the photographs, before Easter, before the shift in his personality. She wants to be hoisted onto her dad’s shoulders the way she was as a child; she wants to trust him and be trusted by him, enough that he would share his secrets with her.

“These were taken right when you came back from Vietnam, weren’t they?”

Mirabelle has tried to open this door before. Today his response is the same as always.

“Not sure. Yeah, I guess.”

The air bites them as Mirabelle and her father continue to walk. Then, coming to a clearing in the snowy forest, they grind to an uncomfortable halt. Mirabelle pushes a hand deeper in her pocket and fingers the card given to her by Carter Dobbs. The distance from the house gives her courage and she thinks now is the time. “There’s a man trying to reach you,” says Mirabelle. “He says he knows you.”

She offers him the card. Taking it, he pauses in the chilling snow and looks at it, saying nothing.

“Do you know him?” Mirabelle asks.

He hands the card back to her. “I know him.” And the conversation is over. But she had noticed something. When he was holding the card, he took his thumb and traced it over the name, and when he did so, he was powerfully distant from where he is now, in this snow with his daughter, in the woods in his backyard, in Vermont.

Her mother leaves the house to go babysit for her three-year-old grandchild. Mirabelle goes to her room after watching several hours of television with her now monosyllabic dad. The house is quiet, and she angles the shade on her bedside lamp and browses some of the books of her youth: Little Women, Jo’s Boys, Little Men, Jane Eyre, The Little Princess, Secret Garden, The Happy Hollisters. Nancy Drew. Agatha Christie. Judy Blume: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Deenie. Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself. But something catches her ear. Something…the sound of a cat? Or an injured animal in the far distance. But her mind keeps recalculating the data, inching the source of the sound closer than the outdoors. This wail, these moans, are coming from inside the house. Wearing her bunny slippers – a gift last Christmas from an aunt who underestimated Mirabelle’s age by fifteen years – she opens the door to her room and steps out into the hall. She does not need to walk far to know that the sounds, which she has now identified as sobbing, are coming from her father, who is behind the closed door of his bedroom. She stands frozen like a deer with bunny feet, then guides the slippers backward into her room, noiselessly. She shuts her door without making a sound, as she had done one night twenty-one years ago after hearing the same cries coming from the same room.