Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“And?” I asked.

“She said I should get in your face a little bit, to make the scene better.”

“Get in my face?”

He stuck his hands in his hair, looked at his shoes. “I don’t remember how she put it — she just said I should get close to you, even kiss you maybe. She told me to do that. I wouldn’t have come up with it on my own.”

I thought I had him figured out. He acted all hard, but really he was one of those guys who couldn’t stand to have anybody hate him. Now that he’d had his fun freaking me out, he was going to pin everything on Sophie and look like the good guy.

“Bullshit,” I said. “Get out of here.”

He stood up. I stood too. I’d expected him to try to argue, but he looked defeated, almost relieved.

“Okay,” he said.

But at our door, he turned back to me, and now he looked scared.

“She told me this other thing,” he said. “She told me that because of something that happened to you, you might get really mad if I tried to kiss you. That you might even leave the set. But that I shouldn’t worry because that was part of it. Whatever happened to you — she didn’t say what — was going to make the movie better.”

I had to sit back down.

“I didn’t ask what it was,” he went on. “I should have. I knew we were doing something fucked up to you, and I did it anyway, and I’m sorry.”

And then he did leave, and I was alone, and I didn’t know if I believed him, but I noticed that I was picking all my clothes up off the floor, like I didn’t want them touching hers anymore.

SOPHIE CAME HOME HOURS LATER. I’d finished the bottle of wine and started in on somebody’s cheap vodka from the kitchen freezer, and I was in what my mom used to call a bloodred mood. I wanted Sophie to ask me what was wrong, but she came in all important, talking about her day, wearing a new suit jacket she’d bought, and finally when she lay back on the bed and started talking at the ceiling without even looking at me, I gave up and interrupted.

“Peter came to see me today,” I told her.

She didn’t look worried. She didn’t look at me at all. She was still staring at the ceiling like something was written up there.

“I thought you weren’t speaking to him,” she said.

“I wasn’t,” I said.

Sophie looked at me then. She sat up on her elbows and fixed me with those giant eyes, but still she didn’t look angry or upset. She just looked focused, like she was in the editing room, cutting a tough scene.

“Did you tell him to kiss me?” I asked.

“Did he say that?” Sophie asked.

“Is it true?”

I wanted so badly for her to say something that made sense, something simple and obvious that would make Peter the liar and not her. Instead she stood up, took her jacket off, ran her fingers through her hair. She still just looked like she was thinking.

I started yelling. “Tell me if it’s fucking true!”

“Can we talk about this in the morning?” she asked.

She held her hand out to me the way she did when she wanted me to come to bed. I took it and dug my nails into it the way I did when she was making me feel so good it hurt.

“Did you tell Peter to kiss me?” I asked again.

She looked away. “I did,” she said.

I threw my jar of vodka against the wall. When it shattered into a million pieces, I picked up the bottle and threw that too. I was looking around for something else to throw when Sophie started talking in a new voice, loud and with a panicky edge on it.

“Allison, you know when you want something to be perfect?”

“No!” I shouted.

“Well, you know when I want something to be perfect?”

I turned to face her. My blood was pounding in my ears.

“Sometimes I just want that so badly that I don’t think about what will happen or how other people feel. I can’t think about it, even though I know I should.”

“Why can’t you?” I asked.

Her eyes were wet. I realized she was scared now, as scared as I’d ever seen her. She raised her arms in a silent shrug, and I remembered how small she was, how fragile.

“Well, you need to learn,” I said. I wasn’t yelling anymore. I was hoarse. “You can’t be like this forever.”

“I know,” she said. She held out her hand again, and this time I took it and lay down on the bed with her. But all that night I dreamed a dog was chasing me, barking and biting at my heels.

MY GRANDMA AND MY GRANDPA loved each other, and when he died she cried for one whole day, my mom said, and then she went out and got a second job baking bread at the women’s prison. She was smart and fast, and soon she was promoted to line cook, then kitchen manager, and she was able to quit her first job at a factory that made wooden dishware, and she worked at the prison until she died. My mom and I visited her when I was four or five years old, before my sisters were born, and she made bread with a soft cheese baked inside it and I kept wondering what magic she used to get it in there. Another woman was staying with my grandma then, a lady named Elma who had been a prisoner. She had a big square body and a face that had seen a lot of sun, and I remember she taught me how to peel an orange in a spiral so you’re left with a bouncy, sweet-smelling snake. She also told me a story about her grandfather that I didn’t believe but that I loved. She said he was a sailor who was captured by pirates, and they were about to make him walk the plank when he made a special Masonic hand signal, and since they were Masons too, they not only let him go but taught him all their pirate secrets and codes and ways of avoiding the law. Elma had round cheeks and deep wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, and when she smiled, I thought she looked like Mrs. Claus, and I told her that, and she laughed.

That night when my grandma was putting me to bed, I asked her what Elma had done to go to prison. My grandma didn’t believe in lying to children, so she told me that Elma’s husband used to beat her and her daughter, so one night Elma killed him. I was scared then — not because I thought Elma would kill us but because I was worried that the nice lady who I’d started to love the quick way little kids do was actually evil and I’d have to hate her.

“Is Elma a bad person?” I asked my grandma.

“What she did was bad,” she said. “But not as bad as letting somebody hurt you over and over and not doing anything about it.”

I knew she was talking about my dad, which wasn’t fair, because he was just a screwup who never hit anyone in his life. But I remembered this forever, how bad she thought Mom was for taking shit from him. And I thought of it the day I packed up my stuff while Sophie was editing and moved to a new apartment across town.

Despite Flaws, Marianne

Makes an Impression

R. Benjamin Martin, Class of 2005

This weekend’s independent film festival at Bolcher Auditorium featured a number of worthy and wholesome efforts. Bogdan in particular, the story of one young boy’s triumph over astigmatism, will no doubt be a contender this Oscar season. But it is not of Bogdan , nor of Woolly Bear , the majestic tale of an annual caterpillar migration, that I have come here to speak. I want to talk about Marianne .

Marianne is not a perfect movie. It is not beautifully lit, nor, it must be said, even competently edited. The sound has roughly the clarity of an expiring person shouting for help from the bottom of a very deep well. The supporting actors are occasionally embarrassing.