Worthing Flash

Washington Theatre Three blocks from the mill. Lights down, burgundy velvet curtains opening. The smell  of popcorn permeating. Father, away in the War. My mother took me to the movies. We sat in the dark, watching movies I was too young to understand, but, somehow, I did. Brando in “On the Waterfront,” Rhett, Scarlet, Heathcliff. I sat beside her, picking   seeds from a pomegranate. Staining my fingers, soaking it all in. As solemn as Sunday Mass.  Mother instilled her love of movies in me. That theatre, old, and in a bad part of town, has survived. Dark, teeming with ghosts. Sandra Giedeman  

The bleak winds reminded Kate that California was, after all, a desert. Semi-arid. She looked out her car window, seeing the whistling wind send tumbleweeds across the road. Wind like this brought memories with it. The Santa Anas, here again. The names of the places here told the story: Death Valley, Furnace Creek, Burnt Ranch. She was driving through the Mojave on her road trip to Utah. Roadside bushes picked up in the beam of her headlights what appeared to be ghostly coyotes. She blinked and saw that they were just dusty-millers, mesquite, greasewood. Not small groups of people clustered near the road, arms upraised in prayer, but Joshua trees. In the Mojave snakes rattled quietly as a muted tambourine before lunging. Get a grip she told herself, noticing that her headlights skewed in different directions—one pointing up like a floodlight, the other illuminating the broken median down the middle of the road. The Santa Anas, a bad wind whipping, lashing, drying everything...

All my aunts had red hair, each a different shade. Vernelle’s was orange. That day, years ago, she poured a glass of iced tea and stuck a wedge of lemon on the glass, “like society people,” she said. She had dropsy and never learned to read. She looked at pictures in movie magazines. We went to Woolworth’s every Saturday and that day she bought a bottle of Persian Melon nail polish. We sat at the dinette table and I painted her nails, dabbing at smears with a cotton ball. She talked about her ex-husband John Robert. “He was a good man,” she said. Smiled when I agreed with her. She lived with grandmother her whole life. I found that 40-year old picture of her when I moved last year. It was taken on Easter Sunday. She wore a dark coat, looked tall and dignified. I didn’t really know her I thought. “Come here,’ she’d say when I was little, “sit on my lap. I want to spend some time with you.” It’s summer. We’re on the porch and a little metal fan is blowing. Her sisters nickn...

My grandmother was a divorced working woman, a rarity in those days. I’d stand next to her at the kitchen counter as she poured soured milk into chocolate cake batter and told stories—made-up stories. She was superstitious and brewed the strongest green tea I’ve had since. She buried talismen in the backyard. So Irish, with her old lady shoes. I don’t think she taught me much by speaking, but mostly by my being able to spend time with her. I watched her care and concentration on whatever was at hand. Now, I feel a strong connection. My first adventure was a train trip with her from St. Louis to Chicago and how she permitted me, at seven, to sip coffee from the cardboard cup the conductor handed me as we rolled by the flaming orange trees outside the windows that October. Those little round spectacles set low on her nose—taking in the world.