The black kitten cries at her bowl meek meek and the gray one glowers from the windowsill. My hand on the can to serve them. First day of spring. Yesterday I drove my little mother for hours through wet snow. Her eightieth birthday. What she wanted was that ride with me— shopping, gossiping, mulling old grievances, 1930, 1958, 1970. How cruel the world has been to her, how uncanny she’s survived it. In her bag, a birthday card from “my Nemesis,” signed Sincerely with love—“Why is she doing this to me?” she demands, “She hates me.” “Maybe she loves you” is and isn’t what Mother wants to hear, maybe after sixty years the connection might as well be love. Might well be love, I don’t say— I won’t spoil her birthday, my implacable mother. In Byfield, in the snowstorm, we bought things at an antiques mall, she a miniature Sunbonnet Baby creamer and saucer— a bargain!—I, a chrome ice bucket stamped with penguins, with Bakelite handles. I wanted it, I had one just like it at home. Sometimes I think the only thing I’m sure I want is what I have. “What do you wish for?” I asked a friend, I was so curious to know how he’d formulate a wish, to know if there is a formula. His list was deliciously simple, my friend the hedonist: a penthouse with a concierge, “wonderful food,” months in Mexico, good movies . . . . Last night, you and I watched “The Way We Were” and I cried— I always do—for the wanting in it, and the losing. “It’s a great movie,” I said, to justify my tears. I wish you were more like me. Streisand and Redford, so opposite it’s emblematic, almost a cliché. Each wants or needs the other to change, so the pushy Jewish lefty, Barbara, should be quiet, accommodating, and the accommodating, handsome, laid-back “nice gentile boy” should agree with her that people are their principles. He thinks people can relax a little, be happy. If only they could both become nothing, they can stay together. All her wishing and wanting and needing won’t make that happen. She marches against the Nazis, the Blacklist, the bomb, through the movie decades, and he doesn’t want to be a great unpopular novelist, so he writes badly for movies, and later, television. At the end (it’s the early ’60s), when they meet again in front of the Plaza, his look—the blank Redford quizzicality I’ve learned is his whole expressive repertoire— seems to ask, “Why? Why did I love you? Why do I still? Why aren’t you like me?” And because the director’s a liberal, Streisand’s the wiser one, more human than Redford—she’s leafletting, to ban the bomb, in the ’70s she’ll be Another Mother for Peace—the way she wriggles her sensual mouth (a mannerism that’s become familiar in the years since this movie was new) I know she loves him or at least yearns for him, still wants him, which is more piercing, more selfish. This morning, my throat is constricted, my head aches, I’m always like this, this movie reminds me you don’t get what you want, even if you’re not weak, or mean, or criminal. I wish I didn’t believe that message so utterly. Today I need to believe something more useful, more positive. Once, when I was a child, my mother lied to me. Maybe that day I was too demanding, more likely I needed consolation—my schoolmates so lucky, so confident, so gentile. Either she meant to reassure me, or—more likely— to instruct when she said (she couldn’t have believed it, the ’40s had happened) that the meek inherit the earth. That was lesson one of our course in resignation. My little mother, little kitten, be patient, I’m trying, it’s for you I’m opening this can of worms, for you I’m opening this can of food.

Great moment in Blade Runner where Roy Batty is expiring, and talks about how everything he’s seen will die with him — ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, sea-beams glittering before the Tannhauser Gates. Memory is like molten gold burning its way through the skin it stops there. There is no transfer. Nothing I have seen will be remembered beyond me. That merciful cleaning of the windows of creation will be an excellent thing my interests notwithstanding. But then again I’ve never been near Orion, or the Tannhauser gates, I’ve only been here.

The popcorn is greasy, and I forgot to bring a Kleenex.   A pill that’s a bomb inside the stomach of a man inside The Embassy blows up. Eructations of flame, luxurious   cauliflowers giganticize into motion. The entire 29-ft. screen is orange, is crackling flesh and brick bursting,   blackening, smithereened. I unwrap a Dentyne and, while jouncing my teeth in rubber tongue-smarting clove, try   with the 2-inch-wide paper to blot butter off my fingers. A bubble-bath, room-sized, in which 14 girls, delectable   and sexless, twist-topped Creamy Freezes (their blond, red, brown, pinkish, lavendar or silver wiglets all   screwed that high, and varnished), scrub-tickle a lone male, whose chest has just the right amount and distribu- tion of curly hair. He’s nervously pretending to defend his modesty. His crotch, below the waterline, is also below the frame—but unsubmerged all 28 slick foamy boobs. Their makeup fails to let the girls look naked. Caterpil- lar lashes, black and thick, lush lips glossed pink like the gum I pop and chew, contact lenses on the eyes that are   mostly blue, they’re nose-perfect replicas of each other. I’ve got most of the grease off and onto this little square   of paper. I’m folding it now, making creases with my nails.

We can have our pick of seats.
Though the movie's already moving,
the theater's almost an empty shell.
    All we can see on our side
of the room is one man and one woman—
as neat, respectable, and distinct
    as the empty chairs that come
between them. But distinctions do not surprise,
fresh as we are from sullen street and subway
    where lonelinesses crowded
about us like unquiet memories
that may have loved us once or known our love.
    Here we are an accidental
fellowship, sheltering from the city's
obscure bereavements to face a screened,
    imaginary living,
as if it were a destination
we were moving toward. Leaning to our right
    and suspended before us
is a bored, smartly uniformed usherette.
Staring beyond her lighted corner, she finds
    a reverie that moves through
and beyond the shine of the silver screening.
But we can see what she will never see—
    that she's the star of Hopper's scene.
For the artist she's a play of light,
and a play of light is all about her.
    Whether the future she is
dreaming is the future she will have
we have no way of knowing. Whatever
    it will prove to be
it has already been. The usherette
Hopper saw might now be seventy,
    hunched before a Hitachi
in an old home or a home for the old.
She might be dreaming now a New York movie,
    Fred Astaire dancing and kissing
Ginger Rogers, who high kicks across New York
City skylines, raising possibilities
    that time has served to lower.
We are watching the usherette, and the subtle
shadows her boredom makes across her not-quite-
    impassive face beneath
the three red-shaded lamps and beside
the stairs that lead, somehow, to dark streets
    that go on and on and on.
But we are no safer here than she.
Despite the semblance of luxury—
    gilt edges, red plush,
and patterned carpet—this is no palace,
and we do not reign here, except in dreams.
    This picture tells us much
about various textures of lighted air,
but at the center Hopper has placed
a slab of darkness and an empty chair.

Across the room behind the mirror he slips a quarter in the slot. She can’t see him, doesn’t want to, isn’t interested in being touched. How are you? she says; it’s what she always says: safe and friendly, not really a question. What would you like to talk about? He doesn’t answer, which isn’t rare, not unheard of, just dumb. He drops a quarter in the slot. She wraps a finger in a strand of hair. My sister died of fever, she says, it’s what she always says, it sounds personal, like she means it. My mother healed herself by baking bread for eight days straight, until the racks of loaves reached the kitchen ceiling. He drops a quarter in the slot. She has a bruise the size of a knuckle below her collarbone and she shows him, which she sometimes does, though not often. Her husband pushed her there on his way to work everyday on his way to poker, on his way to bed. He’s been gone six years, she says, but it won’t go away. It’s like a botched tattoo, a smudge of blue ink. He says something, he says, A tattoo is like a marriage. He taps the mirror with a coin. She says, How long were you married? She says, Sometimes I can hear the river from my bedroom window. Sometimes it’s the sea. But I know it’s just the highway, just traffic passing through. He drops a quarter in the slot. She starts to say something else, how she’s been to Hawaii. She hears the door open, close.