Bricked

After dinner each night, when the sky turned the color of ripe peaches, my mother’s rule was that I had to take a bath and say a prayer then go to bed. Once she tucked me in and left the room, I would throw off the blanket and kneel on the coolness of turned-down sheets to look out my window at children still playing in the street.

If they had noticed me, I would have made faces at them. If I’d owned a bow, like Tootles the Lost Boy from Peter Pan, I would have shot them with an arrow.

On any normal evening, the injustice of an early curfew soured my stomach. But tonight would be different. For the first time, my mother would let me stay up and see a movie.

I’d watched television before. On weekdays, my mother worked at our hometown station. She had shown up on Channel 4 of the set in our living room, interviewing people or reading the afternoon news for WTAP. I’d seen her; it was real.

But television rotted developing minds, my mother said. She opposed it on principle. Books and magazines were good; television was not. Other than seeing her on camera sitting up straight with her hair sprayed firmly into place to read the news, my brother and I were only allowed to watch approved shows in limited quantities: Sesame Street or Mister Rogers, and sometimes Captain Kangaroo.

After she enrolled me in Montessori, I discovered that even the nuns watched television. When one or another Apollo spaceship landed on the moon, they would wheel a TV set on a gray metal cart into the room. We sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the older children in their chairs.

Every time one of the sisters plugged in the television and twisted a knob to switch it on, there the astronauts were, bobbing around on the grainy pancake surface already familiar from storybooks and the nighttime sky. The fact that I had seen this happen only once or twice in no way hindered my belief that it was going on all the time.

Leaving the fortress of the walled convent to go back home afterward, I imagined the sisters in their hilltop cathedral gathering in shifts, keeping silent watch around the clock over the American spacemen on the moon.

I’d seen television elsewhere, too. Our babysitter, Eva, took care of us at her house on the afternoons my mother worked. After my mother vanished each day from the TV screen, Eva left the set at her house tuned to the same channel and settled in to watch Days of Our Lives and Another World. I lingered to see the frantic drama of soap opera universes, which revealed grownups swept entirely up in romance or revenge.

Like Captain Kangaroo and the moon walks, soap operas showed the same people in the same settings over and over. Whenever the TV lit up, there they were again, where they’d always been. But I was told a movie would be different.

After a week of anticipation, my mother and I sat down together to watch The Wizard of Oz. By the time Dorothy took flight in a tornado, I believed this story had been created specifically for me. At first, the picture was as washed-out as the nuns’ television, and then the world had wild colors. Trees moved, and monkeys could fly. The girl had monsters for new friends, while other monsters chased her.

It was confusing and filled with sad and lonely people. The lion, I could tell, was a person dressed up in a lion suit, but did the people in the movie know he wasn’t a lion? I was less sure whether anyone could live without a brain or a heart, but it was hard to say this was impossible when they were right there on the screen.

As promised, a movie was different than regular television. On television, Mr. Rogers sat in his living room and spoke directly to me in mine. But with this movie, my living room ceased to exist. I fell into Dorothy’s world.

Sooner than I expected, Dorothy ended up back inside her dusty, pale home. She had left the other place behind. I was blindsided. What had happened?

Sitting on the flat olive-green carpet of the living room, I watched the screen fade to black. A commercial came on. I waited for everyone to return.

“That’s it,” my mother said, “No more to see. Bedtime.”

When she finally turned the TV off, I waited in front of the dark cabinet to see if it would come to life again on its own. Nothing. I ran upstairs and fell onto my bed and wept—quietly at first then with heaving abandon.

After some time, I heard my mother’s feet on the stairs. Sitting lightly at the edge of my mattress, she laid a hand on my head to soothe me. But I didn’t want company or comfort. I had already crossed over to despair.

“Did the movie scare you?” she asked.

“No, no,” I tried to say.

I could point to the books in my room but had no words to explain what had seized me. I could finish a book and start it again. Unlike a movie, the same people and animals were always on the pages. They lived there, as sure as Captain Kangaroo was in the Captain’s Place on television every day whether I watched him or not, just as my mother was on the screen whenever she was not with me, just as the astronauts now lived on the moon, where the nuns were somehow responsible for them.

How could I explain these ideas to her? It was impossible to harness my churning thoughts.

Finally, I spoke. “What happened to the people in the movie?” I asked. “Where did they go?”

I imagined them trapped or abandoned and in need of rescue.

“The movie was made a long time ago,” my mother said. “Before you were born. Before I was born.”

“Where are they now?” I asked.

“They’re actors,” she said, not revealing that Dorothy had been dead for years. “They went somewhere else to make other movies.”

I had seen no other movies; her words meant nothing. She tried another tack.

“You can watch it all again,” she said. “The same movie will be on in a year. After your birthday and Christmas. It comes on TV every year.”

A year might as well have been God or the sky; it was an idea with no borders. Those people were gone.

Who was living in Oz now? How could you know ahead of time when a story might end? The words would not line up to come out of my mouth. I wailed in misery until my head filled with snot, then I passed out.

More than a decade later, during my first year away from home, my mother would recall my inexplicable grief that night. “I really thought you’d like the movie,” she would say in a tone of permanent wonder. “I had no idea.”

I was weeping for Dorothy, who had surely been exiled into the abyss when my mother turned off the television. I was weeping for myself, shut out in the split second it took the screen to go blank on a universe more alive than my own. It was possible, I began to see, for people to come into my life and leave it. I might love something only to lose it.

[You can read another story in this series about my West Virginia childhood here, or find out more about me and this newsletter in my introductory post.]