Disaster movie

Eleventh in a series on my West Virginia childhood and Appalachian exile.

Less than a year after my parents’ divorce, my father married again, this time to an elementary-school librarian who liked to do crafts and bake. Like my mother, she had dark hair and dark eyes, though somehow they looked nothing alike.

Out with her one weekend, I ran into my Sunday school teacher from Christ Lutheran, the new church I went to with my mother. I announced to Mrs. DiNicola that my father would probably marry this girlfriend, because he’d kept her around longer than any of the others. Months later, he did.

As far as I knew, divorce wasn’t allowed for Catholics, but my grandmother was on her third marriage, and I never heard anyone mention it as an obstacle to my father’s plans either. Only decades later would my stepmother share that finding a location and officiant for the ceremony had been a challenge. These discussions had been kept, as they probably should have been, out of earshot of children. Meanwhile, my great-grandmother sewed a voluminous green and yellow dress with a Peter Pan collar so that I could be a flower girl in the wedding.

To show the true depth of my affection for my stepmother, I wrote rhyming poems for her. Her mother was Italian, and her father was Polish. In my poems, I called her a Polack. Where had I heard Polack jokes? Not at home; my mother would have been horrified. Probably at my new school.

I also meant the poems to be funny. It didn’t occur to me that they were mean. Weeks before my seventh birthday, I drafted them in pencil then copied them over in pen to share with my new stepmother as gifts, carefully unfolding the creased notebook paper before reading them aloud. Those love poems—more than a dozen, all of them in sing-song cadence and filled with feeble slurs—were my heartfelt attempt at literature.

In the moment, my stepmother showed no sense of being offended. By the time I asked about the poems years later, wondering whether they had bothered her, she’d forgotten them completely.

My brother and I traveled to Weirton, West Virginia, for the ceremony and stayed with my new stepmother’s parents. Her mother taught me to use a hand-cranked pasta machine to make ravioli. Her father worked as a roll grinder at Weirton Steel, a job that impressed me, though I somehow imagined it involved climbing huge towers.

During the reception dinner, hundreds of people sat at long rows of tables in an enormous hall. As soon as my brother and I understood we could clink our forks against our goblets of water to make the newlyweds stand and kiss, we became a blight on the celebration.

My father’s second wedding was the most spectacular event of my short life. After dinner, I asked the band to play “The Hustle” over and over, as I tried to line dance. I felt that I had attained my rightful position at the center of attention.

At the end of the night, people drifted away, and the musicians began to pack up their instruments. When I learned that I wouldn’t go with the bride and groom on their honeymoon, I cried.

***

Long before my father’s second wedding, before my parents’ divorce had even been finalized, perhaps before they had even separated, neighbors noticed an unfamiliar car parked in front of the house on the hill. One of them asked my brother about the Valiant, saying something about a fair. Seven or eight years old at the time, he thought only of 4-H and state festivals; it would take years for that arrow to hit its mark.

There was no question whose car it was; my mother dated only one man after my father left. In time, we met him. Taller than all of us, he wore dark three-piece suits and a tie every day. He had one blue eye and one brown—the result, he said, of someone attacking him with a rock on Quincy Hill when he was a teenager. It had left him blind in one eye.

He was local and already belonged to that place long before we had moved there. For the first time, I wondered if our neighborhood was dangerous.

Friendly and agreeable, he liked to lean in close to people to show he was taking them seriously. He made the kind of jokes a child would enjoy. But I was immersed in my own world; he was my mother’s friend, not mine. He barely registered. Decades into adulthood, I would find out that he was the person my father blamed for ending my parents’ marriage.

A few months after the divorce was final, he took the three of us to a drive-in movie. It was the first time I’d watched a movie in a car. The show, a double feature, began with The Towering Inferno. A short-circuit started a small fire inside a skyscraper. Sparks turned to raging flames, engulfing a lower floor and cutting off escape for everyone trapped high in the tallest building in the world.

By then, having seen at least a half-dozen films, from Alice in Wonderland to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, I felt myself a cinema veteran. Onscreen, as accident cascaded into disaster, the actors’ voices amplified inside the small space of the car made me feel like I was trapped with them. I was enthralled.

The second half of the double feature was M*A*S*H*. “This one is for grownups,” my mother said, handing pillows and blankets to my brother and me in the backseat and telling us to go to sleep. I did as I was told, curling up and looking out the side window at the night sky until I floated into darkness.

The next day, my thoughts were all about carnage in the skyscraper. The movie had wound me up and left me electrified. I could not return to stillness until I’d recalled each scene and reenacted it in detail.

Making up a Towering Inferno game, I pushed my bed against the window wall and threw up the sash, escaping onto the roof by using two sheets tied to each other then to the leg of the bed frame. I looked over the edge of the gutter at the ground and thought about shimmying down until my feet reached cool grass, but the sheets didn’t seem long enough for that.

I was perfectly nestled in my memory of the movie, which was more real to me than events in my life. Untouchable and oblivious to the presence or absence of anyone else in the house, I likewise missed all the warning signs that went unnoticed in the film. I didn’t once think about what all of us going to a movie together might signify in my own world, did not feel the oxygen draining from the room, or notice the air around me shimmering with heat, smoke already rising.

You can read another story in this series about my childhood here, or find out more about me and this newsletter on my About page.