Love and Trouble by Claire Dederer

Author:Claire Dederer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-05-09T04:00:00+00:00

August 6, 1985, age eighteen

I wonder if we are destined never to be in love with anyone because we’re TOO romantic?

12.

Jump Cuts

The Seven Gables Theatre is arranged over three floors, each maroon-er than the last. There are maroon drapes absolutely everywhere, including a heavy, labial pair hanging at the entrance to the theater itself. Maroon-and-gold-and-black-patterned carpeting covers the first and second floors. Dusty, stiff, maroon-upholstered furniture clogs both lobbies. In the theater itself the seats are maroon velvet, the color of dried blood.

But the theater of course is not where we work, except to clean up empty Junior Mints boxes and spilled popcorn after screenings. There’s nothing to do in the theater, and this is after all our place of work.

We wear narrow black skirts and plain white shirts. We smooth our hair into bobs or tight ponytails. Ours is an aesthetic of refusal. We are mods. We plunder thrift shops trying to find clothes that are plain enough. It’s the middle of the ’80s and nothing is plain enough. We are pretty committed to being as pretentious as humanly possible. However, in this benighted pre-Internet era, it’s hard to know what exactly to pretend to. We know one thing for sure: Europe is good. So we love our jobs at the art-house cinema, which rarely shows an American film.

The box office is a spacious room, always occupied by Grant and Kristen. Grant, our manager, is a just-handsome, juicy-lipped, slightly bug-eyed gay man—boy, really—only a couple of years older than us. We have never had a gay friend before, or not that we knew of anyway. Grant is out, proud, and above all loud. Kristen is Grant’s familiar, her witchy laughing head next to his all the time. Grant and Kristen are the theater mom and dad; we are their flock.

We complain about going to work, but really we like it. We like having a uniform and a paycheck and a clear set of tasks. We have active love lives, but our love lives aren’t as lovely as life at the Seven Gables, a whole little world devoted to romance and art.

The lead-up to showtime quickens. Kristen imperiously ejects us all from the ticket booth, even though her change-making is notoriously sloppy, and we swarm the concession stand, keeping an eye out for cute boys. We have, it must be said, fans. Boys come to see grim Swedish dramas and obscure documentaries because of us. We are known for our style.

Working alongside us is none other than Eleanor Lund, of “We call them windies and we don’t think they’re funny” fame. The whole staff calls her “Windy.” The reason everyone is so ready to mock her is that (a) we are all assholes and (b) she is as prissy as ever. She is still a pin-neat blonde, she still looks askance at bad behavior. (For heaven’s sake, why is she working at an art-house movie theater, traditionally the first job of every pretentious high-school fuckup on earth?) She eyes us

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