Fur

Abstract

Fur Grace Alvino (bio) She’d come to hate the movies, even though she never saw them. Shyamalan, Fight Club, the man who came in always wanting to talk about Kubrick. The man had broad hands and thin wrists and one blue eye that wept, and he came to the ticket box where she worked and waxed on about Nicole Kidman. “I just don’t think that girl is right for the role,” he said, “I just don’t think she’s right,” and she stared at the man and imagined him sitting before the previews in the dark. She kept a box of Twizzlers beside her in the booth, and she’d eat them in great bites. They’d get stuck against her gums. The place itself was old. It had once been a real theater, with touring companies and plays, but the owners had hoisted a great screen above the stage and covered the orchestra pit with a tarp. It made more money that way, even though it only had the one screen and smelled like rotting wood; she’d seen mice clinging to the rafters and gnawing on the seats. They made her wear a purple vest that itched around her neck, handed down from Jeanette, who worked the popcorn machine. Jeanette had pockmarks and chewed Spearmint gum and spoke fast to hide her lisp, and sometimes on breaks she’d sneak into the screenings. Jeanette would come to the ticket box and report: Star Wars had a pod race, American Beauty a plastic bag. Employees were promised two free tickets a month, but those somehow never came through. Unlike Jeanette, she never tried to see the films. She spent her breaks sweeping the theater lobby with the owners’ crumbling broom, its bristles hush-hush-hushing against the thin red carpet. She’d listen for the audience to make out their reactions: a wave of high-pitched laughter, a child’s keening wail. When the theater showed The Matrix, [End Page 379] all she’d heard were gasps, and she’d stared at Laurence Fishburne on the poster and wondered at the source. The Sixth Sense had made a woman scream, so she’d figured it was bloody. A man had cried all during Tarzan. His sobs were long and low. When she was younger, she’d watched movies in her basement, dug her toes into the cushions of the secondhand couch. They had a nineteen-inch Toshiba and a tape of Field of Dreams; it got fuzzy at the part when Shoeless Joe showed up. She’d turn off all the lights and breathe in the stench of mildew, the carpet still soaked from the last late August flood. Sometimes her father would come down and watch the movie with her, his blue Kroger polo wrinkled at the neck. He’d bring Mountain Dew with ice cubes, and she’d shake them so they clinked together, and her father would frown and pull the glass out of her hand. “Be quiet,” he would say, “just listen to the movie,” and she’d sit and watch Archie’s first at bat. She’d close her eyes and listen to the rustle of the cornfield, crackling through the sound system and ringing off the walls. She’d hear a pipe drip somewhere, feel the moisture on the cushions, and dig her toes in harder, sense that she was sinking in. When the matinee crowd came in on Thursdays, she would try to guess their ages, their stories and just how many showings they had left. They were old, most of them, and they complained often of mice; she was fascinated by their hands, the sunspots stretching to their wrists. She’d scratch hard at the rash beneath her vest, and the women would frown and wipe their tickets on their sleeves. She tried ointments on her skin, rosebud salve on the cuts, but none of them could help; sores were blooming at her neck. She’d lick her fingers and rub them along her collarbone, tap tap tap against the hot pink skin that moistened at her touch. She’d lean back against the booth and listen...