Concessions by Elizabeth Stix

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The movie is post-apocalyptic. A desolate army outpost sits in the shadow of a giant, rusted-out Ferris Wheel in a barren wasteland. 

“No one would ride on that,” my mother leans over and whispers in my ear. “It’s a bulls-eye target for the enemy!” 

“Shh,” I tell her. “It’s a fantasy.”

“It still has to make sense,” she says. She straightens her back against her seat, sniffs, then a minute later says, “I’m going to get some popcorn.”

She stands up and sidles past the high school kids that line our row, then feels her way down the steps, waving her arm for a railing that isn’t there. I lurch in my seat when she teeters, but she catches herself, and it doesn’t matter because I couldn’t have gotten there in time anyway. I finally exhale when the square of light washes in and then narrows to black as the theater door swings shut behind her. 

Four scenes later, in a dilapidated, burned-out office building, war-grizzled men argue about who will pay for candy bars sold by a wandering refugee. Terrorists did blow up that Ferris Wheel; she was right. And I realize with a gnawing dread that she’s been gone for way too long.

I push past the high school students and make my way down the stairs toward the exit, waving my arms in front of me in the darkness. Once in the lobby, I’m momentarily disoriented by the identical entrances to screen after screen in the multiplex, a dizzying carpet of geometrical patterns lining the path that runs between them. Then I see her, alone, standing at the concession counter. She stands so still I wonder at first if she has fallen asleep on her feet. 

“Betty?” I say quietly. I press my hand flat against her back. Her lips are pursed, and she is angry.

“There’s nobody here!” she says. “There’s no one in the whole place! It’s a ghost town out here!” I look around. The lobby is abandoned. 

“Have you been standing here the whole time?” 

“I’m hungry,” she says. I notice that her posture is stooped. 

“What did you eat with Ollie?” I ask her. She spent the day with my brother going shopping. 

“We didn’t have time for lunch,” she tells me, still looking around for the non-existent concession worker. “I wanted to watch the ice skating in the outdoor rink they put up next to Macy’s and Ollie had to get some appliance for his computer.”

“But you were gone all day.” A familiar burn rises at my brother. How he manages to make things worse without leaving any trace astounds me.

“Don’t be such a fuss-budget, Abby,” my mother says. “I’m capable of feeding myself.” Little white balls of saliva gather at the corners of her mouth. She looks a hundred years old. 

“I’ll go find someone,” I say. I march across the stained carpet, which seems to undulate beneath my feet. “Hello?!” I call out. I walk by giant dioramas of coming attractions. In one you can put your face in a cut-out window next to the movie stars. Another has a dog driving a car with a man cowering in the back seat. “Is anybody working here?”

I walk up an ornate staircase as wide as my living room, which opens in both directions in the middle. I take the left side and feel myself breathing hard when I get to the top. A teenage boy in a maroon uniform shirt pushes a carpet sweeper along the floor. 

“There’s no one at the concession stand downstairs,” I say. He looks up at me blankly. “The movie is still on. Are you open downstairs, or what?”

“We’re open,” he says. “There should be people there.”

“Well, there aren’t,” I say. 

“Yeah,” he says, thinking it over. “There should be people down there.”

I’m wasting my time, I think. I go back downstairs to the concession, where a young woman is now behind the counter laughing it up with my mother. The smell of fresh popcorn warms the air, and the popping noise accelerates as white kernels overflow the canister and tumble onto the tray below. 

“There was no one here,” I say to the woman.

“I had to get more butter,” she answers. She and my mother share a look and I have to bat away the flickering notion that they have been talking about me. 

“You should have more people working here,” I say. She ignores me and rearranges the popcorn to make room for more. “Get whatever you want,” I say to my mother. “Do you want a hot dog? You should eat something.” 

“I’m getting popcorn,” Mom says. 

“That’s not enough,” I tell her.

She scowls at me. “I’m getting popcorn!”

There’s nothing more I can do. I shake my head and wait while the girl scrapes the popcorn and scoops it into a red and white-striped sack the size of a small grocery bag. She hands my mother her popcorn. “Twelve dollars.”

“I’ve got it,” I say, reaching in my purse for my wallet. “Twelve dollars, Jesus.” I open my wallet and pull out six singles – everything I have. “Do you have any money?” I say sheepishly. She pulls out a twenty-dollar bill and pays with it. 

“I can put it on my card,” I say. 

“Don’t worry about it.” She puts a fistful of popcorn in her mouth. “This movie is terrible,” she says. “I’m ready to go home.”

The theater is on the second level of an outdoor shopping mall. My mother and I walk outside and lean over the railing and watch people move down the cobbled pathway below like cars on an underpass. The mall is lit up with twinkling Christmas lights, and the air is getting chill. Giant shining balls hang from the trees. Clusters of young people careen through families and couples, sometimes shrieking and chasing each other. From here it looks like they are dressed in costumes – some with their faces painted blue or green and some wearing what look like ball gowns. They are headed to the other end of the mall. 

The row of restaurants on our level catches my eye and I realize that I’m starving. “Let’s get a real bite to eat,” I say. 

We go to a cafe that serves only food on skewers. I am ravenous when the waitress puts our food on the table. “I hate this,” my mother says. “Gimmicky food. Everything has to have a gimmick these days.” 

“It’s good though, isn’t it?” 

“Oh, I’m not complaining.”

She slides chicken and green peppers onto her plate. “How’s Henry liking his job?” 

“It’s okay,” I answer. Henry is my boyfriend of two years. He has been working for our city councilwoman for one of them. “I guess he thought it would be better. He thought he wouldn’t get bossed around so much.” I picture Henry then, pushing away from the dining table, his whole body lately radiating with the word “long-suffering.” It’s a thankless job, and I wonder how long he will last. 

“Some people don’t like a woman with an opinion,” my mother says. I look at her and don’t know what to make of it. Does she mean he’s with me because I don’t have opinions? I can’t get the question I want to ask her to form in my mouth. 

“That’s not it,” I say. I turn to the menu on the wall behind the register to see if this place sells wine, but I can’t read the menu from here. I need to get glasses.

“Look what happened with your brother and Sandy,” Mom says. 

“Sandy cheated on Ollie with his best friend,” I say. “I think that was the dominant sticking point.” 

“That’s what Ollie said was the sticking point,” she says, sucking her diet soda from the straw. “Nobody knows what goes on inside a relationship.”

God knows that’s true, I think, remembering the heavy, silent years in my childhood home before my father moved out. 

“Sandy married Max Pippick six months after she and Ollie broke up,” I say. “Are we really debating this?” 

“Eat,” my mother says, pointing at my plate with her skewer. “You’re hungry.”

I put an oily chunk of grilled onion in my mouth. “You’re the one who skipped lunch.” 

A group of teenage girls runs by us wearing their pajamas, carrying big, bulky stuffed animals. 

“What’s going on down there, anyway?” I ask, peering down the walkway. The low thrum of a rock band’s bass floats up toward us, punctuated by laughter.

“It’s a holiday party, or early New Year’s, or something,” my mom says. 

“They’re in costume, though.” 

“We dressed in costume for holiday parties. We dressed up, anyway.”

A man walks by us on stilts, in a hurry. We’re finished with our dinner then, my mother and I. And as we have so often done, like two peas in a pod, two birds of a feather, two women born with the same small bladder – we set off to find a bathroom.

We stop before we get there to take a closer look at the revelers. They are not just high school students; there are people of all ages, dressed up in gowns and dark suits and pajamas and costumes. A rock band plays cover songs from inside a tent decorated with red and green lights. Staffed tables in the middle of the street serve food and drinks while jugglers on stilts roam the crowd. A giant full moon floats overhead.

Two women giggle up to us holding hands, their faces painted entirely in blue, down to their eyelashes. “Will you take our picture?” one says to me.

“What is this?” I ask her, taking her phone while she and her friend throw themselves into a hug and pose.

“It’s the San Encanto Holiday Gala.” The camera clicks.

“Is it a benefit?” I ask her. “I don’t think the flash went off that time. Let me do it again.”

“Now you two get in the picture with us,” she says, grabbing our hands and pulling us between them. She extends her arm out to take a portrait of the four of us.

“But you’ll never see us again,” I protest. 

I look at my mother and she shrugs, and the four of us squeeze together. I lean my head against hers and smile as the camera goes off. Then the two women let go of us and run into the dancing crowd, holding hands. Everyone is so festive. I feel like a chaperone at the prom – though I didn’t go to my own prom, so I’m guessing here.

“I think we can get to a bathroom through the tent,” I say. We move inside and are pulled forward by the warm hum of the crowd, whose clamorous energy rises and bounces off the billowing walls. Without thinking, I find I have taken my mother’s hand, and we glide and push our way around. She stops and points to a booth on the side of the tent. 

“I want to get my face painted,” she shouts at me over the music. 

“Are you joking?” 

This from a woman who used to sleep wearing a hairnet. Who won’t hang up on a recording because it’s rude. Lately she’s been fraying at the edges, though, showing flashes of strange rebellion. She plays Dungeons and Dragons at her neighbor Kenneth’s house, eating fried chicken and drinking beer from the bottle with his friends. She joined a pétanque club at the community center and now throws hollow metal balls at a wooden one in the park on Sundays, surrounded by old Italian men. And tonight she slips her hand from mine and yells into the ear of a man at the edge of the party, then sits down in a chair. I catch up with her as he begins painting her forehead red, in broad strokes.

“Will this come off?” I ask him.

“What color do you want?” a young woman with a bumblebee antenna hairband asks me. 

“I’m not doing it.”

The man brushes my mother’s face and throat and the space above her lips. Her features relax as the color covers her cheeks, her nose, her mouth.

“Oh, what the hell,” I tell the woman. I sit in a chair next to my mother. “Any color. Surprise me.”

I lean my head upwards and she begins drawing her brush across my face in gentle sweeping motions. She holds my hair off of my forehead and traces her fingers around my ears. “Keep your eyes closed,” she says. She moves the soft strands down the sides of my nose, my jaw, my neck. Her fingers press in and massage my temples.

My mind drifts to Henry. I wonder if he is working in the garden now, tending to his winter melons, leaning in to smell each one, testing for its ripeness. He likes to garden at night, when it’s cool and dark. I see him out there, his flashlight positioned like a lantern, illuminating soft and mossy leaves while his fingers press into the earth. Sometimes I watch him from the kitchen window. 

“Open your eyes,” the face painter tells me. Her voice startles me. My mother is standing over me, peering down and grinning. Her face is completely red. 

The woman holds up a hand mirror and I am astonished by what I see. I blink a few times. My face is painted golden. I turn and examine myself from different angles. My cheeks catch the sparkling lights; my lashes brush the air as they move. 

“You’re the Tin Man!” says my mother. She grins, her white teeth a bright crack in her tomato head.

“The Tin Man isn’t gold,” I say. I put the mirror down. “I think there’s a bathroom over there.” I nod toward the entrance to Nordstrom and press myself up from the seat. 

We walk into the store. It’s brightly lit, with holiday bunting and bulbous ornaments hanging from the ceiling and gifts in shiny wrapping tucked into every display. People stare at us as we walk through the room, but I don’t care; the color and noise and lights and paint have made me feel as if I’m in a dream.

The bathroom is luxurious. It’s old and ornate. There’s a stall on either side of the room with frosted glass doors, and the sinks and countertops are marble. My mother takes a Benzedrex decongestant inhaler and sticks it up her nostril, a habit she has done for as long as I can remember. 

“I thought you were going to wean yourself off those,” I say.

“I asked my doctor. He says there’s nothing wrong with it.”

“I read an article that says that there is. It makes your nasal membranes swell. It’s addictive.”

“I’ll die with swollen nasal membranes, then,” my mother says. She sticks the inhaler up her other nostril and sucks in.

I look at her in the mirror. Her face is bright red; her eyelids droop with age. She bares her teeth involuntarily as she tilts her head back and sniffs.

“I think you should come live with me,” I say. I have been waiting for the right time to say this. I don’t know that I’m going to now until I hear the words coming from my mouth.

“Why would I do that?” she asks.

“I think it would be safer,” I say. “You’re getting frail, and I’m worried about you falling and no one finding you.” 

“I’m not frail,” she says. “I’m in better shape than you are. I’ve lived in that house for thirty-seven years.” She puts the inhaler into her purse. “Besides,” she says, “aren’t you going to move in with Henry?”

The question startles me. I run cold water over my hands, which look fleshy and naked in contrast to my painted face, then look around for a towel.

“We’ve never talked about it,” I lie.

I don’t tell her that Henry does want to move in together. He wants to marry me. I don’t tell her that I still sleep with my old friend Ezra every time he comes through town, even though now he’s cheating on his second wife with me. I don’t tell Henry about that either. 

“If I fall and no one finds me,” my mother says, “please give my glass animal collection to the Salvation Army.”

“I’m not joking, Mom. Why won’t you let me help you?” 

She turns to me in the bad fluorescent light, and says, “Why do you insist on helping me?” 

She goes into the bathroom stall and closes the door behind her. My eyes sting against the gold powder. The room feels airless, ancient, like a marble tomb. I go into the other stall and we both pee and flush the toilet. I come out and wait for her by the sinks. 

“Come on,” she mutters.

“What’s the matter?” I say.

“The toilet won’t stop running.”

“It’ll stop,” I say. “It has to stop some time.” 

She rattles the handle. “Let me in,” I say.

She unlocks the stall door, and we huddle over the toilet. Water circles in the bowl. We peer into it, her red face next to my gold one. 

“Forget it,” she says. “It’s not our problem.”

“We can’t leave it like this,” I say. “It’ll flood.”

“It won’t flood. Why would it flood? I think it’s stopping now,” she says. 

The water swirls.

“It’s not stopping.” I jiggle the handle and it comes off in my hand.

“What did you do?” she says. 

“Nothing! I barely touched it!” I try to screw it back on, but the bolt has fractured. I put my hands on either side of the toilet tank and push it. It wobbles on the floor.

“What are you doing?” my mother asks, her voice rising. 

“Something needs to settle in the tank. Something isn’t sealing properly.” 

“You’re going to break the whole thing now.”

“No, I’m not,” I say. “I’m fixing it. You’re the one who broke it.” I rattle it again and water swells up and spills over the edges of the bowl. It flows onto the black and white tiles, washing over our shoes.

“Good God,” my mother says.

“Do something.” I say. “Do something!”

“Me?” she says. “What am I supposed to do?” 

I turn and face her. She is so small, so old, in this alabaster room. Her brown shoes are planted on the tiles, flat and stalwart, water splashing onto the scuffed leather. Her wool coat hangs from her shoulders as if of its own volition, square like a general, and full of air. I swear I would forgive her if I could remember what it was she has done. 

I put the broken handle down on the counter. “Just forget it,” I say. “Let’s go.”

She looks at me as if I might be testing her. Then a sly smile curls her lips. 

“After you, Abby,” she says. 

We leave and move through the sales floor, passing a salesgirl stocking perfume.

“There’s a problem with the toilet in the ladies room,” my mother says, her eyes alive. 

“I’ll let someone know,” says the girl, not looking up from her task. 

We exit to the plaza. The air is cool and the music from the gala washes over us. The full moon glows above us in the sky. I take her hand again and we press into the crowd of dancing revelers. We are two peas in a pod, she and I, two birds of a feather. We are two Christmas globes, red and golden, rising clear into the night.

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Elizabeth Stix’s short story collection, THINGS I WANT BACK FROM YOU, comes out in June. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Tin House, Boulevard, The Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine, and elsewhere. When she’s not writing, she can be found staying up way too late doing the NYT Spelling Bee.

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7 June 2024