On a Saturday in mid-January, I hung out with a man I knew from college. It was a social visit at a bar, a chance to catch up over drinks. It shouldn’t have been a big deal, but it was. It shouldn’t have ended badly, but it did. It shouldn’t have left me feeling repulsed by who I was, yet I came away with the queasy certainty that my worst fears about myself had been confirmed. I made a series of mistakes, and looking back on it, I think my first error was an innocuous decision I made the night before: to watch Mildred Pierce.
I. The Movie
For the uninitiated, Mildred Pierce is a 1945 film noir, starring Joan Crawford in the title role and directed by Michael Curtiz, based on the 1941 James M. Cain novel of the same name. (Yes, there was indeed an HBO miniseries based on the same story, starring Kate Winslet and directed by Todd Haynes, released in 2011. No, that is not the version I’ll be discussing. And yes, this essay contains spoilers for the 77-year-old film. You’ve been warned.) If I had to boil down the plot of Mildred Pierce, I’d tell you it’s about a long-suffering, do-gooder woman who’s treated badly by just about everyone, but still somehow manages to rise from the ash every time. Through sheer grit, she becomes a tycoon, creating a chain of successful restaurants that bear her name, and she does this while simultaneously raising two daughters alone. She’s a lovely gal, a real gem, though men are just as quick to fuck her over as they are to fuck her. Of course, any woman in this world has likely had enough bad encounters to expect that of men. What’s less expected is that Mildred’s older daughter, Veda (played, quite mesmerizingly, by Ann Blyth), is the one who ultimately destroys our titular lead.
In a movie composed largely of antagonists, Veda is the worst of them. She’s Mildred’s fiercest enemy, the most formidable of all the recurring villains in this woman’s life. Veda’s cruelty and greed cut the deepest because she’s Mildred’s daughter: thus, Mildred is condemned to love her for eternity, no matter the cost. She loves her with a fervent passion, a religious devotion, and Veda, in turn, despises Mildred with equal intensity. The movie is explicitly clear in who the audience is meant to root for: Mildred is self-sacrificing, hard-working, loyal to a fault. Her story is a Greek tragedy, a cautionary tale against the dangers of caring for others, of being too kind, too generous, too loving, too naïve.
The betrayals of Mildred are pointed and gendered: most of the film’s villains are male, ruthless and self-absorbed, who exploit a vulnerable woman for sex or money or domestic labor, then cast her aside. They’re callous, but Veda is cunning. Veda is a masterful manipulator, an angel-faced young girl who will speak sweetly to her mother and feign affection while readying to stab her in the back. Mildred is everything a woman ought to be: a good wife, a good mother, a good friend. She is faithful, even when her husbands are not. She’ll give up anything—even her freedom—for her daughter. She’s a good cook, she’s well-mannered, she refrains from promiscuity. She works, and is exceptionally good at her job, but her decision to enter the workforce only occurs when her husband leaves and she’s left destitute, forced to support their children on her own. In this way, she’s not challenging male authority or attempting to rise above her station for some greater feminist cause: her career is a necessity, not an indulgence. And notably, she finds success in the hospitality industry, getting her start waiting tables and baking pies. She is still within the perimeters of women’s work, she’s just serving customers instead of her husband. And he left her—not the other way around. Because no matter how awful a husband he might’ve been, Mildred wants to stand by her man. She wants to see the best in him, to believe that he’s not taking advantage of her and squandering her love, even when it’s glaringly obvious. And, for much of the movie, she’s in a similar denial about Veda: no matter how many times people point out that Veda’s a spoiled brat, she ignores the warnings, endures her daughter’s greed, indulges all her whims.
Mildred represents the conundrum of womanhood: if you are, somehow, the perfect woman—sweet and generous and loving and kind, never a whore, never a bitch, always putting others (especially men and your children) before yourself—you might still be punished. You may lead an unhappy life, exploited at every turn, existing for others and never yourself. But at least you will be pious, if pitiable. Suffering, shackled women are often revered, especially if they endure their suffering silently, without ever blaming or cursing or speaking out against those who caused it. Women are supposed to please others, and to do so without expecting anything in return—not money or fame or loyalty or love or even kindness.
If Mildred’s the ideal woman, Veda is the opposite, the Jezebel to Mildred’s Mary. Unlike Mildred, who expects nothing, Veda’s expectations are sky-high. She wants the world and she’s unafraid to demand it. She takes and takes, sucking the money—and the life—out of her mother. She’s every negative stereotype about women: conceited, materialistic, and insatiably greedy, content to mooch off others; highly manipulative and deviously clever; a skilled liar who will fake a pregnancy just to extort cash from a sad, lovestruck sap; always looking out for herself, even to the detriment of other people, just as ruthless—and arguably more so—than the film’s worst men. When she’s betrayed and rejected by her lover, she doesn’t take it on the chin as her mom always did: instead, Veda kills him. And she’s a wanton slut too, sleeping with her mother’s husband, becoming a showgirl—a proto-stripper—in order to pay the bills after Mildred briefly cuts her off, and marrying a man for whom she has seemingly no affection just to shake him down for a hefty divorce settlement. Mildred wasn’t particularly ambitious, her career being a means to an end above all else, and her pursuit of increased income originating from a place of motherly love as she tried to appease her daughter’s expensive tastes. But Veda’s ambition is pure and innate, and what’s more, it’s rooted in her own self-interest. Veda just wants affluence, luxury. Veda, a girl born into a lower-class family, wants to cheat her way into the life of the elite, the über-rich, the aristocratic. So she learns French, she has her mother buy her fancy cars, and she schemes to the top of the social stratosphere. But it’s all a lie. She’s just a filthy harlot in sheep’s clothes, an interloper in a world where she’ll never belong. She’s conning people, donning a costume and affect that’ll make upper-crusters believe she’s their kin. But we, the audience, know exactly who (or what) she really is. The personification of male anxieties, a girl who rejects the rules her mother has always followed; she’s a bad person, but more than that, she’s a bad woman.
II. Bad News
As always happens when I watch or rewatch a great film, I couldn’t stop thinking about it after the credits rolled. The movie was still on my mind the following evening, as I prepared to grab drinks with the aforementioned college pal. I was staying with my mother in the house where I spent my teenage years, applying makeup—specifically, copious amounts of eyeliner—in the bathroom where I’d first mastered the art of the Cleopatra cat-eye. The door was open, my mom’s voice drifting in from her neighboring bedroom, interspersed with the loudmouth talking-heads arguing on her preferred cable news station. We chatted off and on about inconsequential nonsense. She didn’t seem to be in a great mood—she seldom ever is—so I guess, in retrospect, I should’ve avoided talking to her altogether. Instead, I chose to bring up what I thought would be a nice, neutral subject, something we both could enjoy discussing: Mildred Pierce. After all, I was dying to talk about it with someone, and perhaps the only passion I shared with both my parents was a love of old movies.
“I watched Mildred Pierce last night,” I said.
Her response was immediate: “Did you notice you’re exactly like that awful daughter?”
What? I froze. I couldn’t believe she’d make the comparison. My response, in true Veda fashion, was bratty: “Oh, so I guess you think that you’re just like Mildred, huh? Well, you’re nothing like her. She’s actually good-hearted and kind.” It wasn’t a nice thing to say, but then again, she gut-punched me first. I felt my response was justified, that my hostility was warranted—unlike hers, which came from left fucking field. And anyway, what I said was true: my mother, like Mildred, was generous to the point of being foolish, and she was frequently exploited as a result. She’d dated a series of terrible men, too. But the key distinction between the pair was that my mother had a mean streak and a hair-trigger temper. Mildred, with her saintly patience and inherent goodliness, did not. The fact that my mother chose to compare me to Veda—for no apparent reason, and as I was preparing to go get drinks with someone (a social occasion which she knew had me rattled and nervous)—only served to underscore that distinction.
But even if my mother was no Mildred, and her disparaging comment was random, that didn’t mean I could just shake it off. As a neurotic, anxious person with chronically low self-esteem, “ignoring invective” has never been one of my skills.
There are two kinds of insults: the kind that hurt because you know they’re not true, and the kind that hurt because you know they are. Oh, sure, maybe the true ones aren’t entirely true—maybe they’re exaggerated, maybe they’re dramatic—but there’s a little nugget of truth that you recognize. You don’t want to recognize it, but how can you not? You know yourself better than anybody. No matter how much you try to deny whatever ugliness lurks within you, it’s always there, a shadow-self that haunts you and prowls around your brain late at night, a creature who takes control when your back is against the wall or when someone prods you in just the right way, at just the right time. You’ll tell yourself that’s not true, that’s not you, you’re fine and good and normal… but then someone else sees it, and calls it out, and suddenly you’re faced with this beast which you pretended for years was just a figment of your imagination. And in the light of day, it seems a lot more loathsome than it ever did when it was still trapped in your mind’s 2am corner.
When my mother compared me to Veda, I wasn’t left reeling because the comparison seemed wrong. It was extreme, yes, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t seen a shinier and more devilish version of myself as I watched the film. The thought occurred to me long before I spoke with my mom, but I’d pushed it down, told myself I was incorrect, that Veda and I were separated by a vast chasm and any resemblance, if it existed, was superficial. It was not something that any other person would notice. Just me being silly, seeing myself in someone else’s reflection.
But then the resemblance was confirmed for me by an independent party, someone I did not prompt, a person who ostensibly knew me well (who knows you better than your mother?) and, jeez, what the fuck did that mean? Was I a Veda? And if not, then who else would I be? Because I knew I wasn’t a Mildred—I was not a doormat, a permissive saint, a man’s ideal of how a woman ought to behave—and I also doubted I was a Kay, Veda’s innocent, tomboyish, doomed-to-an-early-grave younger sister. So if not a Mildred, and not a Kay… hmm. Okay, fine. Let’s say I was a Veda, for the sake of argument. In what way, exactly, did I resemble her?
My favorite scene in the movie—I’d probably call it the film’s best—comes after Veda’s alleged pregnancy earns her a fat check. It’s not until this scene that the audience finds out, along with Mildred, that the pregnancy is a lie. Upon learning the truth, Mildred is horrified her daughter could be capable of such a thing. “Money. That’s what you live for, isn’t it? … I’ve never denied you anything. Anything money could buy, I’ve given you. But that wasn’t enough, was it?”
“Why do you think I went to all this trouble? Why do you think I want money so badly?” Veda responds. When Mildred asks the reason, Veda says, in a soft but sinister tone, “Are you sure you want to know?” Her face—gorgeous and angelic as ever—stays neutral, but there’s a glimmer in her eye, a tension in her posture. You can feel the charge between them, and you know that something’s coming, that their relationship is on the verge of collapse.
When Mildred affirms that yes, she does indeed want to know, the darkness in Veda can finally spill out. “Then I’ll tell you,” she whispers, and now her tone is biting, spiteful, her eyes narrowing. “With this money, I can get away from you. From you and your chickens and your pies and your kitchens, and everything that smells of grease!” Her lip is curled, her revulsion visible. You can hear it in her voice too, the disdainful way she spats each word. “I can get away from this shack with its cheap furniture, and this town and its dollar days, and its women that wear uniforms and its men that wear overalls.” She turns away from Mildred, disgusted.
But so, too, is Mildred disgusted by Veda. “I think I’m really seeing you for the first time in my life,” Mildred says, “and you’re cheap and horrible.”
Veda, of course, won’t let her mother have the last word. She turns back to Mildred with a devastating remark of her own, commenting on how Mildred is trying to make herself look the part of a wealthy lady, but no matter what she does with her hair or clothes, it won’t make a difference: “You’ll never be anything but a common frump, whose father lived over a grocery store and whose mother took in washing.” Finally, Veda declares, “With this money, I can get away from every rotten, stinking thing that makes me think of this place or you!”
I watched this scene, riveted, hanging on each word. Since then, I’ve rewatched it several times, and every viewing, I’m struck with the same feeling. In this scene, which makes Veda look so dreadful, I feel sorry for Mildred—and yet, I identify with Veda. I know how she feels, because I’ve felt it too. I have felt it for as long as I can remember. I still feel it now, as I write this.
I believe my mother knew, at least on some level, that she was failing me as a parent. She certainly knew that my absentee father was failing me. Her solution to this, rather than to ask me about my thoughts and feelings, or to bond over the important things, or to help me pursue my passions and stick with things and get educated, was to buy me stuff. As a child, I had so many toys—anything we could afford, I would get. As a teenager, I was lavished with beautiful clothes and costumes, much of which I’d never wear, and pieces of art, many of which I’d never hang. Like Veda, I was spoiled by my mom. Like Mildred, my mother thought that if she just bought me whatever I asked for, I would be satisfied and I would love her. But it didn’t work. It just made her resent me for being spoiled and unappreciative, on top of all my other faults. And the toys and clothes didn’t make me happy, and they didn’t make me love her. The truth is that I found her embarrassing. I always wanted someone else’s mother, one who was pretty and glamorous and lived a jet-setting, high-society life. Instead, my mother was working-class, white-trash, vulgar and crude and common. Even before I knew what any of those terms meant, I could intuit it, feel ashamed of it. And that shame would become all-consuming when I was seven and we moved to a wealthy suburb, where all the kids came from rich, well-educated, two-parent households, and all of their moms looked like supermodels. My mother, on the other hand, was—as Veda put it—a “frump.” Everyone else lived in beautiful homes, but ours was—as Veda put it—a “shack with cheap furniture,” a crumbling duplex owned by a slumlord.
It makes me feel petty to admit this—that I was embarrassed of my mother for such frivolous, classist reasons. But I was a child. And really, why wouldn’t I feel that way? I lived in a bubble of prosperous nuclear families, where everyone was white and all the women stick-thin, where everyone owned mansions, and no one else had a mother or life like mine. I felt bad and wrong, and I lusted for wealth, and I looked at my friends’ homes and parents with envy.
I was just an impressionable child who wanted to fit in, someone who feared my mother and house and low-class background would make all the one-percenters with whom I attended school think less of me, that I’d be branded as other,as wrong, as insignificant. And I did end up being excluded and bullied by the children at that school, though whether it was because of my economic status or because I was weird in unrelated, unnamable ways, that’s anybody’s guess.
Now that I’m older, I still wish I had someone else’s mother, but my reasons are more complex. I don’t take issue with the fact that my mom is crass, I take issue with how she raised me, how she treated me—and how she continues to treat me, to this day. I think back on my childhood and my heart breaks for the kid I was, and the person I might’ve been if I had a different caregiver. Because my mom was a negligent, irresponsible, occasionally abusive parent. Of all the noises from my childhood, what I remember most vividly is the sound of her screaming at me—always at the top of her lungs, always with that red face, those wild eyes. To this day, when I think back on it, my chest tightens.
I wanted an escape hatch, a shortcut to a new home and new life and new parents and a new me. I couldn’t wait to get out of California, with its sunny days that all looked the same, and its annual hell-fires that clogged your lungs with smoke, and its smarmy tech bros slowly taking over—and ruining—San Francisco.
Like Veda, I pined for wealth as a child, and a teenager, and I still pine for it now as an adult. And like Veda, I pined for money not just because I enjoy nice things, though that is certainly true, but because money is the only way I’ll ever get that escape hatch, that shortcut to a new life, that long-overdue emancipation from my mother. I could start over: detach myself from the daughter she raised, the girl she irrevocably damaged, the monster inside me I’m sure she created.
III. Saturday Night
When I showed up to the bar, I was jittery, the two shots I’d downed beforehand having failed to steady my nerves. He texted me that he was running late, and as I waited for him by the entrance, I tried to get a handle on myself—to stop quivering, to gather up whatever confidence I could muster. All the while, my thoughts kept drifting to Mildred and my mother and my likability (or lack thereof, as the case may be). I wanted to convince myself the evening would go well, that I’d be charming and good company, but I had a feeling in my gut that told me otherwise. Something was wrong that night—I was wrong that night. I was going to screw up. I don’t know how I knew it, but I did. Every moment I waited for him felt like an eternity, a doomsday clock ticking ominously in my head. Along with nerves, I was filled with dread, the hot-lava kind that scalds you from the inside out, leaving you melted on the floor.
I wanted to cancel. I’d given it some thought too, before I downed the shots, before I headed out the door, before I arrived and took a seat and tried to keep myself from shaking. I couldn’t bear to do it, though. It was just so rude, canceling on someone last minute, the day of the event. Of course, in hindsight, I probably should’ve. Because what happened next was humiliating enough that it’s the one part of this essay I have not wanted to write. If I could, I’d skip over this section entirely, perhaps summarize it in a few lines. Something like: “I talked too much, I shared too much. I lost control of myself. If the evening was a movie, it would’ve been a flop, one that loses the thread early on and can never quite recover.” That would be neat and tidy, wouldn’t it? But unfortunately, this is not a neat and tidy story.
Once he arrived, I forced a smile and played with my clutch, wondering how I seemed to him—if he could sense my unease. He ordered a drink, which I paid for. The drinks were always on me. Every time I go anywhere with somebody, I always pay.
He started telling me a story about having just been harassed by a crazy person, a man carrying a bag of comic book figurines and a dirty blanket. I listened with wide eyes and emphatic nods. I wasn’t pretending—I did find it interesting—but maybe I was trying a little too hard to get that across. The truth was that I wanted to keep him talking for as long as possible. I didn’t know what I would say once I opened my mouth, but I expected it would be something I’d regret the next morning.
Even though I found his story interesting, and played the part of a rapt audience, I was already somewhere else. I’m not sure where, exactly, I had gone—what part of hell I’d fallen into. Maybe I was still at home, in my bathroom, trying to regain my composure with my mother’s words ringing in my ears. Or maybe I was in the black-and-white noir world of Mildred Pierce, dressed up like Veda, telling my mom to go fuck herself in 1940s verbiage. Usually when I drink, I feel cheerful. This time was different. I’d been melancholic since my mother’s comment, and afterwards, when I downed the shots, that feeling only intensified. Now, instead of a dull gray, my mood was a harsh blue, a winter storm with violent snaps of snow and spears of ice, frail trees and homebound people, a world gone silent and solitary.
I just kept hearing those words: cheap and horrible. They would pop into my head at random, like the stab of a migraine, taunting me. And as I sat and smiled and listened, they kept surfacing in the back of my brain, making me wonder if that’s all I was.
Eventually, my friend’s story drew to a close. Now it was my turn to speak. Oh God. For whatever reason, I launched into telling him about a childhood friend of mine, a troubled girl who’d given me a scar on my hand—which I still have to this day—and once deliberately jumped on my back while making it look like an accident. She’d always scared me, having seemed capable of doing something that would send her to an asylum or prison. I wasn’t the only one who thought so. My mother worried she might kill me, so whenever I visited the girl’s apartment, my mom warned me to stay away from their windows lest the girl push me out. “Why the fuck would my mother let me hang out with her if she thought the girl might kill me?” I wondered aloud, a rhetorical question I knew that neither of us could answer. This would be the start of the night’s running theme: I would share personal stories unprompted, and I would complain about my mother. A lot.
I wanted revenge, I suppose. For the Veda remark, and for countless others just like it. For all the times she’d cut me to the bone. All the criticisms, the insults, piling up in my brain. I’d bury them as best I could, but they were always beating somewhere inside me, a million telltale hearts sound-tracking my life. It only seemed appropriate to finally tell someone about all the mistakes she’d made, the bad choices, my saddest stories. It didn’t occur to me until later that I wasn’t just punishing her by sharing these anecdotes, I was punishing myself.
I told the boy about how I was neglected as a child, walking myself home from elementary school, spending hours alone at a creek when I was seven or eight (“I could’ve been kidnapped or murdered so easily”), and how my life became “formless” after my mother unceremoniously yanked me out of fifth grade—a decision she made not for my benefit, but because her child attending traditional school was stressing her out, and the fact that I was bullied and friendless was really hard on her. I shared with him how, when I was 12, she showed me a fairly graphic rape scene from her favorite Showtime TV series (for no particular reason). I complained about now having to live with her again, and how badly I wanted to flee—that I’d take any apartment, anywhere. And then at some point, out of nowhere, I asked him what he’d do if he had limitless funds. He told me he’d build himself a house in the Victorian style, and a few other things that my alcohol-addled brain failed to absorb. My answer was decidedly darker. “I’d get an apartment at The Plaza Hotel. I’d hire a personal assistant and a housekeeper. I’d buy myself all-new friends. I’d never come back to California. And,” I added, venom in my voice but an incongruent smile on my face, “I’d never speak to my mother ever again.”
I wasn’t sure if that was true—the Plaza apartment certainly was, but never revisiting California or speaking to my mother? Those were new ideas. Still, in that moment, they felt true. That scene flickered in my mind, of Veda arguing with Mildred. I could relate to it now more than ever.
I wish I could say that’s all I did that night: overshare and whine about my mother. But it wasn’t. I also spoke, at great length, about movies. The boy hated movies.
I started rattling off a list of classic films, since I was curious just how limited his film-viewing experience really was. To my horror, he had, essentially, never watched anything. (Yeah, sure, he’d watched some stuff—he wasn’t Amish—but he might as well have never glimpsed a movie theater or TV screen in his life.) Even the titles were unfamiliar to him, to the point where he asked me if I was making them up. For inexplicable reasons, I then decided to burden him with all of my opinions on a whole bundle of films. Again: this was a person who knew nothing about the audio-visual arts, and yet I considered it vital I share my thoughts with him about the stylistic choices of directors he’d never heard of, and to hold a one-sided debate on the artistic merit of movies he’d never watch.
I think I should pause here to give you some context, and a brief description of the person to whom I was delivering all my cinematic hot takes. He was a blank-slate of a boy, with the unfortunate ailment of being too young. I’m speaking, of course, of that youthful ignorance which afflicts a person with little awareness of (or interest in) the world that existed before they were born. He liked sports. And booze, and vape pens, and songs with catchy beats but vacuous lyrics. He came from a rich family, but lacked the pomposity you might expect. He was just some bro, a frat kid, a cishet white man indistinguishable from a million others, with an easy life and easy smile. Don’t get me wrong, the kid was affable and fun—you’d like him, I’m sure—but he was also someone of limited knowledge, hobbies and tastes. At one point, I used the word “cherubic” and he asked me to define it. He was clearly the wrong audience for my film rants, which I knew. If I’d been in my right mind, I would’ve avoided these pointless digressions. But I was not in my right mind. I was a nervous wreck, soaked in booze. And when I get nervous, I tend to talk a lot, usually about film or TV or books or musicals, or—if I’m feeling particularly obnoxious—all of the above, at a rapid-fire pace. I don’t remember everything I said that night, but I know it was a lot. I was a lot.
Even at the time, I was acutely aware that I was talking too much, and that instead of the fun hangout he’d been promised, I was offering him a film lecture sandwiched between traumatic stories. I desperately wanted to sew my mouth shut, but I couldn’t. It was almost an out-of-body experience, hearing myself say all the wrong things, watching as I lost him more and more, yet unable to seal my damn lips—which, to add insult to injury, were sparkly with a childlike glitter gloss. (“It’s called Unicorn Snot, but I think it should be called Unicorn Come,” I told him. He did not laugh.) A thread had been pulled, and now the entire fabric of my being was unraveling.
To his credit, he listened, but he kept quiet and didn’t try to feign interest. His reaction to my personal stories was also lackluster—sure, he’d act horrified, he would acknowledge that what I’d experienced was fucked up, but he never said anything to console me. Maybe there was nothing he could say. But regardless, I found my feelings toward him—pure sunshine before the night began—shifting. Just as I’m sure he saw me in a different (and unflattering) light that evening, I was seeing him differently too, though I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Maybe I was pissed at him because he was emblematic of so many people my age: oblivious and vague and myopic. Or maybe it came from a place of class resentment, the socioeconomic divide between us finally getting to me. It didn’t seem fair that I knew more than he did but he was the rich one, he was the one from a prosperous and happy family. (His mother went to Columbia! His father didn’t leave him!) It’s shameful to admit, but if I’m honest, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I deserved it more than he did. There was my inner Veda, rearing her head again, whispering to me that this boy had been born into the life I should’ve had—that if I’d been given all his advantages and opportunities, I would’ve done so much more.
I made some kind of comment about how I didn’t get how he’d gone through life without seeing any classic films or knowing anything about them. Was he immune to cultural osmosis? But what I really wanted to know, I think, was how he could’ve floated through life without it fucking him up. He was just so aggressively normal, to the point where he didn’t even need any movies or books or TV shows. I couldn’t comprehend that. And, of course, I was jealous of it too. How had he made it this far in life without a single scratch while I was shredded to pieces?
I already knew the answer. He didn’t have to watch any of those movies, or to know anything about them. He didn’t live his life vicariously through people on screens, nor did he use media as a coping mechanism like I did. He didn’t need to be cultured, to know enough about the arts to speak on them with eloquent authority, because he’d been born rich and secure in himself, certain of his own self-worth. Unlike me, he wasn’t overcompensating for anything. He was functional and well-adjusted, exceedingly popular and easily liked. I was not. He wasn’t trying to change himself, to pretend to be something he wasn’t, because why would he? He didn’t need to cheat his way into a good life, to work overtime to be taken seriously, to try so hard to be seen as intelligent and valuable. I was the wrong one, the pretender, the cheap and horrible girl trying to disguise herself as someone worthy.
It was dawning on me that I had nothing in common with this kid, which was troubling, because it made me feel even more abnormal. We were close in age, and somehow he was the older one—my senior by three years. But just by listening to our conversation, you’d never know. We seemed generations apart.
I didn’t feel 22, as I sat across from that little boy. I felt old and bitter, a divorcée furious at the world for having outgrown her. Still mad at her long-dead parents; still alone, forever and always. And frozen in time, stuck in the halcyon days before the Internet, back when celebrities were movie stars and all the movies were auteur cinema. But I’d somehow stumbled out of my time machine and ended up here, talking to anyone who’d listen. I’d buy them drinks so they’d be my whore, purchasing their ear instead of their ass. Then I’d talk endlessly, going around in circles—whatever it took to exorcise my demons, to bring my darkest secrets to light, to vocalize my displeasure at the cruelty I’d endured. I could hide behind the façade of class and culture, tell myself I was—in the words of Olivia de Havilland—a “survivor from an age that people no longer understand,” but the truth was that I was just another jaded outcast, unhappy with my life but unhappier with myself, trying to find salvation at the bottom of a glass of bourbon. I thought that if I dropped sad pieces of my life in the lap of my drinking companion, he could absolve me of my self-loathing—with an “I’ve been there too,” or preferably, “I think you’re great and you deserve better”—but he offered no such words of encouragement. Just a tight, forced smile, occasional chuckles, and frequent trips to the bar for more beers on my tab. I don’t blame him.
All the while, as I spoke and spoke and he listened dutifully if aloofly, Mildred’s words—which, in my bleary, half-drunk state, really did seem like my own mother’s—screamed in my head: cheap and horrible. That’s what I was: old and bitter at 22, a divorcée who’d never been married, an orphan despite having two living-and-breathing parents, completely alone even when I was sitting across from someone who was ostensibly my college friend, or at least an acquaintance. But cheap and horrible girls have nothing, and so they want everything. As for me, I wanted a legion of friends and a ban on social media and an end to assembly-line film franchises and an apartment at The Plaza Hotel and a wardrobe of Givenchy and Oscar de la Renta. Mostly, in that moment, I wanted an escape from my mother, my home, my name, myself. I wanted somebody else’s life, someone who lived decades ago, someone who wrote at a typewriter and got paid for each word, someone who people adored without bribes, someone who’d never, ever return to California or face all the people who’d hurt her. I craved a fresh start as someone wealthy and wonderful, beautiful and beloved, from a time before the apocalypse.
But I was stuck, and this heavy feeling of worthlessness and unlikability kept my shoulders slumped, my face scrunched into a scowl. My eyes would wander around the room, landing on tables, customers, rows of booze lit up by neon. I’d stare off as I spoke, afraid of eye contact, afraid of how he’d react to my revelations—and how casually I tossed them off, bombs I threw like marbles. But it was okay that I was being weird, okay that I was exposing myself as some cynical and pathetic misfit, because he was getting his fucking drinks for free. Say what you will about the horrible, the unlikable, the pitiful old drunks bending your ear for hours at the end of the bar, but at least some of us will compensate you for your time. In my case, I’ll buy your affection however I can: I’ll spend my last dime, then I’ll cut open my chest and present you with my heart—not to give you my love, but to give you the very essence of my personhood in the stupid hope that you will cherish it and heal whatever ails me. Of course, once the drinks dry up and you leave, this bitter bitch remains at the end of the bar, still downing shots to soothe her soul and quiet the noise in her head.
That’s where we find ourselves now. The night’s long gone, but it never ended for me. I keep replaying it in my head, haunted by the things I said and the things I didn’t, the sweet words you failed to offer, the empty glaze in your eyes. You took my drinks and you stole my heart, you bloody bastard. You made me pay for your Uber ride—or no, half your Uber ride (such a gentleman)—without ever saying thanks. You have more money than me, your family has more money than mine, but I still paid because, like Veda, I’m desperate to pretend I’m a bigshot, that I’m glamorous and intellectual and well-liked and rich. Desperate to pretend that I matter. But it’s all a façade, and that night—when I fell apart so spectacularly—you must’ve noticed. Yet you didn’t ask me how I was doing, didn’t text me the next day some perfunctory message of concern. It could’ve been simple, like: You seem really sad. Is everything okay? But no, nothing. You just took off, leaving me to wonder what it was. My endless, compulsive chatter about old movies? (Sorry.) My incredulity that you’d never heard of Martin Scorscese or A Clockwork Orange? (Sorry.) My parade of sad stories? (Sorry.) The fact that I hinted I don’t have any real friends—not good friends, at least; not friends who give a shit—and that makes me just a little too pathetic to hang out with? That even the free drinks aren’t worth it if they come with a whiny, mopey brat, a spoiled monster made in Veda’s mold, who is the worst combination of self-loathing and smug, neglected and spoiled? A wannabe social-climber held back by her white-trash origins, her profane mouthiness, her rebellious streak? Was any of that detectable, or was it only the brokenness you saw? The sad, friendless loser who cries herself to sleep every night and is haunted by all the skeletons in her closet. I guess what I’m asking is this: If you dropped me because I’m not the person you want me to be, then what is it that’s wrong with me? My selfishness or my trauma? And how, exactly, can I turn myself into somebody else, somebody better? Because believe me, I’ve been trying to do that for years.
IV. Sunday Morning
The night never reached a theatrical conclusion, it just fizzled out. We left the bar at some point, because the boy wanted a vape pen. As we wandered up and down the same city streets, making aimless conversation, I wanted to say, “This feels just like Breathless.” But somehow, knowing that references to French New Wave in general or Godard in particular would be lost on him, I stifled the urge.
When we couldn’t find an open convenience store, we hopped in a Lyft and traveled to my home. The car ride was brutal. I’d already overshared and made a fool of myself, but I swear I managed to dig deeper until I reached all-new lows. After recounting one especially rough anecdote about being excluded by some girls in college—a story my mother said I should never tell because it made me sound “so pathetic”—I seemed to have broken him: he could only respond with “wow,” in a tone of voice that fell somewhere between stunned disbelief and secondhand embarrassment. Or perhaps he was just exhausted by me and his tone was actually the sound of a car’s final few sputters before its engine fails, which is just as bad.
At some point during the ride—I think shortly after I shared that story—the conversation came to a screeching halt. The silence seemed never-ending: I would’ve thrown myself out the window to escape it. He stared at his phone while I stared straight ahead with a blank expression, as though I’d just lived through a war and the trauma had rendered me stoic. I wished I could come up with a joke to lighten the mood, but nothing seemed funny anymore. I couldn’t remember why I even wanted to do this, how going out for drinks ever sounded like it’d be enjoyable for either of us.
Then, once the conversation finally, mercifully resumed, I found myself telling a tale about Stephen King and Stanley Kubrick while simultaneously apologizing for weaving yet another yarn he wouldn’t care about. “I just think it’s so interesting,” I gushed, which was true.
“It is interesting,” he said, which was probably not true. I’m guessing he was simply relieved I’d taken a break from divulging all my personal dysfunction.
When we got to my house, he gave me a hug before leaving me to wallow. I hate hugs, but I smiled and went along with it, just as he’d done all night. I think I might’ve apologized for being weird or sad or both, but the memory’s fuzzy. I felt seized with a fresh panic, that sense of dread, because I knew this was the end and it was my fault. I’d ruined the relationship. I’d made myself look like a freak, again. Sometimes it seemed like I was the recurring villain of my own life.
Sure enough, he hopped in his Uber and disappeared from my world. I spent the next few weeks waiting for a text that would never arrive. Eventually, I came to grips with the fact that it was over: I’d made a mess of the evening and I just had to accept that. And I have accepted it, sorta kinda, except for those nights when it eats away at me.
After he left, it was the early hours of Sunday morning. I climbed up the steps to our front porch and let myself inside. The house was deathly quiet, my mother asleep. I’d like to claim I had fantasies of smothering her with a pillow, just for the dramatic visual, but I did not. All I wanted to do was lose consciousness for a while—fall into a deep, dark sleep, with no awareness of the things I’d just said, the friendship I’d just lost. But before I headed to bed, I took a detour to my bathroom. I had thought I looked pretty when the night first began, but now my eyeliner seemed clumsily applied, and I’d sweat enough over the course of the evening that my hair had gotten damp, the humidity turning it to a wall of frizz. Standing there, looking at myself in the mirror, all I could think—all I could see—was cheap and horrible.
I took a shower, scrubbing my skin as if I could somehow wash off the night’s events. Then when I emerged, my formerly-straightened hair had turned curly, and my face was clean and innocent as a baby’s. One shower was all it took to transform me from a vamp into a flower child. It didn’t matter: I still couldn’t recognize myself.
The movie Mildred Pierce ends with Veda being carted off to jail. This did not happen in the book (nor did the murder for which she’s imprisoned), but was added to the film in order to abide by the Hays Code, which required all cinematic villains and evil-doers be punished. Personally, I’m not a fan of this ending. I think it fails to recognize that for Veda, happiness is elusive: it doesn’t matter whether she’s rich or poor, living the luxurious life of her dreams or rotting away in prison. Either way, she’ll never be at peace with herself. She’ll always be searching, wanting, craving something more, wishing she could be somebody else. In this way, she’s already in prison. No jail is necessary to punish Mildred Pierce’s ultimate villain, because existing as Veda is punishment enough.