Less Cheek, More Throat
by Janelle Bassett
I’ve decided that instead of continuing to look for work I can do from home, I’m going to focus my energy on making Anjelica Huston fall in love with my children.
My children have no college funds, no handheld electronics, no matching pillowcases. I’m not a provider; they do without. All their protein comes from peanuts and canned meats, which seems to make them grow in abrupt lurches. First the diet stunts their growth, they stay the same size for three seasons. But then their bodies’ desire to reach maturity overpowers their nutritional deficiencies, and their limbs and necks spurt inches in days. And these are awful days—the children experience growing pains and hunger pangs, they invent new insults. I need help.
In terms of an intergenerational exchange of adoration and energy, Anjelica and my kids are a sure match. Renatta and Troy are intense, devastatingly artistic, jutty cheekboned, and have no known living grandparents. They are always offering a suddenly flourish—pliés, a stanza of poetry, a single operatic note—and as soon as the flourish is out, expressed, they turn grey and go crouch all huffy near the window, looking like smokers who can’t yet smoke. I feel like Anjelica would enjoy rewarding such behavior with black licorice and unsentimental encouragement.
And of course my children have thick dark hair with severe parts. I wouldn’t try to convince Anjelica Huston to be a surrogate grandmother to a couple of sunny blondies.
I have to act fast—on Tuesday, Anjelica told Terry Gross that if she were a grandmother that she’d like the children to call her “Amuse” instead of Granny or Nana. This is a clue that she’s open to a surrogate grandparent relationship. This was a national broadcast, not to mention the podcast audience. I bet there will soon be a line of mothers outside her door, presenting the children they’ve dressed in black leotards, after forcing them to study pictures of Wednesday Adams with magnifying glasses.
We will make her a video—equal parts introduction, invitation, and performance. The video will serve as a prelude to future shared meals, to sitting together stringing black beetles onto dark yarn for the Christmas tree, and hopefully, to direct deposits.
I’ll serve as the video's director. We will start at once.
“Renatta, go into the closet for half an hour to make sure your complexion doesn’t look rosy or unrestrained. Take off your socks so you feel a slight chill.”
Renatta sits on a stool and rolls each sock down dramatically, like she’s opening the stage curtains to reveal a set change. “Can I sit in the garden shed instead?”
I take the socks from her and fold them into a ball. “State your reasons.”
“I like the sounds the squirrels make when they try to get in but cannot.”
“Fine. Go. Troy! Begin constructing a shadow puppet stage right away.”
Troy pulls a tape measurer out of his black jumpsuit. A piece of tourmaline and two jacks also fall out. “Would four feet by three feet be sufficient?”
He pulls the tape out to show me the width and uses his other arm to estimate the height. I nod. “Sufficient.”
He reels the tape back in. “If there’s a panther or a wild boar in the production, will you cast me?”
“Casting decisions for the puppet show will be posted on my bathroom door in one hour. Once posted, all decisions are final.”
Troy turns to show me his profile. “I often have creative differences with my director.”
I am proud of his fussy defiance, but I won’t ruin his pose by patting it on the head. “Use that feeling,” I tell him. “Put it right into your stage hammering.”
⦿
I’m recording from the hallway, at the top of the staircase. Renatta and Troy take turns creeping on tiptoes in and out of frame, popping out of one room then disappearing into the room across the hall. I’ve turned off the lights and given them lit candles to hold, so it’s clear they are lurking mysteriously and not frolicking merrily.
I’ll only use five seconds of the hallway creeping—it will be cut into a montage of the footage I’ve already shot of them grating ginger, berating ants, shucking corn, painting volcanoes and composing a dirge on empty bottles of soot-colored fingernail polish. The shadow puppet scene was a dud. I’ve nixed it, except for the moment they bust through the paper screen with their elbows, which I plan to use as an opening credit.
Renatta and Troy’s running and leaping has become slow and unconvincing. They don’t at all look like they might have done something artistically naughty in the room they’ve just left.
“Cut!” I yell. “It’s time for your close-ups!
⦿
The children stand shoulder to shoulder on my bedroom rug. A makeup mirror (on the “evening looks” setting) is suspended from the ceiling fan above them. I’ve put blue eye shadow on the insides of their wrists, which won’t show but will nevertheless be exuded.
I push their heads closer to each other and step back to look through the camera. “Now smile, but give your smile a complicated depth—look pleased, but also think of the sea and knots in shoelaces and of feeling chronically underestimated. Let that come through, convey a palpable aloofness. But keep your aloofness grounded in pain. But keep the pain relatable. Relatable but not common. No! Chin down, eyes up. Less cheek! More throat!”
They are adjusting their heads and necks by stiff quarter inches while maintaining perfect eye contact with my camera lens. They look like mechanisms inside a pocket watch. They look like pigeons who just made the acquaintance of a full-length mirror. That they are clicking their chins and eyeballs by such slight degrees, that their faces are close together but not interacting, that the mirror above them could fall at any second because I am so-so at knots… it all adds up to tickling me. I try to stifle the building laugh. Think of your empty bank account. Think of homemade cards that read “Thanks for the ski trip, Amuse.” Think of the undeserving competition: kids who watch mindless YouTube videos with their mouths open, kids who wait for applause, kids who wear neon orange and name their dogs Tickle.
The laugh is paused but still inside me, held by tensed abs. I tap the record button—because nothing makes you regain composure like showtime—and point at the children to indicate that we’re rolling. But Renatta takes the pointing as a wordless stage direction for “more fingers” and brings her hands up by her face, into the shot. She isn’t sure where to place them. After moving her fingers across her forehead and poking at her temples, she settles on the “dangling each of her pointer fingers under her ears like fleshy earrings” look. My abs are no match for such a stupid image and I laugh at full volume.
The children throw their heads back too, manufacturing fake laughs in a cadence similar to my own. They think I am laughing as a director, showing them how I want it done—a honk hee hee toward the sky.
I call out “Stop!” as my laughter bends me over and puts me on the floor. Only when I’m at their feet do I remember to end the video. Troy looks down at me. “Should we get on the floor too?”
“Yes, come down. I’ll show you what just happened.”
They settle their heads into my armpits and I push play. It’s brief, but it’s all there: they move like time-keeping birds, then Renatta adds her finger jewelry and they both imitate my laugh as the camera angle falls toward the ground.
Renatta puts her leg over mine. “Is that what you were going for, Mama?”
“No, we’ll have to reshoot. Although…” As I try to remember whether Lily Tomlin has grandchildren, I notice that the knot holding the makeup lamp above us is beginning to loosen.
I leap up and hit record right as the knot gives up on holding itself together. I couldn’t have planned a more dynamic close-up shot of my children’s faces: surprise, fear, pain, glass, betrayal.
Janelle Bassett's writing appears (or is forthcoming) in The Offing, American Literary Review, The Rumpus, SmokeLong Quarterly, and VIDA Review. She lives in St. Louis and reads fiction for Split Lip Magazine.
