Extras

by Susan D. Bernstein

 

I had become accustomed to playing the part of an extra. I liked to gloss that up, think of “Extra” as some kind of exotic character from a faraway place, but everyone knows in film parlance what an extra means. Not much. When I was in high school, my brother used me to cut his teeth as a cinematographer. For the bargain price of six long-playing records, he made me his stunt girl. I drove Lenny’s black Corvette along the reservoir near our house.  Clumsily hoisting a flag, I climbed the stone steps of a neglected quarry so he could practice panning, zooms, proper lighting, fades.

Once I really was an extra in a movie.  Lenny was location manager for a made-for-television version of John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud, and since it was shot in a New England college town close to where I was living, I decided to spend a day on the set. Our mother had donated some of her vintage fifties dresses, and the wardrobe woman, wanting to please Lenny, thought it would be a nice touch if I wore one of these outfits in the graduation scene. I ended up on the cutting-room floor, the place many a fine extra has landed. But the hours sitting in that stuffy white chapel, wearing a dress with a too tight crinoline-lined waistband sticking into me like thorns, made my fall from celluloid fame seem like torture without reward.

I’ve been extraed here and there much of my life. My mother used me as a stand-in for the models when she couldn’t make it to her studio art class, my “ex” paid me to ghost-write his doctoral dissertation, and once when I lived down the street from a famous chef, whose name will go unmentioned, I was selected to taste test a few of her weirdest concoctions. Those never appeared in her cookbooks, so it was the culinary-version of the cutting-room floor for me again.

Maybe I’m talking about exploitation and guinea pigs here, but I use “extra” because of the sense of being the peripheral character, the prop, the pins that hold the seams together but get pulled out and tossed by the time the garment is finished. The point of this cutting-room floor syndrome is that I became weary of myself as superfluous, marginal, not the main feature.  I was tired of editing other people’s writing and not publishing my own, or appearing in crowd scenes, metaphorically speaking, but never a face remembered. Arthur Miller wrote, “A man is not a piece of fruit. You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away.” But of course you can. We throw peels away all the time, most of us anyhow, who don’t compost or zest up our desserts.

I hope I’ve provided sufficient justification for what follows. I live in a university town where my ex-husband Sam is a professor. I teach piano to children and take care of my own two, at least on the days they’re with me according to the labyrinthine custody schedule. Sam has a joint degree in social work and mathematics, a professional testament to his belief that human relations are polynomial equations.  Over the years, I’ve had a lot of friends who are at the university; it’s unavoidable in a place like this, especially if you land in Urbana because you had the luck to marry an academic.

This story of my life as and with extras involves one of my university pals, Anabel Aron, a documentary filmmaker. Now she’s starting a new project about postcolonial glocalization of Tsunami relief work. For this, she captured a competitive arts grant so that she can learn six languages, travel to swanky resorts on the Indian Rim, and study architecture, regional religious rites, and related cuisines. Usually Anabel likes to enlist her friends for her projects.

I was cast in her documentary on incest, although not literal incest, and not exactly a documentary. Anabel’s idea was to approach her subject through theory and practice by interviewing women about their fathers and sex.  The topics that could qualify as about sex might range from swapping “dirty jokes” to watching erotic scenes in movies together, or father-to-daughter premarital advice to fantasies about fathers having weird trysts, like sodomy with a neighbor’s collie.  Her subject seemed more suited to Indiana than Illinois, given the Kinsey Institute in Bloomington. The gist of the project was to bring to the forefront whether or how fathers and daughters talked about sex. Anabel had a series in mind.  She also planned to do a sequel on mothers and sons, then fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, and eventually rippling out to grandparents and grandchildren and siblings. For this pilot version, she was particularly interested in finding women whose fathers were dead so as to avoid any sticky issues around confidentiality and betrayal. Since both my parents died before I’d moved to Urbana, I was an especially attractive resource.

Anabel selected a group of women to tell their stories, and these narratives were to furnish fodder to interrogate the term “incest” from a variety of theoretical, discursive, reality, and visual vantage points, with an eye towards analyzing the spectral dimensions of dead fathers. At first, Anabel wanted to interview a lawyer, a psychiatrist, a person of the cloth (as in religious vestments), a moral philosopher, and a sculptor.  I didn’t follow the relevance of this last one, but perhaps I wasn’t paying full attention during one of Anabel’s briefing sessions.  In any case, the list was shortened and the professional profiles adjusted.  As a piano teacher, I was meant to add a “tonal” slant on transgressing boundaries of intimacy. Anabel was also interested in how different sensory perceptions shaped these memories.

“All you have to do is tell the group and the camera stories about your father and yourself,” she explained to me over coffee at a cafe one morning. I had indicated that group self-disclosure wasn’t my style, and that I found it all too contrived.  Anabel thought more instructions would keep me on board. “Whatever you relate to us should come from three different periods of your relationship with your father: from childhood, from adulthood, and then an event around the time he died.” She excelled in a determined vision, but I clearly had compromised eyesight for her optical galaxy.

“I’m still having trouble seeing where the sex bit comes into this,” I said.

“I can’t tell you that part. You have to make the decision for yourself. What I’m interested in is power.” Anabel was entering a few notes into her laptop. “I know you understand that.” I couldn’t read her tone. Was it a minor or major key, to be taken literally or interpreted with grace notes of irony? Or was this unmitigated condescension? She played squash with Sam on Monday nights. Even though Sam had remarried and Anabel was a lesbian, this bothered me. Who knows if they talked about me when they toweled off the sweat courtside?

I proposed an alternative to Anabel. “How about if I tell stories about your father and sex?  You could tell me some of your memories, and then I could retell these as my own.” I thought this pseudo-confession idea would give me the margin of comfort I was seeking, as well as offer her an interesting twist on memory, veracity, and appropriated autobiography.

Anabel had this way of training her eyes around the region of my frontal lobe, as if she’d discovered some curious aberration. “Sorry. I want your own true story. This isn’t a fiction workshop. This is a documentary about incest and power.” Anabel’s brusqueness I could read loud and clear. I was working on a novel about a woman who leaves her husband in Denver to research a book on the sordid history of water closets in Europe. I wrote bits of it between getting the kids to school and afternoon piano lessons. So I took Anabel’s remark as a slight on my novice attempts. I had tried to publish “Touring Toilets,” a short story derived from a chapter, but so far, no luck.  The cutting-room floor syndrome again.

As she concluded our session, she said to me, “It’s your decision in the end. Let me know if you want to do this.” We parted, but I was miffed. Did she think she was doing me some huge favor by casting me in the first place? Wasn’t it really the other way round? That’s when I decided to give her camera the tall tale of Willy.

I auditioned my rough draft on my daughter Talia who was in tenth grade and the editor of her school creative writing magazine. “Did I ever tell you that your grandfather was a chaplain in Vietnam?” I began one night after dinner. Jacob was upstairs working on his science fair project.

“I didn’t know there were Jewish chaplains or even Jewish soldiers in Vietnam.” She gave me a skeptical look. “Are you making this up, Mom?”  That wasn’t a promising start, but I didn’t give up easily.

“Of course there were Jewish-Americans in the service in Vietnam. But my father was the only Jewish chaplain, and it was a very difficult post, as you can imagine.”

“So how old were you while he was there? And what exactly did he do?  I didn’t know he was a rabbi.  You told me he sold textiles!” Talia was picking at her toenails again, so I nudged her.

“This was a special service, not his regular day job. He was what you’d call a lay rabbi.” I needed a sex-accented story, but I didn’t want to make my father out to be a member of a lecherous rabbinate. In the end, I couldn’t go through with this half-cooked concoction. I didn’t know what any chaplains in Vietnam did, let alone Jewish ones, and I didn’t care to research this since all my spare time was devoted to hunting up background history on privies and pail closets, an unplumbed field for fiction as far as I could tell. And the section about my Vietnamese half-sister Mylie, whom I met when my father brought her back to New York when I was ten, was too cliched.

When I tried to tell a version of this story to my friend Max, I started giggling over the part about my father, on his day off, entering a Saigon brothel. “Listen,” Max said. “If you want to make this work, you’ve got to hang your story on scaffolding that’s built from real life.” Max also had moved to Urbana with his academic wife Rachel who was a medical anthropologist. He’d had a good life in New York as a struggling actor who walked the boards as an off-Broadway understudy by night, and worked as an undercover private eye by day. Max said the detective job taught him more about narrative suspense than his master’s degree in American literature.

One beam of my scaffold came from the Thursday nights of my childhood.  My father stayed extra hours at his office in the city once a week, catching a late train and arriving home after nine. My mother would take my brother and me out to dinner, to Schraffts, Adventurer’s Inn, and some evenings when we cruised the department stores, we’d get the hamburger deluxe at Saks’s Dogwood Terrace.

Occasionally my mother teased my father about his Thursday nights downtown. “So, dear, how is your lady friend this week?  Keeping you up at the office in your shirt sleeves?” At first, in my primary school years, I innocently thought my mother was referring to Angela, my father’s secretary, but eventually, I caught onto the joke and wondered about the hidden roots of this humor.

My father’s typical reply to my mother’s angular remarks about his late nights at the office went something like this, “Darling, you know I have my standing appointment with Willy Loman.”

“Ah, Willy!  And how is dear Willy? What is he peddling this week? I think he’d be happier if he left his wife and kids. At least, they’d be happier without all that doom and gloom.” I assumed my mother knew Willy, that perhaps she’d joined them for one of those Thursday dinner meetings when I had an overnight school trip.  But when my brother was laboring over an English paper on The Death of a Salesman when I was twelve, I absorbed enough of the plot to figure out this alleged Willy Loman was a miserable traveling salesman, the postwar American Dream gone awry.

So these late nights at the office with over-dinner meetings with Willy were one keystone in my scaffolding for Anabel’s project.  The other architectural feature came from a different play, a Broadway production of Travesties. I was working in Washington DC that year, and decided at the last minute to visit my parents in New York on a weekend when they already had tickets for the theatre. My mother had managed to get a third seat, but a few rows behind the other two. As we headed down the aisle, my father suggested that my mother and I sit together.  When we headed back to the lobby at intermission, my father wore a bemused expression.

“Geez,” he began, as my mother lit up a cigarette. “The guy next to me, his hand kept getting on my leg during the first act.  I just ignored it because I thought it was a mistake and didn’t want to embarrass him.  But then–“ my mother interrupted him with her laughter.  He went on, “After a while, I did cross my leg to get him to move his hand, but he put it back on my leg, even higher!” My father looked like a kid who had discovered the underside of suburban garden plots and was amazed by the hidden humus of wriggling worms, so to speak, quite beyond any sense of personal affront.  He seemed more dazzled than disgusted.

“Oh my!” This was my mother’s trademark verbal exclamation. “He’s probably looking for a sugar daddy.” Her eye had inventoried this younger man as a sharp dresser when my father first took his seat.  Now she was clearly amused and offered to treat the two men to a tête-à-tête at Sardi’s. Witnessing this exchange, I was baffled by my mother’s joking. Was this some perverse homophobia on her part? Or an appetite for a new twist in the doldrums of marital life? Or a hint, an invitation? There was some discussion about which of us should occupy the hot seat for the rest of the performance, but after the intermission, the mystery man had vanished, perhaps discouraged about a future of sugar-daddy luxuries with the unreceptive seatmate.  Nevertheless, my scaffolding was complete.

The videotaping session took place in Anabel’s living room where we sitting ducks were arranged in a semi-circle, the camera and boom in our faces. “Remember this is to be a conversation,” she directed us. “First, I want each of you to take turns telling your stories about a childhood memory of your father. I’ve asked a few of you to bring family documents to read.” This was one of Anabel’s slanted ways of remaking the genre. “But who goes first, second, and so on, doesn’t matter.  Jump in as you feel moved.” Crossing her legs beneath her Indian tunic with a purple paisley print, Anabel settled herself into the sofa, an expectant smile animating her face.

I felt moved to leave right then, but I had rehearsed. And besides, Anabel’s partner Molly had made a beautiful lunch for us of split pea and fennel soup, cornmeal sourdough bread, arugula and Parmesan salad, and an aromatic seasonal pie. I wanted the catered lunch just like the real film stars and the extras.

Joan, the director at the campus Catholic center, spoke first. “My father liked me to dress up as a religious sister when I was little, but later, when I said I wanted to take vows after graduating high school,  he was very opposed. ‘That’s throwing your life away,’ he said. He told me some story about a girl from his hometown who became a nun after she gave her baby up for adoption. ‘That’s the kind of girls you’ll find there. Well, maybe not every one of them, but mark my words, some of them end up in convents from loose morals.’  I was shocked and saddened by what my father said to me.”

Pausing in her account, Joan appeared to be in her fifties with gorgeous aquamarine eyes and a pale peach sweater. She had a careful way of speaking, and I suppose my surprise at her composure was only calibrated by my own discomfort, scaffolding or no. When no one else cut the momentary break, Anabel said with her most intense look, “Did you think he was exaggerating or lying?” It seemed to me that the sex element was a leitmotif with her reference to loose morals, unless the father had a back story of his own Joan had yet to reveal.

Joan thoughtfully considered Anabel’s question. “You know, I was never sure. But that story about sexually active girls who end up as nuns did deter me, offensive and likely fabricated as it is.”

“What about when your father died?” asked Anabel. I felt sure she had scoped out many of the stories ahead of time, although not mine.

“That was the most amazing part of it all.  One morning, it was November 1979, my father was leaving on a trip for his work.  I can still see the breakfast table and the sunshine flooding the room.  It was then that my father said to me, ‘Joan, if your heart is set on entering the convent, then you should. I’ll always love you.’ My mother and brothers were speechless, and so was I. It was as if my father had some kind of premonition.” She paused again, uneasily heading for the crisis, and maybe on the brink of tears. But no, her voice was steady. “Later that afternoon that the call came. He’d been killed instantly when an oncoming semi on the interstate veered across the centerline.”

The four other women caught in this web of mutual unveiling wore a collective deer-in-the-headlights expression. Joan closed her narrative, again following a heartbeat pause. “I knew from that moment that I would find a way to make Catholicism the center of my life.”

True to her theme, Anabel asked, “How did that experience shape your understanding of confessing incest?” This seemed a bit beside the point.  Somehow we muddled on to the next sequence of revelations.

A dancer named Magdalena, Lena for short, substituted for the moral philosopher who had balked due to some “scruples,” Anabel had enigmatically explained. Lena told us how her father’s deception about having a second family, complete with a house, a wife, and two sons, inspired her career choice. “I thought that I might as well make money on the familial talents of pirouettes, arabesques, and chassés, to be figural here. My father was a wonderful man.” What Lena remarked made sense given that Anabel encouraged us to think about the performative nature of confession, not as some absolute truth, but as drama that devolves inevitably on hidden sex.

I had planned to chime in with my serial midway through, so as not to attract the attention of the first or last positions. I was sitting next to Chelsea the sculptor. She was the one woman in the group I had met before, mostly at Anabel’s lawn parties. Chelsea taught in the Art Department and had devised an innovative way of constructing female bodies from bobby pins, eye pencil shavings, comb teeth, and hairbrush bristles. She exhibited these creations in plexiglass boxes at women’s college galleries.  Some day I hoped to commission her to fashion a structure inspired by the European toilets of my novel, and then I’d use a photo of this artwork for the cover of my book. I’d leave the raw materials for this sculpture to her discretion.

I liked Chelsea’s face. She had earnest eyes and a quiet mouth, so I figured I could direct my performance at her. I was a bit nervous about meeting Anabel’s gaze, and felt too sheepish about Joan and Lena. The psychiatrist had also bailed out on the project. I took a breath and began. “My story mixes up the three categories we’ve been asked to prepare for Anabel.” Lane the videographer aimed the lens barrel at me, as I composed myself for the execution. Anabel uncrossed her legs and leaned back on a few batik throw pillows, with her tabby cat Chennai plopped in her lap. Although I kept issuing myself silent stage directions to avoid looking at her, I found my eyes returning there like a moth to a candle flame.

“When I was a child, my father used to play a game with us–with my brother and me.” All those expectant, half-smiling faces, waiting for the other shoe to drop, turned to me. “He had this pair of worn-out brown leather slippers, and called them his Magic Shoes. ‘Whenever I put my feet in these shoes, I turn into a traveling clown!’ he told us. And then he would demonstrate, by calling out, ‘Who am I? Who am I? I’m Lucky, the traveling clown, want to come along?’ He’d pick me up piggy-back style, and romp around the room.”

The general expression of my auditors was polite anticipation, but I knew my preamble was rather boring.  I aimed to build from here. Anabel had simply ordered that we start out with a memory about our fathers from childhood. Mine was a jokester. “So my father would talk about all the trips Lucky took in his Magic Shoes. He’d jump me around my parents’ bedroom, then throw us on the bed, and say where we’d landed. Maybe the moon, maybe Far Rockaway–at the time I had no idea this was a real place–and sometimes the Good Ship Lollipop, and then he’d sing a few lines about Peppermint Bay.”

I looked directly at Chelsea, and she returned her wide-mouthed, pretty smile with a nod. I barreled ahead. “Sometimes my father actually did travel, for business. Usually he’d stay in his office Wednesday nights, and some weeks he’d be gone two nights.”  I launched into the Willy Loman story, mostly a true account of what my father would say about his late nights, only I embellished it to staying overnight on a regular basis.

Now I was gearing up for the crux of the confession. I set the scene. “It was my mother’s funeral at The Riverside on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side, where many of my extended family’s funerals had taken place.” Probably this was a totally irrelevant detail, maybe even cause for suspicion, although I caught an encouraging sign as Anabel nodded vigorously.

I dug into my script. “The funeral was a kind of a blur, a surreal time, when my mother died, and especially the funeral, with people gradually filling up this chilly powder blue room with Greek cornices over draped windows, and a sign at the door with my mother’s name on it. I think her coffin was at one end of the room. A stream of people greeted me, my brother, and my father.  We weren’t in a receiving line or anything, but different relatives, old family friends, and a few of my mine too, stopped in, hugged me and looked sorrowful, for maybe a few seconds.”

I wanted to sound very animated here. I drew myself up on the sofa, took a breath before the leap, and looked deep into Chelsea’s hazel eyes. “Then I saw this very tall, older man come up to my father. I didn’t know him, but he was striking, lots of thick curly white hair and a singular presence. He wore a lavender bow tie and his vivid dark eyes poured intensity into mine. I wasn’t close enough to hear what he said to my father, but saw him wrap my father in a bear hug.  Even more to my amazement, I thought I saw my father’s eyes blinking back tears.  Now,” and here I tilted my head for emphasis, “my father was never a demonstrative man.  The scene really defied my comprehension.

“Later, I asked my father about this mystery mourner, but I left out the embrace and the tears. He said, ‘Oh, that was Freddy Fox, an old friend from before I got married. I was so surprised to see him there. It’s been years, not since we were kids in Brooklyn.  We kept sight of each other through the grapevine.  He told me he’d seen Mother’s obituary in The Times.’ The trouble was, I didn’t buy the story. I had never heard his name, so why the emotional reaction to a virtual stranger?”

Chelsea seemed completely with me, nodding. I could feel Anabel’s eyes like bullets across the room, but I managed to steer clear of her gaze.  Chelsea proved the perfect, gullible listener. “Did you ever find out who he was? Was his name really Freddy Fox?” I hesitated. I hadn’t considered how the name sounded more like fable than fact.

“No, I never did find out for sure. I told my brother about this incident, but he hadn’t seen the man or my father’s uncharacteristic greeting,  so I don’t think he put much stock in the whole story. He treated me as if I were a little loopy with grief, prone to exaggeration or imagining things. I thought about Freddy for some time, and kept expecting my father would mention this renewed friendship from decades and decades ago, but he never did.”

“Did you try to find his name in a phone book or something?” I think this was Joan’s question, dutifully posed, since Anabel had insisted that our collective unearthing of paternal perversities be a “conversation.”

“No, but I did see him one more time, and that was even more incredible. My father died two years after my mother, and at his funeral service, just as we were heading out of the chapel to drive to the cemetery, I saw this same Freddy making a beeline for me. There was no question that there were tears in his eyes. We had never met, and yet he seemed to want to explain himself to me. ‘Judy,’ he began. Now, no one has called me Judy since I turned sixteen and announced that I was Judith. No one, absolutely no one, except my family and a few childhood friends who would occasionally fall back on old habits. He went on, ‘I know you don’t know me, but I feel like I know you, Judy. Every year your father showed me your school picture, so in a way I watched you grow up.’ This from the man my father hadn’t seen since he was a boy?  Or had I missed something?”

I stopped, I had to. No one lent a helping word. So I had to continue, or cry out that the jig was up.  I wasn’t about to do that.  I plunged ahead, “I just stood there, frozen with surprise, probably a bit dazed from the intensity of the occasion. I don’t recall saying anything in reply to Freddy, or at least I thought he was Freddy. He started weeping in earnest, this strange man. ‘Judy, I’m Willy. I am Willy Loman,’ he rasped into my ear, and quickly turned on his heels and hurried away. I never saw him at the cemetery, or anywhere else. I wish I had a better ending, but that’s what happened.“

”So, what did you think? This Freddy was like your father’s boyfriend or something?” Chelsea got it. I was grateful for that comment which must have meant my performance was credible.

“I just don’t know. And I doubt I ever will. But yes, I guess that’s how all this appears to make sense.”  Joan nodded.  I didn’t catch Lena’s face, but she was seated on Anabel’s far side, and my eyes didn’t want to go anywhere near there.

Anabel’s plan following this session was to hire actors, screen all the confession footage, and then have the actors each memorize and perform the very stories we’d told before the camera about our fathers. After that, she’d put all this together somehow, to complicate whose story was genuine, and whose story was only a role studied and delivered.

The documentary isn’t quite finished, but I did hear that the actors were skeptical about me. “It’s just too pat,” one of them apparently said. “I think she’s rehearsed it. Plus she doesn’t tell it in a spontaneous way.”  Well, what of that? Bad acting? I’m no professional. Besides, why wouldn’t someone rehearse their story of their real-life before encountering the camera lens? As for me, I can see Freddy so clearly, I can hear his revelation as if it happened this morning.  I almost believe it.  The story fits the scaffolding and makes my father more remarkable, emerging from gray flannel business suits with matching felt fedora into a person with a past. I hope my grand performance will not be consigned to the cutting-room floor, and I will finally rise, like the phoenix, from the ash heap of the extra into the firmament of the extraordinary. Let my story have its screen time of fame, I want to tell Anabel.  Let me be part of the video display in the museum exhibition “Crafting Confession” next year.

Whatever becomes of that creative endeavor, I still have my privies project percolating.  I’ve now decided to insert imaginary scenes of famous literary characters and their water closet moments: Elizabeth Bennett, Hans Castorp, Clarissa Dalloway. If no one wants my book, I’ll turn it into a screenplay and persuade my brother to produce it on another shoestring budget, despite the fact that he abandoned his film career years ago. Besides, he never delivered on the sixth record for my only starring role.  The film’s title now seems much too ironic: “The Empty Mirror.” I didn’t appreciate until this moment how brilliantly he captured the pathos of the Extra.

 

Susan D. Bernstein moved a few years ago to Boston from Madison, Wisconsin where she spent 28 years as a professor of English with a focus on Victorian literature and gender studies. She now teaches in the English Department at Boston University, including a course on life writing. In addition to scholarly books and articles, she has published literary nonfiction essays and short fiction, and is writing a novel.