As my parents navigated their separation in the early nineties, my mother was on the road to recovery and reinventing herself. In addition to the AA meetings, she chopped all her hair off, started yoga, and participated in some intense therapy. Weird times. She would later call it a “selfish phase,” but I do not blame her for that. She spent her entire life doing things for other people; she had never put herself first.
My mother’s family history is sordid. She grew up the oldest of five children – four girls and one boy in the middle. Her father died of alcoholism before turning forty, and his best friend Fred swooped in and married his wife, my grandmother. The family drama surrounding this caused some serious rifts. Whilst getting sober, my mother accused her stepfather of molesting her when she was young; her sisters supported her in her sobriety and this accusation, but her brother and mother did not – they were in denial and refused to accept any of this as fact. They cut off the family and ceased talking to any of the sisters, who were also going through their own journeys with AA and therapy (with various amounts of success – the youngest, Patty, drank herself to death in the mid-nineties). Regardless, I have multiple cousins on that side of the family that I don’t even know.
Valerie Ann Lawrence became Valerie Ann Caswell when she married Rick Caswell right after high school, as she desperately needed to get out of her family situation. Within a year she became pregnant, and within two she became a single mother, as Rick battled depression, anxiety, and unemployment. After the divorce, he did not pay child support, and my sister Lisa and her survived on their own for a while until my father came into the picture when my sister was four, and she became Valerie Ann Bujold. She used to joke about all her last names, because she changed it again after the second divorce. She’d say that she should introduce herself as “Valerie Ann Lawrence-Caswell-Bujold-back-to-Lawrence-again.”
Around this time she found Wicca. She referred to herself as a witch, she had a coven, she worshiped the moon, and said “thank Goddess” and “Goddess bless” when someone sneezed. She had an altar, wore crystals around her neck, and listened to chanting music of Irish ladies singing about the Earth being a woman and rising and “a river of birds in migration, of a woman with wings.” Her coven had many meetings in the woods, where they’d commune with nature, and dance naked around a fire (I never witnessed this, but I took her word for it). They were good people who were kind and provided her with a sense of belonging in a cold universe.
With her newfound sobriety came new friends “from the program,” and several people came in and out of our lives. The College Professor taught English at a local college, and in addition to being the first openly gay man I ever encountered, he also taught me how to tie a tie. The Crystal Healer took us away to her cabin one weekend and I learned all about the healing energy of crystals. The Homeless Woman and Her Teenage Son lived with us for a time, so she could “get back on her feet.” She took my sister Lisa’s room, and her son slept on the couch in the basement and cooked clay pipes in our oven, which he told me “not to tell.”
Like I said: Weird times. We were also broke, without any financial stability; my parents had stopped paying the mortgage on the house, and at some point of my freshman year of high school, the house was in foreclosure and my parents filed for bankruptcy.
All of this is the backdrop, what hung in the air during Christmas of 1991.
My aunt Michele hosted a large family party every Christmas Eve at her house in nearby Nashua. I always had to wear uncomfortable clothes and hang out with my jock cousin BJ. The sports talk coming out of his mouth agitated me. I hated sports. I tried talking about movies, but he didn’t like movies; he’d rather be throwing a ball around, so I sat around drinking ginger ale while relatives laughed and got drunk on Christmas punch and asked me all the questions relatives ask you when they see you once a year. Add in the elephant in the room, my mother being noticeably absent (in her words, “I can’t be around all that booze”), and the entire family in denial about her alcoholism, this Christmas Eve might possibly have been the most awkward I’d ever experienced. But I grit my teeth and got through it.
The next morning, I woke with the sun, but the excitement of Christmas morning was noticeably absent. I stayed in bed for a while, staring at the ceiling, until I couldn’t hold my pee anymore. When I walked into the kitchen, my mother sat at the table, coffee steaming to her left, cigarette burning in the ashtray to her right, and she wrote in her journal, an activity she had taken up when she started therapy. She looked up at me, and smiled the warmest, most welcoming, genuine smile, motioned for a hug, and said in her sing-song voice, “Good morning! Merry Christmas!”
Mommy instantly made me feel better.
We exchanged gifts; she gave me a couple books and some clothes, and I gave her a miniature pewter figurine – an armored knight with a sword, in an attack position, about an inch high. We loved our fantasy movies. When I went to AA meetings with her, she always called me her knight in shining armor, so I thought it was appropriate.
After pancakes and bacon, we sat around watching TV, reading, and napping, with the occasional snack in-between. My sister made no appearance that day, as she was with her father’s family, and as the day wore on I felt blue. And hungry.
“What’s for dinner,” I asked.
“Hm. I don’t know,” she responded as she looked over at me. She sensed my disappointment, and continued, “You know what? Let’s go out for Chinese food. Like the family in A Christmas Story. And then we can go to a movie.”
Wait. You can do that? You can go to a restaurant on Christmas? And movie theaters are open?
As it turned out, yes you could and yes they were. This has since become a cultural phenomenon; Chinese restaurants go on two hour waits and prestige blockbuster movies open on Christmas day, but in 1991? A novel idea. We went to the best Chinese restaurant in town, in a plaza with a dog groomer and Rich’s department store. Kids always got free Coke, and everyone at the table got a free chicken wing. With only a handful of people in the restaurant, we had our own private dining experience. We brought the newspaper to see what movies were playing (yes, back then you had to either call the theater or look up times in the paper). As we munched on our Pu Pu Platter and Lo mein, we discussed and debated what film to see. We narrowed it down to The Addams Family, Beauty and the Beast, and Hook.
I liked the old Addams Family television show, but my mother - not so much. Hook had that Spielberg magic and Robin Williams, but the reviews - yikes. Beauty and the Beast looked good – great reviews, nice songs, and the Disney animated film renaissance had begun two years prior with the gigantic smash The Little Mermaid. It seemed like a clear choice.
Beauty and the Beast is a wonderful film. It’s the first animated film ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, the music has Alan Menken at the top of his game, and the animation is some of the best Disney has ever produced, blending in some early computer-generated technology. That ballroom scene? Beautiful. I dare you to watch that sequence and not feel warm all over.
However, as great as it is, it isn’t the film itself that I love, it is the memory associated with it that gets me. With the weight of everything, all the emotional detritus flying around me, these few hours with my mother gave me a respite. Her and I and nothing else except Chinese food and a cartoon. Everything else faded away.
We knew immediately we had experienced something special, a “core memory.” We drove home in a silence of unspoken happiness and warmth, unlike the silence I usually had with my father. When we pulled into the driveway, my mother put the car in park, turned it off, and said to me, but mostly to herself, “This day was a ten.”
We had created a tradition, and tried to recreate the magic of the day every year for the next several years, but it never landed. Something about the spontaneity of the day resulted in an unexpected bright spot in a gloomy cloud. My mother always said, “the universe provides.” True. Beauty and the Beast came to us when we needed it most.
Of course I remember all the subsequent Christmas movies we went to after that. My sister came the next year with Aladdin, then Mrs. Doubtfire. Then my girlfriend joined with Pulp Fiction (which Lisa hated), and then Toy Story, and Jerry Maguire. By the time we got to As Good as it Gets, and then You’ve Got Mail, my parents were back living with each other, I was emerging into adulthood, and “Chinese and a movie” became an obligation and annoying. All those movies are fine, in their own right, associated with their own memories, some fuzzy, some clear, some pleasant, others not, but nothing holds a Lumiere candle to Beauty and the Beast.
Chris Bujold (he/him) has degrees in Film, Theatre, and English, and is a public school teacher. Once upon a time he lived in New York City and started a theatre company. He was recently published in Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight and Roxane Gay’s The Audacity. He lives a full, albeit chaotic life with his wife, three kids, and two dogs.
