Water Lilies Don't Float

When Water Lilies Don’t Float first released in theaters, it was reported to be a monumental box office failure, costing upwards of one and a half million dollars and only making around five hundred thousand in ticket sales, and only a fraction more upon digital release.

The director, Michael Lianig, of Copperville and Fortunate Won fame, wasted no time blaming this on the breakout leading actress, a young Miss Courtney Waller, whom he claimed “could not keep up with [Lianig’s] grand visions of who Lily Waters was supposed to be” (Variety Bazaar, 1943). He did not retract his statements when Waller, only twenty-one, tragically took her own life six months after the premiere. Sources reported that it was her sister who found her surrounded by pills in her bedroom that hot summer morning.

Now, almost one hundred years later, a full theater watches the black-and-white film with rapt attention, the call of the classic’s beauty in tragedy like sugar water to buzzing swarms of parched insects.

A girl dressed in black jeans and a nondescript black t-shirt passes full row after full row until she reaches the top and sneaks through the unlocked door of the projector room. She untucks her hair from her red lanyard, which, unbeknownst to the moviegoers, does not actually have the logo of the theater on it but a random car dealership’s. The flutter of adrenaline that accompanies sneaking around and getting away with it thrums through her chest and down, down, down to the very tips of her fingers and the soles of her feet.

She leans slightly over the lip of the window in the room that lets the film’s image through to the large screen below, careful to keep enough distance so her fly-away hairs do not create half-moon shadows upon Lily Waters’s smooth skin and cupid’s bowed lips.

Those lips form the words she knows by heart, filling the air with her light and breathy voice. The girl takes it all in and forces her eyes to remain open. She glances down at the audience, convinces herself that she can instantly make out which ones are true friends and which are succubi, feeding off of the sadness in Lily’s—Waller’s—crystalline eyes. She has half a mind to throw her weight into the thrumming projector, to lift the door that houses the giant lightbulb and smash it against the cement floor.

It was probably hot enough to burn her hands before she could release it. She would scream and scream and scream.

But then, Lily was humming, and the girl knew she would not be able to do it.

“Shh, girl,” Lily’s mother cooed.

“Either I sing or scream, Mother,” Lily explained, her throat bobbing with a dramatic swallow. Her gloved hands shook as she continued her subdued song and their promenade by a placid lake. The girl in the theater mouthed the words along with her.

“Surely, there is something that can be done to ease your melancholy,” the mother said. “People are beginning to talk.”

“So let them,” the girls whispered in unison. “Let them talk, and let me hum my heart’s lament. What do I care what others think of the inner yearnings of my soul?”

“But what is it you yearn for, my dear? What could possibly be causing you so much woe?”

The girl opened her mouth in time with Lily’s, but the door to the booth snicked open, so she had to turn her attention and crouch back into the shadows.

“Don’t you get it? If I knew—if it were that simple—I would not have to sing,” a voice much closer and clearer than Lily Waters’s came from the other side of the projector, and the girl bit her lip. She had wanted to say that line. “I’m sure you know you are not allowed to be in here.”

It took a moment for her to recognize she was being addressed, as the interrupter had not come to force her out of her hiding spot.

“Then again, neither am I, I suppose,” the voice continued with a sigh. After a moment filled only with the swelling soundtrack of the film below, the voice asked, “Why do you think she did it? Courtney Waller, I mean.”

Anger filled the girl’s stomach with acid, acid that pushed up her throat and demanded to spew.

“What does it matter?” she hissed and finally rose to her full height.

She blinked when her eyes met nothing but empty air. She rounded the giant machine to see the person, another young girl, crouched much like she had been a few minutes prior, so just her eyes were above the edge of the cutout. The girl watched the back of the interrupter’s head for a blink before she sighed and returned to her side so they could watch the movie together.

“So?” the interrupter asked. “What do you think?”

The girl curved her lip. “I don’t know, and I don’t want to speculate,” she bit out. On the screen, Lily was dancing in circles with a man—Harold Barringer, played by late actor Eric Humphries—but her eyes were locked with the camera lens, allowing the audience to feel her overwhelming apathy.

“I think she didn’t want to end up like Lily,” her companion muttered. “You know, in a loveless marriage, listless and uninspired.”

The girl clicked her tongue in distaste. What an ignorant interpretation of Lily as a character. She repeated this aloud with so much fervor that her lips brushed against the booth wall and her fingers creaked from their clenched positions upon the ledge.

“How do you figure?”

“Lily was not uninspired. She was listless because of all of her inspirations. The painting of the water lilies. Nature as a whole. Her place in the universe. She was inspired by it all, and she couldn’t do anything to express it. Don’t you see? Her relationship was not loveless. Harry was the closest thing she had to a friend, but it wasn’t enough, because he didn’t get that she needed to create, to live and experience everything.”

“But how can someone possibly experience everything?” her viewing partner questioned.

“One can’t,” she said easily. “That’s the crux of her entire character. Her expectations and desires are unattainable. She is flawed in that she cannot be content with being human.”

“Do you think, then, that Waller felt the same way?”

The girl worried her lip between her teeth once more, allowing the sting to distract her from the gnawing, growing, starving emptiness in her middle demanding to be acknowledged.

“Why can we not be satisfied with simply being alive?” the other girl continued in the silence. “Even this film. It took death for everyone to see it as important. Tragedy elevates art and life, and that’s the damned tragedy of it all. I wish the living could see that that’s what’s worth staying for: lungs breathing, hearts beating, eyes seeing.”

“It’s not that simple,” she heard herself stutter out, as if from far away, like she was sitting in the front row yards ahead.

“Is it not?”

She did not have a chance to answer; the credits were rolling. The crowd was dispersing, and soon real staff members would be coming to sweep their detritus from the carpeted rows. The girl stood and made to beckon the other to hurry up before they got caught. But when she came once more to the other side, she found that she was all alone. Lily Waters’s humming from the speakers surrounded her.

She rubbed a sudden chill from her arms and reached for the door to make her escape—alone.