The Ticket

Some days, the pull to go back to 1982 is so strong it leaves her breathless. 

Iris will stand in front of her vanity, making eye contact with her exhausted reflection, and somehow a sliver of time will peel away, leaving her young again. No plum-colored circles under her eyes. No wrinkles at the corners of her lips.

It’s not that she wishes she were who she used to be or even where she used to be. It’s a when, in this case. To the way her small town used to be. And specifically to the movie theater that was torn down in the 90s during a ravenous era of destruction and rebuilding, but somehow forgotten about and left fallow.

She doesn’t mind the smudges of fatigue she wears now. She doesn’t care about the silver in her hair. What she longs for is a the embodiment of hope she once had, and a type of love she never knew again. For whatever reason, in her timeline this equals 1982. The nostalgia of payphone booths and neon-tinged jukeboxes and a diner that was open 24-hours. Black-and-white tiled floor and wise-cracking waitresses. 

“You could go see a movie,” she explained Marge, her coworker, over coffee in the commissary, “and then cross the street to get a coffee and a slice of cherry pie.”

“They’ve got peach today,” Marge said, indicating the dessert tray. But Iris was back in time. “When you were done hanging out, you’d walk home in the strangely comforting 2 a.m. hazy halo of the streetlights. Fall into your bed exhausted and satisfied.”

Marge wasn’t paying attention. She was half out of her chair to see what other treats were on display.

In a tiny cobalt blue plastic box tucked to the back of Iris’s jewelry case is a ticket stub. A faded half stub representing the perfect memory of a perfect night.

She goes through the motions of her days. She doesn’t hate her job, and she doesn’t hate her apartment, and she doesn’t even hate the on-again/off-again boyfriend who remembers to come by when he’s feeling frisky but never remembers her birthday or the anniversary of their first date. Dan plays the clarinet in a band that performs in dive bars around town, and he works at an insurance agency to pay the bills, and one of her friends once said, “Aren’t you lucky? To have a boyfriend at our age?” And Iris thought about that word for the rest of the afternoon. "Lucky." Was she?

Every day, she finds herself standing by the lot where the movie theater was. There is a large magnolia tree growing to one side, and she picks up some of the waxy petals when they fall, and she brings them home and puts them in a bowl that was once her grandmother’s. Magnolia petals are white with pink-tinged rims. Their scent is somehow filled with water. Lemon-tinted. Not heavy or cloying.

She is always looking for the light.

When she was young, she wore bright colors, acid greens and electric pinks. She dyed her hair violet and she had a pair of shiny vinyl boots with spikes. Now, she dresses in grays, her closet a wash of rain cloud, to sidewalk, to wet asphalt. And her hair is grayer by the day. And even her blue eyes seem gray.

Iris remembers when a guidance counselor gave her a quiz. An aptitude test that was supposed to indicate what type of job she would excel at. This gruff, bearded man had been baffled by the results, which had shown both an inclination towards creativity and a longing for structure. She’d wound up working in a museum, where she found a bit of both.

Nostalgia really nags at her as she catalogs in the museum. The pieces she’s referencing are a thousand years old, but her mind is going back a mere four decades. To when she and Ronny had a standing date. Meet up on the corner, make out behind the movie theater, grab a seat in the last row and sometimes catch the action on screen.

She heard through friends that he’s painting houses. According to Linked In, he works at “self.” She remembers snagging spray paint from the hardware store when nobody was looking, and she wrote their initials on the concrete wall. R & I. 4-Ever. The letters were intricate. She had artistic talent, for sure. The letters were within a gilded frame.

It’s still there.

Under some ivy. She had to look.

There wasn’t any big event to break them up.

She went to college and he didn’t. She moved around a lot. And he didn’t. She came home, thinking maybe they’d meet. Maybe they’d run into one another, now that she was in his old neighborhood, only to learn that he’d sold his family’s house and bought a little boat.

When she is categorizing paintings, she often finds herself staring a little too long at the seafaring ones. Is he on the water? Is he thinking of her? Does he remember?

In her mind, he hasn’t aged. But she’s slowly becoming a relic. In her mind, he has on his jeans and a plaid flannel. Converse high tops with knotted laces. Sometimes she’d wear one of his shirts over her shoulders. The flannel smelled like him in the best possible way. Maybe in a box somewhere, she still has one of his shirts. She is so well-organized that her nostalgia is categorized like the antiquities at work.

Often while she enjoys the quiet and the subtle magic of being around ancient objects, she worries about becoming obsolete herself. Some day, maybe someone will put a dust cover over her, and she will be relegated to one of the storage units in the basement. There will be a little notecard. “This was Iris. 1964-2037. She knew where the Sharpies were.”

She ends things with Dan. He isn’t surprised. She ends things when he misses her birthday yet again, and she spends the evening drying magnolia petals in her oven at 275 degrees. She puts the potpourri by her bed, and she dreams of kisses all night long.

In the morning, when she goes to the vanity to see if she does indeed look a year older, there is a whole ticket by her silver-backed hairbrush. Not the half stub that she has kept safe for decades in the little blue plastic box. Detritus of a life that she knows some stranger will tip into a trashcan at some point, not understanding that the ticket was once magic.

There, manifested by the power of her desires is a whole ticket, un-torn, perfectly crisp. She observes it in the clinical way she observes everything. It’s not faded pinkish but bright true red.

She looks at the ticket for a moment because it can’t really be there. Doesn’t cost $1.75 to see a movie anymore. And no theater gives out tickets like this. She gets a step-stool and takes down the box of memories from the top of her closet.

There’s the plaid flannel. She didn’t truly doubt for a second whether she’d kept it. She brings the shirt to her face and even after all these years, she can still smell the scent of promise. 

No need to go into work today. She puts her effects into order. What effects she has. She’s always been organized. She leaves her bank book on the kitchen table. Her last will. Her few good pieces of jewelry that she hopes will make the young neighbor who lives next door happy. The neighbor is a pretty woman in her twenties who doesn’t have a lot of money. Iris hopes she’ll wear her grandmother’s pearls with delight.

When it’s dark, she walks to the place where the theater used to be, a place where there was an empty lot and the base of a building, covered all over in graffiti. Marvin the Martian. A talking skunk. A robot. Names and dates and slogans in brightly colored paint.

She has passed this lot every day, and she was used to the pull and the longing and the memories of going to the theater with her boyfriend. Wearing his flannel shirt over her shoulders. Holding his hand and settling in, last row of the balcony.

Some days, the pull to be in his arms made her dizzy with ache.

She understood that everyone has some type of longing, desires, nostalgia. Almost everyone. That people have regrets and whisperings of what might have been circling in their minds before they go to sleep. 

Once, when she had a live-in lover, the sensation of her first beau was so strong that she looked in the bed to make sure it wasn’t him. Perhaps her current life was a dream, and her real life was the road she ought to have taken.

The ticket is in her change purse. But a part of her brain tells her this isn’t real. She’s day-dreaming, or truly dreaming, asleep at her desk or asleep in her bed.

But the other part of her brain knows that this feels real. The bright colors on the marquee and the scent of hot fresh popcorn are too true-to-life than the way dreams feel.

She looks around the neighborhood to see if there are any other changes she can spy, and what she sees is a small tree growing to the left of the building. A tree that is sturdy and old now. Magnolia petals dropping when she walks by the empty lot.

She hands the usher the ticket, and he tears it in half and gives her back the stub. “You’re sure you want to see this picture?” he asks her. And for a flash, he is featureless. A cutout, make-believe, cardboard stand-in. Blurry at the edges, as if seen only through water or tears.

When she nods, he says, “You have to say the words,” and he is becoming more solid by the second. Green eyes. Freckles. A missed button on his white shirt.

“Yes,” she says, and he smiles, and behind him she sees a flash of plaid flannel going around the corner, and she knows if she hurries, she can catch up.

She gives one last look over her shoulder at the rainy night, says a quiet goodbye, and walks inside.