Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) by Delia Ephron Read Free Book Online

preparing to survive a catastrophe, natural or terrorist, that results in an all-systems failure (banks, phones, food, transportation, breathing, whatever). Mr. Edwards said he went to see the movie
Deliverance
when he was ten years old . . . went in, according to the article, a fairly regular kid and emerged a Prepper.
    “Ten” did pop out at me. I was ten when
Seven Brides
overwhelmed, seduced, and altered my life. He was tenwhen he saw
Deliverance
. I asked a developmental psychologist about ten. A big year, it turns out, when children first begin to think for themselves, entertaining ideas different from what their parents tell them. Budding sexuality, too. First feelings.
Deliverance
has a male rape in it—no wonder Edwards emerged a Prepper. I’m surprised more men didn’t, but then it had an R rating. Ten-year-old Aton Edwards never should have been in that theater.
    I do wonder if you spend your life preparing for disaster if you are disappointed if a disaster doesn’t happen. If you are hoping for a disaster so you haven’t wasted your time or can prove you’re right or can finally have the adventure you crave or get to watch everyone else go down while you inflate your raft, load it up with gas masks and cans of tuna fish, and sail off Manhattan island (row, actually—row across the Hudson to New Jersey, are they kidding?).
    The impact of
Seven Brides
was undoubtedly greater because I saw it in a theater as opposed to on a DVD, as opposed to lying on a bed, where I can say to whomever I’m watching with, “Would you please pause it? I want to get an apple.”
    As for romantic films being denigrated as chick flicks, consider this. My adolescent yearnings aside, whenyou’re looking for love, aspiring to love, hoping for love, dreaming of love, movies are where it seems possible. When you’re past the “falling” phase and in the calmer yet more complicated “being in love” (assuming you’re committed to it), the only place you ever fall in love again is at the movies.
    That is no small thing.
    I blame my entire twenties walkabout on
Seven Brides
. On hoping some man was going to whisk me out a window and in the spring we would be singing with little baby lambs on our laps. (That happens, too, in
Seven Brides
. Oh God, I really do hope I haven’t ruined the movie for you. I haven’t even mentioned the fantastic sequence when the lonely brothers in the dead of winter sing “I’m a lonesome polecat.” There, I’ve mentioned it. Although there is no ruining this movie. Trust a woman who has now seen it thirty times or more. I did eventually stop counting.)
    When Howard Keel didn’t show up, I pretended he did. I married the first man who asked me and began living someone else’s life. Not Jane Powell’s, but sort of. Marrying this man for misguided reasons wasn’t the nicest thing to do to him, but, like Howard Keel, he had ulterior motives. Not wanting to be alone, I think.Besides, as you will soon see, while I wasted six years of his life, he wanted to wreck mine completely.
    He was a professor at Brown University. Given how little I liked college, this was even weirder—I was a faculty wife living in a pretty but precious neighborhood around the university in Providence, Rhode Island.
    While I had had no passion for Barnard, I had fallen head over heels for New York City. If New York is for you, nothing else will do. The beauty, the excitement, the friction. The thrill of mastery—not simply navigating the subway system, for instance, but knowing exactly where to get on a train so that, when you reach your destination and get off, you are exactly opposite the exit. I can’t tell you how good that always makes me feel, that I know something that no one else knows except another New Yorker. Mostly, however, loving New York is personal: the validation of identity. New Yorkers are born all over the country and then they come to the city and it strikes them, “Oh, this is who I am.”
    At