Drive-In Movie

All my life whenever my mother entered the room, and no matter how large the room, it immediately shrank and felt too small. Her way of moving through the world was like the gigantic bodies flashing on a drive-in movie screen. What the bodies did to and with one another looked private, intimate, and yet the screen made them so large, so public that their bodies overwhelmed the darkness and filled the whole horizon.

I see my mother that way too—after all, my parents ran a drive-in movie theater from the time I was born until I was seven years old. I went to the movies every night, since my parents couldn’t afford babysitters. My bed was the back window well of our old green Plymouth. My twin brother curled up on one half while I slept on the other, the tops of our heads nearly touching. Our older brother slept on the back seat below us. Just as dusk fell, they’d leave us there, well tucked in.

My mother went to help with the snack bar while my father ran the projector. The screen would start flickering, the movie music would swell out of the steel, pock-faced speaker hung from the partially rolled-up window, and then I’d be out, the voices of the actors mixing with the voices in my dreams. My father was a quiet man who used words to arrange things, while my mother loved words for how they deranged them. In my ears the movie voices and my mother’s voice melded together, larger than life but unsettlingly familiar.

The movie overwhelmed my senses by night, even as my mother overwhelmed them by day. My whole life long, I’ve desired and resisted that feeling of engulfment. It’s been solacing at times, at other times threatening—and when I was in my forties, devastating.

Let me try to explain: one of my earliest memories is of riding a tricycle in our patchy front lawn, the whole of Texas sprawled around, the grass scorched from the sun. But instead of expanding space, I feel her shadow looming over me, her ample bosom and belly making all out of doors seem cramped. In those days, the late 1950s, I remember the neighbor lady whispering to another lady that my mother was “fat.” I’m not sure I understood what “fat” meant, but I knew it was meant to shame. Over the years, she herself sometimes said she was fat, mainly to my dad, and would promise to lose weight. But my father, who genuinely didn’t care, would only say, “You look fine to me.” But she persisted, trying out Metrecal, abandoning it for Weight Watchers. She’d lose twenty pounds, then gain it back.

Broad forehead, a nose large and mottled blue from skin grafts, her lips full and sensual, my mother’s eyes, gray-blue, project an inner light that heralds her intelligence. She reminds me of a painting of Mary Magdalene, one of Piero della Francesca’s big-boned, fleshy, fiercely physical women: sturdy legs, broad shoulders, a strong neck. Which brings me to the tricky part of feeling engulfed by my mother’s body, and her gift to me of words—for the words and her body were intertwined.

When I was four, she taught me phonics with flashcards, my throat and tongue and lips mobilized in a kind of game we played together. All barriers fell away between us, her face softened, the tension in her shoulders lifted, and being with her was intimate and helpful, a cure you didn’t notice happening. When I put my tongue to my teeth to say th, or touched my bottom teeth to my upper lip to say ph, it was like repeating a magic spell that tamed her anger, if only for the length of our sessions. Patience toward a student, even if it was her own child, seemed far easier for her to manage. Our bodies making sounds together allowed me an intimacy just the opposite of being hugged. Whenever she tried to put her arms around me, I felt overwhelmed, invaded, and shrank away.

Once I’d learned to read at five, the sessions stopped for good. And it wasn’t until years later that Thoreau brought back our shared intimacy, if only for those few uncanny minutes when she read aloud to me—minutes that led me to be a poet and that have shaped my entire life.

Here is a poem:

Excerpted with permission from Rosie: A Memoir of Farewell by Tom Sleigh, published by Unbound Edition Press, 2026. Previously Tom Sleigh took The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire.

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