For Christmas, Mickey bought his mother a pair of earrings that looked like they had tiny diamonds in them. He got a carton of cigarettes for his uncle. He toyed with the idea of buying Earl a tie or something, but he hadn’t been around much after Thanksgiving and Mom seemed to be tired of him. Usually, she was distraught after one of their frequent break-ups. This time, she had nothing but ridicule for him. She didn’t like his hair or the way he had gotten fat or how he smelled or the kind of store he owned or his car or the movies he took her to. Earl was a loser, she claimed, and she was at a time of her life when she wanted to be with a winner.

During Christmas vacation, Mickey spent a lot of time at the library. He explored the idea of fixing that old projector and dug out some of the same books he had looked through before. Again, the closest he got was a picture of something similar made by Biddens and Sons of Chicago. This time, the picture gave him an idea and when he got home he got out the projector, looked it over carefully and found an engraved plate on its underside. The lettering was obscured by grime, and was rubbed away in places, but Mickey made out part of the name and was sure he saw the word “Chicago.”

The next day, he approached Miss Gallio and asked her how he could get in touch with the company that made his projector.

“If you go downtown to the main library,” she told him, “there are telephone books from every major city in the country.” She smiled. It would have had a pleasing effect if her teeth were whiter or straighter. Miss Gallio was always so neat and bright-eyed and kind in how she spoke to everyone, but her smile didn’t flatter her, Mickey realized.

“Do you think they’d help – Bidden company, I mean – if I wrote to them?” Mickey asked.

“I’m sure they would. Why don’t you ask your mother if you can go downtown with me sometime? I go there once every two weeks for meetings.”

Mickey shrugged.

“Want me to call and ask her?”

“She’s at work,” Mickey said. “She doesn’t like getting calls at work.”

“I’ll call your house in the evening.”

“She’ll probably say no.”

Miss Gallio smiled again. “I’ll bet she’ll be delighted with your initiative.” Mickey wanted to believe her. Why shouldn’t Mom give him permission to go someplace with the librarian. It was almost the same as going on a class field trip.

That evening, when Mom came home from work, she put together a quick spaghetti dinner, with a can of tomato sauce and one of string beans. “If I had a daughter, I bet she’d be putting supper on the table for me when I get home,” Mom said, voicing a complaint that had only recently become part of her nightly litany. Earl was out of her life, so she didn’t talk about him so much. She’d recently been promoted one grade level at work, so she was happy with her job and civil service in general.

“I can make supper,” Mickey offered.

Mom snorted at him. She gestured with a nod at the cupboards and he took that as his cue to set the table. “You’d burn every pot in the house,” she said. “Call your uncle up now.”

After dinner, Mickey watched the telephone, willing it to ring. When it did, he gave an involuntary shudder and Uncle Tony glanced curiously in his direction. Mom grabbed the telephone from the wall and cradled the receiver on her shoulder as she lit a cigarette and listened.

“Yes. I remember when we met,” Mom said, then listened some more before saying, “That’s nice that you offer, but I think I can take my son downtown if he wants to go.”

Mickey swallowed and pursed his lips.

Mom was nodding. “Yes, yes,” she said. “Thank you, Miss Gallio.” And she hung up the telephone. She took a drag on her cigarette and glared across the room at Mickey. In a few seconds she returned to the table and sat. She sipped at her glass of wine. She tossed her cigarette into the sink.

“That was Miss Gallio from the library, wasn’t it?” Mickey finally said.

“If you wanted to go to the library downtown, why didn’t you ask me? Why did you ask her?”

“I didn’t ask her. She offered.”

“You could have asked me,” Mom said.

“Can we go sometime?”

Mom flicked out her tongue and ran it across the top of her lower lip. “Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe if you’d ask me first instead of that librarian I would have said yes. As it is, you can wait until I’m damn good and ready to take you.” She narrowed her dark eyes at him. Suddenly, she slammed the flat of her hand on the tabletop, making the dishes rattle. “When I’m good and ready, that’s when you’ll go.”

“Which is never,” Mickey snapped at her and rose from the table.

Mom grabbed his wrist. “What did you say?” She stood over him. “Are you talking back?” She slapped him before he could answer. “Are you?”

“I-I’m not talking back,” he muttered. When she slapped him again, he blinked back his tears. She was red in the face now. He knew, if he cried, she’d stop hitting him. That’s what she wanted and he braced himself for another slap.

“You want me to take him?” Uncle Tony asked.

“He ain’t goin’!” Mom shouted. Uncle Tony sighed loudly. “You ain’t goin’. You hear me? Go on. Talk back one more time and I’ll get out the strap. You ain’t had a good lickin’ in a long time. You think you’re getting too old? No, sir. You certainly are not. Go on. Talk back one more time.”

Mickey bowed his head and stepped backwards to get away from her and walked around the table and headed for his room. He wouldn’t cry, he told himself. That was what she wanted and he wouldn’t do it, not in front of her.

When school resumed after New Years, Mickey joined the committee to plan the graduation ceremony for his sixth grade class, the class of 1957. They’d have a ceremony in the afternoon, followed by a party. Everyone would be encouraged to bring in cake or candy or something. They’d be able to put a tub of ice-cream in the freezer in the teacher’s lounge. They could have a record player and play music. Graduation was a time to celebrate, one of the teachers told them.

Being on the committee made Mickey feel more responsible and adult. There was a lot of planning to get done. They even had meetings after school with their teacher and the principal. During one of those meetings, Mickey noticed the school’s movie projector in his classroom. A movie about safety was planned for tomorrow, he had learned, which was why the projector had been wheeled into the room.

Trying not to arouse anyone’s suspicion, Mickey gravitated to the projector as the Graduation Committee meeting came to a close. As he suspected, this projector was made by Bidden and Sons. He saw the company name engraved in script on a brass plate across the bottom of the machine. On the cart, on one of the bottom shelves, there were some instruction booklets. There was also an overhead and a slide projector on the cart, so two of the booklets were for those machines.

“What are you going, Mickey?” Miss Harmon, the sixth grade teacher asked. “Don’t play with that. It’s not a toy.”

“I just want to see the instructions.” He grabbed at the one that had a cover with a picture of a projector. He opened it quickly, before anyone could stop him, and found what he was looking for. “I need to write this down,” he explained, and hurried over to his desk.

“What are you going?” Mr. Holbert demanded.

Mickey decided to tell him. “I want to write to the company that makes projectors and ask them a question.”

“Why?”

“So I can learn how to build one of these,” Mickey said.

Mr. Holbert and Miss Harmon laughed, as did the other children. Mickey didn’t care. He had an address for Biddens and Sons and that was what counted. That night, sitting at his desk, he carefully printed his letter, explaining to Mr. Biddens that he had an old time projector and he wanted to fix it and needed a picture of how it worked. When he finished the letter, he confided in his uncle, who suggested he tell the company the model number, which was engraved on the name plate.

“You can’t read it,” Mickey said.

“I’ll show you a trick,” Uncle Tony offered. He got a sheet of scratch paper and a pencil and made a rubbing of the name plate. The name of the company and the model number came up in sharp contrast on the sheet of paper, the letters a bold white against the dark pencil shading.

“That address,” Mickey said, pointing. “It’s different.”

“Because they probably moved since then. This projector was made 10 years ago, I bet.” Uncle Tony opened a drawer in the box atop his work table and gave Mickey a three-cent stamp. The next morning, on his way to school, Mickey mailed his letter. Three weeks later, he got a reply from someone named Gladys Laiman. It was a short letter thanking him for his interest in their older products and wishing him luck with his project, and a small cardboard box of assorted parts that Laiman had found in the warehouse. There was also an old instruction manual that was yellow from age. In it, Mickey found a blow-up of his projector, with each part expertly drawn and identified.

Ecstatic, he ran to the library after supper that evening and showed Miss Gallio the letter and the booklet. She hugged him – the first time ever she had done that! And Mickey raced home to start work on the projector.

The spare parts were all he needed. There was a tube with a lens to replace the broken one. The blow-up diagram showed him how the crank worked. There was a grooved wheel and a black rubber band to use for the pulley. The band was rounded and fit precisely into the wheel’s groove. Carefully, using his uncle’s tools, he unscrewed and unbolted, made adjustments where he thought they should be made, replaced the lens tube, and cleaned the slide where the film would go. When he was certain he had fixed everything possible, he loaded the take-up reel on the bottom arm and a short eight-millimeter movie reel on the other arm, then threaded the film carefully into the slide. When he cranked the arm, the film advanced, the take-up reel doing its job of pulling the film along.

For the final test, he plugged the projector’s cord into an outlet. Nothing happened. No light. He checked for an “on” button. There was none. He looked at the instruction booklet. According to it, the projector’s lamp would turn on when he plugged it in. There was a drawing showing a hand and lightning bolt-type lines indicating a flash from the enclosed light bulb at the back of the machine.

Mickey pried off the top and unscrewed the bulb. It rattled. He checked the wattage. He couldn’t read it. The bulb was black on top and the lettering was obscured. He leafed through the booklet and found that he needed a twenty-five watt bulb. Anything higher, the instructions warned, and the film could be set on fire.

Since it was close to midnight, Mickey didn’t want to take a chance on being caught by Mom and sent to bed. He was determined to finish the projector tonight. Months had slipped by without any progress. Now that he was nearly done…

He went downstairs into the basement. A dim bulb shone above the coal bin. Mickey had a flashlight, which he pointed at the wooden shelves set against the earthen walls. Now and then he heard something scurry away. He checked his feet. The worse part about the rats was when they ran over your feet, even when you wore shoes.

When he found the box of light bulbs, Mickey quickly searched for the size he needed. There were a lot of fifty-watt bulbs, a couple of thirty-fives, one fifteen. And, one twenty-five. He ran back upstairs, the bulb in his hand.

Mom stood at the work table, fingering the instruction booklet, looking at the projector. She had probably been sleeping. She wore a long, flannel nightgown and she had bunny-face slippers on her feet. Her cigarette glowed in the dim light as she smoked it.

“I’m just getting ready for bed,” Mickey said.

“What’re you doing?” she asked, her voice hoarse. “Building something?”

“The projector Uncle Tony gave me.”

Mom nodded. “Does it work?”

“Almost.” Mickey screwed in the light bulb. It brightened under his fingers. The reflectors in the housing made the twenty-five watts erupt like an arc-light. He covered it, one hand shading his eyes. The figures in the eight-millimeter film were thrown against the wall.

Mom snickered. “That’s Laurel and Hardy.”

She pointed. Mickey cranked the film and the two men sauntered down a street. A piano suddenly fell, just missing Laurel when he turned to his rotund companion to say something.

Mom laughed. She stubbed out her cigarette. “I’ll get you an old sheet you can use as a screen.”

“Really? Mickey asked. “Great.”

“Tomorrow. It’s bedtime for you now.”

Mickey unplugged the projector. He wasn’t sure what to do about the film, but Mom told him to crank all of it to the take-up reel and he could rewind it back to the smaller reel later. Once he had the projector back in its box, along with the reels of film, he and Mom headed upstairs together. When the weekend came, Mom gave him a large piece of white linen, which he tacked to the wall in the living room. For the rest of the evening, until Mom left with Earl and Uncle Tony left to drink at the corner bar, Mickey entertained the family with his small collection of silent films. He beamed when they applauded. He proudly explained to Uncle Tony how he had fixed the projector. He wanted to invite Miss Gallio to see it, but Mom vetoed the idea. She didn’t want strangers in the house when no one was home.

How he’d find more old films, Mickey didn’t know. Maybe he could borrow them from the library, like he secretly borrowed books. Maybe he could buy them at the used book and magazine store. Maybe he could find a stash of these on one of his weekend trash-picking trips with Uncle Tony.

Then, later in the week, when he came home from school, he saw his projector on display in the store’s window. A hand-lettered sign propped against its base said, “$25.00.”

“Uncle Tony,” Mickey said, bursting into the store. He looked around for customers. There were none. His uncle sat in the back, leafing through the newspaper. “Why are you selling the projector?”

“It’s fixed, ain’t it?”

“I thought you gave it to me.”

Uncle Tony held his long face on a slant. He set the newspaper on his lap. “I gave it to you to fix. Don’t worry, you’ll get some money when we sell it.”

“I want the projector,” Mickey whined.

“You want it?” Uncle Tony stood. The newspaper fell to the floor. He stooped, picked it up, rolled it up as though he was going to use it as a weapon, and said, “For what? You saw the movies. They’re just silent films. How many times are you going to watch them?”

“We can get more,” Mickey explained.

Uncle Tony shook his head. “I’d rather get something for your efforts. Twenty-five bucks is half the monthly mortgage. You know that?”

Mickey shook his head.

“Maybe it’s about time you learned about those things,” Uncle Tony said. “Better get upstairs and do your homework before your mom gets home.” He gestured at the stairs by pointing his chin in that direction. Mickey glanced back at the display window with its old electric motors and lamps and his projector, these beacons that brought passers-by into the store.

“It’s spring, that’s why,” Mom explained. She had a broom in one hand and a dust pan in another. Uncle Tony sat at the kitchen table and shook his head. It was Sunday and the store was closed, but Mom wanted her brother and her son busy cleaning house. Mickey had the shed. There were old magazines, rags, broken toys, and sundry other items to be packed into cardboard boxes and carried out on trash day. Mickey laughed when he thought of some other junk store owner roaming their street and picking through their discards. They wouldn’t find anything of value, he thought with a smile.

Uncle Tony had the basement. Mom took care of the apartment, but when Mickey finished downstairs, he hurried up to help her. She always had a pile of old clothes that she liked to bundle and take to the Salvation Army. “Doing a bit of charity once a year ain’t gonna kill us,” she always told Mickey. “That’s my religion, you know. Charity. Once a year, at least.”

Sometimes Mickey contributed clothes he had outgrown, though Mom always tried to salvage them by taking out the seat or lengthening the legs or otherwise adjusting the garment. She was good with pants, but not too adept at fixing jackets. She cried when he outgrew his one suit, but reminded Mickey that he still had a sports coat that fit him.

“Help me with this.” Mom Stood at the narrow closet built into the wall. It had three high shelves, which she could reach when she used a step-ladder. “I can’t get this down.”

Mickey was nearly as tall as his mom, but his reach was slightly longer and he could stretch, so he got on the stepladder and at her direction took down the cardboard boxes stashed on the top shelf. He set them alongside her bed. Mom pulled a fuzzy looking, off-green colored stole from one of them, a wide brimmed hat with a feather popped out next. Mickey wondered if people really wore these things or if they came from some show or Halloween party.

Donning the stole, wrapping it about her neck, and putting on the hat, Mom stood in front of her full length mirror and posed, her thick hips thrust out in one direction and then in another. Mickey stood by the closet, watching.

“Don’t just look at me,” she said, pointing at his reflection in the tall mirror. “Get all those boxes down.”

“They are,” he said.

Mom sat on the bed, tossed the hat aside, moved the stole out of the way, and rifled through one of the boxes, then another. “I oughta get rid of this junk.” She pulled out a green, leather bound book. Mickey had seen it before. Once, she had shared it with him. It was her high school yearbook. She didn’t spend much time with it now. She went to a small shoebox, opened it, and sorted through the loose photographs stored there. Some she looked at for only a second; others she stared at much longer.

“Who are those people, Mom?”

“Your relatives.” She padded the mattress to indicate that he should sit beside her. He did so and she showed him the old photographs. They were in black-and-white. Some were brownish in color. Some had black edges, as though they were getting moldy. A few had printing on the reverse side. Mickey tried to take one from Mom and check the back side, but she wouldn’t let him.

“But who are they?” he asked.

“Aunt Louisa. Uncle Sam. My aunt and uncle, actually. Your great-aunt, great-uncle.”

“Are they still alive?”

Mom shrugged. “They could be dead for all I care.” She came across a picture of a woman in uniform. She was a tall, thin woman. Behind her was an army barracks. “Her name was Gloria,” Mom whispered. She cradled the picture. “I knew her during the war.” Mom put the picture on her lap and stared down at it for a moment.

“Any pictures of my father in there?” Mickey asked.

Mom’s face wrinkled and she pressed her lips together and shook her head. “Why do you have to ask that for? I’ve told you, there ain’t no pictures of him.”

“Just asked.”

“Just asked? Don’t. Don’t you understand?” she hissed. “Don’t ask about pictures of your father!”

“I just want to know what he looked like.”

Mom grabbed Mickey by the arm. “Want to know what he looked like?” She dragged him to the full length mirror and pressed his face against the glass. “Look at yourself! Just keep looking at yourself. That’s what he looked like.” She banged his forehead into the mirror, pulled him away from the glass and shoved him across the room. Mickey hit the wall. Pain shot through his shoulder. He saw himself then in the mirror, his face red, his eyes wide.

“You don’t need to ask me the same damn thing over and over again,” Mom screamed.

Mickey refused to cry. He stood. He rubbed his sore shoulder. He saw in the mirror that his forehead was bruised. He glowered at his mom. He moistened his lips and said, “I hate you.”

“You hate me?” she screamed at him. “Me? You little bastard. You unappreciative, inconsiderate bastard.” She lunged at Mickey, but he slipped out of her grasp. When she tried to slap him, he darted away and took refuge on the other side of the room, standing on her bed, balancing himself so he didn’t fall.

“What do I got?” Mom continued to rage. “A kid who don’t care and a brother who can’t wipe his ass without me.” She sat on the floor, her face contorted with sobs that wracked her body, her breasts heaving under her housecoat, her wide back rising and falling as she cried, her rage unconcealed, her eyes glaring at Mickey, who slipped around on the other side of the room to get to the door.

“Bastard!” Mom screamed. “I wish you’d never been born.”

Mickey bolted for the open door and ran into the kitchen. Uncle Tony stood at the top of the steps leading down to the store. “What happened?” Uncle Tony asked.

“I hate her,” Mickey said. “I hate her. I hate her.” He let loose his tears and ran to his room. Uncle Tony stopped him, but Mickey didn’t want to be held, didn’t want his solace. He broke free. Uncle Tony went to mom and Mickey looked back and watched as his uncle knelt and take her into his arms. She continued to cry. She whimpered as Uncle Tony gathered her up into his arms and held her tightly, her face in his shoulder and his arms around her body.