Divya Srinivasan
Divya Srinivasan

My parents have rented a house on Cape Cod. The drive from Washington, D.C., is impossibly long; we know that my father is getting hungry when he starts reading road signs out loud. He misquotes the Howard Johnson’s slogan (“Someone you know wherever you go”) as “Someone you know wherever you are.” We will tease him about this for years. The HoJo cola is flat, too sweet, almost pruney. Everyone except me has a fried-clam sandwich on a hot-dog roll with a blunt, squared-off end. The allure of fried rubber bands is (and remains) lost on me. At a motel somewhere in Connecticut, I am assigned the cot, because no one is willing to share a bed with me—I kick. The drinking glasses are wrapped in white paper bags; the toilet seat has a band around it, indicating cleanliness. Our car is parked right outside the door.

In the living room of the Wellfleet house, a single large pane of glass overlooks Cape Cod Bay. At night, the window is like an enormous television set on which I watch the reflections of my family: my mother and my brother at a table sifting through puzzle pieces, my father sketchbook in hand—his inky lines scratching out a version of my mother that she will insist looks nothing like her. “I am not that fat—am I?”

This is the summer that I know more than I can understand; I’m on the cusp of something. I stand at the edge of the ocean. The water is painfully cold; the tide sucks my ankles into the sand. My brother and I dare each other to go all the way in.

It is evening; we are going out with my parents. We are going because we know no babysitter here and we are not old enough to be left alone. For some reason, I am wearing my pajamas. My brother and I have brought pillows and blankets in the car. My father parks in a field, punctuated by metal speaker poles, facing a huge blank white billboard. There are people picnicking; others have set up folding lawn chairs next to their cars. Their faces are flushed—too many hours in the sun. The atmosphere is like a carnival. Someone sips from a flask, trying so hard to be inconspicuous that my eyes immediately go there. My father and I walk around. My brother, who is just enough older than me to be perpetually embarrassed by everything, stays in the car with my mother. I am being allowed a taste of a more adult world, but walking in my pajamas, in the twilight, I am not passing. I am being escorted by my father, who is humoring me. We are killing time, waiting for it to get dark so that the movie can start. On the program tonight is Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde”—the movie that redefined the standard for violence in film.

As the light fades and the first stars come out, the movie begins. It is thrilling, larger than life, romantic—heightened by the night air, by the vastness of the screen. For the first time, I understand the concepts of sexiness and attraction—Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty emanate both. In the beginning, there is something fun about the movie—madcap, Keystone Cops, outlaw heroes, the chase. I sit in the back seat with my brother eating penny candy: Pixie Stix, Atomic Fire Balls, root-beer barrels, Lik-m-aid. And then I am afraid, overwhelmed. During the parts of the film that I don’t like, I duck down in the seat; the sound of gunfire—blasting from the metal box just in front of my left ear, tinny, too loud—is inescapable. I look to the sky for relief; there are thin white clouds, a three-quarter moon. I look above the screen and there are stars: there is a world beyond this one. I sleep. In what feels like the middle of the night—the sound of fresh gunfire wakes me—my eyes open and, with a sick sensation, I see that Bonnie and Clyde are dead. More than killed—overkilled.

Remembering this now, I am not sure if they were inside their car or just next to it. I call my mother. Remind me of the summer we went to Wellfleet and saw “Bonnie and Clyde” at the drive-in, I tell her. “I have no memory of it,” she says. “But, if you say it happened, it must be true.” ♦