Saccades Project

Sketch:

Thea and Cam go to NYC for the day. They leave early Saturday morning, arrive in Penn before noon, and hop the subway downtown. They go out for noodles near St. Mark’s; they take pictures of themselves in front of the Joe Strummer mural off Tompkins; and then they go shopping. Sometime around four o’clock, they make it to a store Thea’s been dying to visit for ages, or weeks, at least, and they’re a little intimidated, but not noticeably. One of the salesgirls approaches them, and she somehow gets to talking with Cam. He’s a little awkward, tries to make conversation, and Thea gets jealous. She ends up throwing a fit, because she feels he was ignoring her, openly, and kotowing to some skinny-ass salesgirl with a cockney accent and leather pants.

She doesn’t speak to him for the rest of the day. Not the whole ride home, on Amtrak, and not even when he tries to talk to her, parked in front of her apartment. He doesn’t understand why, claims she’s overreacting. Maybe, maybe not.

The next day, she finds a picture of Erin Wasson, who she cannot stand, and she prints out two hundred copies. She cuts the picture into circles, sized to fit the inside of a Dixie paper plate, which they have a good two hundred of, below the kitchen sink. And then, having read about Kubrick, having read that every page of the famous, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” scene was handtyped, she begins defacing Erin Wasson, the salesgirl.

Sunday night, Ray finishes watching the game on television, and knocks on her door. She says, “It’s open,” and he finds her there, sitting on her bed, with a spread of markers and glue and yarn, across her bed, and a good fifty paper plates already tacked to the wall, behind her bed. Raymond can’t speak. She waits, looking at him, completely non-plussed, and then, finally, Ray says, “I’m going to pick up your mother now.” And Thea says, “Okay. See you,” and she returns to her stack of paper plates.

Both sides misbehave. All the time.