Honeymoon Sweet
by Moira Brown
The weekend following my twenty-fourth birthday is the weekend I go honeymooning with my sister. The Executive Suite at the Motor Court Motel in London, Ontario, looks something like the dream realm. Wood panelling, patterned carpet clashing patterned linens, heart-shaped jacuzzi, too many mirrors. The air is thick and smells smoky, and everything is a little sticky. I am seduced by the fantastic ugly.
My sister and I share comfort in the sleaze. We indulge in indoor cigarettes, cheap wine in cheap plastic cups, and pretentious conversation. There is also a shared tension which I think comes from being surrounded by mirrored selves, and we respond to this with avoidance and cautious narcissism. In the future, I will replay footage of the sleazy smoking, drinking, and chatting and cringe at the frames which expose this. At frame 5:32, I will glance over one shoulder and stomach suck. At frame 17:56 she will adjust her facial geometry. In too many frames, my gaze will be so slightly offset from my sisters as I engage in performative conversation with myself. In too too many frames, our shoulders will hunch in discomfort, amongst other displays of quiet recoil.
I can’t recall when, but at some point, I started calling my sister “my sister, the poem” or “the poem” for short. I think because I perceive her life as very sad, and I prefer a sadness that is also romantic. It could also be for the reason that she is very good at writing poems. In childhood, the poem and I, we were enemies. We communicated predominately through routine experiments in violence, and our warfare was creative and distinct from one another. I opted for physicality and theatrics. She met my freakish attacks with cleverly plotted psychological battery. We hated each other, a lot. Our shared bedroom was messy and full of hate.
When I first befriended the poem, we were infant adults and we mostly just drank and practiced being victims. We would bitch about our upbringing, men, bipolar, Toronto rent… all that banal bullshit. We’d whine about how impossible life is and flip-flop between naive certainty and self-doubt. We were supposed to be precocious and prolific by then, but instead we’d just sit, and drink, and bitch.
London, Ontario, is where our Granny B lived. We are visiting in part to collect material for a documentary titled Janice Plays Piano (by me) or Cigarettes, Sunflowers, and The Meaning of Life (by the poem). I imagine Granny B would disapprove of both titles. Janice Brown was a dichotomous woman who was horrible and inappropriate (and many other things). Despite this, the poem and I often reference her as the one who made us feel most loved.
The air is getting thicker. We cheers to Janice and offer her second-hand ghost smoke. We discuss Janice’s artistic lifestyle. When we were small and she was alive, she spoiled us with trips to the theatre as often as she made us complicit in the petty theft of fast-food serviettes. She fed us slop on fine china, set proper with those little spoons and salad forks. She lived for the experience of luxury.
Now we are big and she is dead. We speak with our noses high and with exaggerated hand gestures, sometimes in a synchronized possession. We sip the wine as if it were finely aged and made from Ruby Roman grapes.
The next day we wake early and collect footage from around the city. We assign meaning to the signs of streets and shops and random reoccurring appearances of the swan—a motif! We document everything.
We visit London landmarks such as the Holly Roller in Victoria Park and Prince Albert’s Diner. The geography of the city seems both familiar and unfamiliar. Everything is the same but somehow seems small and unspecial. We re-enact memory from afar behind masks and plexiglass. We try out several techniques in spinning mundane into theatre. We question the ethics of the documentarian, recognizing how theatrical and fragile memory is, and the character we are building of Janice Brown is just that—a character.
Janice Brown wasn’t horrible, really. However, she certainly exhibited inappropriate behaviour.
EXHIBIT A:
Between bites of breakfast, she once lectured my father about chosen misery. She loudly mourned the loss of his former trumpet-playing girlfriend, whom she preferred to his wife and their byproducts who sat at her table. Naturally, my mother cried, and my sister and I sat in quiet confusion, picking at our cheerios.
She said things like this regularly with casual demeanour.
EXHIBIT B:
Too soon after arriving at some London playground, I had to pee. I was firmly told to hold in the pee. I retaliated with fussy crying which she loathed. Children should be seen and not heard—a tired and treasured Janice Brown idiom. She then placed me in the middle of the adjacent soccer field and yanked my pants down so that I could piss all over them, as opposed to in them. Other children watched from the monkey bars and that twirly whirly thing. The walk back to her apartment was soggy and short.
She did things like this with a casual regularity which occasionally got her grounded from grandmotherhood (unsupervised visiting privileges revoked).
In between shooting locations, we take a break from memory. Waiting for the bus, we meet someone called Flower of Mary. Flower of Mary insists on paying our fare since the women’s shelter gives her bus tickets in plenty. Her and I exchange some intimate autobiography while the poem quietly observes the overshare. We smile, laugh, and nearly cry within a five-minute span until we board and sit on opposite ends of the bus.
I generally enjoy the bus but the poem and I agree that a car would have been an asset. If we had a car, we could have scoped out other potential filming locations like Port Burwell or Storybook Gardens. I imagine the poem on the wheel and my camera steadied on the passenger window: Southern Ontario shot in motion.
Image by Moira Brown
A man who finds pleasure in buying groceries and gifts for the poem had driven us to The Motor Court in a shiny car. When we stopped for gas I bought him a coffee, extra-large, which was really just a cheap power move disguised as gratitude. The car conversation was pleasant enough, but I hadn’t entirely decided if he seemed fine. I remained a quasi-skeptic. Negligently, I spent the rest of the drive asleep on heated leather seats, like a drooling cherub sleeping in the hands of god.
Here in the present, the poem and I don’t speak. She records the sounds of the bus. I imagine a scene shot at Storybook Gardens. It’s a re-enactment where we take shots of space without subject and later impose puppets or animated sketches. Little me is attacked by a swan I am chasing. Granny B comes and rescues. She points her puppet finger and says, “swans, like people, are exceptionally beautiful and therefore very mean.” I sometimes quote this and do so in varied contexts. I don’t know why, because like, are swans even that good-looking? They’re just feathers and a lot of neck.
Like all good documentarians, we engage in some light trespassing. We sit in her backyard which used to be soil for sunflowers and is now gravel and spray-paint for insurance customers’ cars. There is some forced and tacky reminiscing for the camera. The yard, that is no longer a yard, has little cinematic tone nor evidence of haunting.
After circling the property, we take stock of the past tenants of 288 Central. We suspect that Granny B was in love with tenant A despite him being much too young and much too gay. To our knowledge she was unable to seduce him, but we recall another scheme in which she attempted to match-make tenant A with my, married-to-my-mother, father.
Janice Brown was a divorcee in the sixties who never remarried, sometimes fucked younger men, and sometimes attempted death in manic depression and heartbreak. As a character, we see Janice Brown as a lonely hysteric, besotted with unavailable gay men and a cheating ex-husband FOREVER AND EVER LA FIN. Basically, the poem and I feel like this Janice Brown death and drama character sometimes. This is basically stupid because neither of us are divorced. The narrative of “the unavailable gay man” doesn’t resonate. We did inherit some of the hysteria, unfortunately.
I am in the future again, warming up for the rigmarole of post-production. I freeze on a frame in which my sister takes a sneaky selfie. Foremost, I am shocked since I have never known the poem to be a real millennial, but rather someone from another point in time or another planet of higher sophistication. Then there is the speculative worry of who for? Not the chauffeur, doubt it.
An egregious mental montage follows: a sequence of salt-and-pepper men, vignette jumping into vignette, my sister black, blue and nearly blinded. The men are more or less the same swan. I return to my body and refocus on the timeline in front of me. Resume.
Back at the motel we drink like Janice did, without any sense of pace or surrender. This is a birthday trip, after all. Cue the self-pitying self-reflection! I had spent the larger body of my twenty-third year in my child body, which books and white coats tell me is synonymous with flashback. The year was torpid-horrid and I spent much of it inward and desperate. Specifically, I was desperate in my lousy attempts of reclaiming some sense of womanhood… whatever it is “womanhood” means. More aptly, I was mourning some past slutty freedom. For me, sexual dysfunction is as ashamed as sexual assault, but for me I guess the two are the same shame.
I don’t pair this with a mental montage. I don’t reflect on archetypes or swans. I don’t think so much. It just kind of sits.
Future poem and I will sit one night after an afternoon of scriptwriting and song rehearsal. She will roll a phoney cigarette with marshmallow root and we will pretend that we won’t smoke tar and nicotine later. In front of projected Super8 featuring our little selves circa 1999, we will smoke the marshmallows and gab about our nasty sisterhood. She will then say something that makes so much sense I will later repeat it to myself, paraphrased, on loop.
That hate we gave to each other was probably just the hate we didn’t feel safe giving to anyone else.
Projected little poem will begin to speak but little me will interject. I will absorb the frame and little poem will disappear. The mic will pick up my obnoxious warbling and nothing else. Many of the tapes will be like this. Little me whoring the spotlight, and little poem somewhere in the backdrop, on the verge of saying something profound.
There’s a narrative I’m committed to titled Solo Honeymoon. The solo honeymooning character is dressed and styled like a sixties pinup and she drinks gin and smokes cigarettes. I think she is called French, or maybe Frenchie. I take some self-portraits of French, pouting and blowing smoke at her reflection. She sits in bubbles and attempts to look seductive and powerful, and also a little bit tragic. My sister helps with the photography.
The next morning, I scrub through my camera. There are a couple photos of French that I deem successful, but they are mostly too soft-focused. French mostly looks like she’s smelling sour milk and not at all pouty or penthouse.
My sister and I drink coffee and swing on the swings on the Motor Court lawn. We laugh over the photos. Some less choreographed shots of my sister are particularly stunning. I show them to her and she half smiles. A beautiful person recognizing their own beauty is a beautiful and favourite thing.
I buy more bubbles and return to the suite. My sister and I clean, stretch, and write—in that order. We cue the jacuzzi jets. We take photos both together and apart. The photos are half-smiles and perfectly crisp.
This story was titled by Emma Brown after hearing its first draft scribbles at the Motor Court Motel (London, Ontario) in 2020.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
Creator photo by David Xavier
Moira Brown is an interdisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and writer, living sometimes in Tiotià:ke (Montréal) and sometimes in Tkaronto (Toronto). Moira finds comfort in a creative practice which explores uncomfortability in perceptions of the self and perceptions of socio-political landscapes. They are forever bound by the aesthetics of glamour and disgust, and take interest in the thinning and thickening line between the two. Moira is currently working on their first feature-length film. bymoirabrown.com