to the CAT scan—Lexie has a blood clot in her brain that may or may not go away, but certainly not in time for her to compete (Ticking Clock redux).
Lexie goes tragically home to Iowa and becomes depressed, self-pitying, and feral, with matted hair. (Probable Producer comment: “She should be having a Helen Keller moment, here.” Screenwriter: “Agreed.”)
Enter Colleen Dewhurst in her trademarked characterization of the crusty New Englander Who Is Gruff and Difficult but Whose Heart Is Golden.
“You wanted to find a way out when you took that jump,” barks Crustbucket, baring her teeth. “Nobody’s going to blame an invalid for giving up,” she sneers.
(The classic “What are you, a Quitter?” speech. The Hollywood Formula pinball machine lights up! Ding ding ding! Extra balls!)
Sightless Lexie tries to punch and kick Colleen Dewhurst, who subdues her in a brutal rasslin’ hold. Both end up in tears à la Miracle Worker.
(“You’re crying,” whispered Ned, amused.
“I am not!” sniffed Liza, embarrassed, wiping her tear-slick cheeks on her sleeve.)
Act III Turning Point:
Nobody can persuade Lexie to get back on the ice, until… Robby Benson returns! Slighted boyfriend to the rescue! With just enough Love and Hate mixed together to berate and abuse blind Lexie back into championship condition, pitilessly barking out stadium dimensions so she can mentally calculate how many feet she has before she smacks the wall.
In just one week of hard work, Robby Benson’s fierce love saves the day. Nobody at the competition even knows Lexie is blind as she takes her final bow until she trips over the carnations that audiences can’t resist hurling at her, and can’t figure out how to stand back up. As she gropes around the ice on her knees, the entire screaming stadium falls into an abrupt, pin-dropping, cricket-chirping silence.
Robby walks out on to the ice and takes her groping hand.
He guides blind Lexie to the middle of the stadium, where the crowd goes wild again for the two of them, holding hands.
“Stay with me?” begs Lexie.
“You bet,” Robby Benson assures.
Roll credits to the sounds of “Through the Eyes of Love,” as sung by Melissa Manchester!
Liza, age ten, was devastated by the film’s beauty and power.
She wanted more than anything to go blind and have Robby Benson restore her, through Tough Love, to athletic championship, in both skating and gymnastics. She began singing the theme song, imitating the large, throaty warble and power-enunciations of Melissa Manchester around the house.
“That’s a hell of a voice you got there,” Johnny would say, and Liza would blush, then imagine herself with long, wavy hair, wearing an all-white fringe ensemble and holding a white tiger cub on her album cover, her slick lips parted, her eyes emanating prismic rays. Her album would be called, simply, Castles.
Johnny and Peppy bought stylish rings and moved with the kids into a condominium complex called The Snooty Fox in Sparks, NV. “Reno is so close to hell you can see Sparks,” went the classic joke. The children had to enter a new school district. Ned had fewer problems in new schools because he’d always been a freak, who eagerly sought out the company of kids with handicaps, harelips, or expansive facial birthmarks. Ned liked finding these people with whom striking up a new friendship was relatively easy.
Liza had more difficulty, socially. The provocative clothing Peppy routinely bought for her perplexed everyone but the black and Mexican fifth-grade girls, who embraced her immediately. The white girls decided that Liza was “a scrounge” and made it their business to exclude her. So Liza “went minority” for a couple of years, much to Peppy’s panic. She sang Michael Jackson songs from the Off the Wall LP with all the wet gasps and carnal hoots, and learned rhythmically advanced, contrapuntal, and pelvic jump rope jingles:
Ain’t yo mama pretty She got meatballs for her titty Scrambled eggs Between her legs Ain’t yo mama pretty
Liza also wrote hieroglyphic notes to girls named “Lil’ Pants,” and “LaFlamme” in an advanced lowrider graffito-font, which was illegible to authority figures, but if you had a Rosetta stone—like alphabet guide sheet, could be translated into several themes:
1. “Keshawn is so fine” (response: ferellfiner but he a dog)
2. “Diane think she so bad” (all flaring that booty in them stanky white jeans)
3. “What do you do if Michael Jackson came in your house?” (!!!! die????)
For the Normals, 1980 was a big year. Shortly before the June date that Peppy had arranged for them to go to the frontier-themed “Chapel-Chaparral” and get married, Johnny Budrone left. It was unannounced and unprovoked, according to Peppy, but it probably had something to do with the fact that he snooped into her bottom drawer and read her turquoise, pink, and lavender diaries and, thus informed, held her entire sex life previous to meeting him against her.
Dear Peppy
Sorry about everything not working out but theres many things a man shoud handel by himself and one thing is his “wife”. Also the back pain is to unbarable and I geuss I am just a Solitary Man by nature. No hard feelings & I hope the kids understand but I just can’t go threw with it. I’m truly sorry and I hope happiness comes your way for you do diserve it.
JB
The spittoon was devoid of black juice. Faded cowboy shirts hung like Mitchum-scented corpses in the closet. He took the burlap pillow with the owl on it, the Ranchero, Ned’s unused air gun, Peppy’s blondest wig. He left $1,600, in twenties, on the table with the note. Peppy was devastated. She made a lot of hysterical phone calls; sea lion orks of guttural despair came out from under the bedroom door.
She was unable to reconcile herself to life without the man with whom sex had been revelatory—a breakthrough connection with The Mysterious, on par with discussing God in sign language with a baboon. Possessing no internal emotional governor or reasonable boundaries, Peppy spun into an unchecked cyclone of outrage, prompting Sharon (the topless magician’s assistant and only witness to her first wedding) to pick up Ned and Liza and take them to Noreen’s house with a stack of Hungry-Man TV dinners. Peppy splintered glass ashtrays against the wall and railed against Johnny’s “chickenshit” emotional cowardice until her fellow tenants at the Snooty Fox had the police knock on her door. Fortunately, Sharon returned from Noreen’s at the right moment and was able to convince the cops she had “everything under control” by having them watch Peppy down two pheno-barbitals with a large glass of water. Peppy’s caterwauling rage finally sank beneath a toxic slumber, on the striped couch where there was still a concave imprint of Johnny.
The next day, awaking to the raw brain-wounds of the pill and grief hangover, Peppy took her Oldsmobile and drove for three and a half hours, deep into the Central Valley of California, near Chico, where she knew of a cliff in a town called Paradise where people went when they wanted to End Things. It was a beautiful valley; a miniature version of the Grand Canyon, writ green and Mediterranean. The whole surrounding area was flat and agricultural; a rich, honey-scented fiesta of almond orchards, rice paddies, and fast, cool tributaries of the Sacramento River, with small farms laid out in green patchwork under high small clouds. The valley came like a surprise: the ground ahead sank down abruptly, a mile-wide crack dipping deeply into the earth, where the trees looked sea blue and compact as broccoli. The place was now an infamous gawking landmark that the local government took no pains to put a guardrail around—the guardrail, they felt, would imply that they were somehow responsible for the ever-growing pile of mangled cars at the bottom of the gorge. Peppy knew about this popular suicide locale from her ex-boyfriend, the dirt-bike mechanic in nearby Williams. Most of the adults in the surrounding areas—Chico, Forest Hills—had considered this route, more