'Red Sparrow,' a Love Story

My mother visits me at college, as she does on occasion, when I call to announce to her that I am once again rebuilding my life from scratch. In years prior, these phone calls have been a scream up from the wreckage some ill-fated love affair or another had left me eyeball-deep in. This time, it is not so. This time, love has left me with a treasure map, and I am simply asking her to teach me to read it, to help me find my way home.

We go to a seedy Mexican restaurant, out of place as it rests in the crook of the Canadian border in the heart of my college town. We order blood orange margaritas, as thick and crimson as the nail polish on my tattered hands. Our tongues pickle in tequila; this is a drinking town and every bartender is born with a heavy hand. I wince. This is too strong for being out to dinner with your mother.

“You don’t have to finish it if you don’t want to,” she says. But it sounds like she’s talking about more than the glass in my hand—sounds like she’s talking about the move. So I down my margarita voracious, until I’m left staring at this woman, whose only resemblance to me, is that she wears my face. I realize that I am staring at a stranger, she lived a whole life before me, a life I will only ever hear of in edits and revisions. I will only ever know all the best versions of her, because I was not around to know any different. Realizing that your mother was once your age is unsettling. I think about it a lot lately.

The more I look, the more resemblance I find. Her lips also stretch a little too wide, her cheeks glow a little too blush with each sip, like mine. We have a way of giggling between our words, as if it were some dialect that belonged to only us. I’m not sure if we do this because we find the world hilarious or if sometimes the weight of it all makes us too nervous to speak.

My mother tells me the same stories every time I see her. These tales are weather worn and dog eared reminders that nothing of note happens to my mother any more that the rest of the family is not included in. Somewhere along the way “her” stories became “our” stories. And I can no longer tell if this is poetic or heartbreaking.

“The first time I got drunk…” my mother tells me for the thousandth time in my young life. I let her tell her stories though, I never interrupt. It is important that she says these things, no matter how many times I’ve heard them. I think it is important for her to remember herself as young. My mother would have been that girl at the party that drinks and then tells the same stories to the same people, a beautiful and broken record. And the same people would have always laughed anyway because she was so beautiful, how could you help it?

If me and my mother had been the same age, I don’t think we would have been friends. Despite my best feminist efforts, I have never gotten along with other girls. Beneath the smile lines and the age-spattered freckles, you can still see it sometimes, the girl she used to be: a John Hughes princess, boy crazed, mean, and klutzy. Me and my mother would not have spoken the same language. I believe that God sent me to her to show her the world. How else would she have seen it otherwise?

We walk to the movie theater. We make a habit of only seeing movies no one in their right mind would go see with their parent; Neighbors, Why Him?, and now Red Sparrow. This movie seems to be crossing all the lines though. My face is glowing crimson as the movie’s title in the dark of the theater. Jennifer Lawrence, in her hackneyed Russian accent, is sitting on a desk in front of her class, legs splayed, hiding nothing. Her would-be assaulter blanches, tooth white, and stumbles from the room. Lawrence sits unmoved, poker faced, eyes streetwalker cold. The man wasn’t interested in her at all. “Power,” she says. “That’s what he wants.” This is what her character, a spy specialized in seductive espionage, wants too. Power, nothing too grand, just perhaps control over her own life.

Watching this scene, I cannot help but wonder what my mother thinks of it. My mother is happy, but there is very little in her own life that she has control over. She is a housewife with a pre-school job, a woman married when she was my age to a man with a too-loud voice. I want to ask her if there was ever a moment in her life where she felt powerful, but I doubt that she would be able to answer me, doubt that she would understand the meaning of the word as I speak it. So I stay silent.

I text the treasure map boy; the boy who has marked home as an X on a map and told me I could meet him there. He is far away now, but we are constructing date plans for when I see him next, in a month and three weeks. Some days I feel like an architect, meticulously sketching out plans for something that is still so frustratingly hypothetical. I can see it all mapped out in my mind’s eye but I can’t touch any of it yet. What I wouldn’t give to be able to, to reach out my hand and find his fingers, his arms, the peach fuzz of his buzz cut. But it is still winter, graduation still just a fever dream. My fingers find a phone and little else to hold on to. But it is everything for now.

I have, in my life, felt powerful. This year is not one of those times. I have felt powerful, yes, but never as happy as I do right now. I stare at Jennifer Lawrence staring at her murdered roommate, the body bobbing in a bathtub of blood, face makeup caked, Christmas wrapped in a grocery bag, breathless and staring. I wonder to myself if the two weren’t mutually exclusive; power and happiness. Must we give up some fraction of control over our own lives in order to be happy? Is power just a currency that you trade in heads-up penny denominations for inches or pounds of happiness? Maybe you can’t have both. Maybe my mother’s wiser than me for knowing this.

The movie ends with Lawrence spoon feeding her mother in some nondescript location that the audience is made to assume is a kitchen in America. The mother has some type of degenerative disease and requires constant care. The audience realizes, in that moment, as the man Lawrence has been fucking for the past two hours is left on the runway, every action her character has taken in this film was to save her mother.

As the lights come back on, my mother reviews the film, as she always does as we leave. “I thought it was good, but they never tell you if they end up together in the end.”

I turn to my mother, utterly bewildered by who she is referring to.

“Who doesn’t?”

“The spy and the American,” she says. “It doesn’t tell you if he goes with her.”

I flash back to earlier in the movie when Lawrence is standing with a hitman as they debate what to do with the American, who is zip-tied to a chair in her kitchen. The hitman begins painstakingly peeling away layers of the American’s skin with a grafter despite his screams. The hitman examines the skin in the palm of his hand with the wonder of a child gazing upon their first snow flake. Lawrence asks him if she can have a turn. The audience had expected her to turn on the hitman, expected her to fight to save the American she had been sleeping with just a few scenes before. But she didn’t. She pressed the grafter to the American’s ankle and peeled all the way up to his thigh with as little concern as if she were skinning a carrot. Where in this rubble had my mother found a love story? Where in this pile of ashes had she found the miracle of a heart?

Just because my own love story is currently panning out something Nicholas Sparks wonderful doesn’t mean I am any less cynical. I have found myself caught in the teeth of too many men to still believe that they can’t bite. Lately, I’ve been able to see my mother’s perspective more days than I don’t. Until, of course, those moments when I can’t.

“Ma, this wasn’t a love story,” I try to explain. “She played him and everyone else in that movie to get what she wanted. That’s it.”

And in the end, all she had wanted was a safe place for her mother to die. My mother was right. Red Sparrow is a love story. The story of a daughter’s love for her ailing mother. I wanted so badly for my own mother to see this; had wanted her to leave the theater thinking that everything had ended happily ever after after all. But Hollywood has taught my mother to care more for the stranger that Lawrence had left on the tarmac than for the dying woman who is reunited with her daughter. And maybe this says everything about us and how we see the world, or maybe it means nothing at all.

I will be leaving my mother in pursuit of home elsewhere. My mother will call me from a different time zone to complain about some temper tantrum my father or brother is having on any given day. Our lives are not like this movie. Our stories are love stories that revolve traditionally around the men that we love, that love us. We are happy in our own ways with this. We do not wish it to be different. I just wish she would be able to recognize another storyline, another truth when she sees it.

I leave the theater feeling robbed, apprehension creeping up the back of my skull on spider legs. My mother and I had just gone to see a movie about a mother-daughter relationship and we couldn’t even recognize it for what it was without analyzing it academically. This is not my mother’s fault or mine. It’s Hollywood. It’s history. It’s culture. The world needs more love stories…but about nonromantic relationships, family, friends. There is more than one brand of love in this world. Can’t you imagine how much less lonely we’d all be if we were all able to recognize that?