Many years ago I lived across the street from a teenage girl, her adolescent brother and their practically nonexistent mother–all of them rather unfortunate looking except for their magnificent red hair.

For the life of me I can’t remember their names…

Bobby. The boy’s name was Bobby…

They lived in one of the many large historic houses of East Nashville, theirs built in the early 20th century, an American Foursquare architectural type, not quite as ornate as a Victorian, but impressive nonetheless.

These days the home has been beautifully, lovingly restored, fetching well over a million dollars in a market where every thing east bank is big bank. But back when my husband and I Iived there, East Nashville was called East Nasty and the Foursquare across the street was ramshackle at best.

So ramshackle, in fact, the sideboards of it’s massive front porch had rotted away, giving access and shelter to a vicious cur and her half grown pack of pups.

The boy had a way with the dogs, commanding them with clicking noises, whistles and hand gestures. And though he terrorized the children of the neighborhood and stole everything he could get his hands on, I had a grudging affection for him. My husband and I would give him pocket money that we couldn’t really spare for odd jobs we really didn’t need.

The girl, on the other hand, we had no interaction with at all, though I would see her, now and again, sitting on the porch or walking down the street, always alone, always with a blank expression.

Sometimes late at night, when I was sitting at the attic window smoking, listening to the cacophony of inner city malaise–the inevitable revving of engines and screeching of brakes, the distant thumping music, angry shouts and, occasionally, gunshots–I would see various young men (young in relative terms, early twenties or so) climb a weathered, yes, ramshackle trestle and disappear into the Foursquare through an open second story widow.

“They’re from the deiseal college up the road,” said Mrs. Gibbony, my octogenarian next door neighbor, when I told her what I’d seen. She flicked her ashes in the wind with a long, yellow forefinger. “You watch, she’ll turn up pregnant.”

And she did.

Then one day I was on Mrs. Gibbony’s front porch having a smoke with her and the girl came out of the Foursquare house and sat on its broad porch steps with her baby–a little girl with the same red hair as the rest of the family. The girl just sat there, holding the baby with lifeless arms, staring off into space, same blank expression.

“Can you believe that girl’s mother works for the Governor?” Mrs. Gibbony scoffed.

“Yeah, I can,” I said.

We laughed.

  • Criterion Collection Edition #965
  • Directed by Barbara Loden • 1970 • United States
    Starring Barbara Loden, Michael Higgins
  • With her first and only feature film—a hard-luck drama she wrote, directed, and starred in—Barbara Loden turned in a groundbreaking work of American independent cinema, bringing to life a kind of character seldom seen on-screen. Set amid a soot-choked Pennsylvania landscape, and shot in an intensely intimate vérité style, the film takes up with distant and soft-spoken Wanda (Loden), who has left her husband, lost custody of her children, and now finds herself alone, drifting between dingy bars and motels, where she falls prey to a series of callous men—including a bank robber who ropes her into his next criminal scheme. An until now difficult-to-see masterpiece that has nonetheless exerted an outsize influence on generations of artists and filmmakers, WANDA is a compassionate and wrenching portrait of a woman stranded on society’s margins.
  • Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation.