“This is Marly Bennet,” the casting director said, introducing her to the assembled group, a few men in suits, a good-looking young man in shirt sleeves. Marly smiled her best smile. This would be a breeze, she would look at the dialogue, give her usual A plus reading, and get the job. She was head and shoulders above the caliber of actress she’d seen in the waiting room.
“She was Mrs. Jones in ‘Keeping Up with the Joneses’,” the casting director told the men, whose eyes were blank. “And before that she was Josie on ‘The Corner Bar.’ ” Nothing. “And she’s Billy Mann’s wife,” the casting director said, and then, as if someone had just plugged in the Christmas lights, suddenly all of their faces shone brightly in her direction. Marly felt her rage rise and her confidence fall, and she had to make a strong effort not to turn around and leave.
She was the one who had studied classical theater, she was the one who was working long before Billy ever stood on the stage at the Comedy Store. Why did everyone persist in introducing her as Billy’s wife? But the casting director was handing her the script and she wanted a job, and what point was there in being childish about the way she’d been introduced?
“Look it over,” the young woman said, and Marly had a flash of remembering when this young woman who was running the casting office was the intern to the now retired founder of the casting company. She was the kid who used to bring in boxes of take-out coffee and doughnuts. “I’ll be reading with you, and when you’re ready to go, tell me,” she said to Marly. Dumb, that’s all it was. To introduce her as Billy’s wife.
Marly sat on a bentwood chair near a glass-topped table covered with résumés and photos of the actresses who were her competition and looked at the dialogue for the commercial. She didn’t want to put on her reading glasses, so she held the script at arms length.
Later she’d rationalize away the whole incident by saying that her brain was only partially with it when she was looking at the script. She was thinking about her morning with Billy and the possibility that he might be coming home. The parts in the script were Suzy, Jane, and Grandmother. Marly felt as if she had a general idea about the dialogue and was ready to read. She looked up at the casting director.
“All set,” she told her.
“Great. Let’s go for it,” the casting director said.
Marly waited for the casting director to give her a cue, but nothing happened. After a minute she looked over at the young woman, who looked at her questioningly and said, “Are you sure you’re ready?”
“I’m sure,” Marly said, then looked back down at the script. But the grandmother had the first line of dialogue. Good God, Marly realized, and then she almost burst into laughter as she saw what she hadn’t before in her quick look at the material. The part of Suzy was for a toddler, Jane was the daughter in her twenties, who wanted her mother to take care of her baby, and they’d brought Marly in to read for Jane’s mother. The grandmother.
If it hadn’t been so funny, she would have wept. “Ahh, yes. Sorry,” she said. “Let’s start again.” And then she read the grandmother’s lines. Granted it was a very young grandmother who couldn’t run after the little child to play because of arthritis, but a grandmother nevertheless. A good-looking Hollywood version of a grandmother, she would tell the girls tonight, and they’d die laughing.
Her audition was completely stilted and forced because while she read the lines, she was holding in a giggle. But later she thought that maybe it wasn’t a giggle at all that had strangled her. “Thank you,” someone said in that dismissive voice that means, “You’ve just wasted our time and yours.” And Marly left, hurrying blindly through the room of waiting actresses, to pick the twins up at school.
Marly watched the twins approach her car. They were slim, with wild blond hair like Billy’s. They love him, she thought as she watched them say a pleasant good-bye to some of their friends and then start an argument with one another as they walked. They’d be ecstatic when she told them he wanted to come home.
Maybe she’d stop at Gelson’s to get the rest of the groceries she needed to make dinner for tomorrow night. Girls’ Night, which for the first many years had rotated from one of their homes to another, had been headquartered at Marly’s since Billy officially moved out, which was now nearly two years. It was the house that she and Billy bought after he started getting successful. Rose said it looked a little like Tara before the war, with a pretty white colonial exterior and a rolling lawn so green it made Marly very apologetic and defensive during the drought.
But the lawn wasn’t healthy because of excessive watering. Its apparent health was due to the kind of care Marly, a perfectionist, gave everything in her life, and the irrigation set-up she had put in called a “drip system.” Ellen said she was familiar with that system because it had provided all the dates she’d ever had.
There was a flower garden, a pool and cabana, and a very private hot tub where the four friends felt good about being naked, if that was possible at their age. The other reason the party was always at her house was that she was the best cook among them, so each time they came she made a glorious meal. Spent hours chopping away, and told them that when she did, she was healing her “inner Julia Child.”
Tomorrow she would make a beautiful primavera sauce. As the twins’ argument got louder, she ran over her grocery list in her head. And when she got to Gelson’s Market on Sunset, the two of them came in with her, still bickering.
While they were waiting in line at the checkout, she saw Sara’s face turn pale and her eyes get wide, and she said, “Mom, look!” She was pointing to the end of the counter where they hang the magazines and the tabloids. And on the front page, the cover, in one of those full-page color shots they publish, was Billy. He was walking with his arm affectionately around some very young girl, who had to be no more than fourteen, and the headlines said PARENTS ACCUSE BILLY MANN OF MOLESTING THEIR CHILD.
Marly walked over, and with a giant yank she wrenched the rack out of its holder and threw it on the ground. Then she went to the next counter and the next, pulling out the entire rack and throwing it over her shoulder so it hit the floor with a loud clang. And when the metal prongs wouldn’t yield to her angry tugging, she ripped all of the copies of the tabloid out of the basket and threw them all around the market in a frantic gesture.
Soon the manager was trying to stop her, but she was hellbent on making her point, and she even knocked down a rack of Danielle Steel’s latest paperback because it was in her line of fire.
“I bring children into this store,” she shouted. “How can you allow this filth in here?” Later she told her friends that while she was going berserk in Gelson’s, in the back of her head she could hear the voice of her ultra-proper grandmother, who once told her, “Men only want one thing, and that is to put their peters inside you.” Marly had been horrified to hear that as a young girl. But now, all these years later, she was thinking how right on the money the old girl really was.
“Mrs. Mann,” the store manager was saying. He knew her name because despite its vast size, Gelson’s prided itself on being a friendly neighborhood market. “I’m so sorry. Maybe we can revamp the system and put the tabloids somewhere where children won’t be privy to them. Mrs. Mann, please.”
Marly was shredding copies of the Enquirer, then handing the shreds to the open-mouthed manager.
“Mom, please. Let’s go home.” The twins were mortified. They hadn’t been old enough to understand when their mother stood on soap boxes to beg for support for the ERA, nor had they been in the courtroom when she fought the neighborhood in the valley that didn’t want the shelter for battered women on one of their streets.
When the entire front of Gelson’s in Pacific Palisades was trashed, Marly put her groceries in the ecologically responsible string bag she always carried to do her marketing, took each of the twins by a hand, and left to go home.
When she got there, she went upstairs to her bathroom and locked the door, sat down on the floor,
and cried. That bastard Billy probably knew this news was breaking today, and he needed her and the girls back in his life so he’d look to the world like a family man who had been wrongly accused. Some lawyer probably told him, “Quick, go make a pass at your estranged wife and see if you can get her back.” And she fell for it. Unfortunately she hadn’t been to one practitioner who had an aphorism to cover this one.
* * *
9
Her kids were sick of it. When they came over to visit her and they all watched TV together, one of them would be channel surfing with the TV remote, and a show or a commercial would flash by with Marly in it, and she’d say, “Marly Bennet! I graduated from college with her.”
She could tell by the way they exchanged looks that they were thinking, big fucking deal. Or one of them would say, “Oh, God, please don’t let, her start telling us again how she was the best one in the class, and now they’re all famous and she’s a Kmart shopper.”
Polly was the only one who humored her about it all. Like that time when she was home sick from school. She came downstairs while her mother was watching “My Brightest Day,” watching Jan do some big scene in a hospital room. She must have had some idiotic smile on her face, maybe she’d even been mouthing the words of the scene along with Jan, like some mental case.
“Was she nice, Mom?” Polly asked her when the closing-theme music was playing.
“Oh, yeah. And we were pretty good friends, too. She was the prettiest one in our class and I was…”
“The best actress, right?”
“Definitely. They all thought I was cool because I was from California. And Jack Solomon, a man who’s now the president of a television network, was just some jerk who used to climb into the window of the dorm room at night and come to Jan’s room when I was there, and we’d all sit on the floor, and we’d laugh and talk about how we were all going to be big in the theater some day. Probably in some rep company or regional theater, or on Broadway. Of course, after a while, I started dating your dad, and even though my parents were paying for me to live in the dorm, I mostly stayed at your dad’s little place till we got married.”
She’d probably told that to Polly five hundred times, and now when she saw how hot Polly was with her boyfriend, she knew telling her that stuff had been a mistake. You weren’t supposed to tell your kids you were fucking around so young, because then they figured it was okay for them to do it, too.
But it was worse to tell it to Polly, because it didn’t take much to do the math that meant that the fucking around her mother had done was the reason she had been born. Why she came into the world, and her mother quit acting to take care of her, and then her brother, Jason, and then Kiki.
Once, just for a laugh, Polly had the idea of using Lou’s video camera and directing a tape of her mother doing a few monologues. That great one she still remembered from The Glass Menagerie, in which Amanda Wingfield chastises her daughter for being afraid to go out in the world and take command of her life.
“Mom, you’re awesome,” Polly said afterward when they put the tape in the VCR and watched it together, holding hands. Tears were rolling down her daughter’s cheeks, and that day Polly had looked at her with more respect than she ever had before.
And the kid was right. She was pretty goddamned good on that tape. Good enough to send it to Ellen Bass, which she never admitted to anyone that she did, with a letter saying give me a part in something, anything. But there was no response. Not a call. No fulfillment of her fantasy that one day the phone would ring and on the other end Ellen would be there, saying, “I’m sending the studio jet to come and get you. You were the best actress in the class. I have a part that only you can play.”
For a while, after all the kids were in school, she tried to do some work in regional theaters, in plays where she could rehearse at night and get Lou to put them to bed. One year she played the young wife in Barefoot in the Park at a local theater, and another year she played Patty in The Moon Is Blue. After Barefoot, when Lou brought the kids backstage they were really stoked. “Wow! Mom! You’re better than a movie star,” Jason said.
She’d seen the look of warning in Lou’s eyes anytime she got caught up in thinking maybe there was still some way she could work as an actress, the look that meant “You do and I’ll walk,” so instead of acting she stayed home and played Little Mommy, the pet name that he called her for years. Right up until he left her for Polly’s third-grade teacher.
And then the bastard, the fucking son of a bitch, when she was at her lowest, with no money, a lousy job, living in another lousy rented house, he found a fancy lawyer who helped him get the kids away from her. Last year in an angry argument over clothes, or some other stupid thing, Polly had shrieked at her, “I’m glad we’re living with Daddy and Sharon. She’s cool. She has a career. You’re lame, Mother.”
Lame and old and unemployable. Maybe Polly’s making that comment was what made her feel justified about taking the savings she’d been putting away for the girl’s wedding and spending it on the trip to Los Angeles and this hotel room at the Sheraton Hemisphere that was fancier than any she’d ever seen in her life. On the fifteenth floor, with a view way below of the movie studio lot.
Right now down there, they were making television shows and movies. She could have been on those movies if she’d had the guts to leave Lou and go after what should’ve been her career. Before her gorgeous orange hair faded to this gray, before she started being menopausal crazy, with those hot flashes and waves of depression.
She had been embarrassed today in the lobby, checking in with her little duffel bag and her striped plastic purse, when the guy at the desk looked at her as if no one had ever made a deposit in cash before, but he took it. And now she stood against the window, looking down at the bright Los Angeles day, and watched as the trams that transported the tourists wended their way around the studio lot and past what had to be the commissary and the Screening rooms.
And those buildings over there must be where the important studio executives had their offices. One of the executives was Ellen Bass. Ellen Bass, who was too busy to watch her tape. And maybe even Rose Schiffman had offices over there, too. That made sense. With a few secretaries typing up all of her movie ideas. She was even nominated for an Oscar a few years back, so everyone must be kissing her little ass.
After she went to see Jan, she would definitely mosey on over to the movie lot and look for Ellen and Rose. That way she might be able to kill two birds with one stone.
* * *
10
Rose liked waking up at five in the morning to write. To sit in her flannel pajamas with an afghan over her feet, while the house was still quiet and there was no chance the phone would ring or that anybody would drop by. Still in a dreamlike haze, she could close herself inside her cluttered home office and get lost in the words she scrawled on the turquoise lines on the yellow legal pad.
Later, when the day began in earnest, she’d turn on the computer and transfer the newly composed pages to the blipping, bleeping, intimidating high-tech machine she still didn’t quite understand after months of instruction, yet somehow managed to operate by rote. But for her the brain-dancing, thought-weaving production times were always during those still, dark hours, when she sat alone in her cluttered little space, sipping from a cup of very black coffee, using up the points on the soft-leaded Blackwing 602 pencils.
Sometimes while she worked, she imagined that she was a romantic figure, like the sensitive and perceptive Colette, reclining on a chaise in a flat in Paris, instead of the myopic and neurotic Mrs. Andrew Schiffman, lying on a convertible sofa in a house in Sherman Oaks. But soon Andy’s alarm clock would blast, and her reverie would be shattered.
“Honeee?” “Mahhh??” The jarring sounds of morning called her back from the far reaches of her mind. Her husband and daughter, both cranky in the morning, rushed around getting ready to go off to work and school, and she had to help them through their morning rituals and out th
e door.
While she rehashed the dilemma between two of her characters in her mind, she made fresh coffee for Andy, who stood in the kitchen with the cordless phone under his bearded chin, simultaneously slathering peanut butter on his toast, and checking in on the conditions of his patients—AIDS patients, cancer patients, some of whom looked last night as if they might not make it through to the morning.
While she decided how to open the love scene, she packed a lunch for Molly, who leaned on one arm, muttering sleepily about how Dad always made her late for school, pushing the cereal around in the bowl and reading “Cathy” out loud to Rose from the morning funnies.
This morning she absently made the lean turkey sandwich and cut up the fresh fruit, knowing attempts at good nutrition were futile, since in a few hours Milly would make a furtive trade with some enviable kid whose mom gave her corn nuts and bologna. From the table where her face was buried in the funnies, Molly said suddenly with a laugh, “Cathy reminds me of you, Mom. She’d kind of ditzy, her office is always a mess, and she’s a worrywart.”
Daughters loved to blow the whistle on their mothers, Rose mused as she padded across the kitchen in her faded pajamas and her beat-up fuzzy slippers. She knew that from watching the behavior of Marly’s twins, who were teenagers now and very critical of their mother. But at the age of ten, Molly seemed to be starting a little early. Probably because she was growing up in crazy, mind-blowing L.A.
“We’re late,” Andy said, hanging up the phone, filling his non-slip coffee mug, kissing Rose on the cheek, and ushering Molly toward the door to the garage. Rose followed, carrying the lunch box, which accidentally slipped out of her hand and crashed to the garage floor, making her have to stoop and open it to make sure the thermos was still intact.
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