Suzanne sat down and pulled Jigger into her lap, and said nothing.
“So, we need you to establish the pace, and Bob will follow you,” he restated brusquely.
Suzanne stroked Jigger. “I hardly think I’m responsible for the pace of the piece.”
“Well, look,” said George impatiently, “it’s a Happened One Night kind of thing. You know what I mean.” He cleared his throat. “Look, do you think you can do this part?”
Suzanne went cold. Jigger jumped out of her lap. The ash fell off her grandfather’s cigarette. “Yeah,” she said in a small voice. “Why?” This is surreal, she thought. I’m going to be fired from a bad movie for not relaxing.
“I always ask my actors that,” he explained. “Look, just because we imagined Goldie Hawn or a Marilyn Monroe kind of thing in this part . . . Now we’ve got to deal with what you have to bring to it. We hired you, now we’ve got to go with what you have.”
Suzanne sighed. This is a lot, she thought. This is as hard as I was hit for taking drugs. “I appreciate your comments, Mr. Lazan,” she said finally. “I’ll certainly give relaxing my best shot. If I’m not enjoying myself, though, it’s not because I’m deliberately trying to sabotage your film.”
George cleared his throat again. “I realize that,” he said. “Just do the best you can.”
“I’ll try,” she replied, in her most relaxed voice.
“Well,” he said, “nice to . . . I’ll see you on the set.”
“You sure will,” Suzanne offered, and hung up. “You sure will,” she repeated to the air in front of her.
“And the farmer hauled another load away!” sang her grandfather. Suzanne looked at him and saw that he was smiling. “Yap, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap,” he said. She walked to his chair, sat on the arm, and kissed his head.
“Soup’s on,” her grandmother called from the kitchen.
Her grandfather shook his head and said, “Don’t that beat all?”
After dinner, Suzanne decided to go to sleep early and put this day behind her. She took off her makeup, brushed her teeth, and put on her nightgown. Before going to bed, though, she decided to call her therapist.
Before she lifted the receiver to dial Norma, the phone rang. “Suzanne?” a man’s voice said. “It’s me, Rob.” Her agent.
“What’s happening?” she said.
“Well, George Lazan called me today and he’s very upset. He says you’re not enjoying your work.” Suzanne felt what she had been holding together all day quickly begin to come apart.
“If George Lazan is upset about that, he should see a shrink,” Suzanne said tightly. “If he’s upset about me not enjoying my work, he should fucking go into therapy.”
“Well,” said Rob, “but, I mean, what are you doing?” He sounded concerned. “What are you doing?”
“I’m on Quaaludes,” shouted Suzanne childishly. “I’m on lodes and base and smack.”
“There’s no need to shout,” he said.
“Rob, it’s me, Suzanne,” she said. “I’ve been working one day.”
“Two days,” he corrected her.
“Well, I usually don’t go into my deep REM relaxation until about my fourth or fifth day on the set.”
“But George Lazan told me you seemed to be holding something back.”
“Don’t do this to me,” said Suzanne ominously. “Do not do this to me! I don’t want to be in this business anymore anyway.” She started to cry. “I will not be treated like I’m deliberately withholding something. I went into this on Monday, and it’s Tuesday, and I’m doing the best I can. I got the job Friday night. It’s Tuesday!” She sniffled loudly, and felt silly.
“Well,” said Rob, sounding worried, “there’s no need to get so upset. I simply wanted to pass on what Lazan said to me—”
“Are they going to fire me?” Suzanne demanded.
“No, of course not,” he assured her.
“What is this, then? This is not going to achieve what they want. This is going to make me defensive. If they want me to relax and enjoy myself, this is not the way to get me to do it. I’ve been in this business twelve years, and they’re treating me like I just got out of drama school.”
“Suzanne, take it easy,” Rob said. “George Lazan is on your side. He wants you to be as good as you can be in this part. So calm down and just go in there tomorrow and be great.”
Suzanne sighed. “All right,” she said finally. “All right. But I don’t want any more of these conversations. If they call after tomorrow and don’t like it, I want you to fucking get me out of it, and . . . I’m sorry. I’m tired. I got four hours’ sleep and I worked all day, and I got a lot of acting lectures, and now . . .” She trailed off dramatically. “Let me talk to you tomorrow. I’ll be more philosophical by then.”
“All right, sweetheart. Take it easy.”
“Thanks,” Suzanne said, and hung up.
“Honey, you shouldn’t get so worked up,” her grandmother said from the doorway.
“They’re treating me like I’m a jerk,” Suzanne said.
“Just ’cause they treat you like a jerk doesn’t mean you have to act like one. How they treat you is not necessarily who you are. My mother always told me that. She’d say, ‘Honey, just ’cause they treat you like shit, you could still act like pie.’ ”
“This was a big recurring theme with Great-grandma Pearl,” said Suzanne. “I remember her saying that a fly is as likely to land on shit as on pie. So she thought everything could be divided into two categories. Either shit or pie.”
“Well, yeah, but she was a smart woman. Very smart woman. But I guess we were never rich enough to have your problems. Not so much time to get ourselves so worked up. Your grandpa worked on the railroad.” She paused for a moment and sat down next to Suzanne on the bed. “You know what you should do? You should do something with your writing, with those poems you used to write. Some of your poems are better than anything I’ve ever read in those cards over at the Palm Desert Mall. Why don’t you find out how you get into that?”
“I don’t know if I want to,” Suzanne said dubiously.
“Well, then, why don’t you find a nice guy and marry him and settle down?”
“It’s the ‘nice’ part I have trouble with,” she said. “Don’t you think that if it was going to happen, it would have happened already?”
“No,” said her grandmother. “You’re a good age for it. Find a nice guy to take care of you.”
“Yeah, but Gran, I’m a lot to take care of.”
“Oh, you talk big,” her grandmother said. “You talk big and you think fancy, but you’re just like other people. You act all rough and tough, but you’re a pushover. You just think too much and you talk too loud.”
“Don’t you think my life is weird, Gran?”
“Weird, weird, you call everything weird. It’s not so weird. But you’ve got to do something sooner or later to get your life together, girl. You don’t take those drugs anymore, and I’m real proud of you for that, but now that you can see it clearly, you’ve got to figure out what you want to do with it all.”
“What was that thing you always used to say? ‘It ain’t what you eat that makes you fat, it’s what you get’?” Suzanne asked.
“Yup.”
“What does that mean? I always thought it was specifically designed to confuse people out of their panic.”
“No,” said her grandmother, “it’s like ‘Your eyes are bigger than your stomach.’ It ain’t what you eat that makes you fat, it’s what you get. It’s like what you eat is what you get—even if it’s a plate of cold beans.”
“I see.”
“What’s happening?” said Suzanne’s grandfather, who was standing in the doorway. “Look what the cat drug in.”
“Hi, Granpaw.”
“Hi, honey,” said her grandmother. “What are you doing up?”
“Well, I heard everybody yap, yap, yappin’ in here and I thought I’d come in,” he said.
“Did I have some already?”
“He doesn’t remember,” her grandmother whispered.
“Oh, I sure do,” he said. “I remember. I heard that. Don’t talk behind my back. You women, I tell you . . .”
“Honey, don’t get all worked up now,” said Suzanne’s grandmother. “Do you want some—”
“I just want some coffee and one of my doughnuts,” he said. “I just heard you so loud in here. I’m all right.” He wandered back to his room.
“He gets worse every day,” her grandmother said. “It reminds me of you, when you used to get all bleary from those painkillers.”
Suzanne sighed. “All I want is to feel like I’ve got a regular life. Do you think I could make it if I moved here and wrote the insides of cards, and—”
“I don’t think you could do it, quite frankly,” said her grandmother. “But I think it’s your way of having a nice dream. Most people dream big, you dream small. It’s just whatever you haven’t got is what you want. It isn’t the life, it’s what you do with it. So, do something regular with your irregular life, rather than trying to get a regular one, ’cause you’d just do something irregular with that.”
“But do you think I could hold down a job? A regular job?”
“I’m one of those people who believe you can do whatever you set your mind to,” her grandmother said. “But, that being said, I think some people have an easier time setting their minds down than others do, and your mind seems to hover. Your brother seems to have his head out of the clouds, but yours is right up there in them. You always read too much, always had your nose in a book. A bookworm. You just don’t seem to have a level look on things, and I don’t know if you can get that or not. Maybe you could just live with it. I don’t think it’s such a bad thing. Certainly there’s worse.”
“Was Mommy like this?”
“You’re a little like your mother. She never was booky like you, but she had that big kind of personality. When you were a little girl you were very quiet. Your mother was more of a tomboy, but you . . . One time when we were driving somewhere I had you in the car seat, and we were taking these bumps really hard, and you took this big bump—you were less than two years old, way less—and you looked over at me and you said, ‘Damn it!’ And I don’t know where you got that word.”
Suzanne smiled. “What else do you remember?”
“You were very serious,” her grandmother continued. “You had these big brown eyes and you were always going, ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ You wondered what everything was. You would frown and point a lot, like a conductor looking for your orchestra. You always seemed very busy, like you were between appointments all the time, but you were just a little child.”
“You know what I remember, Gran? I don’t know where I was, but I was little enough to be under doorknobs, and I wanted to say a word so bad, and the word was ‘interesting.’ And I tried to say it, but it always came out ‘insterting.’ And that was my first big, big frustration.”
“You take things pretty hard,” her grandmother said. “I always tried to get you not to, but I don’t know, you can’t get children to be other than they are, and your nature is you take things rough. You work them over too much. Let things be, I always figure, but you always mull around and check everything out. Oh, you were a nosy little thing.”
“I like to hear stories about me,” Suzanne said. “It’s like I expect to hear some clue one day, like ‘Rosebud,’ where I’ll think, ‘That was the moment.’ See, I don’t really remember feeling like a child, or like I imagine children are supposed to feel—that kind of Yippee! thing like running down a green pasture or something. That’s why I love hearing stories about myself as a child, so it seems like maybe I didn’t just land here.”
“No, you didn’t land here,” her grandmother said. “You were a child. There’s plenty of children in the world that are serious children. You had to grow up fast because of the divorce. That was hard, but it happens to lots of people nowadays. Of course, it’s easier on children when it doesn’t, but there’s no use going over that. I don’t know, you did things children do. You wore big hats and put on your mother’s makeup and wore her big high heels. You directed little shows in the closet. You were a child, and you can still be a child if you want. If you want we can go down to the market and I can get you some baby food. You’re not missing that much.”
“I always feel like I’m missing something.”
“Well, you always did feel that way. You never could even nap. Never.”
“I’ve always had this sense of foreboding,” Suzanne explained, “that something could go wrong and . . .”
“And what? You think that if you could be there you could prevent it? A little person like yourself? If it’s gonna go wrong, it’ll do it all by itself.”
“I know, but I feel like if I were there, I might be able to make it go right.”
“Well, that feeling is wrong,” her grandmother said. “So maybe the foreboding one is, too. You can’t stop things from doing what they’re going to do, unless you’re doing the things. And if you really want to get married and have children and cook, well, you better get a move on, little sister. You’re not doing any of that stuff now. You should shit or get off the pot, pardon my French.”
“Beautiful French,” said Suzanne. “Is that some Berlitz thing I’m not aware of?”
“Don’t you be fresh.”
“Is there a cutoff age for fresh?” asked Suzanne. “Or does it just go on indefinitely as long as you have older relatives?”
“Don’t make fun of me,” said her grandmother. “You know what I’m saying is right. Just pick someone and make it work, rather than using all the make-it-work energy saying, ‘He’s too short, he’s too tall, he’s no good . . .’ Just pick somebody. I’ve stayed with your grandfather now for fifty-odd years. I don’t like him, but I picked him. I’m proud of the fact that we’ve had this long marriage. I can’t say it’s all happy, it’s not always a good life, but we have a life together, and it’s as God intended. You’re there with your partner, and you don’t always like them but you don’t leave just ’cause you don’t like it. You’re spoiled. Your generation thinks that if you don’t like something, you can do this or do that, take a drug or whatever, but that’s not my generation. We make a choice and we stick with it, and I think you could learn something from that.”
“Yeah,” said Suzanne, “but you and Granpaw hate each other.”
“Where did you get that idea? We don’t hate each other. He just mostly stays in the back of the house and I stay in the front, but we see each other. We have our history together. We are each other’s lives, and I don’t hate my life.”
“So I should just . . . pick somebody?” asked Suzanne.
“I’m not saying I just went out and picked him, but I stuck by him,” she went on. “I can’t say we’ve had the happiest marriage, but we don’t just get up and walk out when we have a fight. We’ve been faithful to each other, and that counts for something. I love your grandfather. I don’t like him all the time, I think he’s an ornery old grunt, but he’s my husband and I will stay with him.”
“So, what qualities should I look for in a guy?”
“Well, you can’t afford to be so choosy. You know, you’ve got twenty-year-olds also looking around, with their tits way up high and the best years of their lives to throw away on somebody. You’ve already thrown yours away, so you can’t be all that choosy. If you find somebody who likes you and respects you, and if you like each other, then, you know, you can work on the rest of it.”
“That sounds reasonable,” said Suzanne, nodding.
“Don’t think you’re not going to argue with them,” her grandmother said. “You can’t spend a lot of time with somebody and not have them get on your nerves, or vice versa. If you expect to not argue, don’t have a relationship.”
“Well, I haven’t,”
said Suzanne.
“Oh, you have,” her grandmother said. “You’ve had a couple. I met Jonathan, I met that fellow Albert . . .”
“Yeah,” said Suzanne.
“Well, what happened with those? You split up with them.”
“We didn’t get along anymore.”
“See, I don’t understand that,” said her grandmother. “This is what I don’t understand about your generation. You just stop getting along? You’ve got to work at getting along. It has to be something you care about, a priority.”
“Gran, you should put out a relationship video. There’s Doctor Ruth for sex, and then, once they’ve had the sex, you could tell people how to stay together.”
“Go ahead, make fun of me,” her grandmother said, getting up from the bed. “And don’t take this movie thing so seriously. Don’t they always say, ‘It’s only a movie’?”
“Yeah, Gran, that’s what they say.”
“Now, how do you want your eggs in the morning?”
“You don’t have to get up,” Suzanne said. “I’ve got a very early call.”
“I’m up anyway,” she said. “Your grandfather has to have his heart medicine.”
“Poached,” said Suzanne.
“All right. Good night, darling. Sweet dreams. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
“You were right there when they handed out clichés, weren’t you?” said Suzanne. “Good night, Gran. I love you.”
She was calmer when she arrived on the set the next morning. The first scene was being shot in a car, which was placed on a platform with the crew and all the equipment on it, all of which would be dragged along by a pickup truck. Rita had just finished connecting Suzanne’s body mike when Simon walked by with Rocky, the first A.D., who was explaining how many extras they needed to do drive-bys in the car scene.
Suzanne followed behind them until Simon and Rocky were through. Then she said, “Excuse me, Simon. Could I talk to you?”
“Certainly, love,” he said. “What’s the problem?”
Postcards From the Edge Page 13