Was

by Geoff Ryman

  Millie poured some water over her fingers and began to spread the paint thinly, perfectly. It had to be perfect.

  “I went back to Lancaster yesterday,” said the Kid, like it was some kind of confession.

  “Oh yeah?” Millie filled in the pores. The slightest little thing, and it would show up.

  Lancaster?

  “That’s way out in the desert somewhere,” said Millie.

  “Yup.”

  “Why’d you go there?” Millie leaned over to get the bit over the ear right.

  “It’s where I’m from. Went to see an old friend of mine. I always called her Muggsie.” The Kid smiled finally, just a wisp of a smile, kind of twisted. “Got there, suddenly found I couldn’t remember her real name. Just Muggsie.”

  “So how was she?” Millie asked.

  “Oh. Just normal. She’s a couple of years older than me. So she’s about eighteen now. Going to get married. It was strange.”

  “Thought you were supposed to be from Grand Rapids.”

  Another studio lie?

  “Well, I am in a way. We lived there until I was two. Then we upped stakes and moved to a dump like Lancaster because my mother wanted to be near Los Angeles so’s we could all become stars.” The Kid sounded sarcastic. “Daddy just wanted to run a movie house and keep us all together. Lancaster was the only place he could find.”

  That face is going to have to have some tone put into it. Millie placed a little jab of darker paint on each cheek. Fresh-faced country kid, so get a nice glow in the cheeks, without it looking like rouge.

  “Thought you spent your whole life touring with your sister,” said Millie, selecting the right jar from the counter.

  The Kid laughed. “No. You can’t do that, Millie. You’ve got to go to school.”

  “Guess so,” said Millie, chuckling too. Wide streak of something down-to-earth in the Kid.

  “I mean everybody thinks we were some big vaudeville family or something. I’ll tell you what we did. We sang in my daddy’s movie house between shows. All of us. Mom played piano; Janie, Jinny, me, we just sang. The only place we were stars was in Lancaster. My daddy was the biggest star of all. He used to sing all the time.” The Kid was staring through to the other side of the mirror, remembering.

  “What’s your daddy do now?” asked Millie. Eyes next. The eyes were the most important thing in makeup.

  “He died,” the Kid said.

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” said Millie.

  “Nobody knows,” said the Kid. “He died three years ago.”

  The Kid looked like she was going to cry. So, thought Millie, she went back home on the weekend and it stirred things up. Poor kid.

  Millie took time out from the makeup. “Sounds like your daddy was a nice man.”

  “The nicest. He had a temper on him though. He was Irish, through and through. He’d just turn on people, say they weren’t treating his girls right. Then he’d go and let half the town into the show for free. If they were poor or anything. So we always had a full house. People would come over and we’d sing. All of us.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “Thing is that I remember hating Lancaster. I remember thinking it was a really nasty, small-minded place. But when I was there, I started remembering all kinds of good things about it.”

  “Like what?” Millie asked, over her shoulder. Getting out the old Panchro—and her little white stick.

  “Oh, like going swimming with Muggsie. We used to run around the old sheds a lot, just playing like kids do. Me and Muggsie and the Gilmores. We had a lot of friends there. People were really very nice to us. We’d go to parties and I’d just hop up onto pianos and sing. There was this place opened up called the Jazz Café, and they asked us in to sing there. And people kept coming to the shows at the theater. They never got tired of the shows, and they must have seen us every week.” The Kid managed to laugh again. “To tell you the truth we probably weren’t all that good. For years and years, the only thing I knew about singing was that you had to be loud.”

  “Oh, every place is a mixture of good and bad,” said Millie. “I got pretty mixed memories of Missouri. Everybody gets into everybody else’s business all the time.”

  “They sure do,” agreed the Kid. She went silent, perplexed, hugging herself. Millie took advantage of the stillness to get the white stick and draw two quick lines over the bags under the eyes. You had to be quick. All these stars got such frail vanity.

  “Okay, now. Hold still, Judy. I’m going to do your eyes.” Millie smoothed even darker brown, No. 30, across the whole of the eyelid and then up to the natural eyebrow. It was a good design, this makeup. It made her eyes look bigger in her face, like a real little girl’s, by darkening everything to the eyebrow and putting on these absolutely enormous eyelashes. Millie had thought it would look phony. Instead, the eyelashes seemed to match the Kid’s own huge dark eyes. And then you didn’t put a thing on the lower lid at all, except for the slightest bit of mascara.

  The huge dark eyes were looking at her, and the Kid was saying something.

  “That’s what I can’t figure,” said the Kid. “I just don’t understand. They were so nice, and then they drove my daddy out.”

  “Drove him out. What do you mean?”

  Millie leaned over and painted in eyebrows lightly with a brush. You had to be careful with eyebrows. Too much, too little, both showed up bad.

  “After we started to get big. They drove my daddy out of town, took away the lease from his movie theater, shoved him out, and a year later he was dead.”

  Millie was silent. She was not sure this was the truth.

  “Why would people do that to him?” the Kid asked, her voice rising.

  “I don’t know. If you were starting to get successful, maybe they were jealous.”

  “He was such a nice man. They killed him, Ma. One year later he was dead!”

  Okay. Millie stopped, put down the brush. She knelt down so that she and the Kid were face-to-face. “What did he die of, Judy?”

  “Spinal meningitis,” the Kid admitted.

  “That’s not Lancaster’s fault.”

  “They still drove him out,” she said, picking at the arm of the chair. “The town drove him out, and my mother had left him for all those men.”

  Millie stood up. Don’t want to hear about that.

  “I’ve talked to your mother,” Millie said carefully. “She seems to be a nice lady.” Millie used the tip of the brush to sketch individual eyebrow hairs.

  “Seems,” said the Kid.

  “I met a lot of kids’ mothers,” said Millie. She meant the mothers of child actors. “Most of them were real pushy. Yours wasn’t.”

  “She’s just better at it.” The Kid’s mouth went firm, drawn tightly inward. “You better hurry up with the makeup.”

  Okay, Kid, end of conversation.

  “She just sat in the limousine,” said the Kid.

  Okay, not the end of conversation. “Who?”

  “My mother. We got driven out to Lancaster in a studio limousine.” The Kid said it in an imitation English accent, to make it sound snotty. “We drove up in a limousine to Muggsie’s house, and my mother sat in it outside so I wouldn’t stay too long. I mean, she could have gone to see the Gilmores or somebody, but she didn’t. She said she didn’t want to get dusty.”

  Does sound pretty snotty to me, thought Millie.

  “She thinks limousines are the best thing in the world. She thinks it’s real great driving all day. Every weekend, I’d have to leave Daddy and go with her all the way to Los Angeles. To take lessons or go to auditions. If it was schooltime, Janie and Jinny would stay behind. And I’d have to sit in the car alone with her. For hours and hours and hours. All along the Mint Canyon Highway. She used to make me wear the same dresses as my sisters. Only mine were real short so I would still look like a baby. And she put my hair in ringlets. Twelve years old and I looked like somebody’s doll.”

 
; The Kid shifted in the chair, fuming.

  “The day we finally left Lancaster, I leaned out of the car, and I gave Muggsie a photograph. Just some photograph of me, and I wrote something on it for Muggsie. And you know what? My mother got mad at me. She said I shouldn’t give away a professional photograph like it was a snapshot. To my best friend. And there was Daddy, waiting left behind, trying to smile, trying to look like we were still a family. And we drove away and left him behind.”

  Okay, okay, so your mother was human. Millie thought of her own teenage boys. They all go through this phase. It isn’t pretty. They all go through this phase of hating their poor old parents. Who are only doing the best they can.

  “She was the real Wicked Witch of the West,” said the Kid.

  “She probably just wanted the best for you,” suggested Millie.

  “She thought that whatever she wanted was the best for us.”

  Well, that was probably true. Millie was keeping an open mind. Some of what the Kid was telling her was probably true, some of it probably not. Millie couldn’t judge which was which and wasn’t going to try. Not judging between truth and falsehood is called keeping an open mind.

  “After that, Daddy followed us around like a puppy dog. We’d go to Chicago, or up North, and he’d drive all that way, just to see us. And my mother would take us farther away. She left him and took us, and he was all alone.” The voice went thin with pity. “He was left all alone when everything went wrong, and he lost his movie house, and the town turned on him. He must have thought even we didn’t love him.”

  “It would have come right again,” said Millie. She knew. Boy, did she know.

  “Listen, honey,” said Millie. “I moved out here with my husband, oh, about 1927. We moved out here, and I didn’t know a soul, and then our marriage broke up, and I was left with two boys. I thought it was the end of the world, but I got a job here at Metro, just as it was starting up. So everything came out right. It would have gone right for your daddy, too.”

  The Kid shook her head. “The only way it could have come out right was if he got us back. And he never would have. My mother would have stopped him. He got another movie house in Lomita. We were already calling ourselves the Garland Sisters. And so he called his movie house Garland’s Theater, after us. He started calling himself Garland. Just so people would think of us as a family still.”

  Either that, thought Millie, or he was cashing in. She kept it to herself.

  “The night he died,” said the Kid, and her voice started to shake, “I had to go on the radio. I had to hug old Wallace Beery and giggle and say how pleased I was to be back on his show.” The Kid spoke in a nasty, piping voice.

  “I had to pretend I was oh so happy. Because they were going to announce that I had a contract with MGM, and I was supposed to pretend that it was because I had gone on his radio show, and of course it was the other way around, the whole thing was a lie. So I did my little routine and then I had to sing, and I knew Daddy was dying in the hospital, but they had a radio by his bed.”

  The Kid had started to cry, and Millie didn’t believe a word.

  “And I had to sing this stupid stupid song. ‘Zing Went the Strings of My Heart.’” The Kid rolled her eyes at its stupidity. “The words didn’t mean anything, but I sang it for him just the same.”

  The Kid’s voice clogged. Millie passed her a Kleenex. Well, there go the eyes. At least I haven’t done the mascara yet. If she’s lying, at least she believes it herself, thought Millie.

  “I don’t know if he ever heard it,” the Kid said, in a voice like a rusty hinge. “He never knew. Any of this.” The Kid made the Kleenex take in the whole of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

  “When people die,” said Millie and coughed, “the people who get left behind have lots of feelings. When my father died, I tried to put the blame for it on all sorts of things. I thought there had to be a reason for it. Sometimes there isn’t. And that seems the worst thing of all, that you can lose something for no reason. And so you start to blame other people.”

  “We all left him alone.”

  Ah, thought Millie. Now I got it.

  “Or even worse,” whispered Millie, “we start blaming ourselves.”

  The face in front of her was puffy, closed against her.

  “Well, you don’t need a lecture from me, I guess,” said Millie and stood up.

  “I hate it here,” said the Kid. “I don’t want to be here.”

  “You don’t like being a movie star?” Millie didn’t sound surprised. Most of them didn’t one way or another. But they hated it when it was taken away as well.

  “It’s okay, I guess,” said the Kid. “I don’t know.” She’d stopped crying, and merely sounded dispirited.

  The way they worked this kid over. Pulled all her teeth together, put her on diets to beef her up, put her on diets to slim her down, sent her to physios for her shoulders. No wonder she feels all spun around by everybody. Even me, painting on a different face.

  “A lot of people would like to be Judy Garland,” Millie reminded her.

  “So would I,” said the Kid.

  Millie caught a whiff of self-dramatization. Poor little movie-star stuff. Well, you are a movie star and, until you decide to quit, we both have a job to do. In about fifteen minutes. Millie examined the makeup. Still got the lips to do, and the fall. And her eyes will be all bloodshot. I don’t have any eyedrops.

  “Listen, honey, I’ve got to go and get something. You going to be all right on your own till I come back?”

  “Sure,” said the Kid. She leaned forward, arm across the counter, and rested her head on it.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” said Millie, but the Kid didn’t answer.

  Outside the trailer, the studio was in full boom. Millie always thought of the phrase as “Full boom.” That was how she had heard it when she was a kid. It made her think of noise, people shouting, getting things done. The sound stage was crawling with people. “You got half an hour, Millie,” Continuity shouted to her across the bare concrete.

  “Don’t worry, I know,” she shouted back.

  Outside there were actors everywhere in all kinds of costumes, coming out of the canteen, finding their sound stage. Props were being rolled in or out. Somebody was carrying a stuffed elephant’s foot. And the secretaries and the clerical help walking to their office the long way round, just to feel part of the excitement.

  What did Millie think? That is one unhappy kid, is what she thought. It’s true what they say, success don’t mean happiness. Funny thing about working with actors was that all the clichés turned out to be true. The blond bombshell really does get ahead by using men, and she really is pretty smart and pretty dumb at the same time. The great actress really is as temperamental as hell and impossible to be around. The clichés were true and that was surprising, more surprising in a way than to find out they weren’t.

  So the Kid doesn’t like the whole schmear, and who can blame her. It is pretty phony. But she asked for it. She doesn’t quit it. She’s the one the whole thing benefits most. She is the center of attention, it all focuses on her. Maybe it’s the responsibility. Like my husband Bill, when he got promoted, he didn’t really like it because it meant more work. But he had to pretend to like it, because you have to pretend you like success.

  Like he pretended he loved me.

  Now, now, Millie. He liked you well enough till he met that little girl form Encino.

  Back in her bungalow, Millie found eyedrops. Collected up other bits and pieces too. Time I got a bigger case, with all these stars. Maybe a degree in psychology too. So’s I can handle them when they start to act up. I wonder. You know, it wouldn’t surprise me one little bit to find out that Frank Garland is still alive and running a movie house in Lomita.

  She put a fresh stick of gum in her mouth. Kinda kept the breath minty when you had to talk into people’s faces doing makeup. She said hi to the Monkeys as they filed out of the stage. Bill, Mark, Tomlin, she passe
d them all, said something to each of them. One big family. Those guys must have been working from well past midnight on top of everything else. Well, the other studios are good; we’re just better, the best. Makes people feel worth something, like they’re doing something in life.

  Back into the dark and the blaze of lights ahead. A wave to Continuity, who’s getting all antsy. Millie saw she hadn’t closed the door to the trailer properly. It hung open, resting against the latch. She walked in without making much sound. She heard the Kid say:

  “You going to be all right on your own until I get back?”

  Millie heard her own Missouri twang. The little minx, she thought. She’s imitating me.

  “Ah-yale be bay-yak in a min-uht,” said the Kid. Her voice rose and fell in swoops. She was sitting up in the chair. Lily had been in and pinned the fall onto her hair already. And I see she’s polished up the eyes for me and put on the lashes. The Kid was in costume, too, dressed like a little girl. The Kid was staring ahead, and it was spooky. She was staring ahead and smiling.

  “Bay-ack in a minute,” she repeated, turning the words into music. That’s how she does it, thought Millie. She turns the sounds into notes, even when she talks. That’s why it sounds so good. She modulates it. That was the word. She modulates her whole self.

  Kid didn’t seem to realize she was there.

  “Frank,” the Kid whispered. “Frank Gumm.”

  That child has indeed suffered a loss, thought Millie.

  “Honest and sticky,” the Kid said. She was smiling and looking kind of weepy at the same time. “And my name’s Frances.”

  “You ready?” Millie said, trying to sound like she had just climbed in and hadn’t heard.

  “Yes, I’m ready now,” said the Kid. That’s a line from the picture, thought Millie. That’s just how she says it to Billie Burke before she goes home.

  Millie didn’t say anything but worked quickly. She put a towel around the shoulders, over the mutton sleeves of the child’s dress, No time for eyewash now—it would make the eyes run.

  “Judy, I just got to finish your lips,” explained Millie.