“No, really. Tell me about your band?” It felt artificial to ask him, but Craig had wanted to establish that theirs was a new relationship, so he’d told them to go over stuff and pretend like it was a first date, even though it wasn’t. Tom had agreed without really agreeing.
“You know, I sing and stuff,” he said and then pushed aside his empty burger basket and leaned across the table, drawing her into a kiss. It felt more private than it ought to because her hair created a curtain around them. He smelled like lemons.
“Oh,” she said when he pulled back. Two of the cameramen and Kitty with her damn mic had moved in so close that Tom accidentally elbowed one of them in the back when he slid back to his seat.
“I like you,” he said.
It made her want to kiss him again. Instead, she looked around the restaurant to see what sort of interest their display had drawn. A few tables from their booth, several college-age students had their heads together whispering. They looked up at their table and then returned to a heated discussion. Of course they’d drawn attention. Isobel told people she hated to be stared at, but it wasn’t true. The cameras made it more obvious that she was someone other than an ordinary person. “I think I’ve been recognized,” she said, discreetly pointing out the table.
Tom nodded. “Part of the job, huh?”
“Kind of hard not to be, given all of this,” she indicated the crew without actually pointing them out.
“Can we go out after this? There’s a—”
“Excuse me.” They were interrupted by one of the girls from the other table.
“Of course,” Isobel said, turning toward her, ready to sign whatever it was she wanted, and also to talk a bit about what it had been like to be on the show. Girls this age typically wanted to talk about how they’d been awkward and how much they’d loved seeing her transform on the show. This girl was pretty though, and Isobel couldn’t imagine her ever going through an awkward stage.
“No, no,” the girl blushed and tugged at the hem of her shirt, which had the image of a nut silkscreened on it. “I’m sorry—I was trying to—it’s just that I was there last night and I—”
Tom took the sharpie the girl had in her outstretched hand. “You want me to sign the shirt?”
The girl nodded. Isobel eyed the logo that distorted itself over the girl’s large breasts. Fat Squirrels. She leaned forward. “It’s easier to sign on the back,” Tom said, putting his hand on the girl’s waist and nudging her slightly so that she turned around. “Mind your hair.”
The girl gathered her long black hair in her hand and then giggled as Tom touched the pen to her shirt and scrawled out his name. Across the room, her friends hooted at her. When he was done, he touched the girl’s shoulder and thanked her for coming to the show. “I haven’t missed one,” she said and bounded back to her table.
“I guess you’re the famous one.” Isobel fumbled with her purse, wanting to get enough cash out to pay for their date. It seemed important that she remain in control. She dropped two twenties on the table and bolted, moving so fast that the crew didn’t realize she was leaving until she’d stepped out the front door and onto the sidewalk.
In the time it took her to draw two deep breaths, Tom was out on the sidewalk with her. “Hey, hey,” he said.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Can we ditch them?” he asked, taking her elbow and steering her toward his car. On the ride over, Jake and Kitty had been in the backseat, filming their pre-date chatter, which had mostly concerned the work they needed to do to finish the kitchen.
Isobel hesitated. She should say yes and jump in the car with Tom, but it would be foolish to piss off Craig and the crew for a few moments of private conversation. She dug her heels into the ground. “I can’t. I—”
“Really?” he crossed his arms.
“Another time.”
The skin around his eyes and his mouth tightened. “I don’t want to talk about it in front of the cameras. I like you and anything I say about the band will make it seem like I don’t like you and you’ve got a dozen reasons not to like me. Most of which you don’t even know yet.”
“Like what?” she asked, afraid of what answers he might give. And yet she wanted to know who Bobby was and why he was often vague about where he was during their time apart.
He looked at the door to the restaurant.
“This isn’t how I wanted to do this.” He ran his fingers through his hair, pulling on the ends. “I have a kid. I’m a recovering alcoholic. I knew who you were the moment you first wandered into the store and I pretended I didn’t because I wanted you to think more of me.”
The door opened and the crew stepped out into the street. Kitty missed the step and stumbled, one of her shoes sliding off her foot and clattering into the street. Why on earth was that girl wearing heels? She looked like a toddler with lipstick. Isobel looked at Kitty, trying to figure out what else was different about her. She felt the heat of Tom’s body next to hers. Isobel thought about the matchbox car she’d found in his sweatshirt and the movie tickets. Part of her had thought it was another woman, another date, but she hadn’t asked him. Now she wanted to ask him about his kid, but she knew that anything said with the crew around would be put on film and used when the moment was right. A good editor could do wonders with scenes. What had happened in the restaurant could be made funny or romantic. They could make Tom look like a dick or a nice guy. It depended on which way their story went. Isobel wished she could see the future, wished she could know how their story would turn out. She grabbed his hand and squeezed.
“Sorry,” she said to Jake, who she knew was giving her the stink eye behind the camera lens. She still needed him on her side with the show. As much as she trusted Jake, she’d come to loathe Craig.
She let Tom open her car door for her.
He slid into the driver’s seat and took several deep breaths before starting the car. “Isobel—I mean Bel,” he said. “It’ll be fine. Just fine.”
Behind her, Jake and another crew member entered the car, adjusting their equipment to make the transition appear seamless. Tom settled himself in the driver’s seat and turned on the car. Then, because she wanted to let Tom know that she understood what he was trying to say, she put her hand on his thigh and squeezed. “I think you’ll like my dad,” she said, raising her voice so it would be clearly heard over the car’s engine and the shuffling of feet and bodies. “He’s sort of a jack of all trades and way back when, before he had any of us children or got married or got divorced, he played keyboards in his college band.”
“So long as he doesn’t play the accordion, we’ll get along fine,” Tom said, taking up her hand and massaging the back of it as they drove.
Attention, she thought, leaning her head against the window. It felt like a force that needed a formula. If Newton had been a youngest child instead of an oldest, surely he’d have discovered the law of attention, which identified the amount of attention needed as inversely related to one’s capacity to feel loved. It became more apparent every day that this particular television show was a bad idea. In fact, the whole idea of her trying to remain an actress was probably a bad idea. But having those cameras around closed up the vacuous hole inside her that craved attention. And yet she wasn’t an extrovert. The paradox of Isobel was that while she preferred to be in the corner hiding from people, whenever she found herself there, she got mad because nobody was paying her any attention.
“You should be talking,” Jake said from the backseat.
Kitty murmured agreement and shifted through a notebook she’d been carrying around. “Talk about Thanksgiving,” she said. “We don’t have anything on that yet.”
“Thanksgiving it is,” Tom said.
Isobel felt the attention on her as they talked, and the heat of the camera acted faster than all the shots of whiskey they’d drunk when they found the stash to ease her mind about all she didn’t know of her own future.
In preparation for Isobe
l’s father’s coming, Craig had asked to talk to each of the cousins about their fathers. As the crew had filmed them over the last week, a story slowly emerged. It was strange to think of reality shows as having writers, but they did. Someone back in California, a woman named Beverly, looked at the footage they’d shot and read through the production notes. It was her job to try to make a story out of the raw material they sent. She’d decided, according to Craig, that the arc should focus on the visit of Isobel’s father.
The day before her father arrived, the production crew transformed the front closet into a sort of private confessional. Craig followed Isobel around the house, giving her the highlights of what Beverly thought should happen.
“We should start with a scene of you embracing on the porch.”
“He’s not going to call me Bel or really do anything you tell him to do,” she said to Craig. “I want you to know that right off.”
Craig crossed his arms when she protested. He listened and then continued giving her notes, which included the fact that they weren’t finding her relationship with Tom believable. “We need to understand why the two of you are together. Find a way to have him save a cat or whatever it is that would make him likable.”
He finished with Isobel and went in search of her cousins, presumably to give them their stories as determined by the all-knowing Beverly. Jake pulled her aside and said he had an idea he wanted to talk over with her outside of work. It rattled her because she didn’t know how to take it. At first she was afraid he was hitting on her, but then he handed her his business card—one that wasn’t for Craig’s company but that read Jake Left Productions. She agreed to coffee after they were done filming the pilot.
Before beginning the confessionals, Craig made what amounted to a speech. “Reality is a tricky business. Or rather, capturing reality is a tricky business. I want each of you to be as honest as possible, but make sure that you talk to the camera. Don’t talk to Jake—he doesn’t care, don’t talk to Kitty, even though she’ll be asking the questions, and don’t think too much, just talk.”
Isobel avoided looking at her cousins. She knew that what Craig was saying felt sleazy and managed, but she also knew it was true. “I don’t know if this is a long-term project for us,” Lizzie said.
Craig waved her concern away, already processing his next thoughts. “We’re going to pretend like we’ve already got money in the bank on this project. That’s how much I believe in it. If you say something I can’t use in the pilot, I’ll save it and use it in the second or even, hell, tenth, episode.”
Crossing her arms, Isobel sat down on the chair they’d dragged into the hall closet. The battery pack for the microphone dug into her back, and she shifted until she was comfortable. It was good to remember that all of this, even what she said during the time they were getting ready to tape, could be used in the show. Her words rang back in her ears. She should find a way to explain that to Elyse and Lizzie, who were talking in low voices in the hallway while Kitty and Jake finished setting up.
Kitty checked the lighting and adjusted the glare around Isobel’s face. The room felt overheated, and the seat, because of its metal frame, was uncomfortably warm. The first few questions were about Isobel’s family. She walked them through the overall happiness of her family and tried to skirt the issue of her mother’s having abandoned the family for a semiprofessional surfboarder she’d met at an audition Isobel had gone on. Kitty pushed her about her mother, asking how it had felt to have her father become the primary parent during the last years she worked on the television show. Taken one after another, the questions and her answers felt banal, but in her mind, she pictured the way Craig would find an old clip of her from Wait for It looking sad and then they’d find some Facebook photo of her mother and Chip. Or even just Chip. And over all of these images would be Isobel’s voice flatly discussing what it had been like without her mother in her life. “In the end I didn’t miss her,” she said. “That’s the kind of guy my dad is. Capable of being two parents if needed—you know like those emperor penguins who sit on the egg when the mother goes away.”
Isobel was so wrapped up in thinking about her mother that she didn’t register the change in topic as it was asked. It wasn’t until she saw Kitty’s body, which had been relaxed and fluid as she held the boom mic, tighten that she realized Craig had taken over asking the questions and had moved her into dangerous territory.
“Did you guys view Benny as a father figure?”
“A father figure? Benny?”
Craig stared at Isobel and then raised two fingers, motioning for her to continue speaking.
“We’re grown women. I’m not sure we’re looking for fathers.”
Craig’s lips tightened into a thin line. He crossed and uncrossed his legs and seemed to read over several of his questions before selecting the next one. “Did Benny get fired because it would save you money?”
“No,” Isobel said. Craig’s head tilted in a way that indicated he needed her to incorporate the question into her answer. “I fired Benny because he’d become a liability. His work had become dangerous. The question of money didn’t enter into it—although I’m sure it’ll help not to have to pay a drunk to take naps in his RV.”
She smiled at Craig, working out what it was that he’d been after. She figured he was trying to find a way to make Benny sympathetic.
“I think we’ve got what we need,” Kitty said after a few wrapping-up questions. She turned and invited Lizzie to sit where Isobel had been, hurrying her cousin into position. The speed with which they moved meant that Isobel wouldn’t be able to warn Lizzie to stay away from any questions they asked about her father. Lizzie didn’t know that they knew about her stepfather not being her real father. That had been such a huge mistake on her part, to tell Craig that in the first place.
They didn’t ask Lizzie directly about her father. They followed the same line of questioning they had with Isobel, asking if Benny had become like a father to the women. Lizzie was stiff and awkward answering the questions. She had a look on her face as if she’d shown up at the right place but the wrong time. Isobel couldn’t put her finger on what was wrong with the situation. She felt relief when they all got through their interviews without incident, although she couldn’t shake the heaviness that had settled on her shoulders as she watched Lizzie in her interview.
Isobel’s father stood out in a crowd. Not because of how he looked, which was exactly ordinary, but because of the way he held himself. Faced with uncomfortable situations (and waiting on the curb for his daughter to pick him up fell squarely into the category of awkward), he stood as he had in military college. It looked as though he were trying to get his shoulder blades to touch each other—his rigidness mediated only by the way the wind tousled his hair. Since her mother had left, her father had never figured out how to get a haircut when he needed one.
Rolling down the passenger window, Isobel honked, waved, and called out, but he only acknowledged her when she pulled the car up directly in front of him. “Such fuss,” he said, tossing his carry-on bag into the backseat. “I told you I could take a cab.”
“Memphis isn’t a town you take a cab in,” she said, leaning over the seat to hug him.
“It’s been too long,” he said. “I’m used to seeing you for monthly Sunday dinners”
“I know,” she said, trying once again to find a reasonable explanation for her decision to abandon L.A. for the South. Coming up blank, she offered what she had at the beginning. “Lizzie needs us.”
“I wish you were as close with your brothers as you are with your cousins. They miss you.”
It wasn’t that Isobel didn’t miss her brothers, it was that their lives mystified her. With full-time jobs and families, their worlds revolved around commitments she couldn’t understand. Often when she was with them, she felt as if they spoke a foreign language.
“Wait till you see the house.” Isobel reached over and tugged at her father’s seatbelt to remind him
to use it.
“I’m more interested in you.”
“Don’t say it, Dad.”
He rubbed his hands on his jeans, as if wiping them off. “I can’t help myself. You have so much more talent than you know and you’re wasting it. No, that’s not right, squandering.”
“It’s not a waste of anything,” she said, putting her blinker on after she’d already exited the interstate. “Lizzie needed the money for the house and, frankly, I needed the exposure.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. You don’t need exposure, you should get out of the television business. Try your hand at one of the million other things you’re good at.”
“Like what, Dad?”
He looked out his window as Spite House came into view. “What a house. I’ve always said anything that makes you look twice is worth twice as much.”
She looked, trying to see it through his eyes. They’d managed to make the place beautiful with the work they’d been doing. Lovely curtains hung on all of the balconies and the small but beautiful door had been painted a dark green. Jake, followed by Kitty, stepped onto the front porch. “You ready?” she asked.
They’d had to coax him into being on camera. Isobel would’ve been happy to leave him out of it, but Craig was intent on making the point that after all that had happened in Isobel’s life, she was ultimately her father’s daughter. Part of the compromise to get him to do the show had been to agree to film his arrival at the house, not at the airport. Being made a fuss over in public would have been too much for her father.
Stepping out of the car, he turned to Isobel. “So, let me get this straight, we’re having Thanksgiving today, even though it isn’t for two more days.”
“Right, Daddy. They need to let the crew go home to their own celebrations.”
Neither one of them were mic’d yet, so Isobel didn’t worry about their conversation as they walked up the set of concrete stairs. Her father had only a duffle bag for a carry-on, and he handled it as if he were a college kid unconcerned about its contents.
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