by Ann Hood
He is saying, “Randy gets all the breaks.”
Lucy adds a body. She is drawing quickly now. She stands My Dolly on pointe, adds a tutu, raises its arms.
Jasper says, “Six months guaranteed. Two of those in San Diego.”
Lucy draws single roses at My Dolly’s feet. A spotlight, the silhouette of clapping hands. She makes My Dolly a star.
Backstage
JULIA STANDS IN A line that stretches for half a block along the West Side Highway. She and fifty other women, all dressed in black leather with moussed hair and heavy makeup, are waiting to get into the pale turquoise building. There is a fluorescent mural of an old car lot painted on one side of it, the side that faces the Hudson and New Jersey. It is predawn, the sky an eerie blue-gray. The cars that pass still have their headlights turned on.
A perfect setting for a B horror movie, Julia thinks. Then she grimaces. She and these other women are in fact waiting to audition for just that, a new slasher film called Punk Rock Nightmare. One of them will be chosen as the heroine, the lucky punker who escapes death.
Julia moves her feet, kicking at the pavement to get warm. She surveys the competition, which is growing by the minute. The line snakes around the corner now. Everyone clutches the copy of Back Stage that has the ad for the audition in it. Everyone has manila envelopes with their photo and résumé tucked inside. Everyone is nervous, but trying to act cool. Some smoke cigarettes or drink coffee from take-out paper cups stamped with I Love New York. Some read The Village Voice.
Finally, a door opens and a man comes out, holding a notebook and looking bored. He walks down the line of women dressed like punk rockers and assigns them each a number in a slow, lazy voice.
“Time to get dehumanized again,” the woman in front of Julia says, loud enough for the man to hear.
Close up, the woman looks older than most of the others. Julia tries to imagine how many times this person has risen in the dark to wait in one of these lines. How many costumes she has worn—housewife, ingénue, vampire? For Julia, this is a game. A way to be someone else for a little while and maybe even get paid for it. Like Queen for a Day, she has told her best friend, Lucy. Like Sybil or Three Faces of Eve. Like Halloween. Like The Gong Show.
Lucy doesn’t really understand. But she pretends to. She is too focused, too self-aware to waste her time shopping in secondhand stores for funny costumes. She has a job and a talent and a boyfriend and a family in Massachusetts. It is difficult for her to understand, really, why Julia does this. Sometimes Lucy tells her she should put her energy into something real. “Your heart’s desire,” Lucy says.
But pretending is Julia’s heart’s desire. What she loves most is just this, painting her face, speaking in a fake accent, and dressing in someone else’s clothes. Today it’s a black leather miniskirt, thigh-high boots, a spiked dog collar around her neck and a rub-on tattoo of a rose on her arm. Who knows what it will be tomorrow? The one thing Julia is sure of, it is better not to know. It is better to pretend.
Julia is number thirty-seven.
The man with the notebook lets them in ten at a time. He yawns when he calls the first group. He glances briefly out across the highway, toward New Jersey, then goes back inside the building.
“Maybe it’s good luck,” the woman in front of Julia says, turning to her again. “I’m number thirty-six and I’m thirty-six years old.”
Julia nods. “Maybe.” She takes a mirror from her bag and reapplies her thick white lipstick. Her hair is cut really short, like a boy’s, and dyed platinum blond. This morning, she spent almost an hour spiking it, tugging the short pieces, covering them in styling gel, then spraying them with heavy-duty hairspray. She looks ridiculous, all porcupine hair and eyes lined in dark black. Her own reflection makes Julia smile. She decides she will audition with a New Jersey accent.
To practice, she says to number thirty-six, “Gawd, I’m tired.”
The woman frowns and turns around. A tag pokes out from the collar of her black leather jacket. Julia reads it, deciphering all the codes—class and style and manufacturer. This is a skill she acquired during a Christmas job at Bloomingdale’s. During that job she told everyone she lived in Queens and was engaged to a man named Mike, who worked at a muffler place. Every night she put on long fake nails, sometimes with appliqués of holly or Santa faces on the pinkie.
At Bloomingdale’s, she worked as a floater, drifting from department to department, covering lunch breaks or working the big sales. She is still a whiz at reading store labels and she breaks the codes on this one easily. Julia realizes that this woman has not scoured used clothing stores for her outfit. She has bought it new, for this audition. The seriousness of that makes Julia suddenly feel sad.
She taps her on the back.
“What?” the woman says.
“Weren’t you in a commercial?” Julia asks her. “For soap or something?”
The woman has sprayed a tuft of her hair orange. She is wearing an ear cuff. “I did a cereal ad a few years ago,” she says.
Julia smiles. “That’s what it was,” she says. “Cereal.”
The door opens. The man reemerges. His voice is bored. “Numbers twenty-one through thirty.”
It is morning now. Rush hour traffic clogs the highway, the sky is a hazy, polluted blue.
Under the thick makeup, the woman’s face softens. “You look familiar too,” she says.
“I’ve worked here and there,” Julia tells her. “You know.”
“Do I ever,” she says, and turns back.
Julia reads to herself: Class 06, Style 4428, Manufacturer 33.
Somewhere in her heart, Julia thinks she can be a screenwriter. She dreams in movie images, tells stories like she’s describing a film. “Fade in,” she’ll say. Or, “Close-up on high heels clicking up the stairs.” That’s how she thinks. But she isn’t sure she will ever really do it. It is too close to her mother’s work. Her mother writes young adult books, starring a Nancy Drew-like character named Vicky Valentine. Vicky Valentine is pretty, smart, and brave. She has haunted Julia forever. She is the teenager Julia never was. She is the daughter her mother always wanted. She is every teenage girl’s friend. But she is Julia’s archenemy.
Julia’s mother lives in Brooklyn, in the same dark apartment Julia grew up in. She is everything Julia does not want to become. A woman scorned, someone slightly off-center, meek and eccentric. Her mother’s best pal is a bright green parrot named Bluebeard whom Julia hates. Bluebeard and Vicky Valentine fill her mother’s life. They both appeared when Julia’s father left her mother for a former Miss Texas and moved away to Houston.
The last time Julia visited her mother was last Christmas. She brought her a small tree that she’d bought on a street corner. It was tabletop size, decorated with little red and white balls and ribbons. When she walked into the apartment, she saw that her mother had bought one just like it, except the ornaments were gold. She sat them side by side, like twins. The sight of those trees unsettled Julia so much, she had to sit finally with her back to them.
As usual, her mother gave her cash for Christmas. It was tucked into a card made especially for money gifts, with an oval cut from the center so Benjamin Franklin’s face peered out. Julia always gave her mother a gift certificate from whichever store she had worked at that season—Tiffany or Saks or Lord & Taylor. And her mother always said, “Don’t spend your money on me.” The truth was that most of Julia’s money was her mother’s anyway, some Vicky Valentine royalties that went straight to Julia’s Chemical Bank account.
Her mother put the gift certificate away with all the others, in the kitchen drawer where she kept a hammer and screwdriver and other things she would never use. Julia had seen them there, all gold and silver, embossed with season’s greetings, held together with a rubber band and going back all the years since Julia had moved out.
“So tell me something,” her mother always said.
It was the parrot who responded. “Snow today,” h
e said. “Gradual clearing by morning.”
Her mother laughed, but Julia couldn’t even manage a smile. From somewhere outside she could hear “Jingle Bell Rock” playing.
“Any new jewelry designs?” her mother asked.
Designing jewelry was Julia’s hobby, something she did to pass the time. She had learned how to do it back in camp as a teenager, and it helped her relax. Her mother always pushed her toward doing it more seriously. You could be like Paloma Picasso maybe, she liked to say.
Julia told her that she’d sold some red and green Christmas ornaments as earrings on a street corner on lower Broadway.
Her mother shook her head. “You could be another—”
“I know,” Julia said.
Then they sat in a thick silence as evening approached. Julia watched the large hand on the clock move. It was the kind that dropped in big increments so that it seemed that it was stuck forever at one time, then suddenly, without warning, changed.
Finally Julia said, “I have this fascination with foreign men. They make me feel exotic or something. I keep thinking they know more than I do. That they can take me somewhere new. Somewhere far away.”
Her mother cleared her throat. “That’s not good, Julia,” she said. “You can’t trust any man, foreign or otherwise.”
“It’s not about trust,” Julia said, knowing she could never tell her mother how far beyond fascination she had gone.
Behind her, Bluebeard said, “Small craft warnings are in effect for the rest of the day.”
Sometimes, Julia wakes up afraid that she is just like her mother, that she lives with a bird and writes for a living. Then she is unable to fall back asleep. Instead, she stays up all night, planning new things to do to prove she is different. She looks in the closets for her audition costumes. She puts on a floppy black hat with a large white ostrich feather trailing down the back and slips on the highest-heeled shoes she can find. She puffs on a cigarette through a black enamel cigarette holder and imitates Bette Davis or Joan Crawford.
Prancing off-balance through the apartment she is subletting, Julia will say out loud, “Long shot of girl alone in her apartment. She is trying to become something, someone, else. Now close-up on her face. She is struggling with, something. She is doing everything she can to overcome her obstacles. Hold on her eyes. On their determination. The audience knows she will eventually be triumphant.”
Julia walks onto the dark stage and peers out at the three men sitting on folding chairs below it.
“Okay,” one of the men says. “You’re?”
She changes her mind and talks like a Cockney. “Julia Greer.”
“Okay,” he says again. All of the men look like accountants, but Julia assumes one must be the director of the movie, one the writer. “Basic plot,” he says, adjusting his glasses. “A crazed murderer with a knife—”
“More like a machete,” another man interrupts.
Julia nods. “A machete,” she repeats. She imagines fields of sugarcane like she saw once in Puerto Rico when she was young and on a family vacation. Men slashed through the field with large machetes and offered the tourists fresh sugarcane to suck on.
“Whatever,” the first man says. “Okay, he’s like, slashing up all your friends. Your boyfriend, your roommates, etcetera. He’s chasing you through some dark downtown nightclub. So. Can you give us a scream? A bloodcurdling scream?”
Julia licks her lips, clears her throat. The sugarcane image is too gentle. It ruins her concentration. She blocks it out, tries to think of something scary. Images bubble in her head and bounce around—that parrot, and heartbreak, and losing control. She opens her mouth and screams at the top of her lungs.
“Okay,” the man says. “Drop off your photo and résumé when you go.”
She hesitates. “That’s it?”
“Right,” the man says.
She steps down carefully and places her photo and resume on a folding table that is littered with other ones. Black-and-white posed faces smile up at her, looking cute or seductive or perky. Her own face floats down, settling on top. Her résumé is full of lies. She sits down periodically and invents new lives for herself, different pasts and experiences. This one says she studied at ACT in San Francisco, that she understudied in Starlight Express, that she did summer stock upstate and made industrial films for the Navy.
Behind her, another woman in leather screams, a loud horrifying scream.
Julia is sure this is the best scream of them all. It’s a perfect scream. She is sure she will never get the part now. So she turns and walks as fast as she can up the aisle and out the door onto the street.
Something blue
KATHERINE IS ON THE Amtrak Minuteman, heading south, from Old Lyme, Connecticut to Penn Station in New York City. It’s 7:05. It’s her wedding day. She has left her wedding dress, still in its protective plastic covering, hanging on her bedroom door. She has left her china and crystal and silver on her mother’s dining room table, a setting of each placed there as if for company. Mostly, she has left Andy, her fiancé, asleep at his parents’ house, unaware that any moment now he will get a phone call from someone telling him she is gone.
It is the first time in months, since last Christmas when Andy gave her the white gold one-carat diamond ring, that Katherine can actually breathe. She feels almost giddy. She feels like dancing. Like opening the window of the train and shouting to all the people in Connecticut and New York City that she is free. This leaving, this waking at dawn today, looking around her at all the wedding paraphernalia—seating cards, monogrammed thank-you notes, still unopened presents, the blue garter, the old penny for her shoe, all of it—seeing it all as small and silly and wrong and actually doing something about it is the bravest thing Katherine has ever done.
She is humming as she sits on the train, sipping coffee and eating a microwave-heated corn muffin. Colors seem brighter. The seats are a bright, almost blinding red. The water that is speeding past her window is a vivid blue. Her own fingernails, painted a shade of nail polish called Barely Pink, to match the hint of pink in her wedding dress, seem very pink. They seem the pink of seashells, of coral, of sunsets.
Katherine thinks about her sister, Shannon, waking up about now and finding her gone. She almost laughs out loud thinking of it. Her sister is beautiful, someone who wakes up looking good. Mascara smudges, flattened hair, blotchy skin, are all foreign to Shannon. She wakes clear-eyed and fresh.
This morning she will wake excited about the wedding. She will walk down the hall to Katherine’s room to wake her. Maybe she will even bring her breakfast in bed. That’s Shannon’s way. “It’s your day,” she would say, carrying toast and coffee in on a tray. She would place a pink rose in a bud vase to keep with the day’s color scheme. She would have advice for how to get through this. “Eat light. Drink decaf. Do some stretches,” Shannon would say. She would say, “Leave the details to me.”
Suddenly, Katherine finds herself laughing out loud. An elderly woman with a sour face glowers at her from across the aisle. The woman shakes her head. She makes a kind of tsk-tsk sound.
Katherine leans toward her. It takes all of her self-control not to tell her, “I’m running away.” Katherine wants to say, “I was laughing because my sister is probably finding out I’ve left, right about now.” Thinking this, she laughs again.
The woman’s frown deepens, but she doesn’t look up. So Katherine settles back in her seat, still smiling to herself.
She thinks about all the details Shannon will have to deal with now. The doorbell will begin to ring, and bridesmaids will start to appear, carrying their pink lace dresses and dyed-to-match shoes. Florists will arrive with bouquets, corsages, and boutonnieres. And all Shannon will have is the note Katherine scribbled as she left: IF I STAY HERE AND DO THIS I THINK I WILL DIE. KATHY.
No one has called her Kathy since she was a child, and now that she’s signed her note that way, it seems funny that she chose it. She thinks that perhaps she should ha
ve added a PS, telling Shannon not to read what she’s written to Andy. To make up some other reason. But it’s too late for that now.
Katherine tries to conjure up Andy’s face, sleeping, thinking that he is getting married today. But her mind comes up blank. It’s as if she doesn’t remember what he looks like, asleep or otherwise. As if all the years they’ve been together are nothing at all.
The train begins to slow. The conductor announces the station: New Haven. Katherine imagines getting off here, going to Yale, becoming an actress or playwright. Or working as a waitress, one of those women who work in small diners, who look like they have a story to tell. She startles herself. She does have a story to tell. She imagines herself, hair piled high and sprayed into a stiff beehive. A name tag that says Kaye. A cigarette in her mouth. She leans across the table of truck drivers, careful to brush her breasts against the sexiest one. She refills their coffee cups, and tells them about the day she was supposed to get married and instead boarded a train out of town.
The woman from across the aisle is gathering her things, getting off here at New Haven. The train goes dark for a few minutes, then all the lights blaze on again and the train lurches forward, toward New York City.
A week earlier, Katherine sat with her mother and sister making up the seating plan. Almost two hundred people were coming to the wedding and their names were on color-coded tags that stuck into round disks. Each disk represented one table. There were ten tags to a disk. Shannon had a master floor plan that looked like an architect’s blueprints, filled with circles and squares and rectangles, all representing bars, dance floor, bandstand, head table, guests’ tables.
Shannon was organized. It was her idea to color-code the tags for easier seating. Blue for his family, pink for theirs, and white for friends of Katherine and Andy. Sitting there, Katherine fought the impulse to scoop up all the tags and blueprints and disks and throw them into the air like confetti.
“We can’t sit Aunt Rita with anybody,” her mother said, staring through her half-glasses at the blue tags.