Domestic Arrangements

by Norma Klein

  Mom said I didn’t have to get that dressed up, so I just wore my shocking pink Gloria Vanderbilt jeans with a velour top to match, that I got this fall. I thought for TV something bright would be good. Mom wore a beige turtleneck dress and boots. She likes to be understated sometimes, she says.

  “Well, Tatiana, this must be a very exciting time for you,” Cheryl said, smiling at me. The cameras were on, but about ten feet away from us. “Tell me, how have your family and friends reacted to your being in Domestic Arrangements? Are they pleased, jealous or what?” She was a short woman with very thick curly black hair, almost like a wig.

  “I think they’re pleased,” I said. “Mostly.”

  “Mostly?”

  “Well, I haven’t been back in school since the movie opened, so I don’t know how that will be.”

  “Are you feeling nervous about the reactions of your friends?”

  “No, not that much.”

  “How about—I know you’re going to get asked about this a great deal—the reaction to the nude scene? Are you afraid that boys may ask you out just because they have certain expectations of the kind of girl you appeared to be in the movie?”

  “Well, I have a boyfriend, so I don’t go out with other boys,” I said.

  “And how does he feel about that scene?”

  I hesitated. “I think he thought it was good . . . he thought I acted well.”

  “Was it a hard scene for you to do?”

  “No, not that much . . . Well, the thing is, at home we go around without clothes a lot, so . . . well, not a lot, but it isn’t such a big thing.”

  She smiled and turned to Mom. “And how about you, Amanda? Did you have any feelings about Tatiana’s appearing in a nude scene at her age? How about the accusations of kiddie porn? Did that disturb you?”

  “Not in the least,” Mom said coolly. “Everything is in the eye of the beholder. I think the scene is in perfect taste, nothing salacious in it at all. It’s five minutes of a two-hour film, after all. I think it says more about our society and its hypocritical values about sex that so much attention is drawn to a scene that’s so short.”

  “I was wondering,” Cheryl said, “did this ever come up for you in the course of your career? You’ve done some acting on stage and TV. Were you ever required to do a nude scene?”

  Mom cleared her throat. “Not exactly. I did have to soak in a bathtub with baking soda for six hours once . . . but I was wearing a body stocking. It was for a commercial.”

  “And I remember the one you did back in the early sixties where you’re undressing behind a screen and one sees your clothing being tossed out.”

  Mom laughed. “But not me . . . Well, for commercials nudity would scarcely—”

  “So evidently the issue never arose. But if it had, you would have had no compunctions about appearing in a scene similar to the one in which Tatiana appeared?”

  “None at all,” Mom said. “If you have a good body, what’s the big deal? I mean, if that’s all you have to offer, that’s one thing. But if it’s part of interpreting a role, I think it’s fine.”

  Cheryl turned to me. “I gather you took several months out from school to make Domestic Arrangements, Tatiana. Was that hard for you? Did you find it hard to keep up with your school-work?”

  “I had a tutor,” I said, “so it wasn’t so bad.”

  “And how about the future? Are you planning any other movies?”

  I looked at Mom.

  “We haven’t decided exactly to what extent Tat will immerse herself in acting,” Mom said. “She has a lot of other interests. And I don’t know if full-time acting is what would be best for her right now.”

  “How do you feel about that, Tatiana?” Cheryl asked.

  “Well, I guess I wouldn’t want to do it all the time,” I said. “Maybe in the summer and stuff like that.”

  “Do you see yourself going into it eventually as a career?”

  “No. I’m going to be a doctor.”

  “You are! How fascinating. What kind?”

  “The kind that delivers babies.”

  “Oh . . . well, that’s certainly a far cry from acting. How do you feel about that, Amanda? Do you think Tatiana will make a good obstetrician?”

  Mom smiled at me. “I think Tatiana will be terrific at whatever she does. She has very steady nerves.”

  “I don’t get nervous,” I admitted. “I don’t know why.”

  “Not even when all the cameras were focused on you and you knew several million dollars were at stake?”

  “I guess I never thought of it that way . . . about the money part. I mean there were lots of other people besides me in the movie.”

  “True, but you certainly had to be visible a good proportion of the time . . . Let me ask you, Tatiana . . . I don’t have children myself. Would you say that Samantha was a typical fourteen-year-old, like your friends or yourself? I’m sure many parents are going to feel a certain anxiety after seeing the movie. Are their daughters in fact engaging in sexual activity to that extent?”

  “Well, I don’t know if she’s typical exactly,” I said. “I guess she seemed sort of naive to me . . . about some things.”

  “About what?”

  “Well, like not knowing anything about birth control . . . thinking if you took the pill a couple of times, you wouldn’t get pregnant. That seemed kind of dumb.”

  “You think most of your friends would . . . have a more complete grasp of the available contraceptive devices?”

  “Yeah . . . I mean, they’d have, like, diaphragms or stuff . . . like I do.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, I got one last week. My parents gave it to me for Christmas.”

  Cheryl looked at Mom. “Well, that’s certainly an unusual gift . . . Then I gather from that that you and Tatiana are fairly open about discussing sex and other related matters?”

  Mom nodded. “I think we are . . . we try to be. The thing is, my parents were so totally closed about everything, maybe I’ve tried almost too hard to be the opposite. But I think it’s healthy. If they’re doing it, they’re doing it. Some girls are ready at thirteen, some at sixteen. I don’t think it’s an area where you can make hard-and-fast rules.”

  “I didn’t like Samantha that much,” I said. “In general, I mean. I didn’t like the way she acted with her boyfriend. I wouldn’t act like that.”

  “What did she do that you didn’t approve of?” Cheryl said.

  “She was just kind of phony,” I said. “Sort of flirting with everyone.”

  “You feel you and your friends prefer to be more natural with boys?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, also . . . of course the relationship between Samantha and her mother seemed very combative and tense . . . unlike the two of you.”

  “Yes, that gets me so mad!” Mom broke in. “I feel that’s so much the way men directors look at relationships between women. It’s so false! They see only the competitive, sexually competitive, aspect and ignore all the rest—the friendship, the camaraderie.”

  “You would have liked it if the mother had been a different kind of person then?”

  “Well, I suppose Charlie, the director, felt . . . I didn’t read the book it was based on, but yes, I thought the mother . . . I thought Serena did a fantastic job. But why yet another mother who has nothing to do all day but shop and make herself up? No one’s like that anymore! We all work, we all have kids, we all do everything or want to. Why aren’t we portrayed on the screen? Modern women.”

  “Yes,” Cheryl said. “Perhaps now that women are taking more of a role in the actual producing and directing of movies, we’ll see a change there. Well, I want to thank you both very much for appearing with me tonight. And I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of you, Tatiana, before you put on your white coat and disappear into a hospital.”

  After the show was taped, they said we could watch ourselves. I was sort of tired by then and would have liked just to go home,
but Mom said she wanted to watch. “Oh, no,” she said, as soon as it started. “Look at my hair! Oh, Christ, why did I wear that dress?”

  “You look nice, Mom,” I said.

  “Oh my God, can we do it over?” she said to Cheryl. “Look at me.”

  “You look fine,” Cheryl said. “And doesn’t Tatiana look darling? The camera just eats her up. Where do you get skin like that, honey?”

  “She’s never had a pimple,” Mom said. “Can you imagine?”

  I thought I was okay in the interview, except it seemed like we didn’t really talk that much about the movie, more about other things like sex. I wonder if I should have said that about having a diaphragm on TV. I don’t see anything wrong with it, but still maybe it was too personal.

  “I’m going to go home and shoot myself,” Mom said as we walked out. “My God, I looked eight hundred years old.”

  “No, you didn’t, Mom,” I said. “You looked nice.”

  “Oh, and I seemed so . . . I shouldn’t have run on that way about women’s roles in movies . . . Except, well, she asked and I—”

  “Was it okay what I said about having a diaphragm?”

  “It’s okay with me,” Mom said. After a minute she said, “I don’t know how Lionel is going to react to the whole thing.”

  “Maybe he won’t see it.”

  “Oh, I think he should see it,” Mom said. “After all . . . Well, what’s done is done. No, it’s good, hon. You just have to get used to it, all those prying questions. Cheryl is one of the good ones. Lots of them don’t give a damn about acting or anything serious.”

  “She seemed like a nice person,” I said.

  “Yeah.” Mom looked pensive. “We were in Oklahoma together years and years ago. She was Ado Annie. Well, she’s certainly put on a bit of weight since then.”

  Daddy came home that night, in time for dinner. After he’d kissed us, he said excitedly, “Hey, did you see the Voice?”

  “Sure,” Mom said. “How did you like it?”

  “I couldn’t believe it,” Daddy said. “I mean . . .”

  I forgot to mention the review of Domestic Arrangements that appeared in the Village Voice. It was sort of embarrassing, almost. This is how it started:

  I surrender. Carry me off and I will submit peacefully. Chagrined as I am to admit it, I have totally lost my heart and soul to a fourteen-year-old girl with a seemingly natural grace, sensuality, and charm that are, to say the very least, unforgettable. Tatiana Engelberg, of the incredibly translucent skin, glorious red hair and delicately nubile body, has burst forth on our screens in a new movie, which, with any other actress in the center role, might have aroused justifiable questions of taste. But the incomparable Ms. Engelberg manages to suffuse the role of Samantha with an integrity and directness that make any salacious overtones of this startlingly frank teenage love story irrelevant. There are scenes in this movie that I personally will remember all my life: Engelberg peering up through a cloud of red hair at her besotted step-father as he drunkenly recites a lyrical passage from Katherine Mansfield; Engelberg sunken into the leather couch of her mother’s new living room watching her boyfriend walking past in the hall outside; Engelberg peeking, flushed, out from under the covers whence she has been hiding from her mother and stepfather. Frankly, I have no idea if Ms. Engelberg can act. It may well be that her performance is one of those acts of nature that come along every once in a while, and cannot be repeated. I hope from the bottom of my heart that this is not the case.

  There was more about the movie, but he made it seem like I was the main thing in it practically. The last line was: “If you miss Tatiana Engelberg in Domestic Arrangements, you will have missed both an aesthetic experience and a possibly unique chance to understand what being young today is all about. I don’t know if we older folk will find more to horrify us or to be pleased about in this clear-eyed view of adolescent sexuality, but I think we come away having seen a grippingly honest view of the world as it appears to the generation that will inherit it from us.”

  “God, he really flipped,” Daddy said.

  “Did you see Newsweek?” Mom asked.

  The man in Newsweek had said, “I tremble for the men in America when the slender, silver-eyed Ms. Engelberg reaches full puberty. It is an event we can await with a certain fear as well as eager anticipation.” The dumb thing is I don’t even have silver eyes.

  Daddy sighed. “I don’t know.”

  “You better get back to Helen soon. She’s been calling every second since you left.” Helen is my agent. She’s a friend of Daddy’s.

  “Let me catch my breath,” Daddy said. He poured himself some sherry.

  “How was Boston?” Deel asked. “Did your movie go well, Daddy?”

  He looked pleased. “Yes, I think it did. I may have to go back next month, but we got most of the shooting done. So, Cordelia, how has life in the past week been treating you?”

  “Nothing special,” Deel said. “Nothing like what’s been happening to old Silver Eyes.”

  “I don’t even have silver eyes,” I said. “One person said they were blue, one person said they were green. They’re gray! Just plain gray.”

  Daddy came over and looked at me. “I think maybe they are silver, come to think of it.”

  “Daddy, they’re not. They’re gray . . . We were on TV,” I said. “Mom and me.”

  “Oh?” Dad looked at Mom. “You didn’t mention that.”

  Mom looked flustered. “It was just—Remember Cheryl Munson? She has that interview show, Talk? I thought it might be fun.”

  “How’d it go?”

  “Good,” I said just as Mom said “Awful.”

  Daddy smiled. “Which was it?”

  “I looked like a wreck,” Mom said. “Tat was terrific.”

  “When’ll it be on?” Daddy asked.

  “Next week.”

  That night, just before I went to sleep, Daddy came into my room. “So how does it feel, Tat, to be a—”

  “Don’t say star!”

  “I have to . . . that’s what you are.”

  “It’s not! I just acted in one movie.”

  “No, well, look, darling, I think it’s good, not letting it go to your head. But you ought to feel proud, too, that—”

  “Should I?”

  “Sure.”

  “Maybe it’ll wreck my whole life.”

  “No . . . how could it?”

  “Maybe I’ll become one of those dumb awful people who acts phony with everyone, like Tatum O’Neal.”

  “Darling, you’ll become whatever you want to become. The world isn’t just something that happens to you. You happen to it.”

  “But, Daddy, I did one really bad thing already.”

  “What was that?”

  “I got a fur coat. It’s real fur. It’s made out of foxes.”

  Daddy smiled. “Well, that doesn’t seem—”

  “What if the kids at school think I’m stuck up? I’m afraid everyone’s going to tease me.”

  “Your real friends won’t.”

  I sighed and looked up at him. I thought of Simon and Mom. I wonder if it’s because Daddy’s gotten plump that she . . . “Are you going to call Helen?”

  “First thing tomorrow.”

  “Mom said Helen said lots of people want me to be in other movies.”

  “Well, that’s to be expected.”

  “I just don’t know what I want to do.” I was beginning to feel really sleepy. “Do you think I should?”

  “Why don’t we wait and see what the roles are?” Daddy took my hand. “Just remember you don’t have to do anything you don’t want. No one’s forcing you either way.”

  “I guess the trouble is I don’t know what I want.”

  “Well, that’s only natural. It’s a complicated thing.”

  “Yeah.” I yawned. “It’s nice that you’re back, Daddy.”

  “It’s nice to be back.”

  But after Daddy left, I just lay there, wo
rrying about everything. I don’t even know if I was good in the movie. That’s the trouble, I wish I really truly thought I was. But a lot of the time I didn’t know what I was doing. Sometimes I wasn’t even concentrating in the scenes some critics liked. And I hate the way all the reviewers talk about the way I look, as though that was such an important thing about me. What difference does it make what color my eyes are, or my hair?

  Chapter Thirteen

  The first day back at school was hard. Some of the boys began saying, “Hey, Silver Eyes” and this one boy I can’t stand, named Mickey Rogers, started singing every time I walked past, “As I looked into her silver eyes . . .” Shellie said I should ignore them. She’d seen the movie after she got back from Texas where she was visiting her father.

  “Did you like it?” I asked. I really respect Shellie’s opinion.

  “Well, I thought you were really good,” she said after a minute.

  “Really? Did you?”

  “Yeah . . . Only wasn’t it hard doing that scene?”

  I frowned. “It wasn’t, that much. I don’t know. Charlie made everybody leave but the cameraman, and he just directed it like it was a regular scene, like I had my clothes on. And the man who played my stepfather was nice. Winston Lane.”

  Shellie grinned. “He was really good-looking. Did he make a pass at you?”

  “Winston? Uh uh! He’s really happily married to this extremely nice woman named Jo. She used to visit him and bring lunch to the set. They have twins.”

  “Huh . . . too bad.”

  I laughed. “Why? He’s, like, thirty-eight or something.”

  “Yeah, but well I thought if you were in movies, movie stars would fall in love with you and that kind of thing.”

  “I don’t think so . . . Anyhow, nobody did with me.”

  “Didn’t they even act interested?” She opened her can of tomato juice.

  “Well, this one cameraman used to kid around with me a little, but that was all.”