No Ordinary Life

by Suzanne Redfearn

  My prospects for employment are limited. I have no degree and no experience outside waitressing. The problem with this occupation in LA is that every out-of-work actor is a server or bartender, making restaurant jobs as rare as openings for a bugle player at the racetrack.

  I drive to the place where I have the most chance of success, the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, the highest density of restaurants per square foot in the city. Plus, it’s an outside mall that doesn’t allow cars, so the kids can wait safely outside while I apply for work.

  “Great,” Emily says when I tell her where we’re going, “we’re going to a mall where we have no money to buy anything.”

  “Would you rather we turn around and stare at the television all day? I promise this is going to be fun. There are street performers—singers, dancers, clowns, magicians—usually a band or two.”

  “A freak show,” she scowls. “That’s what Grandma says.”

  “Your grandmother doesn’t know everything.”

  Neither Molly nor Tom participate, already wisely choosing the stance of Switzerland, both remaining silent as Emily launches barbs and I bat them away.

  Parking is a nightmare and costs a small fortune. The parking structure is full, so we park in a metered spot on the street that costs two dollars an hour. I deposit four dollars and check my watch. We have until 12:02.

  Despite Emily’s determination to be a grouch, her sour mood lightens the moment our feet hit the promenade. Like the circus or an amusement park, there’s a carnival atmosphere and a sense of adventure, the unexpected lurking in front of us—music, voices, chimes, cotton candy, churros, ice cream—all of it floating in the air, all of it only moments away.

  We’ve just started when Tom tugs at my shirt and points. My heart clenches knowing his voice has disappeared, but I brush away the feeling, determined not to let the “cat” interfere with our day. Following his finger, I see a man sitting on a box in front of a trash can holding two bushy branches in front of him. He blends into the background and is so still that, had Tom not pointed him out, I would have missed him completely.

  It doesn’t surprise me that Tom saw him. Tom notices details the way a blind man compensates for lack of sight with highly attuned hearing. The rest of us are so busy talking or thinking about what we’re going to say that we miss things, but Tom sees and hears it all.

  I hold the kids back, allowing two girls in their twenties to walk ahead of us. One texts as the other window-shops, each of them carrying a shopping bag swinging at their side.

  When they’re a foot away, the man extends the branch in his left arm into their path. Cell-Phone Girl screeches, and her phone flies from her hand. Window-Shopping Girl jumps nearly a foot, and her hand shoots to her heart, causing her shopping bag to fly up and smack her in the face.

  Both bust up laughing when they realize they were ambushed by the famous Third Street Promenade bushman, and Window-Shopping Girl fishes into her purse and hands the man a dollar.

  Molly claps with delight and says, “I want to be scawred.”

  Tom grins ear to ear, and Emily’s face is lit up. It’s the first happy moment of our new life, and I savor it. We can make happy out of anything. It’s a phrase my dad used to say.

  I give Tom a high-five for spotting the stalker. Not only would I have hated being scared, but I would have hated giving up a dollar for the privilege.

  * * *

  We’ve canvassed nearly two-thirds of the promenade, and I’m starting to feel desperate. There are no jobs. Things may improve in a few weeks when it’s closer to summer and the busy season, but right now is slow and no one is hiring.

  I check my watch. Twenty-two minutes remain before our meter runs out. We need ten minutes to walk back, leaving twelve minutes, enough time for one more rejection.

  “Last one,” I say. The kids don’t even acknowledge my departure. Emily is looking at bracelets on a jewelry cart. Tom stands beside her watching the people. Molly is doing little he-man dance squats to the beat of a band playing nearby.

  I walk through the door of a restaurant called Namaka, Exotic Cuisine, and as soon as I walk in, I know this isn’t the place for me. Cumin and curry—the overwhelming smell of the Indian spices makes me want to gag.

  Growing up, I ate all kinds of food. My dad loved to cook. We didn’t have money to go to fancy restaurants, so he made fancy food at home. I liked all of it except for Indian food.

  I pivot to leave when a voice stops me. “Welcome,” it says in a nasally tone that makes me want to run instead of walk out the door. Painting on a smile, I turn back.

  The man is dark and little and wears a false smile too big for his face.

  “I was wondering if you have any job openings,” I say, hoping for a quick rejection so I can squeeze in one more restaurant before our meter runs out.

  “You experience?” It isn’t said with so much an accent as an abruptness, as if he doesn’t have the patience for verbs.

  I nod.

  He runs me over with his eyes. “Fine. Table nine.” With the back of his hand, he gestures toward the patio where two lone customers sit with closed menus in front of them and looks of impatience on their faces.

  I blink several times, unsure I heard him. “You’re hiring me?”

  He squints like now he’s not so sure.

  “I mean, I’m glad you’re hiring me,” I say quickly, “but I can’t start right now. Can I start tomorrow?”

  He harrumphs, and I swallow at the thought of having just lost the one job I was offered. “Eleven,” he says, then walks past me, his oversized smile beaming as he greets a family of four that has just walked through the door.

  “It smells wonderful in here,” the woman says, and her husband dutifully nods.

  My new boss walks the family to the patio to join the hungry couple, and I return outside, relieved but unenthused. I do not like Indian food, and I do not like the man who hired me, but it’s a job and I start tomorrow. I check my watch. We have two minutes before we need to start walking back to the car.

  Emily and Tom are still beside the cart where I left them, absorbed in some sort of puzzle cube, each of them holding one and trying to unravel it.

  “Where’s Molly?” I ask when I walk up and realize she’s not beside them.

  Emily looks up from her puzzle, her eyes scanning side to side before swelling in panic. “She was right here.”

  Emily and Tom drop the toys on the cart and chase after me as I run person-to-person asking if anyone has seen a little girl in overalls, my heart scatter-firing in panic, the absolute worst feeling in the world. Thousands of people now crowd the walkway, the foot traffic having picked up with the lunch hour. In and out I weave, my eyes searching wildly.

  A crowd is gathered around a street performer, a mime. I burst through the huddle mumbling excuse-mes. No Molly. Pushing my way back out, I run toward another group gathered around a band, music thrumming from the center.

  A wide black lady with a purse the size of a suitcase shoves me back when I try to push to the front, so I scoot around her to another part of the crowd.

  This audience is denser and deeper than the one clustered around the mime, a press of at least sixty people laughing and clapping and making it impossible for me to get through.

  “Please,” I cry, “I’m looking for my little girl.”

  My voice is tiny in the din of the music, but one man turns. Perhaps fifty with pink skin and a purple golf shirt stretched over a large belly, he smiles then presses his impressive weight against the crowd to create an opening. “That her?” he says, pointing.

  Tears spring to my eyes when I see Molly in the center of the crowd, relief flooding my system and nearly sending me to my knees. The man braces my elbow, keeping me upright.

  “She’s quite a performer,” he drawls.

  And sure enough, there she is, center stage, dancing with a very tall black man who is playing a guitar and singing. Actually she’s having a throwdow
n with the man. He does a simple two-step or slide then Molly mimics it.

  I have no idea how it started, but the audience is loving it. It’s very amusing, a six-and-a-half-foot-tall black dude with beaded dreadlocks laying down smooth dance moves that then a small, pudgy white girl with gold curls imitates. And watching it, it’s impossible not to smile. My heart radiates with pride. That’s my girl, my girl.

  Tom and Emily sidle up beside me and are proud as well, all of us beaming as we watch Molly do her Molly thing. Several people in the crowd have their phones out and are taking pictures. I pull out my own antique flip phone and snap a shot as well.

  The big man stops playing the guitar and starts clapping his hands over his head, encouraging the audience to join in, and the entire street explodes in unison to sing the ending. Then he pulls the microphone from its stand, holds it down to Molly, and Molly leads the audience in the finale, “…Jowhnny B. Goode.”

  The crowd erupts in applause, and the big man gives Molly a high-five. Then Molly skips to the guy playing the drums and they knock knuckles.

  She is skipping back when a woman steps forward and hands her something. I rush toward them, but the woman disappears into the crowd before I get there.

  “What’d she give you?” Emily asks, hugging Molly against her hip, clearly relieved that Molly was found and clearly feeling bad about losing her in the first place.

  Molly opens her hand to reveal a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Why she give me money?” Molly asks.

  “She must have liked the way you danced,” I say, my heart swollen to bursting.

  We race back to the car and arrive to another fabulous relief, no ticket. In a splurge of celebration, I drop another two dollars in the meter, and Molly treats us to ice cream with her twenty dollars. We carry our cones to the beach and for the next hour play in the sand.

  Today might just be our lucky day.

  7

  We’ve been in LA a month and have settled into a routine, not miserable but a good measure shy of content, a sustainable existence that borders on normal.

  My mom and I barely see each other, which is perhaps the reason the precarious peace exists. My four shifts at Namaka keep me out until after the rest of the house is asleep, and my mom works the other three days, two as a volunteer at the local library and the third at Star Gazer, a weekly tabloid devoted to stalking celebrities, snapping photos of them, then making up stories to go along with those photos.

  Prior to her retirement, my mom had been a middle school English teacher. Now she uses her writing skills and her obsession with the famous to write an astrology column on celebrities, divining their futures from the position of the sun and the moon, the exact moment of their birth, and their current location on the globe. It’s all very scientific hogwash, but the readers love it, and her column is one of the most popular in the magazine.

  School ends in a week, and I’m stressed about the summer routine, or rather lack of routine. Since we moved here, my mom has homeschooled Tom, sparing him from starting in a new school, so he and Molly have been home, but blessedly Emily’s been gone five days a week, sparing us all from her spite.

  Emily hates her new school, hates LA, and hates me. And I hate to admit it, but I’m glad she’s not around on the days I’m home so I don’t have to deal with it. The only saving grace is the soccer team she joined. Other than that, she’s miserable and miserable to be around, and when school ends, she’s going to be like a caged elephant with a stubbed toe.

  * * *

  I’m surprised when I walk into the condo after my shift to find my mom still awake. I look at the clock. 10:15.

  “What are you doing up?” I ask, my tongue thick from exhaustion and boredom. The new rhythm of my life—working, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry—is like elevator music, droning on endlessly without enough differentiation to tell one day from the next.

  My mom springs from the couch, her face lit up in a way that scares me. It’s the same look she had on her face when I was eleven and she announced we were going on a celebrity cruise where we would mingle with the famous. A total disaster. Even my mom didn’t recognize the has-beens that were billed as the stars on the cruise, and my dad and I spent the vacation leaning over the railing green with seasickness.

  “You’re not going to believe what happened today,” she says.

  “You won the lottery.”

  “Better.”

  “Better than winning the lottery? Tom got up in front of Congress and gave a speech on the injustice of banning peanut butter from school lunches.”

  “Better.”

  Nothing could be better than that. “What?” I say, tired of the game.

  She holds out a business card. “Look who came by the condo today.”

  Monique Braxton, Braxton Talent Agency, a Wilshire Boulevard address, a phone number, a website, an email, a Facebook page, a Twitter account.

  I shrug.

  “Don’t you know who that is? Monique Braxton. She’s like the biggest talent agent on the planet. She reps anyone who’s anyone. Not adults, only kids, but if you’re a someone under eighteen, you’re a Monique Braxton kid.” My mom is so excited that the words spit and sputter like machine-gun fire.

  “So?”

  “So, look at this.”

  Grabbing me by the wrist, she pulls me to her laptop on the kitchen table and wiggles the mouse to wake it. The screen opens to a YouTube page. She clicks the play button and the video starts…a video of Molly!

  I watch in disbelief. The video is from our day on the promenade. It starts abruptly, the big man strumming the beginning riff of “Johnny B. Goode,” his body bobbing with the beat. Behind him, off to the side, Molly does little he-man squats in sync with the big man’s big he-man squats. It’s very funny to watch.

  The big man does a hip thrust and a leg kick, and Molly follows with a hilarious mini–hip thrust and leg kick that causes a burst of giggles from the audience. The big man looks confused by the reaction and repeats the move. Molly mimics him again, and again the audience cracks up, then the big man whirls, spots his miniature impersonator, wiggles his finger for her to come toward him, and that’s when the throwdown begins.

  The video is three minutes and fifty-two seconds long and ends with Molly knocking knuckles with the drummer. In the final seconds I see us—Emily, Tom, and me standing in the background, matching grins on our faces.

  “So, the thing is,” my mom says, “this video’s gone viral. Look at the number of hits.”

  I blink at the number, certain it can’t be right. 7,867,672.

  “Did you hear me?” my mom nearly screeches.

  “Huh?”

  “The Gap wants Molly for a commercial.”

  “What?”

  “The Gap, you know, the clothes store.”

  “Yeah, what about them?”

  “They want Molly to be in one of their commercials. They hired Monique Braxton to track Molly down, and Monique Braxton did. Not some assistant but her. Monique Braxton, in the flesh. Here. In my condo.”

  She’s so giddy that I can almost imagine her as the little girl she must have been, a little like Molly but with a penchant for the stars. I bet she was one of those girls who collected princess paraphernalia and, when she outgrew that, plastered her wall with movie posters—her passion carried into adulthood, a fascination with the famous that borders on obsessive.

  My mom can tell you more about most stars than she can about me. She knows how old they are, where they were born, who they’ve dated, what movies they’ve starred in, what tragedies have befallen them, the addictions they have, who they’re related to, who supposedly likes them and who loathes them. She subscribes to every tabloid in print, has sat in at least a hundred studio audiences, and regularly signs up for Hollywood tours that drive past celebrities’ houses.

  “And she absolutely loved Molly,” she says. “Of course what’s not to love? Did you see that video?”

  I glance at Mol
ly snoring on the pull-out couch.

  “Can you believe it? Molly. Our Molly.”

  “How’d she find us?” I ask.

  “A private investigator. He asked around on the promenade, and one of the managers at one of the restaurants remembered you and pulled out your application. Simple as that.”

  Simple as that. My skin prickles, and my stomach knots—millions of strangers watching Molly, private investigators asking around about us, famous talent agents showing up uninvited on our doorstep—it feels like a punch to the solar plexus, a strange mixture of exhilaration and horror, a sickly stew of pride and violation.

  “So all you need to do is call her tomorrow to set up an appointment.”

  My head shakes, causing my mom to squint and say in a much slower voice, “What do you mean, no?”

  “Molly’s not…We’re not…I’m…We’re just normal people. We’re not…” I gesture to the frozen image of Molly on the screen. “That.”

  My mom’s face literally changes color, transforming from pale peach to so crimson I feel the heat radiating from her skin. Then she blows, “Jesus criminy Christ, Faye. Bad enough you haven’t an ounce of gumption to go out and do something with your life, but now this amazing opportunity literally lands in your lap, and you’re just going to let it slip right through your fingers. You’re just like your father. A pot of gold could have dropped from the sky with his name on it, and he’d have walked around it, complaining it was raining gold when what we really needed was a bit of rain.”

  8

  I assumed the whole Monique Braxton incident was over.

  I was wrong.

  “Your appointment is at ten,” my mom says, as if our conversation two nights ago didn’t happen, and as if I’m still fourteen and she’s reminding me about an orthodontist appointment. “The card is on the table. Molly needs to go with you. I’ve made arrangements for Mrs. Owen to watch Tom while you’re gone.” Without waiting for my response, she walks out the door.