“Oh, Dad,” she says. “He does know I’m coming to see him and not what’s left of his hair?”
“Ann,” Hank chides, but there’s a laugh in his voice.
“Well, when he gets back, will you tell him I called?”
“Honey, of course. Oh, beautiful choice, Mrs. Keene! I’ll wrap them right up!”
“Will I see you at Christmas, Uncle Hank?”
The line crackles and she wonders if he’s busy wrapping up pork chops. Hank always ties the twine with a flourish that makes the customers feel they’re at Bergdorf’s. “Ann,” he says finally. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
—
She stays the night in Santa Rosa at a motel with a red roof and baskets of drooping begonias. The sign out front advertised air-conditioning, but her room is as stifling as a sauna. She changes into a pair of shorts and a light blouse and glares at the air conditioner in her window. It remains stubbornly silent. In the front office, they seem unconcerned about the inaction from the air conditioner. And, no, they’re awful sorry, but she took the last room. It figures.
She walks down the street to a shop that’s just about to close and buys a bottle of orange Nehi. It’s icy cold and she walks back to the motel with it pressed against her neck. The motel has a dismal little pool to the side. Though she has no intention of putting on a bathing suit for recreational purposes, she pushes open the gate. Apart from a sleeping cat, it’s deserted. The sun is going down and the red glow from the sign lights the water. Louise slips off her Keds and sits on the side of the pool. The water is tepid and speckled with leaves, but she dips her feet in.
She’s forgotten, though, that she doesn’t have a bottle opener. She briefly wonders about asking in the office, but that would mean slipping her toes from the water and walking back across the parking lot. Behind her, the gate squeaks. A woman comes in, barefoot, in a yellowed bathing cap and swimsuit. It’s the waitress, Bette, with the rhinestone glasses. She doesn’t look any less bored.
Bette walks over and takes the bottle from Louise without a word. She takes it to the fence, hooks one edge of the bottle cap along the rail, and whaps on the bottle until the cap pops off.
“How did you do that?” Louise asks. It looks like a useful skill, even if just as a party trick.
She shrugs and straddles her glasses over the top of the rail. “I’m a waitress,” she says, as if that explains everything.
The Nehi is cold and sweet and perfect. “Thank you.”
Bette shrugs again. She drops her bathrobe in a puddle by the fence, walks to the far side of the pool, and dives into that red-lighted water.
When she comes up for air, it’s to pick a cypress leaf off her nose.
“It’s not much of a pool,” Louise says. She takes a swallow of her soda and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
Bette swipes water off her face. “Expert on pools?”
“I’ve been in a few. I’m from California.”
“Well, lah-de-dah.” She squints in Louise’s direction. “Some of us take what we can get.”
Louise wonders why she ever started the conversation. “You don’t have to be so rude.”
“And you don’t have to be so talkative.” Bette deliberately turns around and begins paddling back to the far edge. “If you worked all day too, you’d want a little quiet at the end of it.”
Louise understands. That silent car ride home from the studio at the end of the day. That first Manhattan in her Columbia Green living room, then the second. A vermouth-sweet moment before she had to go argue with Arnie again. She understands.
“I have whiskey in my room,” she says. “I’ll go get it.”
“Oh, hell,” Bette says, and climbs out of the pool.
—
They drink it out of water tumblers with a splash of orange Nehi. Louise is doubtful, but Bette insists. “Almost like a Ward 8,” she says.
Louise takes a skeptical sip. Not even close. “Almost.”
Bette takes off her bathing cap and tosses it next to the pool. It’s torn along one side. Limp strands of platinum blond hair snake out.
“Peroxide is better for your hair than bleach,” Louise says.
Bette puts a defensive hand to her head. “Who says I bleach it?”
“I haven’t always been a brunette. When I was seventeen, I wanted to be Jean Harlow.”
Bette runs fingers through her short curls. “I did it myself. Wanted to look like that Monroe actress, the one who was in Monkey Business. I saw her pictures in Photoplay.”
“Try peroxide next time,” Louise advises. “You don’t want to be bald before thirty.”
Bette pretends to ignore her.
They sit without talking. Louise sips her drink. It’s growing on her. The light from the motel sign judders. A lightbulb somewhere near the T is going out. Louise tops off her glass with more whiskey.
She doesn’t know why conversation suddenly feels awkward. She knows how to talk to people. It’s her job, literally. She knows how to chitchat in the makeup chair, how to impress in an interview, how to defer in production meetings. How to gossip in between costume fittings and debate in between cocktails. How to smile and parrot the publicity-approved answers to fans. Louise is an expert talker.
But what does this scene call for? What would the script say?
She studies Bette, outlined against the lighted sign, her eyes closed, her damp hair drying, her empty cup loose in her hand. She couldn’t think of a movie she’d played in with a casual scene like this—two women at ease, feet in a swimming pool. She’d never even been barefoot in a film. Heaven forbid audiences realize that actresses have toes.
Come to think of it, though, she’s never played this scene in real life. Sitting with a girlfriend, just idly chatting. She goes for drinks sometimes at Donnie Jensen’s house. All the guys there are old friends—Tim and Mack and Ray and Little Eddie Flynn—but she’s always the only woman in his crowd. She and Arnie used to play bridge with the Wellers, back when Arnie still went out. Lola Weller was a peach, but it was really Sidney who was Arn’s friend; the wives were just part of the package. Pauline is maybe the only female friend she has, and, really, Louise only ever sees her for the occasional slice of pie and commiseration about the war. She realizes that she doesn’t really know what it is that women talk about together.
When she looks through the photos of her mother and Florrie Daniels, at their smiles and easy friendship, she wonders how it’s done. She wonders what she’s missing.
Louise runs a finger around the rim of her glass and ponders what to say. Conversation wasn’t this hard with Duane. Even Steve at the Prickly Pear was easier to talk to. “Do you live here at the motel?”
Bette is scornful. “Who lives at a motel?”
Sometimes it feels like half of Hollywood is living in one hotel or another. The Garden of Allah, the Sunset Tower Hotel, the Roosevelt Hotel. William Frawley’s lived for decades at the Knickerbocker. “People do.”
“Prostitutes do.”
Louise lets that slide. She’s certainly not going to talk about her months living at the Roosevelt. “Do you always swim in places you don’t live?”
Bette blows a flop of bangs up from her forehead. “I work here, okay?”
“I thought you worked at the café.”
“I’m not the first girl to have two jobs.” She looks down at Louise’s pristine Keds, pointedly. “Some of us have to work for a living.”
Louise takes an eye-stinging swallow of whiskey. What she wants to say and what her publicist likely wants her to say are two very different things. The last time she’d mouthed off to a pushy fan outside the Brown Derby, it had been a headline the very next day. LOUISE LOSES IT. “Bite your tongue, Lou,” Arnie used to remind her. “Play your part.” One…two…three…four…She counts, takes a breath, and puts on a Louise Wilde smile.
“That sounds difficult,” she says consolingly, confidingly.
Bette waves away Louise’
s comment. “Well, what’s a girl to do? I followed a guy out West not knowing he was a low-down bum.”
“And what does he do?”
“Sponge.”
Louise shrugs. “Men.” She refills her glass. This time she puts only a splash of Nehi.
Bette sits up. “Who are you to talk to me like you’re my sister? Like you understand? You with your white shorts and fancy car over there.”
Louise pulls her feet out of the water. “You don’t have to be rude. You don’t know anything about me.”
“I serve broads like you all the time at the café. Make your perfumed beds in the hotel. See you driving through town with your husbands and your pearls and your patent leather purses.”
“And you never assume that maybe, just maybe, we buy those pearls and those cars ourselves?” Louise can’t help it. “That we work, like you do? That we might be the ones bringing home the bacon?”
Bette snorts. “So you have a deadbeat at home too?”
She stops. “Just because a guy isn’t working right now, doesn’t mean he’s a deadbeat.”
Just because it’s been months since Arnie’s written a thing. Since he’s called the office. Since he’s put on a fucking pair of pants.
“Oh yeah?” Bette asks. “Then what would you call it, sweetheart?”
Louise hurls her drink at the pool, as though it’s the drink’s fault that Arnie is sitting back at home, that Bette hit too close. It splashes into the water, orange and brown swirling out. The glass bobs away across the pool.
Bette stands and retrieves her bathing cap and robe. “Sister, they ain’t all Tyrone Power.”
She leaves Louise alone under the blinking sign.
BERYL
When life becomes a routine, it’s easy to miss the tiny beautiful things in it.
FRANCIE
Does life do that? Mine always feels too haphazard for monotony.
BERYL
Parenthood is built on routines. Keeping house demands tidiness and repetition.
FRANCIE
And our trip?
BERYL
The freedom to notice everything around me. To marvel at little things like birdsong, like the delicious warmth of a fire, like the absolute joy of that cup of coffee after a day driving.
FRANCIE
Like the taste of burned toast when your friend is in charge of breakfast.
BERYL
(taking plate of black toast)
Like how lucky I feel when my friend offers to make it.
—Excerpt from the unproduced screenplay When She Was King
Chapter Thirteen
1926
Tuesday
F. is out of the hospital tomorrow. I have a few surprises up my sleeve. I hope they cheer her up. I hope they make up for the rest of it.
Supper: Rice.
Camp
25¢
MAY 11, 1926
They promise I get to go home tomorrow. As much “home” as our little campsite is.
I feel a million and two times better, but I can’t help but be nervous. Last time I was out there I collapsed right on Ethel. I scared her. I don’t want to do that again. I don’t want her to see me like that.
My stitches came out, but there’s still a mark on my cheek from where the incision was. Sister Theodore Mary said I’m lucky that’s all I have, better that vanity suffers than life. Sister Benedict braided my hair and said that the scar would remind me of the time God held me in his hand.
I wonder if E will notice. I wonder if, every time she looks at my face, she’ll remember the time I almost left her alone in Kansas.
Wednesday
She’s mine!
Spending today and tonight at the campsite. Will start driving again tomorrow. The two of us need to have a serious talk.
Supper: Soup, this time for two.
Camp
25¢
St. Rose Hospital, 16 days
$64.00
May 12, 1926
When I stepped outside of the hospital, it was to the Model T pulled right up to the curb. Wearing wool knickers, a dark blouse, unbuttoned cardigan, and plain straw cloche, Ethel stood straight by the Lizzie, holding open the passenger door like a chauffeur. She seemed almost nervous, fiddling with the buttons on her sweater, adjusting one drooping sock, but when she spotted me, she broke into a big grin. She left the door hanging open and ran across the sidewalk to catch me in a bear hug. My back was sore from two weeks in bed, my stomach was shrunk, and I felt more than a little tottery on my feet, but I let her squeeze me until Sister Theodore Mary clucked her tongue and told her to be careful not to knock me down.
She looked shamefaced, but didn’t let go of my arms. I didn’t complain. The nun still glared at us from under her wimple, whether due to the outpouring of affection or Eth’s boyish duds, I wasn’t sure. Let’s get the hell outta here, I whispered right under Sister Theodore Mary’s disapproving nose.
As we walked to the car, E said, I sold a few of my dresses to a secondhand shop and got us these togs instead. Your set is back at the campsite.
I’d worn trousers once before, when I went to a speakeasy in Greenwich Village, one of those spots where the women sometimes wore bow ties and paid more attention to one another than to the men. I’d heard of the club, had even spent one evening outside, watching from across the street, as women and men looked left and right before entering in pairs. One woman walked past me in a splendid man’s tuxedo, but tailored, you know, so that it was clear she was definitely not a man. Coming in? she asked me, and here I’d thought no one could see me lurking across the street. You’ll be among friends.
I did go back the next day, in a pair of trousers I nicked from the neighbors’ line. Maybe it was the trousers, maybe it was the gin rickeys, maybe it was the couples sitting far too close, but I blushed from the moment I arrived until I left. The woman in the tuxedo wasn’t there that night, but I did meet one in a powder-pink evening dress. When we left, I walked her home.
Being on the road wasn’t the same thing. We passed women all the time in waistcoats and knickers, trousers tucked into high boots. Women who still curled their hair and wore red lipstick, and just wore men’s clothes. It didn’t mean anything, I told myself, that Ethel was dressed like that now. But, oh, if it didn’t make me wish I was in a pink evening gown.
But I just smiled and pretended I wasn’t looking at her legs. A girl goes to the hospital for two weeks, and look at all the changes, I said.
Oh, and that’s not even all. She waved at the open car door with a flourish. Madame, your car awaits.
The thought of getting behind the wheel, of navigating the streets of Great Bend, of not collapsing again made me queasy. But then I realized that the passenger door was the one open and Eth was grinning. Change number two. I learned to drive!
My head was swirling and all I wanted to do was lay it on the pillow of my cot. I put myself in your hands, I told Eth.
It wasn’t only the car (what a weird view from the passenger seat!) and Ethel that looked different. The campsite did too. I suppose it was to be expected. She’d been the one to set it up, all by herself, and had been settled in for the past two weeks. The campsite had a lived-in look. The dirt was well-tramped and the fire pit overfull with charred wood. Clotheslines ran back and forth. One tent looked freshly set up for my return; the other needed a good dusting.
She tucked me in to my old cot and for the first time I missed the comparable luxury of the hospital bed. But this was mine, with its scratchy plaid blanket and inflatable pillow, with the smell of canvas and damp wool, with the sound of Ethel rattling pots and pans around the fire. Forget what I wrote yesterday. This is “home.”
Thursday
Every time I try to think of Nevada, all I can think of is her hair.
Supper:—
Camp
25¢
May 13, 1926
I told E I didn’t know if I could face the cold showers. Truthfully I didn’t kno
w if I could stand upright long enough for one. So she brought the laundry tub into my tent and set all of our pots and pans and kettles boiling over the fire.
The water was only lukewarm, but she’d shaved a little bit of Fairy soap into the tub. The rest of the bar floated in the middle like a water lily. The water swirled milky white around it and the air smelled warm and fresh. She’d folded the cot up out of the way. I draped all of my clothes over the folded cot and took out my hairpins. My hair reaches my waist when it’s unpinned. I’d forgotten a comb.
I was facing the cot, balancing the pile of pins on top of my draped pajama top. I wasn’t wearing anything at all and a snake of cool air from outside the tent sent a shiver down my back. I shook back my hair and turned around.
The tent was open, and Ethel stood there.
When I turned, she dropped her gaze. But she was there. She’d been watching me. And she hadn’t said a word. I forgot your towel. She held a clean one, clutched up tight to her chest. I forgot to ask if you needed any help.
Blushes splotched my arms and my chest. I could feel them on my face. I yanked up my pajama shirt, and pins scattered everywhere. No, I tried to say, no, I don’t need any help, but no words came out because she looked up then, looked up slowly from bottom to top until she met my eyes. She still squeezed that towel, her arms so tight around her, but she said, You’ve just come from the hospital. You’re weak as a kitten. Let me help you.
And so I nodded. What else was I to do? I couldn’t say a thing.
You look dizzy, she said, and came straight into the tent. Dizzy? I was now. I felt I was going to wilt. She was right next to me and the tent suddenly wasn’t big enough. Don’t be silly, she said, and took the pajama shirt from my hands. After all, we’re both girls.
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