Not Your All-American Girl

by Wendy Wan-Long Shang

  “The play?” asked my dad.

  I nodded.

  “You didn’t get a part?” my dad said.

  “I got one,” I said.

  “Well, that’s great!” He was obviously relieved.

  “I’m in the ensemble,” I said.

  “Fantastic!” He came over and kissed me on the forehead. “Be sure to tell your mom when she gets home. You’ll be the best Hula-Hooper Pleasant Valley has ever seen.”

  “With the best voice,” said Safta.

  “And the smartest brain,” added Wai Po.

  “No one cares how smart you are when you’re in the ensemble,” I said. “They only care about the stars.”

  “You’re the star in our hearts,” said Safta.

  I tried to let their words wash over me, like a warm bath. And they were right: It was good that I was in the ensemble. Some people who tried out wouldn’t be anything. It didn’t make sense, but somehow, I felt like I had let everyone down by not looking more all-American.

  MY BROTHER, DAVID, LIKES TRIVIA, so this was his attempt to make me feel better when he came into my room: “Did you know Sylvester Stallone got turned down for the role of Han Solo?”

  “So?” I said.

  “So people get rejected all the time, and they still do great stuff. Sylvester Stallone won an Oscar for Rocky.”

  That was true.

  “Technically Stallone wasn’t turned down,” David continued. “He took himself out of the running. He said that he didn’t think someone who looked like him seemed like he belonged in space.”

  This was one of those times I wished I had stopped David from going on one of his trivia tangents. Mrs. Tyndall probably thought I didn’t look like I belonged in space, either. If she had been casting Star Wars, she probably would have made me a stormtrooper so my face would be all covered up by a helmet.

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “I don’t look like I belong anywhere.” I told him about Tara and the all-American girl.

  “You belong,” David said.

  “Prove it.”

  I could see the wheels turning in his head. “The category is … musicals that Lauren could star in.” He paused. “I might need to call Hector. That’s really more his specialty.”

  David and I shared the receiver while he called Hector and explained the situation.

  “Lauren not getting a callback is the crime of the century,” Hector said. “She had the best audition.” That made me feel a tiny bit better.

  “Focus on the question,” said David. “We need a part where Lauren looks like she belongs.”

  “Well, The King and I takes place in Siam,” Hector said. “But, uh, the female lead is white. Siam is the old name for Thailand.”

  David put his hand over the mouthpiece. “This could take a while,” he told me.

  “Does it have to be a Broadway play? Could it be a movie?” asked Hector.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Or a TV show?”

  “Sure.”

  There was a long pause. “The village women in M*A*S*H?” said Hector timidly. M*A*S*H was a TV show set during the Korean War.

  “They don’t sing,” I said.

  “Let me ask my grandmother,” said Hector. He put down the phone and came back a few minutes later. “Rodgers and Hammerstein. South Pacific. There’s a character named Bloody Mary who is Polynesian. She sings.”

  “Bloody Mary?” I asked. “What kind of name is that?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen it,” Hector said.

  David and Hector then veered off into a conversation about whether Bruce Lee, the martial arts star, ever did any singing. Then David hung up.

  “So, are you okay now?” he asked.

  I tried to feel grateful. But one show featuring someone named Bloody Mary did not feel like enough. One just proved how few there were. I shrugged.

  “Do you mind if I turn on the game?” asked David, who clearly thought he had carried out his brotherly duties. “Scott and I bet tomorrow’s snack cake on it.”

  “Sure.”

  The closest baseball team to us was the Baltimore Orioles, and on a clear night, you could pick up the games on the radio. But as David hunted around for the station on the radio, instead of the twang of a baseball game announcer, this pure, haunting voice started singing about being lonely and blue.

  “Stop,” I said.

  “That’s country music,” said David. “No one listens to country music, at least not in this house.”

  “Why not?”

  David gave me a long stare. “It’s for people who live in the country and ride horses and drive trucks,” he said. “Not exactly our family.” He meant because we were Jewish, because we were Chinese. Because we were both. He reached for the dial again.

  “Change the station, and I’ll change you,” I threatened.

  “Fine,” he said. “But I’m taking your Walkman.” He put the headphones on and went out of the room. I closed the door and listened to the rest of the song.

  The singer’s voice was a mixture of mountains and longing. I felt her loneliness, but I felt connected to her, too. For the first time all day, it seemed like someone understood me.

  I checked the dial. It was around 102. The DJ came on and said I was listening to WTRY, which I had always skipped over in favor of the Top 40 stations. But that voice changed things. The DJ didn’t announce the singer’s name. I had to know who she was.

  I went downstairs and grabbed the phone book, just as Mom walked through the front door. She put down a small suitcase.

  “I hope you’re not calling someone this late,” she said, just like that. She’d been gone for almost a week, and she didn’t skip a beat in the Mom department. “Tara?”

  “No,” I said. It’s easier to be a good friend if I don’t talk to her, I thought, but I didn’t want to unload on Mom right as she walked in. That usually made her grumpy. I gave her a hug to welcome her home. “How was the trial?”

  “The judge really had it in for one of our attorneys,” she said. “But I think we put on a good case.”

  “Did you win?”

  “We don’t get to find out right away.” She pushed back her hair. Her eyes looked more tired than usual. “How was the tryout?”

  “I got a part, but …” Just then Dad walked in.

  “Look who’s here! The world’s greatest paralegal.” He gave her a kiss. I try not to watch when my parents do stuff like that, but I could hear their lips smacking. Ew.

  “It’s good to be home. I’m beat,” said Mom. Apparently getting to go on a trip like this was a big compliment to her. But it was a compliment that came with a lot of work.

  “Did Lauren tell you she got a part in the play?”

  “She did, and she was just about to tell me what she was doing with the phone book.”

  I had forgotten I was holding it. I put it down on the counter. “I’m calling the radio station. I want to ask about a song.”

  “After a proper greeting,” she said. I hugged her again, and then ran to Wai Po’s room to let her know that Mom was home, which made me forget about calling the radio station for a few more minutes. Then I did the math I had forgotten about because I had been bumming about Brenda Sue Parker.

  Finally I went back down to the kitchen and dialed.

  “WTRY.” The announcer’s voice was low and deep, just the way he sounded on the radio. “Nashville Nick. What can I play for you?”

  “Hi,” I said. “Um, I was actually wondering if you could tell me who sang a song I just heard.”

  “That was George Jones with ‘You’ve Still Got a Place in My Heart.’ ”

  “No,” I said. “This was a little while ago. It was a woman singing.”

  “The Judds?”

  “Maybe? But there was just one of them.”

  “Can you tell me how it went?”

  “Well.” It was really the feeling of the song that got to me.

  “Hold on, let me switch to a c
ommercial and we’ll solve this mystery.” He disappeared and then came back on the line. “Right. So let’s hear it: Tell me what you remember about that song.”

  “Okay,” I said. I hummed a little bit and sang the words lonely and blue.

  “That, my friend, is the legendary Patsy Klein, singing ‘Have You Ever Been Lonely?’ Her music has been around a long time.”

  Klein! No wonder her music spoke to me. She was Jewish. Like me! And like Calvin Klein, whose name was also on the hiney of designer jeans I didn’t own. Patsy probably wasn’t Chinese, too. That would be too much to hope for. Still! We had something in common. We were somewhere people weren’t expecting us. Also, that meant David was wrong about something, which was always enjoyable.

  “This is my first time hearing her,” I said.

  “Well, just for that, I’m going to play another one for you. So don’t touch that radio dial!”

  “Thanks, Nashville Nick,” I said.

  “Call me Nash.” Even his nickname had a nickname.

  “Thanks, Nash.”

  “Hey, how about I record you announcing the next song? Just say your name and let everyone know that Patsy Klein’s ‘Crazy’ is coming up next.”

  I was going to be on the radio! I took a deep breath and thought fast; I needed a nickname, too. Something besides Tara’s Friend and The Button Girl and Person Who Will Always Be the Side Dish.

  “Hi,” I said. “This is Lonesome L! Patsy Klein is coming up next with her hit song ‘Crazy.’ ”

  “CRAZY,” THE SONG, WAS TOTALLY awesome. It was even more awesome than “Have You Ever Been Lonely?” There was so much emotion in her voice, you didn’t want to just sing along, you wanted to cry along, too.

  I ran back downstairs as soon as it was over. The kitchen was empty and the lights were off, except for the one over the stove that my mom leaves on as a night-light, in case of emergencies. I wasn’t sure what sort of kitchen emergencies there are in the middle of the night, unless you counted midnight snacks. I really wanted a phone in my room, like Tara had.

  I dialed WTRY and waited for Nashville Nick to answer.

  “It’s perfect,” I said. “It’s a perfect, perfect song.”

  “I knew you’d like it,” he said. “I hope you’ll keep tuning in to WTRY.” He paused. “That sounded like a commercial, but I do hope you’ll keep listening. We play the modern stuff during the day, but at night, I play the real deal.”

  “I like the real deal,” I said.

  “Ma’am,” said Nash. I wondered if he thought I was really a ma’am, or if he was the type of person who called everyone ma’am. “You have impeccable taste.”

  “Lauren,” Mom called from the living room.

  “Thanks again,” I told Nashville Nick. I hung up the phone, fast, and ran upstairs and down the hall and jumped into bed.

  My mom followed me up the stairs and poked her head into my room. “That’s more like it,” she said.

  I tried to design a Patsy Klein button before school the next morning. I didn’t know what she looked like, so I didn’t try to draw her. Instead I drew a cowboy hat that ended up looking more like a car. I also tried a horseshoe and a boot. In the end, I just went back to her name, in a turquoise marker, because she sang so much about being blue. That might have been because blue rhymed with so many things: clue, dew, glue, moo, true, woo.

  Tara was too nervous to eat lunch before her callback. After school she handed me her peanut butter sandwich and I ate it for her. Sometimes, that is what friends have to do. The other thing they have to do is say “good luck,” even if the person they are saying it to never needs good luck.

  “I’m going to mess up, I know,” Tara said.

  She said this before math tests, too, even though she never got below a ninety-six. She said it before she won the science fair and advanced in the oratory contest. But she didn’t mess up. Ever.

  I didn’t know how to respond, so I just squeezed her arm. I stopped squeezing before it turned into a pinch.

  I wasn’t sure where to sit in the auditorium to watch the callbacks. I thought about sitting in the front, where Tara could see me, and Mrs. Tyndall might see me and realize that she had made a dreadful mistake. I thought about sitting in the back, so I could get out of there as soon as possible.

  I ended up picking a seat in the eighth row from the back. I picked the eighth row because there are eight letters in the word ensemble, which was where I was hoping Tara would end up so that we could still be We. Then I sat four seats in because there are four letters in Tara.

  Hector came over and sat down next to me, in the third seat, to wait for his callback. If Mrs. Tyndall was really casting people who looked the part, Hector would be Brenda Sue’s dad, the owner of the toy store, because Hector tended to dress like a fussy adult. He liked wearing cardigans and loafers instead of T-shirts and jeans. But wasn’t that the whole point of acting? That you could be anything or anyone? That when you stepped into a role, you were transformed? That’s how I thought it was supposed to work.

  They did the roles of the mayor and Brenda Sue’s dad first. The same two boys, Paul Giardino and Max Burka, who were the tallest boys trying out, had made the cut for both roles. So really it was just Mrs. Tyndall trying to decide who should be who.

  “Paul should be the mayor,” Hector whispered. “Since he’s the SCA president. Audiences like that kind of thing. Connections to real life.”

  This time, Mrs. Tyndall had them sing the same song, one from the play, so she could compare them. Then she called up Hector and Ricky to sing for the parts of Theodore and Elvis. I noticed Mrs. Tyndall was barefoot. I couldn’t tell from the eighth row from the back whether her feet were ugly or not, but in my experience, when adults get to be Mrs. Tyndall’s age, feet get pretty unattractive.

  “Okay.” Mrs. Tyndall swooshed to the center of the stage. “Very nice, boys. Very nice. Now: Where are my Brenda Sues?”

  Tara and Jennifer stood up at exactly the same time.

  “Lovely,” she said. “Let’s see. Tara?”

  Tara walked slowly up the steps. Her hands were at her sides, like she was fighting to keep them down because the excitement was about to bubble out of her whole body. She was in character.

  She sang a song from the musical called “Jumping through Hoops.”

  She was better than I thought she’d be, though there were still some notes she struggled with. She had these little movements that she incorporated, which told me she had been practicing. She didn’t have a Hula-Hoop, but she pretended to have one.

  She was adorable and funny. She was wearing a pink oxford, Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, and white sneakers, which made her look just like the girls in the magazines. She wore the smile she had when she was about to come up with a wild-but-good idea. I was so proud that she was my best friend.

  And then I wasn’t.

  Mean, spidery thoughts crept into my brain. Why did Tara get to make callbacks, just because she had blue eyes and freckles? Was there ever, ever anything that she couldn’t get? And why couldn’t I even have a decent pair of jeans? My mom bought me a pair of knockoff designer jeans from “Sylvia Soupson,” who was not a designer I had ever heard of, like Gloria Vanderbilt. Gloria Vanderbilt had a swan on the front pocket of her jeans. Sylvia Soupson had what looked like a pigeon.

  I was like the jeans—a knockoff. An imitation of what everyone really wanted.

  “I have to go,” I mumbled to Hector, who was sitting next to me again. I ran out of the auditorium before Tara, or anyone else, could see how truly terrible I was.

  I COULDN’T GO STRAIGHT HOME after school, so I went to Holmes’s. They called it a hardware store, but it was really an everything store. Besides hammers and rakes, they carried school supplies, since they were close to the school, and things you couldn’t find anywhere else, like egg coddlers. They also sold candy, magazines, bird feeders, crafts, toys, sleds, and rubber ducks with the heads of presidents. And buttons, of course.

>   At first I grabbed my favorite chocolate bar, which was an Almond Joy, but then I put it back because it reminded me that Tara and I used to sing the jingle together: Sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. I didn’t want anything to do with Tara and singing. I picked out a Zero bar instead and headed over to the magazine rack.

  I looked at Young Miss and Seventeen. They also had Ms., which Tara’s mom subscribed to and sometimes made us read. Then I looked at the ones that the high school girls usually got, Cosmopolitan and Glamour, which had quizzes that told you things like what kind of girlfriend you were and what kind of friend. I opened to a friend quiz.

  1. Your friend at work gets the promotion that you wanted. What do you do?

  a. Congratulate her!

  b. Sulk. What does she have that you don’t?

  c. Talk to your boss about why you didn’t get the promotion, and work harder next time.

  2. Your friend’s car is in the shop, and she wants to borrow yours to run errands on Saturday morning. Your friend is notorious for being late, and you have a blind date at one o’clock. What do you do?

  a. Let her borrow the car! Girlfriends are more important than blind dates!

  b. No way! There’s a reason why her car is in the shop.

  c. Let her borrow the car, but make it clear that you need the car back on time.

  3. Your friend has you over for dinner, and it tastes terrible! What do you do?

  a. Eat slowly but don’t complain. She was being thoughtful!

  b. Tell her the truth! That’s what friends do and besides, you might save someone else from food poisoning.

  c. Try a compliment sandwich. Find something to compliment (the silverware pattern is nice, right?), then provide some constructive criticism (maybe next time a bit less salt), and close on another compliment.

  I skipped ahead to the scoring section. If you scored mostly A’s, you were Sweet and Supportive. Mostly B’s meant you were Tough but True. Mostly C’s were for friends who liked to Communicate and Compromise. I didn’t feel like any of those categories. I needed one of my own: Mad and Sad.