by Ann Hood
“Floor wax?” Libby said. It was funny how after all these years she still remembered her lines in Fiddler. Her very first one was, “Mama, you know that Papa works hard.” The girl who had played the lead, Golde, was not nearly as good as she was. “You know,” Libby said, “I can sing too.”
“Yes,” Carl said. “You mentioned that at some point.” He was standing, ready for her to leave.
Libby tried to be professional. He had given her a lead on an acting job. She certainly didn’t see Ashley or Heather in here. Besides, Farrah Fawcett had started in commercials. For shampoo, of all things. That had led to Charlie’s Angels, to marrying Lee Majors. To a full-fledged career, for God’s sake. Maybe she was on her way, after all.
She put on her best smile and shook Carl’s hand, firmly. A handshake was very important. It gave a real message as to who a person really was. Carl seemed startled. His handshake was limp, like a boneless chicken breast. As she walked away, Libby sang “Matchmaker,” softly, just in case he was still listening.
Libby was practical. She prided herself on that part of her personality. Sometimes, back in Holly, when she was depressed, she wrote down all of her positive attributes. It made her feel better. Practical was always way at the top of that list, even before pretty and slender.
That was why she did what she did. Because she was practical. Because she knew from her research that Hollywood was corrupt, that you had to play their game. When she walked into the waiting room for that audition and saw twenty other women, all pretty and slender, all her age, she realized she had to do something to get that commercial.
Suddenly, standing there surrounded by women who looked just like her, Libby decided that getting chosen for this floor wax ad was the most important thing in the world. It was what she had come all this way for, what she had risked everything for, why she had left her husband and children. When her name was called and she walked into the room for the audition, her only hope was that the man she was about to meet wasn’t too disgusting.
He wasn’t. He wasn’t her type, either, but he wasn’t the worst person she’d ever seen. He was a little short. He could lose ten or fifteen pounds. He was a bit older than she expected, close to sixty, she figured.
Libby had had an affair once, with a man named William Monroe. If one afternoon constituted an affair. That was five years ago, at the Marriott in Boston. She had seen an ad in the paper that said a major airline would be in Boston recruiting flight attendants. Maybe, she thought, that was the job for her. She imagined herself flying around the world, jetting into Paris and Rome, sipping champagne.
Tom hadn’t liked the idea. “But it says here you’ll have to relocate,” he told her. Ever so slightly, he moved his lips when he read. Not enough for anyone to really notice, although she always did.
“So we’ll relocate,” she told him, pretending that she would take him along.
“I don’t know, Libby,” he said. He looked frightened.
She went anyway, dressed in red, white and blue, trying to look like a flight attendant right from the start. But at the interview, they didn’t even ask her questions. They just sat there, waiting for her to say something. After a few minutes they thanked her and showed her out. Later she realized that they wanted someone who would just talk, someone friendly and cheerful. Probably she seemed much too professional for that kind of job, too mature. But at that moment when they didn’t want her, before she figured out why, she had gone down to the bar and ordered a drink. Libby wasn’t used to being rejected.
That was where she met William Monroe. He was in Boston on a job interview too, a handsome man a few years younger than Libby. He thought he’d gotten the job he’d come for and felt like celebrating. They drank too much and then she went back to his room with him. After they’d made love, she threw up. “Too much to drink,” she told him.
But really she wasn’t sure if that were true. It was, she thought, just too much. Blowing the interview, having sex with a stranger, all of it. And life itself, this feeling of being trapped, of not knowing which way to turn. Sitting on that cold bathroom floor of William Monroe’s hotel room, Libby had remembered a guidance counselor in high school named Mr. Polaski. She had tried to explain to him her need to do something big, something away from Holly. Mr. Polaski had been in the Peace Corps. He had a thick mustache and long sideburns. She thought she could trust him. But he said, “Pretty girls like you should get married and make their husbands happy.” “But I want more than that,” she told him. He thought a long while. “You could be a teacher,” he said finally. Somewhere out there women were burning their bras, demanding things, but in Holly women were still just pretty future wives.
That was how Libby still felt—confused, trapped. Magazines were always writing about successful women. They showed proof, pictures of women in suits with briefcases and running shoes, waving goodbye to their husbands and children, going to an office where they made important decisions. Libby always studied those pictures carefully. The women seemed to be the same age as she was. Yet somehow they had found out something that she hadn’t. They had houses that overlooked the ocean, or town houses in historic parts of cities. They had jobs and nice clothes and children who understood them. She had nothing.
A few years ago she had tried to start a book club. She had read in the newspaper about how they were popular in cities everywhere. Women got together and made fancy dinners and discussed important books. But at the very first meeting they couldn’t decide on what book to read, Jackie Collins or Judith Krantz. No one would listen to Libby’s suggestions. No one liked the risotto it had taken her so long to make. Alice Rose spilled her wine on Libby’s personal copy of The Women’s Room.
When they finally left, Tom helped her clean up. “You know,” he said, “I like to read. If you want, we can read the same book and then I’ll talk to you about it.”
He hadn’t read a book since high school and she knew it. Although she supposed his offer was sweet, that someone else would think she had the best husband in the world, it only made Libby even sadder.
Now, here she was up against twenty other women. She was not special here. All she wanted was this one thing, to mop a floor on national television. Other than that one afternoon with William Monroe, the only man she had ever had sex with was Tom. Still, she faced the man who maybe could finally change her life and said, “I want this part more than anything in the world and I will do anything for it.” Then slowly, staring past his gaze and out the window at the skyscrapers of Los Angeles, Libby unbuttoned her blouse.
Dana knew something was up when Caitlin walked into Dana’s study hall, her face all creased with worry. Study hall was first period for Dana, and all around her everyone was hurrying to finish homework due next period. Usually, Dana wrote lyrics to rock songs in the back of her Spanish notebook. For these forty-five minutes every morning, she pretended her songs were good. She could imagine herself on MTV, surrounded by men in tuxedos, dancing and spinning, her latest hit playing in the background.
In her fantasy, she looked a little like China Phillips from the group Wilson Phillips. Her mother had told her that China Phillips’s mother used to be in the Mamas and the Papas. “I laughed when I read they named their kid China,” her mother had said. “I mean China?” And then her mother had gone into all the weird names the old rock stars gave their kids, God and America and Zowie.
Now she watched as Caitlin whispered to Mr. Ross and they both glanced over at Dana, their eyes all sneaky. Mr. Ross taught chemistry and always smelled like one of his experiments, sickly sweet or slightly eggy. He crooked his finger at Dana.
“Ms. Harper,” he said. He insisted on calling everybody Mr. or Ms. His big joke was to say on the first day, “Do we have any Mrs. here?” Last year Dorrie Flagg got pregnant and married some guy in the marines over the summer. She’d come back to school wearing a baby blue maternity dress covered with faded bunnies, and when Mr. Harper asked that stupid question she’d raised her hand.
“I’m Mrs. Bay now,” she’d said, and everyone giggled.
Dana walked past all the tables filled with microscopes and test tubes toward Caitlin and Mr. Ross. Caitlin’s jeans were too big for her, and they were bunched up funny by an old beaded belt that said HOLLYWOOD across the back, except now it said HYWOO because Caitlin was so skinny she had to almost double it up.
“Ms. Mitchell has to talk to you,” Mr. Ross said. “She has exactly three minutes and only because it’s an extreme emergency. Right, Ms. Mitchell?”
Caitlin nodded. She took Dana’s arm and practically dragged her into the hall. Even through the closed door they could hear Mr. Ross saying, “Don’t you people have anything to study?”
“What a jerk,” Caitlin said.
“He smells like Dr Pepper or something today,” Dana said.
“Listen, I wanted to tell you first. In case anybody mentions it even though I don’t know how they’d ever find out, but you never can tell in this one-horse town who knows what.” Caitlin looked around and sighed. “Man,” she said, “what I would give for a cigarette.”
Dana leaned against the wall. It was painted dull yellow and lined with army green lockers. With a red felt-tip pen someone had made a row of peace signs in a crack between two cinder blocks. Dana spit on her finger and rubbed them off.
“Are you listening?” Caitlin said. She sounded annoyed.
“Yes.”
“Your mother called last night. She called my mother at like two a.m. or something. Scared the hell out of her.”
Dana felt her whole body stiffen. Even her toes seemed to be rigid.
“She called to tell her,” Caitlin was saying, “she’s going to be on television Monday night. In a floor wax commercial.”
Dana wondered if she could walk if she tried. That’s how stiff she felt. Like a board. Like one of these cinder blocks behind her.
“I figured it was better to tell you. I mean, what if you watched TV and saw her.”
Dana nodded. She felt like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, all stiff and creaky.
“I hope I did the right thing,” Caitlin said.
Dana managed to nod again.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” Caitlin said, looking down the hall. “God, do I wish I had a cig right now.” She turned back to Dana. “I should get back to English. Beowulf.”
Dana wanted to say thanks, or to at least tell her she’d done the right thing, but all she could do was walk on her stiff legs, robotlike, back to study hall.
Dana hardly ever went into Troy’s room. It smelled weird, like pot and socks and sweat. But today, when she heard him come in from school and climb the stairs and close his bedroom door, she decided to go in there and tell him. Since she had gotten home, all she had done was lie on her bed and think, Oil can, oil can, just like the Tin Man. He had needed a heart, and Dana felt as if hers was missing too. Hers was in a red convertible, driving down Hollywood Boulevard.
She knocked on Troy’s door and hesitated before opening it, even after he yelled “Come in.” She never knew what she’d find Troy doing.
But he was just sitting on his bed reading The Scarlet Letter.
“Why are you walking so weird?” he said. “You look like those Iraqi soldiers when they march down the streets of Baghdad.”
His room didn’t smell too bad. It just had a guy smell, that was all. Dana sat on the very edge of his bed. She saw he had a bandage over his John Lennon tattoo, to hide it.
“Well,” she said, “Mom is in a TV commercial. It’s airing Monday night.” Then she said, “Floor wax.”
Troy’s thick eyebrows bunched together so they looked like a caterpillar creeping across his face.
“A floor wax commercial?” he said.
Dana watched his Adam’s apple bob up and down real quick. “She called Sue,” Dana said.
Troy nodded slowly. One finger held his place in The Scarlet Letter, and Dana saw that he was pressing real hard, crinkling the cover.
“Sue,” Troy said. “Figures.”
It did figure, Dana thought. It was always Sue whom their mother let in to her room when she hid up there for days on end, and Sue whom they’d find her on the phone with when she should have been talking to them, asking them how school was that day.
Dana looked at the wallpaper on Troy’s walls. It was old, put up when he was a kid. There were Revolutionary War soldiers and cannons and Redcoats, but they had discolored so that nothing was red or blue or black anymore. Instead, everything was some shade of gray, battleship or silver or blue-gray. Except the Redcoats. They had turned a strange orange.
Dana didn’t know what else to say, so she just sat there for a while longer.
Neither of them told their father. But Monday night after dinner he said, “So? Should we watch her or not?”
Dana supposed Sue had told him. She tried to imagine being in love, the way her father was with her mother, and having that person leave you. She had never really thought about it that way before, but now that she did, she saw her father a little differently. He was a tragic figure suddenly. He’d been abandoned by his wife! What did he think about alone in bed every night? Dana wondered.
“Do you want to watch her?” Dana asked him, her voice so gentle that he looked at her startled.
“It’s going to break my heart,” he said after a minute.
How much can a heart break? Dana wondered. Was there some cut-off point where it couldn’t hurt any more than it already did?
“But I would sort of like to see her,” her father said softly.
Troy swallowed so hard that Dana heard him do it. “Me too,” he said.
“I feel like I have no heart at all,” Dana told them. “Like I’m stiff and cold and my chest is empty. Like the Tin Man.”
Her father put his arms around her and hugged. He hadn’t done that since she was a little girl. “Oh baby,” he said. “I am so sorry.”
“I hate her,” Troy said. Dana heard him swallow real hard again.
Their father said, “I feel like my heart is one of those ones you get on Valentine’s Day when you’re a kid. And it keeps getting ripped up. And ripped up some more.”
“Still,” Troy said, “watching her would be better than not.”
Their father nodded too enthusiastically. “Definitely. And maybe it would help in a funny kind of way.”
They settled in front of the television. Tom lined up three bottles of beer beside him. He drank the first one very fast, his eyes glued to the set even though Libby wasn’t supposed to be on until halfway through the Monday movie.
Jeopardy! was almost over, the contestants busy trying to write down their questions for the Final Jeopardy answer: “He was the only president ever to wear a Nazi uniform.”
Dana tried to figure out the question but she was getting that old stiff feeling again. Everything felt paralyzed, even her tongue and brain.
Troy muttered, “Ronald Reagan. Who else could it be? He probably was in some stupid movie.”
No one else said anything until the movie started. Then Tom said, “A goddamn commercial.” And then they were silent again.
When she appeared on their television, Dana leaned forward. They all did. The seats creaked and rustled. Their breathing changed. There she was, all blond and beautiful being beamed into living rooms everywhere, waxing a floor until stars shot out of it.
Dana thought about how some family in Kansas had just seen her mother, someone in Hawaii and Texas.
“You okay?” their father asked. He didn’t sound okay.
“She seemed like a stranger,” Troy said. He walked out of the room, and Dana could hear him making a telephone call in the kitchen.
“She did a good job, I think,” Tom said. “Don’t you think so?”
Dana shrugged. She was waiting to feel something.
“Still feel like the Tin Man?” he asked her.
“Yeah.”
Troy didn’t come back after the commercial. But Dana and Tom s
tayed and watched the movie. Dana heard her father make a strange noise, almost like a choked sob, but she didn’t look over at him. She was afraid he’d feel too embarrassed.
Finally, Dana turned off the television.
“I guess she’ll never come back now,” Tom said.
The room was very dark without the light from the set. But Dana could see that his head was bent.
“I guess she’s gone for good,” he said, and he made that strange sound again.
Dana stood in the middle of the living room, trying to figure out what to do. She could hear Troy, still on the phone, his voice low. Tom was still looking down, peeling the label off the beer bottle. He had it almost off in one piece, but then it ripped.
“No one loves me,” he said. He looked up finally and she saw that his face was wet. “That’s what we used to say when we were kids. If you can’t rip it off in one piece, it means no one loves you.”
Dana thought, I love you. But she didn’t say anything. She stood there a moment longer, and then went to bed.
In the morning, she found something from her father sitting beside her bed, on the crowded night table. It was an oil can, from his garage. She could still smell oil on it. She picked it up and held it in both her hands. He must have driven to the garage to get it, then driven all the way back home and left it here for her to find when she woke up.
She got up quickly, wishing she had said or done something last night, standing there with him after the movie. But when she ran downstairs to find him, to say something to him, he was already gone.
Sue was small and thin. Not like her kid, Caitlin, but scrawny and small-boned. She reminded Tom of a homeless cat, or a lost child. She had never once cut her hair, so that it grew all wild and ragged to her hips. Seeing her now, pressing her face against the screen door of her house, Tom thought that if he didn’t know better, he would guess her to be a teenager instead of a grown woman.
“Harp,” she said. “Hi.”
It was the morning after he had watched Libby on that commercial, and Tom had not slept at all. Instead, he’d sat in front of the television as if she might appear again and step from the screen into the living room. Even two six-packs of beer had not made that fantasy come true.