“Get dressed.” She walks out the door. I wait for it to click closed, and then I go back over to my stashed duffel bag to get my outfit for the show.
I’m singing “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel, which is from the movie Say Anything. I’ve always liked that movie because the characters feel honest. And, Jesus Christ, the scene where Lloyd stands outside and holds the stereo above his head and plays “In Your Eyes” to Diane, who’s in bed, because he knows that he doesn’t have any better words? Right there, that’s what I love about music, what I love so much more than performing it.
Yesterday morning I took a cab down to Hollywood Boulevard, wearing a big pair of sunglasses and my hair tucked in the Angels cap. I was there to shop in the older, trashier stores, the ones that were there before the new hotels and Hollywood and Highland Center came in. Back in the days when I was pretending to be a social butterfly, my mom drove me up to the trashy stores so I could get a Julia-Roberts-in-the-beginning-of-Pretty-Woman costume for an eighth-grade Halloween party.
I take the outfit I bought out of my duffel and put it on. The shorts feel a little bit up my ass, but this is all going to be uncomfortable anyway, so who am I kidding?
I take a deep breath. I put the robe back on and tie it up so I can make it to the stage without anyone stopping me. I’ll just say I’m cold.
Mila’s waiting for me out in the hallway. She’s wearing her show clothes, which are a yellow neoprene crop top and bronze harem pants. Shiny white eye shadow too. I’m looking at one of the few people in the world who can pull this off. Tonight she’s going to be singing M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” from the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack.
“You’re really going to do this?” she asks. She’s the only person I’ve told about my winning idea. It came to me in a dream, and I woke up and told her because I knew she would laugh.
“Yeah.”
“I’m not going to stop you.”
“Thanks. I wouldn’t want you to.”
The stage manager, Patty, is coming down the hallway for me. I’m up first tonight.
This look comes over Mila’s eyes and it feels older than she is. Not that I’m getting all kooky with old soul and past life shit. I just mean that it’s like I can actually see the show biz in her irises. “You can’t want this as much as I want this”—and I know she means fame; she means something bigger than the show—“without also getting what’s wrong about it. So I get you. I don’t want to be you. But I get you.”
“I mean, also,” I say, “you’ll have the room to yourself.”
Mila shuts her eyes. “I have an early memory that I don’t know is true. I look in the crib next to me. My sister’s lying there. I think to myself, I wish I had my own room.”
Patty reaches us and folds her arms over the top of her big headset. “What’s this?” she asks me. “Why are you still in a robe? I had to get you in the wings a minute ago.”
“Brrrr.” I shiver. “I’m not wearing much under here. Trying to keep warm so I don’t pull something.”
“Come on,” Patty says, and Mila makes the gesture of pretending to wave a tiny flag. I smile at her and go. Patty and I walk down the hallway and through the dimmed backstage, which is its usual crowded chaos. The show’s audio comes over the backstage speakers. It’s starting. The theme song kicks in, and the audience claps and whistles, and Lance comes on the mic and says, “Gooooood evening out there! It’s time to turn on the spotlight!”
Liz from makeup puts more last-minute lipstick on me, and then Zara is behind me, sticking in one more bobby pin. Patty makes me hold her hand for support on the way to the wings because I’m wearing high heels and there are cables and wires all over the floor.
She gets me into position, and I can see Lance from the back, the lights over the stage, just the shapes of heads filling the audience.
He says, “Let’s see what’s been going on with Magnolia Anderson. . . .”
My video package launches on the screens in back of Lance. Ever since Lucien found out that I wanted to go home, he said I could do whatever the hell I wanted. He wasn’t going to drag me through a performance.
When Skip came over to the mansion with his crew, I got into an inflatable tube in the pool. I brought a lemonade with me and floated around and drank my drink.
From the edge of the pool, Lucien asked questions so he could at least say he’d tried to do his job.
“How are you feeling this week, Magnolia?”
“That’s personal,” I said.
“Anything on your mind?”
“This is good lemonade.”
“Anything upsetting you?”
“It’s a little bright out. I wish it were raining. I really love the rain.”
While the video plays, a couple of stagehands wheel out low platforms loaded with the pillar candles that Catherine got me. They’re in a race to light them.
The producers have cut together the footage to tell a story about how I’ve been pampering myself after the shock of Ford’s reveal and betrayal. They’ve turned my wishing for rain into a melancholy moment, like it’s a sign of my inner turmoil. But tonight I don’t care if people see me as melancholy or moody or gloomy. Or tomorrow. I mean, every single one of the seven dwarves didn’t need to be bouncing off the walls. There’s a downbeat Care Bear. Why isn’t there the same understanding of actual people?
“And here she is, singing ‘In Your Eyes!’” throws Lance as he exits left. The stage lights drop. The stagehands are gone. The hundred candles flicker. Patty says, “Go,” and I pull off the robe and hand it to her.
I walk to the middle of the stage. I can hear the floor creaking a little under my feet, but no one in the audience will.
The mic is waiting in the middle of the candles. I step behind it. The first notes of the song kick in. The house piano player and the drummer are somewhere below the stage. The lights lift, and the stage is cast in a kind of romantic, quivering blue green.
I’m wearing a red-white-and-blue stars-and-stripes bra bustier with red-white-and-blue stars-and-stripes jean shorts. I’ve cut some holes in the shorts. Around my shoulders I’ve tied on an American flag, making myself a shawl.
I take the mic off the stand and hold it so close that my lips just touch the metal. With one hand, I untie the knot in the flag.
I start singing. “Love.”
I take the flag from around my shoulders and let it drift down to the floor like I’m dropping an old silk scarf for drama. There’s an audible gasp from someone in the wings, probably Patty since she’s aware this wasn’t in rehearsals. I sing that I want to run away.
I lower myself onto my knees until I can sit myself down on the American flag. And then I just repeat the line that I want to run away instead of moving on to the part about coming back to the place you are. I just sing it and sing it until I get to the chorus. Then I sing about being complete in their eyes. I’m being sarcastic and it’s pretty obvious, but that’s okay.
43
After my song, I walk down the hallway toward my dressing room as fast as I can. My heart feels like it’s part of my pounding headache. It’s a headache from the tension.
Gardener’s gone up onstage; I can hear him over the sound system. He’s singing Nine Inch Nails “The Perfect Drug” from the Lost Highway soundtrack. When Trent Reznor talk-sings, it’s sexy, but Gardener doesn’t have that kind of ache in his voice. He sounds like some guy from my high school reading a book report. He’s singing the part that goes, “And I want you!” and it basically sounds like he might as well be singing, “By Herman Melville!”
“What did you do?” my mom cries out. I turn around.
She’s standing there in her quilted stovepipes and her top that hangs off a shoulder. Both of her hands are up on her collarbone. She has multiple rings on every finger, even her thumbs. I know she’s loved every moment of this sh
ow. It sounds dramatic to say that it’s given her a reason to get dressed in the mornings, because it’s not like she was hanging around the house in a robe, but it’s given her that reason to do herself up the way she always wanted to.
“I don’t want to be here, Mom,” I say, and the thing is, I mean it as an apology. I know from her perspective, this is coming out of nowhere. I never told her that this was only her dream because she never would have believed it.
Tears form in her eyes. I’m watching in horror as I make her cry. That’s one of the major reasons she thought the Real Housewives wouldn’t have her: because it’s so hard to make her cry.
“What did you do?” my mom says again, but with a choke in her voice. “I don’t get it at all. I don’t get why you would do this to me. You have ruined everything.” She gives me a look that slices at my heart. “What’s wrong with you?”
Something about that question flips a switch. I agreed to be on the show because I thought there was something wrong with me, because I thought I had to change myself. I didn’t have a mom who told me that there was nothing that needed fixing. I had a mom who couldn’t see me beyond herself.
Now, instead of asking why when I tell her I want to go home, she asks me what’s wrong with me. Something has to be wrong because I don’t want what she wants. So this question instantaneously binds my heart and makes it go faster than before, like it’s anger that’s pushing my blood around.
“Nothing’s wrong with me!” I yell. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Me?” She wipes her tears away with one hand, anger taking her over too. “What have I done to you except support you this whole way? What have I done except make this all possible?”
“You’ve made this all possible for yourself!” I shout. I can’t stop myself now. “Who said I ever wanted this kind of stress? This level of attention? Do you even have any idea what I’m like? Have you seen me, Mom? Have you ever actually seen how I act in a roomful of people? Or have you just created some imaginary version of me in your head like you did for Dad after he disappointed you? In your head you just turned me into an extension of yourself. And turned Dad into someone who never existed after the divorce. You just totally wrote him off. Even when he was dying. And now, even after he’s dead. And you’ve totally ignored how I might not want what you want, because I guess that’s also been unpleasant for you to think about.” It must be a commercial break now because no one’s singing, and people are starting to stream backstage.
“I have some questions for you too,” I go on. “I want to know if you’ve had any awareness of how shitty it’s been for me to have you refuse to speak about Dad after he died, considering he was my parent? And considering whatever went down between the two of you didn’t go down between him and me? And do you know how hard it is for a kid to feel responsible for her mom’s feelings all the time? Like, to feel that she’s got her mom’s happiness in her hands, but also to feel that her mom is kind of clueless about how that might work in the other direction?”
Stagehands are looking around the corner to see what the fight in the hallway is about. I’m sure Catherine is on her way to rip me a new asshole any second.
“So please, Mom,” I say, “don’t act like it’s my problem here. Nothing’s wrong with me because I’m not eating up being out there in front of millions of people every week. It’s you who has the problem. Your problem is that this shit is more meaningful to you than your real life. Your problem is that you only see what you insist on seeing. I’m okay.”
While I’ve been confessing everything about how I feel, my mom’s tears have stopped. I’m shaking. I’ve never come close to saying any of this out loud. I could never do it before, but the same thing that’s churning in me to get off this show is making me feel incapable of being anything but confrontational and stark about it all. I don’t know if she’s going to rail back at me or cave or what. It seems like she’s going to say something.
Her hands drop down to her sides. “You want to be miserable?” she asks, her face tightening into an unrecognizable mask. “You be miserable. But I’m not going to let you force me to be miserable with you. You’re on your own.” She turns her back on me and walks away.
44
I’m given my own town car for the elimination show on Friday because Catherine held me back for a meeting with legal. I didn’t realize it at the time, but when I left the stage after Wednesday’s performance, I accidentally left my American flag cape too close to a pillar. It briefly caught on fire before the stagehands brought out extinguishers. Burning the flag was absolutely unintentional. But I’m hearing it wasn’t really interpreted that way, considering I’d already used the flag as a rug.
Two of the show’s lawyers came to the mansion to impress upon me the financial trouble I could be in if I disrupt the show tonight. The numbers sound unreal. I used to think seventy-five dollars for a night of babysitting was amazing.
These past two days Catherine has bounced back and forth between being personally furious at me for being ungrateful (and almost burning down the set), and then professionally happy about the media attention my performance brought the show. I’ve supposedly angered a lot of people out there and confused a lot of others, but the worst part is that I’ve also inspired this casually anarchist online group to start a campaign for keeping me. I heard they’ve been using computers to dial in and vote for me repeatedly.
I was right to worry that you can’t reliably predict what will make an audience abandon or get behind you.
Now I’m nervous, sitting in the backseat of the Lincoln, being driven down Ventura to the studio lot. My mom, not speaking to me, is in another car with McKinley’s mom. The fortysomething driver has been making eye contact with me in the rearview mirror every so often like there’s something he wants to say.
“You hear any of that, my friend?” he finally says.
“Of what?”
He gestures to the dashboard radio. He’s had it on low volume on the front speakers. I can hear DJ types talking, but I haven’t locked on to anything they say.
“Story about Ford.”
From the way he says Ford’s name, I can tell he watches the show. His pronunciation sort of has an eye roll in it.
Around the house I’ve tried not to pay attention to things having to do with Ford, and Mila is great at never mentioning news of him. I hang out with her, and it’s like she’s this editor who effortlessly chops him out of our lives. But now curiosity gets the best of me.
“What are they saying?”
The driver adjusts the mirror so we can see each other more fully. “You want the gossip? Look, I can’t get enough of gossip, but I have enough self-control to be respectful if you’re not into it.”
“Let’s hear it.”
I see a happy flash in the driver’s eyes. “Okay, so here’s the deal. His mom gave a phone interview to KIIS FM Wednesday night after your performances. Told them Ford didn’t hide his family because he was protecting them—she said he did it because he was an ungrateful kid and, quote, a bad seed, unquote. Said the family was just pretending like that was the story because they’d wanted to help him, but now she’d decided that Ford didn’t deserve it because he was so awful to them. He wouldn’t even let his family come stay with him when they ran out of money for their hotel. Did you know that? He turned them away like they were nothing. Said that’s the kind of son he is. So she’s finally had to come out with the truth.”
I’m not planning on having kids any time soon, but I’m sure that if/when I do have a kid, even if that kid were to majorly disappoint me, even if that kid were to crush my feelings, I still wouldn’t want to destroy his chances at realizing his dream. I think only a bad mom would throw her kid under the bus like that, and that’s even if he was the person she said he was.
“Why would she do that?” I wonder.
“She was sloshed. Slurring. What,
you don’t have embarrassing drunks in your family?”
“Not that I know of. I mean, obviously, I’m sure somewhere out there I have a third cousin who’s at the bar every night. But my parents never really kept in touch with their extended families.”
“Well, if you had a loose cannon drunk in your family, you’d know there doesn’t have to be rhyme or reason. Sometimes they just get crazy mean. You don’t always see it coming. My sister did AA and it worked out for her, but let me tell you something. Before that she would pick fights with me that were ten years old. High school stuff, my friend. For some people, booze just magnifies feelings they buried when they weren’t wasted.”
We pull up to Gate 2 of the lot, and the driver rolls down the window to show the security guard his credentials. “Good evening,” he says, suddenly professional.
“If she was obviously drunk, then people probably won’t put that much weight on what she’s saying about him.”
“Well,” the driver says, being waved through, “then there was also the town car driver—I actually know the guy—who told E!Online that Ford and his brother puked all over his car. My friend had to scrub the chunks out! So that’s probably not going to help either.”
I lean my head against the window, and it’s not that I want to be thinking about Ford right now, but I can’t deny a gut feeling that this kind of thing was the reason that Ford tried to pretend like his family didn’t exist.
The driver pulls to a stop in front of the studio.
“So many chunks,” he reiterates.
“Magnolia,” Lance says, and I get down from my stool. I walk across the stage to electronic music that’s both sad and pulsing, however that works. I take my place next to Lance and face out toward the judges and audience. I’ve made it into the bottom two. Here we go.
“I wonder who’s going to join her?” Lance ponders into the microphone. The anxiety of waiting for this to be over is undoing my nerves. I’m close to shaking him to just get it out.
Everybody Knows Your Name Page 20