Heart of Glass

by Wendy Lawless

  For about two weeks of the run, it rained torrentially during the performances. Since the play’s set on a farm during a severe dry spell, this led to some hilarious moments onstage for the actors and the audience. An actor would stick his hands in pockets, look up, and drawl, “I sure do wish it would rain!”—while water poured down the backdrop and leaked into buckets on folding chairs placed around the ­theater, and the company tried to keep a straight face.

  Although Stanley and I were buddies and spent so much time together just sitting around the tent, I couldn’t confide too much in him because of his religion. Sharing my recent sordid past with him—sex, abortion, smoking, ­drinking—seemed inappropriate, and I feared that if he knew the truth about me, he’d judge me in some way or shun me. He wouldn’t have done either, but I felt embarrassed about my wanton behavior and found that I often edited myself when I was talking to him. In many ways he was the perfect guy: thoughtful, kind, funny, sweet, and nice looking. But I knew I’d never cut it as a Mormon. Too bad, I thought.

  The next show was the musical Camelot, which Richard Geer would be directing. I was playing young Wart, pulling the sword out of the stone, and would be in the chorus as a lady-in-waiting, dancing around in a long dress and a wimple. I found a bestie in Barbie, who was playing Guinevere. She was about five years older than me, slender, with ­flaming-red hair and a wicked sense of humor. She was a badass and didn’t take any shit from anyone, especially the men in the cast. She hated the guy who played Lancelot so much (he was a pompous windbag and not a great actor) that she took her contacts out before the show so she couldn’t see him. Barbie adopted me in a big-sister way, and I was grateful to have a gal pal to hang out with.

  One night after Camelot had opened, Richard came backstage, again, to give notes in the dressing room. Barbie was tired of his barging in every night, so she just stripped down to her panties—she didn’t wear a bra—while he stood there blushing and stuttering. I thought she was awesome. She had a boyfriend who was off somewhere working as an actor. She showed me his picture, a glossy eight-by-ten of him naked except for his mustache and a bow tie. He had one leg up on a chair and was striking a defiant pose for the camera.

  She had grown up in Boulder and had a condo in a complex there. We started driving down there on our days off and spending the night and next day there. Since she knew the way well and drove way too fast, we always made good time. We’d whip down the two-lane roads, blasting Grace Jones singing “Pull Up to the Bumper” with windows down and an open, cold bottle of Moët champagne stuck between my legs for sustenance. A Steamboat Springs eccentric, a zaftig lesbian lingerie heiress who insisted that we call her S.O.B.—we never knew why—lavished each of the actors with a case of Moët on every opening night, so we were always well stocked.

  Barbie and I arrived at the apartment, took a late-night swim in the pool, and flopped into bed. Boulder was a crunchy place, full of Deadheads, flower children, and followers of Jack Kerouac. The Naropa Institute clung to a mountain overlooking the town; an Oxford-educated Buddhist had founded it, and Allen Ginsberg taught poetry there. The town had a grungy, groovy vibe, which normally held no appeal for me, but at least you could buy the New York Times, browse at bookstores, and get a decent cup of coffee. Civilization!

  I had recently received a summons for my former roommate Harvey’s trial, forwarded to me through the mail by Jenny. I called the court from Barbie’s apartment, as I had no phone number of my own—Barbie saved me from taking a roll of quarters to a phone booth. The trial was set for late August in New York. I was able to convince the clerk that I didn’t know anything about Harvey personally. We didn’t hang out—I just rented a room from him, and he gave me a suitcase and a TV. Since I was now in Colorado and wasn’t a strong enough witness to be flown in by the government, they released me. It was a relief—I had been worried about testifying against Harvey and seeing him being dragged away in handcuffs. Also, I had simply nothing to wear on the stand.

  Finally, the show in which I had an actual speaking role, The Importance of Being Earnest, opened. It was directed by the smart young guy who’d hired me in Minneapolis. Playing the peculiarly charming Cecily was a blast; I wore a blond Gibson-girl wig that made me look like Carol Channing and skipped around frivolously with a paddleball toy. Barbie was playing Gwendolen, and we had such fun sparring during the tea scene that we had difficulty keeping our composure.

  Robin arrived in Steamboat a few days after our Earnest premiere in the wee hours on a bus from the Denver airport, looking a little green and dazed from her long trip from Boston.

  “Thanks for schlepping all the way out here!” I hugged her and grabbed her cotton Gap duffel bag.

  “You’re welcome,” she slurred, zombielike. “Where the hell am I?”

  “The Rocky Mountains, girl.” I made a sweeping tour-guide arm gesture, even though it was dark and we were in a bus station parking lot.

  “East Jesus is more like it. Why are you doing theater on the prairie, for God’s sake?”

  I shrugged. “It’s a start, right?”

  As it was around four thirty in the morning and eleven thirty in London, we drove over to watch Prince Charles and Lady Di get married on the little, crappy black-and-white telly in the theater office. We watched in the dark, the TV casting a nearly lunar glow on us as the future princess got out of the coach in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral and floated up the red-carpeted aisle, swathed in a cloud of taffeta and lace.

  “Wow, that dress looks like it might swallow her up,” Robin said.

  “Yeah.” I sighed. “She’s the same age as me.”

  “And the similarities end there. Jeez, look at that ring! Nice rock.”

  We were two girls in the middle of nowhere watching a fairy-tale wedding taking place in a glittering city that we had once called home. It was like everything you’d ever dreamed about in the movies: a shy, lovely young woman plucked from obscurity to marry one of the world’s most eligible bachelors. Pure fantasy. The faces of the men we would marry were still a blank. Maybe those guys were out there somewhere, but who knew if we’d ever find them.

  My sister took in the play that evening, after we had both had power naps. I could hear her laughter from the audience; she was enjoying herself. Afterward, she sneaked back to the dressing-room tent.

  “You were great! What a kooky play.” She smiled at me.

  “Thanks. It’s fun.” Robbie’s support of my acting never wavered. She came to see me wherever I managed to work, and it meant a lot.

  I drove her down to the Denver airport, and we popped into a place that looked like a HoJo’s, called Denny’s, for dinner before she got on the plane. We sat in a booth, eating club sandwiches and sipping on enormous iced teas loaded with crushed ice, and talked about the future, the fall specifically. She was planning to take some classes at UMass Boston—maybe study the classics or film—she wasn’t sure. I guessed I’d head back to New York when the play ended. I told her that Daddy was coming to Steamboat soon.

  “That’s nice,” she replied.

  “It’s too bad you’ll just miss him.”

  “Yeah.”

  There was an awkward silence. A wave of guilt swept over me as it dawned on me that perhaps I had Pollyannaishly dragged my sister into reuniting with our father and maybe she hadn’t been ready at Christmas. I had been focused on how I’d feel better having her with me. Perhaps I’d unwittingly pushed her into something she didn’t want. I had forced my way into Daddy’s life, carving out my own space; my sister was different—maybe she didn’t feel the connection I’d grabbed on to and embraced. I realized in that moment that whatever relationship Daddy and Robin forged, it would have to be achieved between the two of them, without me. I searched for a way to tell her this, apologize maybe.

  But suddenly Robin leaned over the table and said in a low voice, “Don’t look up right away, but I think there
are policemen outside.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see little black flecks darting around, popping up and down, like in one of those shooting-gallery carnival games. “Um, I guess we should get the check?”

  “Yeah, maybe, before we get taken hostage.”

  “Let’s just do this.” I pulled a twenty out of my purse and put it on the table.

  We rose stealthily and slowly ambled out of the restaurant past about ten cops squatting in the low bushes outside with their guns drawn. Losing our nerve, we squealed and made a break for the parking lot. The officers ignored us, storming into the restaurant. Screams and shouts erupted from the Denny’s dining room, followed by silence. Hiding behind my car, I turned to ask a guy crouched down behind a tree next to us what was happening. Apparently an armed gunman had been inside, planning to rob the place, but someone had tipped off the cops. Police and thieves were seemingly never far away from the Lawless sisters. We got into my Honda and drove away.

  “Close call,” Robin said as she lit up a cigarette.

  • • •

  My father came to visit and see the show, causing a bit of a stir, as he was a sort of regional-theater celebrity. As everyone crowded around him—the director and some of the other actors—I felt like Jimmy Lawless’s daughter for only the second or third time in my life. I wondered if people thought I had some special advantage because of who my father was. No one in the company knew that we’d only recently reunited or that I’d had a crazy-train childhood, instead of growing up with him. Unexpectedly, I didn’t feel nervous at all knowing he was out in the audience. It gave me a feeling of security—as if he was rooting for me—and made me want to do my best.

  At dinner after the show, he told me how relieved he was when I made my entrance and said my first lines. “You can’t teach that, you know. You’ve definitely got ‘it,’ kid.”

  “Thanks, Daddy,” I gushed.

  He told me he had been worried that if I wasn’t good, he wouldn’t know what to say to me, regaling me with funny stories about going to see friends in shows who were terrible and having to go backstage and say something nice. He’d say, “That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen!” or “Do you do that every night? Incredible!”—not wanting to lie.

  “Soon, I’ll be known as Wendy Lawless’s father!” He laughed, and so did I. I was thrilled that he liked my performance. I had lived up to his expectations and gained his respect as a fellow actor. I was giddy with happiness. He drove off in his big black Buick LeSabre the next day to play Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1 in Denver. Someday, I hoped, it might be me going off for a big role somewhere. For now I was happy with his encouragement and just to be working.

  At the end of the summer the tent came down, and we all dispersed. Being in a theater company was intense yet fleeting. You quickly became a family with your coworkers, then it was over—and you never knew if you’d see each other again. Some people I’d never want to see again, but others wrote down their contact information on the clipboard that was passed around on that last day and I promised to write letters or call. Many actors went back to Denver. Barbie returned to her condo in Boulder, where she said I’d always be welcome. Stanley and I caravanned in a torrential rainstorm, following each other’s car as far as Kansas City, where we spent the night at a hotel in the Plaza section of town. I remembered staying in this same hotel with my mother and sister while visiting my dying grandfather eight years previously. Stanley and I shared a room, sleeping in separate double beds. The air-conditioning in our room was broken and couldn’t be turned off.

  “Can I get in with you?” I asked after failing to fall asleep for what felt like ages. “I’m freezing!”

  “Sure, Wendell.”

  We cuddled spoon-style for warmth beneath the covers, not speaking. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck and a hardness that pressed into my lower back. Politely ignoring the latter, I said good night. We got up before dawn the next morning—he was headed to DC to work at the Arena Stage in the box office, and I was headed back to New York.

  “Well, little ole Wendy, you take care.”

  “You, too.” I embraced him.

  “Let me know where you finally end up.”

  “I will. Good luck with your job.”

  “Oh, and thanks for the English Beat cassette.”

  “Sure, Stanley.”

  We got into our cars and drove off on our separate journeys. Watching him in my rearview mirror, I saw Stanley riding toward his new job, his marriage to Old Valerie, and four or five perfectly blond Mormon kids. He had it all figured out: a map of the future. I was driving into the ­unknown—but at least the sun was starting to come up.

  chapter six

  SPRING AWAKENING

  After my stint in Wild West theater, I returned to Manhattan, not knowing where else to go. I moved back into my room at Ninety-seventh Street; it was almost as if Pete and Jenny had it waiting for me. After turning heads in a tiny town in Colorado with my personal style, I needed to work a bit harder to get noticed and stand out in the city. To go along with my spiky do, I took it up a notch by wearing suits and ties. A pair of white Keds high-tops completed the androgynous look that I fancied made me look like little David Bowie.

  Some people, though, seemed threatened by my macho style.

  “What are you? Some kind of Nazi?” a male friend of Pete’s asked me one night at dinner.

  I was about to open my mouth when Pete stepped in and quipped, “No, Wend’s just feminine—in a butch sort

  of way.”

  Rodney, my old boss from Barnes & Noble, had vanished, and my job had been filled by some new kid fresh off the bus. Since I couldn’t type and acting jobs weren’t falling from the skies, I capitalized on my skill set—talking on the phone. I got a job at an Italian deli on Lexington in the Forties, Piatti Pronti. This lunch place catered to office workers in Midtown, and I took the orders for delivery. I thought I could probably make a killing teaching most of the people I talked to how to speak properly. Many were simply unintelligible, squawking into my ear in a thick Queens or Brooklyn accent. Sometimes I had to ask them to repeat or—if it was especially garbled—spell their orders, addresses, and names. It was crazy busy from noon to three, the phone ringing and everyone yelling, and then I was back out on the street, heading home by four.

  After work on an especially gorgeous November afternoon, I thought I’d take a nostalgic stroll up Fifth Avenue and maybe take the crosstown bus at Eighty-sixth Street, walking the eleven blocks home. Along the way, I dreamed of my million-dollar idea of teaching speech classes to accent-challenged New Yorkers. I headed west along Forty-second Street past Grand Central Terminal, and turned up Fifth at the stately New York Public Library, with its imposing marble lions, Patience and Fortitude, keeping sentry at the steps. I peered through the glass front of Scribner’s bookstore, with its ornate beaux arts ironwork and vaulted ceilings, looking like a place far too serious for me to go inside. Just past Saks Fifth Avenue, I could see the opulent neo-Gothic spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where my sister and I had once watched on television our mother, swathed in her mink and sporting a dramatic fluttery, black chiffon head scarf and Persol sunglasses, mount the steps to attend Senator Robert Kennedy’s memorial service. I was looking in the windows of Saks, contemplating going inside to breathe in the high-end-department-store smell of leather and fresh lipstick, when I ran into Nina Franco, who was on her way out, clutching one of the store’s classy taupe shopping bags with the curly script.

  I had met Nina the summer I was seventeen, at a small theater in New Hampshire, the Peterborough Players, where we were both apprentices. I had been very much in awe of her; she was outspoken and accomplished and had a serious boyfriend, who was the youngest actor in the Equity company. Nina was a few years older than me and had recently graduated from NYU undergrad. She was brainy, spoke at least two la
nguages besides English, and was well connected in the New York theater world.

  “Omigod! Hi, Wendy Lawless!” Nina gave me a big hug. She was about five feet tall, in heels, with perfectly streaked, long brunette hair, and her nose was just a little too big for her face, which kept her from looking like any other pretty girl from the Upper East Side. She had a lovely smile and perfect teeth.

  “Hi, Nina!”

  “I just got out of Georgette Klinger on Madison and was doing a little shopping. How are you?”

  Nina was the first person I’d ever known who claimed to go regularly to get her blackheads sucked out at Georgette Klinger, the first fancy facial spa in Manhattan, opened by a Czech beauty queen who’d fled the Nazis and who used to make beauty creams in her kitchen before she opened her first salon. Nina dressed well, and dramatically, all in black, making her look like a chic imp. If I was thrift shop, Nina was definitely Saks.

  “I still remember how amazing you were in that Tennessee Williams play.”

  Nina was referring to the apprentice production at the end of the summer where I got to be in This Property Is Condemned, the story of a young girl walking down some railroad tracks, haunted by the death of her beautiful older sister. It was a great part, and I had gotten some compliments from the actors in the company who had attended the show.

  “Thanks, Nina. Gosh, what are you up to?” I noticed her face looked all dewy and blemish-free.

  “I’m directing an Equity showcase, and I’m casting it right now. I can’t believe I ran into you because you’d be perfect for it. Are you available?”