I clutched both her hands in mine. “Frankie. You’re incredible. Of course you can. You can win an Oscar, I know it. Soon the studios’ll be beating down your door. I just thought it might be nice for you to start out among girls like us, and —”
“You really think I’ll make it?” She squeezed my hands tighter, urgency punctuating her words. “You aren’t just saying that?”
“Of course I think so. I —” I swallowed. I knew she’d said it before, but Frankie said a lot of things. “I love you, Frankie. I know you can do anything you aim for, and I —”
She kissed me before I could finish, a toe-curling kiss that melted away the rest of the world. Frankie loved me back — she had to, didn’t she, to kiss me that way? That’s why she’d brought me to the Shrinking Violet. I wasn’t alone in loving her, in loving girls, in finding my true self —
“Hey, would you look at that!” exclaimed some wise Joe as he passed us on the sidewalk. “Sorry, ladies, but I bet your guys’ll be wantin’ that job back when they get home too!”
I yanked away from Frankie, but I knew just how I looked — lips ripe and swollen, panting for breath, my every skin cell crackling and alive. The man chuckled to himself and continued down the boulevard, but his words rattled around inside me like loose rocks in my shoe as we headed back to Mrs. M’s. There was no more hiding who I was.
I was in love with another girl.
“Don’t be silly,” Frankie said that night, in the silvery dark of my room. “We’re just havin’ fun, you and me. No need to put a label on it or nothin’.”
“It’s not just fun for me.” My heart was throbbing, sore and worn out. “This is who I am — who I’ve always been. I just never admitted it before.” And I wanted it to be more. The way she looked at me sometimes, like I was the only one who knew the roles she wanted to play — that’s the way she made me feel all the time. “I don’t want to be someone I’m not anymore.”
Her laugh was like metal shearing in two. “You think you can just declare it, and no one’s gonna mind?” She turned away from me. “That Mrs. M would keep renting to you? That the studios would hire you? Ain’t it tough enough, just being a gal? Why do you want to make it even harder for yourself?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do.” I cupped my hand around hers. “All those girls at the Shrinking Violet — they aren’t afraid. I shouldn’t be either.”
“Those girls at the Shrinking Violet can’t get work anywhere else. Even in this day and age, with no menfolk around. You think they’re there because it’s so lucrative?” She pulled her hand away. “Get some sleep, Evie. I think the champagne’s gone to your head.”
After she’d left that morning, I was back at my typewriter. If she didn’t think I should declare myself to the whole world, well, there was at least one person to whom I owed the truth.
I’m coming to understand something about myself that I hadn’t known before. I care deeply for you, but I’m not sure I’m able to be a wife — to you or any man.
Once the words stared back at me, black ink on white, I realized they were the words I’d been searching for all along.
I’d come to Los Angeles to find myself — the work and life that I wanted. Now, for the first time, I felt that I actually knew who I was. Behind the scenes, writing the script, not acting out someone else’s story. Loving a girl who inspired passion in me, instead of a man I was expected to look to for security. It was terrifying, to throw away the script I’d been working from my whole life — but now I felt certain that I could write my own.
“I told him. I told James the truth about me.” I gazed into Frankie’s eyes that night, aching to drown in their depths.
“What truth?” She turned away from me and buried herself in her script. Another audition, this time for a supporting role. Frankie supported no one, but she was, I could tell, grateful the studio had given her a second chance.
“That I like girls. That I like you.” I reached for her shoulder, but she shrugged me off.
“I don’t see why you worry about defining it.” She leaned back in her chair. “How should I say this line? ‘Oh, Deborah, I don’t know how you always land the right man!’” She rasped breathlessly. “Or is it a joke? ‘Oh, Deborah, I don’t know how you always land them . . . ’”
I wanted to believe, though, that Frankie appreciated me telling James the truth. She just needed to get her big break — we both did. If we couldn’t do it now, with the war on, then when would we get another chance?
As it turned out, my letter never reached James.
One afternoon, Mrs. M called me to the front door, and I bounded out of my room, thinking Frankie had rushed straight from her audition to tell me she’d landed the part.
But I didn’t recognize the dark-haired man standing there, crow’s-feet crinkling his damp eyes, hat crushed in his restless hands. And yet I knew him — his features lined up so well with James’s.