—
Outside, the girls raced toward the frozen yogurt shop, Charlotte dripping a trail of pennies behind her. Once we were out of eyeshot of the GenFem center, Caleb turned to look at me, a deep line splitting his forehead in two.
“They’re lying,” he said. “They don’t want us to know that she’s a member.”
“I know.”
“They clearly don’t want to tell you how to find her, either.”
“They acknowledged the existence of the retreat in Ojai, though. She’s there, I’m sure of it,” I said. “I just don’t know exactly where it is.”
He looked at me and frowned. “Ojai’s a small town,” he said. “How hard can it really be to find?”
THEN
8
THE FIRST TIME ELLI and I switched places, we were thirteen years old. We were a few months into the fourth season of To the Maxx and I had watched Elli grow more wan and apathetic by the day. It was late spring and she wanted to go back to Santa Barbara, to spend long days with her books and her iPod in the sun. “Wouldn’t you rather be at the beach than sitting on set every day?” she’d ask me, and when I said no, not at all, she would get petulant and pick at the tiny zits on her nose until Bettina, the makeup artist, swatted her hand away.
The director had noticed the change in her, too.
“Hey, you,” he barked at her on set one afternoon. Hey, you was what the crew fell back on when they couldn’t remember which one of us they were looking at, when the call sheet was misplaced and all they knew was that they had a twin in front of them. “Can we talk about how you’re playing this scene? You’re supposed to be happy that your mom is taking you to visit New York and instead you look like someone killed your cat.”
Elli sat glumly on the white shag rug of our mock bedroom. The plane ticket she was supposed to be clutching to her chest instead hung limply from her fist. The walls of the set ended just yards above her head; if you looked up past the lights, all you could see was the dark void of the backlot warehouse, the ceiling invisible in the gloom. It felt like we were on a spaceship, in the middle of a black hole, flying off into nowhere.
Paige Bart, who played Marci Maxx, gave Elli an encouraging little pat on her head. “It’s OK, honey, let’s go again.”
Elli smiled tremulously at Paige and tried her line again. “Oh, Mummy. You shouldn’t have done this. I know we can’t afford it.” The words caught in her throat and came out as a peevish whine. Paige flicked her eyes at the camera and raised an eyebrow.
“Cut!” the director screamed. From where I sat, in a chair just behind him, I could hear him murmur to the assistant director. “This one’s gotta be Elli, right? Can we get Samantha back?”
“We used up Sam’s hours already today. We’re stuck with Elli unless you want to strike and run it again with Sam tomorrow morning.”
The director swore under his breath, and then stood up. “OK, half-hour break, let’s regroup and try this again in a bit. Elli, go grab a Coke, get your blood sugar up, whatever it takes, OK, kid?”
My mother materialized out of the darkness behind me, a look of grim concern on her face as she stepped into the lights of the set. Elli saw her coming. She stood up and bolted for the exit, moving fast. I followed my sister out, blinking in the sudden flood of daylight, and chased her across the parking lot to our trailer. I could hear our mother behind us, calling our names.
Elli ran up the stairs of the trailer and threw the door open, but I managed to slip in behind her before she could get it shut again. Once I was inside, I locked the handle and turned to face my sister. She was crying now, black rivulets of mascara worming grooves through the beige pancake makeup that continually clogged our pores.
“You’re fucking up your face. Bettina is going to kill you.”
She swiped at her face, leaving a black smear across her cheek. “He’s so mean. I’m not going back.”
Behind us, our mother was banging on the door to the trailer. “Girls? What’s going on in there? Elli? Do you want to do a meditation with me? Would that help?”
“Not right now, Mom!” Elli screamed through the door. She turned to me, desperation in her eyes. “I can’t do this anymore.”
“What? You mean this scene? Or you can’t do this, like…act?”
“I don’t know.” Her eyes were rimmed with pink. She looked like a crazed raccoon. She hesitated. “Can’t we just…take a week off?”
“We can’t. It doesn’t work that way.” I stared at her destroyed face, an anguished echo of my own, and thought hard. How could I save her? How could I save us?
“But what if you took a week off?” I heard myself say.
“What do you mean?”
I leaned in close. “You be me,” I whispered, “and I’ll be you.”
* * *
—
It didn’t take much to become her that first time. I still had my stage makeup on from my scenes that morning; a few quick swipes with the hairbrush and my hair was hers, too. I donned the costume that Elli had been wearing and she put on my sweats, washed her face, and put a compress over her eyes until the redness vanished. Half an hour later, we exited our trailer quietly and found my mother sitting on the bottom of the stairs, reading a book by Pema Ch?dr?n.
She jumped up, her cheeks flushed from the sun, sweat spreading in rings under her armpits. She’d already started on the natural deodorant by then and I could smell her, musky and sharp. “I don’t like being locked out,” she said, peevish. Already, the balance between us was shifting; paying the bills had given us power, and she no longer knew quite how to shut us down.
“I’m OK now, I just needed to relax for a bit,” I said to her, letting a faint tremor creep into my voice. I softened my step as I walked down the stairs and behind me I could hear Elli’s feet landing with a thud. Is that how I walk? I thought, perturbed and delighted. I was chewing Elli’s gum and Elli was sucking on one of the cinnamon Altoids I liked, clicking it against her teeth the way I did. It felt like we were performing cartoon versions of each other; and yet maybe this was how the world saw us, as oversized caricatures of the smaller people we believed ourselves to be inside.
I remember that I felt a vague thrill as my eyes met my mother’s, lashes trembling. I willed my face into a mask of weary obedience, the face of a good girl who was determined to try her best just to make everyone happy. The face of my sister, so similar to mine and yet so different underneath. This was the ultimate test of my acting abilities: If anyone was going to catch us, it was going to be our mother.
“You sure?” Her eyes snapped from me to Elli and back again and I saw something cross her face, a faint question mark. And then, just as quickly, it disappeared. Her eyes shot away, as if the question had been answered and she was uninterested in considering it any further.
“OK, then,” she said. “If you’re ready, then let’s get back to set. We’re three minutes late.”
* * *
—