“Maybe it would be good for you, too,” Emily says.
“But I’m not being self--deprecating. I’m telling you, I had a genuine talent for being myself, and for a while it worked. In fact, it probably worked better in film than it did onstage.”
“You’re talking like we haven’t seen the movie a hundred times,” Nell says. “You were really good.”
I shrug. “It’s like being able to sing one song perfectly. It’s a great trick, but it’s only going to get you so far.”
Go back to New Hampshire, to Bill Ripley sitting in that darkened university theater beside his sister. Ripley wasn’t new to the game, and when he saw me he understood what he was looking at: a pretty girl who wasn’t so much playing a part as she was right for the part she was playing. Unlike his niece, I knew how not to ruin things.
When I got off the plane in Los Angeles, a deeply tanned man in a black suit held up a clipboard with my name on it. He took the little duffel bag from my hand and walked me out to an honest--to--god limousine double--parked in front of the terminal. You could have knocked me over with a feather, as my grandmother liked to say. Had he driven me around the airport and dropped me off in the exact same spot, and I had flown back to New Hampshire without ever seeing anything else of California, it would have been worth it because one day I’d be able to tell my children that I had ridden in a limousine. I rolled down the tinted window so that anyone straining to see who was in the back of that car would see it was me, basking in sunshine.
The hotel had a swimming pool. A small gift basket in my room contained fruits so foreign to me that I didn’t know how to eat them. A note from Ripley read Welcome! Please sign for all your meals at the hotel, which was nice enough but hardly the same as Welcome! Pick you up for dinner at 7. The hamburger I ordered from room service was brought to me beneath a great silver dome which the waiter whisked away with a flourish. As far as I could tell, everything in California was something out of a movie. I ate the fifteen--dollar hamburger in a fluffy white bed and practiced my lines. The next morning a different driver in a different limousine drove me to a soundstage at Warner Brothers. For two hours people dressed me, undressed me, and dressed me again. I sat in a fancy barber’s chair while a Black man wearing a pink T--shirt that fit him so exactly I was sure he’d had it tailored, took off the makeup I had so thoughtfully applied that morning and painted a whole new face on top of my face. When he wanted me to lift my chin or turn to the left, he held his finger in front of my face. “Follow my finger,” he said, and so I did.
“Eyebrows?” he asked the man sitting in a chair beside mine, reading a script.
The man looked at me in the mirror, then he looked at the makeup artist. “Hold off,” he said.
A woman with hair as fine and colorless as cornsilk and no eyebrows at all brushed out my hair, then picked it up and poured it through her hands again and again. “Look at this,” she said to her colleagues. “It’s like a shampoo commercial.”
I kept thinking of that scene when Dorothy and her friends get spruced up before they’re taken to meet the Wizard. Pat, pat here, pat, pat there, and a couple of brand new straws. That’s how we keep you young and fair.
Merry Old Land of Oz.
When their considerable efforts were complete and I had been transformed into someone who looked like my more attractive first cousin, I was taken onto the set where I stood in front of a white backdrop. The man who’d been sitting in the barber chair next to mine took my picture. His praise was so obsequious that I first felt embarrassed for myself and then felt embarrassed for him. Another man came in with a small camera on a tripod and had me say my name (Lara Kenison) and the name of the film (Singularity) and the part I was reading for (Lindsay). When all that was done, they took me into the set’s open space where Ripley was waiting with everyone else.
Nell’s hands drop from the branches and she leaves them hanging by her sides. Idle hands, I start to say—-an old family joke—-but stop myself. She is standing beside me in a smocked dress covered in daisies, a dress with big pockets that had once been mine and had then been Emily’s, then Maisie’s. Nell’s eyes are bright with terror.
“Weren’t you terrified?” she whispers.
Maisie and Emily stop. All three girls watch me as I try to remember. This was a very long time ago. I look around that vast white space. Ripley is there along with the famous actress who is playing my mother and the less--famous actor who is playing her boyfriend. People with boom mics and giant lights and cameras on dollies are there, silently adjusting the angles of their equipment. The two actors and I are sitting at a table that is meant to stand in for a dining room table, and we’re laughing because that’s what the scene calls for. For all the times I’ve ever been onstage, I’ve never been asked to laugh before, and the laughter comes easily. I had been so afraid that day I read for Emily in high school, but when I look around for that fear now it isn’t there. I understand that all I have to do is try not to act, and that’s easy because I have no idea how to act. It’s the reason Ripley brought me out to California.
“No,” I tell my daughters. “I’m not afraid.”
I don’t know where I got the idea that if they liked me I’d just stay in California and make the movie, but as soon as the screen test was finished they put me in the car and returned me to the airport with my duffel, even though I hadn’t packed my duffel before I left the hotel. I took the red--eye to Boston and a shuttle van back to Durham. I would have three hours to sleep before sociology.
I set my alarm and crawled into my single bed, thinking about that limousine. My roommate was sound asleep and I wasn’t going wake her up to tell her, but the limousine was the thing I couldn’t get over.
Two weeks later my mother called me on the hall phone and told me they needed me back in L.A.
“Did I get the part?” I had already felt bad about not getting the part. I had already gotten over feeling bad.
“Mr. Ripley said they need a second test.”
“That’s a lot of money to spend when they’ve already seen me.”
“I think they have the money,” my mother said.