All This Heavenly Glory (4 page)

So then a year went by and I didn’t hear from him which was no big surprise although I did see him in front of the OTB a couple
of times looking at racing forms but I always crossed the streetbefore he saw me. Then one day he came into the video store
with a bunch of people and I said hi like he was just another customer and he looked at me like he knew me and was wondering
if he’d had sex with me but he wasn’t exactly sure and so finally I said, I
read for the woman in the fur coat,
and he said,
Right, right, well we’re just scouting locations for a different film now, that project you read is in turnaround but 1 definitely
still want you and in the meantime this new film is a documentary I’m sure you’d be fantastic in.
At that point I was just thinking, Don’t say
turnaround
to me, and he still didn’t take my number but about a week later I saw him in front of the OTB and it was too late to cross
the street and he said,
Come up to
my
apartment right now I want to show you some of the footage we’ve got on the documentary,
and I said,
That’s okay,
and he said,
I live right around the corner, I really want
your
opinion,
and I was just like,
Why?
and he said he could tell that I saw things that everyone didn’t see and I just wanted to go,
So then you know that I see that you’re full
of
shit, right?
but apparently I was worried about offending him, so I said,
I have to be somewhere in a half hour
(which I really didn’t), and he said,
That’s fine,
and I realized from the bizarre half-formed grin on his face that he probably wanted to say he could do it six times in a
half hour but for some reason decided to restrain himself. So I went up to his apartment and thankfully there was a housekeeper
there and he put a tape in the VCR and it was basically just him interviewing all different kinds of people about sex, pretty
much anything they felt like saying about sex or if they happened to feel like engaging in sex with him while the camera continued
to roll. I watched a segment in which he asks this one woman if she shaves her pubic hair and she says that she does and he
asks her why she does that and she says she thinks it’s erotic or something and he says to her casually but all Mr. Intellectual
Feminist Prick,
So you don’t find that to be an insult to
your
womanhood,
like it’s this important opinion he heard someone say but you could tell he couldn’t give a shit one way or another and sure
enough in the next second he tells her exactly what he wants to do to her clean-shaven pussy and when it looks like she’s
about to let him I was just like, okay,
Gotta go,
and he said,
Did that make you uncomfortable?
and I said,
If you mean by uncomfortable did it make me feel like I might throw up, then yes,
and he said,
So f I told you right here, right now what I wanted to do to you would that make you uncomfortable?
and as his fat hand came toward my face as though there was any chance that he perceived some kind of agreement on my part
which wasn’t there, I pushed it away from me and I said,
I am not interested in you,
and he said,
Not even a little?
You
came up here,
and I said,
Get away from me, you’re hideous,
which he is, and he said,
Well Carmela didn’t think so when she was masturbating me in my bed last night, isn’t that right, Carmela?
he said in the direction of the housekeeper who nodded but who obviously didn’t speak enough English to dispute his claim
and who couldn’t possibly have been doing anything the night before other than praying to the Lord Jesus to save her fatassed
fucking perverted boss from the depths of hell. Then I slammed the door behind me without saying goodbye.

I’m not an actress, I already said that. It was naïve of me to think that this guy would give me a part based on my having
an intelligent quality and probably he wouldn’t have given me a part even if I did have sex with him. But I’m a little bit
older now, and I really don’t want to work in a video store for the rest of my life as you can well imagine, who would, and
my friends all seem to agree that my impressions are totally right on. So I think I’m going to go spend a little time in Hollywood
and see what happens. Howard the filmmaker said I could use his name.

C
HARLOTTE ANNE BYERS
, age nine, has only been in New York for a little over three years, but she already knows too much. Lesson Number One: Ditch
the southern accent. Charlotte Anne arrived in the city, practically in white gloves (“Always dress up for the airplane,”
her mother said), only weeks before her first-grade debut in the New York City publicschool system, where she learned in a
matter of days to discard the southern accent, thankfully, via the experience of her classmate Sue Ellen Smiley, whose combination
drawl/unfortunate surname made her the target of endless ridicule. It would be a while before Charlotte Anne was able to completely
stop using the phrase “Y’all,” but minus the accent, it didn’t seem to damage her socially in any significant way. (One kid
insisted on calling her “Byer Self” and tried to bring the name into wide usage, but he had to explain the joke too many times
and it never caught on.) With regard to her friend Karen Pink-Park, who has a surprisingly strong sense of herself in spite
of her petite stature, and is not cursed in Smiley fashion by her unusual last name (in fact, she thinks it’s cute), attempts
have been made at abuse, but Karen, who is quite pretty, has a way of squinting her eyes that will sufficiently frighten any
child enough to cause them to consider seriously what she was capable of doing, post-squint. Karen, who was part of Charlotte
Anne’s small circle by the beginning of third grade, is generally willing to overlook the presence of an occasional Karen
Pink-Park has other things on her mind.

Lesson Number Two: A fire drill is when you exit the school building in an orderly fashion so you know what to do in case
of fire. A schoolwide assembly is held the first week of school each year for the purpose of talking about fire safety (at
which assembly most of the fifth-grade class is already kind of bored, since they’ve heard it all five times, snickering among
themselves that they should have a Charlie Chop Off Drill or an Evil Babysitter Drill, referring to one probably mythical
criminal who chopped off little boys’ parts and one entirely real crime in which the sister of a girl whose birthday party
Charlotte Anne had once been to was kidnapped and subsequently brutally murdered and left in a trash can). Charlotte Anne
and most of her classmates feel reassured by the friendly firemen and their explanations and advice, probably in some way
indirectly contributing to Lesson Number Three: Don’t ask about the civil defense drill. Nine-year-old Charlotte Anne, in
New York for a little over three years, still has no idea what the words
civil
or
defense
mean, together or separately, why no friendly civil defensemen come to assemble and inform, or why the civil defense alarm
(something like a totally deafening police siren) is considerably more frightening than the fire alarm (more like a really
noisy bicycle bell). Charlotte Anne knows only that when the totally deafening civil defense alarm goes off, you are to exit
the classroom in an orderly fashion but remain in the hallway, lined up with your back to the wall, crouched, knees to shoulders,
arms over head.

Charlotte Anne also knows that all kids don’t keep their Beautiful Crissy dolls (with the beautiful, “growing” hair) as pristine
as she would, if she had one, that there are kids who cut their dolls’ hair, or lose parts of games, and that some of them
will invite you over for a playdate saying that they have a certain game and then that turns out to be a lie, or don’t know
where they even keep things, which she will usually consider when invited over for a playdate, seeing as how what’s the point,
really, if there are only parts of things to play with. Charlotte Anne decides to go over to play with Karen Pink-Park and
especially to see Karen’s new brunette Beautiful Crissy, only to discover that this Beautiful Crissy has only a sort of pixie
cut, not unlike the one on her own head she’s still growing out, the one her mother said would look “so cute” (but mostly
seemed to be about cutting off all the blonde parts from a previous occasion when she had bleached her daughter’s naturally
brown hair, also executed with the “so cute” reasoning) that coincided with the move to New York and the curious absence of
her dad (Charlotte Anne has never heard anyone besides her friend Meg Davidson say the word
divorce,
will not hear the word said by an adult until sometime later in third grade when her mother tells her “the divorce is final”
with few additional details and with Charlotte Anne not asking any questions, since she learned from Meg Lesson Number Four:
Divorce is when your dad moves to someplace called Encino because it’s cheaper to start a handbag business there), which unfortunate
combination of events served mostly to mark the time when she started making mental notes on things in New York not seeming
quite right. In addition to the unfortunate haircut, Charlotte Anne also notices that the hole in the Crissy doll’s head where
the ponytail is supposed to “grow” from is empty, exposing the spool around which the ponytail would wrap or unwrap when you
pressed in the “belly button,” depending on whether you were “growing” or “putting back” the ponytail. (Charlotte Anne is
increasingly bothered by a literal view of the Crissy doll’s hair-growing, as she also knows that she has neither a spool
inside her head nor a belly button that activates anything, and thinks of writing a letter to the Ideal company suggesting
that they make some more realistic and possibly educational growing apparatus.) Charlotte Anne is not the sort of kid who
would ever ask another kid why they would do such a thing, especially not Karen Pink-Park, who was likely to offer a scary
squint. And so when Charlotte Anne thoughtlessly says, “Let’s do something else,” she’s not really thinking that Karen is
going to say she wants to talk about boys, which Charlotte Anne is neither interested in nor knows anything about. Which explains
her answer to Karen Pink-Park’s question, “If a boy wanted to see this, or this,” pointing to higher and lower portions of
her anatomy, “what would you show him?” Charlotte Anne doesn’t think to realize this is an unlikely scenario, or that she
could maybe say, “That’s kind of a yucky question,” which is what she thinks but would never say, not sure if everyone is
possibly going to move to Encino if she says the wrong thing, and so instead says, trying to sound casual, “This,” pointing
to the pockets of her pants, which is as close as she wants to get to pointing to anything else. Charlotte Anne has been accumulating
some useful information since the move north, but not included is anything regarding to what these parts do, only the knowledge
that there’s some good reason why you try to keep them covered up. “No,” Karen advises, “you show him this,” she says, pointing
to her shirt. Karen Pink-Park has a tone of voice that defies challenge, even to someone who might be inclined, which Charlotte
Anne is not. Karen looks bored. “Let’s go bounce on my sister’s bed.”

Charlotte Anne and Karen make their way through a long hallway to her sister Sunny’s room. Sunny has a four-poster canopy
bed that captures Charlotte Anne’s imagination, that she files away on her mental list of things that other girls have. Sunny
Pink-Park, not nearly as cute as her older sister, is never given a choice about the bed-bouncing, and is also about as far
away from any metaphoric representation of her given name as possible, and by the end of the afternoon, Charlotte Anne will
have a pretty good idea that Sunny may not have initially started out her life looking so gloomy and not sunny. Charlotte
Anne and Karen jump up and down on Sunny’s bed while Sunny kind of slumps over her desk ignoring them, doodling some frowny-faces
on her math homework and drawing a self-portrait in the margins, in which frownyfaced Sunny is holding an umbrella directly
underneath a big sun. Karen tries to make a game out of who can touch the canopy the most times, which isn’t a feat of any
kind for either of them, even the shorter Karen, and Charlotte Anne is aware that Karen has a thing about winning, and that
it’s better just to let her win, even in a dumb game the rules of which, Charlotte Anne notices, keep changing in order to
create a more favorable outcome for Karen. Some minutes after the bouncing game begins, Charlotte Anne realizes that Karen
and Sunny’s father has been standing in the doorway watching, and stops jumping for a minute, because at her house, anyway,
bouncing on the bed leads to no TV. “It’s okay,” Karen Pink-Park’s dad says, with a smile that makes Charlotte Anne uncomfortable
enough to decide she’s tired of bouncing without knowing exactly why, and Karen bounces off the bed right around the same
time. “I’m going to the deli,” the dad says. “Mom needs milk. I’ll bring you back something.” Sunny Pink-Park rolls her eyes.