Anywhere But Here (62 page)

“You said you’d take me.” My face fell loose. “You haven’t worked for months.”

“Well, Honey, I’m sorry, but something today came up and I just have to go.”

“You’re not going to take me?”

“Try and call and ask them if they’ll schedule it an hour later, and I’ll come pick you up if I can when I’m done. But I’ve got to run. I’m sorry, but I’ve got to do what’s best.” Her polished purse, her heels, the patent leather gleamed as she tripped to the car. I heard the gate slamming. I ran outside undressed, banged on the car windows. She opened her door. “See if you can change the time.”

“I can’t,” I screamed.

She shrugged, looked in the car mirror, frowning, then smiling again, arranging her face. Then I guessed. “You’re not going to work, you’re going to go see Leonard Hawthorne, who doesn’t even want to marry you or anything; that’s where you’re going! It’s not to work for money. You promised!”

She shrugged again and started rolling up the window. “I’m not going to talk to you while you’re like this,” she said and drove away, out of our alley.

Peter Keller was in Massachusetts. I called Daniel Swan, but only Darcy and the twins were home, she didn’t know where Daniel was. I even called Leslie, but her mom said she was out taking her tennis lesson and I wouldn’t have ever said anything like this was important enough for her to hurry and call me back, I never would have done that. When you called Leslie’s family, they answered in another zone and you had to kind of respect their slow time. Then it was a half hour to three o’clock and I stuffed my dress and makeup and hair things and all the money I had in bags and ran down to the corner, stopping every few feet in the alley to bend over and underbrush my hair, and when I came to Elevado, I hitched and a milk truck picked me up. This was 1975 and there weren’t milk trucks any place in the country anymore, except Beverly Hills had these stores called Jurgensons and for
about three times the price of anywhere else, they delivered your food in these white, old-fashioned trucks.

The guy drove me to Wilshire, two blocks from the place, and I took my Korkease off and ran. Then, just before I went up in the building, I was sitting on the curb, buckling my shoes, and I saw this orange, flowered baseball cap with a big bill in the window of a jeans store, on a ladder actually, and I liked it and on a whim, I just went in and bought it for six dollars. It was something I would have never done if my mother had brought me, I would have been checking my makeup in the car, all perfect, and this seemed like something just personally me, and I slammed it on my head and went up the elevator.

I thought once I got there, I could check in with a secretary or casting girl or I didn’t know what and then I thought I’d find a ladies’ room and go and wash up and change and put on my makeup and everything. But when I walked in, it was this ordinary, glass-doored, impressive-looking office, with a big desk, and a big, manicured blond secretary, and when I said who I was, she said my name into an intercom and in like a second, they showed me into this enormous room with windows and striped thin blinds and a view of the whole world and two men were sitting in chairs, leaning back with shirts and ties, saying my name.

They motioned me over to an empty part of the room and I stood there with all my bags just on the carpet and they were laughing, one of them smoked, he leaned down to light his cigarette again, and said, “So, okay, what have you got in there, in all those bags.”

And I don’t know what happened, I went dark. Pigeon-toed and knock-kneed, I bent down and started pulling things out of my bags. “A dress, a ladies’ room, please. Just because I want to clean up a little doesn’t mean I don’t, I have Dignity. Yes Dignity, with a capital D. I may not have money, but class.” I was tripping, leg over leg, and it went on a long time, I put on makeup without a hand mirror, I changed without a bathroom, pulling my dress over my head, I faked those air machines that blow your hands dry. “There,” I said, landing on the floor, my stuff a strewn pile, my makeup smeared, hair two panels in front of my face. “Don’t
you feel better clean? Yes, I do, much, much, better. You can seat us now, please.”

I’d mimicked people all my life, but that was the first time I’d done her. I looked up again. My legs felt like Gumby. The men had been quiet, both of them, and now they were laughing. One clapped. I had screamed. I thought they must have felt terribly sorry for me. But I was a little elated, too. I knew there was a chance I’d done something good, good enough to change my life. “Okay,” the one with the cigarette said, taking out a gold case, lighting another. “Do they teach you to read, too, over at Beverly Hills High?” The whole time there, I forgot I was wearing that orange hat.

When I came out of the building I spent the whole three dollars I had left on a hot fudge sundae at the Westwood Will Wright’s, and I ate it in about a minute, standing at the takeout counter. I was so hungry all of a sudden. Then I went to go home. Nobody picked me up on Wilshire, this time, when I hitched. I stood at the corner of Westwood Boulevard, in front of two huge office buildings at a bus stop, still carrying my bags. About fifty people in gray business suits milled, waiting for the bus. I went up to each one, I swear, each one, I said, “Excuse me, I live in Beverly Hills, I go to the high school; I lost my wallet and I don’t have any money. Could I possibly borrow forty cents for the bus and if you give me your address I’ll send it back to you?” I got two nods, fast, flickering, almost like sleights of hand. Other people just looked away, into the hills you couldn’t see for the smog, as if they didn’t hear me. I ended up walking home. I got there at eight o’clock and stood looking in the refrigerator. It was empty. My mother must have thrown out all the food.

After a while, I knocked, lightly, at her door. “Mom, are we going to get some supper?”

“Leave me be, Ann. Just go away.” Her voice was flat and totally different. I scuffed up to the Kellers’ and went in the back and the cook fixed me a ham sandwich.

What I was afraid of never happened. My mother just talked about Dr. Hawthorne less and less. In the evenings, she still wore her peach-colored robe, but she tended to lie on the couch flipping through magazines. I didn’t find any more red envelopes in our mail. I’d been walking around waiting for the day she’d fall apart. But she didn’t. She hadn’t with Josh Spritzer, either.

One afternoon, late, she rushed in dressed up, her white lab coat over a pantsuit.

“Well, I’m back at Palm Manor and guess what? They gave me a party, they were so glad to get me back. They said no one else they’d had in either convalescent home was good with the people the way I was.”

A tear formed on the corner of one eye.

“Control yourself, Mom.” I could be such a pill.

She dabbed her eye with a sleeve. “Well, I suppose I understand these old people. A lot of them are out here from the midwest or somewhere else, you know, and here they are in a home. All alone.”

“I’m glad you’re working again,” I said. I was so cold. I walked away to my room. She should just work and make money to pay for my school and clothes and for college. For me to go away. I didn’t want to hear about it, about her trying, how she felt. She should just do it and make it look easy.

“’Course I suppose they’ve got it pretty good there. There’s a lot worse, I’ll tell you,” she said, mostly to herself.

The gas and electricity was cut off again and I stayed home from school to pay the bill. We both did it rotely, something we were used to. Now, the people in Pacific Gas and Electric knew my name.

“I’ll catch a father for you yet, Ann, you just wait.” My mother patted my knee. We sat parked in front of Baskin-Robbins and she sighed.

“Not for me, anymore. You should look for a husband for you.
But I don’t need a father anymore.” We both knew I would go away in one year.

My mother sat up straighten “Well, sure you do. For when you’re in college, you can have parties and bring your kids home. And just to have a man you can look up to a little and talk.”

“Even if you marry someone, he won’t be my father. I had a father.”

“Yeah, well where is he.”

I shrugged. “Anyone else’ll just be your husband. I won’t really know him that well.”

“Just wait and see. You plan too much. You’re thinking and analyzing, you’ve got to learn to just be. And besides, you might like to have a man to look up to, to ask for advice once in a while.”

A piece of my mother’s hair hung near her ice cream cone. I reached over and hooked it behind her ear.

“I have you.”

“Yes, but you need a man, too. You’ll see.” She started the engine of the car. “Who knows, maybe you’ll be better off not growing up with a man all the time. Because with my father, you always compare and nobody else ever has that real closeness you did with him. Maybe you’re better off never knowing it. I think so. I think everything’s just going to go right in your life.”

We got the call, union scale, sixteen weeks shooting the first season. The part was Marie Iroquois on “Sante Fe.” They’d changed me to an Indian.

We had habits, but we never admitted them. We ate out every night, but every night, it was as if my mother felt freshly surprised that driving in the car and finding a restaurant was, at ten o’clock, our only alternative. We never bought food for the half-size refrigerator anymore. All we had in the house was carrot juice and wheat germ oil.

It was stubbornness. My mother didn’t want this to be our life. She’d do it a day at a time, she’d put up with it, but she wasn’t going to
plan
for it. We didn’t pay bills, we didn’t buy groceries, we bounced checks. Accepting our duties might have meant we
were stuck forever. We made it so we couldn’t keep going the way we were; something had to happen. But the thing was, it never did.

My mother had to pick me up from work now, in Studio City. She came late a lot of times. I’d hang around with this boy, Clark, a guy from the Valley.

It wasn’t anything like I’d thought it would be, television. I just had to stand around and say lines, once in a while I got to say one word more than another word to make people laugh, but it didn’t really matter what I did. It was work, like my sophomore part-time job in the PE office. Mostly they wanted pictures of black hair. Before, I’d imagined the movies were the center of the world, and people loved you, people like my father came up and saw you and told you you were beautiful. But this was like nothing. The places we shot were in the Valley, just gray lots and studios, trailer dressing rooms. We stood around waiting most of the time. Nobody thought we were anywhere. Even people like Clark, who wanted to be actors, and who walked funny, he sort of bounced to make himself seem taller, they all just wanted to get somewhere else.

But other people, outside television, treated you different. Teenaged girls on Beverly Drive giggled behind, turned shy if I stopped, and looked up at me.

I was still going to leave her. I’d go to college, a clean, safe, normal escape. I’d have the money. Before, she used to tell me I had a trust fund. I asked her about it a lot. The first time, when I was fourteen or something, it was, “Don’t worry, I arranged this with your father’s family when you were a baby. There was money set aside for your college then, from Egypt.”

“Like the whole country of Egypt is just going to send me money.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve worked it out. On your seventeenth birthday, it’ll come.”

The second time, it was, “Well, I’m worried, I haven’t heard anything from the Egyptians and I’m very worried.” I asked about
papers, documents, even names. She had nothing. The next time I asked was the June before Marie Iroquois. We sat in the car, licking ice cream cones. She put her fingers to her throat. “My jewels are your trust, Ann, so just be quiet.” Once the checks started from “Santa Fe” I never mentioned it again.

The point of the fight was always, “I don’t know why you can’t go to UCLA like all these kids I see, they’re getting good educations, they’re studying to be nurses and lawyers and female doctors. I see them in the convalescent homes.”

I had no answer so I didn’t give one. And the fights always passed.

I got into a better school than I deserved, with my lousy grades. But even colleges thought you were different if they saw you on TV.

We both knew I would go. We joked about it.

“You know after we’ve worked so hard all these years, you could really just stay a while and help out a little, so we could get ahead once, you know, after I’ve worked nights and at Hamburger Hamlet and as a maid, and everything, you know? It wouldn’t kill you.”

I knew.

Something I found when I was packing to go away: a newspaper clipping, in a shoe box where I kept things, from the
Beverly Hills Courier
, March 2, 1972.

13-YEAR-OLD SEEKS HOME. NEAT, WELL-BEHAVED
OKAY STUDENT. B + PRETTY (DARK HAIR, THIN).
DOES NOT SMOKE AND HAS NO INTEREST IN EXPERIMENTING
WITH DRUGS. PLANNING TO GO TO COLLEGE.
I WOULD HELP AROUND THE HOUSE. MAY BE THE DAUGHTER
YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED. NO TROUBLE. PO BOX 254.