Coming Clean: A Memoir (14 page)

I got lucky when the show I interned for was cancelled in December. I considered it a get-out-of-LA-free card. I’d stick around until shooting wrapped, and afterward I could move back to New York having tried and failed through no fault of my own. After two years of convincing myself that I never wanted to go back home again, I was actually excited to be with my family—despite my mother’s preflight warning call.

“I just don’t want you to hate me when you see it,” she said. “I made sure the door to your bedroom is always closed so nothing sneaks in there.” I could hear the shame in her voice and the fear, as if she thought I would come home, take one look at their apartment, and slit my wrists.

“It’s okay, Mom. I’ll help you clean up.” There was no point in making her feel worse by telling her I was disappointed. It’s nothing I hadn’t experienced before.

When I made it home after my flight, the two-bedroom apartment was worse than I had expected. My father’s papers had taken over the entire loveseat and two thirds of the couch
in the living room—that was his “office,” he said, as if bus drivers everywhere needed an office to sort their timesheets and behavioral reports on second graders. There was a thin pathway between his wall of papers and the television that allowed us to walk through the apartment from the kitchen to the bedrooms, but no one but my father could actually sit down and watch a movie in the stuffed sitting area.

My mother had a wall in their bedroom that consisted of her computer desk and boxes of things she had ordered online but hadn’t found use for or time to return. If she wasn’t in the kitchen cooking something, she was there, sitting at the computer with her back to the rest of the house.

Piles of clothes took over the top of their dresser, and my father’s side of the bed consisted of bags and bags of papers. The kitchen fared better than the rest of the house. There were still some parts of the floor visible, and the kitchen table was kept half-cleared so that we could at least eat as a family if we sat close together. My room, as my mother had promised, was spotless, just as I’d left it the last time I visited them.

I told myself that the apartment was fine; we could cook food, the heating worked, and showers could be had any time of the day. I couldn’t ask for more.

M
Y MOTHER HAD WALKED RIGHT
past me when I got off the plane. I had lost almost twenty pounds while in LA, and she didn’t recognize me. The weight loss wasn’t a conscious effort—I had simply stopped eating because no one I knew ate, and so I felt silly sitting down to a meal when a Diet Coke seemed to be enough to sustain the people around me for days on end.

In my first few days at home, I made up for every meal I had skipped while in Los Angeles. As soon as I finished one plate, my mother was standing by with another. With me home, she seemed to have found a purpose in life—making up for lost mothering. She was happier than I’d seen her in years, spending hours in the kitchen preparing meals she hadn’t made since I was a child. I didn’t remember my mother loving to cook—it always seemed like an annoying task she had to do at the end of a long commute.

If I strayed from her eyesight for more than a few minutes at a time, she would call out for me to make sure I hadn’t disappeared. Not that I could go anywhere. I didn’t have a car, which
meant I was completely homebound during the day while my father was at work. I wasn’t used to having to be accounted for, having someone else doing my laundry or cooking for me. I missed the ordered life I had created for myself, but it was obvious that she needed to do this, and so I spent hours eating, being within earshot, and letting my mother take care of me.

My father seemed less fazed with my return. I was gone and now I was back, and his routine stayed the same: He went to work in the morning and came home in the evening. Once home, he would sit on the couch, turn on the radio, and proceed to inspect the various documents he surrounded himself with, ignoring my mother and me.

He shifted magazines, pens, and the portable cassette players he carried with him to work (so that he could record the thoughts and musings that entered his head while driving) to the floor to make room for me on the couch one night that first week.

“What are these papers on the coffee table?”

“What, this?” he said, gesturing to the papers piled six inches high. “Your mom won’t let me get a desk and a bookcase.”

“Why do you need a desk and a bookcase?”

“So I can organize my work.”

“Do you think you’d be able to keep the rest of the house clean if you had a desk and a bookcase, Daddy?” I tried to imagine what kind of desk would suit my father’s needs. Based on the hundreds of plastic bags filled with papers that covered the couches, tables, floors, and closets, we would be looking at a pretty gigantic desk.

“Absolutely. No doubt about it,” he said.

“Okay, I’ll talk to Mom about it.”

“Thanks, kiddo. You’re okay, I don’t care what your mother says about you,” he said, laughing.

I left him to his photocopied articles, highlighters, and old PC magazines, and went to talk to my mom. She was at her computer, and because she had started to lose much of her vision to macular degeneration, the type size she used to read emails could be seen across the room.

“I was talking to Dad,” I said. “He says that he could contain his papers better if he had a desk and a bookcase.”

“I’m sure he did. That’s his latest argument.”

“Maybe we should get them for him.”

She looked at me as if she was reassessing my intelligence. “There aren’t enough desks and bookcases in the world to contain your father.”

“But isn’t it worth a try?”

“We’ve tried. He’s had desks and bookcases. Kim, he had a whole house and he filled it—do you really think three drawers are going to fix him?”

I did and I didn’t. I hadn’t quite given up on finding the key to fixing him, but to be honest, it hadn’t been on my mind much in the last couple of years. I didn’t bring it up again, and hoped that my father hadn’t gotten too excited about the prospect of office furniture.

It didn’t take long, maybe a month, for me to stop seeing the mess. Life had returned to normal.

My graduation present was $3,000 and the instructions to buy myself a car. I felt guilty taking that kind of money from my parents.
If anyone needed a new car, it was them. They were driving a hand-me-down Bronco that was only a pothole away from being scrap metal. The passenger-side window didn’t close, and my mother would come home from trips to the store with chapped lips and ruddy cheeks from the winter breeze hitting her in the face on the way home. The seatbelts had been cut off by the previous owners, and the power steering didn’t work; my father swayed with each corner the car took, putting the whole of his weight into turning the steering wheel. I needed a car, but only in the short term. I gave myself a six-month deadline to get out of Long Island, time enough to save up for a security deposit and a few months’ rent in New York City. I would get the best car I could find for $3,000 and give it to my parents as soon as I could save enough money to move out.

I put Rachel’s boyfriend Tim in charge of my car search; he knew cars better than anyone I knew, and I trusted him with my money, for the most part. I was a little nervous when he said he’d found a great deal on a practically brand-new Kia that had less than 5,000 miles on it and was only $2,400—for the moment, at least, because it was listed for auction on eBay.

My mother and I scoured the car’s Internet listing, searching for hidden accident reports, but the whole thing looked aboveboard. “It has airbags,” my mom said. “I’d like to know you’ll be safe.”

“This coming from the woman that needs aviator goggles in her own car,” I fired back.

“Yes, but I’m your mother. It’s my job to worry about you.”

She had no idea how much I worried about her and my father.

We bid, we won, and we drove to Queens to pick up my new car. Tim was right: The car was in great condition, far better
than most of the cars my parents had driven in my lifetime, which only made me feel more guilty about the extravagance of the gift.

With a car, I could finally get a job, but the restaurant I had worked at during high school and my first summer home from college had closed, and the only place hiring in the dead of winter was a Ruby Tuesday near my parents’ apartment. Shortly after I started, I realized why the H
ELP
W
ANTED
sign taped on the front door looked withered and sun-bleached—it was a permanent fixture. During my first shift, two servers quit, and another was caught selling drugs in the bathroom—she wasn’t fired, they needed her on the floor. If I were lucky, I would come home with forty dollars in tips after a weekend of waitressing. Even with my housing paid for, I didn’t make nearly enough money to save for my future life. With what little I made, I filled my gas tank, subscribed to
Backstage
, and paid my student loans, and barely had enough left over to meet Rachel and Tim a couple nights a week. They were still in college, but they’d gone to school close to home, which meant I had a modicum of a social life—although it usually consisted of disco fries at 2 a.m.

Because I lived in the suburbs, my copy of
Backstage
always came a few days late, meaning that half of the open calls listed inside were already long over, so I stuck with mail-order submissions for acting jobs. I never wanted to be an ingénue—sweet girls-next-door with dreams of falling in love, perhaps tap-dancing a little, who had a happy ending never appealed to me. In college, when I was responsible for coming up with my own scenes and monologues for class, I was drawn to the toenail-chewing hillbillies, cheerful sociopaths, and quirky outcasts—people who
would never quite fit in, whether they knew it or not. People I understood.

That was fine for college, but after weeks with no responses to my submissions, I came to terms with the fact that my headshots looked how I looked in real life: like a sweet girl-next-door with dreams of falling in love, perhaps tap-dancing a little, who would have a happy ending. That was who I was going to get called in to play.

Within days of dropping my first batch of submissions for lovelorn young women in the mail, I got a call to audition for
The Importance of Being Earnest.

I did my best to ask about the audition details in the most professional of tones, mimicking the agents I’d spoken to as a casting intern. “What should I have prepared? By when do you plan on making a decision?” After I hung up, I realized I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and I had no idea where I was going. The theater was in Brooklyn. The only thing I knew about Brooklyn was which rappers hailed from there.

I was scared of driving into Brooklyn, scared of going on my first real audition, scared of being outed as someone who foolishly thought that she could make a career as an actor.

I went to the kitchen, where my mother was chopping onions, to ask her to go on my first job interview with me.

“You’re not serious,” was her response.

“I’m nervous, and I’ve never driven in Brooklyn.”

“Why would you take a role you have to drive to Brooklyn for?”

“Because it’s a role.”

“Kim,” she said. “Fine.”

I pulled up to the theater an hour late for my audition. I’d taken a wrong turn off of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and been too nervous to ask for directions. I tiptoed into the theater and prepared to apologize profusely in hopes that I’d still be allowed to read for one of the two female leads. My mom waited in the car, in January, to preserve what little dignity I was pretending to have.

The theater was nothing more than a large storefront with a curtain separating the stage from the waiting area. The director popped his head out, asked who I was, and motioned with his finger for me to wait. From the plywood bench lining the bright blue hallway, I could hear each perfectly posh-accented word the girl auditioning inside the theater said. I made a mental note about how she was delivering her lines so as to not read mine the same way. The actress walked out trailed by the two men holding the audition, each competing to say good-bye last.

Men, in general, did not fall all over themselves for me, at least not that I’d ever noticed, so I was pretty sure my chances of getting a part were slim. Still, I had to start somewhere, and I walked into the theater as if I were someone who actually possessed a spine.

“Hi, I’m Kimberly Rae Miller. Sorry I’m late.”

“We were wondering where you were. Not a problem. There are two sets of sides—Gwendolyn and Cecily, and we’ll start with Gwendolyn.” The director handed me two sets of stapled photocopies, starting immediately on his cue.

Every acting class I’d ever taken in my life meant nothing—I was making every mistake I could. I tried to play coy, but instead started walking around in circles on the stage. I never looked up from the page, too scared that I’d forget a word or accidentally
look my auditioner in the eye. And the accent I had carefully practiced around the house in the days preceding the audition kept fading in and out.

When I was finished with Gwendolyn, they let me read for Cecily, and when I was finished butchering Cecily’s lines, they asked if I had a Shakespeare monologue to audition for their production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.

I didn’t, so I declined the offer to extend my torture. Just as they’d done with the pretty girl before me, the two men in the theater followed me out, doing their best to outflirt one another. I didn’t think I had a chance in hell of getting a part, but I was actually feeling okay about my first audition.

A few days later, as I left my shift at Ruby Tuesday having made an astronomical eight dollars in tips, I got a call. I got a part. I got
the
part. I was going to be Cecily Cardew, the most sweet and maniacal of ingénues.

I was so excited I didn’t give a second thought to the fact that I would be spending the next two months going back and forth to that very sketchy Brooklyn theater. Personal safety was of little consequence, because I was now officially a working actress—albeit not one who was actually getting paid.