Sister Golden Hair: A Novel (35 page)

In the mirror I was stiff and unnatural. I could not be like the girls at school and cry whenever I wanted. I’d never be an actress and live in a castle high up in the Hollywood Hills, eating lobster tails and chocolate éclairs. I’d thought it was adorable the way Dwayne went on about Hollywood. Even before Glen McCabe, he’d talked of wanting to move there, getting a house with a pool, learning to surf, and going to parties where he’d meet David Soul and Keith Carradine. I knew he was dreamy, but I liked to put my head on his chest and listen to him go off into La La Land. There was something soothing and familiar about the tenor of his voice.

I could hear people on the street. Most of them had disappeared for the day once auditions were over, but some camped out, sleeping in their cars. I could see Mr. Ananais picking up the garbage with a stick and looking sadly at the trampled grass.

The next day people started getting in line at 6:00
AM
. I heard them talking below my window about how Glen said he’d pay ten dollars an hour, fifteen if you had a beard. One guy said if he could get hired, he’d be able to make his car payment. Another said he was going to pay for his mother’s hernia operation.

By nine o’clock over a hundred people had lined up. Eddie and Phillip carried Lulubell over and Glen gave the cat a part as a lazy Confederate kitty lying out on a porch. Her job, Eddie told me, was
to act uninterested
. Yesterday the people in line had all looked vaguely theatrical. Today the people looked more ordinary: guys in gray work shirts, housewives, teenagers. Everybody thought they had hidden talents. Even those who had no talent thought that having no talent must be a sort of talent.

Dwayne appeared just after nine, saying he’d quit Hancock’s for a job helping McCabe. His duties included collecting the ten-dollar application fee, distributing forms, and asking people if they had experience singing, dancing, riding, or sword fighting. Dwayne told each applicant that, once registered, he or she would be a full member of the Screen Actors Guild. I heard him tell several people that, after Glen’s film wrapped, he was going to move to Los Angeles. To think of him living the good life while I was stuck in Bent Tree made me sick to my stomach.

Dwayne ran out of the duplex to tell me that Glen knew David Soul and that Soul was interested in the part of Jeb Stuart! I tried to ask him to take me with him to LA, but he was so excited that Liza Minnelli was going to lead the Southern belles in the big ballroom dance scene, I didn’t have a chance. Just before lunch he told me George C. Scott had agreed to play Grant, and Al Pacino wanted to be Ambrose Burnside. Glen was in negotiations with Sylvester Stallone to play Longstreet. Late in the afternoon Glen got the OK from the studio to burn down a barn. He and Mrs. Smith were going to scout locations in Vinton in the morning. Mrs. Smith was going to do the paperwork with the fire department this afternoon. She’d invested in the film, and so she would have some creative control. Dwayne roamed up and down the line, mostly dealing with girls. One nervous girl in a tube top and feather earrings burst into tears, and Dwayne rubbed her back till she got ahold of herself. He fed ice cubes to a girl who fainted and waited with her until her mom arrived.

Near dinnertime Dwayne came to get me for my audition. I’d been in the bathroom practicing, going over my facial expressions and trying to make my smile look genuine. I’d rehearsed for so long in the bathroom mirror I had no idea when my expression looked natural and when it didn’t. We walked in silence, side by side, to the door of 17A. Inside, the duplex was cool, dark, and smoky. The rooms were the same as ours, the gold shag and plaster swirl ceiling, but with pictures of
puppies and stacks of magazines about dogs. Glen sat on his folding chair, a shoe box full of money at his feet. He stirred his drink with his pointer finger, then put it inside his cavernous mouth and sucked.

Time wobbled off its usual track and seemed to elongate.

“This is the girl I told you about,” Dwayne said.

“Can you act, my dear?” Glen asked me, leaning his massive form back into the chair.

“I thought you wanted extras?”

“We have a few speaking parts,” he said. “For the right people.”

He tipped his glass to his mouth, holding his pinkie out, the ice clinking against his teeth. Even though it was freezing in the duplex, his upper lip sweat like Nixon’s. He closed his eyes.

“I see you as a girl dressed as a boy,” Glen said, “so you can fight for the motherland you love.”

A girl inside a boy. I liked that.

“She has a certain look, don’t you think?” Dwayne said.

“I see a scene where you show the soldier boy you love your womanhood.”

I was not exactly sure what he meant; the term
womanhood
had always confused me.

He opened his eyes and looked at me.

“Would you be willing to do that?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

McCabe frowned and turned to Dwayne.

“I thought you said she wanted to be in our film?”

“She does!”

“Apparently not,” McCabe said, standing and walking into the kitchen. He swung open the refrigerator door and got out a bottle of vodka.

I waited for him to say something more.

“You’re free to go,” he finally said. “Good luck with your life.”

I retreated to my room and lay there, staring up at the ceiling. I stared into the eyes of the Egyptian on the poster above my dresser. Was this really my only chance? Was I actually blowing everything? Like everybody else, I wanted to be saved.

I walked over the shag, down the hallway, and locked myself in the bathroom. I stared into the mirror. I was skinny and pathetic. I pulled off my dress and reached around to unhitch my bra, letting the white cotton cups fall. I looked in the mirror. I didn’t want to see myself the way I did every day when I pulled my clothes on in the morning, or pulled them off and put my T-shirt on at night. I wanted to see myself the way Glen McCabe wanted to see me. My nipples were small like pearl buttons, a washed-out pink flooding up around each.

I heard a knock on the front door and Dwayne asked my mom if he could see me. Normally my mom would
have never let a boy come to my room but something about McCabe’s movie had pushed aside her anxieties and suspicions. I heard her say, “Go on up!”

I pulled my shirt back on and ran to my room. Quickly, I tore down the kitten poster, throwing it under the bed. After that I arranged myself against the pillows and moved my face into a smile.

“Hey,” Dwayne said, coming through the doorway.

I knew what was coming.

“Are you sure you don’t want to be in the movie?”

“Not if I have to show my womanhood.”

“You could think of it like a stepping stone.”

The overhead light made his blond hair glitter and his eyes, while vacant, were the prettiest shade of blue.

“OK,” I said.

“Really?”

I nodded.

He jumped on the bed and kissed me.

“You won’t be sorry, I promise!”

He kissed me again full on the mouth and turned and walked out of my room and down the stairs. I heard the front door close and I watched him moving into a cone of light and then out again into the dark. Each time he moved into the streetlight in his white pants and shirt, his hair shone like a movie star’s.

After an hour of trying to get to sleep, of turning my pillow over and over, I decided to pray. But this time I wasn’t going to pray to Cher, with her black hair as powerful as crude oil, or to Bowie, with his red hair
and different-color eyes, or even to a giant mushroom, imagining myself lying prostrate under it. I wanted to contact God directly, but the ways I’d been taught to connect didn’t really work anymore, it was like trying to talk on a phone with terrible reception. Maybe it was because God was gone. On TV I’d hear hippies say that God was dead, but what was left after someone died? A hole, a space that was just as affecting as when they were alive. Just because the body was gone did not mean someone was not real. I was going to pray into the hole, yell down:
Do I really have to bare my womanhood?

I’m not sure exactly what I expected. Only in the Bible did God speak to people directly; these days He occasionally showed His image on frosted windows or dirty dish towels. I’d never heard an actual voice, though sometimes my attention had been focused in a way that felt outside my control; I’d noticed a drop of water falling from the bathroom faucet, or the weave of the material of my jeans. I waited, I knelt until my legs got numb and I heard Phillip in the shower. My knuckles were white, my teeth clenched, but bits of my brain were falling asleep. I opened my eyes and the first thing I saw was the business card lying on the night table. McCabe had given it to me on my way out in case I changed my mind. I grabbed it and walked across the hall into my parents’ bedroom. I sat on the side of the bed and picked up the receiver. Under Glen’s name was printed
UNIVERSAL
INTERNATIONAL STUDIOS
. I dialed the number. I was afraid my mother would come in and catch me calling long-distance. We never called long-distance. We never called anybody until the rates went down after eleven.

“Stay Bright Laundromat,” a woman said with enthusiasm.

“What?” I said.

“We close at midnight.”

I hung up. My palms sweat. I dialed the number again.

“Stay Bright Laundromat.”

I slammed down the phone. The number must be printed on the card wrong. I unfolded the sheets McCabe had given everybody who auditioned. The words were purple and I could tell the sheets had not been printed but run off on a mimeograph machine, like my father’s church bulletin. A few words had been misspelled, blocked out with
XXX
s, and then retyped.

Maybe the number had changed since McCabe had had the cards made up. I dialed information and waited for the California operator. I asked for the number of the studio.

“Are you sure you have the name right?”

“I think so.”

“Checking again.”

I listened to the rushing silence over the line.

“There is no listing under that name.”

I hung up, walked into the living room, and sat down on the couch. The radio dial on the stereo glowed and
I watched the lighted windows of the duplexes down the main road. My dad came in, closing his umbrella; he looked exhausted from his shift at the psych center. I turned on the lamp.

“I have to talk to you.”

“Now?” he said.

“Glen McCabe asked me to show him my womanhood.”

“That movie guy? You didn’t do it, did you?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, thank God for that,” he said, walking over to the phone. He picked up the receiver. “I’m going to call the police.”