You Look Like That Girl: A Child Actor Stops Pretending and Finally Grows Up (11 page)

Margaret interrupted our intimate moment to ask if we should get started. My mother grabbed her purse, saying she would be back later to pick me up. I waved goodbye without even looking in her direction.

Margaret blindfolded me in an act of cruel and unusual punishment. Keeping me from looking at Scott was like taking someone to the Grand Canyon and not letting them look down. We got to work and I learned how to navigate a room blind and how to pour drinks without spilling. I poured a few glasses of sticky soda all over my hands before I learned
the proper technique. Scott sympathized with my struggles and tried to help me but we just made a bigger mess. His laugh made me delightedly dizzy, and somehow made me feel like laughing at my mistakes was okay.

As we went through the day, I found him easy to be with, open and sweet. He was always kind and helpful as I messed up the tasks he dealt with on a daily basis. He had been blind since birth, and tolerated my inelegant questions with ease. I was accustomed to boys at school who treated me like I was an aberration because I was on television, or the boys I met on movies who only cared to brag about how much money they had made on their last film. Scott was different.

I was given the task of making lunch while blindfolded. Margaret left us alone and Scott sat at the kitchen table while I knocked things over in the cupboard as I tried to remember the ordering system to find the peanut butter. I wondered if I would still make him peanut butter and jelly after we were married. I assembled the sandwich wrong, so the jelly was on the outside, which I only realized after I put my hand in strawberry goo. There was still a little remnant of peanut butter on the top but Scott was forgiving and I hoped he found my flaws charming. I poured him a Coke and tried to not let the foam break over the lip of the glass.

“You got the jam to peanut butter ratio perfect! And you got the glass of Coke so full!”

“I spilled a bit over the side,” I deflected. “It’s super fizzy.”

It’s super fizzy?
I was not bringing my A-game. We didn’t have much time together; I needed to be doing something more memorable than discussing the exuberant carbonation of his beverage.

With the bandana still over my eyes I told him the most interesting things about my twelve-year-old life thus far. I talked about my pets and tried to impart the fact that I was a loving individual who would be good to our children. I told him I was looking forward to spending several months in Italy and that I was trying to learn Italian, which was partially true in that I was throwing “Ciao” into my daily lexicon. I said I was excited about seeing Italian art because that made me appear mature.
I didn’t mention the fact that my mother had promised an educational field trip to Florence to see the statue of David, which I was looking forward to because I had never seen a penis before. After I mentioned the art, I felt the need to say something a little more normal, so I didn’t seem like some stuck-up child actor who is not relatable.

“And I really like pizza!”

Damn. I had been doing so well and now I said something stupid about pizza. I wished I could see him and search his face for a reaction. Finally the silence was broken.

“Oh man, I bet the pizza over there is so good!”

I was saved. My man also liked pizza. All was well in my world.

“So, what do you look like?” Scott asked, his mouth half full of peanut butter.

I didn’t know how to answer the question.

“Do you want more to drink?” I stalled to buy more time to come to terms with my appearance, because clearly that is something that a girl can work through on the way to the fridge.

“I’m good, thanks. Seriously, what do you look like?”

“I have brown hair.”

He laughed. “Doesn’t help me. I don’t know what brown is. Never seen it.”

“Oh, right. I’m short.”

He sighed at me. “What else?”

“I don’t know. It’s a hard question.”

“Are you pretty?”

There it was. The question that I would struggle with for the first thirty years of my life. It was unanswerable and yet, the only person in the world that I cared about at that moment wanted me to answer it.

“No.”

“Liar. You sound pretty.”

“Sounds can be deceiving,” I said.

“Not really. Can I touch your face?”

“Okay,” I answered too quickly.

I reached out for his hands as he reached out for mine. After a moment of awkward grasping, I guided his hands to the sides of my face.

“So, here’s my face,” I said, completely unnecessarily.

He used the softest touch to feel my cheeks. He silently slipped the bandana off my eyes. I could finally see him, looking even more lovely than I had remembered, his head tilted to the ground with a look of concentration on his face. He outlined my eyebrows and grazed along my lids. I tried to mirror his intense look as I felt this was a serious moment but I couldn’t help my lips from forming a dopey grin.

“You’re smiling,” he said when he outlined my mouth.

“It tickles.” I didn’t mention that the feel of him was the most wonderful thing I had ever known.

“As I suspected,” he declared. “Pretty.”

My heart leapt out of my chest and bounced along the floor.

“Here, let’s get your blindfold back on. Margaret wanted you to wear it all day.” I had a hard time getting the blindfold back on over my slightly swollen head.

I tried to go back to eating my sandwich, but it’s hard to chew and grin at the same time. Suddenly, lunch was over as Margaret interrupted our date and put us back to work. She placed Scott on one side of the room, acting as bait, and I was twirled around and had to find him by tracking the sound of his voice. There was a stereo playing loudly and I was supposed to block out the ambient noise.

“Hey, Lisa, I’m over here,” Scott shouted at me.

I could hear that he was down low and figured that he was sitting on the floor. When I got to where I thought he was, I knelt down and reached out, intending to touch a perfectly proportioned shoulder. Instead, I grabbed something soft and warm and thoroughly unfamiliar. Over the stereo, I might have heard Margaret gasp and I whipped off the blindfold. Squinting through the bright sunlight pouring into the room, I saw Scott sitting in a chair in front of me, my hand squarely in
his crotch. I was frozen, slowly registering what I held in my hand. With a look of surprise in his face, he squirmed slightly to get away from my grasp. Margaret stared, appalled by the sight of the actress on her knees, hand in her student’s lap. I finally retracted, as if I had been bitten. Hot, humiliated tears filled my eyes. I was molesting the blind kid.

“Well,” My victim spoke. “You found me.”

My unshielded eyes watched him break into a smirk. I smiled, too, and my tears poured out onto the carpet.

“Let’s move on to more cane work,” Margaret suggested in an unnecessarily loud and high-pitched voice. Less penis-grabbing involved in cane work, I suppose.

Far too soon, the day with Scott was over. I thanked him for spending time with me, but what I meant was, “I love you.”

“I had a blast. I can’t wait to see your show when it comes out,” he said.

“You mean hear it?”

“Hey, no making fun of the blind guy.” He swatted at my shoulder and I melted.

“I’ll make sure you know when it’s on.”

“Do me a favor?”

“Anything.” I meant it.

“You know how you were telling me about that scene in the movie when you get really mad and throw stuff around? When you film that part, you should throw something through a window.”

“Why?”

“I’ll hear the smash and know you are doing it for me.”

“I will. Promise,” I managed to say through the lump in my throat.

We hugged good-bye and I inhaled the warm, musty scent of teenaged boy. I wanted to stay there forever, in Margaret’s living room, being held by this sweet, thoughtful, kind boy. He didn’t let go and I wondered how long it would be before someone peeled me off him. Eventually, Mom ushered me out the door and I stumbled to the car in my love haze.

Soon after, I left for the shoot and spent the following four months working on the mini-series. I thought about Scott often and tried to make him proud of my authentic portrayal of blindness. I used the cane the right way and instructed the other actors, explaining that I needed to hold their arm just above the elbow if they were walking with me in the scene. I fought with the producers about how the role should be played and changed details to make them more realistic. It appeared that I was a devoted method actor; I was really just a kid with my first crush.

While I was on location in Italy, my grandma heard from Margaret that Scott had received a scholarship to a prestigious blind school and moved across the country to live in the dorms. It was over, whatever it had been. I’d never see him again. I was heartbroken imagining him out there somewhere, feeling some other girl’s face and eating a better-balanced PB&J.

Filming continued, despite the fact I was navigating my first broken heart. I threw myself into my work and enjoyed the distraction of being on location in a foreign land. Mom and I made friends with the waiters at the restaurant across the street who liked to practice their English. I attempted to get my schoolwork done, even though it felt ridiculous to try to study French in Italy. I found plenty of enjoyment from the education provided by wandering through Roman ruins and sampling every gelato shop in town.

The day we filmed the scene of my emotional breakdown, I remembered my promise to acknowledge Scott in the show. During rehearsals, I saw that there was no window to smash, so I asked the director if I could throw a lamp.

“It’s something my character would do,” I said with all the passion a twelve-year-old actor could muster.

After checking with prop masters and sound people, the director reluctantly allowed it.

“Let’s try to get this in one take, people! She’s gonna be breaking shit.”

I broke that lamp with enormous intention, gratitude and love. I broke it for a boy who took things in stride, who lived his life with joyful gratitude and zero pity. A boy who didn’t surrender to the challenges of life and who taught me it was okay to laugh at my mistakes. A boy who smelled really good and waited for me to let go first. A boy who thought I was pretty, even though he never saw my face.

It’s still some of my best work.

One of the wonderful things about a film shoot is its intensity and ability to consume every moment of your waking life. Filming hours are demanding and it’s easy to become totally immersed and forget about one’s love interest back home. (This would be a skill I would perfect, to quite a fault, later in my career.) I worked hard, studied my script, and enjoyed living in Rome. It was always one of my favorite parts of film life, the opportunity to live somewhere new while on location for several months. I learned to shut off my other life, the one in which I went to school with kids whose careers involved lemonade and dog walking.

I acclimatized to a life where home was a hotel that stood behind a Bernini fountain, where a merman with rippling abs rode a clamshell and blew a conch. The weekends meant taking the train to Venice and strolling the canals while eating loaves of olive bread from greasy brown paper bags. My off-set social interactions largely revolved around the crazy homeless man who lived in the piazza in front of the hotel. He wore a long, ragged black trench coat and would do pirouettes and spring his long, lanky body into the air. As he landed, he would bonk Vespa drivers on the head with a fairy wand while they sped through the traffic circle. All the while, my eccentric friend would sing the word “sara” repeatedly, long into the night. Perhaps it was the name of the long-lost-love that drove him to madness, or, maybe it was
sará
, the Italian word for “it will
be.” Maybe he was a Buddhist poet.

When working internationally, key crewmembers are usually imported from L.A. or New York and the rest of the crew is hired locally. It’s of utmost importance that the drivers be locals when working in a foreign place. That way, you don’t have a bunch of freaked out Americans trying to figure out the rules of a Roman traffic circle. My driver was Roberto, a Roman man in his early forties with dark, intense eyes and a firm handshake that made everyone feel that everything was under control. His car was pristine and smelled of polishing wax, and the dangling tree air freshener always got tangled with the rosary that hung from the rear view mirror.

One of our locations was high up in the mountains above Rome in a secluded monastery. The series might have been melodramatic, but the scenery was stunningly beautiful. The fog would roll in across the mountain and you could hear the clanking bells of the sheep long before they broke through the mist. Their herder, seemingly nonplussed by the presence of a production company, expertly guided the flock through our trucks, trailers, and light stands. It looked like a scene that belonged back in the 1800s, but there they all were, solidly in 1992, hooves tripping over Panasonic cables as the sheep bleated their way past.

The drive up the mountain was treacherous. It required hairpin turns that were so narrow that only one car could fit at a time. We were usually traveling before dawn, so that I had time to get into hair, makeup, and wardrobe before the cameras started rolling at sunrise. Roberto would give two friendly beeps of the horn as we began each turn, a noise that sounded like a peppy, “Coming through!” but really meant, “If you can hear this, please pray because we are about to collide and shall all be plummeted over the side momentarily!” So, we curved and beeped and prayed for an hour each way. Roberto was obsessed with the Enya album
Watermark
and would play it constantly on the car stereo. To this day, the peaceful, soothing notes of “Sail Away” make me violently nauseated.