With or Without You Page 10

  “Whassup, Long Island?” Angel says. Her accent reminds me how we called it the guyland. But I’ve had enough of memory lane today.

  “I can’t sing the song right now,” I blurt out, still in shock from my encounter with Stella and that priest. What kind of sadists run a story line at the expense of a dead star? Have they no respect for your memory? As soon as my hands stop shaking, I’ll write the network.

  Angel hoists herself up on her side. I drag over a metal chair, the same ones they have in the fishbowl. “You seen a ghost or something?” she says. “You whiter than the walls.”

  I sit, run my hand through my hair, wet with sweat. A chill rushes through me. I’m hunched like the oldest of the oldies with my arms and legs crossed. It’s easy to feel old when you wear the same clothes every day. Angel pulls a cigarette from the pack in her bra and lights it for me. The first drag makes me lightheaded, after the second I want to cry. I keep my head down, watching my sneaker tap against the floor. It doesn’t belong to me, the same way the angry voice and fingers weren’t mine. Angel touches my head. I want to speak, but nothing comes out. I can’t even smoke. I just hold the damn thing so close to my face it singes a couple of bangs the way it used to happen with bong hits. Outside. The year I had a friend … and look where that got me.

  “That shit smells nasty.” Angel takes the cigarette from my hand and brushes off my bangs. She strokes my hair, a touch like my grandmother’s mitten—not the least bit tainted. “You gotta hang in, know what I’m saying? No, you don’t know what I’m saying, you don’t know, you think somebody holding a knife to your throat’s gonna say, ‘Tell me what’s George Washington’s birthday or I’ll kill you. Tell me the capital of New Hampshire.’ All that shit’s a distraction, just forget you ever knew it. Being street smart’s all that counts now, especially when you get around a bunch a niggas.” The N word shocks me every time, I’d been so scared away from it. When I was in first grade, my parents sold one of our early houses to a black family, and all the kids at school called me nigger lover. A teacher overhearing them scolded, “Don’t you ever, ever, ever use that word!” It was the worst word. But it’s all you hear inside. The minute anything breaks it goes racial. Angel lifts my chin, grabs a piece of skin next to my ear. “Next time you cut from here”—she drags her fist across my mouth up to the other ear—“to here. Then you pull down the tongue like this.” Pretending to yank my tongue, she warns it won’t work if you don’t cut the face right. She calls this a Colombian necktie.

  My shoulders cave inward. I’m not street smart AND I can’t think of a single city in New Hampshire. “Man, we gotta school you better, get you happy.” Angel smiles because happy is Mimi’happy Mimi’s word and we don’t really talk about Mimi. Again, she pets my head, and it seems fucked-up this woman who’s sliced up people’s faces and ripped out their body parts and uses the N word can be so gentle. I’m glad it’s her and not Mimi here now. Too much sex makes me weary.

  But even Angel’s magic palms can’t realign the fire in me. The shrink says I’ve walked the world with eighteen years of it bottled up inside. Whenever she says this I think of that TV show I Dream of Jeannie. J.R. Ewing in his first life, before he got fat and rich and rode horses, releases the beautiful Jeannie from her bottle, but she’s really the side of himself the young J.R. had hidden away, the playful, devious, wild person he’d be if he didn’t have to show up for work every day in a uniform. Uniforms do funny things to people. But the second he opens that bottle his life changes, and believe me, anybody’s life can change in a few seconds.

  Angel must feel my muscles contracting, see my sneakers tapping faster. She takes her hand away, leans back on her elbow, and I’m smothered in guilt. I can’t figure out why this stuff comes when people are nice. I don’t think like this with Mimi. I never want to yell at her or scratch her eyes out until she goes away.

  I drag my chair back to the desk and take out a legal pad. Angel asks if she can listen to my Walkman, the one Mimi’s been eyeing for a new tattoo gun. I toss it to Angel, who slips the headphones over her ears and folds her hands on top of her stomach. She hums along with the radio, happy. So happy I’m giving her the damn thing.

  REAL DIVAS DON’T CRY (UNLESS THEY’RE ASKED

  W OEFUL WAS A WORD not used much in the Harrison household. Mildred herself couldn’t remember ever speaking such a sentiment out loud, yet if anyone had asked what she was feeling that October morning when she and Brooke boarded the silver Amtrak car in Philadelphia for the World Without End audition in Manhattan, she might have said woeful. In fact, the self-proclaimed throwback who wore her monochromatic skirts below the knee and dragged Tom swing dancing some Saturdays, longed to roll down the window of the train and regale those gathered on the platform with a heart-wrenching, “Woe is me!”

  But of course the windows on the modern locomotive were sealed shut, the platform was empty, and back then people weren’t yet in the habit of questioning Mildred Harrison. A good thing for Brooke, who didn’t need the added burden of her mother’s nerves; Mildred knew Brooke probably had her own fears about auditioning for the “high-school-aged” Jaymie Jo, though she’d just turned seventeen a few weeks earlier and her agent, Kenny Zeller, kept telling her she was made for the role. He’d even put in a furtive call to Mildred, saying they had it “hook, line, and sinker.” Kenny and Tom had once discussed trout fishing and since then the agent always tried to work in an outdoorsy metaphor or two. “Listen,” he told Mildred. “This is something I wouldn’t usually tell somebody’s mother, but I think you’ll understand. They’re looking for someone real, someone who looks like a regular teenager, but with major-babe potential. Who better, huh?”

  Who better? Mildred asked herself as the train snaked up through the factories and fields of southern New Jersey. True, Brooke seemed a shoe-in, but what mother wouldn’t feel uneasy about accepting her daughter’s major-babe potential? And film was such a fickle medium. Off the top of her head, Mildred could recite the list of pilots, commercials, and industrial videos Brooke hadn’t clinched, each rejection sending Mildred into a cauldron of fear and insecurity. The stages in and around Blue Bell, even in Philly, were one thing, but Mildred knew that out there in the world of television were hundreds of Brookes, all vying for a few precious spots in the public’s imagination, and while the who-better question was paramount, she couldn’t zap the imperialistic cry of its number one competitor: Why her? Brooke wasn’t that special really, just another pretty girl with a good memory for dialogue. Constantly Mildred found herself wondering whether they’d made the right decision in pulling her from public school, sending her to New York for training, letting her travel for summer stock productions. Well, Kenny Zeller thought them right, and, forgetting his ten percent interest in every job, Mildred tried to believe him. She listened when he explained that Brooke’s time had come. Maybe she would never be the proverbial child star, but weren’t most of them dead, in rehab, or washed up by eighteen? Brooke, on the other hand, had enough regional spots and theatrical performances for directors to take seriously, but she was still fresh. New blood. And she radiated a kind of poise and self-possession rare among young people.

  So stalwart and tenacious was Brooke that Kenny would joke that she and Mildred had reversed roles, Brooke becoming the stage mother to her mother, for it was Mildred who bit her fingernails down to the cuticles on those nights before auditions, while Brooke boiled water for chamomile tea and made certain Mildred packed her spongy globe that looked like a blue baseball with green continents instead of seams. Mildred liked to squeeze it in her palm as they awaited Brooke’s call. “It’s going to happen, Mom, if not this time then the next. Everything’s leading up to it,” Brooke often said, words offering slight assurance to Mildred, who was convinced her daughter had to be in denial. It wasn’t right the way she never cried after a rejection.

  Meanwhile at night, after Mildred and Tom made love and he rested his hand between her breasts for a few minutes b
efore swinging his legs over to his side of the bed and shutting his eyes, Mildred would slip into the bathroom, sit down on the toilet, and cry big tears that sometimes left her breathless for hours. Had Tom ever discovered his wife and asked what was the matter, she wouldn’t have known how to respond, her feelings being all tangled up like the knots in her favorite gold necklace, and she’d never had much patience for dwelling on the negative. Instead she kept her feelings from everyone: Tom, Brooke, Kenny, their parents and friends, and especially from Cynthia, who was becoming an odd sort of teenager. Mildred never knew what to make of the way her youngest daughter’s eyes watered every night during the six o’clock news, nor how she couldn’t sit through an entire war movie. Yet recently, Cynthia had spearheaded her own tactical maneuver, breaking into the junior high school science lab and emptying from their formaldehyde baths those frogs awaiting the procession of shaky X-Acto knives later that week. The girl made no attempt to hide her crime, even left a note saying, “WE WILL NOT DIE FOR YOUR SINS … thanks for the proper burial, Cynthia! (P.S. Stop Animal Testing).” The next day she was suspended for three days, a punishment Mildred thought excessive though she wouldn’t interfere in school affairs. Privately, however, she applauded her daughter’s spirit, just as she’d cheered silently when Cynthia painted her walls and ceiling black, then pasted up hundreds of glow-in-the-dark stars and solar systems and relinquished her four-poster bed for an air mattress, which she said gave her the feeling of sleeping outside. It was refreshing to see the girl developing tastes and opinions of her own, although the reference to animal testing did seem a direct jab at Tom, whose work at Paxton sometimes involved rats or tiny monkeys, a small price given the outcome: new and better drugs. One day he might help to cure cancer or discover a way to halt his father’s diabetes. While she would never argue that the end always justified the means, Mildred had to come down on the side of science, although she did recognize the ethical complexities of the situation. Cynthia, on the other hand, at the dawn of her teenage years was typical in one way: She saw the world in absolutes. You were either right or wrong, and more often than not, Mildred and Tom were flat-out wrong.

  Brooke, however, was always right, and the two girls had bonded deeply over the years, something Mildred and Tom couldn’t have arranged any better if they’d tried. Recently Brooke had been taking her sleeping bag into Cynthia’s room and spending the night in her sister’s pin-up planetarium. “She’s built a whole world in there,” Brooke told Mildred. “It’s so incredible. You know, I’ve been thinking … she’s the real artist in the family.” And if this realization prompted any sort of anxiety in Brooke, she followed her mother’s example of swallowing it and wholeheartedly embraced her sister, always, always lobbying for Cynthia to join them on shoots and auditions. “You’ve got your squishy ball, I’ve got Cyn. She’s my good luck charm,” Brooke had said a few nights earlier; she’d wanted Cynthia to come to New York. But Mildred put her foot down.

  “She can’t miss any more school,” Mildred said. “She’s already fallen behind.”

  “So what? She’s smarter than everyone in her class. She doesn’t need school. She’s going to do something really great someday and none of this is going to matter. Please let her skip school tomorrow, please let her come.”

  “No.”

  “But—”

  “I mean it, Brooke. No.”

  Mildred couldn’t afford the added stress of carting along another daughter. She was already beside herself. This was Brooke’s biggest audition yet, a high-profile spot on a major daytime soap, and when ingénues were the biggest stars in the game. Already a few had become household names and were now making movies. Mildred sensed that Brooke was thinking that far ahead, believing Kenny when he told her she practically had this part without an audition and from it would stem many others. Although the role sounded demanding; Kenny had done some digging and discovered that within the year this character would suffer a kidnapping, reunite with the father she never knew, and become romantically linked with a young black man—that is, if the story line made it past the more conservative sponsors. But Kenny had a good feeling. He explained to Mildred that soaps could get away with that sort of thing: Who was going to raise a fuss about an interracial relationship when characters were routinely enduring brain transplants, torture chambers, multifaceted infidelities, maybe a return from the dead? Heck, there was even a bunch of villains trying to control the weather … the weather! Kenny said it was positively mythological. No, he told Mildred not to worry about a few I.R.K.’s (“interracial kisses,” he’d translated over the telephone, and Mildred could see him curling his fingers into quote marks), and despite the rise of political conservatism, she knew that people were curious about such matters.

  That the couple were teenagers on the show made the situation more palatable to Mildred who didn’t know many black people herself. There was one family who lived a couple of roads away, and Mildred would always wave when she saw them out in the yard or say a few words if she ran into the woman at the A&P. It was the decent thing to do. But every so often when Mildred drove by their adorable A-frame and saw it covered with toilet paper and signs telling them to go back where they came from, she was besieged by the overt animosity of the act and disgraced by her own tacit complicity in not making sure the family was invited to the block parties, the duplicate bridge games, the winter festivals she always attended. No, she never gave the injustice, the indignity, a second thought until she drove by the house desecrated and imagined a brood of penetrating eyes peering out from behind the curtains with their index fingers pointing: shame on you. She could barely catch her breath, and perhaps if she’d been a different person, more like her younger daughter in her quest for right and wrong, Mildred might have lingered with this feeling, no matter how discomfiting, but instead she let it disintegrate as quickly as the A-frame in her rearview mirror. Only now she found herself wondering if they, too, might suffer should Brooke get the role. Blue Bell had already shown its true colors, so to speak, and hadn’t the silent majority just a couple of years ago voted the conservative Ronald Reagan into office? Even Tom had become a neocon, jumping parties to align himself with the former Hollywood star. For weeks after the election Cynthia called her father Mr. Harrison, while Brooke accompanied him to a screening of Bedtime for Bonzo at the rec center. Yes, there was potential for trouble in the family, in their community, not to mention in the rest of the country, but Mildred pushed all of that aside as Brooke excitedly pointed out the Empire State Building almost directly in front of them and they sunk underground toward the great city of New York.

  As the train crept into Penn Station, Brooke plowed her arms through the sleeves of her suitably monikered denim jacket, then yanked her knapsack down from the shelf. “Let’s go,” she said, removing her sunglasses from her breast pocket and fitting them above her forehead, a second set of eyes. Mildred couldn’t help staring. Her daughter was a “major babe” all right: so blond, so expressive, her eyes a metallic blue and shiny like the brand-new graffiti-resistant subway cars, her lips naturally rosy just like Tom’s. That was Mildred’s favorite thing about her husband.

  “Come on, Mom, it’s gonna be wicked hard getting a cab,” Brooke said, her whiny tone reminding Mildred that she was indeed a regular teenager as well.

  “All right, all right,” Mildred said, and though the train hadn’t stopped completely, she grabbed her purse from the empty seat next to her and joined Brooke to wait for the doors to open.

  They were the first people off the train, Mildred following Brooke down the escalator and up the steps to Eighth Avenue where it was wicked easy finding a cab, actually, but Mildred didn’t dare joke before an audition. They made it to the network offices half an hour before Brooke’s call, finding Kenny Zeller already settled in the waiting room. His hair was buzzed short in the back with wispy bangs in front and black as the T-shirt he wore beneath his oversized gray blazer. A bit odd, his appearance, though Mildred knew it w
as what men on television looked like. When her lips brushed against his smooth cheek in greeting, Mildred embraced the smell of verbena, maybe, or pine, and wondered if Tom might agree to using a little cologne. He certainly wouldn’t be caught anywhere in Blue Bell wearing a T-shirt and suit jacket.

  Kenny led Mildred to a leather armchair, then took Brooke’s hand and sat down next to her on the couch. “Okay, here’s the deal,” he said. “I’m hearing they haven’t liked anyone yet, so it’s practically yours. Remember what we said.”

  “Nothing fancy, just be myself.”

  “Right. You’ve got what they want. No need to embellish.”

  “Aren’t you gonna say carpe diem? You always say carpe diem,” Brooke smiled, her tongue jutting over perfectly curved lips, a studied twinkle in her eyes.

  “Better than that,” Kenny pointed his forefinger at Brooke. “It’s carpe ano now. Carpe decade. Carpe, carpe, carpe.”

  Brooke grabbed his finger, smiling, and it seemed they’d come out from the same distant land only to find each other in the great diaspora of New York City. With them Mildred felt like the outsider. That sinking feeling in her stomach returned, accompanied by a frightening premonition. Brooke was going to get the part.

  Minutes later, out came a woman about Kenny’s age, a young thirtyish, wearing the same kind of oversized suit, only hers was black with a silky camisole under the jacket. The hallowed trinity of mother-ingénue-agent stood to attention, and after a round of obligatory handshakes, it was time for Brooke to audition. “Should I come with?” Kenny asked, and the woman responded no. Brooke winked at Mildred: Kenny always asked and they always said no. It was their private joke. Then, calmly, as if she were walking into the kitchen for a snack, Brooke collected her things and followed the woman to the white door. Before going in, she stopped and dug Mildred’s globe out of her bag. “Squishy ball,” she said, tossing it to her mother.