The Fame Thief (14 page)

She drank half of it in one long pull.

G.R.
,
hard to
read in a floral scroll of fine lines, was engraved into the side of the flask, which dangled loosely from his hand. Dolly eased it away from him and screwed the top back on. She put it on the divider between their seats, sighed, unfastened her belt, got up, and crossed the aisle to the opposite window seat to watch the world go by below. She felt the gaze of the pilot, craning around to watch her. Probably trying to figure out who she was, this woman with George Raft.

Georgie’s head was tilted back, his eyes closed, and his mouth open. In the overhead light his face looked slack and much older than it seemed when he was awake. While he was awake, being “George Raft,” he had the muscles of his face under total control, but now his age showed. Before she stepped in front of a camera, Dolly thought, she wouldn’t have known about that muscle mask, but now—now she’d felt it shoulder aside her normal face every time the lights went on and the cameras started to roll. Not rigid, not stiff, just sort of electrically responsive, slightly tauter than life. A complete awareness of every square inch of skin, bone, and muscle she bared to the camera’s eye.

Acting, she had discovered, was both harder and easier than she’d expected. She didn’t really know anything about it, and she wasn’t sure she wouldn’t rather keep it that way. Now that she was used to the cameras, the lights, and the army of silent people, frozen in the darkness just beyond the lights with their microphones and makeup and clipboards, acting was like a water faucet. When she turned the spigot, either it flowed easily or nothing at all came out. When it flowed, she could forget even that her face felt twelve times bigger than usual the moment the sound man called “Rolling” and the director said “Action.” The flow—when it came—filled her up and told her what to do with her arms and hands, and where in a speech the emphasis belonged.

When the faucet went dry, she’d learned to pretend it hadn’t. As stiff and uncomfortable and
orphaned
as it felt, as unconvincing as she thought she must be at those times, she’d learned the hard way that it usually didn’t matter. Later, watching herself on film, in the daily rushes she used to dread, she couldn’t tell whether the faucet had been flowing or not.

The lights of Los Angeles were far behind. Now the land slipping by below was mostly dark, save for the little yellow constellations of small groups of houses or the glistening starfish of a town, its streets radiating outward and dimming as they moved away from the center. A ribbon of highway, Route 66, unrolled itself through the darkness, a fragile tendril of moving lights leading from one place to another. Maybe from one life to another. Taking people from someplace to someplace else, where they probably hoped things would be better.

That had been her mother and her down there only four years ago, headlights slicing open the endless darkness as her mother grimly pushed the old Plymouth west, one anxious mile at a time, one eye glued to the rearview mirror. After the two-day drop south and east from Scranton to pick up Route 66 in Springfield, Illinois, before it made its downward dip through the panhandle of Texas, her mother had stopped the car beside the sign that marked the final right, the one that would put them on the road to dreams and oranges. She had passed her forearm over he face, wiping her eyes.

“Honey,” she said, “from now on, you’re an adult.”

And it had turned out to be true, in ways her mother had probably not intended.

Dolly pressed her face against the cool windowpane and looked down at her life.

Wanda hadn’t thought she’d be able to sleep when she climbed into bed, fully dressed beneath her nightgown, and forced her eyes closed. But it seemed to be only a moment before her mother shook her awake, standing over her in the tiny, dark bedroom with her index finger pressed to her lips, commanding silence. The streetlight outside provided just enough yellowish light for Wanda to see the things she’d slipped beneath the bed, the brown paper supermarket bags jammed full of her favorite clothes, her diary, and the small yellow stuffed horse she’d had since she was two.

No makeup. Even after she turned sixteen, her father had forbidden makeup, and her three tubes of pale, barely noticeable lipstick were hidden a block away, along with her face powder and a dried-out, cracking cake of mascara, in the bedroom of her friend Betty, whose mother didn’t notice anything that wasn’t directly between her easy chair and the cupboard where she stored her bottle.

But, Wanda thought, there would be plenty of makeup in Hollywood.

Her father was a snorer, especially now that he was working extra shifts to mine coal. He was in top form that night, the
racket following them through the house as they tiptoed from room to room. In the pantry, her mother reached up for a canister that turned out to be full of fives, tens, and twenties, the booty—she said later—from more than a year of skimping on the groceries and pocketing the difference. The house seemed smaller to Wanda than usual, her father’s bed just feet away wherever she was, every noise they made amplified, but still he snored on, and she realized she had the tail of her mother’s blouse wadded up in her hand. Her fingers seemed cramped as she let it go. Her palm was wet and cold.

Room after room, stop after stop: a basket of food pulled from the oven, the one place her father would never find anything, two small cardboard suitcases, smelling new in the darkness, from the cramped, spidery space beneath the stairs, coats and hats—it was April, but still cold—from the closet just inside the front door. Wanda held her breath when her mother opened the closet because the hinges creaked like a joke on a radio show, but it swung wide without a whisper, and Wanda smelled the oil her mother had used to silence the hardware. The front door also opened without a murmur, and the cold slapped Wanda on the face as they hurried across the dead, stiff little lawn toward the old, high-roofed Plymouth. The car was a black silhouette against the ghost-light of the city, reflecting off the low clouds—snow clouds, her father had said the previous evening. Remembering that, Wanda felt a sudden clutching in her heart: her
father
.

The car had been backed into the driveway. It was a two-door, and the trunk always groaned when it was popped open, so her mother eased the passenger door outward and crawled in, leaning over the seat to put the food basket on the backseat, and then taking the suitcases Wanda handed to her and sliding them over the top of the seats and easing them to the floor. Last were
the bulging supermarket bags, stowed on the floor beneath the dashboard; when the car was a safe distance away, their contents were to be transferred to the suitcases. Suitcases, her mother had explained, would be less conspicuous.

And, standing there, looking at her breath drift by in the air and listening to the crumpled complaints of the bags being pushed into place, Wanda wondered why they needed to avoid being conspicuous.

A little chill rippled over the skin on her back and arms as her mother scooted over to position herself behind the wheel and waved Wanda in. “Don’t close the door,” her mother said. “Just hold it shut until I tell you.” Then she closed her eyes and bowed her head until her forehead rested on the steering wheel and said, “Dear Lord, please bless this journey and carry me and my little moviestar to the fields of glory. Amen.”

Wanda echoed the “Amen,” although her eyes remained open. With her back curved like that, her mother looked smaller than usual, and her voice had been higher and less steady than usual, smearing the air with a dirty topaz color. But then her mother straightened and said, in her normal tone, “Hold onto that door.” She released the parking brake and pushed the clutch to the floor, and they began to roll down the driveway.

“We’re off,” her mother said, grabbing Wanda’s arm and squeezing it so hard that Wanda almost cried out. At the bottom of the drive, she wrapped both hands around the wheel and steered right, down the hill, the car gathering speed until she reached down and turned on the ignition and popped the clutch. The engine dragged at them and then caught with a cough, and her mother pressed down on the gas and said, “Slam it, moviestar. We’re free.”

Half an hour later, with the sky beginning to pale in the west, her mother pulled the car to the curb in front of a house with
only one lighted window, and the two of them pulled out the bags and packed the suitcases. To Wanda, it felt like a shared moment, she and her mother doing the same things at the same time, but then she folded a blouse too quickly, and her mother reached over and slapped her hand and said, “Lazy.” Wanda snatched her hand back and re-folded the blouse, blinking against the little sizzle of pain. When she’d placed the blouse in the suitcase, precisely folded and all its wrinkles smoothed out, her mother said, without looking up from her own suitcase, “We have to do everything carefully. This is your adventure, Wanda, and the thing you never read in stories about adventures is that people who are having one have to be very, very careful. Do you understand?”

Wanda said, “Sure,” putting a little sullen edge into the word.

“Don’t give me that, sweetie. This is a small car, and we’re going to be in it for a long time. If we’re not going to get along, tell me now, and we’ll turn around and go home.”

Wanda recognized the dare and almost called it, but the word
moviestar
, echoing in her mind, made her clamp her teeth together against the impulse. “Sorry, Mom.”

“That’s my baby.” The color of her mother’s voice lightened toward yellow, closer to her normal color. “Tell me, sweetie, what do you like most in the world? What’s the smell you like most in the world?”

“Shalimar.” It was her mother’s perfume. At the age of eight, Wanda had been spanked and sent to bed without dinner for sneaking into her mother’s and father’s room and pouring half a bottle of the scent over herself.

“Well, sweetie, we’re floating to Hollywood on a cloud of Shalimar.” She picked up her purse, put it in the center of the open suitcase in her lap, and pulled out a small, circular bottle with a tapering glass stopper. “Close your eyes.”

With her eyelids pressed together so tightly she saw little red fireworks, Wanda heard the whispery sound of the stopper sliding out, and then the fragrance bloomed around her with its own delicious color, a clear cool aquamarine, and she felt her mother’s fingertips behind her right ear and then her left, leaving cool spots where the alcohol was evaporating, and the smell thickened and gathered strength, and the color lightened and deepened and rippled, the clearest, cleanest water in the history of the world, and Wanda surprised herself by laughing.

“Me, too,” her mother said, and Wanda opened her eyes to see one of her mother’s rare smiles. She was almost pretty when she smiled. “It used to make me laugh, too.” She dabbed a finger behind each of her own ears and said, “The hell with it,” and poured a few precious drops on the dashboard. She slid the bottle back into her purse, inhaled deeply, and said, “Flowers all the way.” As the smile faded she leaned forward and studied the sky. “Getting light. We’ve got to get some miles behind us.”

It went wrong
almost immediately.

At 9:30 the first night, the two of them yawned in unison and her mother hooked a left off the highway and bumped east through the dark on a narrow, pot-holed, tree-lined road for half an hour, chasing the moon above a ragged treeline until they came to a small, paint-peeled town with a crumbling stucco motel in it. Wanda was ordered to stay in the car, the heat on full, while her mother talked to the clerk, visible through the window of the office, and then came back clutching a big key with a plastic tag that said 12. With a glance at the clerk, whose nose was already buried in a big copy of
Life
, Wanda’s mother steered the car to the far edge of the parking lot, squinting at the room numbers until she cranked the wheel left, toward the doors, hanging a wide U-turn that ended when the right front
wheel bumped up onto the walkway in front of number 12, so close that Wanda could almost have hit the building with her opening door.

“Stay put,” her mother said. She climbed out of the car and toted the suitcases and the food basket into the room while Wanda, who had never been in a motel, tried to get a look at the room. After the third trip, her mother came out to the car and opened Wanda’s door.

“Get in there,” she said, almost a whisper, but with a lot of whip in it. “And stay in there.”

Wanda climbed out and darted four feet across the sidewalk into the room, feeling foolish. She wasn’t a moviestar yet. Her mother shot an index finger at her and said, “Don’t you dare set foot out that door.” Then she hurried around the car, climbed in, and started it. Without turning on the lights, she backed it out of Wanda’s line of vision and then drove to Wanda’s left, away from the road. When the sound of the engine had dwindled, Wanda disobeyed just enough to put her head out for a look and she saw the car disappearing behind the last unit in the motel. She ducked back in and sat on the double bed, listening to her mother’s shoes scuffing on the walkway until she reappeared in the door, zipping her purse shut. She pulled the door closed and leaned her back against it, her eyes pressed shut.