The Truth about My Success (12 page)

“I’m sure you believe that, Susie,” soothes Ethan Lovejoy, “but that kind of thing doesn’t matter to us here. We care about inner worth, not material success.”

“Of course I believe it!” shouts Paloma. “It’s true! And if you don’t drive me back to the airport right now, when I get out of this dump I’m going to tell everybody what you do here. How you kidnap young girls. And hold them prisoner. And molest them. And make them work as slaves.” Kicking and sobbing, the words tumble out, inspired by fury and an episode of last season’s
Angel in the House
. “And don’t think I won’t, because I will. I’m on Facebook and Twitter you know. I have a website. I have a publicist. And I—” Paloma stops abruptly, not because she has run out of either words or accusations but because she finally realizes that she’s all alone.

Jack
Silk said that the first week was going to be the hardest – so much to learn, so much to get used to, so much to remember – which Oona will later realize is one of the rare times he told her the unadulterated truth.

Both the Minnicks are still in bed when Oona comes down for breakfast the next morning.

Leone, however, has left them an itinerary of what she and Maria are supposed to do today to turn the rather ordinary, brown-eyed, dark-haired, five-five-and-a-fraction-or-two Oona into a head-turning, five-foot-six-inch blonde with startling blue eyes.

“We go in my car,” says Maria. “Mrs Minnick says it is less conspicuous.”

This isn’t really true. Maria’s car may be less conspicuous than an elephant would be navigating the traffic of Los Angeles, but it is not less conspicuous than the Cadillac, the Camaro or the Mercedes. In general, however, Hollywood stars do not ride around in ancient, battle-scarred Volkswagens with a plastic image of the Virgin of Guadalupe hanging from the rearview mirror on a chain of plastic beads, and Paloma Rose has never been an exception to that rule. What Leone means by “less conspicuous” is that even if Oona is spotted in Maria’s car no one would believe she was Paloma. Not even the vultures strutting and stretching their wings outside the gate are likely to give the Beetle a second look.

The first thing on Leone’s itinerary is to go shopping: clothes, shoes and accessories.

Oona reads off the list of stores. She’s heard of one or two, but most are so exclusive they might as well be secret societies. “You know these places?” she asks as the little car struggles up a hill.

“Not personally,” says Maria, “but I can find them.”

Leone, however, is on intimate terms with all of these stores, and has phoned ahead to say that her niece is visiting from Arkansas and will be coming in to “pick up a few things”. Maria has been told to park out of sight.

Oona buys her clothes in discount chains or thrift stores. Neither she nor Maria has ever been in a designer’s shop or high-end boutique before, and there are a few minutes while they hover outside the first one on Leone’s list when it looks as though they never will. And then the door opens and a woman who looks like a movie star playing a diplomat’s wife opens the door and says, “Ms Ginness? Maria? Please come right in.”

Oona has never had another person pay so much attention to her body and what she puts on it before. Heads shake, lips purse and eyes narrow. She is scrutinized, measured and advised. Does she want something for morning, afternoon or evening? Does she want something elegant or casual; for work or for leisure; to socialize with associates or socialize with friends? It seems that these aren’t clothes that she’s trying on but personal statements. “What is it you want to say?” the salespeople ask her. “What do you want to project?”

By the time they move on to shoes, Oona feels as if she hasn’t been shopping but interviewing for an important scholarship that she’s guaranteed not to get.

“It is much easier to be poor,” says Maria.

Buying shoes that Paloma would wear but in the slightly smaller size that fits Oona is only marginally less stressful and demanding.

The shoe shops are more like first-class airport lounges – places Oona has only seen in movies – than the stores where Oona buys her shoes. No aisles of shelves arranged by size. No tables of bargains. No tissue paper or box lids scattered over the floors like autumn leaves on a country lane.

She has also never worn heels before. Aware of the need to balance herself for the first time since she learned to walk, Oona staggers across the tasteful carpets (no linoleum here, either), steady as a giraffe on a pitching ship, watched by Maria who is ready to catch her.

Oona was right to worry about walking in high heels. She only manages not to fall or crash into a wall by taking small steps slowly enough to make it feel as if time has stopped. “What happens if you need to run away from somebody who’s trying to mug you?” she whispers to Maria.

“You take them off,” Maria whispers back. “Then you can run.”

The prices, however, could make a goldfish run on stilts. “Five hundred dollars? Five hundred dollars for a pair of shoes?”

“Wait’ll you see what the bags cost,” says Maria.

The next stop is the optician’s, to pick up the lenses tinted the same colour as Paloma’s, a clear and delicate blue not unlike the waters of the Gulf of Mexico eight or so hundred years ago. Wearing contacts is another new experience. They make Oona cry.

“I think my eyes may be permanently damaged,” she says as she dabs at the tears with Maria’s handkerchief.

“You’ll get used to them,” comforts Maria. “Most people do.”

Oona sighs. “Only because you can get used to anything.”

Which she can only hope includes the Minnicks.

Their last port of call is the beautician’s – another first for Oona. Her mom always cut her hair, and when illness put a stop to that Oona started cutting it herself. Paloma, needless to say, has her hair done in an exclusive salon by a sought-after stylist who charges two-hundred dollars for a trim. But going anywhere like that is, of course, out of the question. It was left to Maria to choose somewhere not part of the Hollywood scene, a task at which she’s definitely succeeded.

Unlike everywhere else they’ve been, the beauty parlour is the kind of place that no celebrity would put so much as a toe in unless her car broke down in a hurricane and it was the only building for fifty miles that hadn’t nailed its doors shut. The women who work here wear pink smocks and (for reasons that will never be explained) bedroom slippers, and aren’t stylists but hairdressers. It’s called, appropriately enough, Angel’s Hair, and decorated with Day of the Dead images.
Rancheras
play in the background and an enormous black cat sleeps beside an elaborately sequined if faded black sombrero in the window. At least they like animals. Angel is the proprietor, Angelina Velas, a large and vivid woman as quick as machine-gun fire. “I feel like an explorer who’s discovered a new continent,” she says, assessing Oona with a professional eye. “Lucky for you I love a challenge,” and shows her to a chair.

Oona has her hair washed. She has it cut. She has the colour taken out of it like bark being stripped from a tree. She has a different colour put in. She has the strands twisted into gentle waves. It’s like some kind of medieval torture. She’s sure her scalp must be bleeding.

“I know they are very good,” Maria assures her. “My nephew’s girlfriend and her sister come here all the time.”

When she’s done, Angelina stands behind Oona’s chair as she stares at her new self in the mirror. “What do you think?”

“I look so different.” She looks like Paloma Rose. It’s kind of frightening. “I wouldn’t recognize myself if I didn’t know it was me.”

Angelina steps around her for a closer look. “You know who you remind me of?” she says. “That girl on the TV. Justina, doesn’t she remind you of that girl on the TV?”

Justina waves a pair of scissors in the air. Thoughtfully. “Which one?”

“You know,” encourages Angelina, “the one who’s an angel.”

“You think?” Maria appears beside Angelina, looking at Oona as if she’s never seen her before. “I don’t know…” She shakes her head. “I think that girl’s much taller.”

Oona isn’t the only one having a day of firsts. Leone is actually waiting for them when they return, appearing at the front door even before Oona – wearing one of her new outfits and a new pair of shoes with lifts, her hair blonde and her eyes blue – gets out of the car. Leone stands at the top of the steps, arms folded and eyes narrowed like a general inspecting her troops. “Close,” says Leone. “Very, very close.” She takes a step back and shakes her head. “Now all we have to do is work on the little details.”

But doesn’t add that the devil, as the saying goes, is in those little details.

It isn’t long before Oona establishes a routine of sorts. She gets up early to take Harriet for her long morning walk. It’s too early for there to be anyone lingering by the main entrance, but, just to be sure, they go out the back way and take a circuitous route, coming out to one side of someone else’s property on a dead-end street several roads below the Minnicks’. Oona always calls her father as soon as they’re out of the house. Last thing at night she and Harriet take another long walk, and she talks to her father again. These are the best times of the day for her. Peaceful. Pleasant. They haven’t met any coyotes yet, but they’ve met quite a few dogs and their owners, as well as cats and cat owners and a man who has an iguana in his backyard. It’s a surprisingly friendly neighbourhood, but this, of course, may be because everyone loves Harriet. People say hello or stop to talk. By day three she knows several names. Ben and Bill the beagle. Lara and Pixie the Great Dane. Jason and Lilly the dachshund. Moira and Orwell the German Shepherd. Mr Jeffers and Comandante the iguana. Mrs Mackinpaw and her cat Sunshine. Oona has twice gotten Sunshine out of a tree. In between these highlights, Oona spends all her time mastering the details of being Paloma Rose. Which is neither pleasant nor peaceful.

“Nonono!” It’s been a long afternoon in what is turning out to be a preternaturally long week. If patience were petrol Leone would be lucky to make it around the block right now. “Go back to the door and try it again, sweetie.” She smiles like a doll. “We’re aiming to imitate poetry in motion, not a bulldozer.”

Oona sits down suddenly. If you ask her, she might as well be in boot camp. Do this. Do that. Don’t do that. Don’t do this. When she closes her eyes at night, she hears Leone’s sweet-as-saccharine voice in her head repeating
Nonono
, and sees her winter-in-the-Arctic smile. She’s never known anyone so easily dissatisfied. She never lets up. No wonder Paloma threw an egg at her; what’s amazing is that she didn’t throw the plate too. Even when Oona does something right, Leone wants it done better. Oona can’t wait till she has everything down and Master Sergeant Minnick finally leaves her alone; Maria said not to get her hopes up. Leone never leaves Paloma alone, why should she leave Oona alone? When she’s about to be totally contrary, Oona sucks in her bottom lip and pulls her eyebrows together. She’s doing that now. “I’m taking a break.” This is an announcement, not a request.

Snow and icy winds fall over the North Pole. “You had a break twenty-eight minutes ago.”

“Well now I’m having another one.”

Leone crosses her arms in front of her. “You’re not trying hard enough, sweetie. How are you going to be ready in time if you don’t try?”

“I am trying.” Oona crosses her legs. “But what you don’t seem to understand is that you’re working against the law of diminishing returns here.”

Leone taps her foot. A different kind of animal would be pawing the ground. “The law of what?”

“Diminishing returns,” says Oona. “We’ve gone way past the point where me doing it again and again is going to make it any better. It’s just going to keep getting worse.” Oona’s been walking from the front door to the middle of the living room for nearly two hours. So now she has a good idea what it’s like to live in a cage.

“It’ll get better if you want it to get better.” Leone is not only a woman who possesses the single-mindedness and determination of the fanatic, she is also unrealistically stubborn. “Let’s try it again. And this time concentrate on being poetry in motion not a clodhopper in muddy boots, OK?”

Oona’s brow is still furrowed, but she stands up. “I’m not a ballet dancer, you know. I just want to get from one place to another. That’s what walking is Mrs Min—”

“Mom.” Just because someone smiles at you doesn’t mean she likes you, a fact both Leone and Oona are very well aware of by now. “Please try to remember that, darling. It is important.”

“That’s what walking is,
Mom
. Getting from one place to another. Not shoving poems around the room.”

Leone sighs. “But one can walk gracefully,
darling
.” Paloma’s main weapons are shouting, screaming and throwing the tantrum of a three-year-old – though usually without the lying on the floor kicking her feet part. Oona’s weapon of choice, however, is debate. You can’t tell her anything that she doesn’t question or want a fuller explanation of. She’s not very good at taking orders. Everything is,
Why?
Or,
How come?
Or,
But that doesn’t make sense
. If you gave her instructions on how to cross to the other side of the street she’d either ask for a second opinion or try to convince you that she should stay where she is. Jack says that Oona wants to be some kind of doctor and has a scientific, enquiring mind – not a charge you can lay on Paloma – but Leone thinks she’s a natural troublemaker. You can tell. She sounds sarcastic just saying hello. And she is certainly a lot of trouble to Leone. “Think gazelle, not moose.”

“Right. Gazelle, not moose.” But Oona isn’t thinking gazelle or moose. She’s thinking charging rhino.

Oona recently read the story
The Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka, in which a man turns into a giant insect. Mr Kafka made becoming someone – or something – else seem relatively uncomplicated. In his story the metamorphosis happens overnight. Gregor Samsa goes to sleep a salesman, and wakes up a Godzilla bug. But changing from Oona Ginness to Paloma Rose is about much more than changing the way Oona looks. As Leone said, gazing at a photo of dear Paloma with a tenderness her only child wouldn’t recognize, “Looking like dear Paloma’s one thing.
Being
her is something else.”