I'll Be You(23)



Elli ran up the stairs of the trailer and threw the door open, but I managed to slip in behind her before she could get it shut again. Once I was inside, I locked the handle and turned to face my sister. She was crying now, black rivulets of mascara worming grooves through the beige pancake makeup that continually clogged our pores.

“You’re fucking up your face. Bettina is going to kill you.”

She swiped at her face, leaving a black smear across her cheek. “He’s so mean. I’m not going back.”

Behind us, our mother was banging on the door to the trailer. “Girls? What’s going on in there? Elli? Do you want to do a meditation with me? Would that help?”

“Not right now, Mom!” Elli screamed through the door. She turned to me, desperation in her eyes. “I can’t do this anymore.”

“What? You mean this scene? Or you can’t do this, like…act?”

“I don’t know.” Her eyes were rimmed with pink. She looked like a crazed raccoon. She hesitated. “Can’t we just…take a week off?”

“We can’t. It doesn’t work that way.” I stared at her destroyed face, an anguished echo of my own, and thought hard. How could I save her? How could I save us?

“But what if you took a week off?” I heard myself say.

“What do you mean?”

I leaned in close. “You be me,” I whispered, “and I’ll be you.”



* * *





It didn’t take much to become her that first time. I still had my stage makeup on from my scenes that morning; a few quick swipes with the hairbrush and my hair was hers, too. I donned the costume that Elli had been wearing and she put on my sweats, washed her face, and put a compress over her eyes until the redness vanished. Half an hour later, we exited our trailer quietly and found my mother sitting on the bottom of the stairs, reading a book by Pema Ch?dr?n.

She jumped up, her cheeks flushed from the sun, sweat spreading in rings under her armpits. She’d already started on the natural deodorant by then and I could smell her, musky and sharp. “I don’t like being locked out,” she said, peevish. Already, the balance between us was shifting; paying the bills had given us power, and she no longer knew quite how to shut us down.

“I’m OK now, I just needed to relax for a bit,” I said to her, letting a faint tremor creep into my voice. I softened my step as I walked down the stairs and behind me I could hear Elli’s feet landing with a thud. Is that how I walk? I thought, perturbed and delighted. I was chewing Elli’s gum and Elli was sucking on one of the cinnamon Altoids I liked, clicking it against her teeth the way I did. It felt like we were performing cartoon versions of each other; and yet maybe this was how the world saw us, as oversized caricatures of the smaller people we believed ourselves to be inside.

I remember that I felt a vague thrill as my eyes met my mother’s, lashes trembling. I willed my face into a mask of weary obedience, the face of a good girl who was determined to try her best just to make everyone happy. The face of my sister, so similar to mine and yet so different underneath. This was the ultimate test of my acting abilities: If anyone was going to catch us, it was going to be our mother.

“You sure?” Her eyes snapped from me to Elli and back again and I saw something cross her face, a faint question mark. And then, just as quickly, it disappeared. Her eyes shot away, as if the question had been answered and she was uninterested in considering it any further.

“OK, then,” she said. “If you’re ready, then let’s get back to set. We’re three minutes late.”



* * *





And so for the next eight weeks, until we finished shooting the season, I played two roles: Elli’s and my own. No one ever suspected that when Elli and I disappeared into the bathroom at lunchtimes or in between scenes, we were swapping places. As far as the crew was concerned we were just teenagers, spending too much time preening in the bathroom; and if we sometimes came out a little backward, our hair not quite right and costumes awry—well, no one looked that closely at kids anyway. No one paid close enough attention to note that “Sam” was a little less assertive than usual or that “Elli” seemed to have developed Sam’s swagger. Who would it benefit anyway, to sniff out our ruse? The director was happy to finally be getting strong performances out of Elli; he wasn’t about to question how he’d gotten them.

Maybe our mother knew what was going on; how could she not? But maybe she also understood why we did what we did—that this was a matter of my sister’s survival, and my own. That was how our mother had always been: willfully blind, stubbornly optimistic. It was easier for her to believe that our problems had seamlessly resolved themselves.

So Elli spent her days being me, reading gossip magazines and playing Tomb Raider on my Game Boy. I got to perform in double the scenes—as well as playing Elli, a role inside a role—and I loved it. By the time we finished shooting the rest of the season, Elli had stopped looking so haunted and I had honed my acting skills to a fine point, and the production was even ahead of schedule. Everyone was happy, so how could what we were doing possibly be wrong?



* * *





Only one person ever found us out: Bettina. Our gum-cracking makeup person, the bird tattoos flying off her arms as she puffed our faces with powder and brushed gloss over our lips. She studied our faces so closely, knew every contour of our cheekbones and crooked lash in our brows: Of course she would have been the one to notice.

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