Siren Queen(39)



“Waverly could fool you with how pretty it was in the spring. For just a week, love-comes-home comes up like drifts of snow, and just as fast, they’re gone. I used to go walking out in the fields full of them, tucking them into my braids and dreaming of a day when there was someone to see me be so pretty.”

“I see you now,” I said, brushing my hand over her cheek.

I did. I could see the proud girl she had been and the beautiful and accomplished woman she was becoming, conquering audiences with one startled flash of her eyes, one soft gasp from her lips.

There was a girl you could sometimes find at the dorms who had a candle, and if you bribed her with jewelry or just the right lipstick, she would light it for you and lead you out of the studios late at night. That year, I followed her light through the clanking basements, through the orange groves, all the way to the Palisades, and when I knocked on the rear door at Emmaline’s house, she came out with a smile to kiss me in the moonlight.

We barely noticed that there was nowhere for us to go. We had the fires, we had her bed, and we had the stories we told each other. We compared ourselves to the great queens who had come before us, silent and speaking, like and unlike us. We danced in the living room to the record player, kept low even with the door locked and the shades drawn.

I heard all of Emmaline’s stories. Some of them were polished smooth, and I never said that I had read them before in the magazines and interviews she had given. They were still hers, no matter who had heard them, and she told me the rougher things as well, the ones that she would never tell to Variety and Dottie Wendt.

She told me about the kittens she had found when she was young, motherless and crying. She had tried to care for them, but all but one died, except for the biggest, who went on to be the most vicious mouser in the county. She told me about a boy from Greensboro who had taken her first kiss like a trophy, and how sometimes she wondered if that boy had it still, or whether it was passed on to someone who now had it all unknowing that it belonged to a movie star and not a shy girl from the county fair. She told me about the magic from her part of the world, how it came down from the Puritan witches who had gone west, and how every ear of corn could listen for the one who had planted it, if she only knew how to ask.

She told me she didn’t mind being paired up with Cassidy Dutch, who was coming up fast in all the dusters with his easy smile and real skills with a lariat.

“He’s sweet, and he don’t get grabby,” she said with a faint smile. “We go out, and he leaves me at the door with a kiss and a chocolate, like he doesn’t know what to do.”

I had heard Cassidy surely did know what to do if the girl was from one of the houses on the Sunset Strip, and he wasn’t half so sweet either, but I didn’t say anything.

We played house in the Palisades, and it was a moonlight kind of house, all shadows and drapes, naked skin and laughter. It wasn’t real, but it was true, and even if I lost sleep from the nights I spent with Emmaline, it felt as if I had gained the right to walk yet another world.

With her, I had entrance to a moonlight place, not one lit by firelight or electricity, but something deeper and lusher and wilder. We talked and we touched each other, and the only consequences we acknowledged were in each other, in each other’s skins and in each other’s hearts.



* * *



Wrapped up in Emmaline as I was, I might not have figured out Greta’s trouble at all if I hadn’t come into our rooms early one night. I limped in sweaty and pained from dance class, grimly aware that my toenails would be limned with blood at best, if I didn’t lose a few entirely. Mme Benoit told us of nights where her shoes had drowned in blood, when every step had been like a sword through her feet. I knew I had gotten off lightly that day, and that was its own particular terror.

I was walking gingerly on my sore feet, and perhaps that was why she didn’t look up when I opened the door. Greta curled up on the couch like a hurt and miserable animal, and almost mechanically, she licked at something white and hard in her hand.

“Greta?”

She uncoiled from the couch like my tentative call had mortally wounded her, but I saw that she was careful to hold whatever it was behind her. When she recognized me, the ferocity drained from her face, and she gave me an aimless look.

“Oh, it is you,” she said with a shrug.

I hobbled over to her, and when she might have tugged away, I wrapped my fingers around her wrist to draw it forward. I blinked because I recognized it. She resisted me taking it from her entirely, but when I drew my hand away, it was smudged with soft white.

“Greta, what are you doing with chalk?”

Sticks of thick white chalk were ubiquitous on the set. They marked at the lightest touch. They were used to set marks on the ground, to trace out the layout of new sets, and of course to score the clapperboards that heralded the beginning of each scene. It left an almost greasy mark in thick white, marring everything it grazed. The chalk wasn’t hard to get; the question was why she even wanted to get it in the first place.

Self-conscious now, she wiped her clean hand over her mouth. I could still see crumbles of chalk dust at the corner of her lip and her tongue, two shades paler than it should have been.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, shrugging, but I knew that wasn’t the case.

“Did it look good to you?” I asked carefully. “Like you saw it and had to have it?”

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