Siren Queen(5)

I was duly impressed. At home, the worst thing you could be was without work, and seven years of standing around in nice clothes seemed far better than pushing a blazing-hot iron that seemed to weigh as much as my little sister over an endless line of white shirts.

“What’s your name?” I asked shyly, and her gaze turned wistful. She had remarkable eyes, one blue and one brown, giving her a cheerful, puppyish look.

“They haven’t given me one yet,” she responded.

I sat with her for the next hour as they shot scene fifteen, more complicated than the one I had been in and requiring more takes. That year, Wolfe put out close to three hundred pictures. Speed was key, and even if Jacko was no genius the likes of Dunholme or Lankin, he got the pictures through on time and under budget, better than artistry any day.

My new friend had been whisked away for a final tug at her wardrobe when my mother came looking for me. I saw her standing as confused as I must have been amid the lights and wires, the people all on their own tracks and us without. She looked frightened, slightly disgusted, and confused, and when she saw me, she stalked over, taking my hand.

“Where have you been? We thought you would be back…”

“Oh, hey, you the kid’s mom?”

Jacko came up behind her like a bear, making my mother wheel around in shock. He looked rough, like a man who wouldn’t bother with clean clothes from the good laundry, no one who came into our place.

He reached into his wallet and peeled out a few bills, thrusting them at my mother. My mother didn’t move to take the money from him, and he scowled.

“English? You speak English? Christ…”

“I do,” she said finally, her words clipped. “I will.”

She took the money, even if she had no idea what it was for, and she never took her eyes off of him. If he was discomforted by her gaze, he never showed it.

“Good, good,” Jacko said, crunching on his toothpick. He glanced down at me speculatively.

“She’s cute. I’m shooting down here again in two weeks, the fourteenth. If you bring her back, she can do that too.”

My mother only stared, and with a sigh, Jacko turned to me.

“I heard you, your English is great, ain’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, proud and oddly ashamed at once. My mother’s was just as good.

“Good. Well, you stick around, you do as you’re told, and maybe someday, well, who knows, right? Could be you up there smooching the sheikhs, yeah?”

Something else called for his attention, and my mother was finally allowed to tug me away.

She opened her fist a block away to reveal two ten-dollar bills. It could be used to patch any number of holes in the laundry, and at the height of the Depression, there were many of those.

“What did you do?” she asked, stunned, and I looked down, suddenly ashamed.

I stammered out an explanation, too anxious and overexcited to lie, and her face turned stony. I could see pride warring with the money in her hand. To my mother, there were things we did and things we did not do. What I had done on the movie set ranged back and forth over that line, pacing restlessly.

To my surprise, instead of scolding me or pinching me, she pulled me into an alley. I could smell the starch and lye of the laundry on her, a clean but oppressive scent. The trains had run the night before, and her hair, hanging over her shoulder in a braid, looked like a strip torn out of the world.

“All right,” she said. The money had disappeared into one of the secret pockets sewn into her shirt. “You don’t have to go back if you don’t want to.”

“I want to,” I said instantly, and she frowned.

Still, she gave me her hand to hold all the way back to the laundry, where I helped my sister fold clothes and wrap them up in crinkling paper. I don’t know what she told my father, if anything. The money wasn’t mine to keep, it wasn’t real in any way that mattered to me. There were more important things.

That night, as I stripped down for a shared bath with my sister, Luli looked at me with some consternation.

“What’s that on your forehead?”

I pulled down my father’s little round shaving mirror to look. There was the faint silvery imprint of a kiss where Maya Vos Santé had kissed me. She hadn’t left a trace of rouge on my skin, but she had left something else instead.

I couldn’t scrub it away, and despite my sister’s uneasy look, I didn’t really want to. Fringes were in fashion, and the kiss was covered readily enough. It was not quite a scar, not quite a brand, but more telling than either.





IV


Even with it all, the money, the crackling atmosphere of the set, the kiss Maya Vos Santé had given me, I might never have longed for a star of my own and a place high in the Los Angeles sky. I don’t know what else might have happened to me; I was too young when it all began, and I hadn’t shown the twists and hooks that would have drawn other fates to me.

(“Oh, you were always meant to be in movies,” Jane said. “One way or another, you would have found your way in, no matter what was standing in your way.”

“Is that a compliment?” I asked her.

“It’s better than a compliment, it’s the truth.”)

Three weeks after shooting Jackson’s Corner, my mother swore and thrust a crisp paper package into my arms.