Siren Queen(8)

My father instead turned around and stalked to their bedroom, slamming the door behind him. The sun came out, the air was thin enough to breathe again. The only sound was my sister’s high wail as she hid under the kitchen table. My mother hesitated, leaving her there for a moment to come to me.

She turned my face side to side, and nodded with relief. No bruise, no bumps, that was good, because I needed to shoot again the next day.

I knew better than to ask why he had done what he had done. There was always the feeling like I was getting away with something when I ran down to where Jacko and the crew were shooting. That I would need to pay for it in one way or another made a kind of dull childhood sense to me. To my surprise, my mother tried to offer me an explanation anyway.

“Your father was humiliated,” she explained, petting my sister’s hair. Luli had come out sniffling, clinging to my mother and watching me with eyes that were strangely baleful in her young face.

“No one said anything to him,” I protested, and she nodded.

“That’s right. No one did. Back in Guangzhou, he was a big man, even if he was a second son. People asked after him, and no one would flatter and praise his daughter when he was standing right there, not even offering a word to the man who had raised her, made her everything she was.”

I scowled at her words. I went to school haphazardly at best, but all my lessons featured white boys and girls making themselves, dragging themselves out of this ghetto or that coal mine, rising above. None of them looked like me. I couldn’t see any well-dressed man being impressed with my industry and offering me my very own orange orchard to run, but the lesson remained.

My mother could see this rebellion in me, and she tapped me hard on the head, not quite a blow, but not a loving thing, either.

“Your father and I made you,” she said sternly. “We feed you and care for you. We named you. That’s not nothing.”

Every time the gap between jobs got too long, I would think that it was over, that my brief career in the movies was done. Everything else would be the laundry, hot steam, filthy clothes, and my father glowering at me forever.

Things with my father continued to fester for a while. He had never had much to do with me before. With my sister, I was solidly part of my mother’s domain, her problem, her responsibility. Now that he was truly seeing me for the first time, not another pair of weaker, more willful hands or an ungrateful mouth he had to feed, I could feel his attention on me like a scouring light. His regard was nerve-racking and predatory, even if he never struck me again.

I started to lose weight, and after I woke from a sound sleep to see his silhouette standing in the doorway in the dead of night, I stopped sleeping as well.

When I showed up for Darcy’s Sons, I looked so terrible that Jacko paused over me, the toothpick working furiously in his mouth. I was certain he would send me home, braced to leave without a tear in my eye, but my heart was a stone in my chest. At last, he bent down so he was eye level with me.

“Hey, CK, stop looking so glum, okay? We’ll get you fixed up.”

He sent me to the makeup girls for the first time, telling them to do what they could to make me look good again. Their magic was an older one, and as the youngest prodded at the dark circles under my eyes, a calm man with a warm smile stirred a mixture of French chalk, almond oil, and carmine on his portable double boiler. The eldest, all black slacks and matador jacket, glared dubiously at the solid cakes of dark mascara she guarded in a chest not unlike my father’s medicine cabinet.

I was a strange case, orange and ocher and tan when they worked with peaches and strawberries. Maya Vos Santé had the same problem, and she brought her own imp to set, a chattering thing of smoke and fire that had mascaras and lipsticks tinted by some mysterious witch from Palo Alto. After the war, Jane would have a shade called Incarnate created for me, a perfect true red without blue or orange in it for my lips under the lights. Incarnate became my signature color—properly ours, but in the books and on the screen, it was mine.

The makeup girls made me presentable enough for Jacko, but then I was delivered up to my mother at the end of the day with a face full of paint. She helped me scrub it off, and though I eventually grew used to it, that day I felt as if I had been basted for the roast.

My mother took action then. She rummaged in the lost laundry pile until she found a tattered gold silk scarf and four small buttons. As my sister and I watched, she sewed the silk into a pair of rough bags, stuffing them with scraps and a lock of hair, one for my sister and one for me. The bags were tied off five times apiece, one head, two arms, and two legs, and then she dressed them with scraps cut from my and Luli’s old dresses. For Luli, my mother used one she had just outgrown, but for me she had to go digging for a dress that I had worn years ago.

I thought of the hair that I had given to the Comique. I had wondered off and on what they did with it, and now I had cause to be very nervous indeed.

My mother didn’t have to do much after that. She left the dolls around the house, in Luli’s chair while she was at school, in my bed when I was working later in the evening for Jacko. It was almost ridiculous how easy it was.

Soon enough my father was placid and easy, crooning over a pair of quiet dolls instead of growling over a pair of terrified girls. He stroked the Luli-doll’s hair, he sat mine at the table and praised her for her dutifulness. Once I even saw him pick the dolls up and hug them as he had never hugged us.