Over Her Dead Body(61)
“Hello, Silvia,” I said as I let her in the front door. She had a key but always rang the bell first. She was nothing if not courteous.
“How are you feeling today?” she asked.
“Like a bag of rocks.”
“Well, you look radiant.” She rolled her r to show off her spicy Spanish accent. She was from Argentina, with pale skin and carrot-red hair—not the typical coloring of someone with that accent. It was a good thing she hadn’t tried to be an actress—she would have been impossible to cast.
“Shall we get started?” she asked, and without waiting for an answer she breezed by me into the kitchen. After three years of visiting me twice a week, she knew where to find a vase for those flowers, and I heard the cupboard open and close and the sound of running water.
“I got it,” I said as I joined her in the kitchen and put the peonies in the vase.
“Let’s get some of those rocks out.” That twirly r again. She was a sturdy woman, short and squat with a voice like a bulldozer. I thought it incongruous that a person who devoted her life to healing would be a smoker, but her rasp was undeniable, as were the yellow rims around her front teeth. We all have our coping mechanisms, I suppose, and being my nurse was probably no picnic.
She followed me into the treatment room and took out her notebook. I stepped on the scale all nerves and prerace jitters like a jockey before the Kentucky Derby. My weight was up four pounds since her visit last Thursday, and she shook her head and tsk-tsk’d me.
“Too many tea parties,” she admonished, then winked to telegraph it was going to be OK. It was expected that my weight would be up, but four pounds was a lot for me.
I sat in my chair and she plugged me in like a Christmas tree, then took out her knitting. We would sit in silence for the next two hours, alone in our heads but physically together. I guess some people liked to talk or listen to music during their treatments, but I preferred to use the time as a meditation. I couldn’t turn the pages of a book with the serpent in my arm, but it was just as well. I had sorted through many a predicament in this chair, including my current one. After my children turned me down, I vowed to do whatever it took to get my chance at freedom. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine how it would all play out. What would my children do when they found out they weren’t getting my money? And more interestingly, what would they do when I came back from the dead? Would they grovel for forgiveness? Turn their back on me forever? Or finally give me the one thing I ever asked for so I could live the rest of my days in dignity?
I considered myself a reliable judge of character. I had a pretty good inkling what they would all do. Except for one of them. Unfortunately for me.
CHAPTER 50
* * *
ASHLEY
I hadn’t planned to kiss him in front of all his friends at that noisy bar. I was just so grateful for how he’d tried to protect me from that awful woman and her battery of questions, and I didn’t know how else to show it.
When I told people I was an actress (which I hated to do), their first question was inevitably some version of “What have I seen you in?” Which was just another way of asking, “Are you a real actress? Or a wannabe?” We would never be so rude to grill people in other professions. “Oh, you’re a doctor? What surgeries have you done? You’re a lawyer? What cases have you argued? You’re a chef? What recipes do you know?” Yet we actors get it every damn day.
I was confident my fortunes were about to change, but I didn’t want to have to explain what was taking so long. So I excused myself to go to the bathroom. As I made my way across the crowded bar, I thought back to my very first booking. It was only for a student short film (about a star tennis player who quits her sport to take care of a sick friend), but it was paid (a hundred dollars a day!) and I was the lead. I’d auditioned for it in the director’s apartment—a crummy little studio on the edge of the USC campus. He didn’t have a costumer, so I wore all my own clothes. The makeup and hair person had never done anyone’s makeup and hair but her own, so I wound up doing that, too. I learned on my next job that makeup and hair were two separate jobs (under the jurisdiction of two separate unions), and that I shouldn’t have been responsible for finding and bringing my own props—sunglasses, backpack, tennis racket, trophies (borrowed from Jordan)—a prop master was supposed to do that. The whole thing was kind of sketchy, and I never did get those props back (sorry, Jordan!), but I didn’t care. As I saw it, every day I got paid to act was a good day, whether the film got finished or not (it didn’t).
My next booking came right away—a guest-star spot on a well-known sitcom. I had a makeup artist and a hairstylist, and the props were all provided and stored on a five-ton truck parked outside the stage. My dressing room (I had a dressing room!) was in a truck called a honey wagon. I think the name was supposed to be ironic, because those dressing rooms are basically just oversize porta-potties and smell nothing like honey, but it was just as sweet to me.
I found out about auditions from a guy in my acting class (back when I could still afford acting classes), and he sometimes even gave me a ride. He taught me how to talk my way in: “I think my audition was supposed to be tomorrow, but I’m working tomorrow so my manager said to just come now?” As he explained, if you’re there and they like your look, they’ll let you read. If they don’t like your look, you’re not getting the job anyway, so what difference does it make?