The Vanishing Half(78)

“It’s not a knock, babe,” he said. “I just mean—well, I can tell you have a flair for the dramatic.”

There was nothing wrong with melodrama, she told her parents when she’d called to share the news. In fact, some of the greatest classic actresses—Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo—trafficked in it from time to time. Her father was glad that she was moving back to California. Her mother was glad that she was working. After she hung up, she wandered around a Burbank shopping mall where, a year later, she would be stopped by a middle-aged woman outside a shoe rack and asked for an autograph. She was jolted each time someone approached her in public. They recognized her? Just as she was, before costumes, before hair and makeup? At first, she was thrilled, then it unsettled her, the idea of anyone noticing her before she noticed them.



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AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF characters she played in the soap world before landing Pacific Cove: a conniving candy striper who steals a baby; a teacher who seduces her student’s father; a stewardess who spills water on the lead, maybe accidentally, maybe intentionally, the script was unclear; the mayor’s daughter who gets seduced by the show rogue; a nurse who gets strangled in a car; a florist who hands the star a rose; a stewardess who survives a plane crash to later be strangled in a car. She wore black wigs, brown wigs, red wigs, and eventually, when she played Charity Harris, her own blonde waves. She only played white girls, which is to say, she never played herself.

On the set of Pacific Cove, the cast and crew referred to her as Charity, never her real name, and later, in an interview with Soap Digest, she would tell a reporter that it helped her stay in character. She preferred readers to think that she was a method actor than know the truth: that no one had bothered to learn her real name because they did not expect her to stick around. Three seasons in the soap world was like three seconds anyway, and when the show ended in 1994, Charity Harris would appear in the finale for a millisecond as the camera swept over photographs on the wall. Only the most passionate fans would remember her most prominent arc, the nine months she’d been kidnapped by her lover’s stalker and tied up in a basement. For months, she’d twisted in the chair—screaming, pleading, begging—and not until years later would she realize that her biggest storyline was not being a real part of the show.

She brought her mother to set once. She’d warned her beforehand that the soundstage could get chilly, so ridiculously, her mother had worn a bright blue sweater in spite of the ninety-degree heat in Burbank. Kennedy gave her a little tour around the sets, pointing out the exterior of the Harris house, the town hall, the surf shack where Charity worked. She even brought her to the basement where Charity was currently trapped, only three months into her abduction.

“I sure hope they let you out of there soon,” her mother said, collapsing Kennedy and Charity like the rest of the crew. It was the most her mother had ever validated her as an actor. Strange that the greatest compliment an actress could receive was that she had disappeared into somebody else. Acting is not about being seen, a drama teacher told her once. True acting meant becoming invisible so that only the character shone through.

“You should just change your name to Charity,” the Pacific Cove director told her. “No offense but when I hear your name, I just think about a guy getting shot in the head.”



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HERE’S SOMETHING she hadn’t thought about in forever:

Once, when she was seven or so, she was sitting in the kitchen on a step stool, watching her mother frost a cake. She was wedged in a corner, trying to learn a new yo-yo trick so halfheartedly that she was just flinging the toy, sending it clattering to the tile, waiting for her annoyed mother to tell her to stop. She did things like that often—desperate things, too small to get her in trouble but irritating enough to earn attention. But her mother wasn’t even looking at her—she wasn’t the type to transform a chore into a bonding opportunity. Honey, let me show you how to knead bread. Or come here, baby, this is how you make frosting. Her mother seemed relieved once Kennedy aged out of asking to help in the kitchen.

“It’s not that I don’t want your help,” her mother always said. “But I can do it faster on my own.” As if that last part contradicted the first one, not justified it.

Why was she baking a cake in the first place? She wasn’t the type to bake for no reason. She contributed store-bought cookies to bake sales, transferring them into a tin so nobody would notice. Her father’s birthday, maybe. But it was summer, not spring, or else she wouldn’t have been home from school in the middle of the day, bored, watching her mother smooth the tiny ripples of frosting.

“How’d you learn to do that?” she asked.

Her mother, concentrating hard, like she was restoring a damaged oil painting.

“I don’t know,” she finally said. “Picked it up over time.”

“Did your mom show you?” She’d thought her mother might say yes, call her over and hand her a knife. But she didn’t even look up.

“We didn’t have money for cakes,” she said.

Later, Kennedy would realize how often her mother used money to avoid discussing her past, as if poverty were so unthinkable to Kennedy that it could explain everything: why her mother owned no family photographs, why no friends from high school ever called, why they’d never been invited to a single wedding or funeral or reunion. “We were poor,” her mother would snap if she asked too many questions, that poverty spreading to every aspect of her life. Her whole past, a barren pantry shelf.