I'm Glad My Mom Died(23)

From that point on, if an audition required crying on cue, I felt nearly positive I would book the job. Word of mouth spread. It got to the point where Susan would phone Mom and proudly announce, “I got another call from a casting director saying, ‘So tell me about the kid who cries.’?”

Granted, crying on cue was not fun for me. It was one of the more miserable experiences of my life, sitting in a cold casting office imagining tragic events that harm my beloved family. Any given event could last me four to six auditions’ worth of tears, but eventually I’d become immune to the event—Mom referred to this as being “all cried out”—so we’d have to switch to a new event. The stapler story became Dustin dying of meningitis; he’d actually had a bad case of it a few years back, so Mom would say, “Imagine if the spinal tap went wrong!” Dustin dying of meningitis became Marcus dying of appendicitis and then Scott dying of pneumonia and then Grandpa dying of old age. (“Imagine he’s in the hospital bed clutching the sock doll you made him when you were six.”)

The time I brought the most tears was for an audition for a bit part in Hollywood Homicide, a feature film starring Harrison Ford and Josh Hartnett. The part was for a little girl sitting in the back of a van with her tourist family, driving down Hollywood Boulevard when Josh Hartnett hijacks the car and starts driving it, causing the family to fly into hysterics.

I don’t know what was going on that particular day, but my tear ducts were especially filled. All I had to do was plop down in the casting office and think of Grandpa clutching his sock doll and BAM!, the tears spilled. An absurd amount. This wasn’t crying, this was sobbing. My body convulsed with me. I was hysterical.

“Wow,” the casting director said as soon as I was finished. She had curly reddish-brown hair and a voice like butter. She was very nice.

“I mean, you have the part, but I kinda wanna see you do it again, just to see it again,” said the guy with gray hair and a brown leather jacket sitting to the casting director’s side.

And so I did it again. I had become the Cirque du Soleil performer of crying on cue. People wanted to see me do it over and over, like I was climbing silks or contorting in aerial hoops. Crying on cue was truly my Special Skill.





22.


EMILY’S DAD HAS JUST been murdered and her mom is a suspect. A crying-on-cue audition for yet another network police procedural, Without a Trace, has just come through. The audition scene is a scene where Emily gets called in for an interrogation and starts getting overwhelmed and then the tears fall.

I’m sitting in the waiting room mustering up all my sadness when something shifts in me. It feels strange. I don’t know how to describe it, but I know, my gut knows, that the tears aren’t gonna come. I feel detached, disconnected, and then irritated.

I tug on Mom’s arm. She dog-ears the diet section in her current issue of Woman’s World. The diet section is her favorite, even though I’m not sure why. Mom’s very petite, four foot eleven “and a whopping ninety-two pounds!” as she often announces with proud irony, knowing her pound count is far from whopping. She sets the magazine down on her lap and leans closer to me so I can whisper in her ear.

“Mommy, I don’t think I’m gonna be able to cry.”

Mom looks at me, puzzled at first, then her confusion turns to intensity. I can tell immediately that she’s switched into pep-talk mode, a role she switches into more often than is necessary because it makes her feel necessary. She furrows her eyebrows and tightens her lips. There’s a childishness to this expression of hers, like she’s a kid pretending to be an adult.

“Of course you will. You’re Emily. You are Emily.”

Mom often says this when she’s “getting me into character.” She’ll say, “You ARE Emily.” Or Kelli. Or Sadie. Or whoever I’m supposed to be that day.

But today, right now, I don’t feel like being Emily. I don’t want to be Emily. This has never happened before, but it’s happening now and it’s scaring me. A part of me is resisting my mind forcing this emotional trauma on itself. A part of me is saying, “No. It’s too painful. I’m not doing this.”

That part of me is foolish. That part of me doesn’t realize that this is my Special Skill, that this is good for me, for my family, for Mom. The more I can cry on cue, the more jobs I can book; the more jobs I can book, the happier Mom will be. I take a deep breath, then smile up at Mom.

“You’re right. I’m Emily,” I say half to convince Mom, half to convince myself.

The part of me that doesn’t want to cry on cue is not convinced. That part of me screams that I’m not Emily, that I’m Jennette, and that I, Jennette, deserve to be listened to. What I want and what I need deserves to be listened to.

Mom finds the fold in her magazine, but just before she goes to reopen it, she leans over once more.

“You’re gonna book this one, Emily.”

But I don’t. The audition doesn’t go well. My heart isn’t in it. I don’t “feel my words.” And worst of all, I do not cry on cue. I tank.

We’re on the way home, in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 101 South. I’m sitting in my booster seat since I’m still small enough to be required to sit in it. I try to work on my history homework but I’m unable to focus because I’m too upset at myself over the audition.