Proposing to Preston (The Winslow Brothers, #2)(3)
***
God, it was so humiliating.
So. Dang. Humiliating.
Elise Klassan stared at herself, the bright white, bubble-like bulbs surrounding her dressing room mirror and lighting her up like a hundred sparklers on the Fourth of July. She reached for another makeup wipe and scrubbed at her other cheek, sighing deeply.
When she had agreed to play Matilda in the off-off-Broadway world premiere of She Loves Me Not, Elise had read the script four times, trying to find a way to play Matilda that didn’t reek of melodrama. She’d decided to play the character as a lost waif, a forgotten nobody who rises to prominence via an inheritance, though she has none of the skills necessary to negotiate her way through higher society. If Matilda could be seen as vulnerable instead of headstrong, the audience would be sympathetic to her ending up rich, but alone. Instead, the director had blocked her efforts at every turn, insisting that the play was a farce with Matilda receiving her just-desserts-comeuppance at the end, and forcing Elise to overact the dramatic moments so they’d read funny.
They didn’t.
They just read bad. No, not bad. Awful.
Throwing the used light-orange makeup wipe into the garbage, she grabbed another and scrubbed at her lips vigorously, the red lipstick coming off on the small white cloth in garish streaks. She attacked her eyes with similar gusto and her cheeks again, relieved to see her lightly freckled face finally emerge from behind the thick pancake. With impatient fingers, she pulled the hundreds of pins from her hair, neatly placing them in an empty Altoids tin. Her dirty blonde hair tumbled in waves around her shoulders, and she drew it back into a ponytail and wrapped a gray scrunchie around it.
She’d taken off her dress and Victorian underthings as soon as she entered the shabby dressing room, but now she pulled on her favorite Old Navy jeans, faded and soft from frequent wear, and took a floral, long-sleeved T-shirt from the chair beside her modest dressing table. Flipping it over her head, she smoothed her ponytail again, and put on her glasses before looking at herself in the mirror. She looked like herself now, like Sarah and Hans Klassan’s youngest daughter, Elise, from Lowville, New York.
Staring at her pink, fresh-scrubbed, bespectacled face, she couldn’t help the intense moment of self-doubt that ensued: Was she crazy for leaving her family’s farm in upstate New York and coming to New York City?
Certainly her three older sisters hadn’t made such a rash decision with their lives. Good Mennonite daughters, they’d all settled in or around Lowville, all were engaged or married to local men from their church, and her oldest sister, Abby, already had two babies. But not Elise.
Always considered an “odd duck” by her family, she’d been captivated by the theater in second grade when she took a field trip to the local high school to see Finian’s Rainbow. It wasn’t just the beautiful songs, like “How Are Things In Glocca Mora” or “Look To The Rainbow.” No. It was the way the high school students, some of whom were friends of her older sisters, had transformed themselves into someone else. To be someone else, she marveled, looking down at her no-frills, homespun clothes, sounded wonderful.
And if the bug hadn’t totally bitten her by the end of the show, the final line, “Maybe there’s no pot of gold at the end of it, but there’s a beautiful new world under it” certainly did. As far as little Elise was concerned, the stage was the rainbow and the beautiful new world was a life beyond Lowville.
Turning her back on the simple life offered by her parent’s tight-knit Mennonite community, Elise had applied to college in that beautiful new world. She’d put herself through the Tisch School of Arts at NYU with loans she’d be paying off for the rest of her natural-born life while she waited tables and played crappy parts in off-off-Broadway plays hoping for her big break.
“Great life you’ve made for yourself here,” she muttered, taking a deep breath and letting it go slowly. “Beautiful new world my…my…foot.”
She hung up her dress for tomorrow night’s performance (ugh), put her makeup away and swiped a paper towel over the top of her dressing table. Grabbing her backpack, she turned off the light in the tiny, grubby room and made her way down the backstage hallway toward the exit.
Incredibly tired and a feeling a little defeated, she didn’t exactly look forward to the twenty-three block walk home to save bus fare, but pulling out her sofa bed and falling asleep sounded like pure heaven. Her roommate, Neve, whom she’d found via an ad in Backstage magazine, owned the apartment where Elise sublet the living room. On Friday nights, Neve bartended until after three, and Elise was fairly certain she’d sleep right through her roommate’s late-night return.
“Great job, Elise!” cried Paige, bustling out of her own dressing room with a southern cheerleader, can-do grin. “Great show!”
Sighing inside, Elise forced a smile and nodded at her co-star. “You too, Paige. Great work.”
It was all such baloney, but Elise said the lines with practiced warmth and sincerity that Paige beamed at her.
“Think the audience noticed my flub in act two?” Paige asked, her elbow rubbing Elise’s as they headed toward the stage door together.
“Nah,” said Elise. “You covered it like a pro.”
In fact, Paige hadn’t covered it. Elise had. But who cared anyway? There weren’t more than fifty people in the theater that held over two hundred, and she didn’t believe the play would last beyond the month.