The Nerviest Girl in the World

by Melissa Wiley

  “Oh good, here’s Pearl,” said Angela, the costume lady. “Go behind the sheet and change into this dress, honey.” She thrust a wad of dingy brown fabric into my hands. “Boys, you run outside now and wait until you’re called. I guess it don’t matter if you get dirty, since you’re supposed to look like pitiful little beggar children.”

  “Why are we living in such a fancy house if we’re beggars?” I asked.

  Mary snorted. “Shows what you know!” she said.

  “What’s eating you?” I fired back. It was really beginning to get my goat that she seemed so irked with me all the time. Sure, we’d never exactly been friends, but I didn’t think we’d been the opposite of friends. We hadn’t been anything, really. Before the pictures, Mary was just some kid at school, and not one of the really interesting ones like Joey Sanchez, who could walk on his hands, or Juniper Howard, who once rode a train all the way to Baltimore, Maryland, and back. I could remember a few times when Mary had recited for the class—she was pretty good at holding your interest; even the rowdy boys stopped socking each other’s arms to listen to her—but apart from that, she didn’t stand out in my mind much. She was a town girl in shiny shoes who didn’t appreciate the smell of horse. Not much there to capture my attention.

  But now she was a source of intense fascination, because however neutral I felt about her, she certainly seemed to have strong feelings about me, and none of them were complimentary, as far as I could tell.

  She didn’t answer, just rolled her eyes at me. Her hair was curled into sausage ringlets again. I don’t know how her mother ever got anything else done—she must have had to spend hours a day on Mary’s perfect hair and speckless clothes. Ugh. I’d rather clean the ostrich pen than sit in a chair for an hour while my mother wrapped my hair around hot irons.

  Mr. Corrigan was in a hurry to film the scene while the light was right. Turned out we were shooting in an old shed out behind the fancy house. It had been fixed up—or maybe unfixed is more like it—to look like a run-down old shack. Against one bare board wall was a rickety bed with shabby covers made of old flour sacks. Mr. Corrigan told me to get into the bed and look deathly ill.

  “Now, you just lie there, Pearl, and look out toward Gordy with big sad eyes. You’re real sick. That’s it. The rest of you kids just stand here against the wall and try to look hungry. No fidgeting, mind. You just watch while Nell acts her part.”

  It seems Nell was the mother of all the raggedy children, including poor sick me. She looked kind of young to have so many kids, but what did I know. Mr. Corrigan talked her through her part. She was worried her little daughter—me—was going to die, and in this scene she was supposed to carry on for a bit and then send Jack out the door to fetch a doctor. I was supposed to lie still and pale in the bed and look like I might give up the ghost if he didn’t get here soon. Easy enough.

  The shed had two big doors that opened wide—wide enough to get a carriage through—and these were spread all the way open to let in as much light as possible. Gordy muttered and peered through the eyehole of his camera, and moved it a little this way and a little that way, and finally he said he was ready.

  Everything would have been just fine if Mary hadn’t snorted. I was suffering into the camera just like I was supposed to, and Nell cried and carried on like she had to shoot her favorite horse. She wrung up her apron between her fists and cried into it, and then raised her eyes to the heavens and implored God to save her precious girl, and tore around the room looking for something to pay the doctor with when he arrived. It was obvious I was her favorite kid, from the way she carried on. She smoothed my hair off my forehead and put a cool cloth on it like I had a fever. I knew fevers made people go out of their minds sometimes, seeing visions and things, and it sure seemed like this kid must be sick enough for visions, or her mama wouldn’t be so distraught. So I stared up into the air like I was seeing something scary—a ghost, maybe, or a bunch of angry ostriches out of their pen. I shuddered a little and rolled my eyes like a horse does when it’s been spooked by something.

  That’s when Mary Mason let out a little contemptuous snort of laughter. It was pretty quiet but it set Walter and the other kids to snickering. I could see them out of the corner of my eye, trying so hard not to laugh that their shoulders were beginning to shake.

  I don’t know what kind of disease I was supposed to be sick from, but laughter must be like measles, because it jumped from the other kids right over to me. I felt a laugh bubbling up and squeezed my lips together hard to keep it back. Nell, who had reached the part of the scene where Jack came in and she shoved a gold watch at him and begged him to go fetch the doctor, shot me a look but didn’t interrupt her weeping and wailing. I frowned hard to push down the laugh but it was like a sneeze, determined to come out. It burst out of me like the bark of a coyote.

  “CUT!” hollered Mr. Corrigan, tearing at his hair. “Pearl, you can’t laugh. And stop rolling your eyes around. You look like a rabid dog.”

  Well, that did it. The other kids burst out with guffaws. Except Mary, who just smirked at me with her mean eyes.

  We tried it again, but it was worse this time. I angled my gaze so I couldn’t see Mary or the other kids, but I kept hearing smothered snorts from their side of the room. And Mr. Corrigan’s words had stuck a picture in my head. I kept imagining myself foaming at the mouth like a mad dog. Another dratted laugh rushed up my throat and belched out into the room.

  “CUT!”

  Again. I felt chilled inside. I knew film cost a pretty penny and it was my fault we were wasting it. I didn’t dare look at Gordy for fear I’d see disappointment in his eyes at my wastefulness.

  “All right, this isn’t working,” said Mr. Corrigan, sounding exasperated. “I need a sick child who looks like a sick child, not a snakebit mare.” He studied the kids ranged against the wall.

  “You, with the curls,” he said, pointing at Mary. “Can you play sick and not laugh?”

  “Why, yes, sir,” said Mary, looking up at him with big ostrichy eyes. “I’m sure I can.”

  “All right, then. Pearl, trade places with—what’s your name?”

  “Mary Mason, sir.”

  “Mary. Go ahead and climb in the bed. Pearl, you stand over there behind the boys. And not a peep from any of you, do you hear?”

  So there I was, fired from my second motion picture role ever, my part ripped out from under me by that simpering Mary Mason.

  The worst part was, she was good.

  I’d die before I’d admit it out loud, but when she turned her face toward the camera it was pale and drawn like she was wasting away and might die any second. Her eyes were big as saucers and full of pain and sorrow. There weren’t any sneaky laughs lurking inside me now. Mary looked so deathly ill I might have worried about her—if she’d been anyone but Mary Mason.

  Besides, the second Mr. Corrigan called “Cut!”—happily this time, because he’d gotten what he wanted—Mary shot me a look of smug triumph.

  If I had been a rabid dog, I’d have bitten her.

  I would have hung around the Flying Q crowd every day, if my folks had let me. But some days the company went far out into the wild country east of town and Mama wouldn’t let me tag along. Frank said Mr. Corrigan had an eye for dramatic scenery. He would find a craggy hill with a lone tree, say, and make up a story to happen in front of it. Lots of times he shot the end of the story first and then went back and figured out the events leading up to it.

  That seemed like a curious way to tell a story, if you asked me.

  But I guess it worked all right, because Frank said word was Mr. Corrigan’s bosses back east were pleased with the reels he’d been sending them. In nine weeks he had directed seven whole pictures—all but one of them featuring my brothers, as cowboys, horse thieves, kidnappers, train robbers; and two of them featuring me. (Counting the one where Mary
Mason took over my sickbed part.)

  Frank knew more than ever about the picture-making business because I’d kept my promise and asked Gordy if he could have a turn at the crank. Gordy went one better and taught him how to look through the eyehole and fiddle with the focusing mechanism. Frank was in hog heaven. He took to camera operating like a duck to water. Gordy, amiable as ever, answered all his questions and then some.

  And some of Gordy’s kind manners must have rubbed off on my brother, because Frank hardly ever condescended to me now when I asked him questions. He talked to me like I was his equal, even though he was five years older. I liked the Gordy version of Frank so much that I didn’t even mind how much time they spent talking. If I was hanging around near the camera, Gordy included me in anything he had to say. Or rather, it was more like he included Frank in our conversations. I appreciated being treated like a person instead of a pesky kid—even if it was a little odd coming from Frank, who had always seemed so many miles above me. It was as if Jezebel had suddenly started treating me like another ostrich.

  I was anxious for the finished pictures to come to town, and desperately hopeful I’d be taken to see them. It took time, Frank reminded me, for the studio to fix up the film so people could watch it. They had to add those cards with words on them to show what the actors were saying.

  “What if you can’t read?” I wanted to know.

  Frank shrugged. “You figure it out, I guess.”

  “Do you think Mama and Papa will take me to see our pictures?” I asked him. This was the question that burned in my mind night and day.

  “You sure you want them to?” Frank grinned. He meant because of my perilous horseback ride.

  “Maybe not that one,” I said.

  But it was the one I wanted to see most of all.

  On days when Flying Q was filming in town, I raced through my chores and washed my face extra hard—anything to persuade Mama to let me go watch. I was amazed at Mr. Corrigan’s inventiveness. You’d think he would have run out of stories after the first couple of weeks, but he kept coming up with new kinds of danger to put Nell or Jack in, and new dastardly deeds for Bart and my brothers to carry out.

  One day the bad guys trapped Nell in a building and knocked over a lantern on the way out, starting a fire. At least, that’s what Mr. Corrigan said would happen. He wasn’t about to stick his star actress in a real fire on purpose. He paid a rancher to let him burn up an old, rotting shed while Gordy filmed it. I wasn’t allowed to hang around that day, which rankled. I would have liked to see the flames roar up.

  But I was there when they filmed the parts with Nell screaming out the second-story window of the Coopers’ house. It was the same kind of old, weathered wood as the burned-up shed. Somehow, Mr. Corrigan’s studio people would mix the two stretches of film together to make it look like the fire was happening in Nell’s building.

  Nell stuck her head out the open window and screamed bloody murder.

  “Heeelp! Someone help me!” she wailed. It was a pity nobody would be able to hear her in the picture—her shrieks made my blood run cold. But there was one thing I couldn’t understand.

  “Why’s she just standing there hollering like a goof?” I asked Gordy. “If it were me, I’d jump out the window.”

  “Jack’s going to come along to save her.”

  “But how does she know that? It’s silly to just stand around and hope somebody shows up to save you.”

  Mr. Corrigan turned and gave me a sharp look. I gulped. I hadn’t realized I was talking loud enough for him to hear me.

  “She’s two stories up, kid. What’s she supposed to do, jump down and break her neck?”

  “Aw, it ain’t that high. I’ve jumped out of our barn loft before and I bet it’s at least as high as that old window,” I boasted. “It’s duck soup. Of course that’s when the hay is piled high. Gotta have a good cushion or you’ll crack your head open.”

  The way Mr. Corrigan was staring at me, I started to wonder if I was looking like a mad dog again. But then he said, “Gordy—cut. I have a thought,” and went into the house to talk to Nell.

  Watching them in the window was like watching a moving picture, I guessed—I could see the direction of their conversation but couldn’t hear what they were saying. But it was easy to follow the thrust of the discussion. Mr. Corrigan leaned out and looked down, and he was pointing at the ground and gesturing to Nell. She peered down too and then reared up, shaking her head, looking at him like this time he was the rabid dog.

  Her voice climbed to where I could hear it. “Not if you paid me double!”

  I saw Mr. Corrigan scrunch his mouth sideways. He was disappointed, I could tell.

  “Aw, she’s too scared to jump,” I muttered. I was disappointed, too. I thought Nell had more gumption.

  “Not too scared. Too smart,” said Gordy companionably.

  “Hmph.” I could see his point.

  “You sound unconvinced, lass.” Gordy’s eyes twinkled at me. I liked the way his smile squinched up higher on one side of his mouth than the other.

  Mr. Corrigan came back out of the house. His hair was spiked up like a yucca plant.

  “Nothing doing,” he said glumly. “I can’t talk her into it.”

  And then he looked at me.

  I’d like to make out as if I was death-defyingly heroic, but the truth is, jumping out that window really was duck soup. Mr. Corrigan talked Mr. Cooper into letting him pile a heap of hay under the window, and then I stood in the window and screamed my head off just like Nell had done. Then Mr. Corrigan told me to look back over my shoulder like I was seeing the flames draw closer, and after that I just hopped right out and fell in the haystack. Easy as pie.

  Mr. Corrigan said he’d have to go back to his hotel and think up a new story that put a little girl in the burning building instead of a beautiful young woman. I was afraid Nell would be sore at me for taking over her part, but she laughed and said she admired my pluck.

  “Don’t worry about me, sugar,” she told me. “Mr. C.’ll use me in the picture somehow. I sell tickets.”

  She was right. In the new version of the story, which we filmed during the next couple of days, I was her little sister and Nell came in from the fields just in time to see me jump out the window. She carried on a bit, fussing over me and hugging me tight, and then stood wringing her hands as she pretended to watch our house burn down. The rest of the story seemed a little silly to me. The older sister decided that since the two were now homeless, she had no choice but to marry a low-down dirty scoundrel who’d been pestering her for years. Just in the nick of time, a young man—Jack, of course—galloped up and stopped the wedding. It turned out he was her long-lost sweetheart, who had gone north to pan for gold, and now he was back with his saddlebags stuffed with sacks of money.

  Since the only other thing besides jumping out the window the little sister had to do was look mournful during the almost-wedding and jubilant at the return of the sweetheart, I got through my scenes without a hitch. The jubilant part was especially easy: I just imagined what Mary Mason would say when she found out I’d landed another part.

  After that, Mr. Corrigan seemed to come up with all kinds of parts for me. I was a rich man’s daughter taken captive by kidnappers; a miner’s daughter trapped in a cave-in; a farmer’s daughter galloping for help in the face of stock thieves. No more sickbed scenes, though. If he needed a tragically ill child, he sent for Mary Mason.

  But audiences preferred adventure tales, he said. And adventuring, it turned out, was a Donnelly specialty. My brothers got bolder and bolder with the feats they were willing to undertake for a picture. Once, Mr. Corrigan hired an automobile and filmed Bill racing alongside it on horseback and then vaulting right into the auto. When they practiced it, Bill made it look so easy I was hankering to try it myself. But then when they did it for rea
l, with the camera rolling, Bill shot off the horse a little too fast and came down more on top of the automobile than in it. Luckily, he got a good grip on the edge of the windshield or he might have rolled right off the hood and under the wheels. As it was, he smashed his face and bloodied his nose. Ike said it was a wonder he hadn’t broken it. Mr. Corrigan didn’t say anything at all for about ten minutes. He went as pale as the moon in a daytime sky and sent everyone home for the day.

  But I heard him murmur to Gordy, “Did you get it?”

  “I got it, boss.”

  “Good lad.”

  It was strange to think about people watching me and my brothers in the pictures—people in faraway cities, people I would never know or see. I tried to imagine some kid in Chicago or Philadelphia watching me jump out of the Coopers’ second-story window. Would they wonder who I was? Would they be admiring or envious?

  The idea gave me a creepy feeling like a lizard running up my spine. I discussed the matter with the ostriches, because I knew they wouldn’t laugh at me. They might try to nip off my nose, but they wouldn’t laugh.

  “Mary Mason says she’s going to be famous,” I said to Jezebel, watching her flap her wings to warn the other birds away from the feed trough until she’d gotten her fill. “She says people all over the world will know her name.”

  Jezebel turned her head and eyed me sideways. She looked skeptical.

  “She’s pretty swell at crying,” I said, “but I don’t know why you’d get famous for that. Anybody with a baby can stay home and watch it blubber for free. Why pay a nickel to watch some kid bawl?”

  Jezebel bobbed her head on her snaky neck. She agreed with me, I could tell.