by Claire Cook
“Deep breaths,” I said encouragingly. “If it’s still possible at your age.”
She gulped in some air. “Can you do me a favor?”
“Depends.”
“The kids are all begging to go to that open casting call thing. Even Riley. I still can’t believe they’re actually shooting a movie in Marshbury.”
I had a clear vision of dollar signs. “It would probably be a great experience for them,” I said.
“Are you going?”
“Hmm, I hadn’t really thought about it.” Boyfriend looked up from his water bowl, and I gave him a wink.
Geri sighed again. “Do you think you could take them for me? I really have to get back to the office for a few hours.”
I’d never understood why the whole world was in such a rush to have children just so they could ask somebody else to take care of them. What was the big deal about procreation? I mean, possums do it. I let Geri wait another second or two, then went in for the kill. “I’d need to hear the magic words first.”
“Okay, I’ll pay you. Time and a half. You’re going to need it. Wait a minute. Riley wants to talk to you.”
I got to work on the second earring and waited for my eight-year-old nephew’s voice. Eventually I heard it. “Aunt Ginger, how do you move a seventeen-hundred-pound shark?”
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll bite.” He laughed like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. Riley was my best audience. I gave him a minute to settle down, then asked, “How do you move a seventeen-hundred-pound shark?”
Riley waited a beat before he delivered his punch line. His timing was probably genetic. “Ve-ry carefully,” he said, in his cute, squeaky voice, which sounded like it had just a touch of helium in it. I heard the thunk of the phone on the counter.
“Nice one, Ry,” I yelled, then I braced myself to listen to my sister again.
Chapter 2
THE EMBARRASSING TRUTH WAS THAT I WAS DYING TO be an extra in Shark Sense. I just couldn’t resist that kind of thing. It would distract me from waking up every day thinking I’d somehow ended up in the wrong life. I simply knew I was destined for something else, but I really would have thought I’d be further along by now when it came to figuring out exactly what.
I’d maxed out this year’s therapy allowance on my lousy health plan in my quest for direction, and honestly, it didn’t help all that much. Even my therapist didn’t quite get it, or me, for that matter.
However you painted the picture, I was still forty-one and single and, though I’d managed a life full of adventure, I hadn’t quite found myself yet. After a few too many years in sales, some more and others less lucrative, my new plan was to transition to the more fulfilling life of an artist. At the moment I made sea glass earrings and sold them for a living, which, by my calculations, meant I was well on my way.
I threw a tank top on over my best jeans and, to complete the look, added a pair of my earrings. The weathered blue glass matched my eyes exactly, plus I liked to wear my own stuff, since you never knew when you’d make a sale. I had to admit that I was still more comfortable thinking in terms of dollars and cents rather than creative opus or artistic oeuvre. It might have been a personality thing. I’m a direct descendant of P. T. Barnum on my mother’s side, and by the way, he did not say there’s a sucker born every minute. He said there’s a customer born every minute. I read that somewhere. Since he died in 1891, it’s not like he ever said anything directly to me. Even my sister, Geri, isn’t quite old enough to have met him.
Speaking of reading, I’d also read an article recently that said you could give yourself a mini face lift by extending your eyeliner vertically at the outer corners. Not that I really needed one yet, but what the hell, I tried it out anyway. I added some mascara and lipstick, then turned my head upside down and gave my hair a good brushing. When I flipped my head back up, it looked full and thick and shiny. I grabbed the hairspray quick, before it got any other ideas. I was one of those lucky tawny-haired people whose occasional gray strands came in looking like highlights. Either that or I was in total denial.
“Sorry, Boyfriend,” I said as I wiggled my way out the door without creating any space for him to follow. “I’ll make it up to you tonight.” As every pet owner knows, leaving the house alone always involves massive quantities of guilt.
Geri and the kids were waiting for me when I pulled into the driveway of her starter castle, her house on steroids, her cookie-cutter McMansion. Okay, I could admit it: I was a tiny bit jealous that she had a house and I didn’t, not that I’d ever, in a million years, want to live in this pretentious monstrosity. A hip little bungalow would be more my style, though at this point I’d probably be perfectly happy to settle for a ranchburger.
Geri was instantly recognizable by her crisp white blouse and black power suit. And by the fact that she was communing with her BlackBerry, which seemed to interest her more than life itself. I put my trusty old VW Jetta into park and gave the door a little kick right where it tended to stick. I jumped out fast, before Geri scaled the entrance to her SUV. When you’re dealing with family, you always get the money up front.
I held out my hand, and Geri handed me a check. I would have preferred cash, but at least I knew it wouldn’t bounce, and I’d learned to pick my battles. Rebecca and Riley swept past me to fight for the front seat of my car. Rachel, who knew she had the age card to play, sauntered over to me, giving her jeans a tug in the general direction of her belly button. “What did you do to your eyes?” she asked.
I batted them extravagantly. “You like?”
Rachel squinted up at me. “You look kind of like a geisha. Is that what you were going for?”
I rubbed the sides of my eyes, and Rachel headed off to my car to conquer the front seat. Geri laughed and handed me a tissue. I gave her a little glare and blew my nose in it. She shook her head. “So,” I said, “how many more hours till you’re fifty?”
“So,” she said, “how many more hours till you’re homeless?”
IT’S NOT EVERY DAY a movie gets shot in Marshbury, Massachusetts. In fact, it’s not any day, at least up until now. So what if it was a horror movie they’d only moved to Marshbury because a great white shark had conveniently managed to get itself stuck in some shallow water off the coast, and could save them a ton of money.
Various officials had been pledging to drive the shark away for over a week when the movie people called. Even the governor had formally called for its eviction, but the fourteen-foot shark seemed to have other ideas. So, the movie people made an offer, and the board of selectmen asked them to double it, and when they did, you’ve never seen permits issued so fast.
The bad news was it was harder than ever to find a parking place at Scuttle Beach. We cruised the lot a few times, then gave up and headed down the street to park in Noah’s driveway. Noah was my human boyfriend. Allegedly anyway.
A line of people stretched almost to Noah’s house. We hopped onto the end of it, and over the next hour or so, we followed it across the causeway, along Sea Street, and halfway across the parking lot, where it seemed to be winding its way back from the rickety old bathhouse.
It looked like the whole town had answered the casting call. Of course, the full-page ad in the Marshbury Mirror had been hard to miss:
SEEKING ACTORS FOR HORROR FILM IN MARSHBURY, MASSACHUSETTS
Description: Open casting call for Worldwide Studio production of Shark Sense. Theatrical Type: horror or possible horror-comedy hybrid. Talent Type: men, women, and children of all ages. Comments: Union and nonunion. Casting will be at the Scuttle Beach parking lot on May 22 from 3–6 pm.
The movie people, who were walking up and down the line handing out clipboards, were hard to miss. It wasn’t just the clipboards. They were dressed all wrong for the town—one tall man wore high-top sneakers with a suit. You just don’t do that in Marshbury. Some people up ahead of us, three women in red and purple jogging suits who were probably in their seventies, all grabbed g
reedily at the clipboard he offered. He cleared his throat dramatically and said, “Take your sheet off and pass the clipboard back when you’re through.” He walked off at a brisk pace.
Rachel was flirting with a boy standing next to us at this point. She was fifteen, so I decided she was entitled. “Becca,” I said to her sister, who was unoccupied and also only twelve. “Go tell Riley to get back here quick so he doesn’t miss out.” Riley had taken off to kick a soccer ball around the parking lot with some friends.
“You snooze, you lose,” she said. “And why does Riley have to do everything we do, anyway?” Rebecca kept her eyes glued to her sister, who I hoped was a better role model in the flirt department than her mother had been for me.
The suit-and-sneaker man was back. “SAG?” he was saying repeatedly as he walked past the line, as if he were selling drugs.
I looked down at my chest. “Not yet, thank God,” I said.
“Gross! I can’t believe you said that in front of me, Aunt Ginger,” Becca said. “Mom would kill you.”
“Just living up to my reputation,” I said. “It takes focus and discipline.”
Riley bumped his way back into line. “Can we go home now?” he asked.
“Hey, no front cuts, Riley,” Becca said.
Rachel dragged her attention back to us and rolled her eyes. “What he means,” she said, “is that he’s looking for union members. Screen Actors Guild. Does anybody but me read?”
The boy Rachel had been flirting with stepped forward. “Do you have your card?” the man asked him. He nodded and they walked off importantly together.
Rachel watched him disappear. “Easy come, easy go,” I said.
“YES, I DO, I do believe in miracles,” I said about twenty minutes later when I finally grabbed us a clipboard. I handed a sheet to each of the kids, and they huddled around me reading while I fished in my bag for more pens. “Union rate,” I read out loud. “One hundred eighteen dollars for eight hours; nonunion, seventy-five dollars for twelve hours.”
“Wow,” Becca said. “I think I make more than that with my paper route.”
I added up how much I made on my earrings on a bad day. It was close. “Okay,” I said. “Just check all under availability and write really messy where it asks who your agent is.”
“What do you think I should put under special expertise? Synchronized swimming?” Rachel asked.
“Oh, you so sucked at that, Rachel,” Becca said.
“Put it anyway,” I said. “And don’t forget that summer we all took sailing lessons.”
Rachel scrunched up her forehead. “You didn’t take sailing lessons with us.”
I was always doing that, forgetting for just a split second that the better part of a generation separated us. “Don’t do that—you’ll get wrinkles,” I said to change the subject. I was pretty sure that forgetting you weren’t still fifteen happened to everyone, but I certainly wasn’t going to call attention to it.
“What’s my inseam?” Rebecca asked. “And what should I put under hat?”
“I put baseball,” Riley said.
“Am I the only one in this family with a brain?” Rachel asked. “They’re looking for your wardrobe sizes, which is why it says ‘wardrobe sizes’ just above it.”
We were almost to the bathhouse. “Just do the best you can,” I said. “And listen, here’s the deal. If I get in, don’t worry, I’ll try to pull the rest of you in, too.”
There were two women and one man sitting behind a long table in front of the bathhouse. I made Riley go first, so I could listen to the questions and fine-tune my strategy.
Riley must have decided on an offensive approach. “How do you move a seventeen-hundred-pound shark?” he asked as he waved his sheet of paper at them.
One of the women took the paper and looked down at it. “I don’t know,” she said. “How do you move a seventeen-hundred-pound shark?”
Riley crossed his arms and waited just long enough. “Ve-ry carefully.”
They laughed. “Got anything else for us?” the same woman asked. She looked down. “Oh that’s so cute. He wrote ‘baseball’ under hat. Are you a baseball fan, honey?”
The man stuck out his hand. “My name is Manny, what’s yours?”
Riley shook his hand and said, “Pedro.”
The man smiled. He was probably in his early thirties, and when he turned his head, I could see he had a ponytail. “Tell me a little about yourself, Pedro.”
“Well, just a few years ago, I was sitting under a mango tree and didn’t have fifty cents to ride the bus.”
“Ohmigod, he’s doing Pedro,” Rachel said. The sisters rolled their eyes. Riley had been doing his Pedro imitation for three years now, since the Red Sox won the World Series when he was five.
The people behind the table were all leaning forward and smiling. “And now what, Pedro?” the ponytailed man named Manny asked.
“But now, Boston, I consider her my house. She is my house. And if I don’t come back here, it’s because she didn’t try hard enough to keep me.”
“Remind me never to negotiate with you, kid.”
And that was it. Riley was in. Or at least Pedro was. And the rest of us were out.
Chapter 3
RACHEL CROSSED HER ARMS AND HUGGED HERSELF while we walked and Riley ran ahead of us, punching his arms in the air like a triumphant little Rocky. “I so don’t get it. What’s Riley got that we don’t have?”
Becca twirled some hair around her finger and turned to look at her sister. “It’s so not fair. I don’t think he should get to be in it if we can’t. We’re a family.”
We caught up with Riley just as he reached Noah’s house. Noah was a glassblower. He made everything from champagne flutes, Christmas ornaments, and witches’ balls to elegant vases and the most amazing sculptures. Witches’ balls are glass balls that you hang in your window. They have weblike strands of glass inside them to catch evil spirits that might otherwise fly around your house. The name probably helps keep the spirits out, too.
Once a week, Noah opened the studio behind his house for a demonstration. Everybody who could fit would sit down at one of the three old wooden benches. The rest of the people would stand in the back with Noah’s dog.
Noah’s furnace would be glowing orange, and you could feel the heat even from the benches. He’d put on special sunglasses because, he’d say, the old glassblowers had all gotten cataracts. Then he’d pick up a long metal blowpipe and dip it into the bucket of molten glass in the furnace.
He’d dip that into a pan of brightly colored crushed glass. Then he’d heat it, and dip it, then heat it and dip it again. He’d sit down at a bench and roll the pipe back and forth along a rail while he shaped the glass blob with a charred applewood block.
Finally, he’d stand up and lift the long metal blowpipe to his mouth. The first time I saw it, I thought he’d blow the glass up like a balloon. But all he did was blow the tiniest puff of air into the pipe and then quickly cover the opening with his thumb. He rolled the pipe around, and the glass expanded so slowly you almost couldn’t see it.
Noah’s stuff was so gorgeous it often sold before it even made it out of his yard to one of the local gift shops. Today, he’d set up a table on the driveway between the street and my car, and it looked like he’d been doing a brisk business.
“Guess what?” Riley yelled. Noah was finishing waiting on two women. His dog, Sage, who today looked like a cross between a chocolate Lab, an Irish setter, and possibly a dachshund, kept her short-legged self lodged between Noah and her competition. Better Sage than me. One of the women was blond and the other brunette, and if you counted the redheaded dog, they surrounded Noah with the full female spectrum of hair color. The two-legged women hugged their purchases to their chests.
They both said thank you and started walking away. The brunette turned around for one last look at him. “We’ll tell all our friends about you,” she practically sang.
I couldn’t resist an un
derstated eye roll, but nobody noticed, except possibly Sage. It was hard to tell. It was also hard to tell just why Noah always seemed to have this effect on women. He was tall, and basically handsome in kind of a geeky, rumpled way. He had dark hair, pale skin, and great eye contact, but there was also something unfinished about him. Maybe women were drawn to him the way they were drawn to a good home improvement project. A tweak here, a tweak there, and look what you’d have.
Riley was telling Noah his big news. “Nice,” Noah said. “Way to go, man.” They reached their fists out to each other and touched knuckles in the gesture that seemed to have replaced the high five, and not a moment too soon.
Riley started jumping up and down with excitement as he continued his story. “And they only wanted me. Aunt Ginger even tried to give the lady her earrings, but they still only wanted me.”
I reached my hands up to my ears. “Only because she was looking at them,” I said. “It wasn’t like it was a bribe or anything.”
“Yeah, big deal, Riley,” Rachel said. “So you’re shark bait.”
Becca’s eyes lit up for the first time since we’d been rejected. “Shark bait, shark bay-yayt.”
“Hey,” Noah said to me after the girls ran off with Riley chasing them. Apparently Sage didn’t see me as any real competition for Noah’s affections, because she took off after the kids, which meant we were alone.
“Hey,” I said back. I picked up a vase that pulled me in with its swirls of poppy red, indigo blue, and black. People were always saying Noah’s work reminded them of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, but I think what they meant was that pretty much everything he created looked vaguely like a vagina. Possibly this was another reason for his fan club.
