by Jane Heller
Mickey sent me out on yet another commercial audition, this one for a local fast-food chain. I was supposed to play a woman in her twenties (I’d told Mickey I could play twenties, remember, and he’d agreed it was worth a shot) who stands behind the counter in her cute little uniform and says cheerfully to the next customer, “How may I serve you today?” After three callbacks, I lost the job, not because I was too old but because I was too chaste. The actress who won the part spun the line into a sexy double entendre-, as in: “How may I service you today?”
Dejected but not suicidal, I decided to look for a part-time job, just as a precautionary measure while I waited for my luck to change. Maura suggested that, since I had no interest in waiting tables again, I should consider retailing. So I scanned the L.A. Times’ classified section and found an ad for a part-time salesperson at a fancy-shmancy shop in Brentwood called Cornucopia! (the exclamation point is theirs, not mine). I assumed it was a fancy-shmancy shop, not only because they were paying more than the other stores with ads in the paper, but because they were in Brentwood, the poshest of the posh in West L.A., or, let me rephrase, the self-annointed poshest of the posh. While the old money lives more quietly in Pasadena, the newly minted—many of them movie and television producers and their trophy families—hunker down in their faux chateaux in Brentwood, where a two-bedroom fixer-upper on a decent piece of property goes for a cool three million dollars. This is just a guess, but I’ll bet there are more nannies in Brentwood than anyplace on earth. More SUVs, too (the Mercedes ones). It’s a place where the wives are blonder, the husbands are tanner, and the kids—well, when you’re six and your parents have already run out of ways to spoil you, it’s a problem.
I called the shop and spoke to the manager, a woman who introduced herself as Cameron Slade and asked me to come in for an interview, which I did the very next morning.
“Nice to meet you,” said Cameron, who clearly didn’t think it was nice to meet me, just a dreary necessity. She was as cold as an ice sculpture and just as chiseled. Her dark brown hair fell smoothly around a face that had been whittled and carved and planed so as to render her one of those women with virtually no lines or spots, no imperfections, no character. She was in her early forties, I figured, but seemed older, despite the cosmetic surgery, probably because she looked so joyless.
“It’s nice to meet you, too,” I said. We sat in her office in the back of the store, which, by the way, reminded me of a stage set, because it felt so manufactured. Cornucopia! specialized in imported accessories for the home—from furniture, linens, and tableware to custom stationery and an entire children’s department—and every piece of merchandise was romanced, displayed beautifully, displayed artfully. The store symbolized wretched excess at its most subversive—not the kind you see on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills but the kind you see in upscale suburbia. It had an aura of preciousness, of We-know-what’s-best-for-you, of Shop-here-if-you’re-the-third-wife-of-a-movie-mogul-and-you-don’t-have-a-clue-which-fork-to-use-for-which-course. “Do you have any sales experience?” asked Cameron.
“I worked in the hosiery department at Macy’s when I lived in Cleveland,” I said. “But that was years ago. I’ve been working as an actress since I moved to L.A.”
“Interesting. I’ve always wanted to be an actress.”
I tried not to roll my eyes. The woman who cleaned my teeth always wanted to be an actress. So did the woman who taught my yoga class and the woman who owned the apartment I rented and the woman who sold me my health insurance policy. Los Angeles has almost as many aspiring actresses as it does cars.
“Would I have seen you in anything?” she asked.
“Probably. I’ve done a lot of television. And I was in Pet Peeve, the last Jim Carrey movie.”
Cameron nodded in recognition. But not because she’d seen me. “Jim Carrey has been a customer of ours,” she said. “Which prompts me to tell you about Rule Number One here at Cornucopia!: No member of the sales staff must ever be a gushing fan around a celebrity. In other words, there will be no discussion of their films or television programs, no attempts to make a connection for personal gain, no pestering them for autographs.”
“Understood.” I assumed that if there was a Rule Number One, there must be other rules. I braced myself.
“So you’d like to work part-time, between auditions. Is that it?”
“Yes. I could give you all day on Saturday and Sunday, plus I could fill in on weekdays if my agent doesn’t have anything for me.”
“You’d be paid a commission on any item you sell.”
“I’m all for that.”
“Good. Are you a careful person?”
“Careful?” No, I’m a bull in a china shop. “Sure. I’d treat the merchandise as if it were my own.”
“That’s Rule Number Two: If a member of the sales staff breaks, scratches, or soils an item, he or she must repair or replace it out of his or her paycheck.”
“As he or she should.”
“Now, are you familiar with the type of merchandise we stock? Our inventory embodies the best of France, Italy, and England. We have exquisite table settings, for example, decorated with French faience such as Quimper or the more subtle colors of Vietri’s cucina fresco. We carry the distinctive D. Porthault line of French linens as well as the silken luxury of Cocoon. In our children’s collection, we have whimsical bedding from Banana Fish and Freddie’s Daisy and imported layettes from Petit Bateau. And for the bath, we carry fragrances and candles from Palais Royale and Dipytich. You have heard of Dipytich, I presume.”
I’d heard of dipshit, which is what this chick was making me feel like. As far as I was concerned, she was speaking in foreign tongues. “Of course I’ve heard of it,” I said with a straight face. “No wonder Cornucopia! has the classy reputation it does, as well as legions of loyal shoppers.”
“Yes, well, I think both our custom stationery and our bridal registry contribute to our success, too,” said Cameron. “Which brings me to Rule Number Three: Since gift wrapping is our specialty, every member of the sales staff must be competent with a glue gun.”
“Hey, just call me Annie Got My Glue Gun,” I said jauntily, slipping in a joke that would incorporate my background as an entertainer as well as my team spirit and, hopefully, nudge Cameron toward hiring me.
“Oh, there’s one other thing,” she said. “Do you know how to iron?”
“Iron?”
“Yes. Sometimes the linens need to be ironed if we’re changing a table setting or a bedding display or if the fabrics have been picked over by the customers.”
“I can do that,” I said, my ironing skill on a par with my ability to pilot an airplane.
“And, of course, there’s the vacuuming. We usually have the sales staff vacuum right after we close at night.”
“That’s a given.” Just hire me already, baby, before I turn around and head back to the biker bar.
After a few more questions, Cameron did hire me, and the victory was bittersweet, obviously. It was tough to face the fact that I wasn’t cutting it as an actress, but so was watching my bank account dwindle to nothing.
When I got home, my mother was vacuuming the carpet in my bedroom.
“Gee, maybe you should take the job I just applied for,” I said.
“What job is that?” she asked.
“A job at a snooty retail shop in Brentwood. One of my tasks will be vacuuming.”
“Speaking of that,” said my mother after shutting off my Hoover, “they don’t make vacuum cleaners like they used to. The suction isn’t there. You have to keep going over the same spot until you finally catch all the dirt, which is terrible for your posture and a major strain on your back. I—”
“Isn’t it lunch time?” I said, finding this latest speech excruciatingly numbing and, therefore, eager to silence it, silence her. “Maybe you’d like to run home and fix yourself something. You know how you hate to skip meals.”
“Why don’t I fix us bo
th something,” she said, thwarting my plan. I had hoped to crack open a jar of peanut butter, stick my finger in it, and curl up in front of Days so I could watch Maura’s expertise in action—alone. “How does tuna on whole wheat sound? Remember how you used to love my tuna fish sandwiches, Stacey?”
Yeah, when I was four. “That would be great, Mom. Thanks.”
I set the table while she puttered around in the kitchen. She had just started scooping the tuna out of the can, into a bowl, when she shrieked. Totally went berserk. Figuring she must have cut herself using the opener, I hustled over, prepared to wrap her finger in a napkin or hold her hand under cold water or call 911 if I couldn’t stop the bleeding, when I saw that she was perfectly intact.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“This!” She pointed downward, into the bowl, as if there were a giant tarantula crawling around in it.
“What?” I said again, not seeing anything but chunks of Fin’s premium solid white albacore in water.
“There’s a bone!”
I peered into the bowl and sure enough there was a bone—a long skinny fish bone that had no business being in anyone’s tuna sandwich. “Wow. I’m glad neither of us choked on that.”
She gathered herself up to her full height and waved her fist in the air. “We will never have a bone in our tuna fish again, not if it’s up to me.” She said this as if she were a political candidate giving a stump speech promising reforms in education, taxes, and gun control. “I am appalled—absolutely incensed—that a reputable company like Fin’s Premium Tuna could be so lax in their quality control that they’d allow this to happen. Get me some Scotch tape, Stacey.”
Okay, I wasn’t exactly pleased to find a bone in the food I was about to eat, but Scotch tape wasn’t the first thing I thought of as a solution. “Why do you want the tape?”
“Just get it, dear.”
I found the tape and brought it to her. By this time, she had separated the bone from the tuna fish, rinsed it off in the sink, and dried it with a paper towel. “What are you planning to do with it?” I said. “Have it made into a necklace?”
“No, Miss Fresh Mouth. I’m going to tape it to my stationery—as evidence—and then I’m going to write Fin’s one of my complaint letters, demanding an apology for nearly killing us. They’ll be sorry they ever dealt with Helen Reiser, I guarantee you.”
My mother picked through the rest of the tuna, to make sure it was safe for us, then added some mayo and a little seasoning to the bowl, and threw a couple of sandwiches together. While we ate, she continued to rant about our near-fatal accident.
“In the blink of an eye, our lives could have been taken from us,” she stewed.
What neither of us realized—how could we?—was that in the blink of an eye, our lives would be taken from us. Our lives as we knew them, that is.
seven
“Miss! Uh, miss!”
It was my third week of employment at Cornucopia!, and it was a wonder I was still showing up at the joint, given how insistent—okay, obnoxious—the customers were.
“Miss! Hel-lo!”
As an example, why was this person yelling at me when I was clearly working at the computer, ringing up a sale for my previous customer—a customer who had just bought a four-hundred-dollar picture frame, imported from Scotland and handpainted with colorful golf balls on it? The frame, by the way, was a gift for her husband’s fifty-first birthday. Oh, and she was, at most, twenty-five. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
“Miss! What are you, deaf?”
I wheeled around to face the woman who was banging on the counter, seemingly oblivious to the fact that I was busy. She was a blonde wearing a black leather bomber jacket and carrying a canvas tote that read “Breathe deeply and let it go.”
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” I told her. “I’m finishing up with another customer.”
“But I’m in a major hurry,” she said. “I’m double-parked and my kids are in the car and I have to buy a birthday present for my daughter’s friend Lily. I need an outfit for the girl. And I need it, like, right away.”
Wow. A fashion emergency, I thought, wondering why it doesn’t track with some people that they’re not the center of the universe. “Just give me a few seconds and I’ll be glad to help you,” I said.
The woman huffed but stayed put until I finished my transaction.
“Now,” I said as I walked her over to Cornucopia!’s children’s department. “How old is your daughter’s friend Lily?”
“Six.”
“Okay. What about this dress?” I took a pretty silk frock off the display. “It’s from France and it’s adorable, don’t you think?” It should be. It cost more than any of my dresses.
“No. Too girly.”
“Isn’t Lily a girl?”
“Yeah, but I’m looking for something hot, something hip, something that says to me ‘trendy designer.’ How about the one over there?”
She pointed to an outfit that was more of a costume than an appropriate article of clothing for a child. It was a leopard-skin jumpsuit with a black leather belt, and what it said to me was “JonBenet Ramsey.”
“Do you like it?” I asked, wondering how anyone could.
“It’s great. Fine. Wrap it as a gift.”
She shoved her American Express platinum card into my hand and took off for the glass cabinet in which the store’s china and silver pill boxes were displayed. I speculated about what sort of pills she might be taking and whether she’d forgotten to take them that day.
On the home front, my mother had composed her complaint letter to Fin’s Premium Tuna and mailed it to their corporate headquarters in San Pedro, about a half hour south of L.A., depending on traffic. Apparently, Fin’s was the only big tuna company with its office and canning plant still in the southern California harbor, the others—Star-Kist, Bumble Bee, and Chicken of the Sea— having defected to foreign ports.
“I’m telling you right now, Stacey, I’d better get a response from those people,” said my mother. “I don’t intend to be dismissed as just another cranky consumer.”
“You’re hard to dismiss, Mom. At the very least, they’ll write you back to apologize.”
I was right about the “at the very least.” A mere two weeks after my mother sent her missive to Fin’s, she received a letter from the company’s public relations director, not only apologizing for the bone and assuring her it was not the norm to find anything other than pure premium tuna inside a can of Fin’s, but inviting her to stop by the cannery, observe the canning process for herself, and see firsthand how deeply committed Fin’s is to providing consumers with the best quality control in the industry.
“Well, that was nice of them,” I remarked after my mother read me the letter. “Do you feel vindicated?”
“Not yet,” she said. “Not until I get a look at that cannery and find out what goes on there.”
I laughed. I honestly thought she was joking. “You’re not really going to San Pedro, Mom. Tell me you’re not.”
“Of course, I’m going. I was invited.”
“Mom.” I sighed. “They didn’t mean for you to make a special trip down there. They were just blowing you off in a very smart way from a PR standpoint. They want you to keep buying their product and quit badmouthing them to other people, so they said, ‘Sure, come on by when you’re in the neighborhood.’ You can’t take any of that stuff seriously.”
“And since when did you become such a cynic? Is this what show business has done to my little girl? Turned her into a person who scoffs at everything?” Did I scoff at everything? Had show business turned me into a cynic? Had all the posturing and pretending and jockeying for position taken away my ability to trust? To believe that there really were people who cared if you almost choked on their tuna fish bone?
Nah.
“I’m not a cynic,” I said. “I just think you should be glad you got your letter from Fin’s and leave it at that. Buy Star-K
ist from now on, if it’ll make you feel better.”
“I’m going down to their plant and getting a look at their operation,” said my mother, sounding like a five-star general. “If they’re just ‘blowing me off ’ as you suggest, a visit from me will catch their attention.”
I couldn’t talk her out of it. In a way, I didn’t want to. The more involved she became with Fin’s and their quality control, the less involved she’d be with me, I figured. And wasn’t that what I’d been praying for? That she would get a life of her own?
“Of course, since I’m new to southern California,” she went on, “I don’t even know where San Pedro is. Would it be too much to ask that you go there with me, Stacey? You could drive and I could read the directions out loud, and we could stop for lunch somewhere, just the two of us. It might be fun, don’t you think?”
No, I don’t think. “I’d like to, Mom, but I’ve got to work.”
“You couldn’t skip a day at that store when your own mother needs you?”
“Well, it’s not only the store. I’ve got my auditions.”
“You could miss one of those, couldn’t you? Just this once? Just for your old mom?” She said this not in her five-star-general voice but in her five-year-old-child voice, the voice that made the guilt kick in. “Besides, a day away from all those show business types would be good for you, a nice change. So listen to your mother and come with me.”
“All right, I’ll come with you,” I said, because I knew she’d wear me down eventually, so why not knuckle under early.
She smiled. “You won’t regret it, dear. You’ll see.” She was incorrect. As you’ll see.
On a bright and sunny Monday morning, we waited out the rush hour traffic on the 405 and headed down to San Pedro at about 10:00 a.m. It was actually a more scenic drive than I’d anticipated, sailing over the Vincent Thomas Bridge to Terminal Island, the Port of Los Angeles and the hundreds of ships docked there in full view from the car. If it weren’t for my mother’s endless rants about her sunglasses that kept sliding down the bridge of her nose and the garbage truck that woke her up at five o’clock that morning and the call she’d gotten from Cleveland from her friend Rosalyn, inviting her to her daughter’s wedding (“God forbid my own daughter should be having a wedding.”), it wouldn’t have been a torturous trip.
