The Radical Element

by The Radical Element- 12 Stories of Daredevils, Debutantes

  The quicker that scene painter went, the more Grace noticed his gait, like the off-kilter rhythm of rain dripping off a roof. He had a limp. The middle of the inner crescent sat against the boy’s shoulder, his fingers splayed over the outer edge. Grace couldn’t see his face or hair. But the shape of him clawed at her. His hands, his walk. He was short, the same height as a boy she’d kissed a few months ago. In trousers, suspenders, and cuffed-up sleeves, he seemed fourteen or fifteen instead of the eighteen or nineteen he probably was.

  He set down the moon. Its shadow slid off him, giving her a clear view of his face.

  The face of the boy she knew.

  No. The word rang in Grace so loud, she kept her lips together to be sure she didn’t say it.

  No. Sawyer could not be here.

  Grace had gone out for this part to avoid him. She’d heard he’d been hired onto some picture about Cleopatra.

  His back was to Grace, so Grace turned her back to him, hoping he wouldn’t see her. Maybe she could hide out in the dressing room. Maybe she could avoid him for the whole picture.

  Or maybe she was being ridiculous, and he wouldn’t even remember her.

  That last thought left a bitter taste on her tongue, like the bite of orange pith.

  The crew hurried all twenty star girls into their flying harnesses. They clipped them in, checking the lobster clasps as Evelyn Farwell swept onto the set. Her curls haloed her like whirls of lemon meringue, and she’d painted her lips the deep red of Valentine’s Day roses. She had the straight lines of a magazine girl. No curves that needed flattening.

  “Evelyn Farwell,” the head costumer snapped.

  The woman’s voice came so shrill the gaffer almost dropped a Fresnel lantern. The metal barn doors flanking the light rattled.

  “You take that color off this instant,” the costumer said.

  “It keeps my lips from disappearing,” Evelyn said.

  “I don’t care,” the costumer called across the set. “Wash it off. You look like a Mexican.”

  The words cut into Grace like the leather straps of the harness.

  She gritted her teeth into a smile as flying cables hoisted each star girl up. She fanned out her arms, shifting her weight so the strands of copper beads would glimmer on film.

  Evelyn Farwell, her cupid’s bow now brightened with a Bourjois pink, her straight hips in her velvet-covered harness, rode the crescent moon into the air. Her dress flowed out behind her, smooth as a Brandy Alexander. So many glass beads had been sewn in that Grace could see Evelyn tensing to keep the train from pulling her backward.

  Grace was a single star in a constellation of silver and copper dresses.

  Less than that. She was something so terrible Evelyn Farwell couldn’t even wear a lip color that suggested it.

  Grace blotted off her camera makeup. The blue greasepaint rimming her eyes. The sweeps of lavender powder contouring her cheeks and brow bone. The yellow lipstick that made her look sick but came out soft on black-and-white film; everyone but the lead girl had to wear it.

  By now, the other girls had skittered off for the holiday. The nice ones asked was she going home; the chatty ones wanted to know where home was. Grace always said Bakersfield. Her hometown, a few miles outside, was small enough that she never named it. There were only so many families in Almendro, and they all knew one another.

  Grace sat alone in the dressing room, lights clicking off outside.

  Those Photoplay covers had promised the things Hollywood held, waiting in the shadows of the blue hills. The sureness that she could become a girl with a smile as light as a spritz of perfume. A girl with laughter ready on her lips. And the ease of knowing she was wanted, and that being wanted let her belong not just somewhere but anywhere.

  It promised more than that Grace could become someone beautiful.

  It promised that she could become someone who could take a full breath in this world.

  She slumped forward, elbows on the dressing table. Her forehead settled on the backs of her wrists.

  You look like a Mexican.

  She should have understood that the girl she’d been born was worth no more in this town than the tin canister holding a film reel. The words shouldn’t have landed this hard. By now, she should have been used to them.

  The snickers from the cameramen. You ever go down to Tijuana? Those girls down there — then, always, a whistle of wonder — they’re ready whenever you are.

  The chatter in the dressing room. Did I get too much sun over the weekend? I’m starting to look like a wetback.

  An investor bringing his fur-coated wife to the set on their way to Café Montmartre. A lament from her. I want plums — don’t you all keep any fruit around this godforsaken place? His laugh before he said, Darling, if it’s plums you want, I’ll hire a dozen Mexicans to go out right now and pick you some.

  To them, Grace and her family would have been nothing but these words, these names. The cameramen did not have to fear being beaten and arrested if they lost their way at night and wandered too close to strangers’ farms. The talcum-pale girls in the dressing room mirrors had never been barred from town shops or turned away from doctors. The producers’ sons had never endured what her brother had, strangers assuming he was not a soldier but a criminal, that he had lost half his leg not in the war but by robbing a bank or stealing a horse.

  Grace sobbed onto the backs of her hands, the hard, gasping breaths alternating between sounding soaked and parched. Her fist hit the dressing table. She didn’t realize she was doing it until the pain rattled her wrist.

  Every day, it was harder to stay Grace Moran. Every evening, she collapsed into bed, wrung out with the effort of draining the color from herself. When she let herself give into what she was, it rushed back into her so fast it felt liquid. It was a pond flooding her bed, and she had to tip her head back to keep enough of her face above water.

  The color glamour was borrowed magic, an heirloom her great-grandmother had handed down like a wedding quilt. But Bisabuela had warned her that the longer she kept it up, the more it would exhaust her. It would be worse than wearing shoes that pinched or a necklace with a clasp that bit the back of her neck.

  She’d almost let the glamour slip that night with Sawyer. Both of them had gotten drunk on brick wine the crew had smuggled from Amador County. Without even changing out of her costume corset and petticoat, Grace had taken hold of Sawyer’s suspenders and tugged him into the lead actress’s green room. The woman was literal about it: green damask settee, green brocade fainting couch, green drapes framing the mirror. Bits of her producer boyfriend’s tobacco were ground into the green tufted rugs, filling the air with a smell like liquor and vanilla.

  By then the lead actress was off to her wrap parties, so Grace pulled Sawyer down onto that fainting couch, his fingers following the laces of her corset.

  When Sawyer had set his mouth against her neck, she’d felt the glamour giving. Her focus, her will, flinched enough to weaken that inherited magic.

  Grace had shoved Sawyer off her and run out of the green room. She hadn’t even glanced back, not wanting to see whatever pained look, whatever wondering, showed on his face.

  She’d never let him close enough to smell her perfume again. She couldn’t afford to. One kiss, one blush or grazing of fingers that caught her off-guard, and Grace Moran might vanish like a curl of smoke off a cigarette.

  The glamour was hollowing her out. Her one hope was the cascarones, and the rumor about wishes made on an Easter full moon. If the cascarones granted her this wish, she could become a girl who belonged in Photoplay, laughing and lovely. The knowledge that the world would make room for her would feel so thick and soft she could revel in it as though it were a fine coat.

  “Are you okay?” Sawyer’s voice broke through the quiet in the dressing room.

  Grace startled, sitting up.

  Before she could look for Sawyer, the mirror in front of her caught her, stilled her. It showed a girl Grace
knew but had never seen in this glass, in this dressing room.

  In place of Grace Moran’s fair pin curls, a color between dark blond and very light brown, there were Graciela Morena’s brown-black waves, full and unbrushed. Instead of Grace’s cream complexion, her skin was tan as the shells of the almonds her family grew. Where a minute ago there had been eyes blue as the ocean off the pier, a pair as brown as magnolia bark blinked back.

  Grace touched her face. Graciela mimicked the gesture.

  Out of the corner of her eye, farther down the mirror, she found Sawyer’s reflection. And he was staring.

  Everything she’d been afraid he’d see when she was kissing him. Everything she worried would show when his breath fell against her neck. This mirror showed it all, how badly she’d let the color glamour slip.

  She met his eyes in the glass. “Get out.”

  His reflection stayed, blinking at her, as if this mirrored boy did not know how to make the real Sawyer do anything.

  “Get out,” she said, yelling now.

  This time he flinched. He left the dressing room fast enough that even as she watched Graciela Morena in the mirror, she caught his limp.

  Grace slowed and steadied her breathing until the color glamour settled back over her. It bleached her hair. It lightened her skin. It spun the brown of her eyes back to the shimmering blue of the whole Pacific Ocean.

  She drove Graciela Morena and all her shades of brown out of her.

  Grace caught up with Sawyer halfway across the studio lot. She had to play nice now. She could not be wild-eyed and worried.

  “Look,” she said, but any next words turned to a breath.

  He gave a slow nod. “Sawyer.”

  His smile, both sad and resigned, prickled. He really thought she hadn’t remembered his name?

  “I know it doesn’t roll off the tongue quite like ‘the kid with the gimp leg,’” he said, “but at least it’s shorter.”

  She felt the flush rise to her cheeks, a flush that would show more in the cream of Grace’s skin than the brown of Graciela’s. She’d never called him that, but it wasn’t as though she’d never heard it around the lot. That first picture they were on together, rumor was he’d managed to get himself hired by a director whose brother had lost his left arm in the war. But that didn’t stop the director from looking the other way when the grips mimicked Sawyer’s walk.

  “For what it’s worth” — Sawyer slid his hands into his pockets — “I think you’re better the way you were.”

  She wanted to tell him no one but the painted moon and backdrops cared what he thought, that he didn’t know from nothing.

  Sawyer shrugged his good-bye and kept on across the set.

  She wished her next impulse had to do with being kind. She wished it had to do with anything except getting on the good side of a boy who had seen Graciela Morena.

  A boy she’d already been cruel to three pictures and all those months ago.

  “Sawyer,” she said.

  He turned around.

  “You have somewhere to go this weekend?” she asked.

  “Pobrecito.” Her mother took Sawyer’s face in her hands.

  Sawyer hadn’t even put down his bag, or Grace’s, which he’d insisted on carrying. He looked a little worried. Grace wished she could tell him the pity in her mother’s face had nothing to do with his limp. To her mother, Sawyer’s presence here meant he either had no family or that he couldn’t see them for Easter, and this, not his walk, was worth her sympathy.

  Grace took the suitcases while her mother was talking at him. He was too distracted to notice.

  Graciela. She was with her family, and she was Graciela now. She had let the color glamour fall. For this weekend, she was cotton dresses and almond blossoms, not beaded gowns and pressed powder. She could let her breasts loose instead of flattening them.

  Being Graciela Morena took so much less work than making herself look like Grace Moran. Without the effort weighing her down, the suitcases felt light as baby chicks.

  Her mother swept Sawyer outside into the almond orchard, saying they would go find Graciela’s father.

  Graciela left her suitcase in her old bedroom, the bed covered with Bisabuela’s rose-embroidered wedding quilt, and Sawyer’s in the room at the end of the hall. She hadn’t bothered packing clothes. Graciela Morena’s soft cotton skirts were all waiting for her, in the room she’d told her parents they could clear and rent out. But they hadn’t.

  Instead she’d stuffed her suitcase full of candy bars that were easy to find in Los Angeles but that her family had to go to Bakersfield to get. Mounds for her mother, Heath bars for her father. And in the inner pockets, money they would never accept. She would have to slip it into the coffee can when they weren’t looking.

  One day Graciela wanted to be a big enough star to buy her mother a pair of the two-tone Chanel heels all the girls on set went mad over. She wanted to buy her family one of the new refrigerators, so her father didn’t have to worry about whether the iceman would come out this far.

  She wanted to get Miguel to doctors who could help him stop having dreams that he had all the parts of himself he’d had before the war.

  A life as Grace Moran promised more than a little place carved out in this world that loved fair-haired, sea-eyed girls. It promised the things she could give her family that they could not give themselves.

  “Hermana,” her brother’s voice called from a half-open door.

  She dashed into the room so fast, she almost slipped on the tile. She threw her arms around her brother. “You’re here!”

  “Where’d you think I’d be?” he asked, ruffling her hair.

  “Married with a hundred babies.” She pulled back to look at him. “That girl is in love with you.”

  “Well.” Miguel gestured at his face and body. “Can you blame her?”

  Graciela punched his shoulder and went back across the hall.

  “If you keep her waiting” — Graciela called from the open door, digging through her suitcase — “I’ll strangle you with your Easter Sunday necktie.”

  Miguel’s shadow crossed the sun cast through the linen curtains. “You’d attack a man who doesn’t have two legs to run away?”

  The fact that Miguel could joke meant he was healing in places she could not see. He had fewer nightmares, Mamá had written her. He went out walking with the crutch instead of shutting himself up in his room, no sky but his ceiling.

  “I’d smother a man in his sleep with his own pillow if he broke that girl’s heart,” Graciela said.

  When Miguel had come off the bus with his trouser pant pinned under where his leg now ended, Dolores hadn’t flinched. She’d thrown herself onto him like he was strong enough for all of her, her wide hips and eager hands and her mouth that had no shame kissing him in full daylight. That was good for both Dolores and Graciela, because if she’d left him, Graciela would’ve gone after her with her father’s Winchester.

  Graciela handed Miguel a Butterfinger bar and threw a dozen more onto his bed.

  He ripped open the orange-and-blue package. “I had to save up for a good ring for her.” He bit into the bar. “Viejo Garcia’ll be done sizing it tomorrow, and if you don’t think it’s perfect, I’ll eat this wrapper.”

  Miguel sat on his bed, holding the candy bar in one hand and parting the curtains with the other. “You taking in strays now?”

  “He couldn’t go home for Easter,” Graciela said. “So I invited him here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m a kind and generous person.”

  Miguel started laughing.

  Graciela nodded at the candy bars on his bed. “Keep laughing, and I’ll crush those to dust.”

  “Then I’ll eat them over toast.” Miguel’s hand dropped the curtain, and the panel fell back into place. “If he’s here, he must already know about you, right?”

  Graciela gave a slow, wincing nod.

  “Did you tell him?” Miguel asked.
<
br />   Graciela studied a band of light on the floor. “He saw me.”

  Miguel whistled softly. “What are you gonna do?”

  “Get him drunk and see if Bruja Licha can make him forget,” Graciela said, wanting to hear her brother laugh again. “Wanna help?”

  “For you, you know I would.” Miguel clucked his tongue. “But it’s Easter. The Lord frowns on drunkenness during la Semana Santa.”

  La Semana Santa. For a minute, she’d forgotten it was Holy Week. In two days, she would fold all her hopes into the glitter of a cascarón.

  “Easter’s a full moon.” She leaned against the door frame. “I’m gonna make my wish.”

  Miguel’s smile fell away. “Graciela,” he said, with the sad look he had when he’d told her that la llorona was not some fairy whistling on the wind but the spirit of a grieving mother. “It’s just a story.”

  Graciela pushed herself off the door frame. “Not to me.”

  She kicked out of her shoes and walked barefoot, the sound of her mother’s laughter pulling her down the hall.

  She stopped in the doorway to the kitchen.

  Sawyer stood at the sink, washing his hands. The afternoon sun came in from the orchard, filling the sink, and water left the fine hairs on the back of his wrists glistening.

  “And we’ll teach you all about the cascarones,” her mother told him. “It’s a full moon, and Easter, so if you’re lucky, they can grant you wishes.”

  A ribbon of worry snaked down the back of Graciela’s neck.

  She loved her family’s generous laughter, how they invited strangers to their table for tamales at Christmas and chiles en nogada in the fall. The warmth of masa and the dark sugar of pomegranates was the smell of their kindness.

  But the cascarones, the story about making a wish when the full moon fell on Easter, this was her family’s magic. And her mother was telling their secrets to a boy who knew Graciela’s. She was giving this boy more power over Graciela, when he already had too much.

  For a minute, Graciela wondered if this was a good thing, him warming to her family. One more reason for him not to turn on her. But watching him here, this boy from the world of trompe l’oeil sets, reminded her of all she’d bartered off. She’d kissed him once and then shoved him away, holding her own glamour closer than she held him or even her own family.