Seeing Stars

by Diane Hammond

  “I can’t,” Bethy said. “I’m done.”

  Ruth pressed her lips together. Ruth hated when Bethy wasted food, but Bethy didn’t think it should count on a day that was this important. While Ruth was at the front counter paying the bill, Bethy went outside, dug up her cell phone, found Allison in her contact list, and called her.

  “Allisolicious,” Allison answered. “May I take your order?”

  Bethany burst out laughing. “You’re funny.”

  “Is this Rachel calling?” Rachel was the name of Bethy’s character in their showcase scene.

  “It was,” Bethy said, “but now it’s Lucy.”

  “Lucy Goosey. How are you, Goosey?”

  “I’m fine,” Bethy said, but she was annoyed—there was an unfamiliar edge to Allison’s voice. “I just got back from the California Dreamers set.”

  “I know,” Allison said. “Mimi’s pissed.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, she just is. She thought I should have gotten the part and not you.”

  “But you didn’t even audition,” Bethany said.

  “She got me in at the last minute.”

  “Oh.”

  “You know she’s changing your name back to Rabinowitz, by the way.”

  “I know.”

  “So no more Roosevelt. Now you’re just plain Rabinowitz.”

  “I don’t see why it mattered in the first place,” Bethany said.

  “Because it’s Jewish.”

  “So?”

  “People don’t like Jewish people.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” said Bethy.

  “Oh, it’s true.”

  “Huh,” said Bethy, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “Okay,” Allison said. “So I’ll see you, Lucy Goosey.”

  And just like that, she hung up.

  Chapter Twelve

  WINTER IN SEATTLE WAS AS DANK AS A SEWER, BUT IT wasn’t just that. No, it was time to confront the truth head-on: Hugh Rabinowitz felt like hell. He had been feeling like hell for weeks, and conceivably for much longer than that. And it wasn’t that he was a hypochondriac, either—that was Ruth’s province. He didn’t have the imagination for it, plus he had such a high pain threshold that you usually had to hit him over the head with a symptom before he paid any attention to it. When he was a kid his appendix had ruptured before he’d even admitted that his stomach hurt. So whatever this was, he knew it was real: a persistent, transcendent fatigue coupled with a vague sense of dread, of not-rightness. He knew what Ruth would say: depression. But if it was depression—and he prided himself on being very open-minded about mental health issues, for a man of his generation—why was he so damned thirsty all the time? He should be turning into a camel, that’s how much he was drinking, but it didn’t matter. What the hell?

  So he put in a call to Manny Kalman, who’d been his internist for about a thousand years, and Manny said, “Get in here, guy, and let’s talk.” So Hugh got in there and they talked, and then they did some lab work, and now Hugh was going back to get the results. It made him nervous that Manny had had his office manager, Sonja, schedule the appointment. Usually Manny just talked to him over the phone and then called in a prescription for some anti-inflammatory or antibiotic, and that would be it for another year or until his annual checkup rolled around.

  So at two o’clock on a drizzly Tuesday afternoon he pulled into the last spot in the practice’s parking lot and trudged into the waiting room with the sound of doom ringing in his ears. He might not be a hypochondriac, but he did have an active imagination, and he couldn’t imagine that Manny had called him in because he had good news.

  Mercifully, the office was empty of patients. Sonja was on the phone behind a sliding glass window, absently clicking impeccably manicured nails on her pharmaceutical endorsement desk blotter as she talked. She was beautifully groomed, unlike Margaret, who managed Hugh’s office with the efficiency of a drill sergeant but who wasn’t, let’s face it, much to behold. When Sonja saw him she slid the glass door open and said, “How’s tricks, sweetie?” She was always calling people sweetie. Hugh thought that was nice.

  “I don’t know. I guess that’ll depend on Manny.” Hugh handed her his debit card for the copay.

  She looked at her telephone console. “Well, let’s get you back there, then. I’ll process this”—she waggled the card—“while you’re in with the doctor.”

  She walked him down the hall in what looked to Hugh like extremely expensive leather shoes that had probably been fabricated on distant, sophisticated shores. Ruthie would have admired them. The heavier she got, the more she appreciated shoes—shoes and purses, which, he’d noted from his patients, seemed to be a large woman’s place of escape. Not that Ruth spent money or even dressed that way—she lacked the confidence. She once told Hugh she’d had a dream in which she’d been dressed by a TV show specializing in updating people’s images, only when she was all done and came out tremulously to join her assembled friends and family, Hugh’s mother had said, Oh, please. Poor Ruthie.

  Sonja showed Hugh into Manny’s office—as though he didn’t know the way after all these years—and closed the door behind him.

  The room was richly furnished with thick carpet and wall-to-wall mahogany. Hugh really needed to spiff up his own office suite one of these days—like there was even a fat chance as long as Ruth was in LA. No money, no one to line up the contractor or supervise the remodel. God knows he wasn’t qualified.

  “Hey, man!” Manny said disingenuously, as though the fact that Hugh was coming in had slipped his mind. Hugh knew because he did the same thing himself from time to time, when a patient—usually a phobic one—needed bolstering with a particularly hale-fellow-well-met declaration. He reached across his desk and gave Hugh a handshake that could bend steel. A manila folder sat in front of him in the exact center of the otherwise unobstructed desk. Manny had always been on the anal-retentive side, but in Hugh’s opinion that was as good a quality in a doctor as it was in a dentist, and more than once he’d said as much.

  “Well?” Hugh said.

  All doctor now, Manny frowned as he opened the folder, looked at a sheet of lab results, and then turned it around so Hugh could see. “Diabetes,” he said.

  Hugh stared at the numbers, as though he had any idea what they meant. The ringing in his ears got louder. “What?”

  “You’ve got diabetes, my friend.”

  “But we’re a heart family.”

  “You’re also an overweight family.”

  Hugh sagged in his chair.

  “Look,” Manny said, folding his hands over his immaculate desk blotter. “It isn’t cancer, it isn’t neurological, and if you take it seriously, it isn’t fatal. And if you lose seventy-five pounds you might be able to kick it. Think of this as a wake-up call. Make it a family project. It wouldn’t hurt Ruth to take off a few pounds.”

  Hugh rubbed his face.

  “Okay,” Manny said, gliding away from his desk on the silent wheels of his expensive chair. “Go home and call Ruth. Bring her onboard. Get her to come in with you the next time and I’ll have Sonja give you some literature to take home with you today. Start reading. Knowledge is your best ally. And I’m going to call in a couple of prescriptions that I want you to start taking right away, so we can get you back on track.” He described each medication, and Hugh did his best to look like he was listening, but all he was hearing was the pounding of his mortal heart. “The good news is, you’re going to be feeling better as long as you work at this thing,” Manny was saying when he next tuned in. “Just remember: you’re the one in control.”

  Easy for Manny to be glib, Hugh thought sourly. He didn’t have diabetes. He’d probably never carried an extra pound in his life, and neither had his elegant wife, Lenore.

  “All right, so let’s bring you back early next week and see how we’re doing,” Manny said. “You’re going to have questions by then.”

 
He walked Hugh back to the reception area, where Hugh got a bag full of pamphlets from Sonja. Then Hugh went to Rite Aid to fill his prescriptions and buy a whole basketful of paraphernalia, and drove home in a daze. You thought you knew your future—how you might look, where you might vacation, how you might feel about retirement. And then this. It turned out that you didn’t know a thing.

  He called Ruth from the driveway.

  “But there isn’t a single diabetic in the family,” she argued, once he’d told her the news. “Heart, yes, but—”

  “I said the same thing, but evidently the numbers were clear. This is real.”

  Ruth was silent.

  “Hello?” said Hugh.

  “I’m here. So what do you have to do?”

  “I don’t really know yet. Learn to control it. I have some things to read.” Hugh started fumbling among the pamphlets Manny had given him and some that he’d picked up himself at Rite Aid along with his medicine. You and Diabetes. How to Live with Diabetes. So You’ve Been Diagnosed with Diabetes: Now What? Indeed.

  “Manny thinks it might be a good idea to have you come home, for us to go and meet with him together,” he said. “This isn’t a summer cold.”

  Ruth didn’t say a word.

  “Ruthie,” he said quietly. “Please don’t make me ask.”

  Ruth sighed. “I know, honey. It’s just that—” There was an awkward silence. He was appalled to find his eyes tearing up.

  “No, nothing. Of course I’ll come home,” she said.

  “That’s my girl,” Hugh said bitterly.

  ALTHOUGH SHE KNEW SHE SHOULDN’T BE, RUTH WAS FURIOUS. Hugh was fat and he’d been fat for a long time, which he should have pretty much known he would be, at his age, given the shape his mother was in; and now he had diabetes. She was fat, too, of course, but she was working on that, plus if you got right down to it, she wasn’t as fat, to begin with. And she had no intention of staying fat, whereas Hugh didn’t care. So now she was supposed to, what, leave Bethy here with Mimi? There were auditions lined up through the whole next week. But she was a wife, and wives stood by their husbands, especially when they were sick and scared like Hugh. She would have to go home and deal with this, and maybe it would be all right after all if she just left Bethy here for a week or so with money for decent food—lots of fruits and vegetables, easy on the carbs—and instructed her specifically to beware of the deleterious effects of sticking to the Orphans too blindly. Once Hugh had come to terms with his health and learned how to eat right and test himself and shoot up his insulin or whatever else diabetics had to do—after all, people were coping with diabetes every day; it wasn’t like it was life-threatening, more of an annoyance; manageable was the thing; it was manageable—she’d come back down and they’d pick up right where they’d left off, except maybe Hugh would finally spring for a studio apartment at the Oakwood. That would give Bethy something to focus on while she was at Mimi’s and dining, no doubt and despite Ruth’s warnings, on Funyuns.

  Hugh would probably give Ruth a hard time about not bringing Bethy back with her to Seattle, but you never knew when that one audition might come that would turn out to be Bethy’s big break. A guest-star role on CSI: Miami; a recurring character on Unfabulous or Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide. So Ruth would call Mimi and work it out, and she’d call Hugh and tell him to book her a flight, and she’d pack up the apartment—there was no use paying for it while she and Bethy were both away—and fly out the following morning.

  She told Bethy that Daddy needed her to handle a few things around the house (why scare her and then leave; the truth could wait) but that she’d be back within a week, and in the meantime how would she feel about staying with Mimi and Allison? Evidently she and Allison had patched up whatever little tiff they’d had, because, to Ruth’s relief, Bethy was not only willing, but enthusiastic.

  So Ruth picked up the phone and called the studio and when Mimi answered she asked whether she could come by and talk for a minute. Mimi said yes, which didn’t necessarily mean she’d be there when Ruth arrived, a hard truth Ruth had learned over the past weeks. The woman was very casual about other people’s time. She hustled Bethy into the car and drove directly to the studio. Mimi’s battered little car was in its usual spot by the Dumpster.

  Allison was in the classroom pretending to do schoolwork when they came in. Bethany, who’d had the presence of mind to bring along some schoolwork herself, pulled a TV tray out of the rack, set it up beside Allison, and unfolded a chair. Ruth knocked on the doorjamb of Mimi’s office, went in, and sat down beside her desk. Mimi’s computer screen was filled with e-mail messages, which she continued to answer while Ruth sat and waited. Beneath Mimi’s feet Tina Marie roused herself briefly to give Ruth an annoyed look before turning around several times and dropping back heavily into her basket.

  Five minutes later, Ruth was still sitting and waiting. She could feel a hot flush cresting near her ears. She cleared her throat.

  “Just another minute,” Mimi said.

  Ruth waited another minute.

  “All right,” said Mimi, finally looking at her with exactly the same expression Tina Marie had shown her.

  “I need to ask a favor,” Ruth said. Her voice came out froggy with nerves. She cleared her throat and started over. “I need to ask a favor.”

  “Oh?”

  “Hugh needs me at home for a few days, and I don’t want to take Bethy with me. She has those auditions, and I don’t think she should miss them. Do you?”

  “She’s always going to have auditions.”

  “Still. I think she has a certain amount of momentum. What I was wondering was, could she stay with you for a few days?”

  Mimi looked at her shrewdly. “I didn’t think you approved of that. I charge seven hundred dollars per week.”

  Ruth barely kept herself from gasping. Still, she wasn’t going to put a price tag on Bethany’s career.

  “And you’ll also want to leave her a couple of hundred dollars in cash for food,” Mimi said.

  Ruth sighed. “All right. I’m going to try to fly out first thing in the morning, so I think it would be the easiest thing if I drop her at your house tonight. I’ll take her home and she’ll pack and I’ll give her dinner and then I’ll bring her by.”

  Mimi nodded vaguely, her eyes having returned to her computer screen. Ruth sighed again and left the office, finding Bethy in the greenroom with Allison.

  “I’m going back to pack,” Ruth told her. “I can pack for you if you want to just stay here, or you can come back with me.”

  “No, I’ll stay here. Allison is going to order a pizza.”

  “Ha cha cha,” said Allison.

  ALLISON WAS USED TO PEOPLE CONSTANTLY COMING AND going from Mimi’s house, but that didn’t mean she liked it. Right now it was just Mimi and her, because Hillary and Reba had each gone home for a week, but there had been times during boot camps when she’d had eight girls sleeping in her room, and more were on the sun porch and in the living room on futons, and the only way you could get into the bathroom was by pretending you had diarrhea. The best times were when it was just the two of them, and Mimi let Allison give her a manicure even though Mimi had fingers as fat as sausages and liked colors that were completely out of fashion, like frosted pink. Those were the cozy times, the times when Allison was able to talk her into leaving the studio by seven and taking her to El Pollo Gordo for dinner.

  Partly what she hated about sharing her room (which was furnished with two bunk beds that Mimi had let Allison choose from Ikea, plus Allison’s own twin bed with matching dust ruffle, comforter, and sheets) was that she liked her things to be just so: the Coach tote, the arsenal of MAC cosmetics, the clothes she kept arranged by item type—skirt, skirt, skirt, blouse, blouse, jacket—in her closet and bureau drawers and bathroom vanity drawer. Kids were always moving stuff or using it, so she’d started a color-coded system where she tied yarn around her dresser drawer pulls and cosmetics cases and cl
othes hangers and shampoo and conditioner bottles. Red yarn meant Hands off; yellow yarn meant it belonged to Mimi (there were very few yellow-tagged items because most of Mimi’s things were in Mimi’s room, which no one was allowed to enter ever, not even Allison, under pain of being dropped from her roster); and green yarn meant, This stuff is crap so everyone can use it. Mostly her system was respected, especially since she’d told Reba and Hillary she’d stop advising them on their wardrobe choices if they so much as laid a finger on her things.

  Allison wasn’t exactly thrilled about having Bethany staying with them. Bethany was so naïve. She’d never owned anything from Juicy or had her own makeup or French-braided her hair or anything. But while she was moisturizing her face with a new Clinique lotion sample she’d picked up at the Beverly Center last week, it occurred to Allison that she could try some products out on her, which would be good practice in case Allison had to go into cosmetology and become a famous Hollywood makeup artist, which was her backup plan if she wasn’t a famous actor by the time she was twenty-one. She sat down at her desk and pulled a piece of bright pink construction paper and some felt-tip markers from the drawer and very, very carefully and decoratively made a sign for their door that said ALLISON AND BETHANY, in that order.

  RUTH FOUND HUGH WAITING FOR HER IN THE AIRPORT THE next morning. Over the years they’d flown in and out of Sea-Tac so many times that it felt like an extension of home.

  Hugh was standing at the baggage carousel, wearing his dental smock under his coat, so he must have gone in to do an early filling or two. She felt herself soften. He was a good man, a responsible man, and an excellent provider. She thought of Angie Buehl and her husband, Dillard, and gave thanks. She knew it was wrong to be such a snob, but there it was.

  On the ride into town Hugh caught her up on his meeting with Manny. It had thrown him for a complete loop, he said; he’d always been so healthy that he took it for granted. Normally, Ruth was the one: endometriosis, a faulty thyroid, vicious summer allergies, gout—and, of course, there had been the fertility problem. But now that she was here, he said, he was sure he’d come to grips, even though his mortality was staring him right in the face. And as he told her about diabetes, she could see why. She’d had no idea. There could be organ complications as well as unhealing ulcers, limb amputations, nerve death, heart disease, blindness, and stroke—dear God.