Seeing Stars

by Diane Hammond

  If she were Bethany, she’d never leave this place, not even for LA. Why would you? You got to eat off nice dishes that all matched; you got good night kisses, and several times a day someone asked you if you needed anything, and if you said yes (which Allison rarely did), that person usually got whatever you needed: a warmer sweater, a fresh diet soda, a hug. When someone called your name here, it was often followed by a term of endearment: honey or sweetie. People called you names like that in LA, too, but they didn’t convey love, just prompts. “Go over there, honey, and read that line again,” or “Thank you, sweetheart, you can go.”

  Maybe Allison wasn’t being fair, though. Her mother used to call her baby sometimes. “Baby, I’m going to go out for a little while. Make sure you keep the door locked.” Now Chet-the-douche called her mom baby and no one called Allison anything at all.

  She had told Mimi that, and Mimi had just shrugged and said, “Well, you’re here now, so.” Mimi wasn’t much for terms of endearment, but she cared about Allison, which Allison knew, so it was okay.

  Now, for the first time during her visit, Allison had the house to herself. Bethany was next door babysitting, Hugh was off drilling teeth, and Ruth had run out to the grocery store. Allison walked from room to room, running her hands over things: the backs of the living room chairs and sofa, the top of the TV, the simple dressers in Ruth and Hugh’s room. She lay down on the bed, on her back, looked at the ceiling, and thought, “This is what they see when they go to bed at night,” and it sounded safe and serene. At Chet’s house, bedrooms were places where you closed your eyes and tried not to hear things like the headboard knocking rhythmically against your wall or your mom shouting, “You goddamn son-of-a-bitch bastard.” The odd thing was, Allison could never make out what Chet said back. Maybe he didn’t say anything at all. Sometimes Allison thought she’d rather hear something, even if it was loud or violent, than emptiness into which she couldn’t follow them. She’d even tiptoed from her room down the hall to their closed door once and tried to see through the space between the hinges, but she must have made a noise because Chet, pissed off, had yelled her name, and she’d gone back to the guest room.

  She opened a jar of moisturizer on Ruth’s bureau and sniffed. It smelled like Ruth. She liked that smell, though it wasn’t sexy in any way, just clean and comfortable. She put some on her finger and worked it into her hands, then sniffed. It still smelled good, but it didn’t smell like Ruth anymore, just like Allison.

  She opened some of the bureau drawers. Most of the clothes were ugly, boring women’s clothes, like big white panties and bras that must have been a D or even a double-D cup. Allison was never going to need a D cup; her boobs were on the small side, and so were her mother’s; and since she’d had her period for a couple of years already, they probably weren’t going to grow much more. Her mother had looked at them once and said, “Good thing you weren’t planning on making a living as a stripper, honey, because you don’t have the tits for it. Nice legs, but no tits.”

  Someone like Ruth would never say tits.

  In the bathroom, Allison looked for a razor, but found only an electric shaver. She’d been thinking about cutting again. She liked it here a lot, but she’d be leaving pretty soon, and cutting always made her feel much calmer. It had started in Texas a year ago, when Chet had yelled at her mother for spending too much money on Allison’s clothes. They hadn’t even spent that much, and what they had spent had been at Target: some socks, a new pair of jeans, a jacket. All of it had cost less than a hundred dollars, but Chet had freaked out anyway, making a huge deal out of examining each item on the receipt before getting right into Allison’s mom’s face and saying, “You don’t spend my fucking money on her without asking me.” He hadn’t cared at all that Allison had been right there in the room.

  Later that day, when her mom had left to go drinking with her best friend, Shelley, Allison had gone swimming topless, though she couldn’t say why, except that it had something to do with Chet’s being such a prick, and her wanting to get back at him somehow.

  So from the side of the pool’s shallow end—the end closest to him—she’d reached back and untied the strings holding up her wet bikini top, which came away with a faint sucking sound. She’d balled up the top and slapped it onto the concrete apron of the pool, right near his feet. He’d been pretending to read the Sunday paper, but she knew full well that what he was really doing was watching her as she swam a few slow laps. He watched her all the time, with those hooded eyes and slack mouth. So she pulled herself out of the pool and walked right past him, slowly, into the cabana—that’s what he called it, only it was more like a converted garage with cheap, thin carpeting—and he followed her. He came up behind her and without saying a word he put his hands on her breasts—not gently, not at all gently—and yanked her backward. She’d felt his hard-on against her. He’d forced her against him with one arm while he yanked his pants down with the other, and then he spun her around. She had just enough time to see his erection—a horrible, red, veiny thing—before he locked his mouth over hers in a kiss that burned like acid. Then he hooked her behind the knee with his foot and she folded up like she was hinged, dropping onto the carpet. He was on the floor, too, right on top of her, and he shoved his cock at her over and over—and it hurt, it hurt a lot—until he broke through and drove all the way up inside her, right up to the hilt of him like a knife. She would swear she heard her hymen tear, though it probably wasn’t possible. She could feel the cheap indoor-outdoor carpet scraping away skin on her lower back as he drove into her over and over; and then he must have come, because he stopped and slackened abruptly on top of her, suddenly so heavy she couldn’t breathe. She started pushing at his shoulders so he’d get off her, get off. He rolled away but reached out to stroke her cheek, except she slapped the hand away. Then he got up and she got up, too; and he pulled his clothes into place but she just stood there, thinking that she didn’t want to put her bathing suit back on because it would be cold and wet and it would sting the rug burn on her back. When he finished with his clothes and brought his face toward hers she thought he was going to kiss her again, but instead he brushed her cheek with his cheek lightly, lingeringly, which gave her goose bumps, and whispered, “If you ever tell a living soul, I will know and I will kill you.”

  After he went outside she looked at her back in a mirror and found on her lower back an abrasion the size of a fist, weeping clear liquid. She left her wet bathing suit where it was on the cabana floor, walked into the house stark naked, and went straight to her bathroom, where she filled her Waterpik—she’d always had excellent dental hygiene—with water too hot to touch. She brought the thing into the shower with her and inserted the Waterpik nozzle into her vagina as far as it would go. She hadn’t been able to feel the heat until it was dripping down her legs like blood.

  She’d stayed in the shower until the hot water ran out, and when it did she sat naked on the bathroom’s fluffy pink, little-girl rug, sucking on her knee until, by accident, her eyes lit on the disposable razor she used in the shower to shave her legs and underarms. She crawled over and picked it up. There were ten perfectly round bruises on her arms, five on each from Chet’s fingers. She held the double blade so it connected two of the bruises and pressed the razor home. Two thin lines of blood welled up like tears.

  She was on a plane back to LA two days later, with five one-hundred-dollar bills zipped into a new Coach bag that had been left on top of her suitcase. Inside there was a note, written in script like barbed wire, that said, “Remember.” Every month after that she got another five hundred dollars in cash in the mail. She made a point of spending every last penny. Once she gave a fifty-dollar bill to the homeless man who lived in a freeway cloverleaf and panhandled near Mimi’s studio, but usually she spent it on whatever. The day after she got back, she bought a box cutter at Kmart and cut four intersecting lines into her left arm: tic tac toe. You win.

  Allison wandered out of Ruth’s bedroom
and into Bethany’s. The girl had a ton of stuff. Books, books, books, paintings on the walls instead of posters, a nice TV, and all these Starbucks teddy bears in different outfits. Bethany had told her she had every Starbucks bear that was ever sold in Seattle, and that meant about six a year since she was eight. She had so many, she said, that a lot of them were in plastic totes in the garage. Allison picked up one that was dressed in bunny pajamas, bunny slippers, and a hood with bunny ears. It must have been an Easter bear. She kissed it on the lips, put its stubby arms around her neck, then put it back on Bethany’s bed and wandered out to the kitchen. The kitchen was her favorite room, with nice windows, cheerful yellow walls with white trim, and a generally homey feel. From there she drifted into the dining room and over to the sideboard that held the oak box full of silverware. The inside of the box was lined with thick, metallic-smelling, plum-colored flannel, which, according to Ruth, kept the silver from tarnishing. Allison picked up a serving spoon, looked at her reflection in the bowl, and stuck out her tongue. When she heard Ruth’s car crunching in the driveway she slipped the spoon into her pocket, closed up the box, and met Ruth at the door to see if she needed any help with the groceries.

  IT WAS ALWAYS HARD ON MIMI WHEN ALLISON WAS AWAY, though she’d never tell Allison that. During the two weeks the girl had been in Seattle and then Houston for Christmas, the house had echoed; even Tina Marie had been abnormally clingy. Not that Mimi was at the house much, but still, you had to sleep some time, and the greenroom couch at the studio was too soft and too lumpy, though if she’d been twenty years younger, she probably wouldn’t have cared. Now it just made her sciatica kick up, so she worked through the evening, buttoned the place up, and drove home at the DUI hour, when all the drunks, drug users, and belligerents came out. This she knew from experience. In the past she had had too much to drink herself on more than a few occasions after a client blew a network mix-and-match, underperformed for the role of a lifetime, or choked on what should have been a cakewalk of a guest-star audition for a casting director who was a fan. That’s when the bottle of wine came out of the beat-to-shit credenza she had picked up, like many of her other furnishings, at a swap meet in Tarzana, along with the juice glass with the picture of Tweety Bird on it that had been given to her by one of her little six-year-olds however many years ago. The first glass of cheap chianti was always bitter, but the wine mellowed over the next three or four glasses until she could drink it like fruit juice.

  MIMI PICKED ALLISON UP AT LAX. SHE’D BEEN CIRCLING the airport for an hour, she said, with Tina Marie barking in the backseat every time a plane flew over. She gave Allison a quick hug after Allison hoisted her suitcase into the trunk and hopped into the front seat.

  “So?” Mimi said. “Did you have a good time in Seattle?”

  Allison nodded. “They have a cute house. Small, you know, but cozy. They don’t have expensive furniture and stuff, though, which is weird since he’s a dentist and he probably makes a ton of money. But it was the kind of house where you could eat in the living room and put your feet up. We went bowling, and we shopped, and it was Hanukkah, so we lit candles and played with these little tops and stuff. Oh, and we saw a couple of movies, except at the end we were the only ones clapping. I guess people don’t clap at the movies unless you’re in LA. Hugh—he said I should call him that, not Dr. Rabinowitz—was in a really good mood the whole time. You could tell because he made us waffles and pancakes. He’s probably really lonely when they’re gone.”

  “And Houston?”

  Allison shrugged and looked out the window. “They gave me a pair of diamond studs and some Jean Paul Gaultier perfume.” She stuck out her wrist so Mimi could smell it. “Mostly they were never around, though. They had all these Christmas parties to go to, but Chet made me stay home because I’m underage. Like that counts if you’re at a party in someone’s house. I guess the bubble over the pool broke, so no swimming. They had this Wii thing, so I played that.”

  Mimi nodded. “Did you download the sides?”

  Allison patted the side of her Coach tote. “I printed them this morning so I could work on them on the plane. Oh, and guess who was in first class? Jessica Alba. She was with some guy, I can’t remember his name, but you could tell he wanted everyone to see him with her. He’d make eye contact with everyone he could as they went by. I didn’t look at him, just because he wanted me to so much.” She fished a compact out of her bag. “She’s pretty.”

  “Who?”

  Allison rolled her eyes. “Jessica Alba. Her skin’s not that great, though.” She pulled down the car visor and opened the compact so she could powder her nose. “She had a zit right here.” She touched a place on her chin. “You could tell she’d tried to cover it up, but you could see it anyway.” She put the compact away and settled the tote on the floor by her feet. “So what’s new at the house?”

  Mimi shrugged. “It’s been pretty quiet. Tina Marie ate a shoe, we found a mouse in the kitchen. Little things. Nothing interesting.”

  “Whose?”

  “What?”

  “Whose shoe?” Allison turned and shook her finger at the little dog in the backseat. “If it was mine, I’ll be so mad.” Tina Marie straightened her narrow shoulders and looked out the car window dismissively. She was riding in the doggie booster seat that Allison and Mimi had bought for her after reading an article on dog auto safety, and she clearly considered it an assault on her dignity.

  Mimi answered for her. “Not yours. Reba’s or Hillary’s, and it was only a Croc flip-flop. I’ve told those girls how many times that anything chewy is fair game.”

  “Oh, whew. Did anyone book anything?”

  “Perry booked an Alpha-Bits commercial.” Perry was one of Mimi’s few African American clients, a four-year-old with a smile like an angel. “He’s booking everything right now.”

  “Sure, because he’s cute,” Allison said. “Nobody else?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  When they got home Allison climbed out of the car, freed a haughty Tina Marie from the loathsome booster seat, and wrestled her suitcase out of the trunk. Mimi took her tote. Allison was glad to be home; she danced into the front hall and turned to Mimi, her eyes twinkling. “So did you miss me?”

  “Of course I missed you,” Mimi said.

  “Oh, good. Me too,” said Allison, looking around the house and hugging herself. “Let’s order out—Chinese. Please? Can we? My treat.”

  “It’s just us,” Mimi said. “Hillary and Reba won’t get back until the day after tomorrow.”

  “Then bring it on, dog,” said Allison in her gangsta voice. She pulled a takeout menu from a drawer in the kitchen, tucked the phone receiver between her shoulder and her ear, and ordered without even asking Mimi what she wanted, because Mimi always wanted the same thing: double happiness chicken and potstickers. For herself Allison ordered lo mein with pea pods and shrimp, and an order of pork fried rice to share.

  “Did you TiVo Ghost Whisperer?” Allison asked Mimi while they were waiting for the delivery. It was one of their favorite shows, and neither one of them thought Jennifer Love Hewitt was fat; she just had big boobs, which Allison, for one, envied. The guides at the Universal Studios theme park said you could see her Rollerblading around the lot at lunch sometimes, and that she always waved at the trams full of tourists. “Did you remember?”

  Mimi had remembered.

  When the food finally arrived they paused the TV while Allison paid. She tipped the delivery guy eight dollars because he was cute and he always blushed when she answered the door. The first time he ever delivered to them he included a headshot of himself and a résumé with the food order. A lot of delivery people did that. You never knew whose house you were going to; the worst that could happen was it got thrown away, but that wouldn’t matter if you made even one decent contact.

  They watched the rest of their show while they ate. Mimi pointed out that she used to manage one of the guest stars, a good-looking
guy in his twenties with a nice smile. “He always overacted,” she said. “It used to just drive me crazy. Someone must have finally gotten through to him, though. That or he’s just finally growing up.”

  “Hey!” Allison said, suddenly leaning forward and pointing at the TV. “Look, that’s right off Lankershim. Remember when we got stuck in traffic because they had that whole detour set up, and we thought it was for CSI? I bet it was this.”

  When the show was over they put all the trash together and Allison stashed away the extra soy sauce and an extra pair of chopsticks, which she used to put her hair up sometimes when she washed her face. Mimi said she was going to take a bath, so Allison dragged her suitcase back to her room and unpacked. She hadn’t worn a lot of what she’d brought, so it was all still neatly folded.

  And underneath it all, carefully nested in one of her socks, was a single silver spoon.

  January 2007

  In Hollywood, the sheer number of celebrities makes you a celebrity, too, if only by proxy. You spend, because they do: on clothes you won’t wear, on handbags and hair extensions and waxing and toning and being, in general, ready—for your moment, your ascension, your destiny. And it’s not the destiny you already know, because that one can’t possibly be all you were meant for; no, it’s your other destiny, the one for which you’ve been preparing for years, the one where you wave to the crowds and shop on Rodeo Drive even for your socks and cigarettes; the destiny where your car windows are tinted to lend you some privacy you won’t really want until the thrill of recognition wears off and you no longer walk down a street watching for people to catch sight of you, elbow the next person over, and whisper your name. Cell phone pictures of you fly through the air like angels, and you graciously stop to sign your name on cocktail napkins and T-shirts; for this, you carry a Sharpie with you at all times. You are prepared because you’ve practiced; you have perfected your public smile and gracious, musical, lilting laugh as you protest, over and over, “I’m no different than you, you know,” when the thing you love the very most is that you are. You pull your fame around you like a cloak that you wear to restaurants like Nobu, where you lunch now with your celebrity friends because your old friends couldn’t possibly understand anymore what it’s like to be you.