Seeing Stars

by Diane Hammond

  He didn’t say anything for the rest of the ride and neither did Cassie or her mom. The traffic in Laurel Canyon wasn’t too bad, and they were over the hill and at the bowling alley on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City a full ten minutes early.

  “All right, you guys,” Cassie’s mom said. “Hop out. Cassie knows to call me when you’re done. I’ll be doing some shopping in Sherman Oaks. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Quinn, and then he remembered. “Thank you for the ride and everything.”

  “Break a pin,” Cassie’s mom said, and drove away smiling.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  THE DAY AFTER HER CONVERSATION WITH DENISE ADDISON, Mimi left Reba and Hillary at the studio, telling them she was running Allison to an audition. Instead, she drove to the Good Earth on Ventura Boulevard—she hated the place, but it was a nod toward Allison, who loved it—and asked to be put in a booth by the window toward the back.

  Allison ordered a soy shake and egg white omelet; Mimi ordered a cup of coffee and eight-grain toast. It was mid-morning and no one much was around. She stirred a packet of real sugar into her coffee—at her weight, fussing over the extra twenty calories was laughable—and watched Allison nervously examine a switch of hair for split ends. Fortified by coffee, Mimi began.

  “All right,” she said. “Here’s the deal. I’m going to give you a full studio scholarship”—there was no such thing, but Allison wouldn’t know that—“which means your mom won’t pay for you to stay with me anymore. You’ll drop out of acting for a year—no auditions, no classes, nothing—and you’ll go to real school, instead. There’s a charter high school for the arts in Van Nuys that’ll take you next fall. If you don’t maintain a B average at the end of the first semester—and I mean a B, not a B minus—you’ll be on a plane to Texas the next day. You’ll be tutored once a week until you’re sixteen so you’ll be ready to pass the proficiency test and get your legal eighteen. If you don’t pass the CHSPE by your second try, we’re done. You’ll get one hundred and seventy-five dollars a month as allowance, period. No Beverly Center shopping sprees, no credit cards, nada. And you’ll be paying for your own movies, snacks, and whatever else. You can go back to Houston any time you want, but as long as you stay with me, the rules don’t change and nothing I’ve said is negotiable.”

  Their waitress slid Allison’s omelet and soy shake in front of her, and handed Mimi her toast with a basket of organic butter and jams. Mimi waited until she left before she went on.

  “I’ve also told Hillary’s and Reba’s parents they’ll have to find someplace else for the girls to live, if they’re going to have them stay in Hollywood. I’m not going to house anyone anymore.”

  “Except me.”

  “Except you.”

  Allison watched her with absolute concentration. “What about boot camp?” The summer session was due to begin in seven weeks.

  “I’ll have the parents pay studio families to house their kids. I’m not going to change anything during the day.”

  “I know, but will I get to do boot camp?”

  “You won’t participate, no. You’ll be working for me, to help me run it. I’ll pay you five dollars an hour. Depending on your behavior and how hard you work, I may or may not let you do social things with them. You’re going to have to earn that.”

  Mimi spread butter, put a clot of jam on her toast. She’d expected Allison’s face to brighten, but it didn’t. Instead she said, “She won’t let me. She wants me to come home.”

  “She did, but now she’s agreed to do this.”

  “Why—”

  Mimi held up her hand. “I’m not done yet.”

  Allison watched her.

  “If and when you go back to acting, I’m going to take a manager’s fee of twenty-five percent of everything you earn until you’re eighteen—really eighteen, not legal eighteen—and I’m going to have you and your mom both sign a contract saying so. It’ll reimburse me for your room and board. If you book a series, it’ll add up to a lot of money. If you can focus again, it’ll happen. If you can’t, once you’re eighteen you’re going to be on your own.”

  “What if she changes her mind?” Allison asked.

  “I don’t think she will.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.” In fact, Mimi knew because the terms of her deal with Denise weren’t quite what she’d laid out for Allison. Mimi wasn’t just giving Allison a free ride to live with her. Mimi was actually paying Denise to let Allison stay with her. It wasn’t much, but Mimi had set the figure high enough that Denise would be reluctant to do without it, once she’d started receiving it. Call her a cynic, but Mimi was an absolute believer that money was the ultimate motivator, at least for a woman like Denise. “And if we have to, we can get you emancipated. That’s it,” Mimi said.

  Across the table, Allison started crying.

  “What?” said Mimi, handing her a napkin.

  Allison blew her nose.

  “Talk to me,” Mimi said. “This is the time to put everything on the table.”

  “You’re going to keep me,” Allison said.

  “Yes, I’m going to keep you.”

  “I didn’t think you would.”

  “Why would you think that?” Mimi said. “Of course I’m keeping you.”

  “You made Quinn go.”

  “You aren’t Quinn.”

  “I’m ready to go home now,” Allison said, even though she hadn’t touched her food. “Can we go home?”

  “Yes,” Mimi said. “We can go home.”

  THAT NIGHT, ALLISON GOT INTO BED AND JUST LAY THERE, looking at the ceiling. Fat Reba was snoring; Hillary kept turning over and over and over. Allison saw a vision of herself tiptoeing up to each one of them with a big fluffy pillow in her hand and suffocating them. She might just do it. Not really, though.

  From Mimi’s room she could hear Jay Leno doing his Tonight Show monologue. She threw back her covers, put her slippers on—lovely satin mules with feathers over the insteps, bought on sale at Neiman Marcus—and click-clacked across the wood floors of the hall and living room and stood in Mimi’s bedroom doorway—which, strictly speaking, was forbidden.

  Mimi was sitting up in bed in a pair of men’s pajamas. She looked tired and disheveled. Tina Marie was snoring on the foot of the bed.

  “I can’t sleep,” Allison said.

  “It’s early.” It was, at least by household standards.

  “I know, but I’m tired.”

  Mimi patted the bed and moved over to make room for Allison. Allison slipped under the sheets, fluffed one of Mimi’s extra pillows, and propped it behind her. They watched Leno for a few minutes. Allison didn’t get any of the jokes, but she didn’t really care. It was just nice to be sitting here. Safe. She wondered if Jay Leno knew what an ugly man he was. If she were that ugly, she probably wouldn’t even want to be an actor, because someone like her was going to sit there in a theater in the dark and think how bad she looked up there on the screen. She snuggled deeper into the pillows, pulled the comforter higher, and closed her eyes. She could probably go to sleep now, here, in Mimi’s room, listening to the studio audience laugh about things that didn’t matter.

  “Show me your arms,” Mimi said.

  “What?”

  “I want to see your arms.”

  Allison crossed them over her chest. “Why?”

  “I want to see if you’re still cutting.”

  Allison sat still for a minute. Then she uncrossed her arms, which she hadn’t worked on in a while—because she’d moved lower, but she wasn’t about to say that—and which were starting to heal. She held them out in front of her and turned them over. Even so, she could hear Mimi suck in her breath.

  “My God,” Mimi said. “What were you thinking?”

  Allison put her arms away. “I don’t know. Nothing.” Which of course wasn’t true. She’d been thinking about everything—Bethany’s betrayal, Chet-the-Oilman’s rape, her mother making her come back t
o Houston, her failure with Carlyle.

  “Doesn’t it hurt?”

  Allison shrugged. “Sometimes. Not usually.”

  Mimi shook her head. “You know they’ll scar.”

  “No, they won’t. They’re just little cuts. They don’t go very deep.”

  “Oh,” said Mimi, “you’d be surprised.”

  EVERY FRIDAY NIGHT, HUGH AND HELENE SHARED A POT roast or brisket dinner. Tonight they had eaten over a vigorous discussion of just how much of an idiot George W. Bush was. Hugh put him at nine point five on a scale of one to ten; Helene was inclined to go easier on him because he wasn’t, after all, an especially bright man, which wasn’t his fault. His parents should have known better than to encourage him to pursue a career for which he was so clearly ill-suited. Then, while Hugh was forking up a potato, she said, “Hanummf.”

  Fork poised in midair, he and Helene had exchanged identical alarmed expressions.

  “What?” Hugh said.

  “Peaninomoffn,” she said.

  “Smile for me, okay, Mom?”

  And with effort she mimicked a smile—or, more accurately, her left side mimicked a smile. Her right side sat the little exercise out.

  “Okay,” Hugh said, jumping up from the table, pressing the kitchen’s emergency button, and then immediately dialing 911. Helene continued to try to talk, tears of frustration streaming down her cheeks, until Hugh finally grasped her hands and said, “It’s all right, Mom. We’ll take care of this. Okay? We’ll take care of this. Just try and relax now. Help’s only a couple minutes away.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, AT THE ALAMEDA EXTENDED STAY Apartments, Ruth’s phone went off while she and Bethy were getting ready to go to a commercial audition for bathroom tissue. Ruth was groggy even though she’d been awake for hours; she and Hugh had been on the phone until late last night, talking quietly in the courtyard so she wouldn’t wake up Bethy. He’d called from the hospital, exhausted: it looked like a stroke. Ruth’s first thought had been, So that’s what the psychic meant, followed, to her lasting shame, by, Thank God it wasn’t me or Bethy.

  Now, dreading the worst, she searched for her phone. Bethy found it first, buried at the bottom of Ruth’s purse. Instead of Hugh, though, it was Allison, asking for Ruth.

  “Do you think you guys will be at the studio later?”

  “Probably not,” Ruth said. “Bethy’s got an audition.”

  “Could you come, though?”

  Ruth sighed. “What do you need, Allison?”

  “No, I don’t need anything. I have something to tell you guys.”

  “Oh?”

  “So I was hoping you were going to be here.”

  “All right,” said Ruth. “We’ll try, but I can’t promise.”

  “Thank you,” said Allison, and Ruth thought she hadn’t heard that voice in a long time. Thank you for letting me stay with you. She didn’t have the energy for the child right now, though.

  As soon as Ruth got off the phone it rang again, and this time it was Hugh. Ruth put the phone against her chest and said to Bethy, “It’s Vee, honey. I’m going to take it outside.”

  “She’s having seizures,” Hugh told her now. “They don’t know why, so they’re doing an MRI. It may not have been a stroke at all.”

  Poor Hugh. “Where are you now?”

  “In the waiting room at Swedish. I had Margaret cancel all my appointments.”

  “I’ll come home.”

  “Not yet. Let’s see what it is first. We could already be past the worst of it.”

  He didn’t sound like he thought they were past the worst of it, though. He sounded like he was preparing himself for more bad news. “I’m so sorry, honey,” Ruth said.

  “She’s scared.”

  “Of course she is,” Ruth said.

  “So am I.”

  “I know.”

  “Well,” he said. However ambivalent Ruth’s own feelings about Helene might be, Hugh was utterly devoted to her.

  “Call as soon as you know anything,” she said. “Bethy has an audition for toilet paper, but I’ll keep my phone turned up.”

  “Toilet paper,” Hugh said.

  “Charmin. I know.”

  She could hear him sigh. “All right. They said we probably won’t know anything for at least a couple of hours.”

  “Well, I’ll stand by. I love you, honey. Tell her Bethy and I are thinking of her every minute.”

  “You haven’t told her, have you?” Hugh said.

  “No. Not until we know more. But your mother doesn’t have to know that.”

  After Hugh had hung up, Ruth just sat there looking stupidly at the cell phone in her hand and thinking about how, in a single moment, everything could change.

  Bethy was standing at the threshold of the closet when Ruth let herself back into the apartment, looking at her clothes. “What do you wear to an audition about toilet paper?” she asked.

  “Who knows,” said Ruth. “Who cares? I say just wear a nice T-shirt and jeans. Look like a nice middle-class kid who takes pains with her hygiene.”

  “I don’t even know what that means,” said Bethy.

  “It means it doesn’t matter.” Ruth took a clean purple T-shirt out of the bureau and handed it to Bethy. “Isn’t their logo lavender?”

  Bethy shrugged, turned her back on Ruth, and changed. “What did Allison want?”

  “She wanted to know if we were going by the studio today.”

  “I wonder why? I mean, except for in the car the other day she hardly even talks to us anymore.”

  “We could swing by, if your audition’s on time. She said she had something to give to us.”

  “Whatever,” Bethy said.

  IN THEIR BEAUTIFULLY APPOINTED APARTMENT AT THE Grove, Angie was stretched out on the living room sofa, feeling like roadkill and watching the little Roomba vacuum go around and around. It was an early model, and its sensors hadn’t been perfected yet. As she watched—her head aching—it made an abrupt and unwarranted right-hand turn straight into a wall. It should have turned itself around again but it didn’t; it just kept straining against the wall.

  Through half-closed eyes, Angie looked at her daughter puttering in the kitchen and wondered what she’d look like at thirty-five. Angie would have liked to see that—she would have liked that more than anything. But it was getting easier to picture Laurel’s life—and Dillard’s, for that matter—without her in it. The thought used to flatten her—Laurel’s wedding, the birth of her first child, her laugh as it would sound when she was fifty. Now, when she thought about the future, she got only a quick, powerful kick to the gut. One day, probably when she was closer to dying, she’d be so aware of their going on without her every single minute of every single, final day that there wouldn’t be a moment when she had to remember all over again that she was dying. Maybe that would be easier.

  IN THE KITCHEN AS SHE WAS PULLING TOGETHER A CHEESE and bread and crudités tray that would pass for dinner, Laurel drifted through her favorite beauty pageant memories. Angie, dressing her up in a princess dress, patent-leather pumps, and a stiff itchy slip, high ponytail and spangles in her hair. Angie, stroking on Laurel’s lipstick from Laurel’s own little makeup case, applying mascara and blusher and saying to Dillard, “Isn’t she a little angel girl? Oh, take another picture, honey,” and Dillard kneeling down on hotel lobby carpeting from Alabama to Tennessee to squeeze off shot after shot with his professional-quality, auto-wind camera. Angie, saying the same thing to her at every pageant, as Laurel waited in the wings: “Show the Lord you’re listening.” The first time she said it Laurel asked her what she meant, and Angie said, “He has blessed you with beauty inside and out. He has big plans for you, honey, and if you’re listening to Him, He’ll help you excel at whatever you do.”

  So Laurel had smiled for the Lord and the judges, had learned to dance and sing and comport herself in a way that was both poised and vivacious. And over the years she had excelled on the pageant circuit, winning Littl
e Miss titles in her town, county, and, almost, her state, where she’d been second runner-up. So when Angie got sick, Laurel had felt she could rightly ask a favor of the Lord in return, and find that He was listening. She had put in years of unceasing toil by then, not only in pageants but also in acting classes, talent competitions, and promotional events at shopping malls and for civic groups. In Hollywood she had sung songs about boxed macaroni, praised the superior quality and durability of paper towels, and eaten chicken and hamburgers and chocolate chip cookies with a glad heart because surely these would prove her godliness. Theatrically, she’d finally booked a four-line role on CSI; a one-liner that had later been cut on Unfabulous; and, her crowning achievement, a flashback that was almost heartbreakingly poignant, though silent, as a young Francine on a made-for-TV movie, in which she, as Francine, walked down a country lane and into a flowering apple orchard with her father, who would soon lose his life on the battlefields of France during World War II.

  In all, in eight months Laurel had booked more jobs than anyone else in the studio: eighteen commercials, infomercials, industrials, and PSAs, as well as the three theatrical roles. And she showed no signs of slowing down. The more sallow and exhausted Angie looked, the more Laurel forced herself to bloom.

  On every set, in secret, she’d asked the PA whether Angie could have the most comfortable chair, the dressing room with a couch, the one closest to the bathrooms, because she was terribly sick. She varied the explanation, saying Angie had kidney disease or congestive heart failure—things that were clearly serious without being contagious, though she never once said cancer. And the PAs always came through, especially in the last months when all you had to do was look at Angie to see that something was very wrong. Oblivious, Angie constantly marveled that people treated them so nicely on set, always arranging the schedule so Laurel was one of the first actors to be signed out at the end of the day. Angie never once caught on, a fact that Laurel was more proud of by far than any of the work she did for the camera.