“Teenagers,” Sandor said indulgently. “We know about their attention span, don’t we Brian?”
“All too well.”
4
November 15, 1971
Dearest Mimi,
I hope you still live at your old address. Even though I always write “Please forward if necessary” on the envelope, it’s like putting a message into a bottle and throwing it in the ocean since you can’t answer me and it’s been just over two years since we came here.
Everything’s changed for the better since my last letter. We’ve moved to Santa Monica because my mother decided that Maggie should be brought up on this side of Los Angeles. It’s so pretty here and about fifteen degrees cooler than the Valley. You can easily get to the beach on the weekends, and that’s the place I feel happiest. When I take a long barefoot walk right in the edge of the water, until I fall into the rhythm of the waves, I get a blissful feeling of peace and happiness. I adore the Pacific! We’ve rented a cute little house and my father got a promotion, so now he’s head of the department again.
My big news is all about school. I’m on a full scholarship at Marymount, where the nuns belong to the Religious Sacred Heart of Mary. It’s a really good school with a terrific drama department. Sister Elizabeth, who’s in charge, is a ball of fire, and I think she likes me.
The other girls, most of them anyway, are pretty snooty. They all seem to have known each other all of their lives, lots of them are very rich, and the big deal here is all about which girls, two years from now, will make their debut at a ball, with their dads in white tie and tails! Lots of them are all members of “old California families”—how old can a family be in such a new state, I’d like to know!—and their mothers and their grandmothers all went to Marymount too. The fact that I went to Sacred Heart gives me a little standing in spite of my lowly scholarship status. Luckily we all wear uniforms but you wouldn’t believe some of the dreamy cars with chauffeurs that come to pick them up after school, while I wait for the bus.
There have been a lot of sweet-sixteen parties lately, for the in-crowd, but when I turned sixteen, I didn’t say anything about it to anyone, since my mother would never have given me a party and anyway, I didn’t exactly know who to ask. Did you have a party? I like to imagine that you did and that it was absolutely wonderful. And that you missed me a little.
The amazing thing about California is that when you’re sixteen you can get a driving license. Lots of my classmates are driving! Can you believe it? My mother doesn’t trust me enough to let me get a job after school, but I bet I could earn a secondhand car in a couple of years. I still have to come home immediately after my last class unless there’s a rehearsal. And I’m not allowed to go to anyone’s house to study … so, naturally, it’s hard to make new friends. You and your big “bad influence” are never far from my parents’ minds! Ah, well, I guess I can’t complain. But if I can’t complain to you, who can I complain to?
I’ll bet you’re wondering about Maggie. Well, you shouldn’t worry. She’s got my mother hanging over her every waking minute and lots of her sleeping minutes. My father too, when he’s home. They absolutely adore her. There’s no question in my mind that they’ve truly convinced themselves that she’s their very own baby. As I wrote you last time, my mother has never let me feed her or diaper her because I was “too clumsy” and now she’s decided that I’m “too busy” with my homework to even be allowed to play with Maggie … as a special treat every once in a while I get to tell her a story! I guess they think that I’ll contaminate the poor little thing.
But Maggie’s a very sweet, loving little girl who’s growing smarter and more fun every day. Remember how we used to talk about the power of positive thinking and how we could grow big breasts if we concentrated on it hard enough? I must be using this technique on myself, without realizing it, because I feel that Maggie truly is my sister. Maybe I’ve been brainwashed because of circumstances, but the whole maternal thing—I just don’t feel it, Mimi. Nothing. I guess it’s just as well, because otherwise I’d be too sad to stand it.
Maggie’s fat and bouncy, and whenever she falls down she laughs as if it’s a big joke. She has the best-natured perpetual grin on her round face—kind of like a gap-toothed jack-o’-lantern—unless she’s hungry, in which case she just falls apart and screams bloody murder. She has a mop of jet-black curls and very pink cheeks and my mother’s bright blue eyes. Riley blue, right from the Old Country. She sort of looks like an old-fashioned doll, with long, blinky eyelashes, and my mother dresses her in fancy dresses she gets filthy and grows out of in a couple of months.
She calls me “Tessa” because she can’t pronounce Teresa. It used to break my heart when I came home and she was still taking her nap and I had to go straight to my room to do my homework, when I knew she was going to be waking up any minute, all smiling and smelling heavenly and warm and squashy with that wonderful baby softness and divine baby stink. But that was my mother’s favorite time to be alone with her, and anyway, I really needed the time to concentrate on my schoolwork. After all, I have my scholarship to keep up, which pretty much means getting all A’s. Maggie is my mother’s baby, that’s the way it is, and one day when I’m married I’ll have one of my own.
Are you finally allowed to go out on dates? And why am I asking, since I can’t get an answer? Needless to say, I’ve never met any boys who would ask me, and if, God forbid, one did, I wouldn’t be permitted to go, because we all know what THAT could lead to (as if I’d ever do THAT again! You’d think they’d finally realize that I’m not completely crazy.). Actually I’m such a boringly good girl that I almost have to make up sins to confess, like, “Father, I took the Lord’s name in vain three days ago when I burned my finger on the frying pan.”
Although you’re supposed to feel absolved after you completely confess a sin and truly repent and have the firm purpose of never sinning again, which I did, believe you me, it hasn’t worked the way it’s supposed to. The Sacrament of Penance didn’t make me feel better, yet I was absolved, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. The Big Three. Shouldn’t that be enough, Mimi? Maybe it’s because my parents treat me like a highly potential sinner, but I can’t get rid of the guilt. I bet you’re not one tenth as screwed up as I am, but then you never were, my bad little Mimi. You enjoyed your sins!
This is all for now. If anything amazing happens, I’ll write again before next year, but I have a feeling that life is just going to go on like this until I’m eighteen and go to college. Probably Mount St. Mary’s, a great education but awfully close to home. More nuns. Not that I don’t like nuns, but it’ll be fun to have a man teacher for a change. Maybe my parents will go bananas, give up entirely on me and let me go off to wild, wicked Berkeley, where I’ll become a flower child or a hippy, or is that as over as the Swinging London we used to talk about so longingly?
With all my love, a million happy, slightly belated returns on your birthday, have a wonderful year, and have a lot of fun for me, but not too much. Remember, THEY SWIM!
I’ll never forget you.
Teresa
5
Teresa, I’ll be picking you up at school tomorrow afternoon,” Agnes said, opening the door and looking in on her daughter.
“Don’t tell me it’s time to get my teeth cleaned again,” Teresa protested, peering up from her homework.
“No, as a matter of fact I’m driving you into Hollywood to an audition for teenaged girls. Paramount is doing a remake of Little Women and they’re looking for young actresses. You’re as ready as you’ve ever been, and your father’s agreed at last. Be sure to wash your hair after dinner.”
“No! Really? You’re not kidding?” Teresa jumped up in flying excitement.
“Certainly not. Why would I be kidding?” her mother said coldly.
“But it’s been years … you never said anything more about … I imagined you’d given up on that idea.”
“Give up? After all
I’ve done for you?” Agnes’s eyes flashed in anger and a clear edge of unmistakable contempt.
“Why did you wait till the last minute to tell me?” Teresa asked, ignoring her mother’s familiar look, a deeply wounding look she tried not to let herself dwell on. “I could have reread that book! It was so old-fashioned I don’t think I ever got through it.”
“I have no idea what part they’re reading for,” Agnes replied. “This isn’t something you can study. In any case, I found out about it only two days ago in the L.A. Times—they’re holding auditions all week at a casting director’s office. I have a sitter for Maggie.”
“Oh, Mother, Mother, thank you!”
“There’s only one way you can thank me, Teresa, and that’s by doing well. I have no illusions that you’ll get a part in the first movie you audition for, but there’s no reason why you shouldn’t eventually justify the sacrifices we’ve had to make for your sake.”
“What should I wear?” Teresa asked, trying to head off the well-worn subject of sacrifice as quickly as possible.
“There won’t be time to change, and in any case you’re better off wearing your uniform. It doesn’t hurt to let people know you’re a Marymount girl, and something classic looks better than trying too hard. Anyway, they won’t care about your clothes. Just sit down and finish your homework, Teresa. Stop looking in the mirror.”
“Couldn’t I at least borrow your tweezers and pluck my eyebrows a little bit? They’re too thick,” she begged. Anything she did would be better than nothing.
“There’s absolutely nothing wrong with your eyebrows. I knew I shouldn’t have told you until tomorrow, but I wanted to be certain you had clean hair and it takes forever to dry.”
“Yes, Mother.”
As soon as Agnes closed the door, Teresa resumed her study of her face in the mirror over her bathroom sink. She was allowed to use no makeup except a small tube of colorless ChapStick, but like every other girl at school she had a stash of forbidden cosmetics, which she, unlike most of them, knew how to use, thanks to her adventures with Mimi. Stealthily, with quick but shaking hands, she applied lipstick and eyeliner and, turning her head from side to side, tried to judge the results.
She looked far too bold, she decided, to play any of the girlish Victorian parts she remembered from the book she’d read years ago. She hadn’t used makeup in so long that she hadn’t realized how very mature it would make her look now. Teresa scrubbed her face and considered it in its nakedness. Clear, very white skin with a faint rosy blush over her cheeks, as if she’d just come in from cold, crisp air, a blush she’d always had no matter what the weather. Her nose was straight and long enough, it seemed to her, to be in proportion with her other features; she had her father’s high cheekbones and his extra width of jawbone at that special point under the ear where the jaw meets the neck; her eyes had always been a color she could never quite figure out, an odd shade of green with a hint of gray; her mouth was as wide as ever, her neck as long. Teresa flashed herself an experimental smile. No question but her teeth were her best feature, she thought. Thank God you couldn’t see her gums—that would have been a misfortune, considering the size of her smile.
People had always thought she was beautiful, Teresa reflected; she’d often heard them say so, either to her face or when she wasn’t supposed to be listening. Not just relatives, not just Mimi. Even Sister Elizabeth, the ancient but extraordinary English teacher and drama coach, had once cautioned her that it wasn’t “enough to be beautiful” to play Joan of Arc. She honestly couldn’t see what they meant, dearly as she’d like to. Her face was just the face she’d grown up with. She wished she could manage to convince herself that she was beautiful. It would make the audition so much less frightening.
If she really were beautiful, wouldn’t she have made more friends at school? Wouldn’t her mother have forgiven her by now? And, by sixteen, shouldn’t she have stopped asking herself such utterly self-pitying and useless questions?
Peggy Brian Westbrook, the veteran casting director, and her young assistant, Fiona Bridges, opened fresh Cokes.
“How many does this make today?” Peggy inquired wearily.
“Cokes or girls?” Fiona asked. She was a twenty-six-year-old sprig of a large London family that had made its living in and around the theater for two hundred years. Fiona, ambitious in a way that belied her blond, placid, classically Anglo-Saxon, riding-to-the-hunt features, had been in Hollywood for three years, having apprenticed herself to Peggy to learn the art of casting, one of the most important parts of show business.
“Either. They all taste the same and produce the same results. Too sweet, and they make me burp.”
“About five Cokes, rough estimate, fifty-six girls, fifty-six. Not one more or one less.” Part of Fiona’s job was to keep detailed notes for Peggy, who saved all her concentration for the actors.
“This is only day three and we don’t have anyone at all who’s even vaguely possible. Not a Beth, not an Amy, not a Meg and obviously not a Jo. Will too much Coke make my hair fall out?” Peggy asked plaintively.
Children, followed by teenaged girls, were her least favorite casting assignments, but this one was for her favorite director, Roddy Fensterwald. Roddy was adored by all women, especially actresses—for all the good it would ever do them. How did such an openly gay man manage to be so maddeningly seductive, she wondered, not for the first time.
“Rot your teeth first, I’d imagine, before your hair went,” Fiona said cheerfully. “Ready for the next hopeful unknown?”
“Please, I’m ready for a lovely vacation on Devil’s Island.”
“Actually I believe Devil’s Island was quite beautiful, it was the conditions that people complained about, all locked up together for the rest of their lives, with foul food,” Fiona replied. “Lots of buggery too, you know. Nasty habit but it probably passed the time.”
“At this point it sounds good to me … at least it didn’t involve teenaged girls.”
“Oh, my, you are leaning toward a case of burnout, Mrs. Westbrook, my dear. Perhaps I should send the next lot away till tomorrow?”
“Bitch. Don’t you dare.”
“If you didn’t love your job you couldn’t do it,” Fiona said smugly. She could always revive Peggy’s vital juices by threatening to send actors away. Peggy lived to see actors, to listen to actors, to smell actors. She was like an animal that lived on one sort of food exclusively: actors, good, bad, or indifferent. She had to have her daily ration of actors to survive. She was a thespiani-vore, if such an animal existed, as well as one of the most highly regarded casting directors in Hollywood.
Fiona buzzed the receptionist. “Right, please send in the next girl, Ginger.”
Outside in the reception room, Teresa sat stiffly, torn between studying the pages the receptionist had passed out to her and to all the other girls in the room, and observing the other hopefuls. She was the only girl accompanied by her mother. Not only that, but there wasn’t another girl who wore a school uniform, Teresa thought miserably. Her pleated gray skirt, severe starched shirt, and navy blazer, with the Marymount crest, suddenly seemed as childish as a pair of Mary Janes.
Many of the girls, as they bent over the pages, had the crisp professional demeanor that indicated that they were accustomed to auditions, and almost all of them were dressed in a version of the latest look, slim sailor pants with a bell-bottom flare, and ribbed “poor boy” clinging sweaters in colors that matched their pants. At least half of them sported the shag, Jane Fonda’s hairdo that had swept America, and all of them wore makeup that enhanced their natural prettiness.
She’d never dreamed that it was possible to see so many pretty girls in one place. But, of course, they were the pick of the crop from all over the country, Teresa told herself. These were the girls who had been heading toward this casting office, or one like it, all of their lives, and although they didn’t chat with each other, there was a tacit communality that bonded them clearly as th
ey read the pages over and over. They belonged here just as clearly as she did not. How, she wondered, could her mother sit so calmly, reading the magazine she’d brought with her?
“Teresa Horvath, please,” the receptionist announced, opening the door into the inner office. Agnes rose with formidable composure. “Come along, Teresa,” she said, leaving her magazine on the chair.
Consigning herself to the good offices of the Sainted Mary, Mother of God, Teresa followed her, standing as straight as possible, her shoulders back, her head high.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Horvath, but Mrs. Westbrook prefers mothers to wait outside during an audition,” Ginger said with a pleasant smile.
“What!” Agnes said in the beginning of outrage.
“She doesn’t make exceptions.” Ginger’s smile never wavered. “Go on in, Teresa.” In a rush of sudden gratitude, Teresa walked past her mother and closed the door to the office behind her, hesitating once she was inside the fairly small office.
“Hello, there,” Peggy said, from behind a table littered with cans of Coke and sheets of photos. “Thanks for coming. This is Fiona Bridges, my assistant. Teresa, that’s right isn’t it, or do you have a nickname?”
“Yes,” Teresa heard herself say. “Yes I do. It’s Tessa.” She stood still with amazement, caught up by a powerful and unexpected sense of selfhood, as she made this claim.
“Lovely.” Peggy’s jaded attention was immediately jerked into life by the clear, distinct melody of Tessa’s voice. “Now, Tessa, why don’t you tell us something about yourself, come on over here where we can see you.”
The Jewels of Tessa Kent Page 5
