Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

by Jillian Lauren

  He called me the night before his surgery.

  “Hi, honey. I was just sitting here on the couch in front of the fire and watching The King and I and Lady Thiang was singing ‘Something Wonderful’ and it made me think of me.”

  My father may be the only man in the world who would call to tell you he heard a song that made him think of himself. I hated him for making those ridiculous phone calls, in which he foisted on me the sentiment he wished I had for him. “Something Wonderful” is a love ballad to an imperfect but charming king, and it’s a risky song to hang your hopes on. Unless you own a country and can waltz like Yul Brynner, it’s never a safe bet to count on your enduring charm to redeem you from acting like a big asshole. If my father most identified in that pivotal moment with “Something Wonderful,” I suppose I would have picked “There Are Worse Things I Could Do” from Grease.

  There were worse things than taking a job that required I leave for Brunei on the day of my father’s surgery. The Southeast-Asian sultanate of Brunei was a country I had only recently even heard of. My job description was elusive at best, but I fantasized that I might arrive and find a wild adventure, a pile of money, and an employer who was no less than Prince Charming. This was my opportunity to shake off my bohemian mantle and reimagine myself as an enigmatic export, maybe a royal mistress or the heroine of a spy novel. More realistically, I suspected I had signed on to be an international quasi-prostitute. There are worse things I could do.

  I had prepared my parents for the fact that I was leaving town that day. I told them that I had gotten an important acting role in a movie, but that it was shooting in Singapore and I had to leave right away. When they later asked about my big break, I planned to tell them that my role had been cut. I justified my lies to my parents by imagining that I would make them come true and they would no longer be lies. Okay, the fantasy movie in Singapore probably wouldn’t happen, but my soon-to-be stardom would overshadow it and all of this would be rendered irrelevant.

  My parents believed in my acting career and had stoically received the news that I was leaving. Before I even got on the plane that day, they had already begun the process of accepting my absence. I would become the prodigal daughter, always off on an exotic adventure that few in my parents’ world could ever fathom. That day at Beth Israel, they began their wait for my repentant return.

  I hung out with my mother and my aunt in the bucket seats of the waiting room outside the ICU, our coats draped over the backs of the chairs. My aunt is a wild-haired ex-hippie who spent the sixties in acid-soaked communes and sleeping on European rooftops—a prodigal daughter in her own right. When my aunt and I get together, it’s usually a nonstop talking marathon, but that day we were unable to think of anything to say. We focused instead on the Jeopardy answers coming from the TV mounted in the corner near the ceiling. My relatives were all Jeopardy fiends. I loved Jeopardy’s Zen premise: All the answers are really questions. When she was dying of cancer, my grandmother could easily clear a board, even in her morphine haze. My aunt and I held hands and answered in unison.

  “Who is Thomas Mann?”

  “What is the Panama Canal?”

  My brother, Johnny, was notably absent, off at yet another boarding school and probably engaged at that very moment in a scheme to grow his own psychedelic mushrooms or to break out of his dorm and hitchhike to the nearest Phish concert. My mother sat quietly reading. Her hair was styled into a tastefully highlighted wedge, her diamond earrings twinkling under the hospital fluorescents. My mother shines in a crisis—hospitals, funerals, support groups. She is the lady you want around when things go way south. This is not to say that she wasn’t worried about my father; just that worried is her natural habitat. When my grandmother was dying, my mother taught me that you have to make yourself at home in hospitals, have to know where they keep the ice, have to keep track of your own medication schedule, have to make friends with the nurses. If you sit around and wait for someone else to bring you a glass of water, you’re bound to get very thirsty.

  The three of us went to eat sweaty lasagna in the hospital cafeteria. We sat with poor posture, like the rest of the people there, who huddled in groups around their lukewarm food. Laughter cut through the room from a table of doctors in scrubs. I couldn’t imagine having to eat in that place every day. My father’s doctor, Dr. Foster, was standing next to the table where the doctors were laughing. He was a handsome, young guy with a shock of black hair and tortoiseshell glasses. He glanced around the room; his eyes rested on us for a second, then moved on without an acknowledgment. It is the unique province of doctors to be in the same room with the family of a man whose internal organs he was just handling and not even nod hello.

  I watched Dr. Foster walk away. When we had talked after the surgery, I had noted a flirtatiousness to his manner. (I know, classy timing.) There had even been a vague but unmistakable suggestion that we should have a drink later in the week. At any moment in time, I imagined, a parallel-universe Jill could make a different choice, could turn a fraction of an inch to the left and step onto a different path.

  That moment I imagined a parallel Jill stayed in New York and altered the course of her days not by seeking fame and fortune but rather by succumbing to the dictates of her upbringing. She takes Dr. Foster up on that drink. She winds up the wife of a doctor, with shapely calves, a standing tennis date, and a two-carat diamond on her finger. She finds fulfillment in her children and in volunteer work. She reads design magazines and gourmet magazines and she does things like making homemade pasta and then indulging in only a few bites. She weekends in the Hamptons and takes two-week Caribbean vacations every year.

  My mother radiated the calm of a martyr marching to the stake. She had surrendered to her fate. I never once saw her try to get out of her marriage to a domineering man who persistently demeaned her. I wondered where her parallel selves lived. Did she scroll back to each cross-roads of her life and wonder, or did she feel that something higher was guiding the needle of her compass, that she was fated to be living out her life exactly as it was?

  When we returned from lunch, a slab of cheese congealing in my stomach, my father was waking up from the anesthesia. A nurse informed us that only one person could go into the ICU at a time, so my mother went first. She emerged after about fifteen minutes looking unshaken, saying only that I should go next because he was asking for me.

  My father hovered somewhere between conscious and unconscious. A hundred tubes and wires traveled in and out of him. He had lost more than fifty pounds and lost it so quickly that his skin had failed to shrink to his new body. It hung off him like excess fabric. He looked shriveled.

  I have a picture of my father and me when I was a baby. He is lying on the bed and I am sleeping across his round belly. He was so big to me then, a mountain. I feel like I remember the moment. I know it’s a trick of memory, a conflation of photographs and reality, because I was only an infant. But I could swear I remember what it was like to lay my head so close to his heart.

  His bloodshot blue eyes scanned the room wildly.

  “It hurts,” he said, his voice small and labored.

  “You’re going to get better now.”

  “I didn’t know it would hurt this much.”

  I stood next to him, holding his hand, conscious of my teeth in my mouth, my toes in my shoes, the watch on my wrist reading ten minutes past the time I needed to leave to make my plane. I talked about my impressive new movie job. It seemed to cheer him up.

  “Look at you,” he said.

  I could have simply not shown up at the airport, could have stayed for that drink with Dr. Foster, but I wasn’t going to. I was unsure of my destiny, but I could tell you with absolute certainty that it did not lie there. I told my father that I’d telephone from Singapore every day. Then I kissed his cheek and left.

  My father called after me in a whisper, “Grab your star and ride it to the top, Jilly.”

  I was a liar. And I left. I cried in the
elevator for my dad, for all that was lost between us, for my own alarming recklessness. But my eyes dried up the minute my ass hit the vinyl cab seat. All my regrets and reservations were overshadowed by the fact that it felt so good to be moving—green flowered suitcase in the trunk, thirty dollars to my name, car window open to the unseasonably warm winter day.

  As he has mellowed and grown older, my father has rewritten our history together and, with it, his opinion of me. He tears up and greets every milestone, from my marriage to my master’s degree, by saying, “My daughter took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

  With one hackneyed phrase he manages both to praise me and to brand me forever the outsider. Read the poem for real, I want to tell him, and you’ll see that the roads are about the same. The traveler only imagines that one is less trodden than the other.

  Nevertheless, two roads diverged. I picked the one that seemed a tiny bit wilder. Because that was who I wanted to be.

  chapter 2

  With overnight stays in Los Angeles and Singapore, I spent three days en route to Brunei. The long hours in the air provided me an opportunity for reflection.

  These days, my life has taken on a slower pace and it seems that the moon can wax and wane and wax again and the time has marked my life in only subtle ways—the slight deepening of the marionette lines around my mouth, the easing of a yoga posture, the straining of a friendship, perhaps, or the birth of a new one. I embark on endless attempts to break bad habits, to acquire new, healthier ones. I usually fail at both, but not to any major detriment. Not anymore. Sometimes I buy a plane ticket. There is a birth, a death, a celebration, a tragedy. But when I sat on that plane to Singapore, I had much to reflect on and even more to hope for. At the time, the barreling truck that was my life hopped the divider and changed directions every five minutes or so.

  I listened to Talking Heads on my CD Walkman. And you may ask yourself, well . . . how did I get here?

  You may ask the same question. You know—what’s a nice girl like you doing on her way to a harem like this? Allow me to back up a few paces.

  How I got there started with a headlong sprint across the beach, well past midnight on an icy November evening in East Hampton. I broke into a flat run over the spotlit dunes, terror pasted across my face. The ground gave beneath my Reeboks and slowed me down as if I was running in a dream. The sand in front of me was strewn with elongated shadows. The only thing the director had told me before he called action was to hit three marks along my trajectory, each indicated with a barely visible sandbag. I wore a tear-away yellow and blue cheerleading costume that fastened with Velcro up the sides, and my chestnut hair was pulled into tight pigtails, each secured with a yellow satin bow. The salty air seared my windpipe and raised goose bumps along my bare arms and legs. I had turned eighteen three months before; I could have been an actual cheerleader.

  I hit the first sandbag at an awkward angle and my ankle twisted. As scripted, a ghostly hand reached out of the darkness and tore my shirt off. I let loose my best Janet Leigh scream and ran, topless now, toward my next mark, spears of pain shooting up my leg.

  I was there. I was for real. I was Patti Smith in pigtails and I was screaming my heart out in front of a camera—finally, in front of a camera. Who gave a shit if it was some trashy vampire movie scheduled for video release in Florida? It was a movie. It was a start. It was a brief stone on the yellow-brick road to being all I ever wanted to be—a shining star of stage and screen. My plan was to be so wholly and incontrovertibly loved that I would never again be left clinging to the outer orbits of anything.

  This movie, this low, low rung on my ladder to success, was called Valerie. Valerie was about a high school girl who was so obsessed with vampires that she magically turned into one and then proceeded to terrorize her school. Two weeks beforehand, I had responded to an ad in Back Stage that led me to the kind of brick townhouse in Newark where old Polish ladies live. This was different from most of my auditions, in which you wound up standing around a generic Midtown casting studio with a bunch of other girls who all face the wall and silently read the sides with their lips moving and their eyebrows going up and down.

  I knew Newark a little bit. My family is one of those old Newark Jewish families whose octogenarians are sought out for interviews by ethnohistorians. My great-great-grandfather and his siblings came on a boat from a shtetl in Poland and, washed in sepia tones, they started with a fruit cart and opened a grocery store that became a grocery chain. They started by delivering newspapers in exchange for pens and wound up writing prescriptions. They were doctors and dentists and business owners and real estate moguls. They helped to found the oldest synagogue in Newark, the same one where my brother and I were Bar and Bat Mitzvahed.

  Ask my father and he’ll tell you all about it: Our family helped build Newark. We love Newark. Long after he left home, his parents were the last white family living on their block for years. They moved only when my grandfather retired and he and my grandmother were too old to take care of the house anymore. Though my father lives in an affluent suburb about twenty minutes away now, he’s quick to tell you that he’s no fancy guy; he’s just that same old kid from Newark. My father is a sentimental man and when I was a little girl he used to take me for rides in his white Cordoba and point out the old house on Lyons Avenue, Weequahic High School, the Jewish cemetery. He talked about it so much that the sidewalks of Newark felt like home, even though we never actually lived there or even really got out of the car.

  So I felt like I almost recognized the townhouse when I arrived at the address that was written on a sheet of paper in my purse. I knocked on the door and the unctuous director of the movie, complete with thinning ponytail and high-waisted jeans, ushered me into a living room, where every surface was cobwebbed in lace doilies and every piece of furniture was ziplocked in plastic; probably his mother’s house. The coffee table had been shoved to the side of the room and in its place was a tripod that held a video camera the size of a toaster.

  I stood in front of the camera and gave an audition, the entirety of which consisted of taking my top off and screaming. The director and his assistant furrowed their brows and took notes on a clipboard while shifting on the squeaking couch covers. They called me two days later to tell me I had been cast as Victim One. The director also told me that Butch Patrick, the guy who had played Eddie Munster, was his cousin, so there was a lot of potential for the project.

  They say there are no small parts, only small actors, and since I hadn’t yet figured out that this aphorism isn’t true, I took the job.

  I headed for my second mark, where a hand reached into the frame and yanked the skirt from my waist. This scream was less hearty, more winded. I ran the last leg of the gauntlet in only panties, sneakers, and ankle socks. When I hit the final sandbag, Maria the actress playing Valerie, stepped in front of me and blocked my path.

  Scream.

  Cut.

  Maria was a clearly anorexic, haunted-looking blonde. Bruise-colored circles that even the white cake makeup couldn’t completely cover shadowed her bruise-colored eyes. Wearing a tatty nightgown and backlit by the bright lights of the set, she looked like an alien, with her sylphlike body somehow supporting a skull that seemed huge in comparison. Why was this girl the star while I was Victim One?

  While we waited for them to set up the next shot, Maria and I wrapped ourselves in a comforter pilfered from a nearby beachfront house that belonged to someone’s parents. We huddled together for warmth and I could feel the sharp edges of her hip bones pressing into me, no insulation at all between her and the world. The crew bustled around us, setting lights and preparing our next scene together. It was my final scene. My Big Moment.

  The director came over to talk to us as his DP set the camera for the shot.

  He addressed Maria first.

  “This is your first kill. You’ve finally given in to the bloodlust you’ve been struggling against all this time. It�
�s ecstatic. It’s orgasmic—the power as you overtake her. Savor it. Take your time. Especially with the bite.”

  He turned to me and simply said, “Fight her.”

  A mousy art-department girl wearing a down vest, a ski hat, and rubber gloves to her elbows mixed a bucketful of fake blood. In the first shot, Maria was meant to rip off the last thin barrier between my torso and the night—a pair of my own panties that were to be sacrificed for the occasion—and then wrestle me to the ground. The second shot was the homoerotic kill, in which I would succumb to the vampire and end up doused in fake blood. The art-department girl stressed to us the necessity of nailing the scene in one take because there would be no way to clean me off again.

  The fight scene was pitiful. Maria barely had enough strength in her hands to grip my wrists. I am shaped like a living replica of the fleshy cartoon girls drawn by R. Crumb, with their big asses, sturdy, round thighs, small waists, and pert B cups, which is to say that I could have reduced Marie’s brittle bones to a pile of twigs with one shove. I wasn’t about to let her frailty ruin my moment. Instead, I interlaced my fingers with hers and jerked her around like a Muppet, attempting to make it look like I was battling for my cheerleader life. Then I pitched myself backward and pulled her down on top of me. She looked shaken.