Now You See Her (6 page)

But when I did, it was like Best Talent all over again. Nobody knew me and nobody treated me special or hugged me and let me go first when I showed up for an audition. I was just a number. I didn’t like it at all. It was

creepy, like those auditions where all the other kids seemed to know each other.

There were five of me. There were
ten
of me. Twenty.

Hello!

I had been the only one of me in Bellamy, Illinois. Now I saw all these girls walking around in leg warm-

ers and dance pants pulled down below their belly but- tons who could stand with one leg straight up against a pillar in the hall. I’d had, like, two years of ballet when I was little, and no way could I do that. There were kids who had a high D above C, some even more notes than that.

Who
were
these kids?

I went out and sat in the car. My father came stomp- ing out after me and practically ripped the door off its hinges. He was so red in the face he looked like he was going to have a heart attack. He said, “Bernadette.” I wouldn’t even look at him.

“It’s Hope in this setting,” I said. I held out my hand, as if I was going to shake hands with him, and he slapped it down. I couldn’t believe it. My father!

He said, “Get in there and don’t be an ass. You may be Hope Whatever Miss Pain-in-the-Butt on the stage, but you’re Bernadette Romano to me. Named after my

sister.” And before I could open my mouth to say any- thing, he pulled me out of the car. “I know what you’re thinking, and I know why,” he said. “Anybody would be intimidated by those kids. But you don’t get to give up before you start.”

“I get to do what I want. It’s my life,” I told him, pushing him away.

“Not yet,” he said. “When it’s your life, I’ll let you know.”

This was about as much attention as my father had ever paid to me when he was sober. And he knew what he was talking about. So, when my turn came, and I sang “Summertime,” which is from this old musical about a man who had no legs who loved some kind of prostitute lady, and all of them were African American. And I sounded really sad, because I was. I didn’t have to act it. My mother had said that was supposed to be a very sad song. Even though the words said the daddy was rich and the mom was beautiful, that really wasn’t true—the lady singing it was just trying to be sweet to her little kid because the father might have died when he was out at sea, fishing. It freaked me out totally when I saw that two of the nine judges were black, and I thought they would hate me for singing that song, but the lady smiled and nodded. And then, because my dad had yelled at me, I was very emotional. Next I did the scene from
Our

Town
, which we all had to read when I was back in ninth grade in Bellamy, where Emily’s already dead and she comes back and she’s begging her mother to really look at her. And I had to think about something, although you’re not supposed to think about anything in real life because that takes away from your character, so I thought about all the times I would beg my dad to look at me when I was really, really little and I had dressed up my doll to look exactly like me and how he was always too busy with his stack of motions and briefs and told me to go away. I thought about the little Bernadette I was and how she would walk away so lonely and ashamed, and so when I asked the stage manager to take me back to my grave, the judges all sat up straighter when I sort of cried out something like, “Mama, let’s look at one another, really look, while there’s still time!”

I felt that same tingly feeling I felt when I was in

Annie
.

The judges all made notes, but nobody applauded. I couldn’t see if anyone else had gotten applause because all the auditions were individual and closed. But some of the girls came out all bubbly and hugged their parents. I didn’t.

On the drive home, nobody said anything much. My mother said, “Well, there’s always next year.” My father said, “She can wait until college.”

When we got my acceptance letter, you’d have thought I got a starring role in a movie made by Steven Spielberg or somebody.

My mom got all new clothes for me. She got a per- sonal shopper from Neiman Marcus to help us. I didn’t care because I liked the clothes, even though I would only be able to wear them on weekends because you had to wear uniforms at Starwood. She got me a new laptop and gave Carter my old one. Carter liked me, for once. She made me get my hair streaked, and I was taking dance three times a week that summer. She wanted me to get my nose fixed, too, but my father said no, though I thought he’d used up all his power with her over pilot season. He said general anesthetic was too dangerous and my nose would still be swollen by the time the summer ended.

I overheard my mother say something about “Italian honkers,” but to me she said, “Your nose makes you look ethnic, and ethnic is in.” I still hated her for it. I know my nose is big, but it’s straight and it’s not like freaking gigantic. I had learned to put light brown eye shadow down the sides of my nose to make it look narrower and not like it had a big bulb at the end. But I knew she never totally liked how I looked. She would have had me tied to the bumpers of two cars and stretched to make me taller, for one thing. She had these pictures of herself

with her sisters in our living room, and they all looked like these tall, thin, beautiful swans with long necks, even in their crappy pink-and-brown seventies clothes. She had three of them framed, one of Maggie, one of her, and one of the three of them. She kept a picture of Marjorie, as the Sugar Plum Fairy in
The Nutcracker
, in a little sil- ver frame in her bedroom. Marjorie was by far the most beautiful. I don’t think she thought I looked like one of them. I thought, The hell with her.
Most
actors are really small. I mean, even the guys you think of as big studs are only like five-seven. They just have big photogenic faces, that’s all. My coach told me that. The only thing my mother ever liked about me was that I had size six feet and pretty hair. But that came “from her side.” The only thing I ever liked about her was nothing. I love her, you know? But I was never good enough. And even stinking drunk, my dad was nicer. Why did she buy me all those clothes? Like, was it to make people think we were rich, which we were, sort of, but not rich like the Gearys or the Neelands, who had what my mother called “family money”? Or did she do it because it was what she would have wanted if she’d been the one going? I left home with four matching tracksuits and four pairs of Nikes, not to mention blazers and long velvet skirts and junk I never even took the tags off.

I got all my ridiculous uniforms—navy blue chinos

with navy blue sweaters and green shorts and skirts—and packed up my clothes. They all had to be embroidered with my name, no name tags or permanent marker.

If I’d known then what would happen to me, I would never have left my room.

IV
‌

I

WAS SO READY
to be away from home.

I could have had any role I wanted around there, but I wanted a bigger world. I knew that I would kick butt. I knew I had so outgrown Bellamy, in every way. For one thing, I wanted to be around people like me. Acting is a lonely life. You’re better than most people at something everyone would do if they could. But it’s also just lonely. And it was lonelier for me because I was under my mother’s thumb so much I couldn’t hang out with kids. I’d never had a boyfriend. Not that I wanted one of the doofs from Bellamy. But I wouldn’t have

minded them wanting me.

I never had a lot of friends there my own age.

By the time I was in ninth grade, Abby and Hannah from the theater group were the only ones I saw outside rehearsal or school, and then not very much. Abby was a

year older and Hannah a year younger. Hannah was totally immature, like calling people and hanging up and TPing houses. But I stayed over probably twice at Hannah’s house, even though she also was practically a coach for bulimics and she was gay or doing a pretty good imitation of it. Not that being gay is a bad thing, but she liked me that way, I think. She would sleep next to me in her bed, which was a king-sized bed. And she was close to her family, which I found weird. I knew I had cousins; my aunt Maggie (“the frog dissection queen”) had three daughters, and one was my age. She sent me checks at my birthday and Christmas and asked me to come to Denver skiing. I wanted to, but my mother said I would break something. So I hadn’t seen my cousins since I was, like, five.

So when Hannah asked me if I would miss seeing my little brother except during summers, I said, “Summers?” Why would I see him in summer?

Who thought I’d be coming home summers? I’d be applying for every possible summer stock thing I could get, if only to get away from my mother. Plus Starwood has a summer program, and if I couldn’t get a job, I could talk my dad into letting me go to that. No way was I going back home. I could never have imagined any way Bellamy would look good to me.

Not until now, that is.

Saying good-bye to kids from school was like swat- ting a mosquito. Too bad, too sad. They never liked me and I never liked them. They hardly ever paid attention to me after fourth grade or so. Especially the ones who were the children of my parents’ so-called stuck-up friends.

I hadn’t done anything with any of them since I was little. When I was little, some kids would ask me over to play. Or their mothers would. Playdates. What crap. My father wanted me to have a normal social life. Not too much theater—at least until I was about nine or ten.

But he might as well not have bothered. I didn’t have anything to say to them. What did they
do
with their lives? Some of them maybe had piano lessons. Or sports. But I had voice, diction, piano, drama, and rehearsal. They had no idea what my life was, so how could we have anything to say to each other?

What they talked about, I totally never got. Video games and toys. Wearing the same color shirt on Fridays! Whippy Skippy! Who liked who and who didn’t like somebody anymore, though before they’d been BFFs. It was all so stupid. They didn’t even know what the Academy Awards were. They talked about going to Fort Wilderness in Wisconsin Dells for vacation. They had never even been to New York or California. They talked

about their brothers and sisters and how irritating or cute they were. I didn’t even know what to say back to them. What did you say? They would start doing one thing and five minutes later, it was like, “Want to color?” “Want to see my puppy?” They couldn’t stick to any- thing. They would want to play dolls or swing outside on their swings. I hadn’t done baby stuff since I was five; and as for playing outside, I didn’t want to get dirty. All my clothes were imported or handmade. Also, I didn’t know how to play pretend. I pretended to be other people professionally. I didn’t want to draw pic- tures of me holding my little brother’s hand. I probably said six sentences to Carter in my whole life. Like “Merry Christmas” or “Get out of my room.” Other kids did stuff with their brothers and sisters. How dull could you be?

It was like I was watching myself playing “child.”

It seemed like . . . such a waste of time to be a kid. You know? I never felt like I really was one. I never wanted to be. Carter would get all excited about some science fair at school or some soccer game. And my parents would go, though I could tell they were bored out of their gourds. My mother said she didn’t even like being in the same room with women who wore pants with elastic waists.

There was this one time I was basically forced to go

over and “play” with the bigger Neeland girl, Jillian. We watched a dumb Disney show. It was a cartoon, not a show that had kid actors in it that I could maybe learn something from, or see if they were better than me. Then her mother wanted us to make cookies, and Jillian asked could we lick the bowl. I remember saying, “There’s a raw egg in that. . . .” Jillian’s mother looked at me like I was nuts. But come on, who would want to eat raw dough? I just looked right back at her, while her daugh- ter stuck her fingers in the bowl and licked it until it was all over her hands. So gross, and fattening. Not just because my mother thought so. I mean, once you get used to not eating all that crap, if you really look at it, it’s disgusting. I haven’t had a real can of pop that wasn’t diet since I was six. I didn’t want to play video games and go to sleepovers anymore, except with other theater people, and usually not even then. I didn’t mind having to wear a cucumber mask and a retainer to bed. I didn’t care that I couldn’t stay up late like other kids, instead of having to get my ten hours, even on Saturday nights. You
need
ten hours or you look like crap. I
wanted
my hair rolled in those long tendrils even when I was nine. It looked better. I couldn’t stand ponytails and French braids that were always coming out. I wasn’t pushed. Or at least, I was pushed only until I saw why. After I saw why, no one had to push me.

Look, I was a regular kid. Some mornings, I didn’t want to get up at eight and go to rehearsal or lessons. I fought back a little. But it was mostly because I didn’t want my mother to think that I was this little puppet who would do anything she said! I don’t like anyone controlling me.