Seeing Stars (12 page)

“Okay.”

“Good girl.” He winked at Bethany, for which Ruth was so grateful she felt momentarily teary. “Any little kindness,” one of the other moms had said to her several days after they arrived here. “You’ll see. Pretty soon you’re going to be grateful for the tiniest little thing, like their remembering your kid’s name for more than five seconds.”

“Hi,” said the faux mother, moving over on the gray carpeted benches in the bullpen.

“Hi,” Bethany said. “You don’t really look like my mom.”

“I’m her mom,” Ruth apologized. “So, you know.”

“Oh,” said the not-mom.

“Do you have children?” Ruth asked politely.

“God, no.”

And that was that. A few minutes later the casting assistant called their names, and Bethany and her faux mom went into a studio and shut the door.

Ruth tried to get comfortable on the rocklike bench. On an opposite bench a woman was crocheting a circular garment with lurid orange yarn. “Ugly, I know,” the woman said, seeing Ruth watching her. “I only do it so I don’t eat.”

“Eat?”

“I’m a serial snacker,” she said. “Bad habit. My coach gave me this to do, instead.” She held up the knitting.

“Coach?” Ruth thought the woman didn’t look very athletic. Then she realized the woman must be referring to a life coach, someone who apparently helped you figure out what you wanted to be and how you were supposed to get there. Ruth had only recently heard of this. In her head she could hear Hugh say,
Funny—in the old days, that’s what parents were for.

“Yeah,” the woman said. “I don’t really know how to make anything, though, so I just make scarves, and then we give them to St. Vincent de Paul. I saw a street person wearing one of them once, just off Lankershim in North Hollywood. He had this huge shopping cart piled full of garbage and plastic bags and old clothes and stuff. And my scarf.”

“Well, at least you know someone’s using it.”

“I guess. It was pretty nasty, to tell you the truth. I bet that man hadn’t bathed in
weeks
.”

“Well, it’s probably hard when you’re living on the street. I read an article once in the
New York Times
about how difficult it is to perform even the most basic hygiene—”

The woman gave Ruth a strange look and then rose as a curly-haired girl walked out of one of the studios and thrust her headshot at the woman snottily. “You gave me two. I looked pretty stupid. And you’re always telling
me
not to waste them.”

They walked away. Bethany was back just a minute or two later, with a lively step.

“It was pretty fun. We had to sing this song about frozen cookie dough.” She sang a couple of bars. “
I love Chip-Chips, yes I do, from freezer to countertop in under two.
”

“Does that even make sense?” Ruth asked, but Bethany wasn’t listening. She was soaring, making wings with her arms as they went down the stairs and out to the street.

“I bet I’m going to get a callback. I think he really liked me.”

When they returned to the car and saw it hadn’t been towed or ticketed, Ruth was tempted to just get in and drive away, but she had to set a moral example for Bethany, so they went into the supermarket, bought a
People
for Ruth and a
Teen People
for Bethy and two Snickers bars and a Diet Coke. From there, they drove to Greta Groban’s apartment.

Greta Groban was Bethy’s acting coach. She charged $75 for a half hour, $125 for a full hour, and either way Ruth suspected that Mimi received a kickback. How long the session lasted was up to Greta and Greta alone. She was German and she looked like Annie Lennox and her eyes were green and intense and possibly touched with madness and you didn’t fuck with her. Mimi had told Ruth that; several of the studio moms had told her that; Greta herself had told her that. Ruth was scared to death of her. “You want your child to book?” she had barked at Ruth on their first meeting. “You bring her to me. And you
leave
her with me—no sitting in the room listening. You go away until I have Bethany call you on your cell phone. It could be fifteen minutes, it could be an hour and a half, and I can’t tell you which because I won’t know until we begin the work and once we begin the work we cannot be interrupted. Oh, and one thing: do not expect miracles. I cannot make your daughter book. If I could, I would charge more. That was a joke. What I can do is make her a stronger actor. And the last thing is, my rates are not negotiable and I expect to be paid in cash, in full, at the end of the session. Period.” It was like receiving ransom instructions from a convicted felon.

Greta’s building, with its tony Beverly Hills zip code, was exactly two buildings on the right side of the city limits, in a building that Ruth imagined had seen better days—say, in the 1970s. Its tiny foyer had foil wallpaper with a big bubble pattern, and its canvas awning was worn through in a couple of spots. Ruth had gone upstairs with Bethy the first time, and the apartment was underfurnished, underaccessorized, and completely lacking in warmth or character. There was a leather couch, a huge flat-screen TV, a battered coffee table, a cheap and leaning floor lamp, and nothing else, not even a token vase. As Greta had explained it, the room was meant to be an empty vessel that would be filled with the energy of whoever performed there. Ruth found it depressing, but if it helped Bethany succeed at her audition, she was fine with it.

Once she’d made sure Bethy had the correct sides and had been safely admitted through the locked front door, Ruth slunk around the corner to a possibly illegal parking spot where she could hunker down, out of sight, until she was summoned. She felt like she was on a stakeout; if she could have located one of Greta’s apartment windows and seen Bethy through it, she would have spent the entire session with a pair of high-powered binoculars in her hands. She loved to watch Bethy act. From the first time Bethy ever got onstage, she had come alive there. She outshined the other children, though she didn’t know it; she became one of the unspoken favorites at the Seattle Children’s Theatre, where she’d taken classes and performed in productions since she was seven. She’d already been to New York City to see, as Ruth had put it, the best of the best. Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel and Joel Grey in
Wicked
. Taye Diggs in
Chicago
. They routinely went to the theater when the touring companies came through Seattle. They had CDs of nearly every major musical ever performed on Broadway.

Ruth’s cell phone finally went off an hour and fifteen minutes later.

“I’m in the elevator,” Bethany said. “God, Mom, she kept making me do the scene
over
and
over
, and I couldn’t tell what she wanted me to do, and have you looked at your watch, because we’re going to be
late
.” Ruth could hear that Bethy was on the verge of either tears or hysterical laughter, which was pretty much the same thing.

“It’s okay,” Ruth said in what she hoped would pass for a calm and modulated tone while at the same time she started the car, threw it into gear, and gunned it away from the curb. Bethy came into view at a dead run and tried to get into the car while it was still moving, yanking repeatedly on the door handle, which released only when Ruth put the car in park, which allowed the door to suddenly fly open and hit Bethany on the shin with a crack Ruth could hear from inside.

“Ow,” Bethy cried. “Owie owie. Go, Mom.
Go!
”

She slammed the door and buckled herself in and they ran a red light Ruth hadn’t even
seen
, never mind stopped for. This was crazy;
they
were crazy, like a couple of bank robbers or bootleggers or Bonnie and Clyde. Bethy started giggling, Ruth did, too, and then there they were, pulled over to the curb and laughing themselves sick on Santa Monica Boulevard.

“She just gets me
going
, Mom,” Bethy said when she could finally talk and they were on their way again. “She has this really intense
thing
she does when you don’t do what she wants you to do because you can’t
understand
what she wants you to do. She puts her hands on your shoulders and gets about one inch from your nose and says,
Focus, Bettany
—that’s what she calls me, Bettany—
focus, for God’s sake.
And I
am
focusing except now her nose is about the size of a rat and her breath is awful. Oh, and she said to tell you she charged a hundred and forty-five dollars this time because we ran long.”

Ruth frowned. “Do you think she helped, though?”

“I don’t know. I mean, she must have,” Bethany said doubtfully. “Mimi says a lot of her students are series regulars. She has this picture in her bathroom of her and some big-deal actor I never heard of. On the wall.”

“Really? You used her bathroom?” Ruth asked. “So what else was in there?” Ruth loved visiting other people’s bathrooms.

“Well, she doesn’t use toilet paper, I can tell you that,” Bethany said. “I had to use an old tissue I found in her wastebasket. There wasn’t even a cardboard tube left. I bet she pees standing up. Maybe she’s not even a woman. Maybe she’s transsexual.”

Ruth shuddered. She and Hugh set the highest possible standard for bathroom hygiene. She tried not to let her horror show, but God only knew what had been on that tissue.

T
HERE WERE ONLY SIX OTHER GIRLS IN THE WAITING ROOM
for the audition. They sat on opposing, heavy, old-fashioned wooden benches like you’d find in a train station. Bethany didn’t recognize anyone, though she’d been hoping maybe Clara would be there. The girls and their mothers tried not to make eye contact with whoever was sitting opposite, and for a long time nobody came in or out, and the only noise was the rhythmic cracking of a tiny piece of gum that belonged to a rail-thin, bored-looking blond girl monitoring the sign-in clipboard and answering the telephone. Finally the other door in the room flew open, scaring them half to death because there’d been no sign whatsoever that anyone had even been in there, and a man Bethany assumed was the casting director appeared. He was balding, small, tiny-eyed, and had acne scarring on both cheeks. Bethany thought they probably hadn’t had Accutane when he was her age. Maybe they hadn’t even had antibiotics.

The casting director walked across the room to the skinny blonde with the chewing gum and picked up the stack of headshots.

“Let’s see who we’ve got here,” he said, leafing through. “Yeah, we’ll start here. Tiffany? Tiffany, ah, Hanson?” He looked over the top of a pair of half glasses at one of the girls, looked at the headshot, looked back at the girl, and finally looked at a mousy woman sitting beside her. “Jesus. You the mom?”

The woman nodded.

“Look, get her new headshots, because you’re wasting her time and mine. Okay? She’s like four years too old. I’m not going to see her today. Sorry, kid.”

The mother and daughter shuffled out of the room in silence and with their shoulders drooping. The casting director tossed her headshot back at the blonde and picked another from the pile.

“Anybody else not look like themselves?” he said. “No? Okay, Shana, Shana Stehnhope?”

A pretty little girl two seats away from Bethany hopped up, fluffing her hair, and followed him into his office. He closed the glass-windowed door behind them with a bang and a rattle.

One by one and without further incident the girls were ushered into his office. Bethany noticed that Ruth sat next to her with her hands tightly clenched in her lap and her eyes fixed on a square of old linoleum on the floor. She always got nervous before Bethy’s auditions—more nervous than Bethy did, which seemed silly. Bethy had told her so, but she just said she couldn’t help it. Because all that separated them was a door, you could hear each girl slate and deliver her lines, and Bethy thought most of them sounded pretty lame. No one was in the office for longer than about two minutes flat and no one said anything to anyone, not even her mother, until they were out in the hall. The casting director said things in single-word sentences:
Go. Thanks. Okay. Next.

Bethany was the last one to read. She didn’t mind; Mimi had said you wanted to be either first or last, because those were the people the casting director stood the best chance of remembering, plus she was confident she’d be better than anyone. When he came out for her, he looked at her headshot, flipped it over to look at her résumé, flipped it back again, and said, “God.”

Ruth’s hands held each other more tightly in her lap. Bethany just sat up straighter, looking—she hoped—perky and worthy of fame.

“All right, honey, come on in,” he said. A lot of people in Hollywood said
honey
and
sweetie
, and although it should have sounded friendly and reassuring, it never did. She followed him into his office, which was even messier than her room at home. There were stacks of headshots everywhere. He sat on a ratty sofa’s one clear cushion, peered at her through the video camera mounted on a tripod to make sure she was in the frame, and gave her the go-ahead nod.

She looked straight into the camera and said, “Hi! My name is Bethany Rabinowitz, and I’m represented by Big Talent.”

The casting director frowned at her headshot. “This says Bethany Ann Roosevelt.”

Bethany clapped her hand over her mouth. “Oh, no. Can we start over?”

The casting director sighed and turned off the video camera. “Who came up with that name?”

“My manager. Mimi Roberts.”

“Do you like it?”

Bethany started hearing a weird sort of roaring in her ears. She had no idea what she was supposed to say. “What?”

“Your name. Bethany Ann Roosevelt. Do you like it?”

“I guess. Not really.”

“She didn’t want you to sound Jewish, right?”

“No, I can be Jewish. I just can’t be, you know,
Jewish
.”

“She’s a terrible manager. You might want to tell your mom that.”

“She is?”

“She’s a colossal pain in the ass.”

Bethany sighed. “Yeah.”