Show Business Kills (12 page)

H
er kids were sick of it. When they came over to visit her and they all watched TV together, one of them would be channel surfing
with the TV remote, and a show or a commercial would flash by with Marly in it, and she’d say, “Marly Bennet! I graduated
from college with her
.”

She could tell by the way they exchanged looks that they were thinking, big fucking deal. Or one of them would say, “Oh, God,
please don’t let, her start telling us again how she was the best one in the class, and now
they’re
all famous and she’s a Kmart shopper
.”

Polly was the only one who humored her about it all. Like that time when she was home sick from school. She came downstairs
while her mother was watching “My Brightest Day,” watching Jan do some big scene in a hospital room. She must have had some
idiotic smile on her face, maybe she’d even been mouthing the words of the scene along with Jan, like some mental case
.

“
Was she nice, Mom?” Polly asked her when the closing-theme music was playing
.

“
Oh, yeah. And we were pretty good friends, too. She was the prettiest one in our class and I was…
”

“
The best actress, right
?”

“
Definitely. They all thought I was cool because I was from California. And Jack Solomon, a man who’s now the president of
a television network, was just some jerk who used to climb into the window of the dorm room at night and come to Jan’s room
when I was there, and we’d all sit on the floor, and we’d laugh and talk about how we were all going to be big in the theater
some day. Probably in some rep company or regional theater, or on Broadway. Of course, after a while, I started dating your
dad, and even though my parents were paying for me to live in the dorm, I mostly stayed at your dad’s little place till we
got married
.”

She’d probably told that to Polly five hundred times, and now when she saw how hot Polly was with her boyfriend, she knew
telling her that stuff had been a mistake. You weren’t supposed to tell your kids you were fucking around so young, because
then they figured it was okay for them to do it, too
.

But it was worse to tell it to Polly, because it didn’t take much to do the math that meant that the fucking around her mother
had done was the reason she had been born. Why she came into the world, and her mother quit acting to take care of her, and
then her brother, Jason, and then Kiki
.

Once, just for a laugh, Polly had the idea of using Lou’s video camera and directing a tape of her mother doing a few monologues.
That great one she still remembered from
The Glass Menagerie,
in which Amanda Wingfield chastises her daughter for being afraid to go out in the world and take command of her life
.

“
Mom, you’re awesome,” Polly said afterward when they put the tape in the VCR and watched it together, holding
hands. Tears were rolling down her daughter’s cheeks, and that day Polly had looked at her with more respect than she ever
had before
.

And the kid was right. She was pretty goddamned good on that tape. Good enough to send it to Ellen Bass, which she never admitted
to anyone that she did, with a letter saying give me a part in something, anything. But there was no response. Not a call.
No fulfillment of her fantasy that one day the phone would ring and on the other end Ellen would be there, saying, “I’m sending
the studio jet to come and get you. You were the best actress in the class. I have a part that only you can play
.”

For a while, after all the kids were in school, she tried to do some work in regional theaters, in plays where she could rehearse
at night and get Lou to put them to bed. One year she played the young wife in
Barefoot in the Park
at a local theater, and another year she played Patty in
The Moon Is Blue.
After
Barefoot,
when Lou brought the kids backstage they were really stoked. “Wow! Mom! You’re better than a movie star,” Jason said
.

She’d seen the look of warning in Lou’s eyes anytime she got caught up in thinking maybe there was still some way she could
work as an actress, the look that meant “You do and I’ll walk,” so instead of acting she stayed home and played Little Mommy,
the pet name that he called her for years. Right up until he left her for Polly’s third-grade teacher
.

And then the bastard, the fucking son of a bitch, when she was at her lowest, with no money, a lousy job, living in another
lousy rented house, he found a fancy lawyer who helped him get the kids away from her. Last year in an angry argument over
clothes, or some other stupid thing,
Polly had shrieked at her, “I’m glad we’re living with Daddy and Sharon. She’s cool. She has a career. You’re lame, Mother
.”

Lame and old and unemployable. Maybe Polly’s making that comment was what made her feel justified about taking the savings
she’d been putting away for the girl’s wedding and spending it on the trip to Los Angeles and this hotel room at the Sheraton
Hemisphere that was fancier than any she’d ever seen in her life. On the fifteenth floor, with a view way below of the movie
studio lot
.

Right now down there, they were making television shows and movies. She could have been on those movies if she’d had the guts
to leave Lou and go after what should’ve been her career. Before her gorgeous orange hair faded to this gray, before she started
being menopausal crazy, with those hot flashes and waves of depression
.

She had been embarrassed today in the lobby, checking in with her little duffel bag and her striped plastic purse, when the
guy at the desk looked at her as if no one had ever made a deposit in cash before, but he took it. And now she stood against
the window, looking down at the bright Los Angeles day, and watched as the trams that transported the tourists wended their
way around the studio lot and past what had to be the commissary and the Screening rooms
.

And those buildings over there must be where the important studio executives had their offices. One of the executives was
Ellen Bass. Ellen Bass, who was too busy to watch her tape. And maybe even Rose Schiffman had offices over there, too. That
made sense. With a few secretaries typing up all of her movie ideas. She was even nominated for an
Oscar a few years back, so everyone must be kissing her little ass
.

After she went to see Jan, she would definitely mosey on over to the movie lot and look for Ellen and Rose. That way she might
be able to kill two birds with one stone
.

  
10
  

R
ose liked waking up at five in the morning to write. To sit in her flannel pajamas with an afghan over her feet, while the
house was still quiet and there was no chance the phone would ring or that anybody would drop by. Still in a dreamlike haze,
she could close herself inside her cluttered home office and get lost in the words she scrawled on the turquoise lines on
the yellow legal pad.

Later, when the day began in earnest, she’d turn on the computer and transfer the newly composed pages to the blipping, bleeping,
intimidating high-tech machine she still didn’t quite understand after months of instruction, yet somehow managed to operate
by rote. But for her the brain-dancing, thought-weaving production times were always during those still, dark hours, when
she sat alone in her cluttered little space, sipping from a cup of very black coffee, using up the points on the soft-leaded
Blackwing 602 pencils.

Sometimes while she worked, she imagined that she was a romantic figure, like the sensitive and perceptive Colette, reclining
on a chaise in a flat in Paris, instead of the myopic and neurotic Mrs. Andrew Schiffman, lying on a convertible
sofa in a house in Sherman Oaks. But soon Andy’s alarm clock would blast, and her reverie would be shattered.

“Honeee?” “Mahhh??” The jarring sounds of morning called her back from the far reaches of her mind. Her husband and daughter,
both cranky in the morning, rushed around getting ready to go off to work and school, and she had to help them through their
morning rituals and out the door.

While she rehashed the dilemma between two of her characters in her mind, she made fresh coffee for Andy, who stood in the
kitchen with the cordless phone under his bearded chin, simultaneously slathering peanut butter on his toast, and checking
in on the conditions of his patients—AIDS patients, cancer patients, some of whom looked last night as if they might not make
it through to the morning.

While she decided how to open the love scene, she packed a lunch for Molly, who leaned on one arm, muttering sleepily about
how Dad always made her late for school, pushing the cereal around in the bowl and reading “Cathy” out loud to Rose from the
morning funnies.

This morning she absently made the lean turkey sandwich and cut up the fresh fruit, knowing attempts at good nutrition were
futile, since in a few hours Milly would make a furtive trade with some enviable kid whose mom gave her corn nuts and bologna.
From the table where her face was buried in the funnies, Molly said suddenly with a laugh, “Cathy reminds me of you, Mom.
She’d kind of ditzy, her office is always a mess, and she’s a worrywart.”

Daughters loved to blow the whistle on their mothers, Rose mused as she padded across the kitchen in her faded pajamas and
her beat-up fuzzy slippers. She knew that from
watching the behavior of Marly’s twins, who were teenagers now and very critical of their mother. But at the age of ten, Molly
seemed to be starting a little early. Probably because she was growing up in crazy, mind-blowing L.A.

“We’re late,” Andy said, hanging up the phone, filling his non-slip coffee mug, kissing Rose on the cheek, and ushering Molly
toward the door to the garage. Rose followed, carrying the lunch box, which accidentally slipped out of her hand and crashed
to the garage floor, making her have to stoop and open it to make sure the thermos was still intact.

“Mom’s so nervous about her big meeting today, she can’t see straight,” Rose heard Molly tell Andy as they got into the car.
And she was right. Poor old mom had a pitch meeting at a studio today, and she hated pitch meetings. As soon as she heard
the garage door close, she topped off her mug with hot coffee and made her way to her bathroom to take a shower, practicing
the key words of the pitch out loud as she did.

“Contemporary woman, high-tech arena, imagine Glenn Close or Meryl Streep.” She felt nauseous, knowing what was ahead of her
today. If only she could phone it in, mail it in, anything but get dressed in presentable clothes and sit in the overdone
office of some interchangeable studio executive trying to sell an idea.

Selling her heart out, just like the vacuum cleaner salesman who once came to her family’s little home in Cleveland, when
Rose was seven, right after her mother died. It was a desperately sad time for them, Rose trying not to fall apart when her
distracted father forgot to pick her up at school. And he was trying so hard to run his hardware store and the household at
the same time.

“Maybe we need this newfangled gizmo,” he said, shrugging
to Rose while he let the salesman in the door. Rose sat in the same chair, smashed in next to her father, watching the mustached
salesman present his product. Giving his overrehearsed spiel, his presentation, his pitch.

“Getta load of this,” Rose remembered the man saying as he threw a bag of dirt on the floor, then showed Rose’s father how
his product so scrupulously sucked it up, and “Hold on to your hat for this…” he said.

Little Rose, the glasses she’d worn since age five sitting on the tip of her nose, noticed the little beads of moisture forming
on the salesman’s bald head. Later she learned there was a name for the way the vacuum cleaner salesman had perspired that
day. It was the reason she’d stopped wearing silk blouses to pitch meetings so no one could see her exude it herself. “Flop
sweat.” The reaction the body had when it knew there was no taker at the end of the sales pitch. The same reaction she had
when she knew before she finished telling her story idea that the studio executive was going to say what her father told the
disappointed vacuum cleaner salesman. “Thanks anyway.”