Someday, Someday, Maybe (12 page)

“In inches, I mean.”

“I’m not sure. I didn’t know they made pants in sizes like that.”

“Well, that’s how they size jeans now. It’s probably where we got the signals crossed. Don’t worry. You’re sitting most of the time, thank God, so we can improvise. Like I said, we can cut them if we have to.”

I can’t believe she’s going to cut a brand-new pair of khakis just so I can sit down in them for a few hours. And I feel guilty that I’m not the right jeans size.

“What’s a
good
size to be? In inches, I mean.”

Alicia looks thoughtful, then seems to decide I’m worthy of being educated. She takes a deep breath.

“Well, I usually do features.” She pauses, somewhat dramatically.

“Uh-huh,” I say, confused as to whether that’s my answer.

“So like, on this last feature I did, I worked with Cordelia Biscayne?” She raises her eyebrows.

“Oh, wow.” I’m trying to look as impressed as I can tell Alicia wants me to be.

“Yes, I know. I was one of the assistants to the designer, but still. Cordelia’s a
doll
, by the way. And anyway, her jean size is twenty-six, twenty-seven. Yours is probably, twenty-nine or thirty? So,” Alicia says, sympathetically. “Not that you should feel bad—I mean, you look fine, and not everyone can be Cordelia Biscayne, right? But, something to aspire to.”

Of all the lists I’ve made of goals, and all the visions I’ve had, it never before occurred to me that I could be this specific, that I could aspire to a goal actually measurable in inches. I wonder if this is how successful people do it. I wonder if the difference between success and failure could more accurately be described in the waist sizes for jeans. “Well, I’m doing all right, I guess,” I imagine myself saying, “but I’m about three inches from where I really want to be.” I think of how much effort it has taken me to even be a 29. I can’t imagine what else I could do to be a 26. But it makes sense, too, that the Cordelia Biscaynes of the world are literally measurably different from the rest of us.

Three inches might as well be three hundred to me today.

“
H
i, I’m Carol, I’ll be doing your makeup. Any allergies or preferences I should know about?”

I’m looking into a giant mirror on a wall of mirrors, each framed by dozens of fluorescent lightbulbs. In the blinding light, my face looks nothing like the face I have in Brooklyn. I wonder if this is my real face, or if the face I have in Brooklyn is the real one, and what my Queens face might look like.

“Um, no, not that I can think of,” I tell her. I wonder if I will, over time, develop preferences, and what they might be in regard to my face being made up. I hope I do this long enough to have time to acquire some, so I don’t feel so unprepared for these types of questions.

She snaps a switch by her station and what seem like a hundred more round bulbs spring to life.

“Wow, do I really have all those freckles?” I just can’t get over how different my face looks in this mirror.

“Mmm, let me see.” Carol puts on the glasses that hang on a chain around her neck and brings her face just inches from mine. I hold very still, as if I’m being examined in a doctor’s office. “Well. You have some freckles, it’s true. I don’t think they’re distracting, though. I don’t see them as a problem, but I can even out your skin tone if that’s what concerns you.” Carol sighs. I don’t think she likes me.

“Okay, great. Whatever you think. Thanks.”

“Want a magazine?” she asks.

“Um, yes, sure. Thanks. Again.”

I’m not sure whether Carol is generally grumpy or if I made her that way. I thumb through the copy of
The National Enquirer
.
MICHAEL GOES AFTER ELVIS’ $200 MILLION! CORDELIA BISCAYNE SHOPPING SPREE! CANDICE BERGEN DEATHBED DRAMA!
I wish I’d brought something else to read. This magazine makes my stomach hurt.

So many people on a set to get to know, I think, while skimming
PRINCESS DI’S LOVE LETTERS!
So many names. How can I remember all the names of all the people I’m meeting in just one day? But isn’t it rude to not at least try?
Mavis, Alicia, Carol
, I say to myself.
Mavis, Alicia, Carol
.

“Do you like to do this yourself?” I look up from my magazine to find Carol waving a strange metal object in front of my face. I have no idea what it is or what it might be used for.

“I’m sorry—what is that?”

Carol peers over her glasses at me in surprise. “You’ve never seen one of these before?”

“No.”

“But of course you have. It’s an eyelash curler! I’m sure your mother has one.”

My mother could have had one, it’s true, but I didn’t have my mother during the time I might have been interested in what it was, something I don’t feel like explaining to Carol.

“Oh yeah, probably,” is all I say.

Carol brings the menacing instrument to my face, clamping my lashes between the narrow opening and then squeezing hard. I feel as if my whole eyelid is being stretched up and over the top of my head, and my eyes start to water.

“Feel okay?” she asks.

“Fine,” I say through gritted teeth. I want to ask Carol if I can do the second eye myself, but I’m afraid I’m already on her bad side, so I endure the discomfort once again. When she’s done, my lashes look like the ones on a doll I had when I was little whose eyes never closed, even when you laid her down.

Finally, I’m done in Makeup and shuttled two chairs down to Hair. “Hi, I’m Debra, I’ll be doing your hair.” (
Mavis, Alicia, Carol, Debra
.) Debra is a black woman with dimples who appears to be about fifty, and not grumpy at all. “Look at those curls! You sure you don’t have one of my people mixed up in your family?” She laughs, squeezing my shoulder. “Don’t you worry. I know just what to do with this mess.”

Miraculously, she does know what to do. Instead of trying to flatten my hair, she curls it with a curling iron, which is the last thing I would ever have thought of. It makes all the curls look neat and shiny instead of the irregularly frizzy, uneven way they usually look.

Debra tilts her head and regards me in the mirror. “There we go,” she says, wrapping a curl around her finger, smoothing it down. “They’ll drop a little more, too, by the time we’re on set. Pretty girl.” She pats me on the head and starts unplugging her irons.

I smile at Debra, and the person in the mirror with the Manhattan face and hair smiles back. I look so little like me, the Brooklyn me, that I can actually enjoy looking at myself without most of the usual dissection. Maybe the trick is for me to always be in some sort of disguise, to always be dressed to play someone else. Only then can I really appreciate myself.

“
T
he client,” as it turns out, isn’t one person but a group of seven people, five men and two women, all with suits and shiny hair, whose names I barely catch, so I don’t even try to add them to my list. One by one they shake my hand and introduce themselves, and then I don’t see them for the rest of the shoot. I do periodically get reports as to their levels of enthusiasm delivered from behind the video monitor where they’re watching.

“The client loved that take,” Bobby the director
(Mavis, Alicia, Carol, Debra, Bobby)
occasionally says, or, “The client is wondering if you could smile more?” I sit in a chair and do the monologue into the camera lens, my too-tight khakis split open in the back, my too-loose shirt gathered with an industrial-looking clamp sticking out from the middle of my back. From the front I look put together, but every other angle would reveal how false the front of me is, how much effort has gone into presenting a one-sided image of perfection.

Bobby is an easygoing guy in his thirties, with very curly brown hair spilling out from underneath his New York Mets baseball cap. He seems to have a lot of confidence and shakes my hand with a strong grip. He’s wearing jeans and a blazer with running shoes. He tells me he usually does features, so this shoot should be a snap.

“I lit this very softly, too, so the freckles will sort of fade. I heard you were concerned.” He looks at me directly and with gravity, the way I imagine a doctor might say, “You have leukemia.”

“Oh, that’s, no, I wasn’t saying …” I want to tell him it’s all a misunderstanding, but I can’t figure out how to explain without sounding like I’m complaining about Carol the makeup artist. I decide it’s too complicated.

“Okay, yeah, thanks.”

I say the exact same lines over and over again until they lose all meaning. Someone with a stopwatch times me, and for about four hours I’m either speeding up or slowing down by increments of one second, two at most. Takes that are twenty-eight seconds strangely feel longer than ones that are twenty-six. Smile more, smile less, tilt my head, talk to the camera like it’s my best friend, raise inflection on the name of the product, but don’t sell it, not too much, not too little, have fun with it, now really have fun with it. Finally, some combination of speed, inflection, enthusiasm, or just exhaustion makes them say, “That’s it! That’s the one!”

I’m confused, because I know they have done lots of different shots: close-ups of my hands and suds and the laundry coming out of the dryer. I know they will use all the different pieces and somehow assemble them into one coherent piece, so I don’t know why it was so important to get that one perfect take, but I’m too shy to ask, as if revealing myself now as the novice I really am might make them doubt their satisfaction with me.

I shake the hands of the client, one by one, and say thank you, goodbye, I had a great time, which is sort of true, and a brunette in a blue suit says, “You were adorable! You remind me a little of myself at your age.” Then, she leans closer and whispers in my ear, “Don’t worry, I hated
my
freckles, too.”

9
 

Barney Sparks, of the Sparks Agency, answered his own phone when I called. He must have been having phone trouble on his end, because he practically yelled the address at me and told me to come by the next day around noon. His office was far across town in the West 40s near Ninth Avenue. I figured the safest way to get there was to walk across on 42nd Street, which is not my favorite route because it’s full of hookers and places advertising live peep shows of various kinds, and drug dealers who walk back and forth trying to sell what sounds like “sense sense, sensamelia.” I know that’s some sort of drug but I’m not sure what kind exactly, or even if I’m hearing it correctly. It’s a harrowing walk but at least there are lots of people, whose presence, although somewhat freaky, makes it less likely there will be no witnesses when I’m abducted and forced into prostitution.

It’s four flights up to Barney’s office. I’m puffing by the time I make it to the top. There’s no secretary sitting at the desk in the little front room.

“Hello?” I say to the emptiness.

“Back here, dear!” comes a loud and raspy voice.

There’s a desk with a window behind it and bookshelves on either side, which are stacked to the ceiling with scripts and old Playbills. The titles are written in Sharpie on the edge of the pages so they can be read when stacked face-to-face, and the block print is bold but shaky. Barney wears a light blue sport coat and has thick white hair cropped very close to his head. The whole place smells like cigar smoke and dust, but there’s something comforting about it. I’m afraid my nervousness is obvious, especially when I discover that the only way to sit in the one huge armchair opposite his desk is to sink into it and be swallowed. I fight the chair for a minute, trying to perch daintily on the edge, and then give up and sit back, which at least might make me look relaxed.

“Frances Banks!” Barney bellows.

Even with his hearing aid turned all the way up, he tells me, he doesn’t have the greatest sense of his own volume. He never raises his voice to people intentionally, but he’s always loud. He says volume is his trademark, and the community respects him for it.

“Frances Banks,” he says again. “Great name! A classic! You can BANK on BANKS! I can see the headline in
The Hollywood Reporter
.” He takes a deep, rattle-y breath, which he seems to have to do anytime he strings more than two sentences together. His breathing is labored and, like his voice, astonishingly loud. “A classy name for a classy gal! Look at YOU! You’re a throwback! A girl next door, with looks like Ava Gardner. Unfortunately you didn’t get her chest—but HEY! I saw your little show thing the other night. My favorite part was when you FELL.”

I’m smiling, but I’m not sure whether he’s teasing me or not. “You’re kidding?”

“No, dear. I’m a sucker for a klutz. It’s where you see what someone is made of. My father, the great Broadway director Irving Sparks, always said: ‘Anyone can smile on their best day. I like to meet a man who can smile on his WORST.’ I was his assistant, as a younger man, just nineteen years old, sitting in the very last row in the audience of
Best Foot Forward
, when a red-headed chorus girl took a terrible spill. She got right back up and never stopped smiling. I waited by the stage door to see if I might hail a cab for her, and that’s how Mrs. Sparks and I began our fifty-two years together. But HEY. Did I ever tell you about Ruth Buzzi?!”