The Good Life (22 page)

Gloria carried her mother's knack for clowning, Sue's way of enlivening every detail until the world seemed fresh. While I cleaned up after dinner, Gloria mimicked the vacuous models and their hyperarticulated walk, the coked-up receptionists at the agencies, the fumbling, frustrated beginning photographers. Her specialty was the creamy agents who never quite said yes, but never ever said no. I applauded, then taught her how to curtsy three different ways.

At work I started to teach complicated steps. Bored with my class of intermediate nine-year-olds, I nudged them: “Extend those legs. Or else bend them. You've got bodies; do something with them.”

Eight girls lifted their legs exactly as high as they'd done before. Plump Ellen Martin, biting her lip, managed to raise her foot another half-inch and sweep her arms above her head, a moment of shining ambition that lasted until her balance listed and she clattered to the floor. The girl behind her mooed.

“She's outdone every one of you,” I said, as Ellen hauled herself back up.

I was annoyed by their mean titters and at the same time felt glee rising like a challenge, rung by rung, up my rib cage. Pulling the blushing Ellen to the center of the room, I gave her an easy combination: one little turn, a tendu kick, a low arabesque. “Hold that. Now hitch up your shoulder. Look down your arm. Bend your knees. Hold it. Hold it!” And plump Ellen, legs bent and arms long, was suddenly as angular and mean as a cat, like the tough MTV dancers that all the girls tried to imitate.

“I thought this was supposed to be ballet,” sulked one of the blond Laurens. She wore heavy, expensive ankle warmers, appropriate for a girl who never broke a sweat.

“I'm giving Ellen some options. When you work as hard as she does, I'll show some to you.” After they left, I blocked out an old routine in front of the mirror, making up steps where I couldn't remember the original, throwing in trashy MTV squats for the hell of it. I watched myself making the old moves. I hadn't lost much.

My spirits were still frothing when I came home and found Gloria sitting motionless in the living room—no TV, no radio, an untouched manicure kit beside her. She hadn't minded so much when LuCille with the long, long neck had gotten the department-store ad, but now Dania, featuring her stubble of brick-colored hair, would carry the cruise wear shoot. Slumped on the couch, Gloria studied her bony toes. “Dania knows people. LuCille knows a director. She's got a flat nose, but she knows a director.”

“Gloria, people know each other. That's normal.” I felt my carbonated spirits drizzle away. “You don't stop knocking on doors now. You knock harder.”

“Every door is locked before I even get to it.” Her voice quivered. “Do you have any idea how that feels?”

“Yes,” I said.

Fishing in the manicure kit, she picked up an orange stick and started working over her cuticles, ramming the soft tissue back from her fingernails. “I can keep going to auditions. If I'm lucky, I'll wind up in a crowd shot for a Toyota Sell-a-thon.”

“Most of us wind up in the Sell-a-thon,” I said, studying her wide-set eyes. Even downcast, they shone. “You figure out whether a Sell-a-thon is better than nothing. If you can't be the star, is it good enough to be close to the star?” If we were both lucky, she was too absorbed in her fingernails to hear the break in my voice. “For what it's worth, I know you deserve much more than a crowd shot. You deserve a spotlight.”

Gloria took a moment to produce a complicated smile. “You are such a mom. Sometimes I feel like I never left home.”

I reached across the coffee table and massaged her foot, closing my mouth against all the words about mothering, about protection, about the ways that girls with second-rate talent acquired a first-rate career. “Something will come through for you. You'll see,” I said. “You'll find a way. Your mother wouldn't have sent you otherwise.”

The words hung a long time before Gloria said, “Tell me something. I've spent a lot of time wondering. Why did she stop performing? Would you have stopped?”

“Hard to know.” I drew my hand back. “I never had your mother's successes.”

“She toured for a year and now she runs the Swan Lake School of Dance in Indianapolis. She's not exactly Balanchine. She kept telling me that I wouldn't be satisfied out here. Do you think she's satisfied?”

Gloria shone her appraising gaze on me, and I wondered whether it had occurred to her that I also was not exactly Balanchine. Hurt sidled to the edge of my brain, and I ushered it into the center. “What do you think? She's your mother, not mine.”

“Jeez. Sorry I asked.”

“Don't you think I want to know? Shoot, I'm dying to know. You tell me: Does she figure she's on the plus side of her tally sheet? When she looks at her life, does she see every show she was never in, or does she see success after success, a whole chorus line of wonderful achievements that you get to be one of?”

The shift in Gloria's expression was quick; what had in one instant looked like curiosity became judgment, calculation, a mask of cheek and lip and brow. Her smile, when she produced it, was an artifact. “Words right out of Mom's mouth. ‘It's all in your perspective. If you don't like what you see, then change how you're looking.'”

“And?” I said, plowing forward, hating myself.

“I look all the time.” She shook out her hair. “I'm starting to get the picture: a double exposure. You over Mom.”

“Your mom over me.”

She shrugged and left the table, hips forward, her hands thrust into her mass of hair, a model model if you asked me.

 

After that I caught Gloria watching me at odd moments. I saw her mother's evaluating eyes, the tiny motions of her finger as she made the swift calculations of my life: divorced, no kids, a so-so business that would one day close its doors without anyone noticing, part ownership in an advertising production company whose products I scarcely paid attention to. I wasn't even in the Sell-a-thon; I was in the used-car lot, kicking tires for customers who would leave before discovering how well I knew my product and how much I could tell them.

Then a photographer invited Gloria to dinner. She sputtered with brittle laughter when she told me. “‘I know a little bistro that hasn't been ruined yet.' Leer, leer. The guy probably has a poster of Hugh Hefner in his bathroom. But he knows people.” Her arch voice glittered.

“There's nothing wrong with going out to dinner with a friend,” I said.

“He's no friend.”

Gloria's shoulders rested against the wall, and her flat pelvis jutted forward like a low smile. I wiped my dry hands on my shirt. “In that case, don't go.”

“Mom would tell me to make him into a friend. She believes in friends. Not exactly your way of doing things.”

I snapped, “Gloria, I took you in because your mom and I were friends. So I'll say what she would say: Make this guy your friend. Or tell him off. But figure out where you stand and then stay there.”

“Aren't you going to tell me what to do?”

“No,” I said, and then, “I just did.”

Two nights later she went out with the photographer, returning home at one-thirty. Although I was furiously awake, I didn't go in to see her or turn on my light. A week later she had a job, her first, one of five models jumping on a trampoline while wearing very tight jeans. “Greg—the director—liked my hair,” she said, swigging celery juice on a quick tour of the kitchen.

“Call your mother,” I said. “She'll want to hear all about it.”

The next day, the first day of Gloria's trampoline shoot, I hoped to lose myself in work, but the inch-and-halt along the Hollywood freeway encouraged me to ponder and reconsider my contribution to Gloria's newfound success. By the time I got to the Glendale studio my whole nervous system pulsed like a wound.

Six applicants for the tap teacher position looked up when I came in. Every one of them had a two-page résumé, Equity, and expensive, professional photos. Every one of them reeled out complicated combinations while wearing a smile that only hinted of rent past due, the craving for a cigarette, every problem in their lives that would be solved by this job. Depressed, I went ahead and let the last applicant really dance. She got louder and quicker, tapping like a jackhammer, and finished with a pirouette that dropped to a full split, old-fashioned razzmatazz that flooded my mouth with bitterness.

“Hooray for Hollywood,” I said, and she produced a 1930s smile—teeth and dimples.

“Talk to me a little,” I went on, while she scrambled back to her feet. “You're very good. But what are you going to do if things don't work out? You know the odds. What's your fallback plan?”

She shrugged, tapping softly, her feet patting the floor like small animals. “I'll just keep trying.”

“But what if trying isn't enough? You can find yourself at forty with nothing to show for yourself but wrecked feet and a studio apartment in San Bernardino.”

“I'm doing what I love right now.” She dimpled again. “I really don't like to talk about it.”

“I'm trying to find out who you are.” Still wearing my street shoes, I began to tap with her, an easy shuffle. “I know you can dance. Everybody can dance. Tell me why I should hire you. You and nobody else. Please.”

She stopped. After another beat, I stopped. Fingering her long red braid, she smoothed her finger over her mouth, then leaned forward and pressed her lips against mine. I was so stunned that my lips parted before I jerked back, dizzy, appalled, at the edge of tears.

“I didn't ask for that,” I said, backing away from her until I could hang onto the barre for support. “What do you think is going on here?”

“Not giving me a job, I guess.”

Clutching the smooth wooden rail, I said, “I need to hire a teacher.”

“Do you want to hire me? I'm very good with kids.” Holding her palms out, she added, “No touching them. I know the rules.”

Still shaking, I saw her to the door, then went home half an hour early. I drove fast and badly, twice cutting people off on turns. Convinced I had crossed some important milestone of degradation, I watched my thoughts careen: I would come home to an empty house. The police would find no trace. Gloria would return weeks later with bruised lips, broken fingernails, and a brain rinsed free of memory.

But Gloria was home, waiting in the corner of the foyer. Her arms—long, long sticks—dangled at her sides. “What's wrong?” I said.

“I can have another job after this one. Greg says there's somebody else who wants to meet me.”

“And?”

“And here you are, witnessing the launch of my thrilling career.” She laced her hands behind her head, then let them fall back to her sides. “I can't take this. I'm going home.”

“You are home.”

“Home-home. ‘Back home again in Indiana,'” she sang.

I took a careful breath. “Your mom wanted you to set the town on fire.”

“Not this way. She told me once that nothing was more stupid than girls who slept with two-bit investors to get a spot in the chorus.”

“But—” I began, then closed my mouth. From the other side of the hall, Gloria faced me, barely casting a shadow. I said, “Come into the kitchen.”

She watched while I unsteadily poured a glass of celery juice, the smell like salty copper, and slid it across the table to her. “Your mother was not the best of the dancers when we were in school,” I said.

“I didn't see how she could be. She's terrible now.”

“But she still got roles. She had a stage career. Most of us didn't. I didn't,” I added unnecessarily.

Gloria nodded. “‘Never expect the world to play fair.'” I recognized Sue's hard vowels and rushed cadence.

“Watching her made me think about how things work. She taught me that talent isn't the only thing.”

“'If you can't go in the front door, go in the side,' she used to tell me while she brushed my hair. She doesn't mind the side door.”

“No,” I said.

“She notices things. What kind of soap people like, what time they go to bed. A lot of people like all that attention. My dad did. My stepdad does. His girlfriends think she's terrific.”

“Wait,” I said.

Gloria's face was as bland as an apple. “I'm just telling you. When you grow up with my mom, you learn to pay attention. First she married a producer who romanced every boy in the chorus, then she married the King of the Hoosier Playboys. She didn't want to get another divorce, so he moved his girlfriends in with us. Two so far. I think she sent me to L.A. before he could bring in Número Tres.”

Air vanished from my lungs. “I had no idea,” I managed to say.

“She likes to have one person in the world who thinks her life is terrific. She loves that.”

“I had no idea. What kind of a friend doesn't know the first thing about her friend's life?”

“Her best one, I think,” Gloria said, and watched me shake my head. “‘If you want to dance, then dance.' From the book of Mona. She quoted it all the time.” I had never said such a thing. Those impatient, rushed words sounded like Sue's, not mine—unless at some point I'd taken them from her, as I had so much else. “You were the great shaping influence of my youth,” Gloria was saying.

“Your youth isn't over.”

“I guess not. She sent me to study at your feet.”

“Your mother—” I listened to the words hover between us, as they had done since Gloria arrived. The room, like every room in the house, was bulging with Sue. I could hardly breathe through all the Sue. And now here was Gloria, presenting me with her mother's despair, for so long my sole desire. I felt the despair as if it were my own. “Your mother—”

“Will be happy to see me come home.”

I snapped my head up. “Pay attention, Gloria. She's got her own work to do, and you're not finished here. In fact, you haven't started.”