Wallflower In Bloom (16 page)

I’d watched enough of my brother’s deals to know how fast that was. These
DWTS
people didn’t mess around. Wait a minute. Tag would
never
let his agent help make this deal happen.

“Um,” I said. “Actually, why don’t you have the contract sent directly to me? It’ll be easier all around that way.”

As soon as I said it, I wondered if I should have kept my mouth shut. Now I truly understood the meaning of the word
ambivalence
. I was completely in conflict—half of me still wanted to find a way out of this mess, and the other half couldn’t wait to start dancing.

The plane door was opening. I stood up, tucked my cell phone in the crook of my neck, and reached for my carry-on.

“Will do,” Karen said. “Well, then, rest up and enjoy your first night in Hollywood.” Her voice changed pitch and got all warm and fuzzy.
“Oh, and we’re hoping Tag will want to come out to support his sister, especially since it was his idea in the first place.”

I tried not to gulp.

“So when you talk to him, please do let him know we’ve got a front-row seat reserved for him at every sho-ow.”

I closed my eyes. “I wi-ill,” I said. “Just the second I talk to him.”

As soon as we hung up, I turned off my phone again so Tag couldn’t reach me.

I deplaned and followed the signs to baggage claim, passing all sorts of famous-looking people whose names were right on the tip of my tongue. Or maybe everybody who lived in L.A. simply had that look.

I climbed into the shiny black Land Rover
Dancing With the Stars
had rented for me instead of the compact I would have rented for myself. I could get used to this Hollywood thing.

When I turned the key in the ignition, the seat started rumbling. Then it started moving around—up and down and forward and backward, as if it were weighing and measuring me.

“Cool it,” I said. “Like I’m not feeling self-conscious enough as it is.”

Once the seat was satisfied, I typed the address of my temporary home sweet home into the GPS.

Los Angeles is so overwhelming it makes Boston seem like a cow field with a few cobblestone paths running through it. But my Land Rover gave me height. And shiny black bulk. It wasn’t quite a Hummer, but it had the same going-off-to-war-in-a-tank vibe.

And in a way, that’s what it felt like. That I was going off to battle. The battle of my life. Of maybe even for a life.

Tag had done some gigs in L.A., so I’d been here several times before. I managed to circle my way out of LAX and head north on what we would have called Route 1 at home but L.A. people called
The One
. I took a right on La Tijera Boulevard and then a left on South La Cienega Boulevard. As each new direction crackled out from the
GPS, I pretended I was taking a Spanish class. “
Tijera
,” I repeated. “
Cienega
.” I wondered if people from L.A. felt like they were taking a foreign-language class when they came to Massachusetts.
Worcester. Woburn. Gloucester. Scituate
.

Twenty-five minutes later I managed to pull into the tiny parking lot without taking anybody out. I slid out of the Land Rover and stretched.

And then it hit me: This was my
Mary Tyler Moore Show
moment.

Just like Mary, I’d actually had the courage to move away and start over. I was here. This was it.

It wasn’t Minneapolis, but I spun around three times and threw my imaginary hat up in the air anyway.

And right then and there I decided that, whatever it took, I was going to make it after all.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but a bush in the hand will feed the whole flock
.

M
y temporary apartment was beyond bland; it was lifeless. Not a single thing in it even hinted that a real person might survive here, let alone flourish. It felt like a failure-to-thrive holding tank.

The front door opened directly into a no-nonsense rectangle of kitchen-dining-living room. The walls were white. The appliances were white. The cabinets were white. The dishes and mugs inside the cabinets were white. The wall-to-wall carpeting was beige, as were the ceramic tiles on the bathroom and kitchen floors. The living room side had a beige pullout couch, a matching chair, and a tarnished brass reading lamp. A white hallway was just big enough to hold the doors to two tiny white bedrooms and one tiny white bathroom.

I’d been expecting the equivalent of a five-star hotel, or at least a three or a four, so I hadn’t even brought a blow-dryer.

I opened the cabinet under the bathroom sink and pulled out a tiny white blow-dryer.

“What else could I possibly need?” I said. My words actually echoed throughout the apartment.

The whole place smelled like bleach. I pulled up the white plastic
miniblind in one of the bedrooms to open the window and let in some air. It didn’t open. I tried the window in the living room. Nothing.

My temporary apartment was permanently airless. I wondered if I could buy a carton of fresh air to go somewhere, maybe at one of those oxygen bars, the ones with the big serpentine hookahs. Did they still have those places, or had I missed an entire fad without taking a single airy toke?

I was so not a nester. Even when Mitchell and I were in one of our honeymoon phases, his idea of decorating was to upgrade the flat-screen TV. Mine was to bang another hole in the rough sheep shed walls and hang up the latest beachy watercolor my sister Colleen had painted for my birthday.

Now I had an overwhelming urge to do something, anything, to my temporary home to make it feel like mine.

I cranked up the AC as far as it would go and grabbed the key I’d picked up from the guy who managed the place. The three-hour time difference between coasts had given me some bonus hours, so I figured I might as well get some fresh air and do a little shopping.

I made a mental shopping list: some art for the walls, food, underwear.

Instead I found tchotchkes, and lots of them. Every other store I passed sold T-shirts, postcards, and refrigerator magnets. I was sure walking just a block or so would take me to an entirely different class of shopping, but in which direction?

Tag could always smell a mall a mile away, and for just a second, I realized I missed him. If he were with me, we’d be pawing our way through the T-shirts right now and scooping up tacky finds like they were hidden treasure—a yellowed Spice Girls T-shirt or a Harrison Ford bobblehead doll.

“You know,” he’d say, “lots of people are bobblehead fans.”

“Don’t start,” I’d say.

Tag would hold poor bobbly-headed Harrison up to the dim light
coming in through the dusty window. “I’m just saying. It’s something we should consider. Either that or an action figure. I’d make a good action figure.”

I bought a laminated refrigerator magnet of the Hollywood sign and a poster of the
Dancing With the Stars
mirror ball trophy. Plus a candle for ambiance.

“Home sweet home,” I said to the guy at the register. He ignored me. It was hard to tell whether it was because I didn’t seem important or because he didn’t speak English.

I handed him Tag’s platinum American Express. “I’m going to be on
Dancing With the Stars
,” I said, trying out the sound of it.

He dragged the card through the little machine. “I have two scripts. One of them is basically in development.”

“Great,” I said. “Good luck.”

His tired brown eyes met mine. “Yeah, you, too.”

The next item on my list was underwear, which I seriously needed if I had any hope of starting a new life, especially a televised one, but the only underwear store I could find was a Frederick’s of Hollywood. I stood outside for a while, casually glancing at the leathery, feathery display in the windows and marveling at the fact that Frederick was actually from Hollywood. Or at least in Hollywood. Eventually I decided I didn’t have the guts to go in, so I kept walking.

I found a little corner grocery store, the kind that makes you doubt even the freshest-looking produce because it’s so dank and dirty inside. I double-checked the date on the milk. I sniffed some scentless coffee and decided to buy it anyway. I picked up a box of Special K, then put it down and grabbed some peanut butter and English muffins instead. And a single banana.

The banana almost made me cry, right there in the dingy little store. Somehow nothing makes you feel more alone than buying a solitary piece of fruit.

The woman behind the register must have sensed it. Or maybe she
just could tell I wasn’t from around here. “Hi there,” she said. “What brings you to the Land of Oz? Business or pleasure?”

I smiled. “I’m going to be on
Dancing With the Stars
.”

She smiled back. “I’m going to be on
Two and a Half Men
. I’m waiting for a callback, but I’m pretty sure I nailed it.”

I wandered down the street with my groceries. There were probably some hip restaurants around, but I had no idea where they were, and I also didn’t think walking into a restaurant with a half gallon of milk would be a very hip thing to do. I stopped at a Subway and bought a large turkey sub, so I’d have leftovers for breakfast in case I didn’t have time to toast the English muffins. Then I walked across the street to another dingy store and bought a package of peanut M&M’s for dessert, just in case.

I kept walking. The crowds of T-shirt and fanny pack–wearing tourists seemed to be thinning and the area appeared to be getting sketchier, but it was hard to tell. I decided to go one more block and then turn around.

I stopped in front of a pet store. Three tall, ornate bird stands filled the display window. Their elaborate scrollwork was the first thing I’d seen so far that made me think of Old Hollywood. An assortment of canaries sat on perches behind the metal bars and peered out at freedom.

“I feel ya,” I whispered. “That’s exactly how things looked to me. Just yesterday, in fact.”

A chiasmus, one of Tag’s most famous, popped into my head:
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but a bush in the hand will feed the whole flock
.

I had no idea what it actually meant, and I was pretty sure Tag didn’t either. But he always managed to hold an entire auditorium of starry-eyed followers right in the palm of his hand with that one. He had this great spiel about how it’s not all about strategy or
competition. You have to let go of that me-first mentality and focus on nurturing the rest of the world. With. Your. Passion.

I shook my head to dislodge my brother from my brain and opened the door to the pet store.

Growing up, we had a standard poodle named FooFoo that we’d rescued when we found him running around lost and panicked at a massive outdoor Grateful Dead concert on Boston Common one summer.

“I think it’s having a bad trip, Eileen,” my father said as the dog circled by our family’s enclave of blankets and lawn chairs for a third time.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Timmy,” my mother said. “It’s just upset because it can’t find its owners.”

The dog’s wiry black fur was perfectly groomed—shaved close to the body, with longer bursts of fur creating a hat on top of its head and a pom-pom at the tip of its tail. The fur on its legs was longer, too, like go-go boots. I’d been dancing my heart out to “Sugaree,” hiding behind my family so they couldn’t see me, spinning around and around until I thought I’d become airborne. Now I had a sudden urge to start singing “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” Fortunately I was old enough to know that something like that could get you kicked out of a Dead concert.

The dog was the kind that would wear a jeweled collar, but it was collarless. It jerked its long pointy nose back and forth frantically as it searched the crowd.

Colleen and Tag jumped up at the same time. Colleen held out a Necco Wafer. “Here, doggy doggy doggy,” she yelled, her voice barely making a dent in the blare of “Sugar Magnolia.”

“Come to papa,” Tag yelled, waving a good-size chunk of Devil Dog in the dog’s direction.

The dog stopped, tilted its head back and forth at our family a few
times, then trotted over to me. When I bent down to pat it, it lapped my face.