Now You See Her (5 page)

been much easier to find me. I would have been totally visible, in the rut beside the jogging path. I would have been smell-able to that stupid cop-dog or search dog or whatever he was. The second dog was a lot smarter, apparently, though I never got a real look at that one. That’s where I got thrown, into the rut; but I scooched myself up. I couldn’t move, but I could see the idiots go clomping by, like, four times. I was almost dead, too. From shock and fear, if not actual injuries. Yes, they released me from the hospital after only a few hours, but that was what I wanted. I was suffering from exposure and dehydration, and I would have gotten frostbite if it had gotten any colder, because the third night it went down to ten degrees. Ten degrees and Logan never came to check on me! He totally chickened out, and I read how he said he would do anything to help search for me because I was a “really special person.”

Can you believe such crap?

By the time they found me, there were like sixty or a hundred reporters camped out at the school in vans with satellites on top. All these beautiful reporters and hand- some anchors were all trying to interview me—some I even recognized—when I was carried by on the stretcher. They were all calling me “honey” and “Hopie” and saying I was “so brave.” I looked like shit, and that was really awful. I couldn’t even brush my hair before

they took pictures of me. I had burrs in my hair. And my parents wouldn’t let me talk to anyone. I’m sure they really were sad at that point. They made like a ring around me with some teachers and the dean and the paramedics.

I would have told them the truth right then! With the reporters and all! After all, besides my brother, Carter, I’m their only child. And Carter wasn’t exactly on their agenda until I tanked out.

I was the family hope, which isn’t a pun.

“You’ll be famous one day,” my mother said. “People all over the country will know your name.”

Well, Mom, you were right. Now where are you?

III
‌

S

EE THOSE THREE
little numerals up there?

Think of them as us: Mom and Dad and me, at the Starwood auditions.

Me in the middle.

I was exactly fourteen and a half. I was freaking out. Back in Bellamy, I had been sort of a star.

It started with community theater, but then, when I was eleven, I went to an open call for this old-time musi- cal about a little orphan girl named Annie at the Bellamy Lakeshore Dinner Theater. An open call is just exactly what it sounds like. It’s a tryout for a show that anyone can come to, but most of the people who come . . . it’s embarrassing. Like, you can hardly hear them when they sing, or they forget the words to their monologues and have to go ask their mothers, and you can see the direc- tor trying hard not to shrink down in his chair, and then

he says, “Very nice, thank you,” and the person, like, turns red as a mosquito bite and runs out of the room. You can tell the people you have to worry about right away, too, because either they just go marching up to the person playing the piano and tell them the key to play their song in, or you’ve seen them before, or they’ve spent the whole waiting time kind of goofing off with their friends or their parents.

I hated seeing people like that, because it totally meant that my chances were less. Anyhow, this Bellamy Lakeshore Dinner Theater was small but respected. It was Equity. I would get paid, like, union scale, five hun- dred a day for three performances a week for three weeks. I think it was that much, or even more. And I would get my union card. That means you’re a member of the actors’ union, which is a professional group that protects actors from people who would work them to death. You get to have dinner breaks and stuff if it’s an Equity production.

I got called back, but all the other girls were older and real dancers. One had naturally curly red hair and freckles, and I thought, Why am I doing this? (I have straight, dark brown hair and olive skin, because my dad is Italian.) Annie was supposed to be a cute little girl with curly red hair. My mother had rented the movie and we watched it. There was no way. They would want

me to be one of the skinny orphan girls.

They made us sing the song about Annie thinking that maybe her mother cooks and sews and has made her a closet of clothes, and I got this sob in my voice, with- out losing control of my breath. I started thinking, What if my own mother didn’t exist? I realized I might miss her. I was trying to think if she’d ever made me a Halloween costume or if we had ever done an art proj- ect together. I couldn’t remember that we ever had. She ran lines with me. She read poems to me and made me repeat them. She read her novels in the same room with me while I practiced piano. But not the other stuff. I got really sentimental about missing this idea of my own mother, a mother I’d never had.

That afternoon, not even four hours later, the direc- tor called me and said that I got the part. The girl who really should have been Annie was my understudy. She was fourteen! I almost died. My mother started to cry, one of the only times I ever saw her cry real tears. Usually she faked crying if my father upset her in some way, and she always cried when I sang. But this time she really cried and said, “She’s really going to make it. She’s really going to go all the way.”

I thought she was overdoing it. But she overdoes everything. And it was practically off-Broadway in the Midwest, after all.

My dad could tell I was scared. He was never quite so involved in the acting as my mother, but he knew why I was scared. My dad had perfect pitch. He could really sing. With a couple of martinis in him, he’d quickly remember he’d been a Whiffenpoof, which is the glee club at Yale. He turned out to be a lawyer because his father said acting was a sissy thing, but he had big ambi- tions for his baby, even though he didn’t brag about me like my mom did. “You won’t give up like I did,” he used to tell me when he was drunk. “You won’t end up star- ing at motions and briefs all day.” I had a great voice, too, when I was little. Great for a little kid, that is. Not like the girl in the movie, and not like Judy Garland in
The Wizard of Oz
, though I think she was grown-up and just pretending to be a kid. I had a nice little vibrato and a high C above middle C. And I could belt, which means your voice sounds a whole lot bigger than it is. But by the time I was eleven, I wasn’t adding on more high notes like real singers do. My coach taught me lots of tricks to “act” the song, so you wouldn’t notice I couldn’t quite hit the highs the way I did before. I still had to work harder than other people who matured vocally better than I did. I practiced until the director warned me about over- doing it and hurting my vocal cords. I jogged to increase my lung capacity. I even talked this girl Casey into giving me her asthma inhaler and saying she’d lost it. They

make your lungs hold more air. I ended up playing my A game for that show. I pulled it off.

We did the show in the Bountiful Mills Theater, an old cannery made over into a theater with a big stage and lots of fancy tables with candles, named after the cereal company that had its headquarters in Trentville, right outside Bellamy. (My father said that they made the town hole into the town hall.) It was this big fancy the- ater with stained-glass windows and did look a little out of place across the street from the trailer park where most of the people at the cereal factory lived. Those peo- ple didn’t go to the theater, but people from Bellamy did, to see the Houston Ballet or the Cleveland Symphony. (My father said that the people who lived in Trentville went to Bellamy—but to fish for channel cat- fish off the highway bridge.) My mother bought fifty- two tickets, one for practically everyone she knew. Other families who had girls in the show got mad at her for buying up so many seats. People’s grandparents couldn’t come to opening night because there weren’t enough seats. But those people were one of the five hundred little girls in the orphanage, not Annie. Anyway, to make up for it, like an apology, my mother had to make a big donation to the theater company. My mother was totally being selfish, but other mothers’ daughters were totally losers, too. I mean, in the chorus,

yelling “It’s the Hard-Knock Life.”

It couldn’t have felt the same way for them that it did for me.

I lie in bed and I think of it now. My first big role.

If you are an actor, there’s nothing like the first time. The first time you really get that this is what your life is about. The whole world is looking at you. People are
paying
to look at you. You can make them feel anything you want them to feel. I got out onstage, and I felt this strange tingly feeling start in my palms and spread up to my brain. I exploded. I literally exploded. When Annie sang about the mother who’s made her a closet of clothes, searching for her baby, I could hear people in the audience sniffling and coughing. Because of me! And I thought, I could do this forever. Not just every night, but forever, without stopping to eat or sleep, until I dropped down dead.

I got my first big write-up in the newspaper.

It wasn’t the
Bellamy Herald
, either; it was the
Chicago Tribune
. My mother had a shadowbox made, with the program and a ticket and photos.

And of course, she thought the next step would be a big movie or the stage in New York.

First, she changed my name.

She changed my name! She said Bernadette Romano sounded like the eleventh child in a Catholic family of

twelve. So I became Hope Shay. Shay was my mother’s maiden name. Hope was my middle name.

She had new composite pictures of me—in jeans, in a man’s shirt over a leotard, in my
Annie
costume, and one smoochy glamour-face shot that made me look about twenty. It was weird seeing
HOPE SHAY
in big bold letters across the top, over a list of what I could do (swim, ride a horse, tennis, ballet—sort of a lie—English accent) and all the stuff I’d acted in. It was also weird, coming back to school after Christmas break and being called “Hope” (or “Dope” or “Mope” after I did this insurance commercial that was on TV all the time, where I had to walk across a room and throw a pom- pom into the air while somebody talked about who would pay for me to go to college if my father died). I could have just gone on with my previous name at school, but my mom said, “Get used to it; it’s your legal name now.” So I did.

And that summer I became, like, the audition queen. My brother went to stay with my grandma Jeanie in Minnesota while I went city to city to city with my par- ents. They said I should think of it “like a vacation.” I tried out for commercials. I tried out for modeling. But I wasn’t thin enough. I tried out for a chorus part in a revival of
Oliver!
on Broadway. I got a callback for that. But by the time I did, I had grown an inch taller, and you

had to be five feet tall max—which made me mad because I never got any taller! I went to Best Talent, a contest in California where they bring in, like, two thou- sand kids from all fifty states. I was one of eight kids who won a first-place award, and a trophy, in acting and a third place in singing. But even I could tell that my third was about a million miles from the first in my age group. I got lots of cards from agents. They all said I should be trying out for sitcoms right away. I was starting to think musical theater wasn’t for me. So was my mother. And she was getting frantic.

One night, we were in Milwaukee or someplace, my mom said, “Mark, we have to rent an apartment in L.A. so I can take her out there for pilot season.”

Pilot season is when they cast and shoot the shows that are going to be pilots the next year. Sitcoms, or even shows like
Law & Order,
whenever they start a new one. I actually know a kid who plays one of the sons of the main detective on
Law & Order: Street Gang Unit.

My dad said no. He put his foot down. I couldn’t believe it. He actually told my mother I wasn’t going to Los Angeles. If my mom wanted me to go to a good arts prep school, that was one thing. But that would be it. They had the biggest fight I’ve ever seen two people have that wasn’t on TV. My mom threw the room ser- vice menu at his head. My dad kicked over a chair. He said

my mom had pushed me enough, and she wasn’t going to hustle my ass for TV shows. He said it just like that. And my mom screamed back at him, “Out there, when you’re twenty, you’re over the hill! Look at Jodie. . . .”

“Yeah, look at your sister!” my dad yelled right back. Look what happened to her because she was pushed and pushed and pushed. No, if she’s going to do this, it’s going to be a regular girl’s life. A girl with a nice, normal family. And this is just going to be a part of it. That’s it, Marian.”

“A regular, nice, normal family. Like ours?” “What’s wrong with ours?”

“What’s right with it?” she bellowed. “It’s boring and small and stupid! All your friends are stupid and small- time! They are so Illinois! My daughter should be in New York at least!”

“That really worked for Marjorie, didn’t it?” my dad yelled.

My dad got his way, though. By the time we got home, I was back in regular school, and my dad wouldn’t even let me apply to Starwood Academy until I was fin- ished with ninth grade.