The Continuity Girl (16 page)

“Fuckbugger. Sorry, Ms. Swain, I’ll be with you in just a moment.”

Kathleen felt a rare but not unfamiliar wave of self-disgust wash over her.
When did I become such a complete bitch?
she wondered.
Was it before or after wardrobe girls started having better bodies than me?
She vowed to try to be nicer to her inferiors,
more folksy and down to earth, like Julia Roberts, who was said to always be chumming around with the crew and who had actually
ended up marrying that handsome second camera assistant.

Mish handed Kathleen a piece of stretchy flesh-toned undergarment that looked, to Kathleen’s eye, like a linebacker’s jockstrap.

“What’s this for?”

“It’s for under your corset. To keep everything...smooth.”

“And who requested this, may I ask?”

Mish seemed to stiffen. Smiled. “No one requested it. The company sent it to me and I just thought you might want to try it.
Apparently Nicole Kidman wore one all the way through
Cold Mountain.
”

“Nicole?” Kathleen wrinkled her nose and looked down at the support garment, held gingerly between her thumb and forefinger.
“But she’s a stick.”

“Exactly.” Mish nodded.

“Well, okay. I guess it can’t hurt, can it?” Kathleen smiled. On second thought there was something about this new girl she
liked. Trusted, even. In fact, she seemed to recall having had a conversation with her earlier in the shoot. Or was that the
other one with the dark hair? Anyway, she felt unusually relaxed with these Canadians. English accents made her tense. She
slipped off her robe and began struggling into the girdle, rotating her hips like a novice belly dancer while hoisting the
elastic up over her thighs. Mish stepped behind her and began to help.

“I’ve become such a disgusting pig ever since I started trying for a baby,” Kathleen laughed, feeling proud of herself for
employing self-deprecating humor (very endearing and down-to-earth). “It’s all the folic acid I have to eat now. Bowls and
bowls of peanuts all day long. I mean, really you’re only supposed to have a small handful, but I haven’t allowed myself nuts
in decades. Once I get started I can’t stop. It’s like...”

“A free-for-all?”

“Exactly! A nut orgy. Oh—ow.” Kathleen winced as Mish tugged the corset strings in another quarter of an inch.

“Sorry, almost done.” Mish double-knotted the string and began rummaging through the rack for the matching petticoat. “How’s
that going, then?”

Kathleen exhaled to make her rib cage as narrow as possible. “Oh, fine. You know.”

Actually Mish didn’t. Nor did she bother to say so.

The digital trill from a tiny silver cell phone distracted Swain. She pressed the phone to her ear with one hand and waved
the other like a flipper. “Just a second. Where’s that remote?”

Mish dropped the laces and began searching the trailer until she found it under a copy of
HEAT
magazine.

“
Oprah,
” said Swain, and then, directing her attention into the phone, “She’s just getting it. What channel again? Twenty-four?
Okay. I’ll call you after.”

Mish turned on the TV and there was the Most Loved Woman in the World. The studio audience applauded hysterically until Winfrey
shushed them with four papal sweeps of her arms.

“And on today’s show we’ll be talking about the issue of late-in-life fertility,”
Oprah
was teleprompted. “Specifically, how
late is too late? When should a woman start to worry and when is it too late to try? We’ll be talking to a group of women
who have succeeded in conceiving later in life—one of our guests had her first baby at the age of fifty-two! Can you believe
that, y’all? And a couple of other women who have not succeeded in making their dreams of motherhood come true, despite the
best medical efforts. Some of these women felt they waited too long, and they are here to tell other women who want to conceive
not to make the same mistake they did by putting things off until it’s just too late.”

Mish, who had been searching for a needle and thread to repair a hem, fell still. “Do you want me to come back later?” she
asked.

“No, no, stay,” said Swain. “That was my assistant calling. My fertility doctor in L.A. is going on maternity leave, so we
have to find another specialist and apparently there’s this guy on
Oprah
who’s written some book. Can you believe what a coincidence
this is? I mean, we were just talking about this and now it’s on
Oprah
—it must be a sign.”

Swain motioned for silence as the commercials finished and the Oprah theme music introduced the next segment.

“Our expert today is Dr. Joe Veil, a fertility specialist and the author of
Baby Love: The New Battle for Motherhood.
He’s
here to give us the straight goods on what women trying to get pregnant later in life can realistically expect. Now tell us,
Dr. Veil, what kind of odds is an average woman facing who’s decided she wants to get pregnant at, say, the age of forty?
We see it all the time on television, or in the tabloids. Seems every established middle-aged movie star and pop singer is
walkin’ around with a bump these days. Is it really as easy as they make it look?”

The camera swiveled over to Dr. Joe Veil. He loosened his collar as he spoke. “Actually, Oprah, it’s
not
as easy as it looks.”
Dr. Veil launched into a litany of the risks and difficulties involved in late-in-life pregnancies. Swain, however, was too
busy swooning to listen.

“He’s a
dish,
isn’t he? Did she say he’s a practising fertility specialist?”

“I hink ho.” Mish’s mouth was full of pins.

Swain stabbed a finger into her phone keypad and began talking almost immediately. “I think he could be the one. Yeah—yeah.
That’s him. Find out for me as soon as you can. I don’t care if we have to fly him over here and put him up at the Ritz. Get
him yesterday. Me
want.
”

She got off the phone and let out a significant
whoosh.
Mish was doing up the final buttons of her collar.

“Do you have children?” Swain asked.

“I haven’t got a maternal bone in my body.” Mish grabbed Swain’s dress off the rack so fiercely she felt the shoulder seam
rip. “We’d better get you on set. You’re already late for your call.”

“Oh, for Chrissake, where is she?”

Richard was agitated and talking to himself. Meredith, who was sitting in her usual spot to the left, pretended not to hear.
Instead, she focused on her notes for the next scene.

The shoot had moved locations to Kewkesbury Park, a sprawling Edwardian country house located at the end of the Northern tube
line, and the crew had just finished setting up for one of the film’s most complicated and expensive segments—the ballroom
dancing scene. Dozens of extras from the London Ballet Academy milled around the set waiting to take their places for the
waltz sequence. They held their heads self-consciously high (even for dancers) as a result of the rustling vintage silks they
wore, the women in bustles and the men in tails and top hats. The crew members moved among them adjusting lights and lenses
in militaristic form.

Kathleen Swain was late for her call and things were behind schedule as usual. Meredith had spent much of the morning wandering
from room to room, exploring the corridors and back stairwells, each one leading to another set of rooms that opened onto
another set of rooms. The place was damp and drafty, the ancient plaster striped with water marks from the rain that had seeped
its way indoors over the years. Everything reeked of mold. And yet, to Meredith (who had a fondness for the ancient and austere),
the place was beautiful.

The house, after all, was very nearly a celebrity in and of itself. In the past couple of years alone it had appeared in dozens
of BBC Agatha Christie dramas, and a reality TV series in which middle-class Brits reenacted the life of Edwardian aristocrats
and their servants, as well as doubling as the interior of Windsor Castle in the TV version of
Diana: Her True Story.
So much
production went on here, in fact, that the owner, an impoverished duke who bred dorgis (a demented-looking cross between dachshunds
and corgis), had confined his living quarters to three rooms above the garage at the end of the lane. While production companies
and tourists overran the grand house of his ancestors, the duke lived the cramped, frugal existence of an inner-city welfare
recipient.

The crew had been waiting for Swain for most of the morning, and now Richard was becoming visibly agitated. He had already
sent the first assistant around to her trailer twice, to no avail. Meredith pulled a chair over to a corner of the room, not
far from the monitor where Richard was pacing and tossing out commands to his crew, and began to scribble down the complicated
set of shot descriptions they had discussed the day before in rehearsal.
Start MS angle toward ballroom door. Inspector enters.
Pan his walk X-L-R across room past waltzing dancers. Hold Full 4/should over Inspector to Miss Celia seated on the sidelines...
And
so on, describing the entire scene through the unblinking eye of the camera in her secret continuity girl language. Meredith
spent so much time at work translating, in cryptic point-form and code, what things looked like from the outside, that she
often amused herself by doing the same thing in real life. Bored on the subway or over dinner, she would find herself making
shot descriptions of scenes as they were playing themselves out.

Tite to Continuity Girl scribbling notes in a binder. RL angle toward door of room. The Movie Star enters. Pan her walk across
the room toward the Director’s chair. Hold Full 4/shot over Movie Star’s R-should to Director seated on chair.

DIRECTOR

Kathleen, how sweet of you to show up for work. And looking ravishing as usual.

MOVIE STAR (HUSHED)

Thank you for being patient, darling. So sorry about the delay. I’m afraid I was having a bit of a woman’s problem.

DIRECTOR

A nasty affliction, that. Now, where were we? Oh, yes, we were in the middle of making a movie.

Wide shot of the room. The crew and extras wait for the Director’s command.

DIRECTOR

Places!

FIRST A.D.

Let’s have a bell!

Angle on the Sound Mixer pressing a button on his panel. A buzz is heard. New angle on the red light outside the stage door.

FIRST A.D.

Quiet!

Silence engulfs the room.

CONTINUITY GIRL

Scene 26, Take 1.

FIRST A.D.

Roll sound.

A beat as the Sound Mixer waits for the recorder to stabilize at the correct speed. Tite of the Sound Mixer whispering the
slate number into the recorder.

SOUND MIXER

Scene 26, Take 1. (Beat of silence.) Speed.

Tite on the Camera Operator peering through the lens to make sure the picture is in perfect frame and focus. Angle over R-should
of Operator as he snaps the camera switch on. P.O.V. camera. A slate appears in front of the lens.

CAMERA OPERATOR

Mark it.

Tite on the clapsticks snapping shut. Timecode on slate freezes, indicating the picture and sound are now in sync. Angle on
the Slate Operator dashing out of set.

CAMERA OPERATOR

Rolling.

Pan across the room, the dancers stand in pairs, poised to begin.

Tite on Director.

DIRECTOR

Action!

When Meredith got home that night, her mother was reclined on the living room sofa smoking a pipe and listening to a vinyl
recording of Leonard Cohen reciting a poem about a girl on a beach. Meredith came up the stairs, dropped her knapsack and
exhaled. Her mother, who was wrapped in a black satin dressing gown, acknowledged her with a nod.

Meredith looked around for somewhere to sit, but as usual every surface was piled high with rubbish. Not the
same
rubbish,
however, as everything seemed to have been shifted around as the result of some invisible tidal pull since she’d last surveyed
the room. She lifted a long-dead potted fern and discovered a perfectly serviceable footstool beneath it. Pulling her cardigan
sleeve over her hand, she dusted it off and sat down.

“Brilliant!” Irma said, opening her eyes. “I’ve been looking for that footstool since the eighties. I remember the night it
went missing. I had a very large dinner party. Full of journalists. Everyone got frightfully pissed and a few of them stayed
over. In the morning the footstool had vanished. Naturally I always assumed one of them had filched it. Don’t ever date a
journalist, darling. They’re dreadful people. Cheap. Unhygienic.”

Meredith said nothing. She placed her chin in her upturned palms and rested one elbow on each knee. Leonard Cohen continued
his droning description of a nude girl’s bottom. If you tuned out the words, he sounded like a man delivering a eulogy for
a person he didn’t particularly like.

“Care for a nip?” Irma indicated the bottle of Limoncello balanced on the sofa near her gnarled and naked feet.

“I’ll have water.” Meredith rose and wove her way around the stacks of magazines and books toward the kitchenette sink. “Want
some?”

Irma’s eyes fluttered open again. “Ucch. Silly Moo, you know I loathe water.”

Irma was always reminding Meredith of things she supposedly knew, but didn’t actually know at all. Had no way of knowing.

Meredith searched for a glass (there were mugs, but she had an aversion to drinking anything cold out of an opaque vessel)
and eventually found one at the back of the oven. She rinsed it out with the last bit of dish soap and dried it with a tea
towel. Filling it took ages. When the water from the faucet finally did pour steadily, it came out warm and full of suspicious-looking
white clouds, which her mother assured her was only gas. Unconvinced, Meredith poured the water down the sink. The drain belched
in protest. Tomorrow she would have to go buy some Evian.

“You know,
he
was the reason why I sent you to boarding school in Canada,” Irma said.