The Fame Thief (15 page)

Wanda said, “I’m hungry.”

“Too late. Everything’s closed. That’s what the basket’s for.”

“There was a restaurant back there—”

Her mother pushed herself away from the door and dropped her purse onto the bed. “Are you listening to me? Get something out of the basket.” She turned her back to Wanda and threw the chain latch and then felt around the doorknob, looking for another lock.

Wanda said, “I want something hot.”

“Children are starving in China.”

“I’m not in China. I’m in wherever we are.”

“No restaurant.”

“Why not?”

“And no questions.”

“Why’d you move the car?”

At the low, four-drawer dresser, her mother leaned forward and looked at herself in the mirror. She turned her head left and then right, then lifted her chin, her eyes never leaving her reflection. The overhead light in the room was so yellow it looked like it was coming through layers of old wax. She unclipped one of her round, orange earrings and looked down at it, bright in her hand. “Getting old,” she said.

“You look fine. Why’d you move—”

“Wanda.” Her mother tightened the hand with the earring into a fist and turned to face her, resting her bottom against the top edge of the dresser. “I have driven several hundred miles today. I didn’t nap, like you did, and I got up an hour earlier than you. Now stop bothering me. Just leave me alone.”

Wanda said, “You
hid
the car.”

Crossed arms were always a bad sign, high and tight over the chest like a wall around the heart. “And if I did?”

“Why can’t I go to the restaurant? Why would you hide the car?”

“That’s enough.” Her mother’s mouth was as straight as a knife-cut. “I am not going to put up with all these questions, young lady. All of this, everything I’m doing, is for you. I’ve interrupted my entire life for you. I’m driving thousands of miles, to a place I’ve never been before, for you. All for you. What am I going to get out of this?”

“How would I know?”

Her mother uncrossed her arms and took a quick step, halving the distance between them. “Young lady,” she said, “you are one minute away from getting your face slapped.”

Wanda flopped onto her back and rolled across the bed to the far side, coming to rest facing the wall, her back to her mother. “This is going to be fun.”

“You’ll have
fun
,” her mother said, spitting the word across the room, “in
Hollywood
. If you’re hungry, eat now. I want to turn off this light and get to sleep.”

“Both of us?” Wanda asked. “In one bed?”

“Unless you’d prefer the floor. Do you need the bathroom?”

“I don’t need anything.”

Her mother said, “Oh, for crying out loud,” and slammed the bathroom door behind her.

Things didn’t get
better as they headed south toward the Golden Road. The car shrank around them and the Shalimar scraped at the back of Wanda’s throat as it aged, the high, aquamarine floral notes fading and revealing a bark-brown base that smelled like Scranton on a bad day, when there were no breezes and the place stank of deep, damp earth and coal smoke. Wanda took to sitting in the backseat, knowing that it irritated her mother. Every few moments, her mother’s eyes would find hers in the rearview mirror.

Wanda had always seen her mother as a confidential partner, the person who knew her secrets—who had
invented
her secrets. Her mother had always been there, an inescapable presence in the house and in Wanda’s life, a steady breeze no more changeable than the shape of the house itself. But now as the distance between the car and home lengthened, her mother began to emit irregular, unpredictable spurts of energy, flaring up and dying down at random intervals like a defective Halloween sparkler.

When the energy was at its highest, her mother’s eyes always came to Wanda’s in the mirror.

Late on the third day, Wanda had moved from one side of the seat to the other, only to see her mother reach up and re-angle the mirror. “Why do you keep staring at me?”

“I’ll look at you all I like.”

“But why? What are you thinking about?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“What I
do
want to know,” Wanda said, her fingers digging into the tops of her thighs, “is why you make me stay in the car all the time. We get gas, I stay in the car. If I have to go to the bathroom, you make me wait until you can pull the car around so nobody can see me. If we stop at a restaurant, you go in alone and I sit here in this stupid car, going crazy, while you get to go inside and order.”

“Those are my rules.”

“It’s not fair.”

“All right,” her mother said, and the flatness of her tone made Wanda pull her head back as though something had been thrown at her. “You want to know what I’m thinking, here it is. Are you ready?”

Wanda pushed back against the seat and brought her knees up. “I’m not sure.”

“Too bad. Listen, my dear, and listen hard, because nobody’s ever told you this before. You’re a very ordinary child. You’re not especially smart—”

“I’m not?” The words struck Wanda like bullets of ice.

“Let me finish. You’re not especially smart, you’re not especially charming. You’re not witty. People who meet you don’t remember you very long. You don’t make an impression.”

Wanda said, “But—”

“Hush. Left to your own resources, this is what your life will
be. A few months from now, when you’re seventeen, some idiot who can barely remember his middle name will get you pregnant. You’ll marry him, thinking you’ve got everything, an adorable baby and a husband who believes he’s married Snow White. But what you’ll really
have
is a husband who will have to quit school and work at some three-dollar-an-hour job that gets his hands filthy and has no future, and as that sinks in, he’ll begin to hate you. And your adorable baby will be a screaming bundle of snot and piss who will wake both of you up thirty times every night, in your awful little apartment with the neighbors banging on the wall every time the baby starts up.” Her eyes flicked to the mirror. “Close your mouth.”

“It’s not—”

“It is, and it makes you look stupid. You need to be aware of that. You need to be aware of everything, because you’re going to another country now, a place where the competition makes the people you know back in Assholeville look like monkeys.” She jerked a thumb back over her shoulder, in the general direction of Scranton. “I haven’t finished with your future, dear. About a year after you have the baby, Prince Charming will start coming home later and later, and he’ll smell of whiskey and sometimes perfume. And sooner or later, when you’re in the middle of reminding him how grateful he should be for his life, he’ll paste you. If you’re lucky, he won’t knock out a tooth, because you won’t be able to afford a dentist, and he won’t break your nose and spoil the one and only valuable thing you possess. Do you know what that is?”

Wanda didn’t answer, just turned to her left and watched the cold, bare woods whip by, trees lifting bare branches toward something they’d never be able to reach.

“I asked you a question.”

“My face.”

“That’s right. And your face is no good to you in Scranton, it’s just bait for the stupid, do you understand me? People who want it without even knowing why. When it’s gone—and it will be after your husband belts you a few times and you give up on the idea that life will ever be better—when it’s gone, you’ll be just another beat-down, hopeless woman sweeping the coal dust out of a house her husband doesn’t even want to come home to. Am I being clear?”

“What you’re being is awful.”

“Well, someone had to say this to you.”

“But you—I mean, you and Daddy.…”

Her mother accelerated but didn’t respond.

“I mean, you.…” Wanda looked at the back of her mother’s head, so familiar, and avoided the eyes in the mirror, not familiar at all. “Did he—did he ever …?”

“On the other hand,” her mother said, as though Wanda weren’t speaking, “you could take this one thing you’ve been given, this precious gift, this
accident
, someplace where it can give you a life you can barely imagine. A place where people will look at you and see—stars.”

The world wavered, and Wanda blinked the ripples away.

Her mother’s shoulders were so hunched they were practically touching her ears. “
That’s
what I’m doing for you, Wannie. And what I need in exchange for this favor is for you to shut up and follow my rules, let me take this face where it will matter, without your rubbing it against the world everywhere, wearing it out like a piece of chalk. You will
keep it to yourself
until I say it’s time to show it, do you understand me?”

Wanda said, “Daddy
hit
you?”

That afternoon, with Route 66 less than ten miles away, they pulled off the road and into a motel. The sun was still up, and Wanda’s mother once again drove straight to the door of the
room and unloaded the car by herself before opening Wanda’s door and watching her scoot into the room. Once Wanda was inside, her mother came in and popped the latches on her suitcase and took out a roll of papery masking tape.

“I’m going to get us something to eat at the Sit ’n Sip that we passed on the way in. You will not open this door. I’m putting a piece of tape across the outside of the door when I leave, and if you open the door, the tape will tear. If this isn’t in one piece when I get back, I swear I’ll leave you here.”

“You don’t need to tape the door.”

“Prove it. Don’t open it while I’m gone.”

“Why did we stop so early?”

“Because we’re getting up at one. From now on, we’re driving mostly at night.” She held up the roll of tape, her index finger through the opening, and wiggled her hand left and right. The tape rolled back and forth, and Wanda’s mother said, “Don’t tear it. Start to earn my trust.”

The door closed behind her, and a moment later, Wanda heard the car start, only a few feet away on the far side of the door. She sat on the bed, feeling like the world around her was very large. The room had a small television, but Wanda didn’t turn it on, just sat looking at the black screen and thinking about the baby she wouldn’t have.

When the sun
was fully up on the first day on Route 66, at about 9
A.M.
, her mother pulled off the highway and began to take the little, local roads, reading street signs aloud and keeping up a running commentary of uncertainty about which way to turn, almost hopping the curb at one moment because her eyes were on the rearview mirror, in spite of the fact that she’d insisted that Wanda sit in front. They’d been on the road since 1:30 in the morning.

They were on a flat, wide street, little soda-cracker houses with dead lawns on either side. People had parked cars on some of the lawns. When they almost hit the curb, Wanda said, “What are you looking for?”

“Shush,” her mother said, looking again at the mirror. “I’ve got enough on my mind without a lot of questions.”

“The sun rises in the east,” Wanda said. “If you keep driving away from it, you’ll be going in the right direction.”

“That’s fine, Miss Smartypants. What about noon? What about the middle of the day?”

“Get back on the highway.”

“And what if I know where I’m going?”

“Then, like I said, what are you looking for?”

“
As
I said.”

“As, as, as.” Wanda slapped her open hands down on her thighs and was rewarded by seeing her mother jump. “Who cares?”

Her mother hit the top of the wheel with the side of her right fist. “You
will not use bad grammar
. You will take your voice down out of your throat and into your chest, the way I showed you, so you don’t sound like a squeaking door. You will be polite. You’ll sit the way I told you, your back straight, with your ankles together and your knees to one side. And you will think before you talk. Nobody will hire a stupid actress.”

“I’m not stupid.”

“That’s still an open question.”

“Mom,” Wanda said, “you’re acting like you hate me.”

“Please, please,” her mother said, looking up at the roof of the car. She checked the rearview mirror again, tapping the brakes when something back there engaged her attention, and Wanda fought the urge to turn around and look, too. With a sigh, her mother made a right onto a narrow street that curved
sharply left. Once they were out of sight of the road they’d left, she pulled the car to the curb, behind an old Dodge with half its paint sanded off. A kid of ten or twelve lazily rode a bike past them on the sidewalk, wiping his nose on the back of his hand and followed by a yawning dog. The boy glanced into the car, looked away, and then snapped his head back to Wanda’s face so fast his bike wobbled.

“Sit tight,” her mother said, craning back to watch the boy and the dog. After a long moment, she opened her door and said, “Come on.”

The world had looked warmer through the windshield than it actually was. A wind, taking courage from the fact that there was nothing much to interfere with it, whipped across the brown lawns and pierced Wanda’s double-breasted swing coat, which had looked so warm in the store. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her plaid wool skirt, glad for the first time that it hung below her knees, and hunched her shoulders to make herself smaller. “Why are we out here?”

“So I can move around a little. I’m sick of the car, and if we’re going to have a fight, I don’t want to have it in there.”

“We don’t have to fight. I just want to know why you’re acting like we’re bank robbers or something, keeping me away from everybody, driving at night, always looking at the mirrors. This morning when that police car was behind us, I thought you were going to start to cry. Why can’t we just stay on the highway? Why can’t I go into restaurants and, and gas stations? Maybe I’d like a Coke, did you think of that? Maybe I’d like to walk to the bathroom instead of being driven to it. I feel like I’ve done something wrong.”

“Honey,” her mother said, and Wanda snagged her toe on an uneven pavement square. When her mother called her
honey
, it didn’t mean anything good. The last time she’d been called
that it was because her mother had gone through her closet and found the pair of slacks she’d bought and hidden on the hanger holding her longest skirt. She had loved those slacks, even if she didn’t have anywhere to wear them.