Anyone

by Lorri Holt

I tell Richard that I think I’m going to have to make some changes. I’m standing in the breakfast nook in my slippers and robe at 7:45 a.m. He is ironing a white shirt, and not doing a very good job. There are wrinkles all over the shoulders.

“What kind of changes?” he asks, with the look that means “Do the changes involve money?”

“I think I’m in some sort of midlife circus—I mean crisis.”

“Please don’t ask about Italy, Lily, I can’t handle Italy right now.”

I haven’t even mentioned Italy. I’m thinking about it, but I haven’t mentioned it. I hand my daughter, Caroline, her sneakers. Well, I toss them at her.

Richard looks up from his ironing. I ignore him.

“Finish your cereal, Caroline,” I say. “And put on your shoes. This is the third time I’ve asked.”

“What’s the matter, Mommy?”

I cannot bring myself to say irreversible frustration to a five-year-old, so I hurry into the back garden to water.

The leaves are turning, it’s barely September, and they’re already falling. I shouldn’t have snapped at her. Her hair is nearly as yellow as the falling leaves, but shinier. I love the way her eyes close when I brush her hair at bedtime. I don’t have time to brush it now, because it’s hot and the yard is thirsty and we can’t afford to hire anyone to help with yard work. I struggle to make things beautiful, but it’s impossible to keep up with the trees, in such a hurry to strip off their summer wardrobe. The leafy mess is everywhere: limp, golden-plum leaves, spiky brown pine needles, and the dried-out husks of that stupid acacia caught in all the fern fronds. We need a new rake.

Richard has a busy life in his head and it keeps him oblivious to the absence of helpful household items, or the presence of things like rings around the toilet bowl. I tested him once, didn’t clean the toilet in his bathroom for a solid month; I wanted to see if he’d notice. He didn’t.
My friend Cindy the sit-com actress told me a joke: How many men does it take to change a roll of toilet paper? Answer: Who knows? It’s never been done.

At least he irons his own shirts.

The backyard air smells spicy. It always smells spicy in September in northern California, I wish I knew why. I love that smell, it reminds me of something....ah, yes. It reminds me of September in northern California. Is that circular logic? Or is it postmodern? I hate postmodernism, it annoys me deeply. Contrary to popular postmodern belief, context is not everything. Take, for example, the context of my life. Please. I’m the only artist in a family of civil servants.

“Working in the arts?” my father says, “Isn’t that an oxymoron?” The only time he doesn’t laugh is when he sees me on TV, playing some cop’s wife on “America’s Most Wanted,” or some housewife with a headache in an aspirin commercial. How’s that for context? Does that explain why I am what I am?

“At least you aren’t playing criminals or prostitutes!” my mother says.
The truth is I’m too old to play prostitutes, and what I am doing is criminal, at least as far as my former standards are concerned: I should be playing Masha in Three Sisters, or Lady Macbeth, or Mother Courage. Instead I run around day after day in a broken-down Mazda to a bunch of auditions: industrial films for the corporate giants, TV commercials for pain relievers and coffee, movie auditions for absurdly small parts that, in the end, will go to friends of the director who live in L.A.

I promised myself that if I hadn’t made it to some half-imagined big time by 40, I’d get out and do something else with my life. The problem is, I’m no good at anything else. Acting is what I know how to do. I can be anyone, that’s my gift.

Eleanor the dog creeps down the back stairs into the yard and heads straight for the swordferns to take a pee. I follow behind her with the hose, rinsing the fronds. A spray of water hits her in the hindquarters, and she jumps and turns and looks up at me as if I were the doggie gestapo.

“Sorry, Eleanor,” I say. She ignores me and creeps back up the stairs. Lately I’ve found pee spots all over the house: in Caroline’s room, on the Oriental rug by the front door, even on our bed. I try to clean them up before Richard sees them—he was raised in an apartment in New York City and thinks animals belong in the wild—but it’s become a losing battle: Eleanor’s 13 and her kidneys are going.

“How long do you let an old dog live?” Richard asked last week after he sat down and landed in a wet spot on the couch.

Richard and I started couples’ counseling last month, and the first thing the therapist observed was our tendency to interrupt each other and push forth our own agendas.

“I don’t have an agenda,” I argued. “I wish I did. I need one.”

“Just try really listening to each other this week,” said the therapist. “Listen and hold back your response until the other is fully finished.”

The problem is, I’m never finished and Richard has a hard time getting started. Whenever there’s a disagreement, his lips go taut and his eyes narrow like Eleanor’s do when Caroline gets too close to her bowl while she’s eating. Then he throws himself into his easy chair as if he were 14 again, his long legs dangling over the arm. “I do not want to talk about this now, Lily,” he’ll say.

I water the spearmint and geraniums, then move up to the back of the yard. All the color has drained out of the showy blossoms of the Ladies-of-the-Nile; what were once huge, vivid lavendar pom-poms are now dirty-gray, shriveled mop-tops. They remind me of bad wigs I’ve worn. I break off the heads and throw them in the dirt. Maybe my hormones are out of whack. I can’t seem to muster up my old enthusiasm for anything: marriage, gardening, showbiz. I don’t believe in anything, and I don’t feel right. I never make wishes anymore, never sing the old songs. I’m normally such a sap that I tear up, just hearing Ethel Merman sing, “There’s no people like show people, they smile when they are low....” In my world you have to get used to rejection. It’s true I haven’t made much money this year, but what’s money? I work fairly regularly, I’m recognized by my peers, I’m doing my art. O.K., I’m mostly lying about the art part, but as my friend Cindy the sit-com actress once said, “Art—I’ve done art.” I wish I felt more like Cindy.

It wasn’t always like this. I used to be part of an artistic adventure—I belonged to a theatre company. We did work that mattered, we fought with each other, we struggled for funds and had meetings that went on for days, during which we worried over our artistic mission: Who are we? What are we trying to do? Then the theatre burned down and our morale melted as permanently as the new lighting board we’d just installed. Arguments about our future erupted, and in the end nobody won; the landlord collected his insurance money, and the company scattered to the four winds.

Now I stand in the garden morning after morning tending the hydrangeas and geraniums, worrying about how Richard and I will pay for the new plumbing, or the dry rot, or the orthodontic work that Caroline is going to need. Sometimes I stare into the branches of the apple tree and wonder: Where am I? What happened? Then I go back inside and change into a business suit (if I’m auditioning for an industrial film), or a pair of slacks and a nice blouse (if I’m auditioning for a housewife in a commercial), or a pair of jeans, a push-up bra, and a tight-fitting sweater (if I’m auditioning for a TV cop’s wife or a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown).

Today is a housewife day, so I take a deep breath of the spicy September air, vow not to lose my temper again with Caroline, and ask myself as I water the fuchsia: What in the world am I doing with my life? I discover that Eleanor has peed on the Chinese lantern plant. It is yellow at the base, probably done for. I have three auditions to get to.

The first audition is in the city, so I drop Caroline off at her school and sign the list in the office for drop-in extended daycare.“I don’t want to stay after school, Mommy, I hate after school, it’s boring.”

She attaches herself to my upper thigh with the force of a limpet on a rock.

I glance up and smile at the Office Parent, a no-nonsense, frizzy-haired woman with four kids, known around school as Ubermom. She scowls, pretending to sort the mail.

I pry Caroline’s fingers from my leg.

“I promise I’ll bring you a treat when I pick you up.”

“What kind of treat?” Caroline loosens her grip and lets her arms fall to her sides.
“A very special one.” I feel like a politician, always making promises for something sweet in the future. Consumed with guilt, I stay in the classroom until circle time.

“Bye-bye, Carrie!” I whisper as the teacher helps the kids get seated. The skin next to Carrie’s ear smells irresistibly sweet, and I kiss her neck.

“Stop it, Mommy!” she hisses. “I have work to do.” She pulls away and stacks the tiny doll-dishes back inside their painted wooden cupboard.

It is already hot at 9:15 a.m., and I’m driving the funky car, a ten-year-old Mazda with a battered front end and no air conditioning. It is Richard’s day for the good car. The good car is called Gracie. The funky car is called the funky car. Traffic is backed up all the way through Berkeley, so I turn on the radio for a traffic report. A big-rig has jackknifed across four lanes of the approach to the Bay Bridge. I will be at least 30 minutes late to the first audition, which is for a TV commercial for a large, low-quality department store. It will feature Joe Montana and a wholesome housewife. Or someone who looks like a wholesome housewife. Maybe me. I can look like that.

Late again. Richard says I live in another time-dimension; he calls it Lilytime. He would have left the house 20 minutes earlier and not waited with Caroline until the teacher called the class to circle. Richard is never late, but his shirts are always a mess.

I glance over at the frontage road that skirts the Bay; cars are moving at least twice as fast, but it’s over a mile to the next exit, so I may as well sit tight. The traffic report segues into a commercial for something called matchmaker.com and my thoughts drift to Cindy, who’s dating an underwater repairman. She says he can go for 20 minutes at a time under the sheets without coming up for air. I wish I was as easygoing as Cindy. She’ll take any job. She took the voiceover job for the porno flick Betty’s Boobs, which I turned down. Through connections she made on that job she landed a part in the sit-com Peter’s Place. On the last episode she wore a dress made entirely of hot dogs.

It’s getting hotter in the car, so I roll down the windows. When I twist around backwards and lean sideways to get to the ones in the back, I pull a wing muscle—not its technical name, I know, but it’s where my left wing would be, if I could fly. I switch to the classical radio station and suddenly hear my own voice on a commercial for the San Francisco Opera.

“Voila!” I reply to the sneering internal doomsayers. I play two different characters in the spot, changing my voice so completely that no one would ever guess both of them are me. I’m a chameleon; I’ll bet I could fool even Caroline into believing I was someone else.

One night when Richard and I were dating, I put on a short black skirt, tight black top, black tights, black pumps, and a red beret, and when he picked me up in his car (the funky one), I pretended to be someone named Sylvie, someone French, accent on the last syllable—Seel-vee. I was Sylvie for the whole evening, even in bed, which I think he especially liked. Sex with a French person has got to be better, non? I climbed on top of him wearing only the beret, and when he climaxed I sang out: “Encore, cheri, encore!” His eyes grew wide with a kind of pleasured amazement, and I never let on that I didn’t do this sort of thing with everyone. When he fell asleep, I rose on one elbow and stared at his face for over an hour. It was a breezy San Francisco night, and the yellow light from a street lamp played across his features, patterned by the movement of a tree branch in the wind. He looked like a sleeping Roman statue, and I decided right then that we would move to Italy and live in a villa, where he would write philosophy books and I would take the European film world by storm with my ability to transform emotion into any language.

Nowadays I’m just me in bed, just Lily, a little droopy in places but still not bad, pour une femme d’un certain âge.

“Whatever happened to Sylvie?” Richard asked on our last anniversary.

“I think she moved to Italy,” I said. “I had a postcard from her not too long ago, from Rome. It said ‘Wish you were here living la dolce vita.’”

In my barely moving car-sauna I feel sweat form on my upper lip and I swipe at it; I sense mascara oozing off my lashes and into the bags under my eyes. Maybe I shouldn’t have worn so much makeup. Richard says I look fine without it, but I’m not blind. I see the changes. Still, I feel young, until I see someone who is young. Yesterday I slowed at a crosswalk to let a woman cross the street. I was on my way home from running errands—market, pet store, cleaners—and, when I slowed the car, she waved her hand and gave a little smile to say thanks. She was about 25, medium height, lean and lovely, with long blonde hair almost exactly the way mine used to be. She wore bike shorts and a tank top, her upper arms were tan and taut, and her butt was perky. The sight of her filled me with sadness. I lifted my hand in a little salute and a funny noise came out of my mouth, as if I had coughed up something unpleasant. Thank goodness Caroline wasn’t with me.

“Why are you sad, Mommy?” she would have said, and I would have had to say, “It’s her butt, honey, it’s her butt and her hair.”

I figure I might as well do vocal warm-ups while I’m roasting on the concrete. Multi-tasking, it’s called. I turn off the radio. I pull the muscles around my mouth and eyes into a tight little prune-face, stretch them out big like an astonished clown. Ooo-wee, ooo-wee, ooo-wee; mmm-wow, mmm-wow, mmm-wow. I drop my jaw open and relax my tongue: ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya. I glance out the window and there is a sweet-faced, dark-eyed little boy in the car next to mine. It’s a new model Volvo station wagon, and he is in a booster carseat in the back. His mother has dark hair in a fashionable bob; she’s talking into a cell phone. She looks five years younger than me; he is maybe a year younger than Caroline. He looks at me with a very serious expression. Perhaps I am the first adult he has ever seen with her tongue hanging out. I stare back at him for a minute in that compromising position, and then I smile broadly, to show I am, after all, just a normal lady. I expect him to smile back at me, but he sticks out his tongue instead and I feel myself filling with a sudden, unreasonable rage. I make my face as long as I can get it, then cross my eyes and stick my tongue back out at him. He starts yelling, I hear him, because my window is down. I quickly face front again, but it’s too late. There’s a honk and I glance over innocently. Volvo-Mom has used her remote control to roll down the passenger-side window.

“What’s the matter with you?” Her face is flawless and lovely in its self-righteous anger.

“He did it first!” I yell, and I roll up my window and refuse to look at her.

Richard says I have a great deal of misplaced anger. “Misplaced?” I asked him. “Where would you like me to put it?”

I move on to tongue twisters (red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather; black bugs bleed blue blood, black bugs bleed blue blood), as fire trucks and the highway patrol cars and giant towtrucks finally appear on the scene, lights flashing, sirens bleating. Caroline would love it. Of course, there’s not much room for maneuvering: it’s ten lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic backed up for half a mile, with nowhere to go but sideways into the Bay, unless you’re a bird. I once flew over a range of mountains in a dream, and, when I crested their peaks, I was dazzled nearly blind by the shine of an endless silver sea. I haven’t flown in my dreams for years now. With my hands on the steering wheel, I flap my arms, just testing. The irritated wing-muscle sends a shooting pain through my mid-back.

I have sweat rings under the arms of my pink Oxford blouse, my crotch is itchy and damp inside my cotton-twill slacks, and the slight curl I took such pains to blow-dry into the ends of my hair earlier this morning is nothing but a limp memory. I look as far from a wholesome, happy housewife as I am from the casting office. My pager goes off. I click the display button and just seeing the numbers gives me palpitations: it’s my espresso-swilling agent, Barbie Bagwell. I swear that’s her name. She’s calling to find out where the hell I am. I glance at my watch. I am wasting, wasting, wasting yet another day of my agenda-less life.

Fortunately, there’s no possibility of calling her back, since I don’t have a cell phone. I consider attempting to borrow the Volvo lady’s phone. It’s enough to put a grim smile on my face. I think of Eleanor, the way her lips pooch out in a dogfaced grin after she’s overturned the kitchen garbage.

“What’s eating you?” my friend Harvey asked me last week. Harvey was a member of my old theatre company, too, and he’s done just fine—he’s the artistic director of the biggest regional theatre in the area. He doesn’t hire me to work there, not because he doesn’t want to, he insists, but because “it would look like favoritism.” “What, it’s not favoritism,” I said, “to hire the young lady you’re screwing three shows running?” “You weren’t right for those roles anyway, Lily, she’s 15 years younger than you.”

It’s not that I’m not working at all; I have more jobs than many actors: I have two radio spots and a local TV commercial running. I’m the voice of a northern California health plan (I only wish I was covered by it), and I just did ten character voices on a CD-ROM game.

But I miss the stage. It’s the concentration I miss, the silence, the space between the spoken words. Even at home, lying next to my sleeping child, if Eleanor barks, I have to let her out no matter how much I would love to fall asleep, forever undisturbed, with the image of Caroline’s sleeping face imprinted in my consciousness. If the doorbell rings, I have to answer it. When the laundry is dirty, I have to do it.

When you’re onstage, you’re allowed to be only there. The rest of my life could be falling apart, but when the lights come up and I put my hands together and make a small bow to what-will-come-next, I walk onstage and it’s like I’m Vasco da Gama; I’m an explorer setting out on a dangerous adventure and there’s no telling how it will end, what will happen, what will be discovered. And sure, you can say that he did it for the sacks of gold, old Vasco, or for the Queen of Portugal, or for God and Country or whatever, but that’s a lot of b.s.—he did it to discover something new.

Discovery is addictive.

Last year I was nominated for an acting award by the West Coast Theatre Critics for my performance as a woman having a nervous breakdown. I didn’t win. The award went to someone who’d played a prostitute. She’s a nice actress, a lovely person. She wore a gorgeous brown silk outfit to the awards ceremony and she bought me a drink after she’d won. I don’t begrudge her. That was the last play I did.

“Move to L.A.,” people tell me. How? I can’t move to L.A., my life is here. What would I say to Richard and Caroline? “Sorry, guys, Mommy needs to try her luck in Tinseltown—there are snacks in the fridge, I’ll be back after pilot-season. Don’t forget to feed the dog!”

Anyway, as Cindy would say, I’ve done L.A. I lived there for a few months once. I was there to do a new play by a very famous playwright—I can’t tell her name, because “she” is really a “he.” But he thinks his plays sell better if the public believes a woman wrote them, since they’re all about women and what we truly think and feel. Pregnant with Caroline and sick every day, my lifeline was my nightly call to Richard. Richard couldn’t be there with me because of his job, so I stayed alone out in Pasadena in a house that reeked of mothballs, which had been stockpiled under the foundation to keep the skunks away. I retched into the toilet every morning before I left for rehearsals, and, when I got home at night, I locked myself into the bedroom for safety and climbed into bed with the telephone. Richard talked me down with his low, soothing voice and his ability to make me laugh. He always used to make me laugh.

“What’re you reading?” I’d ask.

“The Origins of Satan.”

“Uh-oh. Where’d he come from?”

“Well, I don’t want to alarm you, Lil, but they’ve narrowed it down to a small area in the vicinity of Burbank. Lock your doors.”

When I hung up the phone, I talked to the fetus in my stomach, sang to her, and stroked the skin that was her first home. Then I lay back in the bed that was not mine and read books about Italy. I’ve always wanted to go to Italy. I am attracted by the light. I turned the pages slowly, gazing at glossy pictures of San Gimignano, while outside the house a line of helicopters chopped their way over the valley. It sounded like a war zone. They were spraying malathion to kill Mediterranean fruit flies, and everyone was supposed to stay inside at night. In the morning my car—the funky one—was sticky with the nasty stuff, and once, when I came home late after a dress rehearsal, my car was sprayed as I drove the freeway.

I creep along in the traffic on San Francisco’s new and improving Embarcadero, past the torn-up concrete and trussed-up imported palms, which have been stuck into the ground at regularly-spaced intervals along what will sometime in the future be a new municipal railway line. Someday. Poor things, the palms, they’re so beautiful, but they have been shorn of their messy outer husks and their crowns are tied up with ropes like some sort of captive sylvan hairdo. It’s like they’re bound and gagged, and where are their roots? There’s nothing but concrete around them. I expect them to blow right over in the first big storm of the season. They’re beautiful, but they don’t belong here. They won’t survive.

I find a parking lot which charges only $10 for the first hour, and I sit in the steaming car and quickly fix my face for the audition. I remove the smudges from beneath my eyes, apply concealer, powder my nose, apply lipliner and a nice matte lipstick in a neutral, housewifely color. I brush and tease my lank hair and spray it with enough hairspray to stop a clock. I have already spent two-fifty and I haven’t even left the parking lot. I grab my briefcase with its requisite headshots and résumés inside and stride up Vallejo toward Sansome. I am ready to be a normal, happy housewife. I walk confidently, ignoring a burgeoning blister on my left heel, caused by my sensible, low-heeled pumps, which are left over from before Caroline’s birth and therefore a half-size too small.

Waiting on the corner of Broadway for the light to change, I am enveloped in a sudden strange dislocation of memory: I am back in my wandering days, the October before Richard and I married, when I walked the streets of San Francisco, searching for evidence that my upcoming marital adventure would yield the treasures I sought. Dolores Street was my favorite. Between 23rd and Army, I ambled up and down the hills every free twilight I had, watching people arriving home. I strolled slowly past Victorian and Edwardian living rooms as the wide-paned windows filled with light and the stage sets of these anonymous peoples’ lives came into view. There were deep-cushioned couches and chairs, bookcases filled with books whose titles I couldn’t read; there were silk-covered lamps whose light spilled onto warm woods and forest-colored fabrics; there were fall flowers in orange and red, and the saturated colors of fine paintings; there was the inviting blue-gold flicker of gas fireplaces in use for the first time that season. I walked as slowly as possible without being obtrusive, and I imagined a life for myself in each of the houses I passed.

The traffic light changes.

Outside the entrance to Rex Renault Casting Agency, I run into Jeannie, my arch-rival in commercial auditions. Jeannie has no children, but she’s always getting the mom jobs. It’s easy to look fresh, relaxed, and easygoing when the only dependent you have is a poodle and you’ve got four 60-second national spots paying at least thirty grand each.

“Lily!! I haven’t seen you in absolutely ages!” She airkisses both my cheeks. “Where have you been?”

This tells me that I am not being sent out much.

“Jeannie, it’s so great to see you again!” All my teeth are showing. “I’ve seen your Chevy spot five times this week! Gosh, I’d love to chat, but I got caught in traffic. I’ve been busy with voiceover stuff, you know, and Caroline, my five-year-old, of course.”

Jeannie’s face changes. “Oh, your sweet little girl. How is she, Lily? Do you have a picture of her with you?”

Something catches in my throat; she really wants to see a picture, but I’m late, so I say, “Let’s have lunch soon and I’ll show you a whole album.”

“It’s a date! Ciao, bella!” She blows a kiss. “Have a great time in there—the producers are so nice—hope you can do the splits in those slacks!”

The splits? She was wearing a lavendar gym outfit. I have gotten the types mixed up. This is the woman-doing-yoga audition, not the happy-housewife audition, and I’ve left my leotard in the car.
“Lily! Where have you been, you were supposed to be here at ten?” Melanie swoops over as soon as she sees me round the corner into the waiting room. Her breasts arrive a second before the rest of her. Melanie is Rex’s assistant casting director, very young, very L.A., very built. She wears only black, with silver accents. Today it’s a black tankdress that shows off the dragon tattooed around her upper left arm.

I will have to lie to get out of this.

“Barbie told me ten-thirty, I swear, it’s written in my book, and then there was this horrendous traffic jam—”

“Never mind, you’re here now, sign in and—oh my God, what are you wearing? Didn’t Barbie tell you this is for Ultra-Slim Nutra-Drinks? They need to see your body, honey! You look like a housewife or something!”

“I am a housewife.”

“Well, not now, you’re not—you’re a fit-and-trim businesswoman in her mid-to-late thirties who cares deeply about her health and does yoga and drinks Ultra-Slim Nutra-Drinks. Do you have a leotard in there?” She gestures at my briefcase.

“The only thing in here I could wear is a tampon.”

There is another woman waiting to audition; a redhead I recognize from a Toyota commercial. She has long legs and short curls and she is looking at me now as if this were a watering hole on the savanna and she is a tiger and I am a zebra. An old zebra.

“They really wanted to see you—they remember you from that California Grape commercial last year—but they’re on a tight deadline, they’ve got lunch meetings. There’s only you and Carla left. Carla, go ahead and go in next, while I fix Lily up with something to wear.”

Carla rises like a flamingo from the black leather chair and crosses to the studio door. She knocks, there is a muffled Come in. She turns and gives me a little glance, the pitying glance of the triumphant toward the defeated.

“I’ve got something I think you can fit into,” Melanie says. “The bust might be a little too big and I hope it’s not too tight in the butt...”

I look down at my blouse, fiddle with the buttons. I follow her into the back office, a room with a row of file cabinets 20 feet long, all stuffed with résumés and headshots of the hundreds of actors who vie for these jobs, day in, day out. There are three gorgeous young gay guys manning the phones, digging through file drawers and sipping coffee from Starbuck’s. The only one whose name I know is Brian.

“Hi, Brian!” I say.

He looks at me quizzically. He’s forgotten who I am.

“Lily Thompson,” I remind him.

“Oh, Lily, hey, how ya doin’?”

Melanie is foraging in a black duffle bag with I Rock printed in silver on its side.

“O.K., Lily, this is the outfit I wore to my Pilates class this morning; I take a mat class every morning at 6:30; you should try it sometime, it’s fantastic, it could help you get those abs in shape. This might be a little damp.” She reaches into the bag and pulls out, I kid you not, a black-and-white zebra-striped stretchy tank top with a pair of shiny black stretch aerobic shorts. “What size aerobic shoes do you wear?”

“Same as all my other shoes—8-1/2.”

“Oh my God! Bigfoot! Jesus, you’ll have to go barefoot, I guess—I’m a size seven.”

I take the skimpy outfit into my hand. It smells strongly of Melanie’s perfume, which I think I recognize from magazine inserts as something by Calvin Klein. I slip into the bathroom.

There are two humps in the tanktop where Melanie’s breasts live in the early mornings. It’s midriff-baring, which is not good, not good at all. It hangs over my bustline. I pull out a three-foot length of toilet paper, tear it in two and shape each length into a thick half-moon. I take the half-moons and prop one beneath each breast to give them a little lift, a kind of miracle-bra effect. The miracle leaves a definite ridge. I slip off my slacks and shoes.

“Chop-chop!” calls Melanie from the other side of the door.

I step into the shorts. The crotch has a damp sweat-stain. I tug them over my hips, thinking of the fortune my friend Cindy the sit-com actress once received in a cookie: “Some pants are born stretch pants. Others have no choice.” My midriff bulges out over the waistline. There is a twinge in my gut, a sudden animal desire to run out the door and down the stairs, yelling like Tarzan. I put my pink Oxford shirt back on over the zebra-striped get-up.

I step back out into the office. My feet look red and squished as a newborn’s face. Their moist, vile fragrance wafts among the desks; Brian glances up, sniffs the air like a dog. He sees my feet and turns quickly back to whatever it was he was working on.

Melanie shoos me into the waiting room. Carla the Tiger is gone. I set my briefcase and purse onto a leather chair, pull a résumé and headshot from the side pocket of the briefcase and tiptoe to the door of the studio. I look inside. At the far end of the room is a conference table with two people behind it, a man and a woman. They look at me as if I were an unexpected dinner guest. They refer to their audition list.

Suddenly in my head I see Caroline, standing at the door to our bedroom last Saturday morning, troubled, her pigtails askew from sleep.

“I woke up right now and I don’t feel right,” she said.

“Are you sick?”

She stood at the door, thinking about the question. “No,” she said. “Need to go back to my room for a minute.”

Richard and I looked at each other, waited there in the bed to see if she were coming back, then tiptoed to the door of her room.

Eleanor sat in the middle of Caroline’s low bed, listing slightly on her arthritic haunches; Caroline lay on the rug, her body curled, her arms straight above her head, toes pointed.

“What are you doing, honey?” Richard asked.

“I’m a U.”

Her face wore a look of supreme concentration. She stayed still for close to a minute, then all at once she sat up with her legs out straight in front of her, her hands in the lap of her nightgown. “I’m better now.”

“You’re better?” I asked. “What happened?”

“You know how sometimes when you wake up you just don’t feel right, and you know that if you make your body go a different direction you’ll be O.K.?”

“Sure,” I said, flooded by a feeling of loss, by the memory of a vast weeping willow in the backyard of my early childhood home, the memory of climbing into the Y between its two main branches whenever life was too much. I would hang on to the branches for dear life, resting my head against the rough, living wood, sure that the tree was breathing with me.

I could sense Richard’s amusement. Caroline reached up and pulled one of Eleanor’s ears.

“I just needed to make a U-turn.”

The woman has cat-eye glasses and dark red lipstick. “I’m Clarissa Vandemere from Foote, Cone & Belding; I think we met once before at a callback for a Clorox spot.”

“Oh, yes, of course.” I imagine Clarissa Clorox at home, in a glass-and-chrome apartment, a white-walled prison of luxury.

She turns to the man, who has thin brown hair, thin, pale lips, a navy suit with skinny pinstripes, and a thin smile.

“This is Jim Bonaparte, my client, from Ultra-Slim.”

“Jim-Bo, nice to meet you.”

I toss my résumé and headshot in front of Clarissa. She moves back, startled, as the résumé sails into her lap.

“Let’s get this show on the road!” I say.

I look around the room for my marks: halfway to the back there is an Oriental rug with a red X marked in the middle with duct tape. Eleanor always chooses the middle of the rug to pee on. Unlike me, she’s got an unerring instinct for the center.

“Who’s running the camera?” I say. “Where’s old Rex, anyway?” The rug feels soft under my bare feet, and I push my toes into the pile, rocking back and forth on my heels.

“Rex had to make a quick call,” Clarissa says, very businesslike. “Are you familiar with Ultra-Slim drinks, Lily?”

“Me? I love to cook. My specialty is Italian food; I think the light in Italy has inspired chefs there through the ages. The light is so beautiful nobody wants to leave—that’s why there are so few famous Italian explorers, but so many famous artists and inventors and such. I’ve never actually been to Italy, but I’ll be going there soon to visit a friend of mine named Sylvie...”

Clarissa taps her pen against her thumb. “Have you tasted Ultra-Slim drinks, Lily?”

“You mean, have I ever drunk one of them?”

“We have some over there on the table, and we’d like you to taste one.” Jim-Bo says this with quite a bit of authority.

I walk to a little table set up on one side of the room with cans of Ultra-Slim in various flavors: Strawberry, Banana, Tropical Fruit, and New Berry. I wonder what new berry has been discovered, and choose the Tropical Fruit. I pop the can open and take a dainty sip. The dominant taste is very much like a medicine I was forced to give Caroline last year when she had a terrible stomach flu. Chalk.

“Whoa!” I say. “I can see why you’re springing for a national spot—this could be a pretty hard sell!” I smack my lips and break out my most radiant smile. “But if anyone can do it, I’m your girl. You’re trying to appeal to the type of woman who imagines that dropping a few pounds will change her life, and you know what?” Clarissa Clorox and Jim-Bo seem kind of quiet, so I smile again. “I can be that woman! I can be anyone!”

Rex sails in. “Lily, my love! We were worried you weren’t going to make it!” He pauses to give me a quick hug. I really do like Rex, and I feel a pang of regret, knowing I won’t be seeing much of him in the future.

“Unbelievable traffic,” I say.

“Of course, of course—you really ought to think about moving back to The City, darling.”

“Not on your life,” I say. “Better trees in Berkeley.”

He gives me a wrinkly-eyed, curious smile. “Did you have a little drinkie-poo yet?”

Can he tell there is a ship inside my head, a three-masted schooner with shining mahogany railings, straining at her dockside ropes? The bosun stands on the quarterdeck in a wash of bright sun, wearing a tricorn hat, telescope in hand.

“Sure did,” I say. “I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Renault!”

“Great!” Rex crosses in back of the camcorder. “Found your mark—Lily, you’re so good. What we’re asking everyone for is a couple of yoga poses. I think, though, that we might want you to take off the pink shirt.”

I hesitate for just the tiniest second, imagining how they will see my body. Then I strip off the shirt and toss it to the ground.

“Woo-woo!” I say. They stare at the zebra stripes. The bosun calls to the deck crew to loosen the rigging. It’s time for me to go.

“I have a great pose I’d like to show you, a new pose.” I flop down onto the rug, my butt in the middle of the red X. “I learned this pose from my daughter, Caroline. I’m sorry you’ll never meet Caroline, Rex, you would have loved her.”

JimBo and Clarissa have a constipated look. Rex lifts his eyes from the camera and watches me, a strange smile playing at his lips.

“I can be anyone,” I say, and I stretch my arms above my head. My wing-muscle cramps, then pulls free as the ship heaves away from the dock, rocking in the silver waves. “This pose is called The U-Turn, and this is how it’s done.”

We come about, heading straight for the edge of the known world.

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Lorri Holt is an actress who lives in Berkeley. She has appeared in A.C.T.’s world-premiere adaptation of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.