I’d asked the shrink if the glowing tiger was supposed to be scary, and he’d said that the self could, at times, feel dangerous. I said, “So I’m the tiger.”
He said, “Yes.” Then he said, “And no.”
* * *
—
In the end I said yes to Marian because yes is easier than no. Yes is an accelerant, a rush. You only live once. I called up Hugo myself, and he said this was wonderful news, he was thrilled, and he would get in touch pronto about scheduling the audition, and I tried to pretend I hadn’t assumed I wouldn’t have to audition.
Before my callback for Katie McGee, I’d stayed in character for days, like I was Daniel Day-Lewis in a training bra, as though Katie McGee were really a character and not just a marketable alloy of precocity and sass. Mitch chaperoned me to the studio himself, marking the gravity of the occasion. No one had yet told me to manifest anything back then, but I manifested the living fuck out of Katie McGee. I walked into that room radiating more Katie McGee–ness than I ever did again for the run of the show. I was pure, unadulterated spunky charm, and when I saw the studio people light up and exchange glances while I said my lines, I felt a white-hot pleasure in my core like the fusion at the center of the sun, radiating outward, warming the faces of the adults behind their table. For the first time in my life, I felt a sense of perfect belonging, of doing something just right, of certainty that I would get what I wanted.
I’d given up hoping ever to feel that way again, but once I realized getting to be Marian wasn’t a given, I suddenly wanted to be her a thousand times more badly than I had. I submerged myself in her. I strode around my house the way I imagined she would. I barely glanced in the mirror because I imagined she disdained vanity. I slouched and sprawled in chairs. I started speaking deliberately and not like a SoCal bubblehead, which had the unintended consequence of making Augustina worry I was mad at her. I tried to do everything the way I thought Marian would, to be confident and self-contained. I googled my brains out, looked at every photo of her I could find and watched the only stray bit of film that seemed to exist: Marian and Eddie Bloom, the navigator, climb out of the plane after a test flight in New Zealand; he grins; she puts her hands in her pockets; they look at each other; she looks at the plane. There’s a close-up of her, her eyes sliding away from the camera, and a close-up of him, looking sturdy and pleasant. In Carol Feiffer’s novel, Eddie is in unrequited love with Marian, while she’s hung up on her childhood friend, Caleb, and I scrutinized the clip for fraughtness between them. Her smile was more reluctant than his, but when they glanced at each other, I could identify only the basic presence of inscrutable silent communication, not its nature. They were saying something to each other, but it was encrypted, accessible only to them.
There was one other thing. Hugo had suggested I take a flying lesson （gingerly, given my family history）， and I said no and then okay and then no again. Then maybe. He said I could think about it, but just in case, he would have one set up and get the instructor to sign an NDA. That way the option was there. I tried to think about the lesson the way Marian would, to inhabit a person who actually wanted to fly a plane. I wasn’t afraid of flying itself, of being aloft. I didn’t get nervous on commercial flights. I didn’t connect that experience, the white noise of it, with my parents plunging into a vast and freezing lake. I didn’t need to recite statistics in my mind or engage in soothing meditations or remind myself of the trustworthy physics of the whole enterprise. But when I imagined flying a plane myself, I could only think of falling.
Hugo’s people had arranged the lesson for very early morning to avoid the press and humans in general, and in the dark predawn, pacing my kitchen, dressed and ready to go, I clutched my phone, desperate to cancel yet never dialing. I’d barely slept. Then M.G. was bringing the car around, headlights on, and I got in and sat paralyzed inside the runaway forward momentum of a yes I’d never quite uttered.
The instructor pilot had thick salt-and-pepper hair the texture of a badger’s and a fat gold wedding band and aviator sunglasses in his front shirt pocket for when the sun came up. He didn’t seem flustered by me. He walked around the plane, explaining what all the different parts did. The Cessna was chunky and earnest-looking, cream-colored with two brown stripes and a single propeller. The morning was overcast. The long strips of grass between the little airport’s runways were gray with dew.
“So what happens on an introductory flight like this,” the pilot said, “is we’ll take off and get up over the marine layer and fly around a bit, and I’ll explain what I’m doing, and then you can have a turn at the controls. Sound good?”