The buckets around our necks hang from canvas straps, and when they’re full we empty them into the lugs. When we have filled enough lugs, Joe heaves them onto the flatbed of the green John Deere Gator and drives them to the barn.
“So, California,” Nell says, nudging. This is the part of the story she’s invested in.
I worry she’s getting too much sun and give her my hat, which she tries to bat away. “It’s too late for me. Save yourself.” I drop it on her head.
Nell accepts it because, unlike her sisters, she doesn’t like to argue. “I want to hear about the audition and then I want to hear about the movie.”
She thinks I have something to teach her but I don’t. Nell doesn’t dominate a room or stand on a chair to sing. She is the one who watches. She has the kind of naturalness Ripley often accused me of having, an ability to be so transparent it’s impossible to turn your eyes away. She works at her craft constantly. Even picking cherries, I swear I can see her thinking about how other people might pick cherries. And that is the difference between us: I was very good at being myself, while Nell is very good at being anyone at all.
“It wasn’t interesting,” I say.
“Humor us,” Emily says. “We’re working.”
I try to explain. “I learned how to act from a State Farm agent in New Hampshire when I was in high school. Other people did too much, so by doing very little I stood out. Mr. Martin needed an Emily because all the Emilys were awful. By not being awful, I looked pretty good. I think Bill Ripley was in a similar situation. Every actress he’d auditioned had been acting up a storm and he needed someone simple in the part. Simple was my specialty.”
“Why are you selling yourself short?” Emily asks, throwing a cherry at me. Maisie leans over and parts the grass with her hands, and when she finds the cherry she pops it in her mouth. We do not waste sweet cherries. “If one of us said that you’d smack us in the back of the head and make us do positive affirmations in front of the mirror.”
“I made you do positive affirmations one time, one time,” I tell her, “and it was good for you.”
“Maybe it would be good for you, too,” Emily says.
“But I’m not being self--deprecating. I’m telling you, I had a genuine talent for being myself, and for a while it worked. In fact, it probably worked better in film than it did onstage.”
“You’re talking like we haven’t seen the movie a hundred times,” Nell says. “You were really good.”
I shrug. “It’s like being able to sing one song perfectly. It’s a great trick, but it’s only going to get you so far.”
Go back to New Hampshire, to Bill Ripley sitting in that darkened university theater beside his sister. Ripley wasn’t new to the game, and when he saw me he understood what he was looking at: a pretty girl who wasn’t so much playing a part as she was right for the part she was playing. Unlike his niece, I knew how not to ruin things.
When I got off the plane in Los Angeles, a deeply tanned man in a black suit held up a clipboard with my name on it. He took the little duffel bag from my hand and walked me out to an honest--to--god limousine double--parked in front of the terminal. You could have knocked me over with a feather, as my grandmother liked to say. Had he driven me around the airport and dropped me off in the exact same spot, and I had flown back to New Hampshire without ever seeing anything else of California, it would have been worth it because one day I’d be able to tell my children that I had ridden in a limousine. I rolled down the tinted window so that anyone straining to see who was in the back of that car would see it was me, basking in sunshine.
The hotel had a swimming pool. A small gift basket in my room contained fruits so foreign to me that I didn’t know how to eat them. A note from Ripley read Welcome! Please sign for all your meals at the hotel, which was nice enough but hardly the same as Welcome! Pick you up for dinner at 7. The hamburger I ordered from room service was brought to me beneath a great silver dome which the waiter whisked away with a flourish. As far as I could tell, everything in California was something out of a movie. I ate the fifteen--dollar hamburger in a fluffy white bed and practiced my lines. The next morning a different driver in a different limousine drove me to a soundstage at Warner Brothers. For two hours people dressed me, undressed me, and dressed me again. I sat in a fancy barber’s chair while a Black man wearing a pink T--shirt that fit him so exactly I was sure he’d had it tailored, took off the makeup I had so thoughtfully applied that morning and painted a whole new face on top of my face. When he wanted me to lift my chin or turn to the left, he held his finger in front of my face. “Follow my finger,” he said, and so I did.
“Eyebrows?” he asked the man sitting in a chair beside mine, reading a script.
The man looked at me in the mirror, then he looked at the makeup artist. “Hold off,” he said.
A woman with hair as fine and colorless as cornsilk and no eyebrows at all brushed out my hair, then picked it up and poured it through her hands again and again. “Look at this,” she said to her colleagues. “It’s like a shampoo commercial.”
I kept thinking of that scene when Dorothy and her friends get spruced up before they’re taken to meet the Wizard. Pat, pat here, pat, pat there, and a couple of brand new straws. That’s how we keep you young and fair.
Merry Old Land of Oz.
When their considerable efforts were complete and I had been transformed into someone who looked like my more attractive first cousin, I was taken onto the set where I stood in front of a white backdrop. The man who’d been sitting in the barber chair next to mine took my picture. His praise was so obsequious that I first felt embarrassed for myself and then felt embarrassed for him. Another man came in with a small camera on a tripod and had me say my name （Lara Kenison） and the name of the film （Singularity） and the part I was reading for （Lindsay）。 When all that was done, they took me into the set’s open space where Ripley was waiting with everyone else.
Nell’s hands drop from the branches and she leaves them hanging by her sides. Idle hands, I start to say—-an old family joke—-but stop myself. She is standing beside me in a smocked dress covered in daisies, a dress with big pockets that had once been mine and had then been Emily’s, then Maisie’s. Nell’s eyes are bright with terror.
“Weren’t you terrified?” she whispers.
Maisie and Emily stop. All three girls watch me as I try to remember. This was a very long time ago. I look around that vast white space. Ripley is there along with the famous actress who is playing my mother and the less--famous actor who is playing her boyfriend. People with boom mics and giant lights and cameras on dollies are there, silently adjusting the angles of their equipment. The two actors and I are sitting at a table that is meant to stand in for a dining room table, and we’re laughing because that’s what the scene calls for. For all the times I’ve ever been onstage, I’ve never been asked to laugh before, and the laughter comes easily. I had been so afraid that day I read for Emily in high school, but when I look around for that fear now it isn’t there. I understand that all I have to do is try not to act, and that’s easy because I have no idea how to act. It’s the reason Ripley brought me out to California.