Flavor of the Month (23 page)

Then Dobe called to the dog, and she got into his car next to him. Dean shut the door, and Dobe turned the big silver Pontiac out of the motel parking lot onto the street. Sharleen turned around and waved a kiss to him. Dean blew his nose.

“He been real good to us, Sharleen,” Dean said. “I was going to ask for some pills for the gas tank, but since he never offered, I thought it would be greedy. Right, Sharleen?”

“Right, honey,” she told him, and put her arm around his shoulders.

Mary Jane sat at the battered desk before her front window, looking out onto West Fifty-fourth Street. Since she had met Dr. Moore, two days ago, she had hardly managed five hours of sleep. She had unplugged her answering machine and had spent the time both pacing and lying flat across the old double bed in the back bedroom, staring at the cracked plaster of the ceiling.

How, she kept asking herself, how could she do this thing? That she
would
do it, or die in the attempt, she knew. But how could she manage to survive the transformation she was contemplating? And not just the physical one. Plain, almost homely, all her life, how could she learn to act the part of a beautiful woman? For without action, she knew, no role could be successfully played. How many pretty girls had she seen who never believed in their own beauty, and couldn’t make anyone else believe in it, either? And how many unextraordinary women had she seen who could project an aura of beauty despite only average looks? It wasn’t enough to get the exterior right, the costumes, makeup, and posture. She would have to perfect the persona of a beautiful woman. How could she, a female who had had absolutely zero faith in her looks, act the part of a beauty? Would she be ridiculous? Would she fail? Once again she stood up and paced the tiny front room. What misgivings did a fat old caterpillar have as it started to close itself into its cocoon? Did it have a genetic script for its upcoming role as a butterfly, or did it ad-lib? Well, she had no script, and since she’d never been good at improvs, she’d have to create one.

She walked back to the desk and stared down at the spiral-bound notebook in front of her. On the first page she had written four headings: “Financial Plan,” “Social Plan,” “Career Plan,” and “Physical Plan.” She had determined that she wouldn’t leave the dark apartment until she had considered all the problems of each category and come up with solutions. She had always been good at observation and imitation, the tools of an actor’s craft. And she would use visualization, the tricks she had learned in therapy, to feel her way to her new role. But how you went about becoming a new, successful, beautiful person when you were an almost middle-aged, unattractive failure wasn’t going to be so easy to visualize.

One thing she knew: she couldn’t go through the process in front of her friends (or her enemies). If all the world was about to become her stage, she knew that she couldn’t undermine her new role by letting people peek into her dressing room. Molly, for instance, would tell her that she was wonderful just the way she was. If Bethanie had been around, she would, no doubt, have felt superior and acted supportive. It made Mary Jane’s skin crawl to think of that. Father Damien would suggest the power of prayer, or maybe some Prozac, which had helped him out of a depression. Chuck would probably suggest primal therapy. Neil, if he had forgiven her and if she could reach him out on the coast, would just crack wise and make her laugh. But Mary Jane knew that all the affection of friends and primal screams in the world wouldn’t change how she looked or give her what she wanted. Unless she took this drastic step and succeeded, she’d never get a leading role again. Sam or any other man worth having would never love her as she was. Her friends were wrong when they told her otherwise, and their kindnesses or lies were useless. The Mary Jane that her friends knew had died alone in that grim farmhouse in upstate New York.

She jumped up from the desk again and recommenced her pacing. If there weren’t already holes in the old tweed carpet, she would be making them now. She wrapped her arms around herself and continued walking to and fro. She would have to disappear, she decided. It wouldn’t be all that hard: just move and leave no forwarding address. New York was a big city. After all, she had no family that would try to reach her. The fight with Neil would be a good excuse not to keep in touch. Who knows, perhaps he never meant to call her again anyway. Sam, obviously, had no plans to try to see her. So all she needed was a relatively believable pretext for disappearing. Well, she’d always been a theater gypsy, as they all were. She could simply tell Molly, Chuck, and her other friends that she’d gotten a job doing stock, then go away and not return. Perhaps, afterward, when she was out of the chrysalis and knew that she could fly, she could call them up, explain everything, and see them again. But not now. If they judged her or dissuaded her, she wouldn’t have the courage to go on, and if she didn’t make this change, she didn’t want to live anymore.

God, it all sounded so melodramatic! She had to smile to herself, but it was a grim ghost of a smile. She walked to the mirror, the small, scratched one that hung over the bookshelf, and stared into her own dark eyes, her pale, shapeless face. She shivered. She felt as if she were staring at the head of a corpse.

She turned away and moved back to the window, then reached into the top drawer of her desk and scrabbled around for her checkbook. If she was going to do this, she had better figure ways and means. The torn blue plastic check cover had her name stamped on it in faded gold. She’d paid four bucks extra for that. Well, she wouldn’t have four bucks extra for a long, long time to come,
and
she’d need a new name. She threw the cover into the wastepaper basket. She opened the ledger side and looked at it. She had a balance of $1,471. She also had her old passbook savings account. She opened the book to the last entry: $3,054. Plus whatever the interest was, not that it was ever much.

Of course, that wasn’t counting her grandmother’s money. That she had already put in a safety-deposit box at the Bowery Bank. She would need it for the operations, and she was determined not to touch it for anything else. But since she didn’t want to have to work during the next year or so (and probably wouldn’t be able to during recovery), she would need a lot more than the cash in her two accounts to live off of, no matter how cheaply she lived.

Well, she could start with a tag sale. Of course, since she’d mostly always been broke, she had decorated the apartment with Salvation Army purchases, thrift-shop finds, and discarded furniture from off the street. She couldn’t raise anything on that stuff. But she could sell her books and her record albums. She would get rid of her stereo, and her TV. That would bring in a few hundred. And her vintage clothes would have to go.

For a moment, she felt a pang. Over the years, she’d collected the old silk dresses, the alligator bags, the taffeta petticoats by relentlessly searching out quality among the crap at flea markets and auctions and thrift stores. She’d lovingly hand-washed and pressed them all, stitched up seams, and mended tears. But hadn’t she collected and worn it all to distract attention from her appearance? Hadn’t it been a pathetic ploy? See my clothes, don’t see me. Some of her stuff was worth money. Well, she wouldn’t need the clothes now, she told herself. She’d give Molly the cashmere forties jacket that Molly had coveted, and bring the rest of it down to a dealer she knew in SoHo. It would give her another few thousand at least.

And she could sublet the apartment and get key money up front. There were hundreds of kids in the theater district who would want it. She’d guarantee them two years, but they’d actually be getting it free and clear. She picked up her pen. Under “Financial Plan” she wrote:

1) Have tag sale

2) Sell books/records/clothes to dealers

3) Put up flyers/run ads for sublet

She did a quick calculation. That would give her perhaps a total of eleven thousand dollars. But she owed some money, too. She added to her list:

4) Pay off MasterCard balance

5) Pay off Nurses’ Credit Union

The only other asset she had was her IRAs. She looked in the bottom drawer of her desk for the Merrill Lynch statement. She had a total of just under eight thousand dollars salted away, but if she cashed them in there’d be tax to pay. And then she wouldn’t have a dime of retirement money. Oh well. What the hell good would eight thousand bucks be when she was sixty-five? Probably wouldn’t pay for a month in a nice rest home by then. And who would want to live this life up to retirement age? She was gambling for high stakes, so she’d better ante up everything, or give up now. She picked up her pen again.

6) Cash in IRAs

7) Close bank accounts. Open new ones.

Since the tellers knew her at her branch, she didn’t want them to comment on her changing looks, bruised eyes, or bandages.

8) Set a daily budget for food, carfare, etc.

9) Stick to the budget

10) Don’t buy anything

11) Find cheap weekly hotel rental

She’d thought it out. A shared apartment, maybe up around Columbia, would be cheapest, and she wasn’t likely to run into her old friends up there, but she didn’t want the hassle of roommates with their questions and curiosity. Still, she needed people around, just in case there was a medical emergency. A single-room-occupancy hotel would do the job: transients wouldn’t notice her, and the desk would ask no questions as long as they were paid. Maybe there was something out in Brooklyn or Queens that would be a few steps up from a welfare hotel. If, in the end, she had to work a little, she’d see if she could do night shift. She’d cross that bridge when she got to it.

Under “Physical Plan” she wrote:

1) Lose weight

2) Exercise

She stopped and had to smile. Well. Easier said than done. But she’d live in a place without a kitchen. There would be no temptation to cook up a pot of pasta with a little garlic, basil, and olive oil. No sneaking Mounds bars. And this, meeting Dr. Moore’s first specification, would be her only job right now. With the pressures of her work and the relationship off, all she had to do was focus on this.

She’d been fifteen pounds overweight her whole life, always fighting it, losing it, and gaining it back. She’d been a size ten when she should have been an eight. Then, in the last year or so, the pounds had really started to creep up. But forty pounds! How long would it take to blitz that off?

In the margin of her notebook, she used some of her mathematics from nursing school. There were about thirty-five hundred calories in a pound. If she lost two pounds a week, took in seven thousand calories less than she expended, it would take twenty weeks before she could see Dr. Moore again! But if she went down to a lot fewer calories than that, she knew she’d be constantly hungry, and probably binge.

She would have to make it up in activity. But she hated exercise classes, and she couldn’t afford a health club now anyway. She would simply have to walk the weight off. Walking was aerobic, she liked it, and it didn’t cost anything. It also kept you out of trouble, as long as you didn’t eat éclairs as you walked. She crossed number “2) Exercise” off her list and replaced it with

2) Walk a minimum of 10 miles per day

At twenty city blocks per mile, that was two hundred blocks! Almost from the George Washington Bridge to Greenwich Village! Well, she could work up to it, and she could walk a different route every day. With determination, she could lose the weight in four months. As a nurse, she knew that any faster wouldn’t be safe or lasting.

She also knew that she would have to be as concrete and specific as possible in writing her plans. Otherwise, she might as well simply write down “Become a famous great actress and win the love of a wonderful man” and be done with it. She picked up her pen again and added

3) Plan each day’s meals in advance

4) Write down everything eaten

5) Keep no food at home

Under “Career Plan” she had quite a bit to put down. But, then, she had done all of this once before.

1) Create new resume

2) Write to West Coast repertory companies

3) After surgery get new head shots

4) Choose new name

If she changed her name, created a new identity, she’d have to give up her Equity card. She had worked so hard to get one, and it had been such a validation of her that it seemed, of everything so far, perhaps the hardest thing she’d have to relinquish. It was the big question that separated the pros from the tyros: “Are you Equity?” She thought of all the audition notices that stated “Equity Only.” She shrugged. Well, so it goes. Equity membership hadn’t gotten her where she wanted to be. Putting together a phony résumé was nothing. She knew enough defunct theatrical endeavors, and could drop enough names, to make anyone believe she had played Eliza Doolittle in the Oak Bluff, Missouri, Dinner Theater revival of
Pygmalion
. Or Emily in
Our Town
. Or Laura in
The Glass Menagerie
. Too bad she’d never gotten a chance to play those roles: always the character actress, never the ingenue, she reminded herself bitterly. But now that would change.

Of course, she’d have to leave off her triumph: creating the role of Jill. And she’d have to drop off mention of her equally precious Obie. But she could bring her talent along. That and good looks should be enough to justify one more assault on the mountain.

But she would also have to work on creating herself anew. She would have to study up on how to play the part of a beautiful, hopeful, successful young woman. Well, she’d read interviews with them, and she’d watch films with those kinds of characters. She knew how to do research for a role; this would be her greatest challenge, more difficult than playing fat, frumpy Jill.

Mary Jane stretched her back against the oak mission chair, then stood up. Outside, dusk was beginning to fall, and people had begun to troop by, all of them coming from the east and walking west from the subway exit toward their homes. Would they have a family waiting? Would there be a nice hot meal, a hug, and maybe a few laughs after a day of hard work? For a moment, she felt self-pity begin to settle on her like a wet, cold mantle. Courage, she told herself. But what if she couldn’t lose the weight that imprisoned her, holding her tighter than a shroud? What if Dr. Moore wouldn’t take her on? Or what if he did but failed?