Girl Act (21 page)

I rummaged through my Chanel bag and found the letter she had written that my father had given me. My hands were shaking. She wrote the following: 

Dearest Vivien, 

Please go see Cassidy; she’s only sixteen and she’s a bright girl, and I want you to give her my goodbye letter and the blue jean jacket. I hope it fits her. Please give her her letters back, I wouldn’t want her to think that they were tossed out in the trash, as I very much enjoyed reading every single letter. What a pleasure it was for me to open my mailbox and find a pen pal letter waiting for me. I hope letter writing will last forever, even with the next generation and the next. Oh, dear me, I do hope so. Please give her my best and make sure she’s good and safe. Love your Aunt Helen. 

I folded it back up. My aunt had been so selfless. I suppose it was disrespectful, but I decided to read all the letters Cassidy had written. I only did it because something in my mind kept nudging me to read them, all of them. Okay, maybe being delirious from a lack of sleep made me decided that or maybe it was just my curiosity to hear the voice of a sixteen-year-old.

I picked up the stack of letters, written with red ink
, in all capitals, all in order. The first letter was about being sixteen, living in Chelsea and going to high school there, wanting to become a dental hygienist and really wanting to have a cat, but her stepfather said no. She had two stepsisters, both were in middle school. Her mother didn’t work. This was more of an introduction letter, and she had drawn a picture of herself on the back, which showed a teenage girl, kind of chunky, in pants, a sweatshirt, with shoulder length hair hanging over her face. It didn’t seem as if she was trying to draw herself as all that happy.

I was almost ready to read number two, but I fell asleep.

Oh, what a dream I had—the late TV creator, Aaron Spelling, (
90210
,
Melrose Place,
and
Dallas
, just to name-drop a few of his mega television hit shows) was still alive and was in a Hollywood hotel room, and I was meeting with him about creative ideas. All of a sudden, he pulled opened a bottom drawer of a dresser.

I asked him, “What if a world opened up that you could enter, whenever you pulled the drawer open?”

And Aaron Spelling said, “Where love lived in full motion.”

Then the dream ended and I woke up to see Tristan walking into Laurel’s bedroom and looking down at me.

“Hey, can you help me out?”

I sat up and blurted out my dream.

“Yeah, well, I’m not building drawers, but I am building an outdoor bar and I need a steady hand to hold some wood while I cut it,” he said.

So I got up, raced into the shower, and then headed down stairs and out into the yard to hold the wood very still while he cut it correctly. The bar was to be curved and seat at least six. Nothing was going to be left to chance for Laurel, with the help of Deeda, who had thought of everything.

“This is going to be amazing!” I said.

“No worries, I won’t tell her you’re jealous”

“Listen, smart ass. Okay, so I was jealous, but I’m not now. I’m really excited for Laurel,” I said, as he went back to trimming the wood without my help.

Gabriel was up and heading back to see his mother. He had been staying at the Harvard Inn in a small single room that had been rented for him in the hopes I guess, that he wouldn’t drop out, and in support of his inevitable loss.

“Stop back anytime, any hour,” I said.

And Tristan echoed, “That’s an order, mate,” and Gabriel sauntered off with his black knapsack over his shoulder.

I headed into the house, racing upstairs to the stack of pen pal letters because I wanted to get through most of them in one sitting. Shadow stared up at me and I said, “You don’t need a walk, you’re incredibly spoiled by the British roommate and me, but you can have a dog treat.” I gave him a rawhide to chew on and he wandered off happily. Wow, what an easy dog.

Letter number two was Cassidy thanking my aunt for writing to her and saying how much it meant, and that if she told her any secrets, would my aunt promise never to tell. It was such typically teenage stuff that it amused me. Pen pal letters number three and four were all about having to baby-sit her stepsisters, because her mother was going places with her new husband, how she was staying up late to finish her homework, and how she wanted to visit my aunt, how she’d never been to Cambridge (only to Somerville once to that Target because her mother wanted something that the Everett one had run out of). How she couldn’t wait for my aunt to write again; that even though she had Facebook, Tumblr and email, she liked letter writing better.

Letters five and six talked about her future and moving away, and how she was trying to get good grades so she could get into a good dental school. She thanked my Aunt Helen for advice on homework and goals and asked when she could visit her in Cambridge, and how she had one good friend, but she had gossiped about her and now they weren’t friends.

I was about to open pen pal letter number seven when Tristan walked in and sat down next to the pile.

“These love letters?” he asked.

I laughed, and explained to him how I had thought they were, but that my aunt had befriended a teenage girl in Chelsea as a pen pal. And I opened letter number one again and held up the red ink drawing for him.

“This is her self-portrait,” I said. Tristan took it from me and looked it over.

“I had a pen pal, once,” he said proudly.

“You did, when and why?” I asked.

“It’s rather nice. I was in my first year of high school, and she lived in San Francisco and was nice-looking.”

“That’s called trying to get an American girlfriend,” I informed him.

“She was nice,” he said, with a smirk.

“You slept with her, right?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“I got to come over to the U.S. for the first time at fifteen-and-a-half, and I stayed with her family for a month,” he said, and then he winked, which meant that he had done it with his American pen pal.

SOS
the text read; it was from Paloma. I hit redial. “My best friend’s in trouble,” I said, as I sprang away from the canopy bed.

“Meirda, el esta casado, el me mintio. Shit, he’s married, he lied to me,” Paloma started screaming into my cell phone.

When she’s really upset and really angry she always talks really fast, while translating Spanish to English or English to Spanish.

“Va a tener un divorcio, he’s getting a divorce, but she’s in no hurry, she’s an actress in the film. Meirda, shit, meirda, shit, shit.” Paloma was hysterical.

So I told her that international men are different, because that was what Laurel had told me (only I left out how I knew that) and that if he had said he hadn’t gotten divorced yet, she would never have agreed to date him, let alone be an actress in his independent film. And I told her that at the end of the day, it was about being actresses—that was the key to our identities. Paloma and I had both wanted to be known on the silver screen or the TV screen, to leave our mark, like Rita Moreno, her hero, and like Faye Dunaway, my hero. And that we could never forget that.

“Think of Rita Moreno, you’re going to be a success like her,” I said.

Then she reminded me how once when Rita Moreno was young she dated Marlon Brando, the once public rumor was that she had had a breakdown over the ending of it, but she did overcome it—and she did go on to find another man—a healthier one.

“Did you sleep with him?” I asked, suddenly worried.

“Mine is mine, he never got any,” Paloma cackled, because the day she was planning on letting him in between her legs, his wife came over and introduced herself. And we both laughed; it was like the timing couldn’t have been any better.

“Tell her thanks,” I kidded. I mean, the worst is to give your body willingly to a guy you think is single, only to find out he’s not. Then you have to feel not only cheap, but also dumb.

I couldn’t tell her about what happened to Laurel when she was twenty-five, because it was Laurel’s story and I kept the friendships separate, like I said before. Laurel had gone to France to take a summer cooking class, okay, really to meet French men, and to fall in love while learning to cook French cuisine. She had dated an Israeli journalist who was working for a French Newspaper for the summer and anyway, they dated, they spent 24/7 together, and she went to bed with him.

“Israeli men make love like they might die tomorrow or in an hour; their soldier training makes them extremely passionate.” That’s what Laurel had said, quote un-quote. Anyway, a short-haired, well-toned Israeli woman came to the apartment one day and he introduced Laurel to his wife, and she never heard from him again. I can’t even begin to go on about how many pounds Laurel lost. It took her six months of therapy, until she was ready to meet a new international man.

Thirty-five minutes later Paloma said, “Soy un actriz. I’m an actress, Thank God, gracias!”

“You bet. FYI, you could end up meeting Romeo at the Sundance Film Festival if the film gets in, so the best is yet to come,” I said. And that got her daydreaming again, and we hung up. I walked to Laurel’s bed to find Tristan’s face twisted as if he was in pain.

“She’s in trouble,” he said, with concern.

“No, she’s okay. She’s going to focus on the film and being an actress,” I answered.

“I’m talking about the pen pal,” he said with uneasiness.

I looked over his shoulder at the letters. He had turned them all over, revealing the ink drawings Cassidy had done on the back of each letter, her self-portrait in the middle. There was a drawing of two girls with halos floating above their head (stepsisters), with their feet above the ground, followed by one of a woman who looked out of shape, wearing a super-huge dress (her mother). The next three were of a man who looked like Freddy Krueger’s twin (
Nightmare on Elm Street
) with a hook (the kind the animation character Captain Hook has). The others were of flowers with knives as stems. I looked at the nine ink drawings and then at Tristan; he was, after all, from the homeland of Sherlock Holmes.

“Well, Sherlock, what’s she telling us?” I asked.

“She’s being abused,” he said.

“Wait a second, she’s sixteen, she was writing to my eighty-plus aunt. It was just a high school teacher’s project, not a social worker’s,” I tried to explain.

He picked up one of the images of the ‘Freddy Krueger twin,’ the stepfather.

“This guy has to be stopped. See, the buckle keeps getting bigger,” he said, and that’s when I saw that the hook wasn’t a hook—it was a belt buckle.

“My dad gave me some more letters,” I said, and quickly pulled them out of my Chanel bag.

Tristan tore them open. The last two drawings were of an old lady with the initials GM written under it and a map of Florida.

“GM stands for Grandmother, we have to get her there,” he said.

“Get her where?” I asked.

“Florida,” he pointed to the map.

Wow, this girl talked in codes; how she imagined my Aunt Helen would have figured it out was too sad to think about.

“We can’t pass up the chance to save her, she’s crying out for help,” he said.

“See something, say something…do something,” I said as it hit me in the pit of my stomach, “Okay, let’s rescue her,” I added.

I had saved stray dogs and cats—why not a teenage girl? Why not?

Okay, so every actress waits to land her biggest, leading role—the role whereby playing that character she will forever be changed. Incidentally it’s the same for male actors. I hadn’t booked it in Hollywood, and now I was about to play ‘it’ and play it for ‘real’. Of course, not in front of a film crew, or TV cameras, or on the radio—but person-to-person. I felt a rush; just the thought of performing to fool a troubled mother and a dangerous, treacherous stepfather gave me the drive. So when you accept your role, you have to review the script—and really know how the scene has to be played out. That’s just what Tristan and I sat up doing for several nights in a row.

We decided not to do the 911 thing (chances were the girl would hide the abuse out of fear), or the call to a social worker (who may or may not be able to get her out of the house or even have enough time to meet her due to backed up case loads). And also Tristan had had a friend who was never saved because of red tape, and now sits in jail because the abuse ate way at his non-violent soul and he fought back with a gun.

In movies, the victim is usually safely rescued, okay, so sometimes it doesn’t turn out well on HBO. But our made-for-not-TV-movie was going to have a happy ending. I knew he needed to be the cop and me the social worker in order to get Cassidy safely to her grandmother’s. We figured that when she turned eighteen, she could decide whatever she wanted.

“Just tell me what to say, and I’ll fake a Boston accent,” Tristan said, like an actor entering his first acting class.

Suddenly, I was not only setting up our ‘rescue’ scene, but training Tristan, and we were about to form a seamless rescue ensemble. I only wished that my Aunt Helen could have seen us, she would have been proud.

I had left my father a ‘SORRY’ note hung across his reading chair. It was painted on a scrap of canvas that Tristan had in the back his Land Rover. Incidentally, he has the Defender model—how perfect an auto name is that? It was his idea for me to use the canvas, because he said paper notes get tossed away too easily.

The ‘sexy’ cop uniform was still in my suitcase from sexing the grip/actor—only now it looked serious and authentic on Tristan. I had to stop myself from becoming aroused. “No, no, he’s your roommate, and you’re on a mission,” I thought. I don’t think he saw my mouth almost pucker up. I hope not. I had three wigs, a reddish with bangs, a blonde and a brunette one that was perfect for a bookish person. I had belly and breast padding and very cheap makeup. My acting motto-have costumes will travel. All I needed was the outfits.

“Check Laurel’s mum’s closet,” Tristan suggested, as if he had worked on the stages of Paramount.

“You’re good,” I said, as I leapt up and he followed.