Viola in Reel Life (10 page)

Romy leans forward from the backseat and asks Kevin a ton of questions about college. I think she likes that she has her face close to his and can check how they look together in the rearview. She asks him
perfectly intelligent questions and Kevin doesn’t seem to mind answering them. It turns out he’s a freshman at Marquette University and he plays hockey. Partial scholarship. With that, he and Romy go into sports world with a conversation that only the athletically inclined would find remotely interesting.

Kevin pulls into the driveway of their house on a pretty, tree-lined street with sidewalks. The Santrys live in a cottage-style stone house with a black wrought-iron gate. Classy. The trees have a few golden leaves hanging on, but the ground is clear where they’ve raked. The yards are soft brown where there was once green grass. A large silk flag with a turkey embroidered on it hangs over the Santrys’ entrance door. We grab our duffels and follow Kevin up the walkway.

“Ma, we’re here. I got the kids,” he says as we enter the house. Marisol and I look at each other. We can hardly be called
kids
after we’ve left home and lived on our own. We look over at Romy, who gets a look of concern on her face. She doesn’t want her crush to consider her a
kid.
Her determined chin softens, but then she gets a steely look in her eye. I’ve seen this look when she plays field hockey and is strategizing her path to the goal. She’s going to prove to Kevin she’s not a kid but a young woman. Her work is cut out for her over this break.

The Santry house smells like cookies are baking in the oven (maybe they are). The living room is big and comfortable with large bright paintings and lots of books in stacks everywhere. There’s an upright piano and potted plants in the windows.

Suzanne’s mother comes out of the kitchen. She’s wearing business clothes, and over them a faded apron that says
FOR THIS I SPENT FOUR YEARS IN COLLEGE?
“You made it!” Mrs. Santry greets us one at a time and gives us each a hug, which makes me feel welcome and miss my own mother. We follow her into the kitchen. It’s a bright yellow country kitchen with a blue tile floor and pots hanging over the sink. There’s a large bay window overlooking a backyard with an above-ground swimming pool in the center of it.

“Come on over and meet my dad,” Suzanne says.

I’m expecting a tall man (everybody in the Santry family is a giant) from the picture. We follow her to the bay window where her dad is sitting, reading. When we get close, I pause. Mr. Santry isn’t sitting in one of the kitchen chairs; he’s in a wheelchair. It’s rolled up to the table. His feet are placed on the floor, not in the stirrups.

Romy looks at me, then at Marisol. We’re all confused. Her dad must have been in an accident, but why wouldn’t Suzanne have mentioned it?

Suzanne runs to her father and sits on his lap.

“Whoa,” he says and laughs. Mr. Santry is as handsome as Kevin, and looks tall too. Suzanne takes her father’s hand, which he cannot seem to lift. She gives him a kiss on each cheek and then hugs him tightly. “Who did you drag home this time?” He grins at us.

Romy, Marisol, and I look at one another. And then I laugh, and they follow suit. “We’re spongers,” I tell him. “Boarding school girls with no place to go on the holiday.”

“But there’s no place else we’d rather be,” Romy says earnestly, looking at Kevin.

“Well, welcome to our house,” Mr. Santry says and smiles.

“You should feel sorry for us,” I tell him. “We’re all alone in the world.”

“Not anymore,” Kevin says. I notice this comment makes Romy stand taller and smooth the last bits of the blue streaks in her hair.

“Why don’t you girls go upstairs and put your things away? We have big plans this afternoon,” Mrs. Santry says.

“Great.” Suzanne climbs out of her father’s lap and gives him another kiss. We follow her into the hallway. I turn and look back at Mr. Santry, who smiles at us. Mrs.
Santry goes to him and tucks the throw that rests on his legs. She leans down and kisses him on his cheek.

I follow Suzanne and the girls up the front stairs. The house feels like a country inn, with flowery prints and distressed furniture painted colors like cobalt blue and antique white. The artwork is fun, and framed photographs line the stairwell. The pictures are in rough-hewn frames from when the Santrys were children. Romy lingers on pictures of Kevin when he was young. I jab her with my elbow to keep her moving up.

“Okay, here’s my room.” Suzanne pushes the door open to a sunny and huge bedroom, painted with lavender and white stripes, and with a set of bunk beds and a trundle underneath. “You guys take the bunk and trundle.”

“Where are you going to sleep?” I ask her.

“The trusty air mattress. Don’t worry. I like it.”

Romy, Marisol, and I set about placing our duffels next to our beds. It’s so funny to have our quad transported intact from South Bend to Chicago. We are actually pretty good at moving as a unit.

“The bathroom is across the hall,” she says. “Girls only.”

“Too bad. I think Romy was hoping to share with Kevin,” I joke.

“Viola! Am I that obvious?” she says.

“Not as obvious as that lip gloss.”

“Seriously?”

“See what happens when a girl likes a boy? Her sense of humor goes right out the window,” I say. Marisol and Suzanne laugh.

I find a plug and commence recharging my phone. Jared promised to text me later and I want to make sure my battery doesn’t die. Suzanne checks her BlackBerry while Marisol and Romy check theirs. I can’t stand it another second, so finally I say, “Suzanne, why is your dad in a wheelchair?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t say anything before,” Suzanne says with a sigh.

“You can tell us anything.” Marisol sits down next to Suzanne on the bed.

“I know.”

“What happened?” Romy asks softly.

“He has MS. You know, multiple sclerosis. And he was fine for a long time, and just in the last year it’s gotten really bad. He can’t walk now.”

Romy, with her many parents, and Marisol with hers, and me with mine—well, we don’t have this kind of problem. And to be honest, I don’t think about it much. My parents are healthy and Grand seems even younger
than my own mom.

Now I understand why Suzanne cries at night. She has terrible sadness, and probably worries about her father getting worse. “I’m sorry, Suzanne.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s a lot to deal with,” Marisol says. “You’re away at school and it must be really hard to be away from him.”

“I didn’t want to go to PA. I wanted to stay here. But it was always in the plan and my dad insisted. He wants all of us to be completely normal—and that includes ignoring him sometimes and disobeying his rules. He said there is no room for perfection in the Santry house.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?”

Suzanne looks away. Her eyes fill with tears. “I don’t know. I guess I thought that if I didn’t talk about it, if I didn’t say he’s sick, maybe he won’t be. That maybe I just dreamed the whole thing up.”

“I get it,” Marisol says. “You don’t want it to be real.”

Mrs. Santry knocks lightly on the door. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah. Oh yeah,” Romy and I chirp.

“I heard you girls wanted to go to the Art Institute.”

“We would love it,” Marisol says.

“Freshen up and meet me downstairs.”

We unpack quickly, placing our clothes neatly in empty drawers in Suzanne’s dresser, then toss the big, empty duffels in the closet. We grab our purses and throw them over our shoulders.

Before we leave the room, Marisol gives Suzanne a hug. Romy looks at me and I look at her, and we go to Suzanne and Marisol and throw our arms around them.

“Okay, okay, I feel the love.” Suzanne’s misty tears turn to laughter. We all laugh.

“Now, if only Romy could feel the love of Kevin. That would make for the best Thanksgiving,” I tease.

“I am totally gonna ratchet down my desire,” Romy promises. But I doubt it. She’s laying on more lip gloss as we go.

The Art Institute of Chicago is near Grant Park. It’s a grand building, and while it doesn’t seem as big as the Met in New York City, it surely is as wonderful. The greatest painters are represented here in the permanent collection: Georges-Pierre Seurat, Edward Hopper, Vincent Van Gogh, and Claude Monet. And these artists are just for starters!

Marisol wants to see some modern works. A favorite artist of hers is the late New Yorker Margo Hoff, known for her enormous and whimsical collages.

I don’t really have anything specific in mind to see, I just want to soak up city life and mill around hordes of people wearing headsets. I want to be on the move, banging into people without saying “excuse me,” see new and interesting things, love or hate those new and interesting things, take in art, talk about it! This museum trip will be the closest thing to being in New York City that I’ve had since the school year began. I hope I get shoved and pushed and cursed at, then I’ll really feel part of things!

Mrs. Santry gives each of us a small metallic admissions button to clip onto our collars. “Okay, girls, you have two hours. Meet me back here at four thirty.”

“Hey, look.” Marisol hands me a brochure. “There’s an installation on old movies.”

I flip through a series of old black-and-white photographs from the 1920s. The title of the show is
The Roaring Twenties on Celluloid.
My mom and dad would love this. They took me to NYU last summer to see
The Birth of a Nation
on the big screen.

“How great.” I’m thinking I can buy Jared a set of postcards or even a T-shirt. No, T-shirt says
going steady,
while a set of postcards says
three kisses by the bus.
I can’t believe it: I’m already getting the hang of dealing with boys! I can thank Suzanne for that; she’s the voice of reason when it comes to them since she’s been dealing with
them all of her life. Sometimes I wish I had a brother to talk to.

“I’m going through the permanent collection,” Marisol says. “For the fundamentals. And then I’m going to check out the moderns.”

“I’ve seen the moderns a billion times,” Suzanne says. “But I’ll go with you. A billion and one.”

“I’m going to the sculpture garden,” Romy says.

“Great. And I’m going to meet an old friend of mine in the cafeteria for a cup of coffee.” Mrs. Santry smiles. She really is very pretty and she’s gone out of her way to make us feel at home. When we left, Mr. Santry was watching football with Kevin, so we didn’t feel bad leaving him behind. Mrs. Santry seems happier, lighter, being out of the house for a while.

“I’m going to the old movie exposition,” I tell them.

“I went last week. You will love it!” Mrs. Santry promises.

“See you guys later.” I walk toward the pavilion housing the old movie show. As much as I like hanging with the girls and living in our quad, sometimes I miss being an only child where I can set the agenda alone. I liked when I didn’t have to consult a group. I liked when I could read late into the night with the light on and nobody would wake up and ask me to turn it off.
I liked lazy Saturdays where I’d read a little, then play on the computer, fix a sandwich, and eat half, or listen to music really loud. Although living with the girls has made me less selfish, I’m still going to savor being alone in the Art Institute.

I unravel my headset as I walk, looping it around my neck. It’s so relaxing to be in a large crowd where nobody knows me; I don’t even mind waiting on the long line into the exposition. I listen to the audio commentary.

A woman’s deep and honeyed voice on the CD says, “Welcome to the Art Institute of Chicago. We are proud to present the traveling exhibition,
The Roaring Twenties on Celluloid
, in conjunction with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Enjoy the show!” Kicky flapper music ensues.

I move through cubicles filled with black-and-white photographs shot by a set photographer. Images of Rudolph Valentino fill one wall, the center of which is a virtual silver screen that runs images of
The Sheik
in rehearsal. A movie about making movies—how perfect.

The Rudolph Valentino section is filled with a tourist group of Italians who are led by a woman carrying a red, white, and green flag. There is hushed awe as they listen to the guide talk about Valentino’s artistry.

I turn the corner and speed through the CD to get to
Our Own
, a display about Midwestern talent in front of and behind the camera.

I peer into dioramas of set models from actual films. Then I turn and face a large wall with a slideshow of faces. The images flip through: actors with slick hair, pale, white powdered skin, and straight teeth with spaces between them; then images of actresses, platinum blond with bobbed hair and pencil-thin eyebrows.

I recognize a very young Joan Crawford from
Our Dancing Daughters
. She’s a little chubby yet exuberant in her first feature film. The biography card to the side says that Joan lived in Missouri and attended Stephens College. Who knew?

I move to the next section, which says
Talent from Central U.S.A
. Here, life-size cutouts of actors and actresses in black-and-white grace a virtual set. There’s a grouping of smiling women in drop-waist dresses wearing satin shoes tied with enormous ribbons. They have gorgeous multiple strands of pearls around their necks. One of the ladies drinks gin out of her shoe. I move along the exhibit, taking in the Roaring Twenties, an era of parties and more parties.

In an instant when I turn the corner, the display turns to Technicolor. As my eye settles on the platforms full of images bursting with color, I see a lady in red.

The image of the lady is pure Hollywood glamour. She is propped against a box, smoking. She wears a vivid, red, drop-waist dress. She has matching red shoes, dressy, with a square heel tied with red satin ribbons. Her blond curls peek out of a small black cloche hat. She looks directly into the camera through the mysterious haze of her cigarette smoke.

I stand back and squint.

I know her.

I have seen her.