Viola in Reel Life (14 page)

“Just a working stiff, Viola.” George smiles at me. It’s hard not to like him.

“Darling…,” Grand says. She turns to me. “He’s modest! George is a
brilliant
actor. He’s the lead in the revival of
Arsenic and Old Lace
.”

“Who do you play?” I ask Grand.

“Aunt Abby. With a lot of age makeup.” She makes a face. “We start rehearsals after New Year’s at the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. The very same theater where I triumphed as Ophelia,” Grand explains.

“How did you guys meet?” I ask.

“At auditions.” George puts his arm around Grand.

“I always pooh-poohed the idea of soul mates, but when I met George, I believed at long last in the concept of it. Two people…” Grand waves her hand through the air like she’s unfurling one of those Japanese twirling ribbons. “Two lives yet one perspective, one world view. Am I right, George?”

I don’t want to interrupt Grand as she defines her love for George, and I remind her that she said the exact same thing about her last two boyfriends, one of whom was a director and the other a venerable lighting designer. Evidently, you can have a lot of soul mates in one lifetime. Grand unpeels them out of the pack like Life Savers out of the foil wrapper.

“You’re right, doll,” George says and smiles. I find it so funny that he’s calling Grand a
doll
, when she’s the one who looks like she’s playing with one. That wasn’t very nice of me—to even think such a thing—but this Christmas is so deeply and profoundly ruined anyhow that being Princess Snark isn’t going to make it any worse.

“Would you like to see your room?” I ask.

“We spoke with Mrs. Headmistress…”

“Mrs. Grundman?”

“Right. Right. That’s the name! And she made sure we have
two
rooms reserved.” Grand looks at George with the “I’m setting a good example for my granddaughter” look.

“Great. Whatever.” I shrug. I figure when you’re sixty-four you can do whatever you want, but if Grand wants to set a good example, why not let her? They’re going to be performing their own screwball comedy running from her room to his or whatever in the cold hallway of the guest wing, but that’s none of my business.

George picks up the suitcases. I help with a small carry-on and show them down to the basement, past the laundry room, beyond the rec room, where the guest rooms are located at the end of a long hallway.

As Grand and George follow me down the stairs, they laugh and joke like a very happy couple. I notice, for the record, that Jared and I are way more low-key and dignified. Grand and George are almost silly.

“Here they are.” I point to the entrances to the furnished guest rooms. “No smoking in the building,” I remind them.

“Oh, I haven’t smoked since the sixties.” Grand laughs.

“And I wasn’t born yet,” George jokes.

“Oh, you!” she says and laughs again.

This is going to be one bizarre Christmas, I think as I climb the stairs back up to our quad.

“NOW, GIRLS. EVEN THOUGH WE’RE HERE IN…”
Grand has to think. A true actress, she has to think what town she is in when she lands, because she travels to a different city every night when she’s on tour. “South Bend, we want to make this Christmas as homespun as possible, don’t we?” Grand says as she sits on the edge of my bed.

There is not one
thing
homespun about my grandmother, and to put her in charge of anything cozy spells disaster. She is not a woman who keeps antique dolls on her bed or has anything crocheted in her apartment—except for a bikini from the seventies.

Grand’s home is an ultra-modern apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a rent-controlled (this
means that my mom doesn’t worry about my grandmother ever losing the apartment and its low rental fee), sunny one bedroom with a terrace. She has wild plants and a Buddha shrine on the terrace (the only Buddha on the terrace of an Upper East Side apartment, she believes). She has simple tangerine leather furniture and giant paintings of single peaches and a giant artichoke. She’s not an arts-and-crafts grandmother with a ceramic beehive cookie jar at
all.
I don’t know if I can trust her with our Indiana Christmas.

“I suppose we’ll need a tree,” she says.

“That’s homey,” Marisol agrees. Of course, she sleeps under a quilt patched together with uneven stitches and actual handwriting on it, so she’s totally into rustic.

“We should celebrate the holiday with a tip of the hat to our various ethnic backgrounds,” Grand says. “Now, I’m of English and Irish descent—as is Viola.”

“I thought Cerise was French,” Marisol says.

“Coral Cerise is Grand’s stage name. Her real-life name is Carol Butler.”

“Oh.” Marisol looks at me, confused. I’m so used to my theatrical grandmother (my dad calls her The Mother-In-Law of Reinvention behind her back) that it didn’t even dawn on me to tell Marisol that Grand changed her name, or even how many times Grand changed it.

Originally, my grandmother was born Carol Evelyn Gray. She married my grandfather and she became Carol Gray Butler. Then after she divorced him, she overhauled everything, her home, her wardrobe, and her name, changing the Carol to Coral (“I never felt like a Carol,” she explained), and became Coral Gray. And then finally Coral Cerise when she went to a psychic who said that Grand’s greatest success in the American theater would come after the age of fifty and
only
if she changed her name. When she changed her name to Cerise, everyone thought she was remarried (which she wasn’t). My mom said that the psychic probably said Charisse, after the great dancer Cyd Charisse but Grand misheard and wrote down Cerise. Anyhow, now, and for the immediate future, she will probably remain Coral Cerise.

“In New York we read a play aloud at Christmas.” Grand goes to our alcove and looks out over the grounds. “It’s a family tradition, so let’s do that here as well.”

“Last year we read
A Christmas Carol
,” I tell Marisol. “Another year we read
George Washington Crossing the Delaware
and
Bertha, Queen of Norway
by Kenneth Koch.”

“Guess who played the queen?” Grand smiles.

“That sounds like fun. And with you and George being professional actors, I bet it will be something.” Marisol easily gets on the theatrical Christmas bus.

“What are your family traditions, Marisol?”

“Well, we collect brown paper bags all fall and then we line them up on the walkway to our house and put votive candles in them and light them on Christmas Eve.”

Grand makes a sort of horrified face and then says, “Lovely.”

“Oh, and we go to Mass,” Marisol says. She gets in the van with the Catholics every Sunday morning and they head over to Saint Mary’s College for church. Marisol said at the beginning of the semester, there were, like, twenty girls and by Christmas break, about three who go, not including the old ladies from Saint Joe’s rest home who they pick up along the way.

“We’ll all go to Mass with you,” Grand says.

“That would be nice.”

“George will drive. He’s Polish and must be Catholic—isn’t that country ninety percent Catholic? And I’ve asked Mrs. Grundman if we can make our own dinner in the kitchen, and she agreed.”

“Whew. We dodged a bullet with that one. The only turkey we have on campus is pressed.”

“We’ll get a real bird, then.” Grand makes a list. “Now, is there anything else you girls would like?”

Marisol gets tears in her eyes. “Can you take us home?”

“Now, Marisol, there will be none of that. NO tears. I’m an actress, and I’m the only one allowed to have
a good sob because I actually get paid to let ’em flow like old Niagara Falls. I promise you will look back on this Christmas when you’re my age…fifty-two-ish, and you will say, that was a great Christmas. Offbeat, original, and totally different. Trust me. I know how to do holidays.”

Marisol wipes her eyes. “Okay, Miss Cerise.”

There are a few nuns, a couple of maintenance people, and Grand, Marisol, George, and me at Christmas-morning Mass at the Chapel of Our Lady of Loretto on the Saint Mary’s College campus. I hope the priest doesn’t die during the service. He’s so old that he actually might. But at least George is in good shape and he’s big enough to carry the man out in a worst-case scenario.

The chapel is very pretty with a high ceiling and lots of tiny tiles on the walls in shades of blue. The chocolate brown wooden benches and matching altar make for a very nice color scheme.

It ends up that George Dvorksy is in fact a Catholic. And evidently, as a bonus, he was an altar boy, so he can help Father Time (literally) say the Mass. George has to put items on the altar and ring bells. Every once in a while George looks up from his sacred duties and winks at Grand. Holy. Holy. Holy.

I can see that Marisol is comforted by her rituals, and I think of my own: how my parents would come to get me on Christmas morning, and we’d go up the stairs where the tree was lit and Christmas presents were everywhere. Mom and Dad would cook, and have their friends over—people who had kids my age—like Lily Kamp with her parents; the Rosenfelds with Anna, Kate, and Jane; the Dyjas with Nick and Kay; and the Prietos with Emilio and Aaron. Mary Ehlinger often came over and read aloud from the poetry of Edgar Guest. And pets were allowed, so there were a couple of dogs—Elvis and Click. We’d all play together while our parents would sit around and talk and laugh.

The talking and the laughing is the music that I miss the most—that, and my parents calling my name to “gather the troops” for dinner. Grand would always show up later, because she sleeps in (all actresses do—never call one before noon or they shoot to kill), and she’d bring one of her boyfriends. So, on that level, the Grand level, it isn’t so odd—George Dvorsky would have fit in at the brownstone—and Mom and her friends would have drunk wine in the kitchen and gone on and on with deep admiration about how young George is, and how amazing a person Grand is to attract such peppy dates.

When it comes time to read from what looks from
back here like the Bible, the old priest motions to my grandmother who puts her hand on her chest and mouths
Me?
I whisper, “Yes, you,” because Father Time doesn’t mean any of the nuns, who seem to have their heads bowed in prayer but are actually asleep.

Grand gets up and out of the pew and sashays to the podium. She pulls her chic reading glasses out of the pocket of her slim wool skirt and reads, “It came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus…” And then Grand does the weirdest thing: She starts crying. And George gets up from his little bench next to Father Time and joins her. He reads aloud where she has left off, and when she pulls herself together, she takes over and tells the rest of the story—which everyone knows—about the poor girl, fifteen and pregnant, and her husband, Joseph, and full-up hotels unable to take them.

Father Time has us all sing “Joy to the World” a capella when the service is over, and Marisol and I belt it out really loud to make up for the deaf nuns. Grand and George hold hands as we go. I’m amazed that I had a spiritual experience, and I wasn’t even looking for it.

Marisol and I clear the dishes from the dining-hall table. Grand made turkey and stuffing and yams and green
bean casserole. We invited the league of nations girls: the two Africans, three Central Europeans, and one Canadian who couldn’t go home for the holidays. Grand and George acted out small scenes from
Arsenic and Old Lace
, which were very funny and doubled as practice for when they return “to the boards” after Christmas. Now everyone else has gone back to Curley Kerner to watch movies, while we sit with Grand and George.

“I’m good at dishes,” George says. “Marisol, want to help me out?”

“Sure!” she says.

“We’ll be in to help shortly,” Grand calls after him. She turns to me and asks, “Did you talk to your parents today?”

“We video conferenced. Mom cried through the whole thing.”

“She doesn’t have my stiff upper lip,” Grand laments. “Never did. Thank God she didn’t go into the theater.”

“I thought it was nice that she missed me. But she should have thought of that before she decided not to come home. My parents are the most selfish people on the planet.”

“Viola…,” Grand says in a warning tone.

“It’s true. They dumped me here.”

“Dumped you? Young lady, you are out of line.” Grand
is not using her actress voice. It’s real. She’s angry with me. “You’re accusing your mother of deliberately missing an opportunity to be with you, and that’s just not true.”

“I’m an only child. There are girls here with, like, ten siblings and somehow their parents manage to get here and bring them home for Christmas. My parents passed. They couldn’t even get it together to carve out, like, three days to see me.”

“Viola, there’s a good reason for that.”

“Well, I’d like to hear it.” I know my parents well. They’re artists. They become so absorbed in their work they don’t hear things like the phone, the doorbell, or the smoke alarm. All my life, I’ve been the one to snap them out of their creative comas. Grand knows this. And I don’t care if it sounds sarcastic, I think it’s wrong for parents to abandon their children on holidays. It scars them for life—whether the parents have a good reason or not. At least Marisol’s parents blew her off for a life-and-death cause. For my parents, it’s just work. “They care about their projects more than me.”

“That’s not true. Your parents can’t afford to come home financially.”

My mind reels. In all my life, my parents never acted like we
didn’t
have money. There didn’t seem to be a lot, but there didn’t appear to be too little, either. Yes, they
are frugal, but that’s because they use all their money to finance their movies. They rent out a floor of the brownstone fixer-upper to a professor from Pratt, and sometimes they take jobs they don’t want their names on (like a certain hour-long TV drama that shot in New York City and was canceled after, like, two episodes). I know we’re not rich; we don’t go on vacations (that’s usually because they travel so much—it’s almost dumb to go on vacation somewhere besides our home to rest), but money never seems to be an issue. The filmmakers and artists my parents know aren’t rich either, but I never, ever thought of them as poor. “Grand, what are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about a bad run of financial reversals and no jobs.”

“Dad and Mom were developing their own projects.”

“When the paying gigs dried up.”

“Why didn’t they tell me?”

“They didn’t want you to worry. And Viola, I didn’t tell you this to have you worry. You’re smart and you’re mature and you can handle knowing the truth. I told you so that you might see things through their eyes.”

“They could have cut corners by keeping me at home—this place is expensive!”

“I’m paying for it,” Grand says.

The reality of
that
hits me like a rock in the face. Grand should not be spending her hard-earned money on me—that’s crazy! She’s one year from retirement age. (Though, if you were to use her version of the math, she’s got an additional thirteen years.)

“And I’m happy to do so. Now, you mustn’t let them know that I told you any of this—it would kill them. They are making good money on this documentary, and they’ve rented out the brownstone for the year. That should put them back in the black.”

Tears fill my eyes. “I didn’t know.” I remember how hard I’ve been on them, and how rude, and how I’d always have some smart-aleck comment, thinking they didn’t want me to be with them because I’d be in the way. But that wasn’t the case at all. I think of my mom, who doesn’t go to the hair salon for highlights, but does them at home—out of a box—to save money. She probably wants to look good for those business meetings when she and Dad go to pitch projects. She’s not one of those moms who want to look good for the sake of looking good or to hang on to their 1980s halcyon Madonna years. She’s just trying to stay in the business, stay current, stay employed.

My mother tries to give me things I want. She takes me to the Village to buy something new when she’s, like,
wearing the same purse she’s had since the 1990s when she had a desk job at a production company.

My dad, who is a terrible handyman, fixes everything in the brownstone, and it takes him hours, and he has to keep a book propped up with the instructions, but he gets the job done—and he doesn’t complain. They paint our rooms themselves, but they’d be laughing and talking as though they liked doing it—not acting a bit like they couldn’t afford a painter.

I’m the most selfish, horrible person I know, and I deserve anything rotten that happens to me because I’m only worried about myself.

“Now you know.” Grand opens her arms to me, and I fall into them. “You are loved, Viola Chesterton, a thousand percent.”

“Thank you.” I bury my face in my grandmother’s neck, the safest place in the world.

“Life sucks sometimes. And sometimes the money comes and sometimes the money goes. You’re rich-ish, then you’re broke-ish…and then you hit it, and you hold on to it. And then something comes up and it’s gone again. My God, these days a root canal can set you back six months.” Grand sighs.