What You Wish For
Authors: Kerry Reichs
what you wish for
KERRY REICHS
Contents
Wyatt Sees a Girl About a Horse
Dimple Tries the Casting Couch
Dimple Colors Outside the Lines
P.S.: Insights, Interviews & More . . .
I have a baby shower, sort of an afternoon/evening thing, so unfortunately I can’t get together Saturday night.
I
looked at the clock and the calendar on my desk to verify the ordinariness of everything but the e-mail, making sure I hadn’t tumbled into a parallel dimension where men scrapbooked and women peed standing up. Nope. My new tampon box was on the counter where I’d tossed it.
It didn’t take a genius to figure this one out. A healthy adult male such as my, apparently former, boyfriend Tom choosing Gerber party games over sex with me was more than a scheduling conflict. Men did not do baby showers. If they did, it was a twenty-minute drive-by under duress, fleeing at the sight of miniature rattles on pink icing. They did
not
pass their Saturday evening rocking the all-day-all-night shower. I’d received a thinly disguised “Dear Dimple” letter.
Yes, Dimple. It’s a terrible nickname, but the alternative, Dimples, would be intolerable, leaving me with little choice but to become a birthday clown, forever making people indefinably uncomfortable. In fact, I owned a matched set of girlish dents, but from babyhood, I’d responded to most situations with a speculative half smile, lifting only one corner of my lips as if I wasn’t sure a thing merited full two-dimple approbation. Hence Dimple, singular.
My real name is Agnis. In a misguided fit of trying to repair a fractured relationship with her mother, my own named me after hers—Agnis Dýemma Bauskenieks. No one calls me that because it’s a dreadful name for a baby, a name that should only be applied from age fifty onward. Since I’m an actress, I’ll never become fifty. I’ll also never have the last name Bauskenieks. Everyone calls me Dimple Bledsoe.
I called my agent.
“Freya Fosse.” Herself barked into the phone.
“Demoted to answering your own phone?” I teased.
“Ugh. They’re having cookies for somebody’s something-or-other in the break room. I fled immediately but Brooke wanted to stay.” Brooke was Freya’s assistant. Freya was a petite, platinum Norwegian windstorm.
“I finally heard from Tom,” I said.
“And?”
I told her.
“A baby shower? Like, a hen party where a fetus is about to come out of a woman’s vagina and everyone coos over onesies and talks about breast milk?”
“Irrefutable, isn’t it?”
She sighed. “I’m sorry to say it but . . .
incontrovertible
comes to mind.” My mind’s eye saw Freya lay down her Mont Blanc and straighten her posture in her black Arne Jacobsen chair. “Dimple. Tom is a perfectly . . .
respectable
person, but . . .”
I was glad she didn’t go into ex-bashing. Tom
was
a perfectly nice person who didn’t deserve to be vilified for failing to have strong feelings for me.
“The important thing is . . .” It must have been a slow day at the office for Freya because this quantity of uninterrupted personal talk was unusual. We were usually on work-related topics by minute three.
“Besides . . .”
I fell into the comforting rhythm of her speech. Maybe it was weird that I called my agent about a breakup but it was either her or my hairdresser. In my line of work, an impermeable watershed separates us from “ordinary” people. Aspiring actresses should hang on to their high school pals, because once you get on the talking box, everyone secretly wants to ask you about the time you met Julia Roberts, no matter how cool they play it. We aren’t different, but tabloids triumph in catching actors Just Like Us
.
If they thought I was just like them, seeing me pump gas wouldn’t be noteworthy. Instead, my parking ticket is news.
“Besides . . .”
I took guilty pleasure in being coddled by Freya. The Just Like Us thing and the long hours isolate actors. To be fair, the immigrant in me wouldn’t be a hand-holding sharer if I had a legion of sympathetic ears. Pain was something I did behind closed doors. No matter how deeply you felt your personal tragedies, they didn’t count for more than a mosquito bite in the face of real suffering. Darfur. Tsunami. Holocaust. That was real. That was malaria. My little welts didn’t count.
“I’m confident . . .”
The truth was, Tom’s most attractive quality had been that he was age appropriate and wanted kids. I didn’t think I’d miss him. I was sorry the length of time between now and the possibility of having a baby multiplied exponentially. My biological age was outpacing the range I offered on my curriculum vitae, and while Wikipedia attributed me with only thirty-six years, the California Department of Vital Records knew the number 3 no longer factored into the equation.
“Nowadays you can’t really dismiss online opportunities . . .”
At that comment I toggled over to look at the website I’d bookmarked. Visiting it was becoming a regular pastime. I considered what I sought in a profile.
“I have good news.” Freya switched to shoptalk. “I had an interesting telephone call from Julian Wales. He directed that extremely well-received independent film
Pull
.”
I snorted. “Of course I know who Julian Wales is.
Everyone
knows who Julian Wales is.”
“He’s sending over a script. He has you in mind for a role.”
“Me?” Freya had my full attention.
“Why
not
you?”
I twisted my rope of hair.
Because I’m old,
I thought. But that was taboo in this line of work, akin to chumming the water. On paper I was still fabulously midthirties. “He won the Oscar for Best Director last year. I’m a TV actress.”
“He met you at a party, and apparently you made quite an impression.”
I remembered. A Hollywood rarity at six feet four inches, eyes that had to be described as piercing despite how naff that sounded, and steel neck cords supporting a bald head. My internal sexual beast, LaMimi, had woken up and tried to take the wheel but I’d held firm. One didn’t give in to a pheromone-driven libido at a business event.
“Because I’m freakishly tall and could look him in the eye without craning?” In Hollywood I made most men look like they came from the Shire. As I spoke, I navigated to Julian Wales’s IMDB website. Yes. He was tall. And handsome.
“Or because he could see without craning that those enormous brown eyes of yours beg to be gently lit on the big screen.”
“He wants me to play a deer?”
Freya did a controlled exhale. “Let’s wait for the script and see, why don’t we?”
“Of course. This is very good news.” My voice was measured but my stomach lurched. A movie. A
Julian Wales
movie. It could be huge. Risky.
“It’s more than ‘good news.’ You’ve been looking for the perfect vehicle to move from television back to the big screen for a long time. Getting a part in Julian Wales’s follow-up to
Pull
would be like taking an express Lamborghini to the stars. Think . . .
life changing
.”
“Mm-hmm,” I agreed. She was right, though to be honest, she’d been the one looking for a movie while I rested comfortably in my current role. I toggled back to the website I’d been considering before. My stomach fluttered like I’d skipped to the edge of a cliff.
“Any actress your age would kill for this chance.” Freya never pulled punches. “
He
came to
us
.”
“It’s quite an opportunity.” I refused to get excited.
“Think capital
O
Opportunity.” Freya’s voice carried a grandiose arm gesture.
I split my screen so I could look at both websites.
“This could be big, Dimple,” Freya said. “Big change.”
Julian Wales’s penetrating eyes looked back from one. The wide-eyed baby on the home page for Hope Women’s Health and Fertility Clinic looked back from the other.
Yes, I thought. This could be big change indeed.
W
yatt looked up when a brunette boarded the bus at Georgina and Seventh, not far from UCLA. The bus was not crowded, but filling up, each row hosting a single rider. Wyatt slid his courier bag to the floor. After assessing the bus, the brunette settled next to Wyatt.
There was nothing threatening about Wyatt. He was Clark Kent with greying temples. Strong jaw, kind face. The suede patches on his elbows were neither retro nor ironic. If he was sporting a purple sequin jumpsuit, he’d still be the first guy you sat next to on a bus.
Wyatt was forty-eight and no one ever argued that it simply wasn’t possible. His gold-rimmed glasses framed cobalt eyes. He was neither effeminate nor macho, he neither slouched nor strutted, he neither beamed nor frowned. Everything about him was . . . grounded. Men wanted him to marry their sisters. Their sisters wanted to marry him after the first reckless romance to the brooding musician ended in divorce. It would surprise observers to know that as a high school principal, this calm man commanded the obedience of a thousand teenagers. A disciplinarian at school, after the bell Wyatt was eminently likable.
Wyatt noted with approbation that the brunette was reading Chaucer. Homework no doubt, but it was better than something about vampires. Wyatt resisted commenting on the Chaucer, as that was what creepy and/or annoying people did. If it was his daughter, or one of his students, he could comment. But not a stranger on a bus. A life of public service had taught Wyatt the importance of boundaries. Once adopted, Wyatt’s beliefs were firm. Which was what had brought him to being on the bus today.
It was very inconvenient timing. Wyatt normally rode his bicycle to school. He’d grown up in Minnesota, where he’d liked his upbringing, the farm, and for that matter, his parents, all just fine. He’d even liked his college and graduate school experience in the Middle. But he never wanted to live in a cold climate again. Wyatt was made for Southern California. He wasn’t a barefoot kind of guy, and he didn’t care if he saw the beach, but he’d push through dirt like a sugar beet for vast blue skies and a steadily shining sun. The whisper of palm fronds and bright fuchsia bougainvillea were a bonus. Palm trees! Fuchsia! He was a long way from St. Paul.
When he’d moved west twenty-odd years ago, his mother had asked, “Don’t you get tired of sunny weather all the time? Don’t you miss the seasons?”
To Wyatt, “seasons” was a delusional word representing “rain,” “sleet,” “soggy brown leaves gunking up the gutters,” and “red-knuckled windshield scraping in subzero temperatures.”
“No,” was his unequivocal response. “I’ve adapted fine. The girls have long legs and wear shorts all year.”
“But
California
. . .” Though her own sister had lived in California for decades, his mother viewed it as a strange and alien place.
“I still don’t like tofu,” he reassured her.
Wyatt missed his commonsense, beef-eating Midwestern parents. They’d died in the way of old married couples, one following the other. At seventy-eight. Barbara had broken her hip in a fall and never been well again. During the cold winter she’d contracted pneumonia and slipped away in her sleep to rest forever under a thick, quiet blanket of snow.
Wyatt’s father, Hank, himself eighty-two, had soldiered on, continuing to work the farm, but Wyatt had sensed a vacancy. Wyatt suspected Hank stuck around only for his son, loath to leave him alone in the world. Despite this, Hank had followed his wife a mere six months later. As Wyatt buried Hank next to Barbara under waving autumn grasses, he wondered if his father saw September, the advent of the academic year, as the real beginning of a new year. It had always struck Wyatt as silly to herald the big leap from one year to the next in the unchanging dark of winter. But summer to fall—bounty to harvest to dead stalks in the field—now that was change. That signaled the death of one year and the long, slow gestation of the next. Wyatt suspected that harvest had signaled to farmer Hank the beginning of a new trip around the sun, twelve long months without Barbara, and he’d elected to quietly bow out after the sugar beets were reaped.
In California, there was no fall. September meant sharpened pencils, less surfing, perhaps a closed-toe shoe. The sun shone on. While the thought of never returning to Minnesota made Wyatt feel oddly untethered, he had his cousin Eva in Los Angeles and the relentless progression of bright seventy-degree days to console himself. After visiting Los Angeles for the first time, Wyatt had wondered why people lived in St. Paul and Ann Arbor. Didn’t they
know
? Riding his bicycle to work was Wyatt’s celebration that he could absorb his recommended daily allowance of vitamin D through the top of his head.
But not today. Today he had an appointment after school. More vexing, today was National Leave Your Car At Home Day. While he preferred not to drive, Wyatt had no aversion to it. Driving was expedient and practical, and often, in the sprawling city, necessary. On normal errand days, he’d add his Prius to the procession of irritated commuters on Sunset Boulevard. Today, however, Wyatt felt it was imperative to set an example for what he sought from his students. Wyatt had urged everyone to go green, and bus, bike, or walk to school. Which is why, despite the inconvenience, he was riding the bus.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ilana had said when he’d called.
“I hate to make you pick me up.” Wyatt felt he should drive the lady.
“It’s, like, no problem.” She sounded relieved. Wyatt wondered if he was a bad driver. He did get distracted by his truant-officer eyes, scanning roadside youth. “Um, I’ll pick ya up between three and four-thirty.”
That was quite a range. “What time is the appointment?”
“Um, I gotta check the
specific
time, but if I get ya, like, between three and four-thirty, we’ll be fine. It’s not far to where it’s at.”
Wyatt winced at the dangling modifier, but let it go. She was a grown woman.
“Where is it?”
“Oh, ya know. Not far.” Ilana wasn’t big on precision. “So did’ja put that money into my account?”
“Yes. Six thousand for the test and another five thousand for various and sundry, correct?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You could have the bills sent directly to me, and I’ll take care of them.” Wyatt didn’t like the current arrangement, but he would discuss it in person.
She snorted. “I’d worry about looking cheaper than fourth-day bread. I’ll bring receipts this afternoon, for ya know, your files or whatever.”
“Do you think you might be a little more specific on when you plan to get here? Since you don’t have a cell phone, I won’t know when precisely you’ll arrive. I’d hate to make you wait.” Ilana thought cell phones caused brain tumors and refused to get one.
She smacked her gum. “Gee, I dunno. Traffic, ya know.” She paused. “I could go by myself.” Did she sound hopeful?
“No!” Wyatt modulated his voice not to spook her. “It’s no problem. I’ll be out front.”
He would wait. It was no big deal. He suppressed his discomfort. It had been a long time since he was on this side of the power differential.
“O-kee. See ya!” she sang and hung up.
So they were set. She’d get him after classes and they would go together.
Wyatt came back to the present when the bus stopped not far from his school.
“Yo, Mr. O!” A shaggy adolescent cruised up the sidewalk as Wyatt alighted. “My wheels didn’t use gas!” He gestured to his skateboard.
Wyatt took in his student’s
Haywood Jablowmi
T-shirt and suppressed a wince. Not against the rules . . . technically. “That’s wonderful, Dylan. You may have positively impacted the life of a polar bear cub. Certainly a smelt, at the very least.”
“Rad!” The boy looked pleased as he kicked off on his board. Wyatt mused over what an odd blend of child and adult were high school students. They tested the boundaries of authority even as they sought the approbation of their elders, shaping themselves to stand alongside them. As he ascended the school steps, a knot of freshman girls peeked at him and giggled, blushing when he waved. Students in a rainbow of offensive and rebellious clothing called out their alternative methods of travel. He praised each one.
Wyatt strolled to his office, speculating on what form of rebellion his own son or daughter would demonstrate in adolescence, smiling as he unlocked his office door. His conjecture soon would be specific. Today he and Ilana would learn whether the baby was a boy or a girl.