“Look,” Natalie continued. ”I’ve
decided that if my career’s going to move forward, I have to take control. My
life’s about me, so I’m going for it. If I can’t land this part, then I’ll have
to admit I don’t have what it takes and I may as well pack it back to Iowa.”
“How ‘bout I go with you?”
“Nah, but thanks, I’ll be okay.
Look, I moved to LA for a break like this. I may have been born in a corn
field, but I do know how to take care of myself. It’s not like he grabbed me
and threw me in his car. He said ‘if I was interested’ to give him a call.”
“Yeah, but that’s a pretty big
carrot you’ll have to admit.”
“I know,” she said. Her dimpled
smile began to fade as she absorbed the fervor of Maggie’s alarm. “I’ll confess
he had a certain edge about him but in this town you have to put yourself out
there, Maggie. No one ever makes it by playing it safe.”
Sue delivered dinner with
another forced smile and refilled their coffee cups. Natalie sensed a fusion of
excitement and hesitation. That confused her. On the one hand, this could be
the opportunity she had been waiting for. Ansell taking an interest in her
couldn’t be a bad thing. But what if she blew the screen test? Maggie did have
a point, it was kind of sudden, but if it hadn’t been for the casual way Tony
approached the offer, she would have walked away without looking back.
She could hear her father
saying, “No risk, no reward!” As an independent farmer, there were plenty of
risks: pests, weather, equipment failure, the economy, and corporate farms to
name a few. Yet many years it did pay off, and when it did, Mom would sew new
dresses for her and her younger sister, Cindy, and Dad would replace a broken
piece of farm equipment.
“Call me when you get home
tonight,” Maggie said after dinner as they walked to Natalie’s car. She gave
her a hug, and continued with a whisper into Natalie’s ear, “I know it’ll be
late, but call me, I’ll wait up.”
Twenty-five minutes later,
Natalie stepped from the bathroom to her closet and selected her wardrobe. After
she drew black tights over her legs, she slipped into a mid-thigh length black
cotton skirt and a light rose-colored button down blouse. Neither one was expensive,
but she thought the outfit might look good to the camera. She finished the
ensemble by zipping her black high heel boots snug over her calves and then
shrugging into her signature knee-length black leather coat.
On her way out, she passed
through the living room and went to the kitchen counter. There she tore off the
top sheet of a notepad with the directions to the screen test. As she headed
for the door, she glanced around the room at the tattered second-hand
furnishings. Maybe this will all change
soon, she thought.
At the mirror hanging near the
front door, she stopped for one last check. She was stunned to see something
wrong. Her makeup was perfect, her clothes were draped just right, she had left
the two top buttons of her blouse open to reveal just enough cleavage to
tantalize the camera, her smile produced those dimples under her smoky eyes,
and her blond hair fell in perfect symmetry over her shoulders. But something—no … someone—else reflected back.
She peered out—that gangly Iowa
farm girl, that menacing fourteen year-old who forecasted she would never
amount to anything. In the lighted mirror at the studio yesterday she had threatened an appearance, now
Amy Westerhill popped her head out. On the way to do a screen test for one of
the most important people in town wasn’t the time to be confronted with her unwelcomed emergence. A vision of
her always caused Natalie’s confidence to drain like water through a colander
of egg noodles.
Natalie had so wanted to leave
Amy behind in the cornfields. If there was a wrong side of the tracks in Iowa,
she had been born on it. Everything about life there repulsed her. The
conversations ad nauseam about the preacher’s sermon over a ritual pot roast
dinner at the scarred, bed-sheet draped dining room table; singing endless
verses of “Just As I Am” during the altar call at State Street Church; the pink
percale curtains on her bedroom window; the sound of her dad starting the
tractor as the sun came up; watching her favorite television shows on a fuzzy
screen with poor reception, a rooster crowing at sunbreak. All of it said Amy
was poor and nobody, and Natalie Beaumont couldn’t bear being that any longer.
To make it worse, her own
hormones sabotaged her. In ninth grade she hated to shower after gym class
because naked, there was no way to hide that her scrawny and stick-like body
had not begun to mature like the other girls in class. The bullies ate her for
breakfast it seemed every day for something over which she had no control. But
once her body began to blossom, she went from shapeless to shapely in less than
four months. Armed with her new figure she believed she had the assets needed
to face off with the popular girls.
Over her mother’s stringent
objections—“good Christian girls don’t jump and gyrate in front of a crowd
wearing short skirts”— she decided to try out for the high school cheerleading
squad. At cheerleader camp in August that year, she nailed the routine on the
third try. When tryouts came the next week, though, the Queen—the head varsity
cheerleader with her long tanned legs, and a following of submissive
minions—inclined her head to one of the sycophants at her ear. From the
sideways glances, snickers and pointed fingers, Amy knew she was the subject.
Amy fought through the obvious
mockery without missing a chant or beat. But when she finished, the Queen from
her throne—a director’s chair on the fifty yard line of the football field—gave
Amy a derisive glance. She started with Amy’s toes and scanned up her entire
body as if she was judging the up-and-coming competition. When she reached
Amy’s face, the Queen with a smirk, but without a word, turned her thumbs down
like Nero with the sentence of death to some Christian in the Coliseum. With
that voiceless, dismissive rejection, Amy knew she would never transcend beyond
the social class to which she had been unwittingly sentenced by birth. Amy
Westerhill had no more value than a wind-tossed cornstalk.
“Damn you, Amy,” Natalie said to
the image. “You’re not welcome here, ever!”
Amy looked back and her eyes, a
mixture of scorn and sadness, taunted Natalie in silence. Waves of self-doubt
washed over Natalie to where she began to feel nauseous. Even changing her name
couldn’t erase where she came from or, in her solitary moments, who her heart
witnessed she really was. Who was she kidding? She was weak, insecure, and
maybe even untalented. Could it be that even those high school theater
accolades were the product of stupid farmers who wouldn’t know talent if they
turned it up with their plow? Do I have
no business trying to make it in Hollywood?
She swallowed hard and pushed
the sickening urge down. Natalie glared back at the reflection of the girl she
had to escape. “Damn you again, Amy. Whatever it takes,” she screamed.
“Whatever it damn well takes!”
Then, with a sharp twist away
from the mirror, she stomped to the front door.
_____
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Jearl Rugh 2012
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