I never heard if Millie said “Yes, sir” again or not because the next thing I heard was, “Papillon!” and Malcolm and I were tumbling in the Orgone.
Tallulah says, “A child actor is a vacuum that Nature has every right to abhor.”
fourteen
MALCOLM AND I resumed walking to and from the school bus together, and Malcolm even sat up front behind the driver with me. One day, as Malcolm and I boarded the bus together, Lynette and the other clones started chanting, “Malcolm and Jeanmarie sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g . . .” I walked straight up to Lynette and very quietly but firmly said, “When my birthday is a national holiday, you’re going to want to remind everyone that we went to the same school, so you just better stop what you’re doing.” She looked at the clone sitting next to her for support, but the clone was deliberately staring out of the window, so Lynette looked back at me and started to say something, but I shook my finger at her and said, “Don’t do this to yourself,” and she shut her mouth. Several days later she made a feeble attempt to tease me about my future fame, but I put a stop to it by very quietly saying, “Careful, or I’ll tell my biographer to leave you out.” I could see that she began to think of me in a different way, and although some of the other clones warmed up toward me—especially whenever they were feeling on the outs with her—Lynette Hrivnak and I were never to become friends.
TALLULAH approved of our plan to have everyone meet at Washington Square Park on Midwinter’s Night. She said that once we found The Regina Stone and she had Then Spot potty trained her soul would have some rest. I told her that I didn’t think she looked very restless, that she always seemed to be lounging about in her blue satin pajamas and never seemed to be anything but relaxed, and I would add a very to the kind of relaxed she seemed to be. Tallulah looked me over—top to toe, elbow to elbow—and said, “You forgot, darling, that Tallulah is an actress.”
Tallulah was the only adult I had ever talked to who could be two things at once: herself and the equal of a sixth grader. Other adults couldn’t. They always showed how proud they were of “being able to communicate with the child on her level.” It was disgusting to listen to them. I always heard that paid-for, patient sound of a social worker talking to someone on welfare. None of them could stand up to five minutes of one-on-one with someone from middle school. In the days before Tallulah, I thought that adulthood was a secret club whose members were more concerned with keeping people out than letting them in. They seemed always to close a door behind them.
But not Tallulah. She opened doors. She was not always kind, and she had enough respect for Malcolm and me to allow herself to be irritating. She never pretended that what was important to us was important to her. Tallulah told us that she had little need to pretend. “After all, darlings, Tallulah has the stage for that.”
At last I told Tallulah that I dreamed of becoming an actress. She was not surprised. “You must want it very much,” she said matter-of-factly.
“I do.”
“Wanting is not enough; you must also try. And try out.”
“I may try out for a part in the spring play. They are going to do Rumpelstiltskin. I would like to play Rumpelstiltskin himself.”
I explained how ever since I had first heard the story in grade school, I had felt that Rumpelstiltskin had been given a bum rap.
In the first place, only a very greedy person would promise someone her future baby in exchange for gold. In the second place, if the miller’s daughter hadn’t become queen—and she never would have without Rumpelstiltskin—she wouldn’t have had hundreds, maybe thousands, of messengers to send out into the kingdom like a secret service to find out what Rumpelstiltskin’s name was. If the miller’s daughter had been investigated by Congress, she would have been indicted for using dirty tricks to get elected, for abusing power and for not giving the handicapped an equal opportunity. I thought the miller’s daughter was a snot.
“Do you think Mrs. Spurling will agree with my interpretation of the part?” I asked.
“If she’s brave, she will. I don’t know this Mrs. Spurling. I don’t know if she will be ready to do the part that way. Timing is important. There is talent, of course. You’ve got to have the right stuff. But you must also have the right timing. The world must be ready for you when you are ready for it. Some people call it luck, and it is luck. Some people call it getting a break, and it is that, too, but I know that without it, you cannot be a star. If you are a painter or a composer, and your work has a life beyond your own, you can become a star after your death, but I must tell you, darling, death is greatly overrated as a maker of immortality.”
Malcolm said, “I don’t see how anyone can become immortal without first dying.”
“Unfortunately, that is true. And isn’t it a bore, darling?”
Malcolm said, “What about me? I don’t want to be an actor. I want to be a scientist.”
“You want to be a star scientist, don’t you?”
“Yes, but what has that got to do with what you’re saying.”
“Listen to Tallulah, darling. She is about to be profound.” Malcolm started to smile but quickly realized that Tallulah was not making a joke, so he listened, and Tallulah said, “There is no difference between being an artist and being a scientist.”
Malcolm replied, “Yes there is. A scientist is methodical. A scientist thinks logically. A scientist uses algorithms.”
“What is an algorithm, darling, some form of birth control?”
“No. It is a mechanical procedure in mathematics.”
“Well, darling, a true scientist is not an algorithm. He is an artist, not a mechanic. Both are seekers of truth. The truth may be poetic in one case and factual in another, but if you are going to be merely logical and merely mechanical, you will never be a star. Just as an actress has to think as well as feel, a scientist must feel as well as think.”
“That’s only two,” I said.
“What’s only two?” Tallulah asked.
“Talent and timing. What’s the third thing that it takes to make a star?”
“I ‘ll let you find that out when you find The Regina Stone.”
ON ONE SINGLE DAY, three kids in my class came down with flu, so I gargled three times before coming to Rahab Station. Malcolm said that my breath smelled like a hospital corridor, and I told him that he could have gone the rest of his life without making that remark. My body scent must have changed, for Spots, Now and Then, sniffed me vigorously when I arrived at Rahab Station. Tallulah must have noticed, too, even though I had heard that people who smoke a lot lose their sense of smell. She told me that I worry too much about germs.
“You are really trying to protect—excuse the expression, darling—your internal organs against an attack. You want them to be perfect.” She took a long drag on her cigarette and said, “Tallulah can tell you that they will get hurt anyway. And really they must. An unscarred performer is truly empty calories: sweet but not nourishing.”
EVERY DAY from the time that Malcolm and I made up until the Friday that school was dismissed for Christmas recess, we went to Jericho Tel and found Now or Then Spot waiting, and we visited with Tallulah. She told wonderful stories about the theater, and she always had something funny to say. I remember many of the things she said, and because I don’t want to waste them, I have written them at the beginnings of these chapters, the way that writers used to do long ago.
The weeks from Thanksgiving to Midwinter’s Day, the last day of school for the year, flew by. We hardly noticed that Tallulah had not sent us Topside since we had made contact with Patrick Henry Mermelstein.
Tallulah says, “If you must complain in public, either be amusing or outrageous”
fifteen
MIDWINTER’S DAY opened with a cold, damp chill that made a person glad it was the shortest day of the year. After I got home from school, Mother called from the airport saying that there was so much air traffic that she had been asked to work another shift. I told her that I
would be fine without her. At seven o’clock I bundled up and left the trailer, anxious to get to Jericho Tel. Malcolm was waiting for me by the steps of his trailer. He, too, was bundled up. He wore a stocking cap and a long striped scarf that he pulled up over his mouth. Neither one of us took a hand out of a pocket to wave. His father had also called to say that he had been asked to work another shift.
We walked fast and were at Jericho Tel by ten minutes past seven, and we began our wait. It was so cold that each minute felt like ten. Our bones seemed to conduct the cold straight up, so we stamped our feet and danced, trying to give the hard frozen ground less surface to chill. We took our hands out of our pockets only to look at our watches, which we took turns doing. When it was five minutes before eight, I began to suspect that Spot would not appear; at eight o’clock, I knew that we would not be called to Rahab Station. We waited five minutes more.
Malcolm complained, “I don’t understand this at all. Tallulah approved of our plan to meet the buskers.”
“We’ll have to go to Washington Square by surface,” I said.
“That will take hours.”
“Then we’d better start now.”
“Listen, Jeanmarie, I think we ought to go home and take a hot bath. Finding The Regina Stone is Tallulah’s problem, not ours.”
“Wrong. It’s ours. If we don’t find it, we’ll never know the third thing that it takes to make a star.”
Malcolm was stamping his feet up and down, doing the jittery dance that people waiting at a bus stop do on a cold day. He took a mittened hand out of his pocket and stretched it out toward me. “Come on,” he said, “we’d better find a way to get to Washington Square.”
We started running toward the exit of Empire Estates, thinking we would hitch a ride on the main road, when we saw Dapper Dan the Diaper Man toss a stack of soiled diapers into the back of his panel truck and walk around to the driver’s side of the cab. “Hey!” Malcolm called. “Hey! Dapper Dan. Dapper Dan.” He got his attention. “Are you heading back to the city?” he asked.
“I’m going home. Can you believe this? Eight o’clock on a Friday night, and I’m just finishing up. I’m driving through rain and sleet and dark of night out here, practically to the end of the island to make two rotten deliveries. Two. Two deliveries at the end of the world.”
Malcolm asked him if he would let us ride with him as far as he went.
“I go as far as Westbury.”
“We really need to get to Greenwich Village, but we’d appreciate a lift as far as you’ll take us,” I said.
We hopped into the front of the truck, and Dapper Dan introduced himself. “My name isn’t Dan. It’s Norman. Call me Norm.” Then he began a long series of complaints about the diaper business and about his brother-in-law. “I just come out of the Army, and this brother-in-law of mine says, ‘Listen, Norm,’—the family calls me Norm—this brother-in-law, he says to me, ‘The babies are booming. You know what’s the choicest gift people can give at a baby shower?’ ‘What?’ I ask like a dummy. ‘A gift certificate for the services of none other than yours truly, Dapper Dan the Diaper Man. One week, two weeks of a gift certificate, and you have these mothers hooked. They don’t never want to wash no dirty diapers. Ever.’ It makes sense to me. He lets me look at the books. I see the figures. The business looks good. So I buy it. Wham, bang, my brother-in-law, he’s out of the business and retired down in Florida, sending me post cards.
“I buy all these huge washing machines and all these commercial dryers to say nothing of thousands of dozens of diapers. You’ve got your newborns, your prefolds, your five-ply crotch for night. I am practically a department store of diapers. What my dear brother-in-law neglects to tell me is that with the baby boom comes the home appliance boom, and every little mother wants her own darling’s tushy wrapped in his own private diapers. When I explain that I sterilize all the diapers, they don’t listen. They talk like they are a branch office of General Hospital.
“I tell you, now that it is too late, I see that rock bottom is just a little downhill from here. Paper. It’s coming. Mark my words, paper diapers are on their way, and those few mothers who can’t get to a washing machine are going to be papering their babies’ behinds, and I am going to be stuck with tons of commercial washers and dryers and a department store of diapers. I used to be a gift certificate. I used to be smiled at and invited in for coffee. Now, all they do is leave the soiled on the back step. I never see anyone. They pay by credit card. I take VISA, American Express, Diner’s Club.”
Neither Malcolm nor I said much. Norm did all the talking, and before we knew it, he was watching the highway exits to turn off for Westbury. I said, “Norm, would you consider taking us into Greenwich Village if Malcolm gives you an idea about how you can turn your fortunes around?”
Norm saw Malcolm give me a mean look. “Who you fooling?” he asked.
“I’m not fooling anyone.” I turned to Malcolm and said, “It’s all right if you give Norman your idea, Malcolm.”
Malcolm said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jeanmarie.”
“Don’t pretend, Malcolm. You know that you can save Norm’s business.” Malcolm pinched my arm and made mean faces. “I know you promised your aunt that you wouldn’t tell anyone, but I think that Norm here deserves a chance. It’s all right if you tell him.”
Malcolm relaxed and smiled. “I expected to get something more than a free ride into the city for my idea,” he said.
“But he has all the equipment, Malcolm. Your aunt doesn’t.”
Malcolm muttered under his breath but loud enough for Norman to hear, “If my aunt finds out that I’ve given away my idea, she’ll probably write me out of her will.”
Norm said, “Am I supposed to believe that you got an aunt that’s got a will?” He said, “The next exit for Westbury is coming up.” He glanced nervously at Malcolm and then checked his rearview mirror and changed lanes. “Heck, I haven’t been in the city in a long time.” He drove along in silence for a while and then asked, “Where did you guys say you needed to go?”
We told him Greenwich Village. “Hey, I’m glad you told me. I can’t leave a couple of nice kids like you alone in the Village on such a cold night. That place is Weirdsville, I tell you. They got more freaks per square mile down there than Barnum and Bailey.”
We said very little for the rest of the way. When we were almost out of the Midtown Tunnel, Malcolm said to me, “That’s city lights at the end of the tunnel. Glad.” He smiled. I smiled back.
Norm asked, “What was that? What d’ya say, kid?”
I said, “We were just reviewing history.”
“History?” Norm said. “For my money, history just keeps on happening.”
WHEN WE GOT to Manhattan, Norm drove straight down Fifth Avenue, and Washington Square loomed up in front of us. I was excited, anxious to get out and find the buskers. I asked him to let us out. He had to circle around before he could pull over to one of the side streets and park. Malcolm reached across me and started to open the door. “Wait a minute, kid,” Norm said. “You said you have an idea for my business. Time to tell.”
Malcolm said, “Blue jeans.”
Norm said, “What about them?”
Malcolm said, “The thing I hate most about new jeans is having to break them in. I only like them after they’ve been washed about ten times. I know I’m not the only person in this world who hates to break in new jeans. So I think that what you ought to do, is to contact the people who manufacture them and tell them that you will give them a good softening in your commercial washing machines. That way, they not only will be pre-softened, they’ll also be pre-shrunk.”
I said, “At Singer Grove it’s considered low fashion to wear new blue jeans.”
Norm said to his steering wheel, “You know, sometimes, you gotta obey your instincts.” He patted the steering wheel with both hands. “Yep,” he said, “something told me that I should pick up you two kids. And something else to
ld me that I should listen to what you might have to say. I like your idea, kid. I like it a lot.”
Malcolm said, “I also think you ought to put pebbles in the washers to soften the denim. That way you can call it ‘stone-washed.’ Better to make them he soft and sound tough.”
“Right,” Norm said. “Good idea. Stone-washed. I like it. I really like it. Stone-washed. Listen, kids, I haven’t bummed around the Village in a long time. I don’t mind having a night out on the town. How about I come with you, we buy you a bite to eat, and I take you back. Who knows, you might come up with one more good idea.” Malcolm told him no, thanks, that we had business to do. “Sure,” Norm said. “I understand. I can understand that.” But I knew he was disappointed that we hadn’t asked him to join us.
Tallulah says, “If ever you want to learn the difference between accuracy and truth, look at a photograph of Gertrude Stein and then look at Picasso’s portrait of her.”
sixteen
IT WAS AFTER ten when we got to Washington Square. There were not many people waiting around. Those who remained were gathered around a mime with a painted white face who was bumping into imaginary walls. Malcolm and I hurried through the crowd looking for familiar faces. We saw none. We broke up. He circled left, and I circled right, and we once again made the rounds of the crowd. No success. I said, “Either we missed them, or they did not show up.” At that moment we were both looking up Fifth Avenue, and we saw a woman wearing a long skirt and an old-fashioned cape walking between two men. There was no mistaking who they were, and Malcolm and I started to run to catch up with them.
They were walking, skipping and hopping, three abreast, up Fifth Avenue with their arms woven around each other. Every now and then we heard their laughter like metal wind chimes on a cold, almost still night. They stopped often to hug each other, and a fresh wave of laughter would tunnel down the street. Malcolm and I were within a half a block of them when they turned and entered a restaurant.