Show Business Kills by Iris Rainer Dart

into this store,” she shouted. “How can you allow this filth in here?” Later she told her friends that while
     she was going berserk in Gelson’s, in the back of her head she could hear the voice of her ultra-proper grandmother, who once
     told her, “Men only want one thing, and that is to put their peters inside you.” Marly had been horrified to hear that as
     a young girl. But now, all these years later, she was thinking how right on the money the old girl really was.
    “Mrs. Mann,” the store manager was saying. He knew her name because despite its vast size, Gelson’s prided itself on being
     a friendly neighborhood market. “I’m so sorry. Maybe we can revamp the system and put the tabloids somewhere where children
     won’t be privy to them. Mrs. Mann, please.”
    Marly was shredding copies of the
Enquirer
, then handing the shreds to the open-mouthed manager.
    “Mom, please. Let’s go home.” The twins were mortified. They hadn’t been old enough to understand when their mother stood
     on soap boxes to beg for support for the ERA, nor had they been in the courtroom when she fought the neighborhood in the valley
     that didn’t want the shelter for battered women on one of their streets.
    When the entire front of Gelson’s in Pacific Palisades was trashed, Marly put her groceries in the ecologically responsible
     string bag she always carried to do her marketing, took each of the twins by a hand, and left to go home.
    When she got there, she went upstairs to her bathroom and locked the door, sat down on the floor, and cried. That bastard
     Billy probably knew this news was breaking today, and he needed her and the girls back in his life so he’d look to the world
     like a family man who had been wrongly accused. Some lawyer probably told him, “Quick, go make a pass at your estranged wife
     and see if you can get her back.” And she fell for it. Unfortunately she hadn’t been to one practitioner who had an aphorism
     to cover this one.

----
   9   
    H
er kids were sick of it. When they came over to visit her and they all watched TV together, one of them would be channel surfing
     with the TV remote, and a show or a commercial would flash by with Marly in it, and she’d say, “Marly Bennet! I graduated
     from college with her
.”
    She could tell by the way they exchanged looks that they were thinking, big fucking deal. Or one of them would say, “Oh, God,
     please don’t let, her start telling us again how she was the best one in the class, and now
they’re
all famous and she’s a Kmart shopper
.”
    Polly was the only one who humored her about it all. Like that time when she was home sick from school. She came downstairs
     while her mother was watching “My Brightest Day,” watching Jan do some big scene in a hospital room. She must have had some
     idiotic smile on her face, maybe she’d even been mouthing the words of the scene along with Jan, like some mental case
.
    “
Was she nice, Mom?” Polly asked her when the closing-theme music was playing
.
    “
Oh, yeah. And we were pretty good friends, too. She was the prettiest one in our class and I was…
”
    “
The best actress, right
?”
    “
Definitely. They all thought I was cool because I was from California. And Jack Solomon, a man who’s now the president of
     a television network, was just some jerk who used to climb into the window of the dorm room at night and come to Jan’s room
     when I was there, and we’d all sit on the floor, and we’d laugh and talk about how we were all going to be big in the theater
     some day. Probably in some rep company or regional theater, or on Broadway. Of course, after a while, I started dating your
     dad, and even though my parents were paying for me to live in the dorm, I mostly stayed at your dad’s little place till we
     got married
.”
    She’d probably told that to Polly five hundred times, and now when she saw how hot Polly was with her boyfriend, she knew
     telling her