Show Business Kills by Iris Rainer Dart Page A

that stuff had been a mistake. You weren’t supposed to tell your kids you were fucking around so young, because
     then they figured it was okay for them to do it, too
.
    But it was worse to tell it to Polly, because it didn’t take much to do the math that meant that the fucking around her mother
     had done was the reason she had been born. Why she came into the world, and her mother quit acting to take care of her, and
     then her brother, Jason, and then Kiki
.
    Once, just for a laugh, Polly had the idea of using Lou’s video camera and directing a tape of her mother doing a few monologues.
     That great one she still remembered from
The Glass Menagerie,
in which Amanda Wingfield chastises her daughter for being afraid to go out in the world and take command of her life
.
    “
Mom, you’re awesome,” Polly said afterward when they put the tape in the VCR and watched it together, holdinghands. Tears were rolling down her daughter’s cheeks, and that day Polly had looked at her with more respect than she ever
     had before
.
    And the kid was right. She was pretty goddamned good on that tape. Good enough to send it to Ellen Bass, which she never admitted
     to anyone that she did, with a letter saying give me a part in something, anything. But there was no response. Not a call.
     No fulfillment of her fantasy that one day the phone would ring and on the other end Ellen would be there, saying, “I’m sending
     the studio jet to come and get you. You were the best actress in the class. I have a part that only you can play
.”
    For a while, after all the kids were in school, she tried to do some work in regional theaters, in plays where she could rehearse
     at night and get Lou to put them to bed. One year she played the young wife in
Barefoot in the Park
at a local theater, and another year she played Patty in
The Moon Is Blue.
After
Barefoot,
when Lou brought the kids backstage they were really stoked. “Wow! Mom! You’re better than a movie star,” Jason said
.
    She’d seen the look of warning in Lou’s eyes anytime she got caught up in thinking maybe there was still some way she could
     work as an actress, the look that meant “You do and I’ll walk,” so instead of acting she stayed home and played Little Mommy,
     the pet name that he called her for years. Right up until he left her for Polly’s third-grade teacher
.
    And then the bastard, the fucking son of a bitch, when she was at her lowest, with no money, a lousy job, living in another
     lousy rented house, he found a fancy lawyer who helped him get the kids away from her. Last year in an angry argument over
     clothes, or some other stupid thing,Polly had shrieked at her, “I’m glad we’re living with Daddy and Sharon. She’s cool. She has a career. You’re lame, Mother
.”
    Lame and old and unemployable. Maybe Polly’s making that comment was what made her feel justified about taking the savings
     she’d been putting away for the girl’s wedding and spending it on the trip to Los Angeles and this hotel room at the Sheraton
     Hemisphere that was fancier than any she’d ever seen in her life. On the fifteenth floor, with a view way below of the movie
     studio lot
.
    Right now down there, they were making television shows and movies. She could have been on those movies if she’d had the guts
     to leave Lou and go after what should’ve been her career. Before her gorgeous orange hair faded to this gray, before she started
     being menopausal crazy, with those hot flashes and waves of depression
.
    She had been embarrassed today in the lobby, checking in with her little duffel bag and her striped plastic purse, when the
     guy at the desk looked at her as if no one had ever made a deposit in cash before, but he took it. And now she stood against
     the window, looking down at the bright Los Angeles day, and watched as the trams that transported the tourists wended their
     way around the studio lot and past what had to be the commissary and the