the living room, and she got into the habit, on the days she didn’t have to go to the studio, of taking her morning coffee to the couch in front of the windows, where she curled up and lost herself in an orchestra of greens. The green she loved best was the brilliant emerald of the newer leaves when they were lighted from behind by the still-rising sun. When they brought back that high, singing note.
At the age of five, Dolly had discovered that certain sounds streamed colors through the air. The new-leaf green of the sycamores was the color that had curled around the room when her mother listened to classical orchestral concerts on the radio back in Scranton. The strings, in their upper register, produced a vital, living green that she’d never seen in nature until she looked out the window at the sycamores.
Not that she wanted to think about her mother. Mom had finally gone, moved in with the second assistant director who’d picked her up on the Boston Blackie picture, when Dolly was still a minor and the law said that her mother was supposed to be on the set. So Mom was living in Studio City now, and Dolly had her new place—and herself—
to
herself, for the first time in her life. Just her, the gleaming oak floors, the deep, glazed indigo of the tiles surrounding the big fireplace in the living room, and the green music of the trees.
She learned when she was seven or eight not to talk about the colors. They frightened her mother, not so much—Dolly thought—because her mother was afraid her daughter was crazy, but because it might interfere with her becoming a moviestar. Dolly was thirteen before she learned that
moviestar
was actually two words. Her mother had always run it together into three shining syllables with their own color, a kind of light piney brown.
Moviestar
was what Dolly—Wanda back then, of course, Wanda Altshuler—was going to be if she was very good and always did what Mother told her and never asked questions and let Mother choose her clothes and stayed away from Scranton boys and brushed her hair two hundred times a day and didn’t eat enough to get full. If she did all those things, and some others she learned about later, after they came to California, then the future was
moviestar
.
When she first tried to figure out how
moviestars
were different from ordinary people, Wanda pictured them like the men and women she saw in the church windows and the paintings of Bible times, people with a little gold plate shining around their heads. The gold plate announced immediately that these people were different, the same kind of different, she thought, as
moviestars
, shining somehow, less coarse and earthly than those around them.
When she was ten, Wanda learned the gold plates were called halos. When she was sixteen and called Dolly, she learned that
moviestars
not only didn’t have halos but also that they were, by and large, unlikely candidates to earn them.
The only problem with the duplex, she thought, as she allowed the front door to close behind her and entered the cool of the living room, was that there was no gate at the bottom of the stairs. Anyone who knocked on Dolly’s front door was already upstairs, just an inch of wood and a couple of locks away from her. The door to the lower unit was at the foot of the stairs, and the older couple who lived there had declined her offer to put in a gate with a buzzer. They rarely had visitors, they said, and they didn’t want to be running back and forth when people pushed the wrong button.
People
, the old man had said, in words Dolly saw in an unpleasant brown, coming to visit a pretty little thing like you.
She went through the living room with a glance at the trees outside—the sun too high to bring out her favorite colors—and put her bags on the dining room table. Just a few things for the trip: some expensive shampoo, a new hairbrush, makeup, a sweet pair of heels that had been cheap enough to buy on impulse.
She was cutting it
At the age of five, Dolly had discovered that certain sounds streamed colors through the air. The new-leaf green of the sycamores was the color that had curled around the room when her mother listened to classical orchestral concerts on the radio back in Scranton. The strings, in their upper register, produced a vital, living green that she’d never seen in nature until she looked out the window at the sycamores.
Not that she wanted to think about her mother. Mom had finally gone, moved in with the second assistant director who’d picked her up on the Boston Blackie picture, when Dolly was still a minor and the law said that her mother was supposed to be on the set. So Mom was living in Studio City now, and Dolly had her new place—and herself—
to
herself, for the first time in her life. Just her, the gleaming oak floors, the deep, glazed indigo of the tiles surrounding the big fireplace in the living room, and the green music of the trees.
She learned when she was seven or eight not to talk about the colors. They frightened her mother, not so much—Dolly thought—because her mother was afraid her daughter was crazy, but because it might interfere with her becoming a moviestar. Dolly was thirteen before she learned that
moviestar
was actually two words. Her mother had always run it together into three shining syllables with their own color, a kind of light piney brown.
Moviestar
was what Dolly—Wanda back then, of course, Wanda Altshuler—was going to be if she was very good and always did what Mother told her and never asked questions and let Mother choose her clothes and stayed away from Scranton boys and brushed her hair two hundred times a day and didn’t eat enough to get full. If she did all those things, and some others she learned about later, after they came to California, then the future was
moviestar
.
When she first tried to figure out how
moviestars
were different from ordinary people, Wanda pictured them like the men and women she saw in the church windows and the paintings of Bible times, people with a little gold plate shining around their heads. The gold plate announced immediately that these people were different, the same kind of different, she thought, as
moviestars
, shining somehow, less coarse and earthly than those around them.
When she was ten, Wanda learned the gold plates were called halos. When she was sixteen and called Dolly, she learned that
moviestars
not only didn’t have halos but also that they were, by and large, unlikely candidates to earn them.
The only problem with the duplex, she thought, as she allowed the front door to close behind her and entered the cool of the living room, was that there was no gate at the bottom of the stairs. Anyone who knocked on Dolly’s front door was already upstairs, just an inch of wood and a couple of locks away from her. The door to the lower unit was at the foot of the stairs, and the older couple who lived there had declined her offer to put in a gate with a buzzer. They rarely had visitors, they said, and they didn’t want to be running back and forth when people pushed the wrong button.
People
, the old man had said, in words Dolly saw in an unpleasant brown, coming to visit a pretty little thing like you.
She went through the living room with a glance at the trees outside—the sun too high to bring out her favorite colors—and put her bags on the dining room table. Just a few things for the trip: some expensive shampoo, a new hairbrush, makeup, a sweet pair of heels that had been cheap enough to buy on impulse.
She was cutting it
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