1986
Don’t let them whisper behind your back!
—LIFEBUOY HEALTH SOAP
I’d called my agent, and she was able to track down numbers for Edith and Janie, the other Earthshine Girls. “Don’t do anything stupid,” she said, and I promised her I wouldn’t.
Edith and Janie agreed to meet me at Eden Park, in the gazebo usually reserved for prom photos and horny teens.
Edith arrived right on time, carrying a cardboard take-out tray with three coffees.
Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail.
She walked toward me, heel to toe, the way I’d been trained to do.
When I was seventeen and Edith eight or nine, she visited the Earthshine studio. She had watched the shoot from the recording box. I saw her and asked the wardrobe assistant who she was. “She’s nobody.”
“Is she an actress?” I asked.
“Just practice your lines.”
I couldn’t focus. I was cold, and I said so.
My nipples had grown hard, becoming little jagged tips poking the fabric of my slip.
“Oh, geez,” said the wardrobe assistant.
“Someone get me some Band-Aids!” She pulled down my costume and taped the Band-Aids over my nipples.
Even then I was being conditioned to hand over my body, to make it pleasing for others.
I watched Edith watch me. The wardrobe assistant pulled up my dress and fastened it.
“Don’t move or I’ll stick you,” she said as she worked to repin my dress.
The girl in the booth held no expression—no smile, no frown.
She sat so still, so restrained, so motionless, I knew she must be an actress.
I didn’t know who she was, but I suspected.
My growing body was becoming a nuisance on set, my widening hips, my rounding breasts.
The production assistant set up a single space heater and pointed it in my direction.
“Take one,” the director yelled. “Roll camera. Roll sound…”
The Earthshine Girl stood at an altar decorated with artificial flowers that smelled skunky.
She wore that wedding dress that laced up the back.
Her hair was done up in a bun with a little loose curl hanging down each side, and I remember how looking through the veil reminded me of looking through fog: I could see, but only enough to take one step at a time.
I didn’t realize this would be the last commercial I’d ever film.
“I’m about to make the biggest commitment of my life!” I’d said commitment in four syllables—I still hadn’t taken elocution classes.
The camera panned to my hands. I wasn’t holding a bouquet, but a canister of soap.
I whispered: “I’ll say ‘I do’ to Earthshine Soap.
An indispensable part of every union.” I was instructed to wink, and I remembered how I had to do the winking shot in several takes until the director yelled: “You don’t have something in your damn eye! ”
Everyone on set had laughed—but not Edith.
Her hands were pressed against the glass of the recording booth.
That’s the moment I figured out who she was and why she was there.
That’s the moment I knew I’d no longer be the Earthshine Girl.
I saw myself on the recording screen, and I saw Edith in the booth, and for a single moment I thought I understood something profound about acting, about life, about how a camera captures you, locks you in space and time, and then you’re stuck, trapped as someone else forever.
“Morning,” I said to Edith now. I didn’t resent her—not anymore, though for a long time I had, watching her do those commercials after my contract was terminated, knowing she had taken my place.
Over the years, I’d bumped into her a few times at auditions, and it was like running into someone with whom I shared an ex: We were friendly and awkward, at once, with the knowing of what we shared.
Now, she handed me a coffee still capped with steam, even though I didn’t really want it, feeling already hyped from my diet pills.
Halley had never mentioned being close with Edith, but I knew they’d spent a lot of time together.
That was her job: chaperone to the Earthshine Girl.
They’d traveled together to conventions.
Once, they flew to Germany for the opening of a new overseas factory.
Halley brought me back a souvenir: a coffee mug that read I DON’T GIVE A SCHNITZEL.
“She always talked about you in a way that made me feel I could never fill your shoes,” Edith said.
“Sorry. I mean, thanks,” I said. Grief is awkward.
Nobody ever knows what to say. I wondered if Halley had told Edith about the time we snuck into Celeste Shadow’s dressing room and combed her wig with fish oil, or the time Halley gave me my first sip of alcohol, vodka mixed with Hawaiian Punch, that I drank in the studio parking lot between takes.
We waited for Janie.
Janie stopped acting after her short stint as the Earthshine Girl.
She married young and had kids. “CEO of my household,” she said when she arrived.
“Just until they’re in school.” She was wearing gray sweatpants, moccasins that may have been slippers.
On her shoulder hung an oversize bag, the kind all moms carry.
She swigged her coffee. “What’s with the reunion? ”
“The Jane Does…” I started.
“No. No. Mr. Longworth would have a total cow,” Janie said.
“You said this was about Halley,” Edith said.
“It is. I’ve been called as a witness at that deposition.”
“What’s that have to do with us?” Janie said.
We’d all signed that confidentiality agreement with Earthshine.
Mr. Longworth had laid out consequences for breaking the terms of our contract—dire ones—legal action and fines, among other things.
None of us could afford that. That’s what legal action really meant to us—the threat of someone with money taking all of ours.
The whole legal profession is based on that model.
The more you have, the easier it is to take.
“Did you see yesterday’s Inquisitor?” I asked.
Earthshine had put out a page-length ad in response to the now class-action lawsuit, a letter signed by Charlie himself. I assumed it was written by his PR firm, since it used phrases like “soap family” and “household cleanliness journey.”
“I saw it,” Janie said. “That stupid photo of a baby holding the soap?”
“What does Halley have to do with the deposition?” Edith asked.
“I need to testify,” I said. “I need to tell them what I know.”
“That’s child abuse, to let a baby play with cleanser like that,” Janie said.
“I still can’t believe she’s gone,” Edith said. She leaned against the railing of the gazebo. “Like that. I heard she was wearing her coat.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
Edith shrugged. “What made her want to do it?”
We all got quiet. Janie took the final gulp of her coffee, then crushed the cup and put it in her giant purse.
“Addiction,” I finally said. The simplest answer, but not the whole one.
“Don’t you think we’d know if we were addicted to Earthshine, like they’re saying?” Janie said. “Don’t you think we’d experience the ‘adverse health consequences’ they talk about on the news?”
“Maybe it doesn’t affect everyone the same,” Edith said.
“She left me something,” I said.
“Halley?” Edith said, now curious. “What?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “An old book of formulas.”
“The formula?” Edith asked. She looked like she was trying to solve a complicated math equation in her head, all xs and ys. “The one Bertie kept in the safe?”
A group of teenagers with cigarettes walked into the gazebo; then, noticing us, walked back out, trailing thin wisps of smoke behind them.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. Medicines, I think.”
“For what?” she asked.
I hesitated for a moment. “All sorts of things. Gout. Indigestion. Depression. And … one for Comet Pills.”
As I said it out loud, I felt foolish. Comet Pills sounded as fanciful as pixie powder or star dust. Camille Flammarion, the scientist who theorized Halley’s could end the world in 1910, was also an author of science fiction. In his book Omega a comet threatens to destroy the Earth.
“Comet Pills?” Janie asked.
“Did Halley ever mention the name Opal Doucet to you?” I asked.
“That friend of Halley’s who visited her on the set? I think she was her drug dealer,” Janie said.
“No—not her,” I said. “She was a massage therapist.”
“The woman who died in the factory fire,” Edith said. “One of them, anyway.”
“Yes,” I said. “But did Halley say anything else?”
Janie rooted around in her bag and produced some ChapStick. She smeared it on her lips. “Why don’t you just ask Old Man Tuttle these questions,” Janie said. “You were always his favorite.”
“He’s grieving,” I said. “Did she say anything? Anything at all? This could be important. She left me a notebook—and I know it’s related to the Jane Does.
To everything they’re saying. I’m beginning to feel …
I think … there really is something in the soap.
Something addictive or mind-altering or …
I don’t know. Look, it’s my face on the package. ”
“It’s our faces, too,” Edith said.
I had to admit, we did all look alike. Same brown eyes.
Same hair we described as “coffee-colored” to add a layer of exoticism to brunette.
When I looked at them, I imagined I was looking in a reverse time-lapse mirror.
The unforgiving slack of my skin now tightened. The lines around my eyes disappeared.
“I have three kids,” said Janie. “I use Earthshine every day, and I’m not exactly infertile. The opposite.” She checked her watch. “Didn’t you ever want kids?”
“You can’t ask those kinds of questions,” Edith said.
“No,” I lied.
“Why not?” Janie asked.
“They’d get in the way,” I said.
“Of what?”
“My art.”
“You mean when you were an extra on WKRP? Or when you pulled lotto balls from that suction machine?”