Chapter 9 1957
Sister. Jumped. Roof. The words that reveal why nobody goes up to the turret are like quarters in a gumball machine—much too big.
“Why—” Aria starts.
A knock and the appearance of a young man carrying brown paper bags in one arm and five paper cups in the other cuts her off.
Her tummy lets out a growl and she unwraps her burger only slightly faster than her friends unwrap theirs.
Her eyes close as she bites into melted cheese and sweet ketchup and the delicious honesty of ground beef.
When she opens her eyes, she sees that Flitter and Calliope have theirs closed too, three girls in reverent contemplation of a burger.
It’s the first truly golden silence Aria has ever experienced—she had too many treasures before to need to find riches in the things she took for granted.
Maybe Flitter feels it too because she says, “How about tonight we stick to the funny stories? The sad ones can wait. I’ll tell you about the time someone drove a motorcycle through the lobby.”
When she’s done, Calliope recounts what happened when Marian Monti fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand, setting fire to her room. “She walked out saying, ‘that was a little too hot to handle’ and went for a swim in the pool!”
Aria giggles nervously. Fire isn’t to be trusted and Marian must have the luck of all the wishing stars in the sky. Unlike Aria’s parents.
Flitter puts “Heartbreak Hotel” on the turntable. “I’ll teach you the bunny hop, kid,” she says and soon Aria’s jumping around the room next to Flitter and Calliope, and Calliope’s ordering more mint juleps until she stumbles into the bathroom and Aria can hear the sound of someone being sick.
She peeps in. Calliope is on her knees in front of the toilet. Flitter is holding her hair, saying, “Let it all out, Cally-o-pee. Let it all out.”
Calliope leans an elbow on the toilet seat and groans. But Calliope doesn’t belong on a dirty toilet floor. So Aria finds a glass among the debris, fills it from the tap, and offers it to Calliope.
Which makes Calliope cry.
“I’m sorry!” Aria drops to her knees beside her friend.
“It’s not you, kid,” Flitter says. “It’s just that sometimes you forget what kindness is. Here.” She presses the glass into Calliope’s hand. “Have one on the city.”
Calliope manages a few sips of water, then crawls into bed. Less than a minute passes before Aria hears a gentle, elegant snore.
“Looks like you get both Calliope’s dancing and her snoring tonight.” Flitter rummages in a pile and pulls out a T-shirt. “Sleep in this. It’s Calliope’s. She won’t mind.”
The T-shirt envelops Aria in a haze of vanilla ice cream and the sachets her mother put in their bureau drawers.
She presses a fistful of cotton to her nose and breathes in safety, knowing she’ll hug that shirt like a teddy bear tonight and hope that, with two friends, a library, and lavender-scented cotton, she’ll be okay.
She scrambles into bed beside Flitter and asks, “Is she all right?”
“Yep. She’ll survive anything. She pretty much brought herself up, you know.”
Flitter speaks to the ceiling, telling the kind of story Aria thought applied only to fairy-tale girls with stepmothers.
“Her dad was a drunk who left her mom to manage the movie theater, so she was never home to look after Calliope. Calliope fed herself on movies and clothed herself with money she made from beauty pageants. She doesn’t usually drink because of her dad and she could walk into any gangster’s club on the Strip and get herself a gig as a mistress with one snap of her fingers, but she’ll never do that because she wants just one dream untarnished.
And you know what? She deserves to get exactly that. ”
Aria is silent for so long that Flitter says, a smile in her voice, “What? No questions?”
“What about you?” Aria says.
“Me? I probably grew up in a family just like yours.” Flitter rolls away and the heaviness of her breath suggests she too is asleep and doesn’t hear Aria whisper, “If your story’s like mine, then it’s a sad one too.”
Aria isn’t sure what time Calliope wakes, just that, even though it’s deep dark, she can hear people laughing as they pass through the lobby, and that the footfalls along the corridor are unsteady, accompanied by murmurs and, once, a whimper.
Aria refills the water glass for Calliope, who says, “Thank you. Sorry about before.”
“You’ve been the nicest person of anyone to me. I don’t care if you vomit all night.” She tucks her head onto Calliope’s shoulder and asks, unwilling to let go of the opportunity to understand the woman beside her who is, she sees now, part-unicorn, part-tragedy, “Why do you want to be an actress?”
Calliope smiles. “Come with me.”
Aria pulls on a too-long pair of pajama pants, then follows Calliope to the elevator.
“Would you mind setting up the screening room for us?” Calliope asks Isaiah.
“Not a bit, Miss Calliope,” he says.
So Aria finds herself in a room at the end of the first-floor corridor where there’s a movie screen. Isaiah hefts a spool of film onto a projector. “How about Fresh Faced?”
“Perfect.” Calliope sits in one of the chairs, as does Aria, while a girl in a bookshop appears on-screen.
As the girl walks across the wooden floor of the bookshop, Calliope says, “Hear her footsteps? That sound is made at a Foley studio. They have things called Foley pits, which are all different floor types—marble, gravel, concrete—and a sound artist walks on them in time to a sequence of film. What you hear in a movie is the sound of someone fake-walking on a fake floor. The real sounds recorded when they’re filming are too dull.
Everything in a movie needs to be bigger, more magnificent.
Look, now she’s pulling a book off the shelf.
I bet they made that sound by sliding cellophane out of an envelope right next to the microphone.
Walnuts are ice cubes clattering in a glass, frozen lettuce snaps like a broken bone; frying bacon is the rain. It’s magic.”
The room they’re in is lit only by the screen and Calliope’s words. It’s dark but not scary, like a winter’s night in front of a wood fire whose flames transform into fantastical shapes before your eyes.
“What else?” Aria asks.
“The movie studios have jungles on their lots, Aria, and lakes. There’s one soundstage they can fill with two million gallons of water to make oceans swell. Can you imagine? And see—they’re in Paris, aren’t they?”
Aria nods because an airplane has just flown over the Eiffel Tower and a man and the girl with the big round eyes are walking over lamplit cobblestones with delicate lace buildings behind them.
“What if I told you they were just down the road? On another soundstage. That the buildings are made of cardboard. None of it’s real.
But we all believe that it is. Watch this.
” Calliope jumps up and selects, from all the movie paraphernalia on the shelves lining the room, a circular object on a base, like a lamp.
Inside is a series of pictures of a horse, its head and legs in all the various stages of a gallop.
Calliope sets the object spinning and at first there’s nothing to see except the separate pictures of the horse going around and around.
But as the cylinder hits a certain speed, it transforms. Now Aria is watching a horse flying along, its neck stretching out, its legs extending then regrouping, extending and regrouping.
She gasps and says delightedly, “Look!”
“It’s called a zoetrope. More magic. Don’t you see,” Calliope says as the cylinder slows and the horse stops galloping and the wizardry ends, “if I’m an actress, I’m making magic every day. Who else in the world gets to do that?”
When the movie ends, Aria feels bereft. Wants to stay in that room where the magic lives.
But she’s yawning and sleepy, so she follows Calliope back out into the corridor, where they pass two men.
One is Bob, who nods and says, “Calliope. Aria,” and Aria is so surprised that he knows her name that she almost misses the hiss of his companion’s voice.
“Jeez, talk about beauty and the beast. Are they letting anyone in the doors now?”
She freezes.
Her hands, the only things she has to hide behind, creep up to her face.
She bites down hard on her fingernails, tears off a piece.
Why did she leave the screening room? Why didn’t she stay in the place where stilled horses could gallop and where Paris wasn’t across an ocean, but a mile or so down the road?
Where, if she surrounded herself with enough magic, it might transform her into something better too?
Before she can flee, Bob says, “That’s Miss Devine Rey’s orphaned niece. Be kind.”
The men continue on. Aria still can’t move. Did the King of Hollywood just defend plain, beastly Aria?
Calliope squeezes her hand. “That’s why we’d all give anything to work for Bob. And don’t listen to idiots who know nothing. You are beautiful, Aria. One day you’ll see it.”
Aria shakes her head vehemently. No magic can achieve a transformation that big.