Chapter 9 1957 #2
“Let me tell you something,” Calliope says once they’re behind the closed door of her room.
“I don’t just want to be an actress.” Her face transforms under the light of the lamp, her eyes ferocious—frightening even—her jaw a sharp line of bone.
“I want to be famous. And I want you to want something big too, no matter who tries to convince you that you can’t.
Because why live if you die unremembered?
Why get up in the morning if you make no difference at all to the world?
Your parents, Aria, when you’re gone, who’ll know their names?
Nobody. Just like if I die right now, this room will be given to some other girl who’ll put her own sheets on the bed and her own perfume in the air.
She’ll go to auditions and she’ll either get the part or most likely not, and to think of how meaningless it might be, this one life I’ve been given, makes me want to throw myself from the turret too—get it done right now so I don’t have to watch myself vanish into nothing.
Name one famous woman, Aria. Someone who isn’t just a name.
Someone who has a face you can picture—a whole woman with a name and a face and a body and a legacy and a legend. ”
Aria discards Jane Austen because she can’t picture her beyond a cameo silhouette; discards Florence Nightingale for similar reasons—she’s even less than a silhouette. Cleopatra is just a head with black hair, bodiless. “I can’t.”
“Exactly.” Calliope sits on the bed, pulls her knees in to her chest and hugs them tightly, the way Aria’s mother used to hold on to her. “A handful of women get to be a name. But almost no woman gets to be an entire remembered person.”
Aria suddenly feels the injustice of this, how cruel the future is likely to be to the three girls in this room just because they’re girls. She shakes an imaginary fist at the world.
“You know what else?” Calliope says, still ferocious. “On-screen, I get to have a different story from the one I was born with. Being famous is how I’ll show all the other small girls with drunk fathers and careless mothers that you can be something else entirely—and be loved by everyone as well.”
It’s like watching Scarlett O’Hara declare, As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again. A moment Aria will remember forever.
Calliope’s dreams are enormous, like a double-bed sheet Aria’s arm span isn’t long enough to grasp.
But these dreams are also necessary. Otherwise all Aria and Calliope have is a bed that isn’t big enough for three in a room where you can’t even open the door properly, deep inside a castle where people jump from the turrets.
Calliope lets go of her knees and smiles at last. “That word we use for Hollywood’s leading ladies is the metaphor for what I want to be. A star, hung forever sparkling for all the world to see.”
Beside them, Flitter stirs. “Why is everyone awake at…” She peers at the clock. “Three in the morning.”
“We’re talking about dreams,” Aria says. Then she tries out a joke. “It’s always better to do that at night.”
Calliope and Flitter laugh and some of the sting of being called a beast dissipates.
“So, what’s yours?” Flitter asks, sitting up now too.
How she wishes she could want something enormous, something that would please Calliope.
But the only thing Aria really wants is tiny—yet also impossible.
She wants to walk in the door of the apartment on West End Avenue in New York City, drop her schoolbag on the floor, and have her mother pop her head out from the kitchen and say, Aria!
I made peanut butter cookies. Want one? Her dad would be in the kitchen too and they’d drink milk and eat cookies and Aria’s heart would fill up from all the love she hadn’t known hung in the air of their home.
She wants to go back there and grab great big fistfuls, stuff them into all the empty places inside her.
“I want to live in a house by the sea,” she says fiercely so that she won’t cry. “My parents always said they’d take me to see a proper beach, like in Hawaii, but…”
They died.
All Aria has left of that promise is a photo of her parents on their honeymoon in Honolulu, a wave curving up behind them like the water that came too late to save them from fire.
“I want to keep their promise for them,” she says despairingly. “So they’re not quite gone, not yet. Most of all”—she brushes away the tears she’s powerless to stop from falling—“I want to never feel like I do right now with no money and no home and no…no…”
“No power,” Flitter says, and Aria nods because that’s it exactly.
“That’s my dream,” Flitter goes on. “I want power. Then nobody can ever hurt you.”
Perhaps that’s true. But thirteen-year-old orphans can hardly aspire to power. “I need to earn some money,” Aria says. “I can’t leave here without money.”
“And I need a part in a movie,” Calliope says. “I can’t be famous if I’ve never had a starring role.”
“No amount of fame or money matters without power,” Flitter insists.
Maybe that idea depresses Calliope as much as it depresses Aria because Calliope just says, “God, I think I’m still breathing bourbon. Hope I’m not suffocating you both.”
She exhales like a dragon all over them, making Aria squeal.
Then she lies on her back, legs draped over Aria’s and Flitter’s laps like they’re a new kind of geometric shape, and Aria uses every ounce of her courage to say, because she wants to formalize this arrangement in the way a family is fixed and permanent, “We need a name. Like The Three Stooges. But better.”
Flitter wrinkles her nose. “That stuff’s for kids.”
“Haven’t you always wanted to be part of a gang?” Calliope wheedles. “Not the Three Little Pigs though.”
“The Three-Ring Circus,” Flitter snorts.
Suddenly Aria knows exactly what they are. “The Three Sisters,” she declares.
Sisters are forevermore. They’re Jo March pulling Amy from the ice; they’re Elizabeth Bennett soothing Jane’s broken heart.
“The Three Sisters,” Flitter whispers.
The subsequent silence holds within it the flutter of eyelids closed to keep the tears from falling out.
Aria can feel it, their history being written, Chapter One of the stories all sisters have so they can say, remember when, and the phrase is like the magic word that opens caves and hearts and entire worlds.
Then Calliope asks Aria, “Won’t you get lonely, living at the beach all by yourself?”
“If I’m by myself, no one can ever hurt me again.”
Calliope touches her cheek. “But no one can ever love you either.”
Not long after, they fall asleep. And none of the three girls crammed onto the bed knows that the wishes they’ve chosen are probably the things that will hurt them the most, in the end.