Curtain Call

Angie is ten minutes late to the audition and she is trying not to think about it, any of it, the confluence of misfortunes: the coffee grinder burning out, then the oat milk spilling on the silk dress she had picked out three weeks ago, then, finally, the painted ceramic mug slipping from her shaking hand and shattering on the floor, nearly taking her toe in the process.

It’s easier to blame the coffee and not the fog of dread that has been seeping through her apartment windows every night, as dense and light as cotton candy. She knows if she just bites into it, it’ll dissolve, but the wad is so thick she doesn’t know where to start.

Angie taps on her phone to check the bus-tracking app. The little dot representing the M101 route blinks mockingly at her before sliding two millimeters closer to her stop. She could have taken the subway, but she doesn’t want to risk being stuck underground. She could take a cab, but her credit card disagrees. She checks the app again, swipes down to refresh it, checks her email, nothing important, checks Instagram, a DM from Maris, she closes it, she checks the bus app again.

She’ll be half an hour late, if she’s lucky.

Colette would call this karma. That was how her mother was always to be referred to as — Colette, her stage name, not Mama or Mommy or Mom or any of those nicknames that “make me picture a frazzled woman with a soup stain on her T-shirt,” she used to say. Colette believed in a lot of wacky things, castor oil by the spoonful for thicker hair and that cash should be stored under a floorboard instead of in the bank, but now Angie wonders if Colette wasn’t wrong about karma. Colette had, after all, met it herself.

“You’re just like your mother,” was one of the last things Maris said to Angie before she went back home last month. Watching Maris board the New Jersey Transit, as commuters bumped her with briefcases and the diesel engine spat and sighed, Angie felt like a 12-year-old girl again. Dressed up like a doll but the last one to be plucked off the shelf.

The M101 arrives at last. It’s time to focus. Angie tries out the mindfulness exercises she found on Youtube: I see a yellow pole. I see mud caked on the floor. I hear a man sniffling. I … shit, what’s the name of the character I’m reading again? How does the monologue go? Did I even rehearse last night? She digs her phone out from her coat pocket and rereads the sides that were emailed to her. The words swim as the bus hits a bump in the road. Her phone dings with a text message from Maris but she swipes it away without reading it and then puts the phone on silent.

She pulls the cord as the bus approaches Times Square and plows a path through tourists to get to a small theater on the next block. She doesn’t have time to check her reflection in the bathroom mirror and sit in a stall to take deep breaths today. She takes the steps to the second floor slowly, both to avoid tripping over her heels and running out of air, but she wishes she could fly up them. The heat blasting from the steam radiators feels like it could choke her.

“Angie Aubin! At last!” Josh, the playwright, shouts as she walks into the auditorium. “You’re so late. Come on back.” Angie looks away from the dozen or so women who are seated, have likely been seated for an hour waiting their turn, glaring at her.

Josh and Angie enter a sparsely decorated office off a dingy hallway. The entire place smells like a deli sandwich. A woman with graying hair and glasses sits behind a table, highlighting a script. “This is Alyssa Morales, the director,” Josh says.

“Pleasure,” Angie says, though Alyssa barely glances up. “I really liked your —”

“Angie was in Little Shop with Maris,” Josh interjects.

Alyssa drops her highlighter and looks Angie up and down. “Really.”

“They’re best friends,” Josh brags, as if he had welded them together himself. “You should’ve seen those two, giggling during rehearsals and pissing off the rest of the cast.”

“Intriguing,” Alyssa says, raising an eyebrow.

“Oh, well, yeah,” Angie fumbles. “I mean, I was just in the background — I mean, I had a small role, she was Audrey, but it was a wonderful experience.”

Alyssa digs through her papers and produces the latest issue of Time Out. Maris’s glossy black hair and grinning face glow on the cover, above a headline that reads, “Suddenly Celeb: Meet Maris, the Tony winner inspiring Japanese actresses across America.”

“She’s great,” Angie says blandly.

“Great?! She’s a star! I have investors left and right calling me, asking me if I can get her in this project and that, and I haven’t — you wouldn’t know how to get in touch with her, would you?” Alyssa says, sounding like a starving wolf in search of her next meal.

“I could — I could see what I can do.”

Alyssa presses a business card into Angie’s hand. “And I’ll see what I can do,” she says, winking.

“Let’s focus now, shall we?” Josh says, glancing at his watch. “Angie, if you could start from ‘I didn’t know how important …’”

It was a disaster. Angie blames Josh’s cliché script and Alyssa forcing her to be herself when she was supposed to be a character. She flicks Alyssa’s business card in a garbage can off 42nd Street.

She’s had bad auditions before. Her first one was at the age of 5, for a coffee-shop commercial with her mother. Colette was a lock: Her blonde curls, round green eyes, and slender frame attracted even the sleepiest couch potato’s eye to the screen. She was relevant enough to continue riding the coattails of her biggest role, a nurse in a hospital procedural that had gone off the air a few years before. The coffee company was going to cast another little girl to play her daughter, but Colette insisted on bringing Angie to the audition. “Who could I play off better than my own daughter?” she cooed.

Angie had one line: “Mom, I want a snack.” But she was angry that day, and most days, in fact. The reasons were blurry now, but the emotions were stark. She crossed her arms and refused to say anything on-camera, and the other girl landed the commercial.

When they got home, Colette shoved the Barbies and the dress-up chest in a closet. She lectured Angie on the importance of making a good impression. “Look at me,” she said. “Everyone loves me, right?”

It was true enough. Colette often was stopped on the street by strangers, though most of them called her by her nurse character’s name. Angie nodded.

“It’s because I dress well and act nice and do what others ask of me. You need to do the same if you’re gonna make it.”

Colette had seemed to decide at that moment that Angie wanted to be an actress too, and Angie warmed to the idea once she entered kindergarten and the other students’ moms fawned over her. “Beautiful, just like her mother.” “She’s going to be a star, Colette.” She’d read lines with her mother over the kitchen counter and tag along on auditions; she noted what types of people seemed to receive attention from the directors and who blended in with the waiting-room seats. Her father would walk in on Colette and Angie rehearsing a Shakespeare play and chuckle and shake his head, a visitor to a land in which only the two girls understood the language.

Angie had landed a few commercials and even the lead role in a community-theater production by the time she hit high school. The practice sessions with her mother devolved into something of a competition. Colette tried on Angie’s homecoming dress and admired herself in the mirror, but gave only a bland nod of approval when Angie modeled it. She’d make Angie read a line again, and again, and again, insisting she fix her intonation or her enunciation, until the words lost all meaning and Angie felt she might as well be reading hieroglyphics.

When Angie failed to land the main role in the senior high-school play, she and Colette launched volleys at each other across the kitchen counter, with her father slinking around pathetically trying to catch the debris.

“At least I have lines,” Angie yelled, shaking the highlighted script at Colette. “When was the last time you had a line that wasn’t, ‘I need some Advil!’?”

“Nobody remembers the main character’s little sister,” Colette said.

“Nobody remembers the Advil lady, either.”

“You’re too sensitive,” Colette sniffed. “Maybe you’re not cut out for this after all.”

Angie felt like a ribbon dropped on the floor: limp, shapeless, weightless. “But I love acting.”

“… Cookies, anyone?” Angie’s dad said, waving a package of Oreos between them. The two women stalked off to their bedrooms.

The lead role went to the new girl in school, Maris, who even back then went by her mononym. She had blue hair and made everyone at rehearsals try the homemade matcha bread her mom packed for her every day. She was from Manhattan, but her father had spent his childhood summers in Seaside Heights, and the family had moved for a change of pace and the charm of nostalgia. She made the director, lemon-faced Mrs. Keyes, cry at the end of her 11 o’clock number. Angie was determined to befriend her, cornering her after every rehearsal to offer her advice, blast their favorite songs backstage, and rank the boys in the cast from most to least dateable. Over the next 10 years, their friendship would unfold like an ancient map, overcoming creases and tears to reveal the wealth within its pages.

The morning after their high-school graduation, the two of them bought French fries and lemonade from a boardwalk stand, then sat on a bench facing the beach. A group of surfers was practicing. Most of them were talented, able to maneuver the waves with the deftness of a shark, but Angie’s eyes were drawn to one young man who fell off his board over and over again, springing back up from the water and flicking the hair out of his face each time as if nothing happened. The other surfers pat him on the back and helped him up, and their friendly laughter carried across the dunes.

For weeks, all Angie could talk about was their plans for NYU in the fall: what their dorm room would look like, who the best drama-department professors were. Now she asked quietly, “Don’t forget me when you’re rich and famous?”

Maris threw a French fry at her. “Don’t forget me when you’re being ridiculous.”

* * *

The day after Maris received her Tony Award, her father called to tell her that he wasn’t at the ceremony because her mother’s cancer had become terminal. Angie entered their shared apartment the next morning, dying to shower the sour scent of the latest one-night stand off of her, when she saw the suitcases neatly lined up at the door like patient children. “What’s this?”

“I told you,” Maris said, taking a sip from one of the ceramic mugs they painted together in their sophomore year of college. “I’m going home.”

“Now?”

“… Yes? Did you not hear me when I said my mom was really sick?”

“Okay, but you just won a Tony.” The award was nowhere in sight. Angie would later find it in a shoebox under Maris’s bed. She took it to her own room and placed it on the vanity.

“And?”

And? Angie could name a thousand ands: magazine covers, exclusive parties, starring roles. Momentum, if nothing else, something actors needed more than talent or air. Angie flattened her lips and bit down. She was a legacy and Maris was first-generation, but who had won the award? Maybe you’re not cut out for this after all. She had pennies and bit parts to her name after years of deprecation and Maris had the world in the palm of her hand and she was taking it all back to Seaside Heights.

“Don’t do that,” Maris warned.

Angie straightened up. “What?”

Maris put her coffee down, sighed, chewed on the inside of her cheek a bit. “Look, I’ve loved our little life here, but this was never really where my heart was, you know? I just kind of tagged along with you because it was fun and I didn’t have a plan of my own.”

Angie knew this was meant to placate her, but it just burned. “So you just took my plan for yourself?”

Maris rolled her eyes. “I didn’t take anything from you.”

Angie continued arguing with her in the cab to the train station. The rain beat down on the roof, and each droplet seemed to sear venom and desperation onto Angie’s tongue as she tried to persuade Maris to stay. Maris explained the concept of family as if she were teaching colors to a toddler. Angie countered that Maris was her family and so she shouldn’t leave.

“No,” Maris said quietly. “Performing, getting famous, that’s your family. That’s the only thing you’ve ever really cared about. And it’s sad that you don’t see that.”

The air was thick and humid and smelled like exhaust and cologne. Angie couldn’t tell if she was breathing, if the sentences she was stringing together made any sense, because Maris just stared out the window, at the rain gliding over the glass like tears. It wasn’t until they clambered out of the car and into the gray underworld of the train station that, possibly for the first time, Angie felt a pang of sympathy for her own mother. She felt like an artist watching someone steal a valuable painting of hers, the lines and details she’d etched so carefully swimming away from her in a haze of polluted air and bitter words.

* * *

Angie sits on the bed and finally opens Maris’s text thread. A month’s worth of unread messages range from despair to drunken musings to anger. The last one reads, “Please at least come to the funeral.”

She thinks about the auditions she failed this month and the ones to come, the appointments categorized and color-coded on her wall calendar. She thinks about Colette, whose nurse-character name is inscribed on her tombstone before the word “mother.” She thinks about the Tony Award, gazing at her from the vanity. She stands up, changes into a hoodie and a pair of leggings, and then she scoops the award in a duffel bag, the weight of it satisfyingly solid against her hip, and she leaves.