Ambition

"Sara wore a chipmunk costume. She wasn't just a chipmunk. She was THE CHIPMUNK. Corporate brown, corporate smile, corporate joy stitched on like a hostage video. Her job was to bounce, nod, and mime delight while being aggressively hugged by sweaty, sunscreen-smelling strangers. She was not allowed to speak. This was particularly challenging because Sara had gone to acting school. A real one. With black box theaters and professors who spoke in long, mysterious sentences about "the work," in return for tuition bills the size of small ransoms

Cinderella had not gone to acting school. Sara knew this because Cinderella talked about it constantly. "Oh, I just kind of fell into acting," Cinderella once said, like she'd tripped over a tiara. But Cinderella was permitted to speak. Cinderella had lines. Sara watched Cinderella rehearse once—actually rehearse, and work through motivation like she was playing King Lear instead of a fairy tale princess. Sara, meanwhile, practiced the emotional spectrum available to a mute chipmunk:

Happy--Happier--The same, but with jazz hands

Sara dreamed of speaking parts. She dreamed of the moment a handler would pull her aside and say, "Legal cleared it. You can say one sentence. Don't blow it."

At night, Sara practiced monologues into the bathroom mirror like Streep or Blanchett. "I'll have a black COFFEE," she'd say. Then again, better. "I'll have a BLACK coffee." It was movie star stuff.

At work, guests asked questions that Sara answered with pantomime. Where's the bathroom? Am I alive? Is this worth it? Sara nodded, shrugged, pointed, and once accidentally communicated something so nuanced a woman said, "Wow. That chipmunk really GETS IT." That haunted her.

She was thirty-seven. Her résumé listed "Physical Comedy" and, beneath it, nothing but Disney dates and a role titled CHIPMUNK (NON-VERBAL) again and again, as if the document had been buffering forever.

One afternoon during a parade Sara caught her foot on the edge of the curb. It wasn't dramatic. No fall. But the chipmunk lurched, just enough. The movement was too uncertain, too human, and for a brief, awful second Sara felt the crowd see her. She wasn't the chipmunk. She was just a person trying not to fall.

Someone gasped. A child laughed. Then Sara recovered, overcorrecting with a dramatic bounce, arms thrown wide like joy had always been the plan. The applause came slowly, generous and full of relief. They weren't clapping for risk or bravery. They were clapping because the stumble hadn't ruined their afternoon.

Sara felt something tighten in her chest. She felt vulnerable. Exposed. It was as if she'd screamed out her name to the crowd, and they had covered their ears.

When she finally made it backstage, she sat on a plastic crate and slowly lifted off her head. Her hair snagged inside the headpiece, and for a few moments she was trapped between human and rodent, the chipmunk's head pulling at her scalp. Sweat cooled on her face. Her hands shook as they held the headpiece in her lap. Around her, costumes came unzipped and apart. No one looked over. No one ever did.

Cinderella passed by, voice on, smooth as breathing. "Great energy out there," she said.

Sara nodded to empty air.

The chipmunk grinned up at her.

At home, she stood in front of the bathroom mirror. The overhead light was unforgiving. It showed the red line across her forehead where the chipmunk head had pressed all day, the flattened hair stuck to her temples, the faint grid pattern the mesh eyeholes left on her cheeks. Her face didn't do anything. No smile waiting to happen. No eyebrows ready to arch. Just skin, slack and still, the kind of stillness that came from hours of not being allowed to move it, not being allowed to use it for anything.

She set the chipmunk head on the counter beside her. Its black plastic eyes gleamed. Its smile was permanent, molded into the foam, wider and more certain than anything Sara's actual mouth had managed in years. Her own face looked smaller by comparison. Paler. Like something that had been erased and poorly redrawn.

"I'm still acting," she said.

The room stayed silent.

It wasn't much, but it was the only line she had.

Three days later, a woman from Guest Experience left a voicemail. Sara almost didn't listen to it. The woman's name was Denise. She said she'd been in the crowd during the parade. Said she'd been there with her daughter, who was six and afraid of costumed characters, and had been, in fact, since a birthday party incident involving a giant duck. But the chipmunk stumbling had made her daughter laugh. And then the chipmunk throwing its arms wide like everything was fine, like everything had always been fine, made her daughter cry. Not scared crying. The other kind. The kind Denise couldn't explain, so she'd taken down the parade schedule from a cast member and asked around until someone gave her the voicemail line for character feedback, which apparently existed. She explained that she was sorry if this was weird, but she wanted Sara to know that her daughter had asked to come back. She wants to see the chipmunk again.

"She wants to see the one who almost fell."

Sara stood in her kitchen holding her phone. She played the message again. Then again.She called Denise back. This was not standard procedure. This was not anything.

They talked for forty minutes.

Within a week, Sara sent Denise a link to a short film she'd made in acting school. A silent piece, eight minutes, no dialogue, a woman in an empty restaurant putting on her coat and leaving and then stopping and sitting back down. It screened at one festival, in 2011, in a room with folding chairs and twelve people. Sara told no one at work it existed.

Denise watched it and sent it to her husband. Her husband sent it to a colleague. The colleague was in development at a small production company in Burbank. Not big. But real.

It took four months. A phone call. A meeting. A short — eight minutes, no dialogue — about a woman in a costume, in a crowd, alone. They wanted Sara to direct. They also, after a conversation about casting, asked if she'd want to act in it too.

She said yes.

The short aired at a festival in March. Sara sat in the back row and watched it with her arms folded across her chest. When the lights went up, a woman three rows ahead turned around, scanning the room. "Is the director here?" she asked.

Sara raised her hand.

She raised it the way a person raises their hand when they're not sure anyone will look. Small. Careful. The way she'd held it up in acting school when she finally understood something her professor had been saying for weeks, the private click of it, before she was sure enough to let anyone see.

But people looked.

People looked.