The crowd heaved a collective gasp. A few people cheered, Bianca fans.
“Darling.” Celeste turned to Vincent. “Do something. She’s a figment of my mind—a side effect of that horrible disease.”
“Do I look like me?” I said, a line from that deviated septum commercial.
“You look exactly like you, darling, though a bit frazzled and unkempt,” said Vincent. “Perhaps you need a nice soak. A warm bath.”
“All systems ready,” I said. Now I was Les Nessman’s copilot fromWKRP. I wasn’t focused. I wasn’t channeling my characters’ essences. I was just saying lines. I wasn’t Les Nessman’s copilot, but I wasn’t Nona either. I could feel something deep in my bones, a ripple of anger, areckoning, something rising up in me. In my ear, thatwaa-waaingbegan again, but it became sharper, more focused, like a radio had been tuned. I squeezed that necklace to ground myself.
“Good, then let’s continue,” Reverend Peacock said. As the music started up again, I turned toward the camera, and the beam light followed me. I was hot. I was sweating. An invisible force unstitched a seam along my ribs and a ball of concrete thudded out. I felt light, buoyant. I was no longer anchored by the weight of gravity. I lifted, suspended in air. I could see my whole life from above with startling clarity.
Everyone was looking at me now. Elliot waved his arms to stop me, but I wasn’t in control of myself, because I was not myself—no self I’d ever known. I breathed in and out, like I’d been taught to do, in through the feet, up through the head, and thewaa-waaingdied down, or maybe just became clearer, like a dial had been turned again, a frequency tuned. I imagined my mouth a perfect O. I listened for her pulse. I listened for her voice.I am Opal Doucet. I am Opal Doucet, I repeated to myself.
I closed my eyes and harnessed my greatest skill as an actress: stillness.I am Opal Doucet. I am Opal Doucet.I became her—not just channeling her essence, I tell you—Iwasher. The weight of my stomach. Wetness between my legs. I smelled kerosene, and I watched smoke billowing above me. Screaming. Heat. The sound of bursting glass.Save her, people were yelling—not everyone, but the women there, the ones in white.
“What have you done?” I asked. My mouth moved, but it wasn’t my voice that spoke.
“Done?” said Celeste. “I’m about to marry Vincent.”
I was there and not there—two places at once. The air smelled peculiar. Something acrid tinged with something sweet. Earthshine Soap. Now everyone was looking up, arms raised like they were worshiping the building itself. It was the production crew, but not the production crew. They were not worshiping, they were pointing.
My body buckled.Pre-telling signs of childbirth, Dixie Ellison haddescribed. Water between my legs. Confusion and chaos. Burning rubber. Pinpricks of bursting glass on my skin. My body was lifted, pulled back from the fire, and I was safe for a moment. My shoes were wet. Soon, she appeared in front me. Bertie Tuttle.
“What have you done?” I asked again.
I was Nona in this moment, and I was on the soundstage in a wedding dress, but I was Opal Doucet, and I wore widow’s black, and the pain seared through me, and I wanted to scream, but, still, I restrained myself as I’d been taught.
A therapist later told me that what happened must have been a fabrication of my mind—the projection of my desires or a way for me to process the trauma of the events. A false memory. Some embellishments become truths after telling and retelling. We can convince ourselves of anything. Wyatt used to like to tell the story of how we met: late summer, that Labor Day cookout. We all jumped into the pool with our clothes on after a few too many gin and tonics. But after repeating the story so many times, he says—no, he really believes—I fell into the pool, and he jumped in to save me. How could I convince him otherwise after so many years? How can I be sure we both jumped in together? My therapist called it confabulation, a sort of memory error. But memory is a way of perceiving, a way of processing, a way of convincing yourself you’d done your best.You don’t need to change your thinking, she told me.You need to change your being.I think she was a Buddhist.
“Why, Bertie?” I asked. I’d disregarded the cardinal rule of television, broken the fourth wall. They call it the fourth wall because it separates fiction from reality, but I think it reminds us that reality can be a fiction to begin with. I was not Les Nessman’s copilot or Stella or Audrey or Opal. I was not myself, either. I moved off the stage and toward the audience, but I could feel the camera following my back. I stood in front of her chair, and she blinked at me like I was both familiar and foreign at once, a stranger she used to know. “Why did you do it?” I asked. “You knew what would happen.” She smelled like kerosene. I would swear it.
The studio grew quiet. So quiet.
Bertie’s eyes flinted. Her body was failing, but her mind was sharp. I gripped the armrests of her chair and leaned forward as I stood above her. In her presence, I almost lost my resolve, wanting to please her above all else, wanting to be a part of her world.
Bertie raised her withered hand and touched my cheek. “I thought you were dead,” she said. Tears welled in her eyes.
“I’m not dead,” I said.
“Stella!” Celeste was calling, now, trying to save the scene. “Stay away from my grandmother. She’s… she’s… contagious.”
The band started up again, theStars and Shadowstheme song. Bertie’s eyelids were thin like paper. Her hands were bony and veiny and shook as she raised one toward me.
Privacy is the opposite of fame. It’s what you must be willing to risk for it. That voice returned to me, the one I’d been hearing. The radio dial had been turned in my head. The sound was clearer now, closer. I listened to it, not a horn or a baby’s cry, but her voice—Opal Doucet.
My tongue was a slug in my mouth; my throat was dry. I remember how at the conservatory we’d drink olive oil before we went onstage so our voices slipped more easily from our mouths. I got closer to her ear—right up to it—and I spoke again, the name Bertie spent her lifetime trying to forget.
“I am Opal Doucet.”
I’m not sure what I expected Bertie to say.
At first, she said nothing.
Actors build tension in a scene not through action, but pauses. Not through words, but silence. Bertie took my hand in her own, and held it there, on her lap. Her skin was warm and soft. Then she pulled me forward, closer, so my ear was to her lips. “It was all I could do. I didn’t know,” she whispered. “I didn’t know.” I’d never seen her look so old and so weak.
I remembered the day she emerged from the viewing booth at the studio, and she said to me in her breathy voice:It’s her. It’s the EarthshineGirl.I stood in that cold studio, in my antique dress and parasol, holding a cardboard canister of Earthshine Soap.Earthshine Soap, I’d been asked to say into the camera, again and again. I had a lisp that elocution class eventually resolved, and when I tried to correct myself, hold my tongue behind my teeth like my mother suggested, she said:No, no, no. In your real voice.
I had been discovered.
