“If they could see you now!” Piper calls after me, as we head through the foyer and out to the rented Ford Explorer.
I drive through the streets of my childhood city, my hands tight around the steering wheel, my knuckles pale. Ben’s head is turned, his eyes out the passenger window, and I can almost hear his thoughts, calculating how vast the divide is between who he thinks I am and where I once came from.
“I know,” I say. “It’s depressing.”
“What?” He looks toward me. “What’s depressing?”
I slow to a stop at a red light, next to a strip of stores where two of the letters droop in the mall sign, where a liquor store abuts a ninety-nine-cent store.
“This place. This town. It’s not like I’m exactly proud of it.”
He shrugs. “I don’t think it’s depressing. It’s just ... part of you. So what?”
The light flips to green, and the car in front of us loiters, so I press the horn too firmly, and the car jolts, the driver flipping me off, and Ben jumps in his seat.
“Jesus, calm down, Tate. Come on, we’re here for agoodthing, your sister.”
“Marrying her high school boyfriend. Straight out of a clichéd script. Nothing you’d ever write.”
“I like Scooter. I like this place. It’s where you came from, and if you want to talk scripts, you should know that background matters.”
I want to say:Of course background matters!That’s why I morph into whatever role I need to be for however long I need to be it. That’s why I’m only purely myself with Ben, no one else. That’s why I was the best at Tisch. That’s why there is Oscar buzz building around Elizabeth Bennet. You don’t so desperately try to escape your childhood without becoming an expert at pretending you’re someone else, someplace else.
Instead I say: “I just miss my mom. She’d like to be here for Piper, help with the wedding. And, I mean, you know, to see my success.”
He rests his hand on my leg. I reach down to grasp it. It’s not like I don’t know that he doesn’t feel the same about his father; it’s not like we’re each not operating with a phantom limb. But Ben loses himself in his writing, where he can exorcise his pain. Not that Ben writes about his father, but even in the newReaganscript, there is messy family interaction, there is catharsis between fathers and children, and there is room for grief at the end. These aren’t Ben’s stories but in some ways they are.
But Elizabeth Bennet is Elizabeth Bennet. I find ways to relate, I find ways to turn her into a bit of my own, but it’s not the same: creating and inhabiting. It’s why, despite not wanting to take advantage, despite never resting on my laurels, I ask him to write something for me,just me. Not any actress, not any hot young thing. Ben knows my story. Ben knows my soul. I want him to write for that, to that, to me. Because when he taps intome, and I braid myself to him, we are a galaxy unto and of ourselves.
He tells me he will, as soon as he’s done polishingReagan. Or maybe the next one after that. He’s promised, and though he promised two years ago, I believe him. Still.
I turn into IHOP, which is across the street from Albertsons.
“I used to come here after my shifts,” I say to Ben. “They had an all-you-could-eat thing after nine p.m., so it was like I could tackle dinner and breakfast all in one sitting.”
He laughs. “I find that hard to believe, knowing what I know now. Fifteen hundred calories and not a bit more.”
“Not funny,” I say, though I’m blushing because he’s not wrong. I’ve become rigidly inflexible with my diet, weighing my chicken breasts, dicing my broccoli, measuring my protein powder for my morning smoothie. I’m never skinny enough, never lithe enough. There is always another pound to lose for the camera, always a side note that Jocelyn, my agent, passes on: “Be sure that she doesn’t gain anything,” or “She works for the time being, but anything more, and we’ll hire a trainer.” Sometimes they just say: “Too heavy. Pass.” So I weigh and I dice and I measure, and I put a supersensitive digital scale in our bathroom, and I pee each morning and tiptoe onto it, and if I’m good and it’s steady, I grant myself three Hershey’s kisses for the day, and if I’m less good and it’s less steady, I do not.
The IHOP is mostly empty, since it’s four p.m., and not quite dinner, not quite lunch, so we seat ourselves. It hasn’t been updated since I left: orange and brown and Formica, with a ’90s station playing overhead and oversized foldable plastic menus.
Ben flips the menu from front to back to front again. “Well, I am getting the never-ending stack of silver dollars. This I have to see.”
I roll my eyes, feel the blush rise to my cheeks again. “There’s nothing better around here. Sorry.”
“I’m being serious!” he says. “Stop apologizing. God, Tate, you know I don’t care about this stuff.”
I flop a hand, but he grabs it and steadies it.
“Listen,” he says. “You don’t think that when I was being dragged out for, like, raw sushi to impress one of my dad’s clients as a kid that I wouldn’t have done anything just to plop down in an IHOP?”
Before I can answer, a shrill “Oh. My. God!” bleats out from the hostess station. We turn and my pink cheeks turn magenta.
Julie Seymour, the field hockey player Aaron Johnson dumped me for, is barreling over, arms outstretched, face contorted with a look I normally see on rabid Lily Marple fans.
“Tatum Connelly!! Oh. My. God!”Her hot pink lipstick is smudged against her front teeth, her thick mascara flaking on the side of her left cheek. “I cannot believe that I am seeing you! You are, like, the biggest thing to happen to this town in, like, forever!” She folds herself atop of me in the booth.
I’ve never been recognized before. No autograph seekers at LAX, no drinks on the house at swanky restaurants in West Hollywood. (Admittedly, I don’t go to many swanky restaurants in West Hollywood.) But no one double-takes when I hike in Runyon Canyon, no photographers trail me when I grocery-shop at Gelson’s. Not that Julie Seymour counts as true recognition, since my face is already familiar, but she has already spoken more words to me now in IHOP, at which she is apparently the hostess, than in the entirety of our high school careers.
