Free In the Night Café by Joyce Johnson

grooms. I’d lean upon an imitation alabaster column and Daddy would bring a braid of hair forward and brush at my bangs and arrange my hand so that it supported my cheek. “Look wistful,” he’d say. Or “Look as if someone just gave you a wonderful present.” He’d fuss with his lights and I’d work on my wistfulness or my joy, telling myself, Don’t blink, don’t blink, so I wouldn’t at the wrong moment. I knew the whole future of the family depended on getting the right shots—on me, though I couldn’t have said why.
    Daddy made shiny prints of me in four different poses, and Ma and I began taking the subway to Forty-second Street and Broadway all the time and sitting around in office after office because show business mostly had to do with sitting around, like waiting to see the doctor. Now and then you’d finally get a minute with a jaded producer—some old man in a striped suit. “Too tall… too short… too young … too old,” the producers used to tell us, hardly looking.
    â€œNot Swedish enough, sweetheart.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, not Swedish enough?” my mother demanded indignantly, mortifying me by holding up one of my blond braids.
    â€œI don’t see Swedish. Okay?”
    â€œMa, let’s go!” I whispered.
    But Ma had iron in her that day. The part called for a blond eight-year-old girl. Well, her daughter was blond and eight, she said—shocking me because I was really nine. My mother said Fair was fair. That was how little she knew about show business. She said nothing would make her walk out of there until the man had seen for himself what a beautiful talent I had. And she straightened the red Woolworth’s bows at the ends of my braids and said, “Don’t let anyone scare you. Show him what you can do.”
    Someone finally put a script in my hands, all typed up on onionskin. It was about a Minnesota farm family whose entire wheat crop had been eaten by locusts and I had to be a little girl dying of scarlet fever in fifteen lines. The first words came out with a squeak, but then my mother’s will got into me, and I read, hardly hearing what I was reading. Maybe it was fear that carried me out of myself, fear of revealing myself as just a nine-year-old little Jewish girl and not being as wonderful as my mother said. I was all mixed up about the lies you had to tell the men in offices, whether such lies counted as real ones or not. I never knew whether it was me who’d landed that part or Ma.
    I met a great actress once, and I asked her, “Did you always know you could do it?” And she said, “I just knew I could execute an intention.” But all the years I was acting or making the rounds trying to get parts, I never had that feeling, not even the eighteen months I played that little Swedish Minnesota girl on Broadway. It was the lights I liked that bathed you and got inside you somehow, and the stage was a clearing in the forest at night and the audience, dark, rustling like trees. And I liked staying up long past my bedtime and eating dinners in the Automat with all my matinee makeup on and the Great White Way that wasn’t white but brown because of the war and the theaters jammed with young servicemen on furlough who’d been given free seats, so even acting was patriotic. I used to tell my mother I was going to marry a sailor.
    You and I once figured out that at least a night or two you were on furlough somewhere in those crowds around Times Square. You’d have been looking for a girl, a grown-up girl of course, not one in pigtails. We used to speculate on the chances we’d actually walked right by each other. “I’d have noticed you , babe,” you said. You said there should have been a voice that said, “Stop right here,” so we could have promised to wait for each other another seventeen years.
    I think I might have been ready