Pushing Upward Read online

  At 11:30 A.M., punctually and a bit apprehensively, I arrived at the Westbrook Retirement Home. I walked down the long corridor and could practically taste the musty air, feel the pores in my skin wanting to close up from the toxicity and lack of oxygen. Passing the industrial steel kitchen, I smelled canned carrots, peas, and potatoes, and felt sorry for anyone having to live on these soggy vegetables. I was surprised they used anything canned. With what they must be charging folks to stay in this pricey establishment, they could certainly afford fresh food, and a French chef to cook it.

  I turned the corner and came face-to-face with several elderly residents standing by their doors, staring at me as I approached. I glanced at one woman who was wearing a beautiful flowered dress with matching orange slippers and thick black designer glasses. She reached out her withered hand, wanting to know if I was a relative or friend coming to have a chat over tea. I smiled, held her hand for a moment, and then gently let go.

  Part of me was frightened by the loneliness in their eyes, their desperate need for human contact. Another part of me wanted to take them all home and give them the care and attention they deserved, or I imagined myself being a journalist, asking them millions of questions about their pasts. I bet they had some intriguing stories that would have made great novels. But I steeled myself to keep walking past the needy eyes and hoped that the queasiness residing in the pit of my stomach would soon dissolve.

  Uncertain whether my unease was related to my recent food binge or to my anticipation of the appointed meeting, I turned the corner and began to count the numbers on the doors: 21, 19. Here it was. Number 17. Hmmm. I could still turn around and leave. Instead, I tugged at my clothes, straightened my posture, took a very deep breath, and knocked on the bland beige door.

  From inside, Emma called out, “Just a minute … I’ll be right there.”

  The door opened and I stood there, speechless. In front of me, barely breast-high, was a petite old woman. Huge, ocean-blue eyes looked up at me, luminous, like a little girl’s. Magnified eyes, exaggerated by fashionable horn-rimmed glasses, sparkled like the midday sun. The woman’s skin was soft yet taut, translucent, like glass. There were no age marks or flaws. And sitting in the middle of her face was the most stately nose I’d ever seen. Her teeth were incredibly white and even. Beautiful silver-white hair, parted with precision to one side, lay gently along one cheek; the other side was combed back behind her chiseled ear. Aged and yet somehow elegant arms hung at her sides, while the rest of her body remained undefined, hidden beneath her oversize sleeveless dress.

  Classy; childlike; ancient. I could have stared at her for hours. This woman, who I had imagined might be in her fifties or sixties from our telephone conversation, was no less than eighty. But as I stood there looking down at her shiny hair and radiant blue eyes, her age was irrelevant. There was an air about her, a mysterious demeanor. I was utterly captivated by this woman now standing before me.

  “Come in,” she said.

  “Thank you,” I replied, after locating my tongue.

  She motioned for me to sit on the dreadful, and I mean dreadful, brown brocade couch. She took a seat directly across from me on the yellow overstuffed chair. Also dreadful. Not wanting to take my eyes off of her, yet curious to take in these surroundings, I glanced around the room. The table next to her chair was stacked with scripts. That’s interesting! My eyes moved to the outdated furniture and accessories that lined the uninviting square room. Even the off-off-white walls looked dingy. I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that none of the furniture in this room belonged to this woman. Polyester couches? Tacky plaid chairs and cheap, thin carpet? This lady was clearly not in her element. Priceless antiques, French provincial settees, expensive crystal placed in fine-crafted armoires should surround her. And yet, when my eyes returned to the gentlewoman, she looked surprisingly comfortable, content, among these foreign objects. But of course she would.

  Emma, it was somehow clear to me, grew roots wherever she was. In her aged body, she sat in the canary yellow chair as if she were an extension of Earth itself. That’s what I wanted … to experience every waking moment of my life with astute awareness: to walk in the world as if I were a part of it, entitled to all its offerings. Solid. Steady. Not in constant fear, like the ground was caving in beneath my feet and if I said the wrong thing or made a mistake, I’d fall off. Not scared of the present or of what the future might bring.

  Our eyes met. We stared at each other for what seemed like a lifetime, and then the woman from the newspaper ad began to speak to me in this melodic voice that I could have fallen asleep to, had there been music in the background and a feather pillow for my head. But beneath the consoling sound that made me think of the beautiful voices of high-class ladies was a no-frills, no-nonsense woman who cut promptly to the chase.

  “My husband, Josef, died a little over a year ago. A few months later, my best friend, Sarah, died. I suffered a mild heart attack shortly afterward. My friend Zelda wanted professional care around me until I regained my strength. She insisted I come to Westbrook. I’ll be returning to my apartment in a week. It’s quite spacious … two large bedrooms, a large living room. It requires very little cleaning, perhaps a little dusting and vacuuming once a week. Do you own a car?”

  “Yeah, um, yes … it’s an old Fiat, but it gets me around.”

  “Good. We can visit the farmers’ market. Josef and I used to go there quite often. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-one.” She offered me a plate of cookies, to which I replied, “No, thank you.”

  “You’re not from Los Angeles, are you? You have very good manners. Where were you raised?”

  “Birmingham, Michigan. It’s a small suburb outside Detroit.”

  “I’ve never been to Detroit. What’s it like?”

  “Well, it has lots of cars. It is the car capital of the universe, and of course, it’s where Motown began. I used to sneak out to Hitsville. That was Motown’s headquarters. What a scene that was! Every Saturday night, hundreds of people would sing and dance outside the studio, in the streets, on top of cars. All the recording artists would show up and …”

  I kept babbling. I could have gone on for hours. Being in Emma’s presence seemed to pull it out of me. Probably because I’d never met anyone who listened with such interest.

  “… I do miss my friends, though.”

  “Not your family?”

  “Not really.”

  She changed the subject. It must have been the tone in my voice. “Why did you move to California?”

  “The weather, and, of course, the theater. I was going to move to New York, but I had enough brutal winters living in Michigan, thank you very much.”

  I was about to ask her, Have you always lived in California? but she interrupted with another question: “Did you study theater in college?”

  “For about a minute. Well, for a year. I wanted to major in theater, but I wasn’t interested in the required courses, like math or economics. So I left and headed for California. I wanted to study with really great teachers.

  “How long have you been in L.A.?”

  “About two years. You see, I always wanted to be an actress. Well, ever since I can remember. And since I’ve been here, I have studied with the best—Stella Adler, when she came to L.A., Sherman Marks, Walter Sheldon. To pay for classes and bills, I’ve worked practically every legitimate job Los Angeles has to offer. I am so ready to audition. But if I don’t keep working, I won’t be able to eat, audition, or get my SAG card—the Screen Actors Guild membership card. I thought if I placed an ad in the paper, found someone to live with, I could start auditioning … fortunately, I’ll be getting a little money from unemployment.”

  The next set of words jumped out of my mouth without warning: “I could help around the apartment. You know, do some cleaning, shop, cook meals.” Cook meals? Did I just say that? I’d never cooked a meal for anyone in my life. Maybe in home economics when the whole class had to make o
melets for the next class period, but it was a collective effort and we were forced to do it. Other than that, I’d never cooked anything.

  “You’re very sensitive. I’m sure you are a wonderful actress. Do you know Bert Klein?”

  “Should I?” I felt so embarrassed not knowing this person who was clearly of major importance.

  “His father was the late Harvey Klein, the movie mogul. His mother, Sarah, was my best friend who passed away. Well, he is practically a son to me.” She looked over at the table with the scripts piled high. “He sends me his scripts to review. If you decide to move in, I am sure you will meet him. I know several people in the entertainment field.”

  She’s not only nice—she’s connected. I must have burned up a lot of karma these last few days. Rachel’s going to flip when she hears this.

  “You know,” she went on, in a kind of reverie, “Josef, my husband, was an exceptional painter. He was one of New York’s celebrated American Eight. We used to have dinner parties with such interesting people, stars and dignitaries. Nehru came one time,” she added with a sigh. “Maybe one day I will have the strength to entertain again.”

  “If you want to invite your friends over, I could help.”

  “We won’t have to worry about the dishes,” she added with a twinkle in her eye. “I only use paper plates.”

  That was it! Between her highly rational dining customs and her theatrical connections, who was I to turn down such an irresistible invitation? Before I left the Westbrook Retirement Home, an agreement was made between the two generations. Emma would cover my room and board and pay for gas, and I would drive her wherever she needed to go, help clean up the apartment, and cook (on occasion). The scheduled date to move in was Saturday. Next Saturday. A week and a day from today.

  I left room number 17 remembering the I Ching’s words:

  PSUHING UPWARD has supreme success.

  The individual … must go to see authoritative people.

  Fear not … success is assured.

  Chapter 5

  The superior man discriminates between high and low …

  That night I had acting class. Walter Sheldon’s two-year advanced scene-study class was coming to an end. Twenty-five students walked in that night wanting to convey our gratefulness, to thank Walter for his dedication and sincere desire to teach us the art and science of acting. Carla, one of the students, brought a cake. I wanted to buy Walter a big, expensive gift. A cool-looking tie or one of those eccentric wool berets he always wore. But all I could afford were candles. It was the least I could do for the man who had taught me more about this craft than any acting book, class, or person I had ever studied with.

  Walter was sixty-two years young, short, with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and thick tortoiseshell glasses. He was always squinting those sky-blue eyes, and a perpetual half smile never left his lips. During the two years I’d known him, he’d never uttered a bad word about anyone. And the stories he would tell! We would stay until the wee hours of the morning, our heads collapsing on the desks, pleading with him to end the class. But no matter how much we begged, he’d ignore our pleas. We’d stay, because no matter how extended his embellishments were, we’d always walk away with a pearl at the end of the night.

  My favorite gem was the one he told us about Marlon Brando. As the story went, Brando disliked doing long theater runs. He got bored easily. While performing on Broadway one year, he had an idea that would not only keep him motivated, but it would keep his character fresh. Every night, before the curtain rose, he would ask the stage manager to hide a nickel somewhere on the stage. Marlon would spend the entire evening looking for that nickel. No one had a clue what he was searching for. The audience simply thought the character was nervous or on edge. For Brando, the brilliant maneuver of the hunt kept him interested and at the top of his game.

  Tonight I was presenting a monologue from Athol Fugard’s Hello and Goodbye, a scene I’d been working on for weeks. It was a brilliant play set in the kitchen of a railway house in South Africa in the sixties. The play revealed the wounded lives of a brother and sister who had not seen each other in years. Hester, the sister, returns to the backcountry of South Africa after living in Johannesburg as a prostitute. She comes back in search of an elusive inheritance and, with her brother Johnny, begins to unpack the memories and truths of their empty and damaged lives.

  I’d spent weeks working on this scene and selected it because of the depth of Hester’s character, my fascination with South Africa, and my own rage at apartheid. I loved the intensity of the scene, imagining myself as a prostitute, confronting an unhappy childhood, feeling the anticipation of financial freedom, and discovering what it must have been like to come home to a place that hadn’t changed in fourteen years.

  The memories I drew upon had to be real, raw. There was no room for pretending or pretension. Authenticity was key in Walter’s class. He demanded it. Another reason I respected him. I called my mother in Michigan, and asked her to send me pictures of the first house we’d lived in. I’d forgotten how the ivy crawled up the side of the small two-story structure and how the maple tree cast a shadow on the entryway. The more I looked at the photo, the more memories surfaced: my father’s beatings, my brother’s bullying, my mother’s enabling … and the escape into the joy of putting on backyard plays. My favorite weekend activity.

  Hester, my character, had to walk ten miles from the train to her house. There was no other way to get there. To prepare for the scene, I stuffed clothes and toiletries into two suitcases and walked ten miles around Westwood Village, just to see where the soreness would be, where Hester would be hurting when she arrived. The pain settled into the back of my shoulders, the right side of my neck, and in the joints of my fingers. I had to remember each one of these discomforts and bring them to the surface, seamlessly, in class. That was my job as an actress: to be aligned with the body, the emotions, and the intellect of the character.

  I drove to Inglewood, a high-crime area in L.A., and closely watched one of the prostitutes walking up and down La Brea. Sitting in my Fiat across the street, I studied how this woman walked, how she spoke to the men driving by, walking by—half-smiling, keeping her head and eyes down. I watched her insecurity, and the limp in her right leg that she pretended didn’t exist. I named her Claire and imagined that she’d been born in Alabama to a poor single mother … she had been made fun of and beaten up by classmates every day after school because she was poor and because of her height, now six feet. Her bitterness moved her to California, where she thought she could improve her life, climb a make-believe ladder, only to find that the rungs kept breaking. Here she was now, in Inglewood, walking at night, hungry to please the cannibals of the street, just to have something to eat herself.

  I brought the stuffed suitcases to Walter’s class. Before presenting the scene I played “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin on a friend’s cassette player, to set the mood. When I reached the perfect emotional pitch, I picked up the suitcases and walked to the center of the room, put the suitcases down on the imaginary dirt road, and brought back the discomfort of carrying the bags for ten miles. I surveyed the imaginary house Hester had grown up in. The one she hadn’t seen in years. And as she walked, and as the class and Walter observed, I saw the ivy crawling up the side of my childhood home. While I repeated her words—“Please let it be different, and strange, even if I get lost and got to ask my way. I won’t mind. But to think of it all still the same, the way it was, and me coming back to find it like that … ! Sick! It made me sick on the stomach”—I reconnected with the prostitute from Inglewood, and how she might have felt going back to Alabama and finding out nothing had changed in her neighborhood.

  When Hester spoke the words “Those windy days with nothing to do; the dust in the street! Even the color of things—so clear, man, it could have been yesterday,” I imagined her sitting on a cement step when she was young, having nothing to do but follow the dust. And as the wind blew the pa
rticles into the foam frothing from the river, I imagined her breathing in the heat, smelling the oppression. I felt each beat, without rushing a moment. I became Hester from South Africa, and nailed the accent.

  When the scene was over, I stood there, waiting for Walter’s critique. Instead, everyone stood up and applauded. Calvin, this guy who had a major crush on me and had loaned me the cassette player, gave me a paper flower. Walter gave me an A++.

  I’d promised Larry Santino, a guy I was kinda dating, that I’d watch his scene, cheer him on as he presented an excerpt from David Rabe’s play The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel. The play was a good choice for Larry in that Pavlo Hummel was close to his age. In addition, both came from New York, and both were graced with low intelligence. It could have been a terrific character study for Larry had he taken his craft more seriously, developed the subtext, the provocation for the character’s actions, researched the Vietnam War, or taken time to speak to veterans who’d experienced firsthand the psychological effects of war. If only he had embraced Pavlo’s heart, studied Pavlo’s gait, grasped the significance of Pavlo’s hopeless stare. But he hadn’t. The only thing we saw was Larry Santino, dressed and pressed in a soldier’s uniform, pretending to be Pavlo Hummel. I knew I was going to have to varnish the truth when he asked me about his performance; otherwise his ego would be bruised and our evening would be ruined. As cute as Larry was, as great a body as had been bestowed upon him, he was extremely insecure about his acting, and he had every reason to be.

  We’d met the first day of Walter Sheldon’s class. It was only seconds after I’d sat down that this cute guy in a white T-shirt, cutoffs, and a Yankees baseball cap took the seat next to me. By the time his thirty-five-second introduction was over, I knew his name, where he was from, the teachers he’d studied with, and that his wink—the one he made with his right eye—was a sign of affection and a prelude to an invitation to have coffee with him after class.