Whispering Hearts Read online

  “A few regional and three off-Broadway productions that died a quick death,” she said, and threw her sack on the floor. She sat and bounced on the mattress. “Nice to have a bed after two months of sofa.”

  “I’ll help you put your things away, if you like.”

  “Naw, it’s okay. Plenty of time.” She took a pink pillow out of her sack and put it against the headboard. Then she lay back. “I’m from upstate New York, small town the size of one of these city blocks, if that. What about you?”

  “Guildford’s not a big city, but it’s bigger than a city block, and there are nice houses and apartments outside of High Street.” Catching myself, I quickly added, “I mean the main street.”

  Piper kicked off her boots. “Cozy,” she said, looking around. “You don’t know how lucky you are getting a place like this in this location.”

  “Oh, I think I do, but you’d love my family’s home if you think this is the bee’s knees.”

  “Whose knees?”

  “It means something fabulous.”

  “Dumb. If you ever got stung, you’d know it’s nothing fabulous. Leave a boyfriend behind?”

  “No,” I said.

  There was a silence that I think she interpreted as my waiting for money. “I checked my bank account before I returned. My agent hasn’t sent in my money for the last job yet. Should be this week.”

  “It’s okay. We paid for this month.”

  “So Grandpa won’t evict us?”

  “No,” I said, smiling, but with a little nervousness.

  She closed her eyes. “Great. Give me a moment or two. I need to catch my breath,” she said. “I packed and got out of there as if the place was on fire. Outlived my welcome, if you know what I mean.”

  “Fish and visitors smell in three days.”

  “What?”

  “A saying by your Benjamin Franklin.”

  “The only Benjamin Franklin I’d like to be mine is on a hundred-dollar bill.” She closed her eyes.

  “Don’t you want to make up your bed so you can be comfortable?”

  She didn’t answer. I shrugged and went out to clean the kitchen and make a list of basic foods. She was so quiet I imagined she had fallen asleep. There’s a difference already, I thought, recalling how hard it had been for me to fall asleep. Then I looked at my watch and paused.

  How did she know the money wasn’t in her account yet? Weren’t the banks closed? If I asked her, she’d think I didn’t trust her, and she might leave.

  When I saw my face reflected in the windowpane, it quickly changed to my father’s.

  He was nodding, his mouth tight, his eyes narrowed.

  FOUR

  Twenty minutes after she had closed her eyes for a nap, Piper came into the living room. “Sorry I passed out on you. My girlfriend had a party last night, so I didn’t get to sleep on her couch until three in the morning.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. I knew you must be tired doing so much so quickly.”

  “Anyway, I didn’t forget.” She handed me the most recent edition of Playbill.

  “Thank you.”

  “I saw that there’s an open call the end of the week for a new musical. They’re looking for some supporting roles that require a little solo work. I circled the audition for you. I know this producer. I mean, I know of him. He’s always looking to make a discovery. Who knows? Maybe you’re it.”

  “What about dancers? Shouldn’t you be going, too?”

  “Different audition time. If they did it all together, they’d have a line of candidates that would go over the George Washington Bridge and back into Jersey. Anyway, I’m sorry about the money for the rent. I’m going to my agent’s office in the morning and get a check right from his agency.”

  “That’s okay. I haven’t set up a bank account yet. I’ll do that tomorrow at the bank closest by.”

  “Perfect. I’ll meet you there, and you can deposit the check right away.”

  Relief washed over me. I would have hated to have made a second mistake in just over forty-eight hours. If I had taken in a deadbeat as a roommate, that certainly would be a classic error. Instead of my name on the directory downstairs, I would have had to post my father’s name for financially ignorant people: Balloon.

  “I’ve got enough money on me for what we need for some basic food,” she said. “I live on a special diet. I’m cheap, a vegetarian. I rarely drink anything alcoholic unless I’m at a party. But I’ll pay half of anything we need together.”

  “Okay. That sounds fine.”

  “Cleaning, huh?” she said, gazing at the kitchen. “I’m not so good at that, but tell me what you think we need done, and I’ll pitch in and do the best I can. My mother stopped asking me to help her years ago. Said I just made her job harder because she had to go over everything I did.”

  “Oh, don’t worry. There’s not much more we can do right now. I was surprised to find we had what we would need to hoover. I already did your bedroom, too.”

  “To hoover? What the hell is that?”

  “Oh, that’s right, you call it vacuuming here. Just get yourself settled in. We’ll work on what’s left to do later. I’d like to whitewash the baseboards. I’ll speak to Mr. Abbot and see if they permit it.”

  “Whitewash? You mean paint them?” she asked. She didn’t look astonished as much as frightened.

  “Yes,” I said. “Don’t worry. I can do it all.”

  “They won’t pay for the paint,” she warned. “I can tell you that. I mean, I didn’t expect I’d be sharing that kind of expense. Why fix it up for someone else, anyway? You’re not going to live here forever, right?”

  “Let’s not worry about it now. You’re probably right. I’ve always been accused of being too ambitious about everything.”

  “Good.” She stretched. “We should shop first before it gets too late for either of us,” Piper said. “I can put my things away and do my room after we shop. I’ll get my jacket, okay?”

  “Okay. I wasn’t going to do much more tonight, anyway.” I paused and smiled at her.

  “What?”

  “I just thought of something. You’re a vegetarian, but you work in a burger place?”

  “Oh, I can touch it; I just don’t eat it. Speaking of which, we can get something to eat for dinner at the market. They have ready-made stuff. There’s even a little area to sit and eat.”

  “Dinner? That’s right. I’ve been so busy that I forgot I didn’t have dinner.”

  “I never get that busy. I agree with my father when it comes to that. ‘You can call me anything you want, but just don’t call me late for dinner.’ He said that so many times that I hear it in my sleep.”

  We both laughed. I was feeling a lot better because I had a roommate who was at least close to my age. I was confident we’d have a lot in common, even though there were obviously bridges to cross when it came to becoming close friends.

  “So you did have boyfriends, though, right?” she asked as we left. “Someone you left behind, a heart you broke?”

  “Not really. Not how you are thinking of a boyfriend. Only good friends, acquaintances.”

  She raised her eyebrows. When we reached the bottom of the steps, she took my arm and leaned into me.

  “Not that I care, but are you a dyke?”

  “What? No,” I said. For a moment, I thought she looked disappointed. “I went out on dates, with guys, but none of them ever became anything serious.”

  “Sure,” she said, her eyes still full of suspicion.

  Leo Abbot opened his door and peered out at us. “Everything good?” he asked, mostly of me.

  “Yes,” I said. “We’re settling in, getting food, and getting to know each other.”

  “People who share apartments get to know each other real well, real fast,” he said. “Dirty habits and all,” he added, and then closed the door softly.

  “He’s a bird,” Piper said, smiling.

  “Bird? In England, that’s slang for a young, s
exy girl.”

  “It’s slang here, too, but not for a sexy girl,” she said, and walked out, holding the door for me. “Has to do with drugs,” she whispered.

  I shook my head. Sometimes, I wondered if American was a different language, but I was sure Americans wondered the same about us.

  At the market, I ate something close to a shepherd’s pie. She had a salad, and we each paid for our own. Afterward, Piper paid for food she said was special and shared what she called the basics. She paid that right to the penny. Despite all I had done today, feeling better about her helped me regain some energy. When we returned, we went about setting up her room and putting away and hanging up her clothes, during which she told me more about herself.

  Like me, she had performed in shows throughout her high school years and claimed she was so encouraged by her music teacher that she had decided to pursue dancing as a career. I wondered if that was true. After many things I said I didn’t like and liked, she said, “Me, too.”

  However, unlike me, she came from a broken family. Her parents had gotten a divorce when she was twelve. She said she favored her father more, although, like mine, he wasn’t enthusiastic about her trying to make a living in show business. In fact, between the lines, I thought she was saying he wasn’t in favor of her making a living at all. He was in favor of her getting married. She called him old-fashioned, stuck in the past. I thought I could say the same for my father, but I didn’t. I sensed there were differences between our fathers that would stretch for miles.

  Anyway, once Piper started to talk about herself, she didn’t want to stop or ask me more about myself. She reminded me of a girl in my class, Violet Murphy, who was said to be interested in only one subject: herself. I was tired, but I didn’t want to be impolite the first day we were together.

  “I was supposed to go to college,” she said, “but I wasn’t much of a student. My mother was on my back all the time because I had barely passing grades. Hated homework. There should be a law against assigning students homework over the weekend. Think about it. Most people who work five days a week get the weekend off from that work. Why aren’t we off from schoolwork? I got into trouble more than once groaning too loudly when a teacher assigned something over the weekend. Well, maybe it was more than a groan. I think I said something like ‘Fuck no,’ and it was like I had set off a firecracker.”

  She paused. I was never good at hiding surprise or shock.

  “I bet you’ve never been suspended from school, huh?”

  “Suspended? No. I was more afraid of my father’s reaction to my misbehaving than I was of my teachers. No matter what you do, you have to come home, right?”

  “I didn’t. Once, anyway. After I got suspended for smoking in the girls’ room, I ran away for a week with this guy who worked at a garage. He left school when he was sixteen and got a job as a mechanic.”

  “Ran away? Where did you go?”

  She laughed. “Not far. To his grandmother’s house. She had a bit of dementia and didn’t even realize we were there nearly a week. I got into more trouble, and he almost lost his job because of it, but that’s the way he was.”

  “Do you still see him?”

  “No. Not long after, he was arrested for something and moved on. It was then that my mother decided to take my dancing seriously. Everyone raved about me at the dance clubs, and I guess she thought it was easier than fighting me all the time. It looked like that was all I cared about, anyway. For her, anything that would get me out of the house was gold. In fact, she bought me the bus ticket to New York City. She said, ‘I would call it a graduation present, but you didn’t graduate.’ ”

  “You didn’t graduate?”

  “Missed too many classes. No big deal. They don’t ask for your graduation certificate at auditions.”

  I listened as she rattled on about her parents and helped make her bed, even though I thought her sheets could use a wash. The more she told me about herself, the more amazed I was that she had gotten even this far. Mr. Wollard once told me that people start from all different places to get themselves onstage. Sometimes, he said, the harder they struggle to do it, the better they are when they do. I knew he meant that as some form of encouragement, but listening to Piper, I realized I couldn’t claim any other struggle to get here besides my father’s disapproval. I had so much encouragement from strangers and my teacher. I had earned my compliments. Ironically, after listening to Piper, I wondered if I was really tough enough for the pursuit. She shed disappointments like a snake slithered out of its skin. Maybe that was the real reason my father was so against it for me. He knew I took everything to heart, especially unhappiness.

  Thinking this way didn’t discourage me, however. It simply suggested I try harder. I vowed to myself that I would master the work at the Last Diner. I would get as crusty as a New Yorker, and nobody would take advantage of me again. I’d make Piper look like a Girl Scout.

  “I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted,” she said, and fell like an axed tree facedown on her bed as soon as I tucked in her sheets.

  “Good idea. Good night,” I said.

  She groaned something in reply.

  Knowing there was someone else with me, someone as tough as she seemed to be, helped me fall asleep a lot sooner than the previous night. I didn’t even notice the noise and the lights.

  She was still sleeping when I rose. I didn’t want to wake her, so I made a pot of coffee and had some toast and jelly. She still hadn’t awoken by the time I was ready to leave. I left her a note with the bank’s address, looked in on her a final time, and then slipped out quietly.

  However, the moment I stepped away from the apartment house, I was feeling skeptical again about her promise to come up with her share of the rent. “You don’t want promises in this life,” my father would say. “You want guarantees, written guarantees.”

  It worried me all morning, but she lived up to her word and met me with her check at the nearest bank during my lunch break. She was actually there ahead of me, waiting. I deposited her check, and then I returned to the restaurant. I told Marge about her, or as much about her as I knew. I hadn’t wanted to say anything until she had paid the rent.

  “Roommates are a tricky business,” she said. “Even if you get along real good at the start, the paint has a way of rubbing off. One is always trying to get the other to be more like her. Keep your eyes on the prize, Emma Corey,” she warned. “You’re not here to make friends, especially ones who will be in and out of your life in the blink of an eye.”

  I had gotten advice from teachers, from my father, of course, and from older people all my life, but for reasons I couldn’t explain, the advice of this hardworking, basically single mother who hadn’t had much of a formal education was increasingly the most important to me.

  On Friday, I went to the open audition advertised in Playbill. Some of the other girls were there hours earlier, apparently. I counted at least sixty ahead of me, and at least that many came after me, all trying out for the same part. I felt funny standing out on a sidewalk in this long line with people who walked by gawking at us. A few of the other girls apparently knew one another from previous auditions. I listened to them talk, realizing a couple of them had been auditioning for years without getting any roles. Why weren’t they discouraged? What made them continue? Would it make me? Did I really have what it took to keep trying for years as these girls had been doing? With every passing month, I’d hear my father say, “You could have been well along with your teacher’s certificate or in a good bank job.”

  I couldn’t imagine how so many of us could be auditioned like this, but when it finally came my turn to go in and perform before the producer and his assistants, I realized why it was possible. They gave me barely thirty seconds to sing a song of my choice a cappella. I sang “Smile,” a song with music written by Charlie Chaplin. It was a song that always garnered me great applause in the pubs and even brought some of the toughest-looking men to tears. I was almost
through the first seven lines when someone interrupted with a curt “Thank you.”

  For a moment, I didn’t move, shocked at how little they had wanted to hear from me; and then I was told to leave my name and contact number. I thought that meant something good, until I learned from others who were leaving that everyone who had sung was told to do the same thing. When I heard nothing after four days, I mentioned that to Piper at dinner one of the few nights she ate with me the first week. She always seemed to have somewhere to go and someone to see. One night, she didn’t even come home.

  “Welcome to reality, where you’re just another number in an audition line,” she said.

  “It’s not my reality. I’m not and never will be just another number,” I shot back, with a hint of anger at the mere suggestion.

  Her eyes widened. “I hope not. But remember, Emma, the higher you dream in this world, the harder you fall.” I was sure that was a line that had been recited to her, maybe often, by her parents or someone who wanted her to do something more substantial with her life.

  My father couldn’t have said it any better himself.

  “Or the higher you soar,” I replied. It might be true for her, I thought, but not for me.

  She laughed and then leaned forward to whisper, even though there was no one in the apartment but me, “You’re probably wondering where I’ve been some nights this week.”

  “I’m sure you have lots of friends,” I said.

  “No, as a matter of fact, I don’t. However,” she said, smiling, “I met someone, someone who even my mother would call substantial.”

  “Really? Who is he? I mean, what’s substantial mean?”

  “He earns a very good salary as a radio engineer at WVOS AM, a station here in Manhattan. He’s not terribly handsome, but he treats me as if I was a princess. Polite as an undertaker. Lives in Queens. After last night, he gave me this,” she said, and pulled the necklace up and out of her shirt to show me a black cameo. “Said it was his grandmother’s.”

  “It’s beautiful. It looks like a valuable antique. He gave you that after only a few days?”