I place my tote bag in the plastic woven front basket of my rusty old Schwinn and pedal away from the Bizarre. The rain, now stopped, allows my tires to suck up the water in its grooves and spit it back out, providing a pleasant rhythm. I love riding my bike after a rain with its shippy-ta-shippy-ta-shippy-ta cadence accompanying my journey.
I should take a left and go directly home, but the thought of the task ahead of me forces my handlebars right. What was I thinking buying such a huge town house in Mount Vernon? What one woman needs that many bedrooms? But it was also the last big purchase with my acting pay. I’m not ready to give that up.
Already I’m thinking about my hair. That’s going to be the first big change I make with the rent money. My investment account is at an all-time low, and as you might guess, I’ve been drawing from it over the years while I decide what I want to do with the rest of my life.
I’m still not sure what I’m going to do, other than clean that bedroom and bathroom.
Such high ambitions, Fiona.
Hey, it’s better than a week ago. It’s a step in some kind of direction. Forward, backward, I can’t tell. But here’s to something being better than nothing.
I pedal down Eastern Avenue, cut over toward the Inner Harbor, wing past Harbor Place and the tourist sites, take a left on Light Street, and continue on until I turn left once more onto Fort Avenue.
I’m reasonably sure there will be several messages on my answering machine at home from my mother, who’ll want to make absolutely sure I understood our conversation the night before.
Sure, I can sum it up for you, Jessica.
“When your father and I divorce, it’s pretend. When you divorce, it’s for real, Fiona. It’s time the world knows the truth of what you did to us.”
She would look so beautiful saying it too, that thick, short hair that once held the golden light of a wheat field in the sun, now more akin to the light of the moon on the snow outside, barely coming to rest on sharp, broad shoulders sprinkled with the intriguing, tiny brown spots of older women who’ve been able to afford years in the sun. On Jessica it happens to be alluring. That impossible waist. Legs still slender and shapely. She’d be looking good in white pants and a red sweater, standing by the sliding glass doors in her feminine but tastefully simple home office.
“When are you coming back home?” she asks almost every time we speak.
“Back to what?” I ask. I never even lived at that ranch. Back means a hell of a lot more than Jessica wants to realize. Surely she realizes. She was there, wasn’t she? Wasn’t everybody?
I stop for a small bottle of chocolate milk at a convenience store on Fort Avenue and read an article by the cash register about rampant sexual abuse in the world of the child star. Wowee, the writers sure got the scoop with that one. They must have been sitting around for three weeks racking their brains for something earth shattering.
“Do you want that magazine?” asks the cashier, a woman in a red T-shirt with the words It’s not rocket surgery, people across her buxom chest.
I shake my head and slide the magazine back into the wire rack. “No, thanks.”
I head outside and tuck the chocolate milk in the basket.
The point is, Mom knew what Campbell was doing to me, and she not only kept me in the industry, she kept me on his show. At one point, hoping to be alleviated from the horror, I begged to live a normal life.
“What’s normal?” she asked.
And now, pedaling as fast as I can toward the interim destination I have chosen for the day, I can’t even pinpoint what normal consists of because surely this life does not fall into that category. I’m thirty-two, with no children, no career, an old house filled with Nutty Bars and junk. This can’t be regular. Please, dear God, don’t let this be regular.
I’m glad I ended up here, though, in this town. At least there’s that.
I love the streets of Baltimore, and I look from side to side as I pedal, hoping to obscure visions of Jessica with views of little rowhouses and pots on stair steps, painted screens and sub shops, but nope. She’s not to be denied.
How can I not hate her a little?
Can someone tell me how to do otherwise?
When I first heard Reba McEntire sing that horrific ballad about poor little Fancy, dressed like a tramp, made up like a harlot, then sent into town all by her young teenage self because this was her one chance to make it out of this godforsaken town, this godforsaken life, this godforsaken house—her one and only chance—I wanted to call the country singer and say how that song trivialized matters like that. That when it’s true, it’s nothing to sing about. I knew exactly how poor Fancy felt. Only my mother wasn’t wasting away from some particularly consumptive form of cancer, wearing an old shirtwaist dress with a dime store pin on the collar held up by skin and bones. Jessica didn’t have any such thing as an excuse for what she did. Oh no. She couldn’t have had some reason that, however twisted, made a tiny bit of sense. There couldn’t have been something there for a daughter to hold on to, some small peg sticking out on which to hang forgiveness.
And I’m supposed to tell the world this?
I don’t know where I will find the strength.
After a while, my eyes focus on the stone gates of Fort McHenry, and just the sight of them starts to relax my muscles. This is my thinking spot. This is the space in which I feel an anonymous ownership, as if the fort is mine, each brick, every last stone, but nobody knows it. And when I’m seen sitting on the walls, people just think, There’s a girl out there sitting on the walls, but what they don’t know is that I own the place.
I zip through the gates and ride toward the museum.
I haven’t had a big change in a while now. I’ve been quite good at keeping that up since Jade left. Beautiful Jade, with the curly black hair that fell in his eyes. His eyes burned. Those burning male eyes that I find sexier than a thousand boy actors. We’d met at the Fourth of July fireworks downtown and stayed by each other’s side when we both realized we were there alone.
Those eyes burned when he said three years later, “I can’t stand it in here anymore, Fia. You’re burying yourself yard sale by yard sale.”
“But it’s for my art. I use these things!” I yelled that day, about five years ago, when we stood in the one room he called his own, up on the third floor, his recording studio.
Two boxes of old purple tile I’d managed to score at a construction site sat against the wall near the door. He should have been congratulating me for getting it up there on my own. Instead, he raised his index finger and shook it. “One. I asked you. One place. One lousy room to call my own. And I walk in here and look. Look right there!” He pointed to the boxes.
“I just need a place for these things and I didn’t know—”
“Know where else to put them? Geez, Fia!”
That night he left. He calls once a month to see how I am doing and once a month I tell him I’m doing all right, just the same, figuring things out a little more each day.
The last statement is a bald-faced lie. I know it. He knows it. I probably ruined my last chance for love.
He was a looker, all right.
I chain my bike to the rack near the visitor center, then skirt the main fort itself in favor of one of the outer walls, a pointed wall overlooking the Patapsco River. Fort McHenry is an old star-shaped fort, famous for being the place where “the flag was still there,” as sung in “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I’ve always loved Francis Scott Key just a little bit. So does my grandpa. He used to bring me here as a kid when I stayed with my grandparents for summer breaks before I started acting full-time.
Few people come out to my wall here, but today, down at the water’s edge, I see two teenagers going at it: kissing, kissing, kissing. They’re a beautiful couple really, with their little ski caps clinging to the backs of their heads and their funky jeans and worn sneakers. The glittered waters reflect a sun now fully emerged from the cloud cover, and the trees are stippled with buds. My heart yearns a little. Not for a relationship, which surprises me, but just for beauty, even small, winking shards of the stuff, for beauty all around.
This world can be such an ugly place.
The boy takes the girl’s hand.
I’d never really had a boyfriend before Jade. Lots of dates, okay, and even boys I saw regularly but never committed to. My best friend, Lila, and I didn’t need males tagging along to have a great time together. In fact, they kind of ruined things. No, they definitely did.
All males? Every single one? This is how preferences become issues, I suppose. Some women know how to pick them, and some women don’t.
The little couple by the water has settled down, sitting and smoking cigarettes, his head in her lap, her playfully slapping at him, then planting a kiss on his lips. Something closer to the fort, to my left, nabs their attention. I follow the direction of their gaze.
A film crew has begun setting up.
I recognize the logo on the equipment. Charm City Radio Pictures. They’ve had a hit homicide detective show, Charm City Killing, for ten years running, and Baltimoreans, particularly those who live downtown, are always talking about a Charm City sighting.
They sure cast some sexy detectives. Even I have to admit.
This is my third sighting, and instead of running away like usual, I sit and watch from my perch as the crew sets up minimal lighting, dragging equipment from an oversized van. Jasper Venn, the famous director/producer who owns Charm City, pulls up in a beat-up black Honda sedan, climbs out with a stainless steel travel mug, and starts his part of his shoot by chatting it up with the grips.
The man is sexy, with gray hair that falls below his chin but stays back from his forehead.
After an hour in which I lose some interest and return my viewing to the water, two actors arrive, the female lead with her wavy auburn hair and Irish face and a hard-edged, sexy black man who, quite seriously, can work a camera like nobody I’ve ever seen. Charm City Killing is the only show I’ve ever watched with the same faithfulness a widow attends daily mass.
When they start to shoot, my heart begins to pound in a rhythm I haven’t experienced in a decade. And when I can take it no longer, I climb down from the wall and find my Schwinn. Time to roll.
Surely there is a way to do the work you do best and be healthy and happy. But if you’re an actor, isn’t that just impossible?
Please say yes.