Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,53
big hit, and she was offered roles that were much better, but paid much less. Even so, her agent said, “Take a couple of them and raise your stock, because the people who make the better studio movies will see that you can actually act.”
When her parents saw that she was succeeding, they were relieved but worried that she had been forced to do things that compromised her self-respect, which she hadn’t, not really, though the director she’d met in Austin had made it clear while they were filming Uncle Fenstad’s Last Request that he would be game for an affair if she were interested. She was not at all attracted to him, and he was newly married. By flirting outrageously but pretending a religious aversion to adultery, she was able to sidestep his offer without crushing his ego. This performance, she realized a year or so later, had been much better than the one memorialized on celluloid for Uncle Fenstad.
Her sister’s reaction to her success was more complicated than their parents’; Belle was jealous and felt excluded but was also intensely curious and, like their mother, full of grim warnings. “They’re eventually going to want you to show your tits,” she said. “They’ll make you, I bet.”
“Not if I have it written in my contract that I won’t show them.”
“You can do that?” said Belle, disbelieving.
“Yes. A lot of women do.”
“But you’re just starting out, so you’re probably going to have to do things you don’t want to.”
“Maybe, but I’m not going to worry about that until I have to.”
“Well, I’d worry about it now. You should be prepared.”
Since graduating from the University of North Texas two years before Elise left for Hollywood, Belle had been living in Dallas with their parents and was employed as a social worker at a county medical clinic where she counseled immigrants and other disenfranchised poor. Elise admired her but suspected that her sister had already had a bit of a martyr complex before taking the clinic job, which was underpaid, exhausting, and full of miserable cases that Elise tried not to imagine, at least not with any frequency. She and Belle had been very close as girls, but when Elise was growing into her long-limbed body, Belle grew awkward in hers, and she gained more weight from late-night pizzas and candy bars at college than anyone had expected. That most of the boys who called the house, starting when Elise was in ninth grade and Belle in twelfth, were asking for the younger, not the older sister had been one of the first wedges to come between them.
Another wedge: after Uncle Fenstad, Elise donated fifteen thousand dollars to Belle’s clinic, hoping this would help restore her to Belle’s good graces, but her largesse had the opposite effect—Belle resented that she didn’t earn anywhere near enough money to be able to make the donation herself. Their mother also seemed unnaturally accepting of Belle’s self-pitying tendencies and general unhappiness—“Belle has such a good heart. I just don’t understand why there isn’t some decent young man out there who will see how wonderful she is and adore her as much as she deserves to be adored.” It was disorienting and upsetting to feel her mother’s and sister’s growing hostility in regard to her own good fortune. When Elise made the mistake of saying to her mother during an argument that she and Belle were resentful of her for doing so well on her own, her mother grew very chilly: “I can’t believe you would say such an ungracious thing about your sister and me. Shame on you, Elise. We have always wished for nothing but happiness for you.”
As the phone calls home grew more stilted after Elise moved from Austin to California, she made them less often. Her father was the one constant; he sounded the same as always—cheerful but missing her, supportive but cautious. He also visited her more frequently than either her mother or sister did, Belle saying that she had trouble getting time off from work, which Elise knew was mostly true. Her mother worked too; she was part owner of a flower and garden shop, and the other owner was often at home, attending to a disabled son. Her mother also said that she did not like L.A.; she found its endless highway systems ugly and frightening, and the people unfriendly and self-obsessed.
“But they’re like that everywhere, Mom,” Elise said. “Dallas isn’t exactly the altruism capital of the world either.”