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