Siren Queen(9)

I saw what he saw sometimes. Out of the corner of my eye, there was a perfect version of myself flitting around the corner, avoiding the rooms where I was because, apparently, she didn’t like the real me either.

My mother’s magic was a patchwork of the mountain lore her father had picked up in Colorado and half-remembered charms from her own mother. The doll versions of Luli and me never grew, and they never left the apartment, not even when my father finally died of a heart attack, the year I turned twenty-eight. My sister and I had come home for Lunar New Year, and my father simply stood up, hand over his heart like he was giving the pledge, and then collapsed gracefully to the ground. He was dead long before the ambulance arrived. As we followed the shrouded stretcher out, out of the corner of my eye, I saw two little doll-girls, hand in hand in the dim hallway, their faces solemn and their button eyes hard. As far as I know, they are there still, haunting the new condos that have taken over Hungarian Hill, haunting the new people with scents of starch and lye, not quite ghosts but no longer merely dolls.





VI


Of course I had a name. I still do. It’s mine, and now I keep it in a carnelian box, hinged and clasped with gold, carved to look like a creamsicle egg. It’s Chinese with an ugly American cognate. I take it out and look at it sometimes. It fits like something made for me, though the maker didn’t quite know my measurements and guessed at the colors that might suit me.

Jacko called me the Chinese Kid, or CK when he was being whimsical. I thought it was affection or plain American disinterest, but a caterer explained it to me one hot June day.

“That man doesn’t do anything by accident,” he snorted. “He’s making sure that you don’t belong to the studio, not yet, not until he can get a good fee for bringing you in.”

I must have looked confused, because he sighed and explained between setting out large trays of sandwiches.

“If he has a name, he’s under contract to reveal it to the studio. Once he does that, he doesn’t get to decide what pictures he has you in, you get lumped in with all the other little changelings that roam the lot.”

The caterer was called away, but I was left frowning. My job, as much as I needed it to breathe, had been simple until then. I showed up, I did as I was told, and my mother received a few bills shoved in her hand at the end of the day. I was fourteen and had been in and out of Jacko’s productions for two years by then. Though sometimes a month would go by without work, leaving me feeling a little like a fish gasping out of water, most of the time he wanted me every two or three weeks.

Nothing stretches like time when you’re a child. I would resign myself to being a laundry drudge for the rest of my life, and then Jacko called.

“Hey, can we have CK for a couple days at the end of the week? Dress her in something Chinesey, all right?”

“CK, CK,” my mother muttered, picking through the pile of lost clothes. “What an asshole.”

Jacko still wasn’t sure how much English my mother spoke. She used her words as sparingly as five-dollar bills when she was around him. Some part of it was a lifetime of keeping every advantage close to her chest, but I’m certain some of it was watching Jacko turn bright red as he had to halt his day to explain something to her.

I know it crossed her mind once or twice to see if she could hold me back for more money. I would have bitten and cursed and run away to the set, but that wasn’t the only thing that held her back. The studios were a strange and treacherous place, and my mother lived where safety meant being beyond notice, out of reach, invisible and unknowable. That I got paid out of Jacko’s own pocket kept me apart, and that satisfied her just fine.

I tried on all sorts of ridiculous names. Every child does. I crossed the names of my most attractive classmates—Betty-Joan, Ruby, Eleanor Jane—with street names and the names of politicians, creating less the names of famous actresses than ugly chimeras for the crew to laugh at.

None of the crew used their real names either. No one was a Francisco Jimenez or a Paul Chen. Instead, they were all Lefty, Biggs, Shakespeare, Gato, and Pashka, things you would call a kid or a pet of some kind.

Verde explained it to me one day while we split a sandwich.

“It’s union rules,” he said proudly. “When you’re an apprentice, you use an egg name that some old lady in Burbank spits out. After you graduate to journeyman, like me, the other guys get together and give you your work name.”

“So why are you called Verde?” I asked, curious, and he frowned.

“If you can’t tell right away why someone has the work name they do, don’t ask ’em,” he told me.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, and I looked apologetic enough that he continued.

“It’s for our own protection, see?” he said. “If the studios get ahold of our real names, if we walked in there without union protection, I mean, Santo Christo, who knows what they would do?” He shook his head, closing his hand around something in his pocket. I knew that it was a little iron icon of the Virgin Mary. There was iron in the cameras, the dollies, and the scaffolding, but only the techs carried iron like that.

For Looks Like a Stranger, I was meant to be sitting on a barrel, peeling an orange in the background as Irene Leonard slapped Lewis Herman across the face. The turquoise Chinese jacket that my mother made for me stretched tight over my shoulders, my breasts, and now even my hips, but it would hold for another few shoots, she thought. I had outgrown two others since I passed my sixteenth birthday, and past seventeen, it looked like I was going to outgrow a third.