Performance Anxiety. Betsy Burke
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Maverick Member?
Fern, Betty and I put our backs into the cleaning for two and a half hours, wondering the whole time how The Bachelor’s ancestors had ever made it out of the cave and into civilization.
As we cleaned, the silence was broken every so often with Betty’s mutters of “Slob.”
Fern said, “The poor man just needs a woman in his life. Someone to clean him up and organize him. You should have seen the way Cliff was living before we got married. He makes The Bachelor look like Mr. Neat. Now, Miranda, how about if you just add your phone number to that little pile on his dresser?”
Betty barked, “Would ya quit with the lonely-hearts crap, Fern? Miranda’s doin’ fine. She’s gonna be an opera star and no man’s gonna get in her way.”
I hoped Betty was a prophet and that her words would come true. I said, “Thanks for caring, Fern. If things don’t shape up by the time I’m thirty-nine, I’ll get you to do a little matchmaking, okay?”
“Oh, you don’t want to wait that long, Miranda. Everybody needs a soul mate.”
Betty said, “A soul mate, Fern, not a middle-aged preschooler who leaves his crap all over the joint. This guy’s mother has a lot to answer for.”
Fern countered with, “Listen to you, Betty. You wouldn’t be talking like that if you’d just get a man by your side, yourself.”
“Don’t need a man. Got ma dogs. And they’re as good as any man ya could know.”
It was dangerous territory. We knew better than to touch on the subject of Betty’s dogs, or the rest of the canine kingdom, for that matter.
As I brought The Bachelor’s stainless-steel fixtures back up to their original gleaming state, my imagination wandered to the life I would lead once I got to London.
My father would probably put me up. I had an open invitation, after all. I pictured his house in South Kensington, solid and white, a small garden in the back, a nice garret room with a gas fire for me on the third floor. He’d coach me on my audition pieces, give me the kind of tips that only the big singers can give you. I’d be doing quite a bit of cleaning and redecorating at his house, too, because he’d been living like The Bachelor himself all these years. He’d told me so.
He’d need me. He’d need a woman’s touch around the place. When we’d spoken on the phone a few years back, he’d told me I was welcome anytime.
It had taken a lot of courage for me to make the call but he’d sounded so happy, really overjoyed to hear from me. And after speaking with him, I could have flown around the room, I felt so high. When I told my mother about his invitation, she said, “He was probably pissed. He’ll have forgotten all about it by tomorrow.”
And Lyle, my mother’s second husband, had chimed in, “If ya gotta go ’n see him, Miranda, ya gotta go. But hang on to your wallet. And just remember, we’re here for you, eh? If ya wanna talk about it afterward.”
I’d wanted to fly off to England as soon as the call had ended, but I was nineteen at the time and already at university. I had no extra money and no extra time. But I knew that the day would come when the reunion with my father would become a reality.
We finished the Special and hauled the equipment down to the company car. There, I took off my Adidas and put my Doc Martens on. I badly wished I could have had a shower first and rinsed off all The Bachelor’s dust. But I was on a tight schedule. Betty was nice enough to give me a lift down to the theater. She wasn’t supposed to take the company car anywhere except to cleaning jobs, but she didn’t care. Nobody, not even Cora, ever argued with Betty.
I ate the last of Grace’s sandwiches in the car. It was Brie, speck and pickled artichokes on seven-grain bread. I looked forward to the day when I became rich and famous and would either pay for Grace to come and cook for me, or I could adopt her.
Can you do that? Adopt special spinster angels? Grace’s sandwiches homed in on oral pleasure centers I never knew I had.
Betty dropped me off right at the stage door.
I checked off my name and descended into the beige bowels of the theater. Fatigue stopped me in the doorway to the women’s chorus dressing room.
And then I had one of those moments. One of those insightful moments that make you so happy your skin tingles. You’ve arrived in your world. The one they nearly didn’t let you into, the one where it’s a privilege to sweat under hot lights in a costume that already reeks of another soprano, have your toes stepped on by hefty mezzos and your eardrums split by tenors who refuse to stop singing directly into the side of your head.
At the mirror next to mine, Tina, who was a mezzo like me, was applying her geisha face. I sat down.
Tina said, “Miranda. Finally. I thought you were going to be late. That stage manager would make a good prison warden. She doesn’t bend an inch on check-ins.”
Three red circles around your name for being late and you risked being kicked out of the chorus.
“I had four minutes to go,” I said.
“That’s cutting it pretty fine,” said Tina.
“You going to stand in the wings tonight?” When a singer was fabulous, like our lead soprano, Ellie Watson, that’s what we did. Stood in the wings and studied her, hoping some of her magic would get into our bloodstreams.
Tina nodded. “Our Madame Butterball’s pretty amazing, eh? That Ellie’s got another one of your paint-peeling voices. Too bad she doesn’t have the look. How much do you think she weighs?”
“More than bathroom scales register,” I replied.
“Yeah, she doesn’t need a dresser, she needs an upholsterer. But I’m not just standing back there to listen to her. I’m going to gape at Kurt. I’m shoving myself under the maestro’s nose so he’ll notice me. I wouldn’t mind studying under him any day. Under him. Over him. Any position he wants. That man is quality grade-A prime cut. He can beat my time with his baton whenever he likes.”
Against all of Kurt’s warning, I whispered into Tina’s ear, “You’re too late. He’s mine.”
She whipped around to look straight at me. Her voice dropped about a thousand decibels. “Kurt Hancock? What do you mean, he’s yours?”
“I mean we’re good friends. More than friends.”
We were huddled over our makeup tables while having this whispered conversation. The dressing room was too quiet and letting the other gossip-starved dames in on the latest developments in my life would be like throwing fat juicy sailors into shark-infested waters—instant death.
“Get your face on, Miranda, and hurry up about it,” Tina ordered. “I gotta have a word with you.” She was as tall as me but she had an angular face and piercing, intimidating, black eyes. When she gave me orders, I obeyed.
I smeared on the white for my geisha face, then drew in the tiny pinched lips and the eyebrows. We always left our wigs until last. They were heavy and itchy. It had been a bit of a catfight when it came to the director giving out these geisha roles. There was a whale-size middle-aged singer who thought that she should get first pick of everything because of seniority. What did she think this was? An office job? This was showbiz. And showbiz, as everyone knows, is the biggest dictatorship in the world. In the end, the geisha parts went to the youngest, thinnest girls in the chorus. Tina and me and six others.
When I finally had my costume and makeup on, Tina dragged me down the hallway and upstairs into a quiet corner of the vast area backstage.
“Okay. So what’s this ‘friends’ stuff?”
“Like I said, Kurt and I are very good friends.”
“In the biblical sense, right? You mean you’re screwing him?”
“Sort of,” I mumbled.
“What