"You sound like it," said Millie, fetching the foundation among the lined-up tubes and tins. Panchro No. 23.
"I don't sleep, Ma," said the Kid, her voice and her face somehow puffy.
"Should go to bed earlier then." Briskly, Millie applied the greasepaint in short dabs over the face and neck.
"I do," the Kid whispered.
Kid looked forty. The Hollywood life. At least you're not drinking. Yet. I'd smell it on your breath. Actors smell like skunks in the morning. Millie looked at the Kid's face in the mirror. Always was a funny face. Looked pinched and plump at the same time. Gonna have to put some white stick over those bags. Good thing I brought some along case I had to tone the colors down. Usually only have to use it on someone older.
Millie poured some water over her fingers and began to spread the paint thinly, perfectly. It had to be perfect.
"I went back to Lancaster yesterday," said the Kid, like it was some kind of confession.
"Oh yeah?" Millie filled in the pores. The slightest little thing, and it would show up.
Lancaster?
"That's way out in the desert somewhere," said Millie.
"Yup."
"Why'd you go there?" Millie leaned over to get the bit over the ear right.
"It's where I'm from. Went to see an old friend of mine. I always called her Muggsie." The Kid smiled finally, just a wisp of a smile, kind of twisted. "Got there, suddenly found I couldn't remember her real name. Just Muggsie."
"So how was she?" Millie asked.
"Oh. Just normal. She's a couple of years older than me. So she's about eighteen now. Going to get married. It was strange."
"Thought you were supposed to be from Grand Rapids."
Another studio lie?
"Well, I am in a way. We lived there until I was two. Then we upped stakes and moved to a dump like Lancaster because my mother wanted to be near Los Angeles so's we could all become stars." The Kid sounded sarcastic. "Daddy just wanted to run a movie house and keep us all together. Lancaster was the only place he could find."
That face is going to have to have some tone put into it. Millie placed a little jab of darker paint on each cheek. Fresh-faced country kid, so get a nice glow in the cheeks, without it looking like rouge.
"Thought you spent your whole life touring with your sisters," said Millie, selecting the right jar from the counter.
The Kid laughed. "No. You can't do that, Millie. You've got to go to school."
"Guess so," said Millie, chuckling too. Wide streak of something down-to-earth in the Kid.
"I mean everybody thinks we were some big vaudeville family or something. I'll tell you what we did. We sang in my daddy's movie house between shows. All of us. Mom played piano; Janie, Jinny, me, we just sang. The only place we were stars was in Lancaster. My daddy was the biggest star of all. He used to sing all the time." The Kid was staring through to the other side of the mirror, remembering.
"What's your daddy do now?" asked Millie. Eyes next. The eyes were the most important thing in the makeup.
"He died," the Kid said.
"Oh, honey, I'm sorry, I didn't know," said Millie.
"Nobody knows," said the Kid. "He died three years ago."
The Kid looked like she was going to cry. So, thought Millie, she went back home on the weekend and it stirred things up. Poor kid.
Millie took time out from the makeup. "Sounds like your daddy was a nice man."
"The nicest. He had a temper on him though. He was Irish, through and through. He'd just turn on people, say they weren't treating his girls right. Then he'd go and let half the town into the show for free. If they were poor or anything. So we always had a full house. People would come over and we'd sing. All of us."
"Sounds like fun."
"Thing is that I remember hating Lancaster. I remember thinking it was a really nasty, small-minded place. But when I was there, I started remembering all kinds of good things about it."
"Like what?" Millie asked, over her shoulder. Getting out the old Panchro-and her little white stick.
"Oh, like going swimming with Muggsie. We used to run around the old sheds a lot, just playing like kids do. Me and Muggsie and the Gilmores. We had a lot of friends there. People were really very nice to us. We'd go to parties and I'd just hop up onto pianos and sing. There was this place opened up called the Jazz Cafe, and they asked us in to sing there. And people kept coming to the shows at the theater. They never got tired of the shows, and they must have seen us every week." The Kid managed to laugh again. "To tell you the truth we probably weren't all that good. For years and years, the only thing I knew about singing was that you had to be loud."
"Oh, every place is a mixture of good and bad," said Millie. "I got pretty mixed memories of Missouri. Everybody gets into everybody else's business all the time."
"They sure do," agreed the Kid. She went silent, perplexed, hugging herself. Millie took advantage of the stillness to get the white stick and draw two quick lines over the bags under the eyes. You had to be quick. All these stars got such frail vanity.
"Okay, now. Hold still, Judy. I'm going to do your eyes." Millie smoothed even darker brown, No. 30, across the whole of the eyelid and then up to the natural eyebrow. It was a good design, this makeup. It made her eyes look bigger in her face, like a real little girl's, by darkening everything to the eyebrow and putting on these absolutely enormous eyelashes. Millie had thought it would look phony. Instead, the eyelashes seemed to match the Kid's own huge dark eyes. And then you didn't put a thing on the lower lid at all, except for the slightest bit of mascara.
The huge dark eyes were looking at her, and the Kid was saying something.
"That's what I can't figure," said the Kid. "I just don't understand. They were so nice, and then they drove my daddy out."
"Drove him out. What you mean?"
Millie leaned over and painted in eyebrows lightly with a brush. You had to be careful with eyebrows. Too much, too little, both showed up bad.
"After we started to get big. They drove my daddy out of town, took away the lease from his movie theater, shoved him out, and a year later he was dead."
Millie was silent. She was not sure this was the truth.
"Why would people do that to him?" the Kid asked, her voice rising.