Leaving Eden Read Free Page B

the most exciting thing in the world.
    Mama’s plan for becoming an actress wasn’t as impossible as it might seem. First off, she’d been acting for years. In Eden High, she was the star of the annual play every year from freshman to senior. Then later, after she graduated and was at school learning how to type and take dictation, she performed in the theater over in Lynchburg. She had the photo album to prove it. All her life Mama dreamed about being a movie star. She believed it was her true destiny.
    Then one day that winter, just after I’d brought in the mail and was sitting on the porch drinking a Coca-Cola, Mama started screaming. By the time I got to the kitchen, she was dancing around the table and waving a magazine in the air. Finally she calmed down enough to tell me how they were going to make a movie about the life of Natalie Wood and how the director still hadn’t settled on the actress for the leading role and was, in his words, looking for a fresh face, someone who could capture the essence of Natalie. Mama said this was her big chance. She was as close to the essence of Natalie Wood as anyone. She was practically a twin.
    According to my granny Goody, from the time Mama was five years old, people were always commenting on the astonishing likeness, first as the little girl in
A Miracle on 34th Street
, a video we owned and watched every Christmas, then in all the ones that followed.
Rebel Without a Cause. Splendor in the Grass. West
Side Story. Gypsy.
It was like Natalie Wood was holding up a beacon for Mama to follow. Final proof was Mama’s high school yearbook photo. She looked exactly like Natalie in
Splendor.
That year was when she started insisting on being called Deanie, after the girl in the movie.
    “I’m doing it, Luddy,” she told my daddy that night. “It’s my big chance. It’s fate.” The way she said
fate
, in a flat, determined voice, refused argument.
    Daddy wasn’t convinced, though he wanted to agree with Mama—it nearly killed him to disagree with her. At the time, I believed he was afraid she might go off and find another life and was afraid, too, that lying at the other end of her dream was only disappointment. He couldn’t bear the thought of Mama being let down any more than he could entertain the thought she would leave him. I myself was torn between wanting Mama to be a star and despairing at the idea of being left without her.
    Mama jumped up and tore out of the room. A minute later, she was back holding two pictures that she slapped down on the table in front of my daddy. One was of Mama taken the previous Christmas, and the other was an autographed photograph of Natalie Wood. I’d always believed Mama got that picture from a Natalie Wood fan club or a film studio. It was that kind of glossy up close photo. A person—looking at the two pictures—would be hard pressed to tell which was the real Natalie.
    “See,” she said. “I’m
supposed
to get this part. It was made for me.”
    “Oh, baby,” Daddy said, “it’s not that I don’t want you to go. I just don’t want you to be disappointed.”
    Mama’s mind didn’t hold room for such thoughts. “You know what I believe, Luddy,” she said. “The sky’s the limit. The sky’s the limit and all we have to do is reach for it.”
    The sky’s the limit
. Mama always said that. But sometimes— and I do love my daddy—sometimes I wondered if Mama really believed that the sky was the limit, why had she settled on a man like Luddington Brock? Half the men in Eden were in love with her. You could tell this by the way their eyes followed her when she walked down the street. She could have had any man in the county. But she picked my daddy.
    Goody had a theory about this. She said in our family women marry down. We marry down, she said, and then spend the rest of our lives trying to elevate our men. Goody had married my granddaddy when he was a clerk at Simpson’s Cash Store and then dedicated her days and her