The Missing Person Read Free Page B

were able to think things up for themselves and then make them work. The world paid attention when men chose to be something, strove toward a goal they had set. Franny believed that all women were like her, waiting for the Great Something they had dreamed about all their lives to happen to them, to be done to them, to arrive.
    True to her credo, events came to Franny as she waited for them, her drifting, dazed self biding its time. She had known this self since her girlhood. But everyone kept telling her she really was Someone because she looked the way she did. There were times when she was able to forget her secret knowledge that there was no direction to her days, no meaning to her beautiful face, that in the long catalogue of human beings she was a missing person.
    Realizing this, when no one else did, neither Demp nor Arnie nor Dolores nor even Mary Maguire, Franny felt black despair spread through her, like night coming down through Coldwater Canyon. She was filled with the stifling fear that someone would find out about her, and realize her absence. There was no Franny Fuller, no FF as the columnists and the advertisements called her, making her seem important, as if people could recognize her by her initials alone. When she was fourteen she had dreamed about having just one name, like Garbo: Laverne or Melinda. But the Studio thought it had a great thing going when Mary Maguire in her column first called her FF. Well, at least , Franny thought, it’s better than Fanny Marker .

2
    The Movie Actress
    Fanny Marker grew up in Utica where she was born. Most of her girlhood was spent dreaming. The dream started when she understood that she was beautiful. She was born that way, had been beautiful, her mother said, from the moment she laid eyes on her in the hospital. Once, on request, she gave Photoplay a baby picture of herself. (It has been reprinted many times since.) Sitting on a gilt throne in front of a fake palm tree, Fanny is pressing a pudgy finger into a fat cheek. The baby-faced little girl smiles charmingly. Her other hand is playing with a golden ringlet that has escaped the pile on her head.
    Fanny didn’t remember the day the picture was taken. But she remembered Jerryboy who was living with her mother years later. He would take his finger with its black, squared-off nail and push it hard into her cheek. It hurt, but he would laugh and say, “You won’t get far with that one dimple.”
    Fanny moved through her childhood in a daze of visions of beauty. She worked at the other cheek with a sharpened pencil point until it cut the skin, but another dimple never developed. Later she learned from the beauty-hints column in Silver Screen to draw on a black beauty spot there. Perc Westmore said it was good, the magazine reported. It worked fine, drawing attention to the one she already had, making it more interesting. But in Jerryboy’s time, when Fanny was fourteen, her beauty began to be more than a baby picture on the dresser. Her mother looked at her hard, sometimes, when Jerryboy fooled around with her and poked at her like that. It was fear, not pleasure, that Jerryboy’s look made her feel.
    She remembered his feet. He was a sheet-metal worker at the time he lived with them. He wore a hard silver hat and huge heavy gloves and a stiff, sweaty jacket to work. After he got home he took off his high boots and left them in the front room of their flat. Fanny could smell them when she passed them going to the john; they smelled like old vomit. His socks were stiff and black on the bottom. He’d leave them hanging off the tops of his boots and walk away, and then she saw his feet, always dirty. But the worse thing was, he had little pads of black hair on his toes, and the first and second toes on each foot were grown together with a yellow skin between them. She was terrified of those feet, and of him. He walked around the apartment barefoot, following her mother into the bedroom,