The Phone Call

"Hello?" A tired older woman answered the phone

"Mama, it's me Rosemary."

"Rosemary, what are you doing calling so late? Can't you sleep? Didn't I tell you that when you can't sleep to just get a glass of warm milk and sit out in the living room for a while until you feel tired again. No TV, no books." The older woman was abruptly cut off by her daughter's attempt to rectify the beginning argument.

"No Mama, I just thought I'd give you a call and it's not that late, it's only 9:30." Her voice trembled like a small child's trying to explain why the cookie jar was broken. It wasn't that Rosemary was afraid of her mother. It was just that her mother always seemed to know what she was supposed to be doing and what she wasn't and always felt it was her special duty to go around telling her, all the time.

"It's raining tonight, really hard, and I thought you might like to hear that. I know how you always wondered if it ever rained in California. You told me that you could never understand how anything grew out here if it was sunny all the time." She remembered that talk, when she had first mentioned the idea of going to California. She was only twenty then and her mother forbade it by going on for an hour talking about how she didn't understand how so many people could live with sunshine and smog and no rain for so long. She went on to talk about how everyone in California was air-headed and blond and how awful it must be and how Rosemary would never fit in.

"Rosemary, did you call me at 9:30 just to tell me about the rain? Or do you have some news for me?" The news Eleanor White was referring to was news of a job. Her daughter had been in California for three months and had not given her any news of an acting prospect. She could never understand why the hell her daughter had moved to California anyway to get a job when there were plenty of jobs in Newark. No, her daughter wanted to be an actress and she had to go to California to get her big start. No one ever hears about award-winning actresses from Newark, Rosemary was fond of saying. And no matter how many times Eleanor had explained that there were plenty of successful jobs in law or business at home, Rosemary never seemed to hear that.

"News, of course I have news, why else would I call at this time of day? I got a part today - a commercial, for Pepsi. Everyone out hear says that commercials are the doorway to the big time." She lied. She couldn't possibly tell her mother that the only jobs she'd been able to land were the dance hall and cleaning the sound stage. She couldn't tell her mother that every time she even entered an audition, it took the director about five seconds to realize she wasn't a fit for the part.

She did, however, tell a half-truth about the Pepsi commercial. Yesterday, when she arrived to clean the studio, they were rapping up the remains of the commercial they had shot earlier that day, for Pepsi. She couldn't give her mother the satisfaction that, once again, she'd been right. That all those years that she said her daughter would fail at acting and end up living in some hole, starving, and working at a strip club was so close to the truth, it was frightening.