Don comes back to say that I’m on. As I walk out into the studio lights, headed for the familiar chair next to Perry, I feel the eyes of the audience on my sagging shoulders and my slightly mussed wig hair. They scan my body for invisible scars, battle wounds, anything.
They scoop down into my tainted soul. They rush for the soft spots, seeking out the wounds. As I sit down faux-meekly in the round armchair, I smell the eagerness, and the charge of victimhood zip-zaps through my body. Perry turns to me, smiling, and says softly, so as not to startle me, “Welcome, Leslie.”
My name is Rita as I drive home from the studio still in costume. I accidentally sat on the sash of Leslie’s denim wraparound skirt getting into the car, and as I drive it pulls the skirt tight, digging into my belly. I told Perry that I thought she should wear a nice dress, something flowery, but he insisted that Leslie hadn’t seen the light of day for years. “This skirt was probably the last thing she looked good in before the married couple put her in their basement,” Perry said. Perry gets involved in the characters he creates. “Trust me, she never knew how to dress.”
It was a day like any other really. The usual questions. “How long did the married couple keep you in their basement?” “What were their names?” “Did they drive nice cars?” “Did this traumatic experience cause you to gain or lose weight?” There was some confusion when a hefty man with a starched white collar raised his hand and asked whether there had been any sex up the butt. Perry turned to me and said, “Leslie, I know this is painful, but was there any anal sex involved?” I got confused. Between me and the husband or between the husband and the wife? Or did the wife strap on a dildo? I wasn’t prepped for this question. “I don’t remember,” I said, looking straight at this man yearning for something ugly.
I started working for Do Unto Others two years ago when my mother died. I called home one day and my father was so confused that when he answered the phone he was panting like a dog. “Rita,” he said, “I can’t talk right now. Your mother’s having a heart attack.” When he called back, she was dead.
My father called me a lonely spinster once, and that’s how I’d come to think of myself. I used to watch the talk shows just to feel better. When my mother died, I started playing the “Well, at least I’m not…” game. Well, at least I’m not being held captive by a married couple. Well, at least I’m not afflicted with a disease that causes me to pick at my face until I am bloody and unrecognizable. I clipped newspaper articles: “Woman Marries Horse: ‘He’s the Only One Who Really Understands Me,’” “Man Shoots Wife and Family ‘Just Because,’” “Ballerina Chews Off Million Dollar Leg in Bear Trap Catastrophe.” I imagined that I was the horse bride, the murderous husband, and the ballerina. I imagined I was them just long enough to be truly glad I wasn’t when I stopped.
Do Unto Others was looking for a substitute guest at about that time. They’d started to run out of ideas, and they feared that they would soon be taken off the air. Their real guests had become too demanding, complaining incessantly about hotel accommodations, not telling all so as not to give away the end of the TV movie being made about their lives. I brought in my cardboard box full of newspaper clippings, and Perry hired me on the spot. He didn’t know that I was already practiced at the art of relieving my grief by putting someone else’s on. I had no idea then that it would become my life, that I would be doing it still, two years later, at the age of forty-eight.
I’ll admit that at first it was an escape from my mother’s death. I left home long before she died, but still, she was my one true friend. “Rita,” she would say at some point during our weekly phone conversations, “you are a good woman, a very good woman.” When she said this, I imagined that the rest of the world thought this highly of me. Possibilities waited in some other room, in some other house miles away, if only I could get to it. The room was filled with friends and admirers who never watched Do Unto Others but would recognize when I arrived that here was a good woman standing before them, one who deserved to feel the warm, gentle pressure of a human hand touching her face.
I keep the envelopes from my mother’s letters by my bed. She sprayed them with her perfume, and late at night when I can’t sleep I sniff their faded scent. I inhale deeply, recapturing that feeling of hope. When I fall asleep, I sometimes have the dream in which Perry is my plastic surgeon, tenderly handling sections of my face as he sculpts and rearranges.
When my mother died, I realized that all her life she was meant to die. That her death was inevitable seemed like a mean trick, something she and I should have talked about more when she was still alive. I worried too that my father, in his old age, didn’t have the mental energy to preserve the details of my mother wholly in his mind. I imagined my mother fading completely from this world and I decided that it was my job to remember her. Do Unto Others is more than simple escape, more than the “Well, at least I’m not…” game. The show is my way of holding my mother to this earth. When I walk out onto the stage, I am grief personified in a mask turned inside out a million times. I’m a reminder to us all.
Over the years, I’ve learned to jump into grief like a swimming pool. The people I play on Do Unto Others have allowed me to swim through wet, sloppy sadness with a suitable stroke, a stroke that the audience recognizes, one that they can imitate.
“I know this isn’t anything like being raised by wolves,” a woman in a blue polyester pantsuit says during today’s show, “but sometimes the way my parents raised me felt, well, wild. Uncivilized.”
The members of the audience crane their necks to get a better look, as if finally this woman might provide them with an answer to all the questions in the world.
Perry turns to me, puts a hand on my shoulder. “Well, I’m sure that Shirley can sympathize with you. Can’t you, Shirley?” The sound of the audience shifting in their seats is the restless sound of animals about to stampede.
I’m wearing a wolf-brown wig. Faint tufts of facial hair dot my chin and jowls.
“Why yes, I can, Perry,” I say. I smile at the woman in the blue polyester pantsuit, and she smiles back. We are lifted momentarily out of that big pool of grief. For a second I suspend her above the child she lost in utero last year, the pending divorce, her daughter who hates her. Well, at least I wasn’t raised by wolves, she might be saying. Well, at least I wasn’t raised by wolves, I think. We are in this together, and the slope of my mother’s forehead drifts back to me, the way it looked when she pulled her hair back on days she couldn’t be bothered.
Today I am Tina, a married woman who is addicted to affairs with married men. I’m feeling a little confused because Perry is a married man, and last night I dreamed that he misplaced my nose during surgery, then pretended not to recognize me without it.
“If I were your husband I’d kill you and then I’d divorce you and then I’d kill the guy you had the affair with,” says one man, jumping up from the audience and screaming before Perry gets to him with the microphone.
I tuck a piece of my hussy-red wig behind my ear and smile the smile of someone who believes strongly in her infidelity.