The Interview

“You know, when I was a little girl, I used to dress up and pose for my favorite doll and teddy bear. I wore all sorts of beads and baubles around my neck; they hung down nearly to my knees. I wore my mothers clip on earrings, the sparkly dangly kind. I had a big floppy hat and enormous brown, Jackie O’ sunglasses. My dress was a silky slip that my mother kept in her drawer, and her shoes, the red ones that were much too big even to walk in made the outfit complete. I’d pose, dance, and sing into the end of my hairbrush and dream the dreams of tomorrow. But I guess that is over now,” she told the woman. She was from the latest magazine.
“But now I hide inside my room, afraid that someone might see.”
“See what?” the woman asked.
She looked up with a tear in her eye and replied, “That deep inside, this “attractive” shell is just that little girl, and me.”
She took another sip of her orange juice, for they agreed to meet for a breakfast meal.
For a moment the woman did not know what to say, but then fighting her human instincts she asked, “Isn’t this what you wanted? Didn’t you want everyone to know your name, to know everything about you?”
“I thought I did, but somehow, at some point, it seems to have crossed the line,” she replied with a frightful, almost pleading glaze.
The woman swallowed hard and replied, “Some would say that you asked for this,” the woman began. “Isn’t that what they call the price of fame?”
She sighed deeply, and then replied, “I wanted people to like me. I wanted them to know my name. But I also wanted to make people smile, think, feel, and dream for themselves. I didn’t think that my talent, and the fame that came with it, had to mean the end of my life. That price is much too high.”
“”But people are fascinated by you, by your life. They only want to know what makes you tick; why you do what you do what you do.” The woman stared down at the notebook in her hand, a lump of pain and guilt growing in the pit of her chest, because that was a truth that only came from the need to rationalize it all.
“I don’t blame them, I don’t even blame you. I watched the movies and television shows, and I awed, and I wondered at the images and people on the screen. What do you think made me want to do this for a living? But now…now I see. There is more to them than just what we see.”
She wiped the corners of her mouth with her napkin and then pushed her chair back. With a directing wave she beckoned for the woman to follow her. The woman hesitated a moment and then got up and followed the woman out into her garden.
They meandered around silently for a while and then she began, “Everyone wants an exclusive… I will give you one.”
An exclusive was every reporters dream, especially with one as sought after as her. She readied her notebook and then listened intently as the woman filled her head with the story of her life, but then she trailed off and said, “But that is not the story that everyone wants to hear is it? They don’t want the truth the want the illusion. They don’t want the details, they only want the dirt.”
The woman was stunned, but understood and reluctantly had to agree.

“I’m still that little girl, dressing up in the fancy clothes and baubles, only now everyone does know my name. Some of them hate me for what I have, and others want it all. But no one wants me, not the real me. The illusion is much more fun than the reality. I am only a dream, thought up one day, and one day I too will be forgotten.” She looked out into the garden, with a distant gaze and then added mysteriously and in almost a whisper, “I wonder if I did just disap…”
“I’m sorry? I can’t quite hear you,” the woman said, but in truth she had heard, and it worried her, but she did not push the question.
Then as if waking from a momentary trance she said, “I’m tired. I think that that will be all for today.” She escorted the woman back through the garden, house, and to the front door where she graciously bid her farewell with the promise of another time. But as the woman inserted her key in the ignition of her car she wondered.
The next morning the woman opened the door of her small, city apartment, and as she reached down for the news paper she gasped. Part of the image of the woman she had interviewed the day before as well as a partial print of the word, “Vanished” were glaring up at her. She closed the door to her apartment, sat on her living room chair by the window and read the details, as they knew them to be. Her phone suddenly rang, and on the other line was her editor and chief, questioning her at top speed, but all she could do was answer vacantly as she recalled the details of the day before, the whispered, unfinished phrase hanging in her thoughts like a banner.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she replied as she hung up the phone.
She stared at the picture, a strange mixture of pity and relief sweeping over her. And she wondered, is she the first? Will she be the last? And she remembered something that the woman said, early on in the conversation they had had in the garden, it was, “You know sometimes I still feel like that little girl, I like her, it’s a shame that she has to hide to stay mine.”


Gail Fattori Copyright © 2008