A Lot Like Christmas: Stories Read online

  I half expected her to be in the audience on Tuesday night, in spite of the LaGuardia scene, but she wasn’t, and on the way home after the show, Jorge told me there’d been a story on the radio about their arrival in California.

  “Did she say anything about the Rockettes?” I asked him.

  “No. She didn’t say anything about your making her walk halfway across Manhattan in a rainstorm, either.” He glared at me in the rearview mirror. “You’re lucky she didn’t catch her death of cold.”

  She wasn’t in the Saturday matinee audience either, or backstage after the show, and by the middle of December I had more important things to worry about, like Austerman’s insistence on a dream-sequence number in Desk Set with me in, you guessed it, a leotard and fishnet stockings.

  Add to that the management’s decision to put an additional matinee on the schedule because of increased ticket demand, Austerman’s wanting me to help audition the Spencer Tracy role, and every reporter in town wanting to do an interview on Only Human’s Tony nomination prospects. By mid-December I was exhausted.

  Which was why I was taking a nap in my dressing room before the show when Benny the stage manager knocked and said there was someone to see me. “A Cassie Ferguson,” he said. “She says she knows you.”

  “Cassie what?” I said blurrily, wondering if that was the name of Austerman’s assistant. “What does she look like?”

  “Blond, tall, hot.”

  All of Austerman’s assistants were tall, blond, and hot. He was as bad as Miss Caswell’s producer boyfriend. And if she was from Austerman, I couldn’t afford to let her see me like this. The nap had added ten years to my face. “Tell her I’m doing an interview with Tiger Beat and I’ll meet with her during intermission.”

  He looked unhappy. “She said she needed to see you right away.”

  “Oh, all right,” I said. “Give me five minutes and then send her in,” and frantically started to repair my makeup, but almost immediately there was a second knock on the door.

  Benny was right. She was a knockout: tall and leggy, with gorgeous long blond hair, and, even though she was wearing a belted raincoat, it was obvious she had a great figure.

  “Well?” she said. “What do you think?”

  “Emily!” I said, staring. “My God! What—?”

  “I had the bingo-bongos done,” she said happily.

  “I can see that.”

  “I was just going to get longer legs, but the proportions didn’t look right, so, since I had to get a new torso anyway, I thought I might as well get a new ass, like in the song, and new—”

  “But why?” I said.

  “To meet the height requirement,” she said, as if it were self-evident.

  Oh, my God, I thought. She was serious. She’s going to try to become a Rockette.

  “The upper limit’s five ten and a half,” she said, “but the median of the current Rockettes is five nine, so I went with that and with thirty-six for my chest. I did a C so I could be sure I’d fit in a size six—that’s the most common costume size. And people tend to be less intimidated by flatter-chested girls.”

  She untied the belt and opened her raincoat wide to reveal a spaghetti-strap black leotard and sheer tights.

  “Hot” was an understatement. She had definitely had the bingo-bongos done.

  It was too bad Torrance wasn’t here. “This,” I would have told him, “is what one is supposed to look like in a leotard. Which is why I have no intention of wearing one in Desk Set or anywhere else.”

  “Do you think I should have gone with a D instead?” Emily asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “What about my outfit? Is it all right for the audition? I analyzed audition videos and photos from the past ten years, and this was the most common, but some of the dancers wore colored leotards or leggings, and I was wondering if I should do that to make them notice me.”

  “Trust me, they’ll notice you,” I said.

  “What about my shoes?” she said, sticking out her foot and pointing a toe in a T-strap black tap shoe. “The audition brochure said character heels, but I didn’t know if I should wear black or beige.”

  “Black,” I said. “But auditions aren’t till summer.”

  “I know, but they have a vacancy they need to fill.”

  Good God, I thought. She’s killed a Rockette, and she must have guessed what I was thinking because she said, “A Rockette on one of the tours quit to get married, and they had to replace her with one of the New York troupe, so they’re holding a special audition.”

  “But you have to know how to tap dance—”

  “I do,” she said. “And I’ve learned jazz, modern, and ballet. Here, I brought an audition tape.” She pulled out an Android, swiped through several screens, and handed it to me.

  And there she was, tap-dancing, executing flawless time steps and cramp rolls and Maxie Fords—and the eye-high kicks the Rockettes were famous for.

  “I’ve had all the choreography terms programmed in, and I’ve memorized three different routines for my audition solo—‘Anything Goes’ and ‘One’ from A Chorus Line and ‘42nd Street.’ Which one do you think I should do?”

  “Emily—”

  “I learned all the routines from the Christmas show, too, but I wasn’t sure I should do one of those,” she said. “Oh, and what about my hair? Is blond okay? Sixty-two percent of the Rockettes are blondes.”

  “Blond is more than okay,” I said.

  “And you think I look like a Rockette?”

  Like the perfect Rockette. “Yes,” I said.

  “What about my face? The age requirement’s eighteen, so I had it altered to look older—”

  She had. Her cheekbones were more defined, and her face thinner, though it was still recognizably Emily’s and had retained the wide, innocent eyes and the disarming smile.

  “—but I was wondering if I should change it to look more like the other Rockettes. I made a composite of the current troupe’s faces, and it has a straighter nose and fuller lips.”

  And much less vulnerability, I thought. A modern-woman-in-Manhattan-who’s-had-lots-of-bad-experiences-and-worse-boyfriends face. The idea of Emily with that face was unthinkable.

  And besides, if she was actually going to try and become a Rockette, she would need all the help she could get. And her face was her biggest weapon. Well, not her biggest, I thought. But definitely a weapon, as witness the reporters’ behavior at that backstage interview. And Jorge’s.

  “What do you think?” Emily asked. “Should I change my face?”

  “No,” I said. “Absolutely not,” and posed the question I should have asked in the first place, especially since he was liable to come bursting in here any minute. “What does Dr. Oakes say about all this? Did he authorize these changes?”

  “No, of course not,” she said. “He’d never let me do this. I got some of the engineers to help me.”

  “How did you talk them into it?” I was about to ask, and then realized I already knew. She’d charmed them just like she’d charmed Jorge and the TSA. “And Dr. Oakes didn’t object?”

  “No. He doesn’t know about it. He’s in Japan with Aiko.”

  Of course, I thought. He’s off introducing his artificials to other countries. And different cultures would have different ideas of what was threatening about artificials. They’d require different models, all with faces and names carefully chosen to make them seem harmless: an Aiko even shorter than the original Emily for Japan, and a Rashmika for India, a Mei-Li for China.

  And meanwhile his American model had turned into a combination of Eliza Doolittle and Frankenstein’s monster.

  “I’m not sure you’re right about my keeping the face,” she said. “What if one of the Rockettes recognizes me? I met some of them that night at Radio City Music Hall.”

  And they’d have seen her on the news or in that interview with me. “So you were planning to audition as Cassie somebody?”

  “Ferguson
. Yes, because the rules say you have to be at least eighteen years old, and I’m only one.”

  One. But what a one! “Definitely a singular sensation,” I murmured under my breath.

  “You don’t think I should do that?” she asked anxiously. “I know it’s lying, but if they know I’m an artificial—”

  They’ll never let you audition, I thought. They’d have exactly the same reaction I’d had, and Emily was even more of a threat to them than she had been to me. As Torrance had said, actresses get where they are by being one of a kind, but with the Rockettes, sameness was the whole point.

  And the Rockettes weren’t stupid. They’d see instantly that if one of them could be replaced, all of them could, and that once the management realized they could have Rockettes who didn’t want health benefits or time-and-a-half for overtime, it would be all over.

  So she was going to have to lie and tell them she was a human. But she’d never get away with it. Even if she managed to fool them at the audition, she wouldn’t make it through her first rehearsal. She didn’t sweat, she didn’t get out of breath, she didn’t make mistakes. And she could learn an entire tap routine by watching it once. They’d spot her instantly.

  Emily was watching me with a worried expression. “You don’t think I should tell them I’m human?”

  “I don’t know. Let me think,” I said, wishing I had Emily’s computer brain to help me figure out what to tell her. I knew what I should tell her: the cold hard truth. That there was no way she could ever be a Rockette and she should go back home to San Jose and do what she’d been designed to do.

  It would be much kinder than letting her batter herself to death trying, like a moth against a porch light. But I also knew she wouldn’t listen, any more than I had when I was eighteen.

  “What do you think?” Emily was asking me. “Should I put ‘artificial’ on my audition form?”

  “No,” I said. “You’re not going to audition.”

  “But you can’t become a Rockette if you don’t audition.”

  “Only if you’re an ordinary human,” I said. “When does Dr. Oakes get back from Japan?”

  “Not till the twenty-second. That’s when we were supposed to go to Williamsburg for Christmas.”

  The twenty-second was a week away, but we didn’t actually have that much time. AIS would already be looking for Emily. Multinational corporations don’t just let a valuable piece of equipment walk away, especially one who was ruining any hope they had of selling the idea of artificials to the public.

  On the other hand, they could hardly let it get out that one of their “perfectly harmless” robots had gone rogue. They’d have to look for her through private channels, which would slow them down. And even if they did decide to go public and had the police put out an APB on her, they’d be looking for a five-foot-one sixteen-year-old with light brown hair, which gave us a little time.

  But the minute Emily went public, they’d come after her and Dr. Oakes would be on the first plane home from Japan. So we’d have to make sure that by the time he got here he wouldn’t be able to do anything.

  “All right, Emily,” I said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to go on every news and talk and late-night show we can find and tell them how much you want to be a Rockette. You’re going to tell them all those things you told me that night in the limo, how the Rockettes started and what they’ve done over the years—dancing in the Macy’s Parade and saving Radio City Music Hall. And you’re going to tell them all the things you’ve done so that you could become a Rockette—how you learned to dance and memorized the routines and studied their history. We’re going to convince them you deserve to be one of them.”

  That wasn’t quite true. What we were going to do was convince the public she deserved to be a Rockette and hope the resulting pressure would force the Rockettes to let her in. “Do you remember the names of the talk show hosts who interviewed you when you were here for the Macy’s parade?” I asked her.

  “Of course.”

  Of course. “Good. I want you to make a list of them and how we can contact them.”

  “Do you want me to call them and set up interviews?”

  “No, we don’t want anyone to know where you are till you show up for the interviews. I’m going to send you to my apartment—Jorge will take you—and I want you to use my computer to find some photographs of Rockette costumes. Preferably one of their Christmas costumes—if we can tie this in with Christmas, it will help. People love Christmas stories with happy endings. Find a photograph, and then call Jorge and have him come and get it and bring it back here to our wardrobe mistress—”

  “Why?”

  “So you can wear it to these interviews. We’re going to arrange for you to dance as part of your appearances. You can do one of the routines you learned.”

  “But—”

  “I know, it won’t be the same as doing the routine with the Rockettes, but it’s a way to show them what you can do. Think of it as your audition. You can do that, can’t you?”

  “Of course,” she said. “It’s just that a photo’s not necessary. I’ve already made all the costumes.”

  “All the…you made all the costumes in the Christmas show?”

  “No. I made all the costumes the Rockettes have ever worn.”

  The plan worked even better than I’d envisioned. Emily went on all the shows and tapped and talked her way into their audiences’ hearts, modeling an array of costumes, from the costume of the original Roxyettes to Bob Mackie’s “Shine,” with its three thousand Swarovski crystals, to the merry-go-round horse costume the Rockettes had worn at the “last” performance, when it had looked like Radio City Music Hall would be torn down, and regaling her enraptured hosts with little-known facts about the Rockettes: that before coming to New York, they had danced in St. Louis as the Missouri Rockets; that in the days when they danced between movie showings, they had practically lived at Radio City Music Hall, sleeping on cots and eating at a special canteen set up for them; that in the open competition at the Paris Exposition, they had defeated the Russians and the corps de ballet of the Paris Opera.

  “Lucille Bremer was a Rockette,” she told them. “You know, Judy Garland’s older sister in Meet Me in St. Louis. And Vera Ellen, from White Christmas, but she kept showing off. A good Rockette never tries to stand out. She tries to dance just like every other Rockette.”

  And on every show and podcast she told the story of how the Rockettes had saved Radio City Music Hall, standing outside and asking passersby to sign a petition to make the building a national landmark. “They went on TV and radio shows just like this one to plead their cause,” she said, “and they all testified at the Landmarks Commission hearing. They did a kick line with the mayor on the steps outside.”

  The audiences ate it—and her own eye-high kicks—up, and her appearances became instant YouTube hits. One, in which she talked reverently about why being a Rockette meant so much to her, went viral.

  The only hitch was Torrance, who thought I was taking a huge risk by helping her. “It’s dangerous,” he said. “There’s a lot of hostility to artificials out there. Some of it could spill over to you, and then there goes your Tony nomination.”

  “I thought you were the one who was convinced Emily was harmless,” I said.

  “That was before she decided she wanted to be a Rockette,” he said disgustedly. “And why are you so set on helping her? I thought you hated her.”

  “I just didn’t want her trying to steal my career. And if she gets to be a Rockette, she won’t be, and Jeannette will be safe.”

  “Jeannette? Who’s Jeannette?”

  “The role I have been playing eight times a week for the past year,” I said. “A fact which Emily would know.”

  “And that’s why you’re helping her? Because she knows what parts you’ve played?”

  “Yes. And because if I get that Tony nomination you’re so worried about me losing, it will be thanks to all the
publicity Emily gave me. I’m just repaying the favor.”

  “Ha!” he said. “You know what I think? I think you orchestrated this whole PR thing to set her up.”

  Like Eve Harrington had set up Margo Channing, siphoning gas from her car and stranding her in Vermont so she could take her place.

  “Are you sure you didn’t put her on all those TV shows so Dr. Oakes would find out where she is and take her home?” Torrance asked.

  And if I did, wouldn’t that be a good thing? And not only for me, for everybody else who happens to be “only human”? I mean, she could rattle off the names of every play and musical and movie ever done and their cast lists and their song lyrics and librettos and dance routines and scripts. And when she was asking all those questions about what to wear to the audition, she’d said, “Should I wear my hair in a topknot?”

  “No, a ponytail,” I’d told her. “With a rose scarf to bring out the color in your cheeks.”

  “Should I make them pinker?” she asked, and she wasn’t talking about makeup.

  How can anyone compete against that? Or the fact that she’d never miss a step. Or forget her lines. Or get old.

  Torrance was right. She was dangerous.

  But I didn’t say that. I said, “I’m just trying to help her. And me. If she’s a Rockette, she can’t steal Bunny out from under me.”

  “Bunny?” he said, looking confused. “Is that Margo Channing’s husband? The one Eve tries to steal?”

  “No. It’s the lead in Desk Set. The musical Austerman’s doing,” I said wryly. “Ring a bell?”

  If they turn her down for the Rockettes, I thought, I’m firing Torrance and making her my manager.

  But it didn’t look like they’d turn her down. After only two days of appearances, the public and press response to Emily was overwhelmingly positive, and the Rockettes who were questioned by reporters as to what they thought of her chances said things like, “She knows more about the Rockettes than we Rockettes do,” and “I don’t know. I mean, I’m worried about artificials taking over and everything, but she wants it so bad!” and I thought, Good God, she’s actually going to pull it off.