The first time you see her, she is only fourteen and trying to look younger. She wears a frayed, faded chartreuse dress with half-torn embroidery and her hair is cropped extremely short, shorter than most boys’. She asks, “Are you sure we’ve never met? I could swear we went to school together or camp or church — you’re so familiar, that’s all.” She’s direct and it wins you over fast.
The next time you see her, four years later, you don’t recognize her at first, she’s become taller, full-bodied, a woman, and after an hour and a half with her, you know you’ve never felt this way before and it scares you in ways that you want to be afraid.
“I’m not hard to please,” she says, “but I don’t settle either, I get bored pretty quick and if I can live without a lot of money, that doesn’t mean I want to.” She contradicts herself all the time and it only makes her more charming.
The next time you see her, she’s a waitress, working tables in some small cafe whose name you’ll soon forget. She’s entirely different, salt of the earth, but her eyes, light hazel eyes, haven’t changed and her long, auburn-dyed hair makes her seem motherly.
“I need you,” she says. ”I need you real bad, you motherfucker, you piece of shit who walked away and never came back, you fucking piece of shit…” and “shit” is the last thing she says before her words become a kiss.
Five years later, the waitress is a memory, she’s a businesswoman now, successful, hard, and she speaks with a quasi-British inflection, pretentious and unconvincing, and she uses words like “rather” and “darling” but they never seem real and neither does she and it’s the first time she’s ever been that way. It leaves a bad taste in your mouth.
The last time you saw her, she was a beggar, dressed in rags, sleeping on the cold steps of Baltimore’s Calvary Baptist Church by night and wandering that city’s rank subways by day, asking for loose change or a small bite to eat — the latter request made it easier for people to give her change. She spoke, you recall, with a mid-Western twang and there are many who say that it was really this, combined with the dirt and the rags, which won her all the acclaim, but you think it had more to do with a certain naked desperation in the eyes. Later that night, after you went home, you saw those same eyes in your sleep, so penetrating, so deep, but infinitely distant all the same because you knew they would never see you. She never sees you and nothing she says is ever said to you.
Someday, you will tell your son, if you have a son, “Try not to fall too hard for movie actresses. They give and they give and they give, but they never give back.”
Joseph Helmreich is the author of Warring Parents, Wounded Children, and the Wretched World of Child Custody, a collection of cautionary tales based on real life child custody disputes (Praeger, 2007). He lives in New York City, where he works in international film distribution for The Weinstein Company.
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17 Responses to “SIREN • by Joseph Helmreich”
Comments
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June 6th, 2009 at 12:07 am
It struck me as possible that it isn’t always the same individual but different persons turning up at different stages, fitting into the developing role.
June 6th, 2009 at 3:24 am
Ha, ha!
If you can take being the victim of an April Fool’s trick, you’ll like this one.
Unfortunately, the first two votes indictate writers’ typically thin skins.
June 6th, 2009 at 4:28 am
This really took me by surprise. Very well done.
June 6th, 2009 at 4:40 am
Very compelling…sill trying to figure out the title?? This really hooked me, and I liked the twist at the end with her having played all the movie roles!
June 6th, 2009 at 6:16 am
Oh you got me.
I think the “Siren” refers to “screen siren,” which was once upon a time a common reference to the famed ladies of the silver screen (Marilyn, Bridgett, Rita, etc.). It was a clever hint that I looked right over. (In mythology, a Siren was a seductive bird-woman who lured sailors to their doom with their singing). Probably a casual relation to both in this story.
Enjoyed.
–John
June 6th, 2009 at 6:41 am
Loved it! I was beginning to wonder by the time I got to the beggar who receives acclaim, and then the ending just flowed from all of it perfectly. I definitely got the reference to both the screen siren and the mythical sirens. Good story!
June 6th, 2009 at 6:55 am
“…you know you’ve never felt this way before and it scares you in ways that you want to be afraid.” Great line!
I loved it! I knew it all along, but that didn’t make me love it any less. I don’t need to be shocked or twisted or surprised — smiling works just fine.
June 6th, 2009 at 7:02 am
I must admit that it took two reads and the comments of others before I got the idea that the character was an actress that he admired. The clues are there, I just glossed over them (or am too thick this morning). Enjoyed the story.
June 6th, 2009 at 7:20 am
Genius last line! At first I didn’t know what was going on, but I loved the way you brought it all together. Having her be an actress was the perfect ending.
June 6th, 2009 at 7:35 am
I didn’t realize she was an actress until I read the comments, although I thought it was a person who was inconstant and therfore played too many roles. Now I think it’s a material puppet, only a “back” because of all those changing accents and has no head of her own, but why should she be handed over to a poupeeophile?
June 6th, 2009 at 8:51 am
A good read. Liked it.
June 6th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
Well written with some interesting imagery. Didn’t get it was an actress until I read it the second time though and I’m not sure that it adds anything to the story. In fact, it felt a little like I’d been misled.
I think it would be more powerful if she really were part of his life.
June 7th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
I really liked this. Thought the ending wove together the vignettes beautifully.
June 7th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
It is very well written. Imaginative and interesting. I look forward to reading more by this writer.
June 8th, 2009 at 8:23 am
I loved the structure he used, formed of repetitive sightings. It’s an interesting form and written with the cadences of poetry. The structure gave a twist to the O’Henry ending, and worked extremely well. Crisp, compact and complex. A wonderful story. I think he has the makings of great writer.
June 8th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Great read, beautifully written and really locks the reader in. Thoroughly enjoyed.
June 8th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
I didn’t guess that the author was speaking of an actress and the varied roles she played on the screen until he revealed this at the end of the piece. Sort of like O’Henry’s surprise endings. Now I wonder if he had an actual actress in mind when writing this. Meryl Streep, for example, comes to my mind as someone who can and has portrayed many different types, using various accents, and has won tremendous acclaim for her work from the public, from critics, and from her colleagues.