The Comeback

by Ella Berman

One small jerk of the wheel and then that perfect in-between moment just after we clear the road but before we start to fall.

“Your last film was Lights of Berlin. You were nominated for a Golden Globe but you’d already disappeared.”

She used to be a semi-successful model back in England, but now she’s just skinny and tired for no reason since she rarely leaves the house.

Weakness has always repelled us both, which is somewhat ironic given my current state.

I thought it would be hard to disappear, but it turns out it’s the easiest thing in the world. Whoever you may have been, you’re forgotten as soon as you pass the San Fernando Valley.

that as much as I don’t know how to ask for anything, my family also wouldn’t know how to give it to me.

I have to try not to feel envious of the way my mother disguises her indifference to us all only for Esme’s benefit, her interest fading again the minute my sister’s left.

“This is really sad, Mom. You know too much about them. You shouldn’t even know where Calabasas is.”

I can’t remember the last time we touched each other on purpose. Before I moved to LA, I guess.

If I thought about it too much, I could feel jealous of her, but I think she could say the same about me.

I do the math and figure that we wouldn’t have left England if it weren’t for me,

I don’t know when it became so difficult for me to have a civil conversation with another human being.

how small her life is because she had to accommodate mine, and how much more she would have given up for even one-tenth of what I have.

wonder now whether her dislike for me crept up on her so slowly that she couldn’t see it happen or whether it happened all at once, like an earthquake.

I sort of looked like her, but mostly because I worked hard at it, copying the way she laughed, the arch tone of her voice, so that people would know not only that we were the same, but also that we were better than everyone else.

The way my parents looked at me changed from that moment on, and, for the first time since my sister was born, I figured out how to hold on to their attention.

It always surprises me how willing we are to forgive someone once we think we understand them.

We’ve both always been on our best behavior after our very worst,

The phenomenon has a name, vanishing twin syndrome, but to hear my mom tell it, I took up too much space before I was even born.

Esme was young then, only eight when I left, and I think I thought of her as mine for a while.

Sometimes I wish he could just figure out how to repress his emotions like the rest of us.

Surely I would never miss seeing Able win for his body of work that couldn’t have existed without me.

Maybe my mom was right about me when she said I wasn’t happy, but what she doesn’t understand is that since the age of fifteen, I’ve never even dared to want to be happy. I’m just trying to stay alive.

I could just figure out how to tell her that, it might be the most honest thing I’ve ever said.

“You could never be normal, Grace, you just don’t know it yet.”

He wanted Marilyn without the overdose, Winona without the shoplifting, Gwyneth without the health shit. I wouldn’t waste my time or reputation on any trashy projects because I would work solely with Able.

I would never again determine my own value because I wasn’t so much a person as an idea, shaped not only by the people around the table with me that night but by the millions of people who would pay to watch my movies in the years to come.

At one point she described in excruciating detail exactly how her career had been hindered when she married my dad instead of moving to Los Angeles as a teenager herself.

After a while, it just became easier not to look at either of them.

From that first movie on, my mom and I fought like rabid dogs, or like two people more similar than they would ever admit.

Of course I understand that I was the one who’d left them behind, but I also understood that they’d let me.

His work was at its most brilliant when I was in it, and, for my part, I glowed on-screen like nobody else around me.

that not one person stopped to question how it all worked so well, a fortysomething man and a teenager being so inextricably linked.

It turns out it’s totally okay to drink so much that you have to be carried out the back door of a strip club, but the moment you order carbs for lunch, you’re certifiably insane.

I came back because I wanted to start over, but now that I’m here, it’s like I’ve forgotten how I ever pretended to be normal.

Or you could join that church everyone goes to? With the tattooed pastor? He wears cowboy boots.”

Up until that point I’d barely been aware that my collarbone even existed, let alone that it was something to be championed.

whether a day would come when Able and the rest of my new team needed me more than I needed them, or maybe even my parents.

My mom wanted me to stop and take everything in, to preserve the moment and store it somewhere so that I could look back on it when I was old and no longer beautiful, and perhaps had forgotten what it felt like to be loved by people I’d never met.

“I don’t know if I was ever addicted to any of it. It just seemed easier to say than admitting that I actually liked forgetting who I was for a few hours.”

People only want to hear the truth if it also happens to be what they want to hear.

We were two kids pretending to be adults in an $8 million house with nothing of our own.

Working with Able was supposed to give me the exposure I needed, without having to force myself on the public in other ways to stay relevant. It was a luxury I always knew I was lucky to have, despite everything else that came with it.

I forgot that Laurel occasionally says LOL out loud.

Three years earlier, at my lowest point ever, I had looked down on the perfect, wisteria-framed houses and wished more than anything in the world that I was hidden safely inside one of them.

Even though I know that I will never be able to tell her my story, with all of the nuances, the gray areas I take up, for some reason just the recognition that something may have been wrong, even if it’s just a hunch, even if she forgets about it tomorrow, is making me aware that I exist.

I knew I could do anything he asked because his belief in me made me feel untouchable.

I’ve noticed you’ve been doing this more and more lately—distorting reality so that it fits in with a narrative you’ve created in your mind.”

Do you remember what I told you? That other people are going to try to get involved and get between us, but it doesn’t matter as long as we understand each other?”

Carrie was the first person in my life who ever admitted to me that things were different for women, particularly in Hollywood, and she was also the first person to ever call me smart.