Ten Days in the Hills by Jane Smiley Read Free Book Online Page A

realize. Anyway, I wrote that book, and it made a fair amount of money. Then I got pregnant and had Simon, and I got interested in babyfood, though of course Simon was on the breast for”—she leaned forward, more as a joke than anything else, because Simon knew this about himself—“thirty-one months. I wrote the next book, with recipes and little pen drawings, called
Don’t Feed Your Baby What You Wouldn’t Eat Yourself!
That was put out by a press that published baby and child-care magazines with a natural slant, you know, homemade diapers, and how you could put a four-year-old child in a warm bath and ask him to remember his birth. When those magazines went out of business, another press bought it. They were more of a media conglomerate, so they brought me to L.A. to do a little demo tape—an infomercial, really. I made little messes and showed how to freeze them in ice-cube trays. That sort of thing. Once we were installed in our rental in South Pasadena, it wasn’t really in the cards to go back to Chicago. And Simon, of course, has never had a trans-fatty acid in his life. You can tell by his head of hair, can’t you?”
    Max laughed and the others smiled.
    “Very dull,” she said. “Now you.” She pointed her fork at Cassie.
    “We’re ready,” said Stoney.
    “Well,” said Cassie, “when I was a small child, in the thirties, I didn’t really know who my father was.”
    “Don’t believe her,” said Delphine.
    Cassie tossed her head. “I lived with my mother and my sister on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, and there were these two men who came around. One was a guy in a suit—he was in advertising, and he later got to be famous for the slogan ‘I’d walk a mile for a Camel.’ His name was Ewan Marshall, like mine. The other one was named Morton Hare. He was an impoverished artist. I preferred him. He would get me up early on Sunday mornings and take me out into Central Park with a gun and he would shoot ducks for food. They both had volatile relations with my mother, who also worked in an ad agency.”
    Cassie took another pancake. Stoney said, “New York always leads to Hollywood.”
    “So, when the war started, both of them went into the army, and my mother wrote a best-seller called
Since You Went Away.
David O. Selznick, who made some big movies—”
    “Like
Gone with the Wind,
” said Stoney.
    “Bought the book and brought my mother out here to write the screenplay, and us with her, of course. We started at the Westlake School. I was in the sixth grade and my sister was in the ninth grade.”
    “A big movie,” said Max.
    “Claudette Colbert played my mother, Jennifer Jones played my sister, and Shirley Temple played me. She had to follow me around and learn how I did things and my facial expressions. In the movie, she’s incredibly spoiled and bratty.”
    “That was you,” said Delphine.
    “Well, she followed me around a fair amount, but she was slightly older than I was and way more mature—when we went to gym class, I saw that they were wrapping her chest to make her look flat, because she was always having to go on good-will trips. She was nice to me, but even I knew she was having a difficult transition to more mature roles, and I think maybe they bought the book not because of how great it was and how noble and long-suffering and brave my mother was, but because Shirley’s career needed a boost. Anyway, Jennifer Jones followed my sister around. She was in her twenties, I think, and married to Robert Walker, who was in the movie as her boyfriend, but actually she was having an affair with David Selznick. Robert Walker was fairly crazy. You remember him, right? He was in
Strangers on a Train
as the guy who proposes that Farley Granger kill his father and he will kill Granger’s wife. It was all a very big deal, because Jennifer Jones had won the Oscar for
Song of Bernadette.
Delphine and I watched
Since You Went Away
a couple of years ago. Joseph Cotten played Morton