Marcia Lee just stood there, looking impatient. “Staged,” she said, a little more loudly than she usually talked, as if Andra were deaf or retarded. “They do those things on purpose to get good television action for the show. They need the drama. Then they can put the clip on a commercial and it looks like all kinds of things are happening, and people watch.”
Andra considered it. “Grace is upset. And Sheila Dunham punched her. She pushed her down on the floor.”
“Well, of course Grace is upset,” Marcia Lee said. “I’d have been, too, if it were me. But it’s her own fault. She had to know that the show was going to look into the backgrounds of all the girls that made it into the house. Why did she lie? I’ll bet she’d have had a better chance of ending up right where she is now—I mean in the house, you know, not in trouble—anyway, she’d have had a better chance of ending up here if she’d just been honest about who she was. I’d bet Sheila Dunham would just have loved to have that man’s daughter on this show—”
“Why?” Andra said. “I thought she hated him.”
“Oh, she does,” Marcia Lee said. “She hates him because he’s always airing stuff on Fox News about how awful the show is and how badly done it is and how lame it is and how nobody should watch it. Actually, I heard it was more complicated than that. It’s like some kind of a vendetta. Sheila got him fired from NBC, or wherever he was last time, and it took him a couple of years just to find a job and he had to sell his apartment. That’s the apartment where Grace grew up. Anyway, I’m probably getting this wrong. Grace told me a few things, but I didn’t realize at the time that she was talking about her own father, and there it is. There are a lot of people who hate Sheila Dunham. No wonder somebody tried to shoot her at casting.”
Andra wandered out into the hall. The girls who had been lounging around there were gone. Andra headed for the big formal front staircase. This house was like a palace in a movie. The staircase curved. The ceilings were incredibly high. The rooms were big. The foyer looked like people should be standing in it wearing ball gowns and gloves that went all the way up to their shoulders. It made Andra twitchy. It really did.
The other girls all seemed to be in the big living room at the front—but it wasn’t called a living room, and Andra couldn’t remember what it was called. She walked past it, trying not to make any noise. She wanted a telephone, or maybe a television. She wasn’t sure. There was nobody for her to call. Her mother almost never had the phone service working, and if she did, she’d been so massively stoned that she wouldn’t be able to make sense anyway. She’d just start in again on that whine about wanting a little money to make sure old Mama didn’t starve. And Andra had to admit it: Old Mama really was starving. There was no getting around the cheeks that sucked in like deflated balloons and the ribs that poked out. The problem was that it was all the drugs and it didn’t matter how much money she gave her. Mama didn’t eat, and what she did eat came right off with the cocaine she took when she had more than her usual in folding cash.
There was a big dining room with a big table and—Andra counted—twenty-four chairs around it. There was a room up front that looked like somebody’s office, with a desk and books and a little sort of half-statue of somebody sitting on the mantelpiece. All the rooms in this house had fireplaces. Even the bedrooms had fireplaces. There was a phone on the desk, but it looked like something in a play. The desk looked like something in a play, too. The phone was big and black with old designs all over it, and a dial that turned instead of buttons. The desk had skinny little legs that curved.
Andra went over to it and picked up the phone. There was no dial tone. Maybe it wasn’t a real phone. Maybe it was just for decoration. Andra hated the way they tried to keep you from contacting anybody in this place.
She went over to the bookshelves on one side of the fireplace and looked at the spines of the books. “Aristotle,” one of them said. “Nichomachean Ethics.” Andra looked on the shelf below that and found “Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice.” That made her feel a little better. She knew about Pride and Prejudice. That had been a movie, with Keira Knightley. She’d even tried to see it. She’d had to go forty blocks to find a movie theater that was playing it, but she had liked the commercials so much. She’d liked the women in big dresses that went down to the floor and the way everybody was so polite to each other all the time. In the end, though, she hadn’t been able to sit through it. She hadn’t been able to figure out what was going on. It was all so slow. There didn’t seem to be a point.