In the wee small hours of the morning, Evelyn is wide awake, tossing and turning on her bed. She is to return to Hollywood once Joe has organized everything — after years of hiatus, she will be back into the warm embraces of Los Angeles and the man she misses.
She isn't worried about her mother as she has been nothing but supportive of her acting career. But her father is a different story; Maurice has urged her to continue her study at Harvard Law School — they were more than happy to have her — but she ultimately settled for a bachelor's degree. Thus he conveyed his dissatisfaction by giving her the cold shoulder; he stopped talking to her altogether and avoided being in her presence for too long.
Dinner was the only time they had to face each other, and Julia was the entertainer of the evening. When Evelyn asked, "Papa, can you pass me the salt?" Her plea fell on deaf ears as Maurice's eyes were glued to his plate.
Julia would notice this and not say a word. She only did her duty as a mother and slid the salt shaker across the table for her daughter. While Maurice remained silent for the rest of the dinnertime, Evelyn swallowed her pride.
Then Evelyn is reminded of the first time she dreamt of being a Hollywood star. She was sixteen and a half, walking out of the cinema with classmates who were predictably starstruck by the male protagonist in the movie. All that she could think about was her face on the screen, not beside James Stewart, but to take his place as the protagonist.
"Did you see how handsome he was? God, Donna Reed is one lucky broad!" Her friend would say and she would disagree, quietly.
"Imagine being a Hollywood star, you get to kiss handsome men and not get in trouble!" She held back her vomit of popcorn and coke.
Although she was good at hiding her real opinions, she never lied when someone finally asked her about it. "Oh, me? Well, I'm absolutely jealous... of their talents." She made sure to give an honest answer, but her classmates were far too narrow-minded to understand her doublespeak.
"They would make great housewives!" She thought, deeply discouraged by girls her age being distracted by the butterflies in their stomachs. While they were fixating on middle-aged men kissing younger and vulnerable women, becoming blind to the great opportunity being served to them on a silver platter, Evelyn began her journey as an aspiring starlet.
It eventually became an exhausting chore for Evelyn to be around that kind of crowd that she began to go to the movies alone. In her hands, always a notebook and a pen, she jot down every slick move made by a character that she thought could be useful to her. One of them was "The Technique" — actresses would furtively tighten their windpipes, choking themselves from the inside to get a teardrop or two rolling down their cheeks.
While walking home after a walk on the beach yesterday, Evelyn had a final heart-to-heart with Bobby. "All my life," she began, "people have said I'm a fool for majoring in such a complex subject in college, that I could never do a man's job. But when I told them I wanted to be a Hollywood star, a naive creature, they called me delusional. What is it that people want from me, Bobby? I can't bear it!"
Bobby didn't respond immediately. He needed to arrange his thoughts in such a way that it wouldn't come off as adulation. "Don't let them tell you what's right or wrong, Eve..." he stopped in his tracks to look Evelyn in the eyes as he said this, "When have you ever played by the rules?" He had devilment blazing in his baby blues — the eyes that are so familiar to her, they took her a thousand years back to their first rendezvous on a grassy lawn.
Evelyn pretended to be naïve and disregarded the implications his words carried — they both knew each other's strengths as they grew up together, but their weaknesses were one another, and therein lies the danger.
"You have proven everybody wrong. You are a star. And stars don't care what mortals got to say." His words certainly had Evelyn's confidence skyrocketing, the words of a man who truly believes in her destiny.
Now fatigued and heavy-eyed, Evelyn gently dozes off to sleep. Her big day was slowly, but surely, approaching her. Leaving her family behind would be easy, she was rarely home since college. However, what confuses her the most is why and how Bobby became the reason for the heaviness in her heart — they're no longer a thing.
Bobby seldom visits Hyannis, is married to a wonderful woman (who is pregnant with their third child), and although he's currently unemployed, he will have yet another job to take all his free time away. So why? Why does he still play such an important part in Evelyn's life? It all began on the dead of night of her 18th birthday...
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