The Cousins Read Online Free

fingers, even then practicing to be the mother she now was.
    But now Jenny was at the door, her husband and two older sons in tow. “We have to catch a plane,” she was saying. “I have a baby-sitter.”
    Kenny, still chewing, embraced Olivia. “I have to go, too,” he said. “I have a quintuple bypass tomorrow morning.”
    He’d better stop eating all that junk or he’ll have one of his own, Olivia thought.
    “Come visit us,” Jenny said to Olivia with a wave.
    “If I can get away from my patients,” Olivia said.
    “And you can visit me,” Kenny said. But they knew nobody visited anybody.
    They left. Olivia went around the room hugging everyone goodbye. Then she rode down in the elevator alone. She wondered why the aunts and uncles still made her so anxious. When she had been a child they had all adored her, the bright and cherished little niece. Maybe her mistake had been to grow up. But they were all totally unaware of how they affected her, and probably would have been surprised. She was, after all, the independent one, the untamed.

2
    O LIVIA WAS VERY YOUNG when her cousin Stanley Silverstone graduated from high school and left for Hollywood. She remembered growing up hearing about him—he was different, he didn’t like to study, he was unusually athletic, physical, even wild. The family said he was a daredevil. It was the fifties. People wanted security, not adventure. The family department store, Julia’s, named after Stan’s mother, had been intended as a great, glittering career opportunity for the men in the family, and an income for their sisters. If Stan didn’t feel it was for him, well, then he could become a lawyer, or even a doctor like his father, secure and respected. But everyone knew early on that Stan wasn’t interested in a normal life. He wanted to become a stuntman. Who had ever heard of such a thing?
    Stuntmen came from rodeos and carnivals, from Hollywood stuntman families and little towns with names like Rabbit Jump; they rode horses and motorcycles and dirt bikes, they had fights, they dove from tall buildings and through plate-glass windows, they crashed cars and staggered from these crashes engulfed in flames. This did not seem like any kind of world for a Jewish boy from New York City who had gone to private school.
    He rented a little house in Topanga Canyon, a Western landscape of scrub and chaparral and big trees. His few neighbors were beatniks and artists and reckless young men who dressed in black and rode big black Harleys in packs. While he honed his skills and tried to make contacts to break into the closed world of stunt people, Julia sent him money. He hung around bars called the Palomino and the River Bottom, where he got into fights and drank and made friends, and eventually one of these stuntman friends got him a Guild card so he could work.
    It was hard getting work, like trying to be an actor. Once you were a star you would have jobs all the time, but in the meantime . . . Stan kept on practicing, getting better. He learned the importance of safety and planning. Julia kept sending checks. He was likable, talented and lucky, and by the time he was in his mid-twenties he was someone who, while not yet anywhere near being one of the big boys, could at least make a living. Julia was proud of him.
    He met Earlene Taylor on a movie, where she was hanging around with the crowd watching them film. She wanted to be an actress, but so far she’d only been waiting tables. She was a big, very pretty, twenty-three-year-old blonde from a small town in Mississippi, who had come to Hollywood to become famous. She had been hoping someone would see her on the set and maybe let her be an extra. Stan did the motorcycle gag that had become one of his specialties, where he slid it under an eighteen-wheeler and came out the other side, and when the director yelled “Print,” Earlene ran up and asked for his autograph. Nobody had ever asked him for an autograph before.
    When he