She hates the thought of ever having skin like crepe paper or memories like an unmanageable frizz. Instead, she wants a set of forever legs like the first lady, evolve into the actress wearing delicate lace or felted cashmere. She'll play the roles of dysfunctional heroines, their life-tragedies, the way everything falls back to earth. Today at the train station, she wears spike-heel bootees and a pair of slashed pants. She will play her most desired role: her father's kidnapped daughter, her daddy's little outlaw. Back in New York, her father was a cloud in her closet, and when he arrived on every other weekend, he was airy and dippy and beautiful. In Zuma, they will reminisce about her mother's lack of style, her fondness for corduroy shorts and Bruce Springsteen T-shirts, a stack of exercise videos, vegan recipes. Her mother was getting dangerously thin. In Zuma, they will wake up in the desert and taste the snow from mountain peaks. She imagines her mother back home, calling everyone, talking to some flat-footed F.B.I. dude who can memorize phone books, a suspect's face divided into thirds. But walking down the streets of Zuma, she'll have high-octane sex appeal: sun reflected off tinted glasses with designer frames, stilettos clinking against pavement, arms full of luminous bangles. She'll be suspicious of helicopters or weather reports from strangers in close ups. And at this altitude, in her father's cabin, she won't give autographs.
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