Fortune’s Prime

Years later, my grandmother would still tell people that I learned to swim in a movie star’s pool, though she always said this with the same slanted tone and pinched expression she used when telling people that my mother dated only rocket scientists or that my grandfather was a real Mr. Fix-It around the house, indicating there was significantly more—or rather, less—to the story and leaving me to explain about Gretta Benson-Klein-Huffacher and how she wasn’t really a movie star, just an old lady who hosted a show for other old ladies on public-access television. Gretta had, many years before my family knew her, appeared briefly in a movie, but it was not a feature, only a short educational film for sociology students about the shifting culture of the American West—the crew filmed in Fortune Valley for a single day, and Gretta’s scene had her onscreen for a matter of seconds, shot from behind in a lavender suit and buying a bottle of port from a local winery, though she would later tell us that she had not really purchased the port, but merely gone through the motions of paying for it. “I was acting,” she explained, and waved her hands around her face to demonstrate: acting. “I wouldn’t touch that regional swill with a pig’s lips.”