"Julia Roberts Wallpaper"
Krista Eide
Krista Eide’s (her) fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in several journals, most recently Prairie Fire, Minola Review, and Carousel. She lives on unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh lands (Vancouver, BC), where she is the managing editor of EVENT magazine and works in film and television. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC.
“This story was prompted by the cover of People magazine’s 1991 issue “50 Most Beautiful People in the World,” on which actress Julia Robert’s slight smile evokes a modern Mona Lisa. In ‘Julia Roberts Wallpaper,’ which also references the films Pretty Woman (1990) and Sleeping with the Enemy (1991), a young girl collages her bedroom wall with images of Julia from celebrity magazines, creating a devotional artwork that determines her entire creative future, or so it appears to her unfocused and less successful sister. The piece also explores the effects of paying attention — whether to art and culture or to the natural environment — in everyday life.”

The evening my sister’s new movie is released for streaming, I make popcorn and curl up on the living room couch. My cat rests beside me, her little legs tucked under her. I press start and watch the opening credits. Julia Roberts is given first billing, of course, and then my sister’s name appears on a shared card. The film opens with a close-up on Julia. She’s in her fifties now and her lips are sapped of their youthful plump, the corners of her eyes are gently creased, but it’s the same big smile, same thick hair. It’s been nearly thirty years, but I still can’t see the woman without thinking about my sister’s wall.
The wall began when my sister, age nine, became convinced Julia Roberts was communicating to her from the cover of People magazine. This was the summer of 1991, the 50 Most Beautiful People in the World issue, and Julia was twenty-three and early in her reign as America’s Sweetheart. In the portrait, her skin is warm, as if lit by an off-camera sunrise. Her eyes are molten caramel, her slight smile is Mona Lisa mysterious. My sister clasped the magazine in her small hands, looked into Julia’s eyes, and saw something only she could see. She tore off the cover and taped it to the wall above her bed so she could whisper to her each night before sleep.
My sister quickly became obsessed with the actress. At the grocery store she blew her meagre allowance on Teen Beat and Us Weekly. For months, she tore out images and taped them next to the People cover, the glossy bits of paper overlapping until one entire bedroom wall, floor to ceiling, was collaged with Julia. Large and small versions of her enormous red mouth and superfluous teeth — that smile turned carnivalesque, maniacal in repetition. Oversized nineties blazers and floral sundresses and auburn curls tumbling everywhere.
I didn’t see anything entrancing about Julia Roberts besides her conventional beauty, so I couldn’t understand my sister’s fixation. I’d come down the hallway, catch sight of dozens of Julias through my sister’s doorway and jump. Before my friends came over, I’d close her door. I was twelve and didn’t want to explain. My bedroom walls were off-white, and my room felt bigger than my sister’s, even though they were the same size — tiny, like one room split into two. I didn’t decorate my walls, did not mar them with thumbtack pricks or gluey tape that lifted strips of paint. Whenever I pressed a clothes moth into a powdery smudge, I immediately wiped it away with a wet cloth.
Our small bedrooms were — still are — in our family’s small house on a small island off the east coast of Vancouver Island. The mainland is close enough that you can see it, the mountainous edge of the continent that plunges into the sea, but there’s no direct way there. You have to catch a ferry much farther south on the mainland to Vancouver Island, drive a few hours north, take a second ferry to another island, then drive to that island’s eastern port to catch the third and final ferry to our island. Most people who lived there had chosen it for its difficulty to reach. This included our parents, who were artists and homesteaders, although both had grown up in big houses in distant suburbs, and when money got tight, accepted big cheques from their parents, sent by registered mail from those houses.
Unlike our parents, my sister and I believed that geography was holding us back, that everything important in life could not be found on that island but was somewhere else in the world. Likely in a city, likely in a place connected to many other places by highways and airplanes. Someplace not moated by water. As soon as we were grown, we’d leave the island and find that place. We were very different people but that was one thing we agreed on.
Early into her infatuation, my sister saw an ad for Columbia House in one of her magazines and signed up to order Julia Roberts movies. Six to eight weeks later, the first of many VHS tapes arrived at our remote post office from somewhere in the real world. Our mother was angry when she received the bill in her name, but she couldn’t cancel — such was the airtight contract of a Columbia House subscription in the nineties.
My sister would play those tapes over and over, memorize the lines, act out the scenes standing in front of the TV, bare feet on the rag rug woven by our mother. She would curl her dark hair into Julia’s spirals and spray them until they were crunchy. She was charismatic sex worker Julia in Pretty Woman. Then, spinning around, she’d play Richard Gere as the uptight businessman. She’d pretend to adjust unevenly hung towels for Julia’s abusive, controlling husband in Sleeping with the Enemy and say meekly, I don’t know why I forgot.
Sometimes our mother or father would pass through the living room and stop a moment to watch my sister gesturing and imitating Julia’s explosive laugh. Good, Mom or Dad would say, hands on hips, head nodding. Good. Our parents acted in the island’s community theatre troupe and were big on us developing our self-expression.
I wasn’t obsessed with anything. Nothing I encountered had ever spoken directly to me, and I didn’t really have hobbies. While my sister performed, I’d be on the living room couch, knees pressed to my chest, body folded into itself. I’d half-watch my sister, half-read the classifieds in the island newsletter — Eggs 4 sale, Smith Farm! Volunteers needed, Spring Carnival – call Carly 4356. 5 free kittens, Sue & Tim 5275. Boring stuff, but back then I absorbed everything from milk cartons to pamphlets, it didn’t matter how boring. Maybe that was my hobby — seeking the pinnacle of boredom, the ocean-floor depth of boredom, the flat, featureless prairie of boredom, but I never reached any of those places. Sometimes I’d glance out the window. I know now that doughy mushrooms were rising in the wet moss beneath the cedars. In the distant cove, the November storm surge was chopping against the beached driftwood. But at age twelve, I didn’t pay much attention to the outdoors.
Within a year, my sister outgrew her Julia mania. She started incorporating other VHS tapes into her theatrical renditions, began buying fan magazines with different stars on the covers. She pulled down her wallpaper, crumpled each little bit and tossed it into the woodstove, where the flames licked at Julia’s glossy white teeth. She began covering her walls with posters of boy singers and sketches she’d done in art class. She tried gymnastics; she plucked at Dad’s guitar. My sister still loved acting, though. She played the lead in every high school play, and after graduating, our grandparents paid for her to attend a prestigious theatre school in New York City. By then, my sister and I had surmised that New York was the most important place a person could be. I was proud of her; I envied her. In the twenty years since, my sister made a career as an actor, just like her childhood idol Julia Roberts (although not nearly as famous — few actors get to be).
Meanwhile, I moved to a small Canadian city for university and then stayed there for two decades. Unlike my sister’s, my path didn’t feel clear cut. I tried a few different jobs that all took place in offices, and therefore seemed important and impressive. But at my desk I’d find my mind drifting back to the island. I’d close my eyes and see the little ferry tipping side to side in its passage. I’d hear my father whistling while he dug up potatoes, the rasp of the shovel piercing the earth. I’d see my mother in her splattered smock mixing paint in the backyard studio. I’d even see the easel, the images on the canvas — everything.
I watch the movie and wait for my sister to appear. She was thrilled when she landed a small role in this big-budget film shooting in New York, where she still lives with her husband and twin daughters. Even though her obsession with Julia Roberts was decades past, even though they shared just one small scene, they finally got to meet and perform together. It was unbelievable if I looked at it with my twelve-year-old eyes, those eyes that watched my sister construct her Julia Roberts wallpaper in her small bedroom in our small house on a small island off the coast of Vancouver Island. When Julia spoke that first time, maybe my nine-year-old sister heard, Look at me, listen to me. Dedicate yourself to me and I’ll make your dreams come true.
Two years ago, when the last of our grandparents died, our parents sold their suburban houses and bought a condominium in downtown Vancouver on the thirty-eighth storey, with floor-to-ceiling windows that afford a view of surrounding towers — all those stacked little nests — and a sliver of the steel bay. Our parents moved in and started wearing expensive clothes, dining at small-plates restaurants and going to the theatre — professional, not community theatre. My mother did not bring her painting supplies to the city; my father retired from his ceramics. It was as though their hippie middle age was a long pupal stage and they’d known they would one day emerge as wealthy urban seniors. But I hadn’t known. I thought the parents I’d had my entire life were who they fundamentally were, who they’d always be.
When they moved to their condo, I asked my parents if I could return to the old house on the island. They said I could live for free as caretaker, but I chose to pay them rent. I gave up my important office job in the city, and now I do a few things to make a living. I’ve started a landscaping business. I keep chickens and sell the eggs. I’ve fired up Dad’s pottery wheel and I’m learning to throw coffee mugs. I sleep in my parents’ old bedroom and the rooms that were once my sister’s and mine are filled with cardboard boxes, all stuff our parents couldn’t fit in their condo — I never go in them. I spend hours each day walking the beaches, the trails through the forests, and I notice things — tiny indigo mussels clinging to rocks, the velvet pads on the underside of fern fronds, the ascending trill of a Swainson’s thrush. All the things I never saw as a child, boring myself in the seasonless light of the television.
I haven’t seen my sister in person for years, but I follow her career — the TV and movie roles that were frequent and prominent in her late twenties but have waned a little in her late thirties. I read the New Yorker reviews of her plays I’ll never see. I watch her onscreen and observe her hairstyle changes, the subtle record of time on her face. I miss her terribly.
In the movie, Julia Roberts is a stressed-out spy who has a midlife crisis and tries various tactics to get through it. About thirty minutes in, she goes to see a new age healer, and there she is, my sister — her beautiful, familiar face. Her voice. She wears a white embroidered peasant blouse similar to one our mother wore when we were children. She’s much shorter than Julia, her hair and skin half a shade darker, but I notice that, in profile, the two have almost identical noses — ski jumps that have been smoothed nearly straight.
It’s your energy, my sister says softly, reaching out her hands and slowly tracing the air around Julia’s head, down her neck, shoulders, arms — as though she’s outlining her form, as though she’s sketching her likeness onto paper. I feel some sort of block.
The scene is brief, and when their exchange concludes and Julia moves on, I pause the film to text my sister and tell her I watched her scene.
You were so good!
Thanks, my sister texts back immediately, even though it’s late on the East Coast.
What was it like, meeting Julia?
My sister tells me she didn’t actually meet Julia. It’s movie magic, she says.
On the morning she arrived to set, ready to shoot, she learned Julia had left not an hour earlier — she’d come down with laryngitis and lost her voice, so she headed home to Los Angeles. She had already completed her other scenes and wouldn’t return. Thirty years later, my sister’s vision-board wallpaper had brought Julia to her and her to Julia, only for them to pass each other, ships in the night.
Instead, my sister shot her scene in New York and Julia did hers in LA, after she’d recovered her voice, and then someone digitally glued the scenes together. Someone put my sister and Julia Roberts in the same room and erased the seam between their two separate rooms, their two separate cities, their two separate realities.
They could’ve just replaced me, my sister says. But luckily, they didn’t.
Because you told them about your wall, right? I’m only half-joking.
My sister replies with a question mark. I elaborate and she says she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. She’s three years younger, so naturally she won’t remember the early nineties as well as I do, but I can’t believe she could forget her wall. I describe everything — the People magazine, how she whispered to Julia each night, the dozens of maniacal smiles. I go on about the Columbia House tapes, her movie reenactments. I piece it all together for my sister — it was the wall that led to her career, her life, this movie, this very moment in time.
My sister laughs. I really can’t remember all that, she says. But it sounds like something I’d do.
After my sister and I say our love yous and our goodbyes, I finish the movie, which turns out to be mediocre. When the closing credits roll and I switch off the TV, the house is so quiet I can hear the night outside — treetops spiraling in the wind, a distant owl. I get up and my cat leaps off the couch, follows me down the hall. I open the door to my childhood bedroom, switch on the light, and look at the tiny room with its stacks of boxes, the walls still beige and blank. My cat slinks around my leg and gives a quizzical chirp. When I was a kid these four walls couldn’t have shown me anything about my future, but now I can see it all.
