16

16

“Daddy would have taken you to the hospital,” Nell says that night at dinner. She will not let this new turn go.

“Daddy would most certainly have taken you to the hospital,” Joe says. He is tired. He is grateful for the deviled eggs and green beans and the whitefish. Every year since we first came to the farm he’s wondered how we’ll get the cherries off the trees in time, and now it seems all of his previous fears were in preparation for this year when we’re down dozens of picking crew, which of course means we’ll be down dozens to shake the tarts off the trees in a few weeks.

“Maybe you passed each other on the road,” Emily says. “Dad coming down from Traverse City, Mom on her way to the hospital. You might have. You would have been going north on 196.”

“We did pass you!” I say, flush with memory. “I told you that.”

“You most certainly did not.” Joe pops half an egg in his mouth.

“I said it to Sebastian. I said, ‘Look, there goes the Stage Manager on his way to ‘work.’?” I remember how much I wanted to tell him to turn around. My leg was just a dull ache by then. Sitting on the wide bench seat of the Plymouth it was easy to believe it had all been a silly bit of drama on my part.

“How did anyone survive without cellphones?” Maisie asks.

“We survived very nicely.”

Joe nods. “I can believe it. Our entire relationship was like that back in the day.”

“Two cars passing in the late afternoon,” I say.

“Did you go see her in the hospital?” Nell asks.

“I was only there two nights,” I say.

“I came,” he says.

“No you didn’t.” I turn to him. “Did you?”

“After the play, on my way back here.”

“I don’t remember.”

“You don’t remember because you were asleep. You’d just gotten out of surgery.”

“You came after the play? It must have been too late for visitors. They let you in?”

“I told them I was your brother and that I’d come as fast as I could. The nurse let me sit by your bed.”

Joe, who never lied, could lie fluently when it was necessary.

“Did you leave her a note?” Maisie asks.

He shook his head. “If I’d left her a note she would have known I was sitting by her bed like some kind of weirdo, thinking how pretty she looked when she was sleeping.”

Oh, Joe, working all day on the farm and then driving down to play the Stage Manager and then coming to the hospital to sit in a vinyl chair and watch me sleep. And I had missed him. “Sebastian didn’t stay?” Emily is disappointed. She needs Sebastian to be better than that.

But Sebastian was better than everyone. He parked the car and carried me into the emergency room, and all the while I was thinking how romantic it would have been had Duke been the one to do the carrying. More romantic, though less practical, as Duke would have played it as a screwball comedy or hospital drama whereas Sebastian told the doctor what had happened with so much specificity they must have thought he was a doctor himself. “He stayed until they got me in a room but then I told him to go back. I knew he wanted to see Pallace and I knew she would want him there.”

“How was Pallace?” Nell asks her father. She cannot help herself.

“Pallace was just fine,” he says diplomatically.

“She was excellent,” I say.

“Were you scared?” Maisie asks me.

“Of Pallace?”

Maisie rolls her eyes. “Of being in the hospital, of surgery.”

There is no scenario in which one of our girls would be in a hospital without us. We would find a way to get there and they know this. But I was the girl who’d left college for Hollywood, who’d lived alone in a furnished apartment in L.A., who’d offered to sleep with the wrong person in her efforts to get a part in a play, who came to Michigan with two suitcases. It never occurred to me to call my parents and tell them what had happened. I was an adult, after all, with good insurance through the Screen Actors Guild. “I was scared later,” I say. “I wasn’t scared then.”

“Were you scared of Pallace?” Nell asks.

“Later,” I say.

I woke up in the morning to a fat beige rotary phone ringing on my bedside table. I didn’t know where I was or what the phone was doing there. I didn’t have a phone in my room at Tom Lake. When it finally occurred to me that the only way to make it stop was to answer it, I picked up the receiver. A man said, “Lara?”

“Ripley?”

“Believe it or not.”

The room was sunny. The shades were up. The second bed was mercifully empty. “Ripley, I’m in the hospital.”

“Why do you think I’m calling you in the hospital?”

“Why are you calling?”

“One of the camp counselors at the lake said you had an accident.”

“Do they know you?”

“No.”

“Then why did they call?”

“Lara, are you on drugs?”

“Probably. I’m just waking up.”

“Waking up? It’s nine o’clock out there.”

I turned my head to look at the nightstand. There wasn’t a clock. “I think I had surgery yesterday. Be sympathetic.”

“I am sympathetic. That’s why I’m calling.”

My ankle was encased in a mound of plaster and laid out on a stack of stiff pillows. Everything about it looked like a prop, a movie cast. “I still don’t understand why they called you.”

“You put me down as your person to contact.”

Had I done that? The form must not have been very clear because really, why would Uncle Wallace have listed his second wife? “I must have thought they meant professional contact, like if I was offered a great part and they needed to get ahold of someone.” Is that what I was thinking?

“Well, I’m touched,” Ripley said. “Are you okay?”

“I think so.” Why was the cast so big? I fell on a tennis court, that was all. “I ruptured my Achilles.”

“You don’t want to do that,” he said, like I’d been offered a part in a teenage slasher film that would ultimately diminish my career.

“Well, I wish you’d called yesterday morning and told me.”

“You aren’t the easiest person to get on the phone.”

“Have you been trying?”

“No, but I was going to. There’s serendipity in this.”

I pushed the button on the guard rail that made the top of the bed go up. I held it until I had achieved the angle I thought of as Elyse Adler. “I want to hear how my ruptured Achilles is going to work in your favor.”

“I need you to come back to L.A.”

I planned to go back to L.A. in the fall when summer stock was over. Duke and I were going together, but somehow hearing Ripley say it, I didn’t want to anymore. I looked out the window of my hospital room, across the parking lot to a row of trees. Even the parking lots had trees! For the first time I realized that I didn’t want to leave Michigan. “I have a contract.”

“Okay, one, it’s a contract with a summer stock theater. That’s easy enough to take care of. Two, you can’t walk, which means you’re no good to them. They’ll be thrilled to get you off the payroll.”

“If that’s one and two I can’t wait to hear three.”

“Three,” Ripley said, pausing to indicate drama. “Three is that your movie is coming out.”

“Singularity?”

“Unless you’ve made another one.”

I had thought it was a wash, a tax write--off for someone. “Oh, Ripley, that’s great. I’m happy for you.” It had taken such a long time.

“Be happy for yourself. The film editor fell in love with you. When he cut it all together he made you the star.”

“I’m not the star.”

“Wait till you see it. It’s a sharp bit of work, kiddo. You’re fantastic. I need you out here for publicity. Publicity is all about sitting down, you know. Plus the injury makes you relatable. How did it happen?”

“Tennis.”

“Tennis in the summer in Michigan. Beautiful.”

My toes were sticking out of the plaster, a pale row of little mushrooms. I could move them, which I took to be a good sign. “Always glad to be picturesque.”

“Did you ever wonder when things were going to change?” Ripley asked. “Well, now they are. This is it.”

I hadn’t wondered when things were going to change. I had wondered when things were going to stop changing. “Ripley, I’m in the hospital. I’m on Demerol. I’m not going to walk away from my commitment.” I didn’t know if I was on Demerol but it seemed possible. I was definitely on something.

“Are you listening to me? You can’t walk and you don’t have any commitments in Michigan. You’ve got a commitment to this film.”

“The nurse is here,” I said, because surely if it was after nine o’clock a nurse would be here any minute.

“Don’t go cagey on me.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I have to go.”

“Do I need to come get you?”

“Ripley, listen to me, I’m hanging up now. Say goodbye.” I said it but then I didn’t give him the chance. I hung up before he did.

Ripley’s announcement that I wasn’t going to be acting on one foot was my first glimpse into the future. The second came by way of the doctor making morning rounds. He told me I would be non--weight--bearing for a minimum of six weeks. I had raised the bed up to sitting, thinking it was more polite.

“Meaning what, exactly?” I wished there had been someone with me so I didn’t have to ask all the stupid questions myself.

“Meaning the cast”—-he stopped and pointed to the cast with his pen—-“does not touch the ground for a minimum of six weeks. Do you want a wheelchair?”

I shook my head.

“Okay. I’ll have someone from P.T. come up and show you how to use the crutches, how to transfer.”

“I’m going to another hospital?”

He paused for a minute, looking back at my chart. “Okay. So. Transfer means getting in and out of a car, in and out of a chair, in and out of the bath. You do those things differently when you’re trying to keep your foot off the floor.”

It wasn’t until he’d left that I realized he had mistaken me for an idiot.

I never thought about New Hampshire in those days, though I missed my grandmother. I wrote her postcards, and every now and then she’d send me a dress. Sometimes she put molasses cookies in the box, sturdy, reliable cookies that were well suited for mailing. I’d offered to send her a plane ticket a couple of times when I was in L.A. but my grandmother didn’t believe in planes, at least not for personal use. She’d been made in New Hampshire and planned to die there, that’s what she always said. I would have liked to have her with me in the hospital. I bet she could have made it as far as Michigan if I told her I needed her. I bet my parents would have come too, or either of my brothers. Even if we weren’t a particularly close family, they were decent people. They would have taken care of me. The problem was they couldn’t have done it on intuition alone and I wasn’t about to call and make them worry. In fact, I couldn’t call and make them worry because the phone was rigged for local and inter--hospital calls only. I could call the patient in the room next to mine but could not call my mother, who I hadn’t called all summer anyway. I was fine. I was taught how to transfer, how to get to the bathroom by myself. A girl in a pink striped smock came around with a book cart and I found a copy of The Bridge of San Luis Rey by one Thornton Wilder. Imagine that. It was about a bridge that snaps and sends a group of strangers careening to their deaths. I’d never read it before.

I had some trouble with swelling and the doctor wanted to make sure he wouldn’t have to change the cast so they kept me for a second night. I thought about all the time I’d spent sitting in my apartment in Los Angeles on the days with nothing to do, and how those days had prepared me to be alone with my thoughts. I had a knack for it, not everyone does. I ate my dinner off a tray and read my slender novel and practiced crutching to the nurses’ station and back. I looked out the window as the sun was going down and realized that Pallace would be going on right about now. Mrs. Webb and Mrs. Gibb would be calling their children to breakfast from the opposite sides of the stage. I ran the whole scene in my mind. I wondered if Pallace would be nervous, but then I thought of her dancing on that chair in her red two--piece. I couldn’t imagine Pallace getting nervous about anything.

Because I couldn’t call my grandmother, I called Tom Lake and asked if they could send somebody to pick me up in the morning. Jeanne, the morning nurse, washed my hair while I sat on a stool in the shower, my foot in the cast, the cast in a plastic bag. I was brushed and braided and ready to go when Sebastian arrived.

Sebastian! “I thought you’d be gone!” I cried, by which I mean tears filled my eyes at the sight of him. Had I been able to jump out of the bed and throw my arms around him I would have done it.

“I called the club and told them my transmission was out.” Sebastian said. “I’m in big trouble.”

“Big trouble for me? You could have sent your brother.”

“Let’s just say the rest of the team was in no condition to drive, and they very much wanted to drive. The last thing anyone needs is Peedee wrapping my car around a tree trying to bring you home from the hospital.”

“And Pallace?”

He patted the front pocket of his jeans. “I took her keys.”

So Pallace was already Mae. You’d have to take the keys away from Mae. She was drinking all day with the men. As sorry as I was to miss my last week as Emily, it was almost worth it to know that I would never be Mae. I would never again endure Cody’s disappointment or my own lousy acting or my inability to fill out the red dress. Pallace could wear the dress. “How are the rehearsals going?” Sebastian claimed to like the rehearsals more than the finished product.

“They don’t let me in.”

I was sitting on the bed, wearing the outfit Pallace had grabbed from my room in the rush of leaving: khaki shorts and my Disney T--shirt which never did fit right again. My foot was up. They had told me to keep it elevated whenever possible. “You were there when I was doing it.”

Sebastian shrugged. “The problem seems to be that my brother has to kiss my girlfriend. They say I make them self--conscious.”

I could so clearly feel Duke lying on top of me on the stage, pinning my hands to the floor. Duke as Eddie and me as Mae. Duke as Eddie, Pallace as Mae. I stopped there. “Will they let you see the play?”

“They can’t keep me from seeing the play,” he said. “I have tickets.”

Jeanne swung through the door with a wheelchair and then stopped short. She actually blushed when she saw Sebastian there. “You’re the actor,” she said to him. I’d told Jeanne all about Duke while she washed my hair.

“I’m the brother,” Sebastian said.

“He’s your brother?” she said to me.

Now we were all laughing. “Can you believe it?” I said.

Jeanne wheeled me to the elevator with my crutches and painkillers and an antibiotic and seven typed pages of instructions. Outside, she made me transfer from the wheelchair to the car just to make sure I knew what I was doing, then she stood there and waved as we drove away. I rolled the window down to wave at her.

“By the way, you’ve been upgraded,” Sebastian told me. “They moved you to the cottage.”

“To Uncle Wallace’s?”

“He isn’t coming back and you can’t go up the stairs so it all works out.”

For my troubles I got the bathtub, the kitchenette. I tried not to be excited since the whole thing was the product of disaster. “Did Duke bring my clothes down?”

He shook his head. “They sent over a couple of interns. The whole job took them two minutes.”

Even if Duke was busy he could have found two minutes, especially since his clothes had to be moved as well. He would come for the better room, for the vodka I was betting was still in the freezer. Now I had to think about unpaid interns going through my underwear drawer. “Wait, wait!” I said. “Pallace was Emily. How did she do?”

“Conflict of interest,” Sebastian said.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning you were Emily and you were great and Pallace is my girlfriend.”

“You know I’m not the only person who’s ever played Emily, right?”

“You were the only person I’d ever seen play her until last night. You’re the gold standard.”

“Sebastian,” I said, “seriously, how did she do?”

And then he smiled, a great, toothy grin of the sort I had never seen from him. He had exactly one word and it was spectacular.

True fact: I had seen only one production of Our Town and that was when I was in seventh grade. The high school put it on and I thought it was spectacular. Every line in the play was new to me. I had no inkling that Emily would die in the third act. I cried so hard when the Stage Manager takes her back to her mother’s kitchen that I had to cover my face with my hands while my grandmother fished through her purse for Kleenex. All of which is to say you don’t see a play when you’re in it. You might see pieces, but you don’t know how it looks from a distance, the whole thing put together. Aside from the Emily I saw in seventh grade, and the Emilys I saw auditioning years later in our high school gymnasium, I didn’t know how other people played the part. That night I was going to see Pallace in Our Town.

Sebastian parked on the street and came around to give me my crutches. I crutched heroically, halfway up the drive, holding that Christmas ham of an enormous cast behind me until I had no choice but to stop. My arms were shaking.

“Come on,” he said, his steadying hand on my back. “I’ll carry you.”

It was one thing to have been carried off the tennis court or into the hospital, but something else entirely to just be carried around. I was sweating as I stared up the steep pitch of the driveway. I had done this to myself. I drank the tequila I knew not to drink, played the tennis game I didn’t want to play. It might not sound like much but it cost me everything.

Sebastian picked me up, letting the crutches clatter to the ground. He gave me a bounce to get me situated in his arms and once again I clasped my arms around his neck like a bride. “Lucky for me my brother fell in love with someone small,” he said.

Love, he said. It was the single mention of that word during my relationship with Duke.

This was how we entered that sunny cottage, Sebastian using his foot to push the door open, Sebastian taking me straight to the bed and laying me out, using the extra pillows to elevate my foot. Someone had cut a bunch of poppies and put them in a drinking glass on the nightstand and I didn’t ask who had done it for fear the flowers would be from him as well.

“I’m going to find you a wheelchair,” he said.

“I don’t need a wheelchair.” What I needed was a minute of sleep.

“Think about how far away the theater is. I really do have to go back to work now, and Duke and Pallace can’t come and get you. It’s the only way you’re going to see the play tonight.”

Sebastian went back for my crutches and leaned them against the foot of the bed. He put my pills and my book on the nightstand. Sebastian kissed my forehead with kindness, the same way my brothers had kissed me as a child. He would get me a wheelchair. He would make sure someone took me to the play. I think I was asleep before he was out the door, and then I was awake again and Duke was kissing me, the startling taste of tequila filling my mouth. He must have come straight from the lake and into my bed. He covered me with his pervasive dampness. “You’ve been gone forever,” he said, pushing off his espadrilles.

“Did Duke come and see you before the play?” Emily asks, her brow knit with concern. Joe has gone off to the goats while the girls and I wash dishes. Cherries, cooking, goats, dishes, the past. Days are endless and the weeks fly by.

“He did.” I lean into the pan to scrub off bits of whitefish. “In between rehearsal and the performance.”

Maisie shakes her head. “Knock yourself out, Duke.”

“They were busy days,” I say.

“Not that busy,” Nell says.

I smile. “No, you’re right. Not that busy.”

“Your girlfriend’s laid up in bed,” Maisie says.

“And she doesn’t get to finish her run of Our Town,” Nell says.

“In fact, she never plays Emily again,” I say, joining them for a moment in the third person. Nell had already come to this conclusion but I can see that Emily and Maisie didn’t know.

“Never?” Emily asks.

I shake my head.

“It’s just like Uncle Wallace,” Nell says, then catches herself. “I don’t mean that. It’s nothing like Uncle Wallace.”

Emily puts down her dish towel. “Never Emily or never anything else?”

“I stopped acting after that.”

“When you were twenty--four?”

“Twenty--five. I turned twenty--five in the hospital.”

“I really can’t stand this,” Maisie says.

“It redefines the quarter--life crisis,” Emily says.

“The what?”

“Quarter--life crisis,” Nell says. “It’s when your life falls apart at twenty--five or thereabout. The pandemic is our quarter--life crisis.”

“Ah.”

“But yours was so much worse,” Nell says.

“Not getting to act in Our Town again is not worse than the pandemic,” I say.

“Did you really go and see her be Emily?” Emily asks.

“Sure I did. All my friends were in that play. I had to be there for them.” I can’t remember if this is true, if this is the person I was at the time or the person I became later. Certainly we preached it to the girls growing up: Work for the good of the collective, root for the team, get over yourself.

“You went in a wheelchair?”

No one is doing dishes now, and I clap my hands the way their father does to restart their engines. “I went in a wheelchair. One of the swings from Cabaret came to get me. This isn’t a Dickens novel.”

“So how was Pallace?” Nell asks. This is the question all three of them want answered: How was Pallace?

I tell them the truth. She was spectacular.

I knew Chan from the lake. He was easy to be around, a good swimmer with a solid connection to a guy who sold top--quality weed in Detroit. He made me feel like he just happened to be walking past the cottage with an empty wheelchair in case I felt like riding along because he was going to the theater anyway. The world isn’t full of people who can pull that off. The sky was tipping into pink as he wheeled me down the path, what was left of the daylight shimmering gold on the lake.

“People are saying that you returned the serve and that it was totally magnificent,” Chan said to me as merrily we rolled along. “It cost you your leg but you did it.”

“It isn’t true,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter. All that matters is what people say. Hey, do you want some cherries? We don’t want to be the first ones there.”

I did want some cherries.

He set the brake so I wouldn’t roll backwards, down the grassy hill and into the lake. “I found this tree last week,” Chan said. “Sweet cherries. I don’t know what it’s doing here. I mean, somebody must have planted it and then not stuck around. Can you imagine bringing a sapling out here with no one to look after it? Good luck, little tree. Maybe it was some kind of performance art.” He went to a tree and picked off a few handfuls, then came back and put them in my lap. I thanked him. I was new to the idea that trees were things that needed looking after.

“You look nice.” He stepped back to look at me in the golden light. “But not too nice. Not like you put too much thought into it. You look exactly the right amount of nice.”

That was the look I’d been going for and it had taken a great deal of effort, considering how hard it was to get dressed with a cast on your foot. The part I hadn’t considered was that other people would know, Chan would know, but I couldn’t do anything about that. I ate cherries all the way to the theater.

We arrived with the chickens, all looking for their seats. The curtain was up and Joe was sitting on the stage reading a book.

There were steps down to the rows of seats so Chan parked me behind the back row and went to get me a program. Duke’s hair would be gelled and pinned by now. He would read through his maniacal Editor Webb notes for the hundredth time and then go smoke a cigarette and stand on his hands. Two slips of paper announced the change of cast: the role of the Stage Manager would be played by Joe Nelson, and the role of Emily Webb would be played by Pallace Clarke. I folded them up and put them in my pocket. I am ready, I am ready, I am ready I told myself, until finally the lights came down and it didn’t matter if I was ready or not.

“This play is called Our Town,” Joe began, the Stage Manager began. He might as well have raised a lantern because we knew we would follow him. You listened to Uncle Wallace because he was mesmerizing, but you listened to Joe because he was telling you what you needed to know. I thought about our first day of rehearsal—-years ago!—-and how it was the same thing then. We knew he was trustworthy. Joe had seen the entire story and stitched it together for us. Now there he was as the Stage Manager, doing the same thing. “This play is called Our Town.”

Emily doesn’t come on for a while, and when she does she only has a single line. I could see Pallace dancing in the chorus of the Kit Kat Klub, her leg flashing up and over the back of her chair and then sitting down hard. I could see her in the lake, laughing, keeping her head above water. I could see her stretched across a blanket by the shore of the lake, a tree above her, her head in Sebastian’s lap. But I could not see her as Emily because when I thought of Emily I was still seeing myself. Had I come with a knife I would have sawed the cast off my leg right there. I could have made do without it. Only three more performances after this one. I could have managed.

But then all the children were there—-George and Rebecca Gibbs having breakfast stage left, which represents their house, Emily and Wally Webb having their breakfast stage right, which represents their house. Pallace was a good head taller than I am, and she was Black, but Pallace was Emily. I believed her from the moment she made her entrance, when she sat down at her mother’s table, saying she’s the brightest girl in school for her age. Every sentence she spoke was sitting in my mouth.

I learned so many things that summer at Tom Lake and most of those lessons I would have gladly done without. The hardest one had nothing to do with Duke or plans or love. It was realizing that I wasn’t Emily anymore. Even if I’d gotten to play the part on Broadway with Spalding Gray, there still would come a time when I’d be finished and someone else would take the role. Many someone elses could do it just as well, because look, Pallace on her second night was every bit as good as I had been after years of practice. Day after day she had watched me in rehearsal and then made the decision to do the part her own way. She stamped her feet at times, found places to laugh I’d never seen. She kissed her father, who was also my boyfriend, and when he says in response that he has never had a kiss from such a great lady before, he meant it. When Pallace had come to her audition for Tom Lake, she wanted to sing and dance, but she wanted to play Emily as well. People who could sing and dance and act and play the ukelele and walk on their hands were legion in summer stock. You couldn’t swim in the lake without brushing up against one. Pallace had practiced, studied hard. With the exception of Lee, the understudies ran neck and neck with the actors they were set to replace. The only disappointment the audience felt was when someone like Uncle Wallace didn’t show. His name was the draw, but they didn’t know a Lara from a Pallace. So when that first Emily took off, why hadn’t they just given the part to the understudy?

“Emily isn’t Black,” I heard the woman in front of me say very clearly to her husband at the first intermission. Programs rustled all around, a collective murmuring like wind in leaves. Where was the slip of paper that had fallen out of their programs?

What had it said?

All those hours she had endured me, day after day as she watched from the back of the theater, all those lines she had wanted to speak for herself.

You don’t see the play when you’re in it, and you miss the chatter of intermission entirely. Our Town has an intermission after each of the first two acts, and the second one felt like a break in a political rally or a tent revival. The disbelievers were starting to lean forward. They were listening. The message had made no sense at first but this Emily was eroding their notion of what was correct. Her wedding day was played not for eroticism but for fear. She didn’t want to leave home, keep house, make meals, endure childbirth, because childbirth would kill her. She wanted to be her father’s girl, his birthday girl. Growing up was a terrible thing—-a clear path to the third act. Emily showed us that, all those moments in life we had missed and would never get back again.

The remaining few who’d managed to hold on to their belief that Emily could not be Black were destroyed by the third act. We all were. When she went back to her mother’s kitchen I cried like I had never seen the play before. I cried because she was that good. I cried because I would never play Emily again. I cried because I had loved that world so much.