17

17

We do not stop for snow in northern Michigan. Schools open, buses run. Knuckling under to snow means condemning yourself to an uneducated populace. Joe gets up early to drive the tractor with the blower attachment down the rutted drive while I shovel the steps. All those years I pulled the girls out of their beds one at a time and rushed them to the warm kitchen to begin their layering, red tights beneath pink long underwear. What difference did it make? I filled them with oatmeal, gave them hot chocolate, finished them off with hats and mittens and boots, then sent them out into the drifts. Had it been snowing this morning we would be in the orchard now, pulling frozen cherries off the trees.

But on this July morning it is raining, great white sheets of water pounding every side of the house. The lightning flicks like a strobe, filling the kitchen with a single second of blinding brightness before flicking off again. We wait for the low crash of thunder, counting one, two, three before it comes. We will work in the rain, but every member of our family has sense enough not to stand beneath a tree in lightning, which means that lightning, at least for an hour or so, is our favorite weather of all.

“Will you look at it,” Nell says.

I look just in time to see a jagged bolt split the sky in half, leaves torn from the trees shooting sideways. “Do you have to stand right in front of the window?” I say to my youngest. She clasps her hands behind her back, cutting a small silhouette in the frame.

“Do you think the lightning’s going to get me?”

“No, but I think the pear trees might. Didn’t you tell me once that pear trees are agitated by lightning somehow? Don’t they come through the window?” All year long we stare out this window—-the tissue--thin blossoms, the birds, the cherries and the apples, the bright--red autumn, the sweep of snow, the resulting mud, and then the blossoms again. French Impressionism has nothing on our view. We put the window in when we expanded the kitchen and built the family room. Michigan farmers like houses they can keep warm, and so for months we debated the question of warmth versus beauty and in the end beauty won. Neighbors come into this room and shake their heads at such decadence.

“You’re awful,” Nell says, stepping away. She says to me, “Does your ankle tell you when it’s going to rain?”

“You mean my Achilles? No. It has no weather predicting abilities.”

“Does it ever hurt?”

I shake my head. “Never. I would say an entire decade can go by without my thinking of it.”

Maisie is lying on her stomach in front of the sofa, one side of her face pressed to the floor. “Hazel,” she pleads. “Sweetheart.” She reaches out her arm to no avail. She reports that the dog is now the size of a cantaloupe, obstinate and trembling in the farthest corner where no one can reach her without moving furniture. “Will one of you bring me a piece of cheese?” Maisie asks, not looking up.

I put down my sewing and go to the refrigerator. Joe and Emily are no doubt in the barn, sorting, stacking, repairing. They will sit in the barn office, which is full of spiders and hay, placing orders and writing checks. They know how to make good use of an hour of lightning, and so do we, but our use is different. I will get the mending done. Nell will make a spinach pie for dinner. Maisie will continue to try to coax the dog from under the sofa.

“So when did Duke start sleeping with Pallace?” Nell asks, pulling out the mixing bowls.

I laugh. Maisie sits straight up, banging her head on the edge of the coffee table.

“Ow!” I say on her behalf. “Are you okay?”

She rubs her head with her fingers then checks them for blood. “Have the two of you been talking without us?”

“No.” Nell comes over to look at her sister’s head in another flash of lightning. “But you know where this is going.”

“I swear to you, I have no idea where this is going.”

“That’s where this is going,” I say.

“I didn’t think Pallace liked Duke.”

“Sometimes that makes it all the more compelling.”

Nell nods in sad agreement and I start to think that when this is over, and it is very nearly over, each of my daughters should be asked to serve up their own brief pasts.

“Well, we can’t talk about it when Emily’s not here,” Maisie says. “We promised.”

“We sure can’t talk about it when she is here,” Nell says. “She’s not going to want to hear anything bad about Duke.”

“How did you know if Mom didn’t tell you?” Maisie asks. “Did Dad tell you?”

Nell groans.

“That’s a horrifying thought,” I say.

“I know that Duke’s sleeping with Pallace because that’s the way it works.” Nell has put on red lipstick this morning though I cannot for the life of me imagine why. “The guy likes the star of the show. Then later on he doesn’t like her because she’s the star of the show. Then there’s a new show with a new star and he realizes the new one’s better.”

“For the record, I didn’t know any of this at the time.” I raise the shirt I’m mending to my lips, bite the thread.

“And you want to be an actress?” Maisie asks Nell.

“Because it’s so different in vet school?” Nell replies.

Now Maisie’s quiet. Her long--distance boyfriend has recently told her he needed space, as if there had been some shortage of space. Nell has told me this in strictest confidence. From Maisie I’ve heard nothing. She lies back out on her stomach. “Hazel?” she says.

“Emily doesn’t understand anything about the way the world works,” Nell says. “Benny’s been in love with her since she was three.”

“Faithfully in love,” Maisie adds.

“She says, ‘You’re so lucky. You get to date lots of people. You get to go out and have experiences and all I’ll ever have is Benny.’?”

Maisie stretches her arm further, the cheese in her upturned palm. “Which is like calling a marine in Afghanistan to tell him that you wish you got to go to war, too.”

Nell shakes her head. “She’s only been in love with Benny and Duke.”

“So maybe it would help her to know that Duke was unfaithful,” Maisie says.

“Maybe we don’t need to talk about it at all,” I say. “That works for me. Duke ended up with Pallace for a while. What else is there to say?”

“I feel so bad for Sebastian,” Maisie says.

“I feel bad for Pallace,” Nell says.

I smile to think that neither of them feels bad for me because here we are, together in this tight house with the rain lashing at the trees.

“Did it happen right away?” Maisie asks.

“I don’t know. What constitutes right away?” We are still on summer stock time, after all, four performances of Our Town left when I came back from the hospital, Fool for Love opened four nights after Our Town closed. I would say within the first five minutes of Fool for Love I knew they’d already had sex and were planning on having sex again as soon as the curtain came down. I knew it, Sebastian knew it, the audience knew it. When she tipped the bottle of tequila back, I could see it going down her throat. When he threw her to the floor and covered her with his body, I could hear people gasp. Sebastian and I gasped. “I think by the time Fool for Love opened things had changed,” I say diplomatically. “I’m not sure. They never told me.”

“What do you mean, they never told you?” Nell asks.

“I mean one night Duke was there and the next night he wasn’t. I couldn’t exactly go out and find him. Having a giant cast on your ankle really does impede your ability to hunt your boyfriend down. They don’t do casts for Achilles ruptures anymore, did you know that? They put you in a walking boot that you can take off in the bath.”

Did it happen before Fool for Love? Did it happen while I was in the hospital? Would it have happened if my ankle hadn’t swollen and I had stayed only one night instead of two? Two nights was one night more than Duke could sleep alone. They don’t even keep you one night now. It’s outpatient surgery. These were the things I used to think about, how with a slight shift in circumstances the outcome might have gone another way. Then I realized it would have gone that way eventually. Then I stopped thinking about it.

“So what did you do?” Nell asks. She abandons the spinach pie before she starts it, coming out of the kitchen to sit across from me in the big green chair. Her red lipstick makes her look French. Maisie gets off the floor and lies down on the sofa. When the next round of thunder shakes the floorboards, Hazel darts out and cries to be picked up.

I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was, and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires do not neatly coexist, but this is where we are in the story.

I’d latched on to Our Town when I was sixteen and stayed fastened tight until the hour Pallace took the stage and said the words I’d thought of as mine. After that the whole thing just blinked out. Ripley thought a good therapist could turn me around but I never tried. My confidence had snapped and left me self--conscious, semiconscious. I don’t think much could be done about that. I needed to come up with a plan, not for my life necessarily, just for these days, something that would justify my staying at Tom Lake until I could walk out on two feet.

I wheeled myself over to the wardrobe department to talk to Cat. Cat was the busiest person I knew that summer. She made the costumes, altered the costumes, mended the costumes, and did it with half the staff she needed. She made the calico dress I wore in the first and second acts, and the white wedding dress for the second and third acts, then she made replicas for Pallace on the off chance I would rupture my Achilles on the tennis court. Once when she was zipping my dress, Cat told me she’d stayed up half the night sewing spangles back onto the glittery bits of the Cabaret wardrobe. She said no matter how tightly she knotted the sequins down, the cast would dance them off again.

I had believed that Tom Lake was more enlightened than the average small town in Michigan, but the longer I stayed, the more I could see how it operated like the rest of the world. The directors and the choreographers were men. The men chose the plays, made the schedule, and ran the lights. The women made the food, styled the wigs, and glued false eyelashes onto eyelids. Cat was the woman with the needle and thread.

There were three steps going up to the large room full of sewing machines and dressmaker’s dummies where she worked behind the scene shop. I tried to calculate a way to get out of the wheelchair and onto the ground and then scooch up the stairs backwards on my rear end while keeping my cast more or less off the ground. That’s when a girl walked by in a striped T--shirt, she couldn’t have been twelve, and asked if I needed help.

Where to begin?

Cat and I didn’t know each other long, but her help was immeasurable. I still sent her a Christmas card every year. For her part, she claimed her fantasy had always been that someone would knock on her door one day and volunteer to do the mending. For mending I had credentials. I knew how to tailor and cut patterns and replicate simple things without patterns, though I couldn’t do any of those things without standing. Mending, however, was work for sitting down. She made me a sewing basket on the spot, put in a beautiful pair of Fiskars like the ones my grandmother had. She gathered up the costumes in a laundry basket, put the sewing basket in the laundry basket, then put the laundry basket on my lap and wheeled me home.

“They put you in the cottage?” she said, looking around in wonder at just how nice it was.

“Just since this.” I nodded at my foot. “Uncle Wallace was here but they say he isn’t coming back.”

“I wouldn’t think so.” Cat, of course, had been there that night. She sat down on the little chintz sofa. I didn’t know how old she was, maybe my mother’s age, but at that time in life I thought every woman over thirty was my mother’s age. Cat had sad green eyes and hair that must have been blond when she was young. I won’t say she was pretty but she had a dreamy quality about her, something soft. “I’ve been here before,” she said, pulling a throw pillow needlepointed with violets into her lap. “A long time ago.”

“With Uncle Wallace?” I meant it to be funny but she nodded.

“He always stayed in the cottage. Nowhere else. The first couple of years he came to Tom Lake he’d invite me over sometimes, maybe once or twice a week. He always said he needed me to hem his pants. He called me his wardrobe mistress. He got such a kick out of that.”

I smiled because I wanted Cat to think I understood the ways of the world. One person’s endured lechery was another person’s cherished summer affair.

“He was a lovely man,” she said, as if he were already dead.

Every day I took a jumble of snags and tears and turned them back into clothes. I found the work extremely satisfying, as I imagine Rumpelstiltskin must have gotten a kick out of spinning all that straw into gold. Did actors destroy everything they touched? Cat brought a new basket over in the morning and by the afternoon I had finished. Sometimes when there was an extra minute she brought a couple of sandwiches and told me stories about Albert Long, nice stories about him being funny or thoughtful, never the things I didn’t want to know. She said she had wanted to visit him in the hospital after his esophageal disaster but she was afraid. After those first couple of years he never seemed to remember who she was, who she had been to him, even when she was on her knees pinning a hem in his trousers. I told her about meeting Elyse Adler and then she was glad she hadn’t gone. Elyse was the wife Uncle Wallace had been cheating on in those days.

I had Duke open all the curtains before he left in the morning. I loved to sew in the cottage, the light was so good. I could sit in bed with my foot up and my mountain of mending and manage to stave off panic for hours at a time, my mind settled by the work in my hands.

“When are you going to call Ripley back?” Duke asked before he left for rehearsal. He had shaved in the shower, the way he did. His hair was dripping on the edge of the bed where he perched, naked. Maybe I did love him.

“It’s impossible to get to a phone around here.”

“They have phones all over the place. He keeps leaving you messages at the office.”

I had made the mistake of telling Duke about Ripley calling me at the hospital. He saw the movie as the answer to everything: the loss of Emily, my one--footedness. “Why should I call him when he never listens to me?”

“If you’re saying something stupid he shouldn’t listen.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” I said.

“Welcome to the world. You’ve got a movie coming out. This isn’t the part where you start burning bridges.”

I touched his arm, the silky skin stretched over muscle. The round red scar where he had put out the cigarette still had the last vestige of a scab. “Would you do me a favor?”

“What?”

“Do you think you could rig up some sort of ironing board over the bed?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I want to iron the mending. That’s how you finish the job. But I can’t iron if I can’t stand up. If I had an ironing board that went over the bed, just a little one—-” I was thinking of the Veit ironing table with suction and blowing my grandmother and I used to dream about. What I was asking for was nothing like that. I had just finished sewing the sash on a muslin apron that I knew belonged to Mrs. Gibbs. I wanted to make it look nice.

He pushed my hair back from my forehead with the flat of his hand “You’re losing your mind, cricket.”

I looked at him, his crazy beauty. “Go,” I said kindly.

Duke was so happy now that Our Town was almost over, now that he was almost Eddie full--time, now that he was taking Pallace back to the room that had once been mine after they swam in the lake. I didn’t know the last part at the time but I understood that everything was shifting. Duke was on his way up and I was on my way out. Neither of us could have said those words but we knew.

Pallace came to see me but found the floor of the cottage to be blistering hot. Try as she might, she couldn’t stand on it for more than a minute. She arrived with a bottle of Orangina from the cafeteria, a bag of pretzels: small offerings to lay on her altar of guilt. Clearly, she was tortured, and I was foolish enough to think she felt bad about taking my part—-two parts! A low fog of tequila settled around her.

“When’s Sebastian coming back?” I turned the open bag of pretzels in her direction but she shook her head. Pallace was thin and getting thinner. I knew because I’d already taken in the red dress she would wear in Fool for Love. Sebastian was very much my hero in those days, and I’d be so much happier once he came back. If Sebastian were there the teams would be even: two actors and two non--actors.

Pallace tipped her head, bit her lip. “He took too much time off. He got in trouble at work. He’s going to be busy for a while catching up on the lessons he missed.” She shifted her weight from side to side, very nearly lifting her feet to keep them from burning. “I should go,” she said, her face aglow. “I’ve got so many lines.”

“Practice here!” I patted the empty space beside me where Duke slept. “You can climb up in the big fluffy bed and we can run lines.”

Oh, Pallace, such a good actress, and yet she couldn’t fix her face to make me think that things were fine, that she was my friend and would return. She all but ran to get away from me.

In retrospect, my inability to put it together was its own sort of gift. I would understand what they were doing soon enough, at which point I would finally understand what I had done to Veronica. Veronica had such a small part in the story and still I loved her more than everyone at Tom Lake put together. She stayed with me after the rest of them had faded, maybe because we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.

Attending those three remaining performances of Our Town was an exercise in endurance. I watched George and Emily up on ladders, talking about their homework, talking about the moon.

George and Emily at the soda fountain talking about their future. There they are at their wedding ceremony and Pallace is asking Duke to take her away. Hadn’t he always said she was his girl? The next thing you know it’s the third act and she’s sitting in the graveyard with the rest of the dead. For all the times I was in the play, I don’t think I ever fully understood just how fast it went. Chan very kindly came back to the cottage and wheeled me over for all three performances, but after that first night I told him he didn’t have to stay. I could ask any stranger to push my wheelchair back across the campus of Tom Lake when the night was black and full of stars. Over time I would have built up my confidence with the wheelchair but it was so hilly and the thought of tipping over in the dark when I was alone and breaking a shoulder or cracking a knee put the fear of god in me. Duke loved to set me on the front stairs of the company housing late at night when he got home, then race around in my wheelchair, making it spin in crazy circles. Then he would take it down the hill, going faster and faster until he threw his up hands and screamed, his head tipped back, his eyes closed. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand to watch him and so I closed my eyes.

The part of this story in which I lived in the cottage and sewed for Cat, the part where Our Town was still in performances and Fool for Love was still in rehearsal and Duke was still in my bed, couldn’t have lasted much more than a week, eight or nine days at most. But they were long days, summer stock days. For me, it may as well have been a geological age.

Saint Sebastian returned for the opening of Fool for Love. Oh, how I’d missed him! It is so clear to me now that he was the best of us. At first glance a person would have thought it was Duke who ruled the orbit, with Sebastian and Pallace and me as the circling moons. But Sebastian was the one who was necessary. His interest in what we said made us interesting, covered up our deficits. I missed the four of us and all the places we were together—-the lake, the tennis court, the car. So often my mind went back to that day at the Nelsons’ farm.

“Look at you!” Sebastian held out his arms to me when I crutched to the open door to meet him.

But look at him, his white Oxford shirt starched and ironed, his navy summer blazer. No doubt it was the same shirt and blazer he wore to the bar of the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, but tonight he was wearing them for Pallace, for the opening of the play that starred his brother and his best girl.

Sebastian brought the wheelchair around and knelt to lift my cast onto the footrest. “It’s going to be so much easier for her now,” he said, reflecting on Pallace. “When it was Our Town one night and then Cabaret the next night and then rehearsing Fool for Love all day, I thought, she’s never going to make it.”

Why hadn’t I thought of it this way? All the pressure she was under because of me, her boyfriend made to stay at work because of me. Small wonder she could barely stand to be in my room. “Pallace is tougher than the rest of us,” I said, by which I meant Duke and myself, not Sebastian.

“That’s why she told me not to come up for a while,” he said.

“She told you not to come?”

“I understood. She didn’t have the time. I mean, when you think about her schedule there wasn’t one minute. I wanted to see her in everything. I can tell you that. I really wanted to see her in Our Town again, even if it meant driving up and turning around to drive back after the show, I would have done it but she said it was too much.” He was so careful to avoid any obstacles or breaks in the walkway as he wheeled me to the theater.

“It would have been a lot.”

“Joe did it.”

Joe Nelson! I hadn’t said goodbye to him after the last performance. I forgot that I wasn’t going to see him again. “Maybe we can all go back to the Nelsons’ farm,” I said, thinking I could get another chance. We could live the entire day again! Lunch with Maisie and Ken, the napkins, Sebastian and Pallace holding hands when we went into the woods, Duke running across the beach, Duke lying down in the thick cemetery grass to smoke. I would take all of it.

“We can go anywhere you want as long as we get her here in time for the curtain.”

Her, he said, not him. So recently it would have been Duke’s schedule Sebastian kept his eye on. “Let’s go to the Yacht Club for lunch,” I said. “The three of us could come down in Pallace’s car and meet you.” Duke loved to talk about the Yacht Club, he loved to say the word yacht, to say how Sebastian ruled the world in his tennis whites.

Sebastian stopped at the place where the view of the lake was best, the place where you turned off to take the path to the theater, the place we ran past day after day as we barreled down the grassy slope in the afternoon heat to throw ourselves into the water.

“The club is no place to go,” he said.

A heron raked across the surface of the lake just as we were watching, wetting his toes and coming up empty. “Look at that!” I said. We were both so excited to see the bird. I could have asked him what was wrong with having lunch at the Yacht Club but I already knew. Sebastian wanted to protect her from everything, including the place where he worked.

Unlike Chan, who left me parked behind the last row, Sebastian picked me up and carried me down the stairs. To be fair, it never crossed my mind that Chan might offer to carry me anywhere, and I don’t think it occurred to him either, but it was comforting to be in Sebastian’s arms again. “You know I wouldn’t do this if you were a normal--sized person,” he said, and I laughed, glad for once to be small. This was the big night, and we’d come early for the privilege of sitting in the center of the second row.

The lights were up as the house started to fill. I told Sebastian about the sewing I’d taken on and the things I’d found in people’s pockets. He asked where I learned to sew and so I told him about my grandmother and how I’d been in her shop since a time before memory. Then he told me about his lessons for the week, about a fourteen--year--old boy named Andy with a canny backhand who was the best student he’d ever had. The boy’s parents had joined the Yacht Club just so he could take lessons with Sebastian. The excitement in his voice when he talked about this kid was moving to me. More than once he told me Andy was his best.

I don’t think Sebastian and I had talked about anything much before he took me to the hospital but we were different now, we counted each other as friends. I was, for those few remaining minutes, happy just to be with him. When in the future I would think of Saint Sebastian it was always at that moment in the theater before the curtain went up, his white shirt and navy blazer, his smile as he leaned over to whisper something about the woman who was standing in the aisle, complaining that all the good seats had been taken when the play was set to start in five minutes.

Fool for Loveis complete in one act. Sam Shepard in his infinite wisdom knew that, if given an intermission, too many people would make a run for the door. I don’t mean the play was bad. As much as I hated it, I knew it wasn’t bad, but it ran a person ragged, both the actors and the audience. Even if you weren’t the two people in the second--row center waking up to the fact that everything you loved was lost, it was hard to watch. When Eddie and Mae started kissing, Sebastian covered my wrist with his hand and kept it there for the rest of the performance, his eyes straight ahead. Duke was gone and Pallace was gone and all we could do was sit there and wait for the show to be over.

But while we waited we watched them. We understood that there had never really been a world in which Pallace would have stayed with a tennis coach from East Detroit, never any world in which Duke would stay with anyone at all. We were members of the audience and they were slender gods, brilliant and terrifying. They lit the room with the lightning of their drunken grief and extravagant love. How could they get to the end of that show without going home and slamming one another up against the wall, the floor, the bed? Surely some actors in the past had managed, the same ones who swapped the tequila for water, but Duke and Pallace were just kids. Prodigiously talented kids.

When finally it was finished, the audience leapt to their feet to applaud and Sebastian pushed his way down the row and was gone. It was the last I would see of him. I sat there in the pale blue dress my grandmother made and my enormous plaster cast and waited. I hadn’t understood that Pallace and I were in a race but we were, and she had won. The cocktail of grief and humiliation and longing battered my heart with such violence I was sure I could feel the muscle tear. When people asked if I needed any help I told them no, my friend was coming right back, but after another half hour, after every other person had trickled away, I had to concede that not even good old Saint Sebastian was coming to get me. That was when I saw how the backs of theater seats could provide a stable means of transfer. I stood and held one and then the next and the next, hopping my way to the aisle and then hopping my way up the stairs row by row, all the way back to where my wheelchair was waiting. I used the chair as a walker, pushing it through the door until I got outside and got myself seated and got myself very slowly back home in the dark. Funnily enough, this turned out to be the thing that saved me: the knowledge that I could get back by myself.