2

2

“You had a ‘u’ in your name?” Emily looks at me skeptically.

“For sixteen years.”

“Did you know she had a ‘u’?” she asks her sisters, and they shake their heads, mystified by what I’ve withheld from them.

“There’s a lot you don’t know,” I say.

Hazel the dog looks at me.

“I didn’t know it was going to be funny,” Maisie says.

“No idea,” Nell says.

“It isn’t funny,” I tell them. “You know that. It isn’t a funny story except for the parts that are.”

“Life,” Nell says, dropping her head against my shoulder in a way that touches me. “Keep going. I’m thinking the hot George is still going to be there.”

I waited for the George and Emily on the stage to finish before going out to the lobby, the application in my hand, the Polaroid camera around my neck. Somehow I’d forgotten there would still be so many people waiting to try out for the other parts: the Gibbses and the Webbs. Men and women and children were pacing, silently mouthing the words on the pages they held. I was one of them now. I was about to tell George I was disappointed in him because all he ever thought about was baseball and was no longer the boy I considered to be my friend.

A scant handful of Georges and Emilys sat in the hallway that went back to the stage. Everyone had a chair except for Veronica and the first George, the good one. They were sitting together on the stairs and he was making her laugh, which, I can tell you, was not the hardest thing in the world to do. Her black hair swung down across one flushed cheek, and I realized that we should have swapped our posts two hours ago. I had forgotten because I’d been studying at the school of theatrical auditions, and she had forgotten because she’d been talking to George. You really couldn’t hear the stage from the hallway, which was why she stayed close to the door, propping it open just a little bit with her fat Stephen King novel. Whatever else was going on, Veronica never stopped paying attention to the stage.

When she looked up and saw me there with the camera she raised one magnificent eyebrow. Veronica’s eyebrows were thick and black and she tweezed them into delicate submission. She could get more information across with an eyebrow than other people could with a microphone. She knew I was going to read for Emily, and that I would get the part. I used to say Veronica could never play poker because her thoughts passed across her forehead like a tickertape. She realized that she could have read for Emily, and then she could have been the one to come to rehearsals with this guy. They could have practiced their lines in his car, and raised their clasped hands above their heads at the end of every performance, bowing one more time before the curtain came down. But Veronica almost never got to go out at night because her mother was a nurse who worked the second shift and her stepfather was long gone and she had to look after her brothers. We both had two brothers, yet another bond between us, though mine were much older and hers, technically half brothers, were little kids. If it hadn’t been for those brothers, Veronica would have made a truly great Emily.

“Really?” she asked me.

I nodded, handing her the camera. She stood to take the clip out of my hair.

“You have to go last,” she said. “No jumping line. If Jimmy’s still around he can read with you.”

Jimmy looked me dead in the eye and reached out his hand. We shook on it. “No place I’d rather be,” he said.

I went back down the hall and took my seat. I didn’t want anyone to think I was getting preferential treatment, which, of course, I was. I didn’t have to run to the bathroom with Veronica to know what she was doing. Mr. Martin needed to find an Emily in a field with no contenders. All his hopes would be pinned on whatever girl came last. I had audited over four hours of AP acting classes, which didn’t mean I knew how to act, but I sure as hell knew how not to. All I had to do was say the words and not get in the way.

When the last pair had gone and it was just me and Veronica and Jimmy--George in the hall, I asked Veronica to braid my hair.

Jimmy--George shook his head and Veronica agreed with him. “It’s prettier down,” she said.

I was wearing jeans and duck boots and my brother Hardy’s old U. New Hampshire sweatshirt. Go Wildcats.

“You would have told me, right?” Veronica said. “If this was always the master plan?”

“You know I never have a plan.” Why did it feel like I was leaving her?

She cocked her head like you do when you hear the sound of a door opening somewhere in the house, then she put her arms around me and squeezed. “Kill it,” she whispered.

The gym was the gym again, site of all humiliations: the running, the kickball, the dancing, the play. I wanted to teach English, join the Peace Corps, save a dog’s life, sew a dress. Acting had not been on the list. When I handed my form to one of the men who stood to take it, I very nearly cried out from the fear. Was this how the Stage Managers felt? Was this the reason they lit their pipes and fiddled with their hats? The Georges leapt, the Emilys twirled their fingers through their hair like they were practicing the baton, all because they knew they were going to die up there. My grandmother was watching, and I knew she must be so afraid for me. I closed my eyes for one second, telling myself it would all go so fast. Jimmy was George and I was Emily and we knew our parts by heart.

“Emily, why are you mad at me?” George said.

“I’m not mad at you,” I said.

It was a simple conversation between two childhood friends who were about to fall in love. I said the lines the way I’d heard them in my head all morning, and when we were finished, Mr. Martin and my grandmother and the three men who were with them stood and clapped their hands.

I look at my watch. It’s easy to forget how late it is because the sun stays up forever in the summer. “We’re switching to montage now,” I tell the girls. “I won’t put you through any more of high school.”

“But what about the play?” Emily asks, her impossible legs over the back of the couch. Emily has never been able to sit on furniture like a normal person. I lost that fight when she was still a child. Whoever installed her interior compass put the magnet in upside down.

“You know all about the play, and anyway, it comes up a lot. We have to pace ourselves.”

“What happened to Veronica and Jimmy--George?” Maisie asks. “I’ve never heard a word about either of them.”

“We lost touch.”

Maisie snorts. “There is no such thing as losing touch.” She pulls her phone from the pocket of her shorts and wags it at me like some wonderful new invention. “What are their last names?”

I look at her and smile.

“You can at least tell us which one of you ended up with him,” Nell says.

“We all ended up with ourselves.”

The girls groan in harmony. It’s their best trick.

Emily reaches over and tugs on my shirt. “Give us something.”

We will be back in the orchard hours from now. If they don’t go to bed soon they’ll be worthless tomorrow, though I don’t tell them that. I labor to tell them as little as possible. “The play was a big success. We were scheduled for six performances and we got extended to ten. A reporter came from Concord and wrote us up in the Monitor.”

My picture was on the front page of the weekend section. My grandmother bought five copies. I found them stacked in the bottom of her blanket chest after she died.

Nell asks who played the Stage Manager. Nell is an actress. She has to see the whole thing in her head.

The Stage Manager. There had been so many Stage Managers. I have to think about it. The bad ones are all so clear in my mind, but who got the part? He was good, I know that. I try to picture him walking me to the cemetery. “Marcia’s father!” I cry, because even if I don’t remember his name, I see his face as clear as day. The brain is a remarkable thing, what’s lost snaps right into focus and you’ve done nothing at all. “He was trying out for Doc Gibbs but he was better than the other men so Mr. Martin made him the Stage Manager.” He lacked the hubris to believe that he should have the lead, that’s what made him good. Marcia was humiliated by the thought of me spending time with her father. She avoided me through all the rehearsals and then the play, wouldn’t sit with me at lunch, wouldn’t look at me, but when we came back in the fall for our senior year we were fine again.

“And Jimmy was George?” Emily asks.

“Clearly, Jimmy was George,” Maisie says.

“Jimmy was George,” I say.

“Was he as good a George as Duke?” Emily asks. Oh, the look that comes over her when she says Duke’s name. I wish I’d had the wherewithal to lie about everything, continuously, right from the start.

“Duke never played George.”

Maisie raises a hand to object. “Who was he then?”

“He was Mr. Webb.”

“No,” Nell says. “No. At Tom Lake? Duke was George.”

“I was there. None of you were born.”

“But all three of us can’t have it wrong,” Emily says, as if their math outweighs my life.

“You remember it that way because it makes a better story if Duke was George and I was Emily. That doesn’t means it’s true.”

They mull on this for a minute.

“But that means he played your father,” Maisie says.

As if on cue, their own father walks in the back door, his pants bristling with chaff. Hazel raises her head and barks until Maisie shushes her. Hazel barks at the entrance of any man.

“Workers,” he says to us, clapping his hands. “Go to bed.”

“Daddy, we’re old,” says Nell, the youngest. “You can’t send us to bed.”

Emily, our farmer, Emily, who plans to take all of this over when we are old, looks at her watch. “Mom was just about to switch to montage.”

“What’s the story?” he asks, pulling off his boots by the door the way I’ve asked him to for years.

The girls look at one another and then at me.

“The past,” I say.

“Ah,” he says, and takes off his glasses. “I’ll be in the shower. No excuses in the morning though.”

“Promise,” we all say.

And so I endeavor to take us through the boring parts as quickly as possible.

My senior year I signed up for drama club. I played Annie Sullivan in The Miracle Worker with a very small seventh grader named Sissy who had to be reminded not to break the skin when she bit me. We slung each other all over the stage. The big spring musical was Bye Bye Birdie, and I played Rosie DeLeon. No one would call me a singer but I didn’t embarrass myself. I got into Dartmouth and Penn without financial aid. I went to the University of New Hampshire, where the yearly bill, including tuition, room, board, books, and fees, came to just over $2,500 after my merit scholarship. In college, I was no closer to knowing what I was going to do with my life than I’d been in high school. The University of New Hampshire didn’t offer fashion design and I still hadn’t signed up for chemistry. I kept the application for the Peace Corps in my desk. My grandmother had given me her beloved black Singer for graduation, a war horse, and I made pocket money shortening the corduroy skirts of sorority girls. The days filled up with British Literature and Introduction to Biology and piles of sewing. I fell asleep in the library, my head turned sideways on an open book. Acting never crossed my mind.

Or it didn’t until my junior year, when I saw an audition notice for Our Town tacked to a cork board in the student center. I was there to tack up my own notice: Stitch--It, Speedy Alterations. My first thought was that it would be fun to register people for the play, and my second thought was that I could try for Emily. There would be so much pleasure in saying those words again, and I understood the metrics by which one’s social sphere was enlarged by theater. Even as a junior, most of the kids I knew in college were the kids I’d gone to high school with.

In any given year more girls who had once played Emily attended the University of New Hampshire than any other university in the country, all of us thinking that we had nailed the part. What I wouldn’t have given to be in the room for their auditions, but this time I lacked a plausible excuse. I waited in the hallway with my number, wearing my brother’s Wildcats sweatshirt for luck.

Luck was everything.

Bill Ripley was in the audience on the night of the third performance. He was a tall man with perpetually flushed cheeks and a premature edge of gray in his dark hair that gave him an air of gravitas. He sat in the fifth row with his sister, his voluminous wool dress coat draped over his lap because he hadn’t wanted to wait in line for the coat check.

I called him The Talented Mr. Ripley because I’d seen the paperback once in a bookstore and liked the title. I thought of it as a compliment. Everyone in my family referred to him as Ripley--Believe--It--Or--Not. Both sobriquets contained an element of truth, which is not to suggest that Ripley was a sociopath, but rather that he had an ability to insert himself in other people’s lives and make them feel like he belonged there. The believe--it--or--not part was self--evident.

People don’t get scouted in Durham, New Hampshire, and Ripley was no scout. His sister lived in Boston, and he’d come to visit for her birthday. What she wanted, what she’d specifically asked him for as a present, was that they drive up to Durham so that he could see his niece, her daughter Rae Ann, in the role of Mrs. Gibbs. Ripley’s sister believed her daughter had talent, and she believed her brother owed her the consideration of a look.

I hadn’t known Ripley’s niece before the play, and even after a slew of rehearsals and three performances I still wouldn’t say I knew her. She played my mother--in--law, and like every other girl in that production, Rae Ann had wanted to be Emily and so held my success quietly against me. That she won the role of Mrs. Gibbs spoke in her favor, and that she was completely flat in the part was hardly her fault. It’s tough for a nineteen--year--old to be successful as a middle--aged mother pantomiming the feeding of chickens. Ripley cut her plenty of slack and still, he never turned his eyes to her. He hugged her after the curtain call and told her she was magnificent, then sent her off to the cast party with her mother, saying he would be along shortly. He loitered in the hallway with his coat, and when a girl came along he asked her where he could find Emily.

Nineteen eighty--four was nothing like what Orwell had envisioned and still it was a world nearly impossible to explain. A strange man in a suit knocked on the door to the dressing room before I’d had the chance to change back into my own clothes, and when I stuck out my head he said he wanted to talk to me and could we go somewhere quiet for a minute? I said sure, like a child taking instructions from an adult, which was the case. A small rehearsal room down the hall had a piano in it and a couch and a couple of folding chairs. I knew no one would be in there so late. I opened the door and ran my hand over the cold cinder block wall, feeling for the light switch. What was I thinking? That’s the part I can’t retrieve.

But this is a story about luck, at least in the early years, and so my luck continued to hold. Bill Ripley had not come to rape or dismember. He sat down on one of the folding chairs, leaving the couch for me. He told me he was a director. They were casting a new movie and this movie had a part for a girl, a critical part, really, but they hadn’t found the right person yet. They’d been looking for quite some time but they hadn’t found her.

I nodded, wishing I’d thought to leave the door open.

“You might be the girl.” He was looking at me hard, and because I’d just come offstage and was not feeling particularly shy, I stared back at him. “What I mean is, I’m pretty sure you are her. I need you to come out to L.A. and take a screen test. Can you do that?”

“I’ve never been to Los Angeles,” I said, when what I meant was, my family went to Florida once for spring break when I was ten and that was the only time I’d been on a plane.

He wrote a number down on the back of a business card and told me he was staying with his sister in Boston, and that I should call him the next morning at nine.

“I’m in class at nine.” I could feel myself starting to sweat in Emily’s long white dress.

He looked at his watch. “They’re going to wonder where I am.” He stood up and held out his hand so I shook it. “Let’s keep this between us for now,” he said.

“Sure,” I said, wondering who I shouldn’t tell.

“Rae Ann is my niece.” He answered my question as if I’d asked it.

“Oh.” Rae Ann. That made me feel better somehow.

“Tomorrow,” he said, and I said, “Tomorrow” like I was a myna bird.

I did not lie awake in my dorm room that night wondering if I’d get the part. I wondered how many quarters I’d need to call someone in Boston during peak rates. Where could I get enough quarters? I wondered how much a plane ticket to Los Angeles would cost in terms of pairs of pants hemmed, and then on top of that the cost of the taxi from the airport and the hotel. Of course all of that was taken care of, though not as quickly as one might think. Bill Ripley straightened everything out, for a while at least. I had dithered around trying to decide what to do with my life for such a long time that he stepped in and made the decision for me. I was going to be an actress.

“Show me where the decency is in that!” Nell shouts, and we all break up laughing.

All three of our girls are home now. Emily came back to the farm after she graduated from college, while Maisie and Nell, still in school, returned in March. It was an anxious spring for the world, though from our kitchen window it played out just like every other spring in northern Michigan: wet and rainy and cold, followed by a late heavy snow, a sudden warm spell, and then the spectacle of trees in bloom. Emily and Maisie and Nell ignored the trees and chose to chip away at their sanity with news feeds instead. I finally put an end to the television being on in the evening because after we watched it, none of us slept. “Turn your head in one direction and it’s hopeless despair,” I told them. “Turn your head in the other direction—-” I pointed to the explosion of white petals out the window.

“You can’t pretend this isn’t happening,” Maisie said.

I couldn’t, and I don’t. Nor do I pretend that all of us being together doesn’t fill me with joy. I understand that joy is inappropriate these days and still, we feel what we feel.

As we moved into summer and blossoms gave way to fruit, our circumstances shifted from Here are our daughters and we are so glad to have them home, to Here are our daughters, who spent their childhood picking cherries and know how to do the job when only a fraction of our regular workers have come this year for seasonal employment. Their father identified the girls sprawled across the furniture pecking at their phones as the hand--pick crew he needed.

“I went to college so I wouldn’t have to pick cherries,” Nell said.

“College is closed,” Joe said. “College can’t protect you now.”