3

3

“Good night, good night, good night,” they sing, knocking against one another purposefully on the stairs. The three of them are younger when they’re together. They regress.

“Mama’s going to California to be a movie star,” Nell says to her sisters. “And we’ll still be locked up on the farm.”

“At least someone got out,” Emily says.

I promise to tell them all about it tomorrow.

Maisie yawns, stretching up her hands to touch the doorframe, Hazel at her heel. Hazel is some kind of yellow terrier with a crooked front leg and fine, irregular hair that stands up in patches. Maisie got her from the animal--control shelter where she worked during her second semester of veterinary school. The staff labeled the cages with folksy names—-Opie and Sparky and Goober and Bear—-subliminal promises of how good these dogs would be. Hazel had long been kenneled in a row of enormous brutes who bit the metal bars day and night in hopes of eating her, and Hazel in turn picked up so many bad habits that one of the staff had scrawled the word “WITCH” above her name with a fat black Sharpie. Those bad habits, along with the bum leg and what appeared to be mange, had rendered her unadoptable, and after several weeks at the shelter, Maisie saw the tag on Witch Hazel’s kennel indicating her time was up. She kept going back to slip biscuits between the bars. Last biscuits.

“Watch your fingers,” her supervisor had said when Maisie announced her plan to take Hazel home for the weekend. But as soon as she reached into the kennel the dog began to howl, disbelieving that good fortune could arrive so late in an unfortunate life. Students were counseled against the dangers of sentimentality but for that day Maisie chose to ignore the lesson, and the mangy little terrier thumped a grateful tail against her.

Emily comes back downstairs with her book, some manual about branch grafting. She says it knocks her out, by which she means puts her to sleep. Emily lives in the little house at the edge of the north apple orchard. She picks up a flashlight from the basket by the back door, the basket of flashlights and sock caps and mittens and bug spray.

“I’ll walk you halfway,” I tell her.

She laughs. She comes back and kisses me. Emily kisses me. “Good night,” she says.

I watch from the window above the sink until I can no longer see her steady beam sweeping over the road, then I turn out all the lights and go upstairs.

Their father is sound asleep. Because he cannot wait for me, he’s left the lamp on the nightstand burning and folded back the covers on my side of the bed. One hand is on his heart, as if the last thing he did was check to see if it was still beating, the other is out of the bed, his fingers nearly brushing the floor. Nothing can wake him in the summer. After dinner, he goes back out to the barn, saying he has just a few more things to finish, then winds up putting in a second day. I picture the farm as a giant parquet dance floor he balances on his head, the trees growing up from the little squares. The fruit that must be picked, the branches that must be pruned, the fertilizer and insecticide (just try growing cherries without it), the barn full of broken machinery along with the new tractor we can’t afford and the goats that seemed like such a good idea five years ago when Benny first suggested them for weed management and cheese, the workers whose children are sick and the workers who need money to go home to see their children and the little house whose roof leaks and the stacks of twenty--pound plastic lugs with Three Sisters Orchard printed on the side, and me and Emily and Maisie and Nell, all of it is on him. We try to be helpful but it is his head this place rests on. He carries it with him to our bed at night.

I put on my nightgown and crawl in beside him, covering the hand that covers his heart. Live forever, I say to myself.

Veronica didn’t get to go to the University of New Hampshire. She had to stay home because no one else was there to watch the boys. Her plan was to do two years of community college and then transfer her credits. Everyone has plans, and by the time we graduated from high school she wasn’t telling me hers anymore. She was the one who started out with Jimmy--George, by which I don’t mean sitting on the steps at the end of the hall, talking. He was older than us, twenty--two, though no one believed it. Veronica asked to see his driver’s license when he told her and she still thought he was lying, just like the guys in the outlet stores thought his ID was fake and then sold him the beer anyway. He lived two towns over and was doing his student teaching. He said the kids in his class had laughed that first day of school when he wrote his name on the blackboard. Jimmy--George was going to be a high school math teacher, and that in itself made him a valuable asset because he did our math homework for us. He did other things. Six years older would be nothing later on, but at the time it was an unimaginable distance. We couldn’t believe how lucky we were when he reached for us, an adult who played a kid onstage.

Veronica told me how she felt about him, and later she told me what they did. Two nights a week he came to her house after he’d finished rehearsal and she’d put the boys to bed. He would curl around her in her single bed so they could go to sleep like married people, then he would get up in the early dark and drive back to the room he rented and get ready for school, all before her mother finished her shift at the hospital. Veronica said that his eyes never left hers the entire time. She said she was pretty sure no one had ever really looked at her before, not in her entire life, and maybe that was true, but it was also true that that was just the way Jimmy--George looked at people. Onstage he looked at me like someone had dropped a giant Mason jar over us and we were alone in the world. He was the one who taught me how not to look away.

“We should be spending time together,” he said one night after rehearsal. “You know, be George and Emily, have a strawberry phosphate or something.”

But we were George and Emily and Veronica. “I don’t think so,” I said.

“I thought you liked acting,” he said. “I’m just talking about us being more convincing.”

I told him that I thought we were pretty good already, when what I should have said was, Back up. He stood much closer when we weren’t on the stage, when no one else was around.

He touched one finger to the side of my neck. “Chemistry,” he said. “That’s what George and Emily have.”

I couldn’t say he was wrong about that. I hedged for a couple of days before climbing into his car, telling myself this thing between us was all in the name of theater. We passed Mr. Martin in the parking lot one night while he was standing beneath a street light in a wool hunting jacket, smoking a cigarette. I could tell he was trying to calculate the potential for damage.

“Fifteen will get you twenty, Mr. Haywood,” he said finally, his voice neither leering nor scolding, just a helpful piece of information passed along. Jimmy’s last name was Haywood.

Jimmy--George removed his hand from my waist and laughed, so I laughed too, even though I had no idea what Mr.

Martin was talking about. Years later, I heard the expression again on a set and it made perfect sense. Mr. Martin had been concerned for Jimmy Haywood’s safety.

For a while we really did just run our lines in the back of his car, and then those lines were lightly punctuated with kissing. One night he asked if I knew a place we could stretch out, something I hadn’t done before, something my body felt keenly attuned to wanting, something Veronica said was amazing. I had the keys to Stitch--It, and so I unlocked the door and took him up the stairs without turning on the lights, past the sewing machines and thread racks, past a thousand buttons and god only knew how many zippers hanging from oversized safety pins, right to a couch where my grandmother sometimes napped. Nobody caught us, and since Veronica was the only person in the world I would have told, I told no one. But god, it ruined everything: the rehearsals, the play, my grandmother’s shop where I’d been the very happiest, and my best friendship. While the math teacher was pulling my sweater over my head, I failed to take into account that Veronica would still be able to read my mind.

I wish I’d thought to ask him why he picked us. I know he wasn’t much more than a kid himself, but if high school girls were his thing, why did he feel the need to drive two towns over to see what was available? He had four classes of math students to choose from. But then of course I realized he must have been sleeping with the math girls, too. He was a good--looking kid, and he knew everything about eye contact, and he could act. Truly, he was the best George I ever saw. This could just as easily have been a story about my having slept with Jimmy--George Haywood who then went on to be a stupendously famous actor, though I’m pretty sure he went on to be a math teacher somewhere in New Hampshire.

I blame myself for what happened. I was hideously disloyal to the person I loved in order to be with a person I didn’t love at all. But I was also sixteen, and as sure as fifteen will get you twenty, sixteen doesn’t stand a chance against twenty--two.

Maybe I should have told my girls this part of the story, but they would have needed to hear it before they turned sixteen for the information to do them any good.

Joe lets us sleep in after all, or Maisie and Nell and I slept. On the far side of the orchard, Emily had set her alarm so that she could start the coffee and make egg sandwiches before she and her father meet for work. Emily, twenty--six, had been a senior in high school when she started saying she would come back after college and help us with the farm. She said that when we were ready to retire she would run the place herself.

“You can do anything in the world,” I said, channeling my grandmother. “And you might want to do something else.”

“You might want to do something else,” my husband echoed, but what he meant was Yes and Please and Thank you. The farm is either the very paradise of Eden or a crushing burden of disappointment and despair manifested in fruit, depending on the day. I would love to leave my child Eden. The other stuff, less so.

“This isn’t a monarchy,” Maisie said. “It’s not like you get the land because you’re the oldest. What if I want to run the farm?”

“Then we run it together,” Emily said. “That’s easier anyway. Do you want the apples or cherries?”

Maisie’s future was never going to be in fruit, but that didn’t mean she wanted her sister to win. Even though no one would believe it now, Emily had once been the harbinger of misery for all of us. Nell certainly didn’t want the farm. She’d been pricing tickets to New York since seventh grade. Of our three girls, only Emily found fascination in the profits of sweet cherries versus tarts. She paid attention to trees the way Maisie paid attention to animals and Nell paid attention to people. Even as a child, she was the one to notice the first traces of brown rot. Emily liked to work outside while her sisters slapped at mosquitos. She was good with her hands while they cut themselves on leaves. She liked to sit in the fruit stand and talk to the people who stopped to buy peaches and jam. Maisie and Nell did not go near the fruit stand.

But in her day, Emily had been a beast, a teenage girl so riven with hormones and rage that her two younger sisters decided it would be easier to just be good. Emily had raised sufficient hell for all of them put together. We worried that her devotion to the orchard might be some latent penance for bad behavior. She was trying to make it up to us long after we had ceased to be hurt.

“Take your time,” we’d say when she talked about the farm. “You don’t have to decide now.”

But she had decided. She signed up for a horticulture major at Michigan State. She signed up for an agribusiness management minor. Her father shook his head when she told him about the minor. “Someone’s been paying attention,” he said.

When I go down the hall and find Maisie and Nell asleep in their twin beds, I see them both as they are and as they were: grown women and little girls. The forced--air heat blew weakly from floor vents on the second story before we updated the HVAC system, and every winter morning they begged to spend a single day warm in bed, and every morning I dragged them out, telling them to wear their bedspreads over their nightgowns and get dressed in front of the stove. Parts of the house date back to the 1800s. It was warm only in pockets. The girls referred to the Little House on the Prairie books as the stories of their lives.

But we are in the full glory of summer now—-the windows open, the room bright, and still these daughters, twenty--four and twenty--two, sleep on.

“You promised your father,” I say, because that’s what gets them.

“Take Hazel out, please,” Maisie says into her pillow.

When I go to lift the little dog from under her arm, Hazel shows me her teeth, even though she doesn’t mean it. She, too, yearns for a day in bed. I carry her because her front leg doesn’t work on stairs. I put her out the kitchen door and she squats beside my pot of geraniums then trots away.

Emily had been fourteen when she first informed me Peter Duke was her father. She’d been slamming around the house for weeks, her head bent beneath the weight of her interior darkness. When I asked what was wrong she said nothing in the same voice one would say go fuck yourself.

Where was everyone? It was early March and the snow was blowing sideways while I sat next to the fireplace with a pile of mending. Sometimes I wondered if the girls bit the buttons off their shirts just to give me something to do. I put my hands in my lap. “Where did you get that idea?”

Her eyes opened up as if she were finally fully awake. “You don’t even deny it.”

“Of course I deny it. I just wonder what could have made you think it.”

“Because it’s true.”

“Emily, it’s not true.”

“How would you even know?”

I don’t remember ever looking at my mother this way, like I could eat her down to the bone then wipe my bloody mouth on her hair. Emily was genuinely frightening, and at the same time I wanted to laugh for the sheer lunacy of it all. Fear and laughter: the two worst reactions in the absence of logic. “I would know because I would have been there.”

“But you’d lie about it. You lie about everything.”

A pause for reflection read as guilt, but the accusation was so strange I was having a hard time being nimble. “What did I lie about?”

“Knowing. Him.” Plunge--plunge, like an ice pick.

“I never lied about that.”

“Well, you never talk about it.”

“That isn’t the same thing as lying.”

“Why won’t you tell me?”

“Because there’s nothing to tell.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Emily, I’m not lying to you.”

“Just give me his phone number.”

“I don’t have Duke’s phone number.”

“Of course you do! You just want to keep me from him. He has the right to know he has a daughter.”

How many daughters must Duke have out there in the world? One wondered. “Your father has a daughter,” I said. “Your father has three daughters. With me. Your mother.” I went on to say that she should consider the feelings of her father who had conceived her, loved her and raised her, before setting out to construct a new origin story.

“Don’t say conceived.” She put her hands over her ears to block my voice retroactively. “That’s disgusting.”

“Think about this for a minute.”

“I can find him myself.” She was crying now and trying hard to stop.

I stood to go to her, my daughter who was losing her mind.

“Sit down!” She was screaming.

“Just tell me what’s happened.”

“I don’t belong here! Maisie and Nell belong here, you and Daddy belong here, but I do not belong in northern fucking Michigan. I’m supposed to be with Duke.”

Fire leapt off her, like the fire in the fireplace spitting and cracking behind me. The snow came down and covered the fields. I wanted to take my sweater off, wrap her up. I wanted to roll her around until the fire was out. “Honey, I knew Duke for one summer, years and years before you were born. I didn’t know him very well then, and now I don’t know him at all. He’s not your father.”

“Then what about my hair? How can you explain that?” Screaming.

Joe must have driven Nell to dance class. That’s where they were. Maybe Maisie had gone along for the ride. The girls loved to be in the car when it was snowing. “Your hair?”

“Tell me I don’t have Duke’s hair.” She held a hank of it up for me to see, dark and heavy and straight. I’d never had the thought before but her magnificent head of hair was not wholly dissimilar to Duke’s.

“Your hair is beautiful and it’s yours, not Duke’s. Nothing in our lives belongs to Duke.”

This scene goes on forever but I’ll stop it here, the details best forgotten. Emily’s belief that she should be living in Malibu with the movie star she deemed to be her father came over her like a fever. For days and even weeks it would recede, only to flare again at the times we were most vulnerable. She was telling me how sick she was of us, that she hated being a teenager, hated her body, didn’t want to be stuck on a cherry orchard, that she had bigger ideas of the world. But she didn’t have words for any of that, not even words she could say to herself. She could only experience the wracking pain of her circumstances, inflict it on us, and then demand that Duke was that pain’s only solution. We all became so sick of it I considered tracking down Duke’s brother Sebastian so that Duke could send her some sort of document of liberation, a headshot signed, “To Emily, I am not your father. Love, Peter Duke.”

Joe took all of this better than I did, but what else was new? Joe took everything better than I did. Emily seemed able to treat him as her father while at the same time endlessly declaring that someone else was her father. She wanted them both. Two fathers and no mother would have been the dream. To some extent, Joe blamed himself for the whole situation. And to a lesser extent, I blamed him, because it had been Joe who unleashed Duke on our girls. I certainly had no intention of telling them I dated a movie star for a summer in my twenties before he was a movie star.

Had it been before or after we took the kitchen wall out to make a family room that Joe told the girls about Duke? It must have been after. Emily must have been twelve, which would mean that Maisie and Nell were more or less ten and eight. Maybe it was Christmastime. I know it was winter. Maisie had dug The Popcorn King out of what we referred to as the movie basket. They had seen it who knew how many times before and that’s exactly what made the experience appealing to them, the repetition, the pleasure of anticipating what came next. They chimed in on the best lines, No BUTTER? and cracked themselves up. Winters were so long, and we leaned into the movie basket and the books on the low shelves beneath the window to save us. Yes, this was definitely after the expansion because I remember standing at the wide white sink doing dishes while the three girls braided their hair into a single fat rope. Their conversation consisted of one of them telling the other two to hold still, and then another one complaining the others were pulling and would mess everything up. The movie’s soundtrack became their soundtrack, the insistent violins that lagged half a beat behind Duke’s feathery alto. Mostly his voice was lost to the water running in the sink and the girls’ laughing, though every now and then I heard him sing the word Popcorn! quite distinctly. He’d done a lot of family movies after the cop show, after the astronaut movie, before he reinvented himself as a Very Serious Actor, though the popcorn movie was already old on the night of this particular viewing, and he was already a Very Serious Actor. We’d lost the cardboard sleeve to the VHS tape. This was the only one of the family movies in which he’d been made to sing and dance, and while he didn’t do either of those things naturally, the immensity of his charisma provided sufficient cover.

I knew the movie as well as the girls did. I knew that we were at the scene where he was dancing on a floor covered in unpopped kernels, dancing and sliding, arms windmilling wildly, nearly falling and never falling, his perfect physicality overwhelming in its abandon. I used to watch that scene and wonder how many times they’d made him dance on popcorn. How many days did they ask him to do it again so that there would be enough footage to splice the number together? On that night I struggled to scrub a crust of lasagna off the bottom of a pan. Baked--on, burnt--on mess. What was that a commercial for? Some tool meant to free me from labor. I did not turn around to watch him in his bowler hat and pearl--gray suit. I was staring out the window above the sink. I did not turn towards his voice, nor, had I been facing in the direction of the television set, would I have turned away. Duke had been famous for as many years as we had been apart. Had every sight or sound of him sent me off on a pilgrimage of nostalgia or excoriation I would have lost my mind years before. We coexisted peacefully, Duke and I, or I coexisted.

Into this scene of braiding and scrubbing and movie and dancing came my husband, stamping the snow from his boots. He stood behind the couch where our three girls were firmly tethered together as one daughter, Nell facing the television and Maisie and Emily each facing out to the side, the backs of their heads touching. They were thrilled by what they had accomplished, the end of the braid secured by a rubber band. Joe stood and watched the screen with them for a minute. The kernels beneath Duke’s feet were just starting to pop and he scooped up handfuls and flung them into the air like snow. That was when Joe said, “You know your mother used to date him.”

Imagine braiding the tails of three mice and then throwing in a cat. I don’t think he realized their heads were fastened, or that they would all begin to scream and claw so violently in an attempt to separate themselves and get to me. I don’t think Joe was thinking. He had seen Duke dancing on popcorn as often as the rest of us, but for whatever reason on that night he offered commentary. One of the girls, I’d bet it was Maisie, thought to tug off the rubber band, and in a matter of seconds they were apart, their long hair flashing into shields. They were loud in that piercing way of girls, and Joe, as if to amend his poor judgment, picked up the remote and paused the movie, thus silencing not the children but the topic of discussion. Duke froze there, the bowler nearly slipping off his loose, dark hair, his mouth open, his eyes half--closed in a moment of mock--sexual ecstacy I could have done without. Emily said that Daddy was making it up. Nell wanted to know if Duke and I had gone to school together. Maisie asked when he was coming to our house, the very thought of which lit the three of them from within, their favorite movie star soon to arrive on a winter night because why else would their father have picked this moment for the great reveal? When is he coming? they cried.

What was it Lear says at the end? Never, never, never, never, never.

We might as well have cut each girl a heavy slice of chocolate cake soaked in espresso, then stood back to watch them lick the plates. They were relentless. How had it happened, they wanted to know. Why hadn’t I married Duke instead?

On that long ago night our girls were still years away from having boyfriends of their own. I tried to remember what I thought dating meant when I was their age: ice cream, movies, walking home from school, the dread and desire that surrounded the mystery of kissing. In summer stock, Duke slept in my bed because I had the infinitely superior room—-a closet, a dresser, a window that looked out over Tom Lake, my own tiny bathroom with a shower we could just barely fit into together. We lay in that double bed and ran each other’s lines. We lay in that bed. When ambition overcame us, we played tennis or swam in the lake. We got drunk after shows or got high. We ate the pita bread I kept in the nightstand for the times we were hungry and couldn’t bear the thought of getting up. Sometimes he would go for coffee and bring it back to bed, or I would go. We were on the stage or in that bed, forgotten cigarettes burning down to the filters in the ashtray. We were dating.

My three little girls stared at me, paralyzed by expectation. Winter, and they had seen every movie in the basket three dozen times. It appalled them to think there was a story in this house they didn’t know.

“We were in a play together,” I said. Truth. And they already knew that for a brief time when I was young I had wanted to be an actress. We had a VHS of that as well.

“So you didn’t date him,” Emily corrected. “You knew him.”

I shrugged. The girls believed we were so old then, their father and I, that they took into account we might not remember our own lives. “We dated while we were in a play.”

He carried my books. He walked me home. We kissed.

When they finally went back to watch the end of the movie, Duke was no longer just the Popcorn King. He was the man who had once eaten ice cream with their mother. “Don’t you want to watch with us?” Maisie asked.

“I’ve seen it,” I said.

“That doesn’t make any difference,” she said. “It’s good.”

“Maybe it’s upsetting to her,” Emily said in a stage whisper, though it was Emily who insisted they start the movie over once it had ended because she wanted to be able to think about Duke as someone I knew in the first part of the film as well as the last. In the beginning, Duke is the banished King of Popcorn who returns in disguise so that he might overthrow the interloper and reclaim his rightful place. That always struck me as the most ludicrous part of the story, the idea that, despite the newsboy’s cap and ragged jacket, anyone would fail to recognize Duke.

Nell looked away from the screen to see how I was holding up. She mouthed the words I love you, information not intended for anyone else.

Joe said it too, when, after more and more of the same, we at last wrestled our children into bed.

“I may have to kill you just to make sure it never happens again,” I said to him, pulling my sweater over my head, that terrible moment when the warmest article of clothing comes off.

“I don’t think a mistake of that magnitude could be made twice.”

“Let’s not find out.” I was shaking with cold and he took me in his arms.

“I had no idea they would care,” he said. “Or at least I didn’t think they would care that much.”

“Or you didn’t think at all. You just said it.”

I could feel his chin nodding against the top of my head. “That’s what it was.”

The high tide of Duke hung around the house for weeks after that, and while it slowly receded, it never went away. The girls began spending their allowance on People magazine, Duke being a reliable fixture for paparazzi: at the opening of the Met season, coming home from the gym with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder, with an admirable mutt on the beach, with an admirable starlet on the beach. The girls started watching his cop show, Rampart, in reruns. They devoted themselves to the Duke movies that were already in the basket because I refused to buy more. Their favorite was a boneheaded remake of The Swiss Family Robinson called Swiss Father Robinson which featured a mostly shirtless Duke on a gorgeous desert island, his snug pants tattered just above the knee. His wife claims that Duke, an internationally famous architect, scarcely knows his own children, and so she stays in Zurich while he takes their four adorable offspring on a sailing adventure by himself. After the brief inconvenience of a shipwreck, he builds his family a chalet in the trees, with a slide that drops the plucky little ones into the bay when they need a bath. A bright red parrot with a yellow breast sits on his shoulder while he splits open coconuts for breakfast, the toddler secured to his back with a sarong. Despite his complete lack of experience, Duke turns out to be a miracle of a father, teaching the children to read and love the land and master carpentry. The most disappointing scene in the movie is when his wife finally shows up to rescue them from paradise. Disappointment, the children learn early on, is embodied by the mother. Two years later, Emily decided Duke was her father, Maisie decided Emily had been possessed by Satan, and Nell decided she wanted to be an actress who would never come home again, though that might have happened anyway. Thanks to his ubiquitous presence in the world, the man I’d spent a summer with took up residence in our home, and still I thought of him remarkably little.