4

4

Hazel’s yellow head pops up in the tall grass. She’s come back to wait for Maisie but when she sees me she decides I am enough. Together we take the dirt road past the wall of hemlocks and white pines to the barn. The cherry trees are so burdened that I don’t know how we’ll get the fruit picked before it rots. Most of the crew trailers are empty, three families down from the usual ten or twelve. Joe has divided the acres and given everyone their parcel to work. We wave to each other at a great distance. I leave a tray of sandwiches at the sorting table in the morning and pick up the empty platter at night. Emily’s ever--helpful boyfriend, Benny Holzapfel, is no help at all since he is working sixteen--hour days on his own family’s farm. Holzapfel—-meaning crab apple, or the crabby people who hang out near sour little apples—-is a selling name but does not suit our warm and generous friends. You could spend years in a New York apartment never knowing the people who live two feet away from you, but live on an orchard in Michigan and you will use the word neighbor to refer to every person for miles. You will rely on them and know their children and their harvest and their machinery and their dogs. The Whitings have an old German shepherd named Duchess, though she could have just as easily been Princess or Queenie. Despite her wolfish appearance, she is a sweet girl. Duchess has been known to walk all the way to our back door in the summer. I give her a bowl of water and some biscuits, and after a nap on the warm flagstones, she heads off again.

Past the pond there is a place where the two farms touch, ours and the Holzapfels. My husband used to joke that someday one of our girls would marry a Holzapfel, but when Benny started showing up in our kitchen his senior year of high school, Joe dropped the joke for fear of scaring the boy away. Since then my husband has whispered his dreams to me alone, in the winter, in our bed late at night: Emily and Benny would marry and join the farms. We would fix up the little house, put on a proper porch, a new kitchen, a real master bedroom, everything on one floor. Joe and I would move to the little house and give our house to Emily and Benny so they could have children here, children who may one day marry the children of the Otts or the Whitings nearby, weaving together an ever greater parcel, because even if a person can’t work the land they have, they will still want more. It has been years since Emily was bewitched by Duke, and years since the enchantment was broken and our daughter returned, and while we love her and rely on her, we’ve never completely gotten over being afraid of her. She says that the farm is her life, and of course she’s going to stay here. She says it with Benny standing beside her in the kitchen, both of them barefoot, shucking corn for dinner.

Benny has been riding his bike down the path that links our farms since he was a child, and by the time he was in high school he was showing up in our kitchen to talk to Joe about his 4-H projects. We called Benny the Man with the Plan—-heirloom apples, high--density apples, club apples—-he made a dinner presentation out of every pamphlet the Michigan Farm Bureau sent. The constant chatter about apples was mostly cover for his nerves because clearly it was Emily he had come to see. Even before he left for college he made it clear he was coming back to work with his parents. Benny hadn’t missed the fact that other lives were available to him, it was just that the choice he liked best was the one that sprang to life beneath the tires of his bike, the one that might include Emily if she were interested.

But Emily had always been interested in the farm, and she had always been interested in Benny, and over time those two interests slowly pushed Duke aside. Or maybe it didn’t have anything to do with the farm, maybe she just outgrew him. She came home from East Lansing to work the harvest every summer. She said we needed to think about building our own cold storage so that we wouldn’t have to outsource refrigeration, and that maybe we could build a big one and split the cost with our neighbors. The investment would pay for itself when we started selling more sweets for the fresh market.

Where was Duke in all these plans?

He was nowhere.

Hazel heads up the hill to the cemetery where generations of my husband’s people are buried behind a low iron fence, and for whatever reason I follow the dog. A plush vegetation is knitted over all the graves, and I think of how meticulously Joe’s aunt had kept things here, but this is not the summer for weeding. The cemetery is the highest point on the property and would have been the logical site for a house, the way it overlooks the trees and the barn and all the way to the edge of the lake, but those first settlers gave the best land to their dead, the very first a two--year--old named Mary. One by one they followed her up the hill until twenty--nine of them were resting beneath the mossy slabs, and there they wait for us to join them. That’s what life was like back in the day, you buried your children, your husband, your parents right there on the farm. They had never been anywhere else. They had never wanted to be anywhere else.

I look down from the hill until I can see Emily in her green Michigan State cap, and a minute later I see Maisie and Nell walking out to the barn. Hazel picks up the distant scent of Maisie in the breeze and darts off to thank her again for her life.

Benny Holzapfel had long professed his faith in fresh--market sweet cherries as part of a healthy system of cash flow. He was still a sophomore in high school when he talked my husband into pushing out the plums at the east end of the upper orchard and putting in forty acres of dark sweets. I hadn’t been in favor of taking the advice of our fifteen--year--old neighbor at the time. I said we needed more trees like we needed more goats, which had also been Benny’s idea. You can’t shake sweet cherries mechanically. You have to take them by hand and they have to come off perfectly, as if every last one was employed by the Michigan tourism board. Tarts are frozen and later boiled down to juice or jam or sold for pies. They’re dried into sturdy cherry--raisins and no one cares what they looked like. The problem with tarts is that distributors make a down payment on delivery and don’t pay the balance until they sell them, and because the cherries are already frozen or dried, there’s never any rush. You could work yourself to death bringing in tarts in July and not see your profit until December, or next July. Sweets, on the other hand, don’t freeze. Early in the summer they last two weeks in the cooler, and by the end of the season when the sugar is high the turnaround is considerably faster. Of course the brines become maraschinos, and some other sweets wind up in yogurt, but most of them we sell through an agricultural co--op for cash, and the co--op in turn sells them to grocery stores and CSAs. The money we make off those pretty cherries put Nell through the University of Michigan and is now subsidizing Maisie’s veterinary education.

Thank you, Benny Holzapfel.

“So, Mr. Ripley has asked you to audition for a film,” Emily prompts once the four of us are in a row of trees picking cherries, buckets hanging from our necks. Emily is tall like her father, strong enough to hoist full lugs all day long. Maisie is smaller than her older sister, though by no means small, and her curls give her extra stature. Nell is like me, or Nell is like I was. It’s as if the genetic material from which these girls were made diminished with every effort, so that the eldest daughter is strapping and the middle is middling and the youngest is a wisp. They might as well have been three bears. I flick away a tiny green inchworm. “Why am I telling you this part?”

“Because you’re putting together the whole picture,” Nell says. “Telling us everything you previously kept from us.”

“You need to go back and get a hat,” I say to Nell.

She touches the top of her head, surprised. She was still half--asleep when she left the house. “I will at the first intermission.”

What Ripley wanted to convey on that phone call, which cost me seven dollars and eighty--five cents in change and made me late for American History, was that he was worried about his niece finding out that he was asking me to audition. “My sister doesn’t know about this particular movie. She wouldn’t be happy to find out a part for someone Rae Ann’s age had been given to the girl standing next to Rae Ann onstage.”

Had he given me a part? I didn’t ask.

“So when you leave town it would be better if you said you had a family emergency, a funeral or something. Tell her your grandmother died.”

I felt like he had stuck me with a pin. “I’m not going to tell her my grandmother died.”

“Think of someone else then.” Ripley’s voice was incapable of concealing boredom.

Ripley--Believe--It--Or--Not asked for my parents’ phone number, which I gave him, and while I was adding up how many skirts I’d have to sew to pay for the trip, the production company bought me a ticket. I was twenty years old but Ripley’s assistant made the arrangements with my parents because I didn’t have a phone. My parents assumed Ripley had told me that, but Ripley wasn’t a man to deal in itineraries. When I called my grandmother and asked if I could borrow the money from her, I found out the problem had already been solved. My family thought it was a wonderful idea for me to leave school in the middle of the semester to go to California at the behest of a man I didn’t know. I thought it was pretty swell myself, not because I dreamed of being an actress—-that part of the equation was still inaccessible to me—-but because it felt like I finally had a direction to go in, and that direction was west. All of New Hampshire sinks into despair in March anyway so no better time to leave. As soon as my grandmother heard the news she kicked her sewing machine into overdrive, putting together what she referred to as my ingenue’s trousseau: dresses, skirts, a swimsuit coverup to match the swimsuit she ordered me from L.L. Bean. She saved this from being the chapter in which I arrived at LAX in a pair of duck boots and my dark--green Loden coat with the barrel toggles.

The buckets around our necks hang from canvas straps, and when they’re full we empty them into the lugs. When we have filled enough lugs, Joe heaves them onto the flatbed of the green John Deere Gator and drives them to the barn.

“So, California,” Nell says, nudging. This is the part of the story she’s invested in.

I worry she’s getting too much sun and give her my hat, which she tries to bat away. “It’s too late for me. Save yourself.” I drop it on her head.

Nell accepts it because, unlike her sisters, she doesn’t like to argue. “I want to hear about the audition and then I want to hear about the movie.”

She thinks I have something to teach her but I don’t. Nell doesn’t dominate a room or stand on a chair to sing. She is the one who watches. She has the kind of naturalness Ripley often accused me of having, an ability to be so transparent it’s impossible to turn your eyes away. She works at her craft constantly. Even picking cherries, I swear I can see her thinking about how other people might pick cherries. And that is the difference between us: I was very good at being myself, while Nell is very good at being anyone at all.

“It wasn’t interesting,” I say.

“Humor us,” Emily says. “We’re working.”

I try to explain. “I learned how to act from a State Farm agent in New Hampshire when I was in high school. Other people did too much, so by doing very little I stood out. Mr. Martin needed an Emily because all the Emilys were awful. By not being awful, I looked pretty good. I think Bill Ripley was in a similar situation. Every actress he’d auditioned had been acting up a storm and he needed someone simple in the part. Simple was my specialty.”

“Why are you selling yourself short?” Emily asks, throwing a cherry at me. Maisie leans over and parts the grass with her hands, and when she finds the cherry she pops it in her mouth. We do not waste sweet cherries. “If one of us said that you’d smack us in the back of the head and make us do positive affirmations in front of the mirror.”

“I made you do positive affirmations one time, one time,” I tell her, “and it was good for you.”

“Maybe it would be good for you, too,” Emily says.

“But I’m not being self--deprecating. I’m telling you, I had a genuine talent for being myself, and for a while it worked. In fact, it probably worked better in film than it did onstage.”

“You’re talking like we haven’t seen the movie a hundred times,” Nell says. “You were really good.”

I shrug. “It’s like being able to sing one song perfectly. It’s a great trick, but it’s only going to get you so far.”

Go back to New Hampshire, to Bill Ripley sitting in that darkened university theater beside his sister. Ripley wasn’t new to the game, and when he saw me he understood what he was looking at: a pretty girl who wasn’t so much playing a part as she was right for the part she was playing. Unlike his niece, I knew how not to ruin things.

When I got off the plane in Los Angeles, a deeply tanned man in a black suit held up a clipboard with my name on it. He took the little duffel bag from my hand and walked me out to an honest--to--god limousine double--parked in front of the terminal. You could have knocked me over with a feather, as my grandmother liked to say. Had he driven me around the airport and dropped me off in the exact same spot, and I had flown back to New Hampshire without ever seeing anything else of California, it would have been worth it because one day I’d be able to tell my children that I had ridden in a limousine. I rolled down the tinted window so that anyone straining to see who was in the back of that car would see it was me, basking in sunshine.

The hotel had a swimming pool. A small gift basket in my room contained fruits so foreign to me that I didn’t know how to eat them. A note from Ripley read Welcome! Please sign for all your meals at the hotel, which was nice enough but hardly the same as Welcome! Pick you up for dinner at 7. The hamburger I ordered from room service was brought to me beneath a great silver dome which the waiter whisked away with a flourish. As far as I could tell, everything in California was something out of a movie. I ate the fifteen--dollar hamburger in a fluffy white bed and practiced my lines. The next morning a different driver in a different limousine drove me to a soundstage at Warner Brothers. For two hours people dressed me, undressed me, and dressed me again. I sat in a fancy barber’s chair while a Black man wearing a pink T--shirt that fit him so exactly I was sure he’d had it tailored, took off the makeup I had so thoughtfully applied that morning and painted a whole new face on top of my face. When he wanted me to lift my chin or turn to the left, he held his finger in front of my face. “Follow my finger,” he said, and so I did.

“Eyebrows?” he asked the man sitting in a chair beside mine, reading a script.

The man looked at me in the mirror, then he looked at the makeup artist. “Hold off,” he said.

A woman with hair as fine and colorless as cornsilk and no eyebrows at all brushed out my hair, then picked it up and poured it through her hands again and again. “Look at this,” she said to her colleagues. “It’s like a shampoo commercial.”

I kept thinking of that scene when Dorothy and her friends get spruced up before they’re taken to meet the Wizard. Pat, pat here, pat, pat there, and a couple of brand new straws. That’s how we keep you young and fair.

Merry Old Land of Oz.

When their considerable efforts were complete and I had been transformed into someone who looked like my more attractive first cousin, I was taken onto the set where I stood in front of a white backdrop. The man who’d been sitting in the barber chair next to mine took my picture. His praise was so obsequious that I first felt embarrassed for myself and then felt embarrassed for him. Another man came in with a small camera on a tripod and had me say my name (Lara Kenison) and the name of the film (Singularity) and the part I was reading for (Lindsay). When all that was done, they took me into the set’s open space where Ripley was waiting with everyone else.

Nell’s hands drop from the branches and she leaves them hanging by her sides. Idle hands, I start to say—-an old family joke—-but stop myself. She is standing beside me in a smocked dress covered in daisies, a dress with big pockets that had once been mine and had then been Emily’s, then Maisie’s. Nell’s eyes are bright with terror.

“Weren’t you terrified?” she whispers.

Maisie and Emily stop. All three girls watch me as I try to remember. This was a very long time ago. I look around that vast white space. Ripley is there along with the famous actress who is playing my mother and the less--famous actor who is playing her boyfriend. People with boom mics and giant lights and cameras on dollies are there, silently adjusting the angles of their equipment. The two actors and I are sitting at a table that is meant to stand in for a dining room table, and we’re laughing because that’s what the scene calls for. For all the times I’ve ever been onstage, I’ve never been asked to laugh before, and the laughter comes easily. I had been so afraid that day I read for Emily in high school, but when I look around for that fear now it isn’t there. I understand that all I have to do is try not to act, and that’s easy because I have no idea how to act. It’s the reason Ripley brought me out to California.

“No,” I tell my daughters. “I’m not afraid.”

I don’t know where I got the idea that if they liked me I’d just stay in California and make the movie, but as soon as the screen test was finished they put me in the car and returned me to the airport with my duffel, even though I hadn’t packed my duffel before I left the hotel. I took the red--eye to Boston and a shuttle van back to Durham. I would have three hours to sleep before sociology.

I set my alarm and crawled into my single bed, thinking about that limousine. My roommate was sound asleep and I wasn’t going wake her up to tell her, but the limousine was the thing I couldn’t get over.

Two weeks later my mother called me on the hall phone and told me they needed me back in L.A.

“Did I get the part?” I had already felt bad about not getting the part. I had already gotten over feeling bad.

“Mr. Ripley said they need a second test.”

“That’s a lot of money to spend when they’ve already seen me.”

“I think they have the money,” my mother said.

And so back I went, this time sliding into the long black car like someone who was used to it; the first time is luxury, the second time privilege.

The next morning Ripley and the casting director met me at a swimming pool on the lot. One of the chaise longues was occupied by a blonde in a red--and--white lifeguard tank suit. She looked up from her magazine and waved so I waved back. The water was dazzling in the sunshine. Movie--swimming--pool--water. Did studio employees swim here on their lunch break, or was this where they made movies in which people swam? Ripley and the casting director had a woman with them, older than me but not old. She was all smiles and solicitude: How was my flight? Had I gotten something for breakfast? Could I believe this gorgeous day?

“We need to see you swim,” Ripley said.

“Seriously?” Right away I wondered how cold the water was because that’s the first thing a person from New Hampshire thinks about when someone starts talking about swimming.

“Do you know how?”

I was in every sense still young and I was trying to put it all together. “Sure I do, but wouldn’t it have been easier to just call and ask me?”

The casting director laughed and Ripley nodded. “Sure, but we’ve got to see you do it. Some people don’t look good when they swim. Other people do.”

I wanted to tell them I’d been a counselor at Camp Huckins for my last two summers of high school, that I’d completed the Red Cross lifesaving course which included a half--mile open--water swim in a lake that was not warm. I taught the water safety class after that. I had the certificate though somehow I knew they could care less. “My suit’s back at the hotel.”

The woman who was with them, the one who was a little older than me, smiled again. “We’ve got plenty of suits,” she said. “Come on, I’ll take you over to wardrobe.”

“Take your time,” Ripley said. “We’ll wait.”

Of course, if some girl takes you to a room and starts telling you how cute this bikini is going to look on you, you figure it out. I thought of the sturdy navy one--piece my grandmother had bought, sitting in my duffel back at the hotel, the tags still on, and felt a surge of rage for having let myself be so duped. When I went back to the pool I didn’t say a word to any of them. I went to the diving board, bounced hard and high twice, then split the bright blue water with my hands. I did three laps with racing turns. Those fuckers wanted to see if I could swim? I’d show them how to swim.

They didn’t tell me I’d gotten the part until I was back in New Hampshire, then said I’d need to be on the set in four weeks. The plane ticket for my third trip out was first class, which, as far as experiences go, beat the limousine by a mile. I was given a union membership and a small furnished apartment. Ripley bought me a pair of sunglasses and told me to wear them whenever I was outside or I’d get crow’s feet. The girl who’d been tasked with taking me to wardrobe was named Ashby, and now it was Ashby’s job to pick me up in the mornings and keep an eye on me on the set. Ashby’s job was to make the weird new things seem vaguely normal, and she was good at it. Ashby wanted to be an actress.

Whatever talent I had for transparency, for smallness, was suited to the camera, where I channeled the memory of Veronica’s remarkable eyebrows and was subsequently praised for my subtle insight. I knew how to smile just a little and then look away while I pushed my hair behind my ears. The cinematographer couldn’t get over the fact that my ears weren’t pierced. He told me it was better than being a virgin. I didn’t tell him the only reason they weren’t pierced was because the girl in line ahead of me at the mall had fainted when they punched her earlobe with the little gun and no one thought to catch her. You never know in life what’s going to serve you; my particular magic was being from New Hampshire with hair that wasn’t dyed and ears that were unpierced. I agreed to wear a two--piece but wouldn’t take my top off, and while I understand that that can be a tough combination to find, it wasn’t exactly the same as acting.

Ripley had me sign with an agent who was a friend of his, and the agent negotiated a contract for $45,000, a fortune to a girl who had so recently scrambled to find change for the pay phone. Not long after I arrived, the filming was delayed because the famous actress who played my mother twisted her ankle while hiking down a trail in Topanga Canyon. She said she’d seen a snake. Ashby told me if anyone else had sprained their ankle this early in production they would have been replaced, but the famous actress was pretty much what this movie had going for it. There were only three weeks left in the semester so I asked if I could go back to school, but everyone agreed that I could not. If the actress’s ankle took a sudden turn for the better, they wouldn’t want to have to wait on me. People in Hollywood thought, and maybe rightly, that New Hampshire was near Mongolia. As a consolation, my agent got me a Diet Dr Pepper commercial and one for Red Lobster. They were the kind of national spots real actors would have sold their mothers to get. I drank a Diet Dr Pepper, showed off my earlobes and opened a bank account. Ripley lent me a car because directors have extra cars—-a little green MG convertible that was older than I was. If this was work, then I was made for it.

The fact that the release date kept getting pushed back wasn’t a problem as far as I was concerned. They decided they needed a winter scene, a flashback, but the famous actress was so famous by then that no one could find a place in her schedule, and even when she did have time and they found the snow they also had to find more money because the winter scene wasn’t in her contract. That threw them off at least another year, it might have been two. There was some problem with postproduction, and then a hang--up with the distribution, none of which was explained to me. Understanding what became of the film wasn’t part of my job, and I didn’t care because I liked L.A. All that sunshine agreed with me. My agent got me two seasons on a forgettable sitcom called The Finnegans along with some more commercials. I had work, a place to live. I went to parties on the beach and ran around with boys who wanted to be movie stars. I got to go dancing. I got out of New Hampshire.

Nell sits down in the grass. “I can’t stand this anymore,” she says.

Emily leans over and puts a hand on her sister’s head.

“What?”

“The whole thing,” Nell says. “That someone just knocked on your door and gave you the part in this really great movie, and when the movie didn’t come out you still got jobs. You were making money even if you weren’t making art. I mean, I understand you had to go swimming first and that wasn’t great but did you even really want it?”

What had I wanted? To fly on a plane? To get out of New Hampshire. I sit down in the grass beside my daughter. “I did, I guess. By the time the movie started shooting I wanted it, but not in the same way you would have wanted it. I get that.”

“I want to go on an audition. I want to act. I want to get the hell out of this orchard. It’s like the universe conspired to make you an actress and the universe conspired to make me pick cherries.”

“But you do that really well,” Maisie says to her. “You have an excellent technique.”

It is sentimental and useless to tell someone you would gladly give them your past because the past is nontransferable, and anyway, I would have wanted to give her only the good days. When seen through Nell’s eyes it’s hard not to think those good days were wasted on me, and that she would have done a better job of it. “We should stop this. There are plenty of other things to talk about. Or we can talk about nothing. Or we can go back to podcasts for a while.” We could listen to podcasts until the hour of our death and not make a dent in the stories that are available to us.

“You can’t stop,” Emily says. “We haven’t even gotten to the part that matters yet.”

“The part that matters?” I ask, though I know.

“Duke. The whole reason you’re telling us about the past is that you’re eventually going to get to Duke.”

“He isn’t the reason for the past,” Maisie says darkly.

Nell rests her head on her knees. “Go ahead. I’m not shutting us down. I’m sulking. There’s a difference. I want you to keep going.”

“Keep going while acknowledging that life is unfair and it should have been you in the movie even though you were still more than a decade away from being born,” Maisie says.

Nell nods against her knees. “That’s all I’m asking for.”

“I have no interest in making you miserable.” If the story was going to end, this wouldn’t be a bad place to end it.

“The circumstances of my life are making me miserable, not the story. It’s not the same thing even when it feels like the same thing.” Nell flops back in the grass, spreading out her arms like a starfish, like a girl for whom hope is lost. The next thing I

know we are all lying in the soft and very green grass, staring up through the branches and cherries and leaves at the Michigan sky, little clouds tumbling high above us. How many years has it been since we have lain in this grass together, beneath these trees, the four of us, discussing which of the clouds were duckies and which were bunnies?

“You should have been famous,” Nell says finally. “I think that’s what kills me.”

I raise myself up on my elbows, taking a moment to admire the sun in my daughters’ hair. “Famous? Are you serious?”

They stir the grass very slightly with their nodding heads.

I lift up my hand to the lushness of trees. “Look at this! Look at the three of you. You think my life would have been better spent making commercials for lobster rolls?”

At that moment Benny comes flying down between the rows, riding his same old bike from high school. Hazel sounds the alarm but we scramble into seated positions too late. He has seen us in repose.

Benny skids to a stop. “You’re sleeping? It’s not even ten o’clock in the morning.”

We all know he’s come to find his girlfriend’s father and not his girlfriend. He wants to borrow a saw or a spool of wire, or he’s come because Joe has called and asked for help fixing something none of us would know how to fix. Benny is thin because he doesn’t take time to eat and his hair is a mop held up by a rubber band because he doesn’t take time to cut his hair.

I wave at him. “We’re solving the problems of the world.”

He gets off his bike long enough to kiss Emily, and we appreciate this: Maisie, whose vet school boyfriend is stuck with his own family in Oregon; Nell, who has no boyfriend; me, who loves love.

“Don’t let your father see you like this,” Benny says, by which he means asleep mid--morning. He doesn’t understand that it’s the weight of the past that’s pinned us there, and before we can explain he rides off again.

We should get up. We should get back to the trees, but we don’t. We sit and watch Benny fly away, our heads still full of movies.