7

7

Wondrous god, I had the presence of mind to stick a chicken in the Crock--Pot with some onions and carrots this morning, and the kitchen garden needs only to be picked, rinsed and reassembled in order to have salad. Emily has made bread and pie and after a day of work, bread and pie are really all we want. We scrub our hands up to the elbows and throw water on our faces to dilute the paste of sweat and sunscreen and bug spray. Sometimes we will deem ourselves too disgusting to sit at the table and so we run up for a quick shower, forgetting we can’t stay awake after a shower, we can’t go back downstairs to eat. And so we eat first, the five of us together, something I would have sworn had gone the way of childhood—-a beautiful memory forever outgrown except for holidays and the occasional birthday, but I would have been wrong because look, here we are at the table talking over the progress of the day in terms of pounds picked and rows cleaned. Benny eats with us on Wednesday nights, and Emily goes to the Holzapfels’ on Sundays. Other than that they’ve decided to eat with their families of origin, at least during harvest, then meet up later in the bed they share.

From our never--ending conversation about stone fruit, Nell veers away. “Daddy,” she says, her fork hovering above lettuce. “What did you think of Duke?”

Her sisters blink. They look at Nell, then me. They hadn’t realized they were allowed to call their father to the stand.

Joe has just taken a bite of buttered bread and for that reason he is slow to answer. “He was a very talented man.”

“Did you like him?”

I can see my husband remembering. Isn’t that the way long marriages are? You can turn off the sound and still know the answer. “Everybody liked Duke. Everybody including me.” His eyes wander back to his plate. He’s starving, and I’ve made potato salad, potato salad being my husband’s truest love.

“You ‘liked’ him?” Emily asks. “There has to be more than that.” The girls’ need for information is voracious, limitless, and Nell has just tapped what they had assumed to be a forbidden line—-did their father like their mother’s boyfriend?

Joe smiles. “Okay, something else about Duke.” He thinks about this and then comes up with the necessary detail. “He could stand on his hands.”

I look at my husband in amazement. “Oh my god, how did I forget that?”

“He could hold on to the seat of a folding chair and go up straight as a ruler. You’d be talking to him and the next thing you knew he was fully inverted. He even pointed his toes. I’d never seen anyone do that before and I haven’t seen anyone do it since. Duke was an athlete, you know. It’s all over his films.”

Duke used to say it was better than caffeine for waking up, all that blood rushing to the brain.

“If it hadn’t been for Sebastian, I bet he wouldn’t have gone for acting at all,” Joe said. “I think he would have played some sort of sport.”

“Sebastian?” Maisie asks.

“Duke’s brother,” Emily says.

“How do you know Sebastian is his brother?” Nell asks.

We are so tired and still, here we are, amazing one another.

Emily fixes her sister with a look and then we remember, of course, that even if she’s outgrown her condition, Emily is still the clearinghouse of Duke information.

“Sebastian was a tennis player,” Joe says. “He was ranked for a minute, wasn’t he?”

I nod. “Juniors.”

“Wait,” Nell says to me, “you knew about Sebastian?”

“I knew Sebastian.”

The girls all begin to speak at once but Joe ignores them, shaking his head at the memory. “To see how good Sebastian was and to know he didn’t make the pros, it always made me think how good the pros must have been. The only person who could ever make Sebastian break a sweat was Duke, and Duke could never beat him. Never. Do you remember that?” my husband asks me. “How hard the two of them went at it?”

I nod. What I hadn’t remembered was that Joe came to watch them play. Everybody came to watch them, which was one of the countless reasons Duke hated to lose.

“Duke had a great game, but he wasn’t good enough to beat his brother, and Sebastian wasn’t good enough to beat, oh, I don’t know, whoever beat him. We all take our place in the food chain.”

“So what did Sebastian do if he wasn’t a tennis player?” Nell asks, though whether the question is meant for me or Joe or Emily isn’t clear.

“He was a schoolteacher, wasn’t he?” Joe asks.

“History,” I say. Saint Sebastian.

Joe nods again, smiles. He has redirected the topic of conversation so deftly that the girls have no idea he’s done it. He crumples his napkin, picks up his silverware and plate. “Good man,” he says. “Good men. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a minute, I have a few things left to do in the barn while it’s still light.”

We don’t remind him that he says this every night. We don’t tell him that he’s too tired already and that whatever it is he thinks he needs to do can wait. We don’t tell him because he doesn’t listen to us.

Emily pushes back from the table. “I’ll go with you.”

“Don’t be crazy. I know how to check on goats.” He puts his dishes in the sink. “You’ve got your story to listen to.”

There was only one table read on the schedule, and even that, I think, was for my benefit. They’d been cooling their heels in Michigan waiting for the new Emily and now that I was there they were ready to work. Duke was out of his chair the minute I came into the rehearsal room, guiding me around the table like it was a cocktail party. “Emily,” he said, “this is your mother, Mrs. Webb, and your brother Wally.” He leaned over and gave the woman who would play his wife a fleeting kiss on the temple. Mrs. Webb was faded and soft, old enough to be my mother had my mother started young, which she would have in Grover’s Corners.

“How do,” Wally Webb said, and offered his hand. He was an actual child, maybe ten or eleven, with straight brown hair and freckles, though the girl playing Rebecca Gibbs was probably sixteen and got the part for being small. I met Doc Gibbs and Mrs. Gibbs and George. Georges were bound to disappoint me, and this one was no exception. He was a good--looking guy with a string of Pizza Hut commercials and a Saturday morning Disney show that was about to be cancelled. Instead of trying to hold my eye, he lifted himself halfway from his chair and halfway shook my hand.

Uncle Wallace though, he was another story. He leapt to his feet and planted both hands on my shoulders. “Look at you!” he cried. “Look at our Emily! Thank god you’re here. I’m going to have to hug you.”

Hugged by Uncle Wallace! Oh, but I had loved him as a child. The gruff and tender caregiver of his sister’s orphaned brood. The carefree bachelor, dashing in middle age, had risen to the challenge, leaving children all across America to wonder how much better their lives might be if only their parents were dead.

Uncle Wallace put a rinse on his hair to keep it in the neighborhood of red, and his face had the slightly pulled--back quality I’d come to accept in women when I was in California but still found disconcerting in men. He pressed me to him a beat too long.

“This is Uncle Wallace’s eleventh production as the Stage Manager,” Duke said. “He’s hot off a smash success at a dinner theater in Tempe.”

“I can do it in my sleep,” Uncle Wallace said, giving me a wink. I would have laughed had Duke not squeezed my upper arm, moving me along to meet Constable Warren and Howie Newsome and Mrs. Soames. The smaller parts went to people in the community, a strategy that resulted in good will and unexpected fund--raising opportunities. I liked Duke for taking every bit as long introducing me to one cast member as another. Apart from Uncle Wallace, none of us were famous, after all. We were on the way up or on the way out. Our audience for the table read was a collection of swings and understudies who sat at the far end of the room with their pens and scripts. The actual stage manager, as opposed to the actor playing the Stage Manager, sat with the assistant stage manager. I waved to them collectively and they waved back.

“We should get going,” one of the men at the table said patiently.

“Andthis is our esteemed director, Mr. Nelson,” Duke said, holding out his hand. “Our fearless leader. He’s the one who has no business being here.”

“But here I am,” Mr. Nelson said.

“I can’t remember when I last worked with a real director,” Uncle Wallace said, pitching to the room. “There’s always a director, of course, or someone claiming to be a director even though they have no interest in your performance. But not this one! Nelson is a man of ideas, of insight. I thought I knew everything about the part, but he’s opened it up for me again, invited me into the very soul of the Stage Manager.” Uncle Wallace turned to me. “Makes it feel like my first time.”

George picked up his script and tapped it on the edge of the table like maybe he was thinking about leaving.

“Drinking,” Duke whispered as we took our places at the table.

“I’m afraid I already gave my terrific introductory speech last week,” Nelson said to me. “Went over the themes we were highlighting. I don’t want to make the rest of the company listen to it twice.”

“We loved it!” Uncle Wallace said. “We’d be happy to hear it again.”

Nelson shook his head. “Let’s go ahead and read through. Lara, I’d be more than happy to catch you up later if you’d like. I’ve been told you know what you’re doing.”

I looked at the director and smiled. I was ready.

I was sixteen when I installed Our Town into my brain, back when my brain was spongy and fresh and capable of holding on to things forever. Thanks to all those nights in Jimmy--George’s car, I could recite George’s lines as easily as Emily’s, and if I didn’t think about it too much I probably could do the other parts as well. Maybe not all of the Stage Manager, but most of it. Three years have gone by. Yes, the sun’s come up over a thousand times. At not quite twenty--five, this would be my third production of the play. I kept the script on my nightstand to read when I woke up in the middle of the night. I’d spoken the lines over traffic while driving Ripley’s MG down the Santa Monica freeway to spend the day at the beach with friends. I ran scenes in my head on the plane going out to New York, on the plane coming to Michigan. I repeated the words like Catholic girls with their rosary beads, clicking through Hail Marys until they were muscle memory. So it was easy for me to be there in Tom Lake, to be Emily again, to be myself. I had enough room in my brain to think about work and wonder about Duke at the same time.

Having known him for all of an hour, I assumed Duke would be a ham, but his Editor Webb was perfectly restrained, a dignified, matter--of--fact man, even when he had to say words like Satiddy, likker. It’s hard not to make hash of those things, but Duke was the kind of natural Ripley would have liked. Not only was he natural, he remained present for the whole reading, unlike George, who managed to check out the very instant his lips stopped moving. Duke paid attention to the other actors, and I flattered myself by imagining he paid the most attention to me.

If it was my gift to play younger, Duke came off older than he was. He was twenty--eight that summer, but as my father, anyone would have thought he was on the other side of forty. Over the course of his career, Duke played older, then for a stretch he played his age, then he played younger, all the while staying in the same exact place. I never knew how he pulled that off.

It hadn’t occurred to me until we started reading the funeral scene that I was now the age of Emily in the third act, and that no matter how young I looked, I would age out of the part in time because time was unavoidable. I thought of all those women dressed as girls who’d showed up to audition at my high school. No one gets to go on playing Emily forever. That’s what I was thinking at the table read, how I would lose her.

I said my lines with my script closed. I thought that Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb were teary, though their voices held. Even George, who doesn’t have a line of dialogue in the third act, turned to look at me. If this was going to be my last time in the part, I was, as Veronica would say, going to kill it. Plus, I held out a flickering hope that if I did my very best work at Tom Lake, word would get back to New York, and that the Emily they’d chosen for the Spalding Gray production would be gently done away with, and even after this I’d have the chance to play her one more time.

When we finished, Mr. Nelson smiled. “Friends, let us breathe an enormous sigh of relief. We’re going to have a play after all.”

We clapped for one another, and the swings and the understudies clapped with us. The people who’d shaken my hand three hours before came back to shake it again. My mother--in--law, Mrs. Gibbs, who’d been especially good in her part, held onto me a minute more. She told me she’d been Emily once. “Probably before you were born,” she said. “I was nothing like you. You’re one of those Emilys that people will talk about for years. They’ll say, ‘I saw Lara Kenison at Tom Lake when she was a child’ and no one will believe it.”

Maisie’s phone rings. The house rule is no phones at the table but we’ve made an exception for Maisie who keeps getting calls from neighbors asking for help, and we made an exception for Emily so that Benny can text her and tell her what time he’ll be back at the house, and so of course we extended the exception to Nell, because why would we let her sisters answer their phones at the table and make her turn hers off? Joe and I turn off our phones because everyone we want to talk to is here.

“Sure,” Maisie says, stepping into the kitchen while we listen. “No, no, it’s fine. We’re finished. I’ll come over.” She ends the call and looks at us. “The Lewers have a calf with intractable diarrhea.”

“Does it ever occur to you to try to protect us while we’re eating?” Nell asks.

“Protecting you means putting my clothes in the wash and taking a shower before I come into our room. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to tell you what happened.” She turns to me. “Pause the story, will you? I don’t want to miss the part about Sebastian.”

Emily stands up from the table. “If you’re stopping the story then I’m going home. You just reminded me I haven’t done laundry in two weeks.”

“Then I’m going to go to help Dad.” Nell stands as well.

“Good night, ladies,” I sing. “Good night, ladies, good night.”

“Keep Hazel here, will you?” Maisie asks. “I don’t want her getting into this.”

“Understandable. The three of you go. I’ll clean up.”

They stack their dishes in the sink and head out the door together, Maisie holding the end of Emily’s braid the way one elephant will use its trunk to hold another elephant’s tail. Nell slips her finger through Maisie’s belt loop. Joe and I used to say that if lightning struck one of these girls all three would go up in flames. “How did you never tell us Duke had a brother?” Nell says to Emily.

“At the time in my life when I found out about Sebastian I wasn’t speaking to you,” Emily reminds her.

Hazel rushes the door just as it’s closing and Maisie turns and pushes her gently inside. “Stay, stay. I’ll be right back.”

But Hazel doesn’t believe her. When they’re gone she scratches and cries until finally I crouch down and pet her ears. “Hazel,” I say to her very quietly. “Hazel. She’s coming back. I’ll stay here until she does. Hazel, listen to me. I’m going to tell you something important, you need to be brave.” I then explain to the dog how I have told myself for so many years that my career fell apart because I wasn’t any good, but now I’m starting to think it all fell apart because I had ceased to be brave. “If this were a movie, I’d be drowning in regret now. But I’m telling you, Hazel, it doesn’t feel anything like regret. It feels like I just missed getting hit by a train.”

The entire life span of summer stock is four months—-four months birth to death—-so time must move faster now. Duke was the person I knew best at Tom Lake. We had been alone together in my room. I had seen him act and felt moved and surprised by what he was capable of. He had seen me act and so waited for me at the door while the others said good night. We had known each other for a matter of hours, but they were summer--stock hours, which in the outside world would have translated to a solid six months.

“I promised I’d show you the lake,” Duke said.

“Did you?”

“I know it’s a lot to manage,” Nelson said to me at the door, “getting thrown in this way. Let me know if I can help. Not that you need help.” Nelson had a thick brush of hair that must have been blond when he was a child, and his eyes behind his glasses were blue and bright. Directors as a rule did not lead with such friendliness, and I was interested to see if it could work.

“She doesn’t need help,” Duke assured him. Duke who was now my agent. “Unless she needs help finding the lake.”

“I think we’ll all remember the switching--Emilys--debacle as a lucky break.” Nelson shook my hand again. “My number’s on the schedule.”

I thanked him. I told him good night.

“?‘My number’s on the schedule’,” Duke said once we were well out of the building. “As if that isn’t the oldest line in the book.” He shook his head in disappointment.

“No,” I said, “?‘I promised to show you the lake’ is the oldest line in the book.”

If the implication was that the director was trying to pick me up, I had missed it. Duke was trying to pick me up, and that was all that mattered. Uncle Wallace had given it a shot as well, saying that he knew a lot more about where the lake was because this was his fourteenth summer here. “Let me show her the goddamn lake,” he said.

The lake, which stretched two miles in length and a half mile across, was right in front of us.

“Is Nelson famous?” I asked Duke as we crossed the grass, down the hill, towards the water.

Duke stretched up his neck to startling length then tipped his head. “He’s not Francis Ford Coppola, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“That’s not what I’m asking.” The day was just then beginning to soften towards dusk. I had woken up in a New York hotel room that morning.

“Well, all right, if you aren’t asking if he’s a very famous Hollywood director, if you’re willing to lower the bar, then yes, I suppose Nelson is famous. By the standards of Tom Lake he’s famous.”

“Meaning what?”

Duke took my hand and started swinging it so as not to appear tender. I could feel the current of his life flow into my fingers and up my arm and travel into the muscle of my heart. “Nelson has directed several plays for a well--established theater company in Chicago we need not name, and last summer he directed in Sag Harbor, and he’s had one play Off Broadway. Something you’ve heard of.” He turned his face away from me and whispered the name of the play in the direction of the lake so the breeze could carry it away.

“Then what’s he doing here?” Even if I had yet to establish the parameters of the assembled talent, I knew enough to know that an Off Broadway play exceeded them.

“It’s a mystery. He’s only directing one play, and once it opens, he’s out of here. Everyone’s trying very hard to make a good impression in hopes he’ll take us with him when he goes.” He stopped. “I don’t mean us. I mean them. I’m not trying to make a good impression. Uncle Wallace is trying to make a good impression. Rumor has it he very badly wants off the dinner--theater circuit.”

“How would a person make a good impression on Nelson?” I wondered if I would make a good impression.

“Acting, I guess. Acting well. Don’t tell that to Uncle Wallace though. You’d break his heart.”

Uncle Wallace may have been a goose but he was certainly acting well. Based on one table read I would count him as an excellent Stage Manager, not that Duke wanted to hear that from me. Duke, I cleverly surmised, would rather hear about Duke. “So you’re making a good impression if you want to or not. You were wonderful.”

It was the strangest moment, like I was telling him something he hadn’t heard before. He stopped and rested one elbow on my shoulder, pushing his hair back behind his ear where it belonged. “You’re just saying that because of the lake and the cherry blossoms.”

“No,” I said. “You were wonderful.”

Then he kissed me, a first--day sort of kiss, very hesitant and sweet, the way George might have kissed Emily had a kiss been written for them. It was not, however, a kiss between an editor and his daughter.

“Thank you,” Duke said.

“Thank you,” I said, or thought I said, then he took back my hand. We walked the path along the lake for a while and then turned back. We lacked both the time and ambition to go all the way around.

“Do you swim?” he asked me.

“Like a fish.”

“Then we’ll go swimming sometime.”

I stopped. He knew what I wanted to do before I knew it myself, because as soon as he said it I wanted to go swimming more than anything. “Let’s go now,” I said. “I’ll tell you, this has been one hell of a day. Let’s go swimming.” It was northern Michigan in the summer. There would still be enough light.

He looked at me. “We’re busy now.”

“We are?”

He nodded, moving a piece of hair from my forehead with his thumb. “We have plans.”

It sounded so much like a line from a play. We were going to go back to my room, and to pretend otherwise would have been acting.

He took out a pack of Marlboros and offered me one.

I shook my head. “I don’t smoke.”

“Would you try?”

“Smoking?”

He nodded. “It’s something we could do together. Just think how nice it would be to go outside during breaks and sit on the lawn. We could look at the lake and smoke.”

He lit two cigarettes with a single match, and then, exhaling, handed one to me. Jimmy--George had nothing on this guy. Nobody had anything on this guy. I took a small drag and coughed. My first cigarette.

“Just a couple of puffs or it will make you dizzy,” he said. “You’ve got to build up your lungs.”

We were walking again. I had a cigarette in one hand and his hand in the other. I couldn’t imagine Emily smoking, and I wondered if the director would have an objection, though surely I wouldn’t be smoking by the time the audience arrived. The way the embers brightened when we inhaled made me think of fireflies. When Duke stopped again we were back at the house where I was living. He took the cigarette from my fingers and put them both out in a pot of geraniums on the porch. Maybe I was a little dizzy. I hadn’t noticed the flowers when I came in or when I went out. That we were walking up the stairs holding hands seemed like the most natural thing in the world. For all I knew he had gone upstairs with the other Emily as well, the one who’d lasted only a day. He may have been taking me back to a bed he’d already slept in, and I couldn’t have cared less because it was my bed now.

“This is odd,” Joe says when he comes in the back door. The dishes are done and I’m on the couch sewing bits of everyone’s castoff dresses and favorite sheets and the random cloth napkin into quilt squares while Hazel sleeps. Thirty years from now I’ll have enough squares to make a quilt for each of our daughters.

“What’s odd?”

“We’re the only two people in the house.”

“Where’s Nell?”

“She went to Emily’s. I guess Maisie’s still trying to plug the calf.”

It might not sound like an overture but I stick my needle in the tomato--shaped pincushion all the same. People with children are attuned to the inherent sexual possibility of an empty house. For years we tried to schedule activities for all three girls at the same time: the weekly dance class, the 4-H meeting, the algebra tutor. A scant hour of overlap was all we were hoping for, but even when those bright stars aligned, one daughter so often refused to leave. There always seemed to be one girl who wanted nothing but to crawl into my lap for an hour while the other two were away. And so I would hold her. You don’t forget that, even if your daughters have grown and been gone for years and then come home.

“I would have thought they’d all rush back for the story.”

“We’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

“How far have you gotten?”

What came after that first night? “Well, I’m at Tom Lake, we’ve had the first table read, so I guess we’re up to Pallace.”

Joe shakes his head. “Oh, Pallace. Don’t you wonder about her?” He cuts a piece of the strawberry cake I’ve left on the counter. I wish he’d eat the whole thing. As thin as he gets in the summer, he should eat a cake every day. “Pallace and then Sebastian.”

“I never should have started.”

He looks at me with that small, sad smile he has. “How? They’re relentless. They would have sat on your chest until you told them everything.”

“And it’s not like I’m telling them everything anyway. I’m not telling them the good parts.”

Joe brushes the crumbs into the sink, rinses the knife. “By which you mean sex.”

I am staring at my husband from across the room, a calm man who isn’t given to picking apart the past, which doesn’t mean he needs to hear it. “I’m speaking in the parlance of three girls in their twenties.”

“Really good sex?” He’s still smiling when he comes over and takes the pincushion from my hand.

I shrug. “Who can remember?”

“You, probably. I’m betting you remember.” My husband smells very faintly of hay and goats.

“I remember yesterday if I’m lucky.” I’m not fooling him but still, I want to be polite.

“How tired are you?” he asks.

“Less tired than you.”

For so many years I have kissed him. For so many years I have not kissed another soul, and there is a deep and abiding comfort in this. Joe is not Duke. Joe was never Duke and I would never have wanted him to be. From the couch Hazel gives a low growl.

“What about her?” Joe asks.

“She can’t climb stairs.”

He looks at the dog. “Really? I just thought Maisie liked to carry her.”

“She does.”

“Can you stay awake while I take a shower?”

“I can.” I follow him up the stairs. We leave the lights on because before we know it, one of the girls will be home.