Into the Woods

4 Little Women, But With Dancing

4

LITTLE WOMEN , BUT WITH DANCING

Teddy

Jack Branksome was going to be an acquired taste. But honestly, if I was going to acquire a taste for anyone here, it was probably going to be for him. He was smart, and he didn’t feel the need to fill every silence with words. We did talk a bit as we sipped our sake, but it wasn’t oppressive. I hadn’t read his book, but I wasn’t much of a reader these days—I’d read a lot as a kid, but somehow I’d lost the habit. He, however, seemed familiar with Concrete Temple.

“You guys broke up, huh?”

“It would appear so.”

“It would appear so?”

Yeah, that had been an idiotic thing to say. It was just that breakup sounded mutual. A civilized parting of ways after both parties realized the relationship had run its course. That was what Karlie and I had done.

That was not what Scott and I had done. Nope, he’d just sat me down in the fucking Hilton Garden Inn in Chicago after the last show of the tour and told me he was done. Our record contract had been fulfilled, and he had no interest in re-upping with our label or any other. In fact, he had studio time and session musicians already booked for a solo album, which meant he’d been sitting on this news for a long time.

Well, he’d been sitting on it for a long time, and then he’d gone and told Jet and Luis before me.

Nothing against Jet and Luis. They were great musicians. But Concrete Temple was Scott and me. The other guys hadn’t been with us from the beginning. They didn’t write. Sure, Jet was a star, but he was still, to be blunt, replaceable. Luis was replaceable.

Scott was not replaceable. There was no Concrete Temple without Scott.

There was no Concrete Temple without me, either, thank you very much.

I guess the problem was, I wasn’t sure if there was a me without Concrete Temple.

I maybe could have dealt with all that junk from Scott—the news he was leaving, being the last to know, the studio already booked for a solo album—if he hadn’t gone on to spew all this shit about how Concrete Temple hadn’t been fulfilling him artistically for fucking years .

You sure managed to cash those unfulfilling checks , I’d snarked back. And then when he called me a hack, I’d smashed the TV.

It was still so mortifying. No, it was more than that. It was terrifying . Because I was not that guy.

And yet, apparently, I was.

I cleared my throat, forced myself back to the here and now, where I was sitting on a porch next to a novelist, looking out at a lake in the middle of a forest where I was meant to get my shit together. “Yeah. We broke up.”

“Too bad.”

“Mm.”

“What do you think of the others here?”

“They seem fine.” What did he want me to say? I didn’t care about paintings or pots, but I could understand that other people did.

“Everyone seems very… perky.”

“Mm.” I raised my glass in agreement, thinking of how every time Gretchen departed my company, she literally leaped away. Which, come to think of it, maybe wasn’t perkiness so much as it was sensibleness. I was no longer feeling the Hulk-smash energy that had animated me the day of the hotel room incident, but I would freely admit that I was not sparkling company right now.

Anyway, I wouldn’t really call Gretchen perky. She looked perky, with her pink-tipped hair and her retro, pinup-style bikini. But she wasn’t perky. She was… well, the word that came to mind was actually sour . Maybe that was my fault: realistically, she’d only turned sour after I’d been a dick to her. But the fact was, I could feel the coolness emanating from her.

I’d thought of her, last night, as the Sugarplum Fairy. The fairy part tracked: she was always leaping through the air. Maybe I should start calling her the Sour plum Fairy. I laughed to myself over what a perfect descriptor that was for her.

“What’s funny?”

“Nothing.” I needed to turn my attention to something besides refining nicknames for Gretchen. I needed to remember why I was here: the album.

After a couple drinks, Jack took his leave, and I intended to start writing. I brought my guitar out to the porch. I went so far as to take it out of the case.

Then I sat on my ass and did nothing. For a long time.

So long that I was still sitting there on my ass doing nothing an hour and a half later when Gretchen pulled up in a God damn paddleboat.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said when she realized I was sitting there, “but apparently I’m arriving by boat.”

“I can see that.” There was no way not to see her, with her bright hair and her bright… self. The sun was peeking out from behind a bank of clouds in a way that made her skin glow.

And there was a lot of skin. She was wearing that same swimsuit from before.

She was wearing that same swimsuit from before. Listen to me. What did I think? She would have executed a costume change while at the beach?

Her swimsuit was white. The top looked like a sports bra, except the straps that went over her shoulders were wide ruffles, and the hem also had a ruffle. The bottom was high-waisted—it covered her belly button—and there were smaller ruffles around the leg holes.

That was… a lot of ruffles for someone so sour.

“I think this is one of those ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time’ scenarios.” She made quotation marks with her fingers even as her legs kept pedaling.

I shook myself out of my thoughts. She was trying to pull up alongside the dock that extended from the little beach in front of my cabin, but she was having trouble.

“It turns out that while one person can do a paddleboat built for two, precision maneuvers are tricky,” she said.

I sighed and put down my guitar—it was apparently only a prop anyway—and rose to mount a rescue mission. “Where’s everyone else?” I asked as I crossed the beach.

“Still swimming. I’m starving all of a sudden, so I decided to come back and change and head up to the dining hall. Marion said we can take the paddleboats back and forth between the swimming area and this beach. There’s supposed to be a post here to tie it to?” She looked like Fred Flintstone with her legs pumping. “I should have just walked, but this looked like fun.” She snorted. “Famous last words.”

“Throw me that rope.” She did, and I hauled her in and secured the boat.

She was on the seat on the far side of the boat, so there was some to-ing and fro-ing as she disembarked. I offered her a hand and was surprised when she took it.

When she alit on the dock, she didn’t immediately let go. She was completely waterlogged. Her hair hung in blond-pink hanks around her face, and there was makeup smeared under her eyes.

She shivered. “The lake is colder than it looks. But you probably already…” She swallowed the rest of her sentence.

“I probably what?” Her smile disappeared, which was unsettling for reasons I could not articulate. “OK, well,” I said, attempting to extricate my hand from hers.

She did not let go. “Were you named after the poet Tennyson?”

I was discombobulated by the abrupt change of subject. “My mom was a fan.”

“‘It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,’” she recited. “That’s Tennyson, right?”

“It is,” I said warily. Where was she going with this? Most people had vaguely heard of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and most people knew his most famous line, but in my experience, they didn’t know it was his , or that it was from a poem at all. That line was more likely to appear in Etsy shops that also sold shabby-chic wooden signs that said Live, Laugh, Love .

Maybe if I couldn’t get any fucking songs written, I could launch an Etsy shop that sold signs that said Die, Cry, Hate . Auden could help me make them look good.

“Well,” Gretchen said, abruptly letting my hand drop, “that’s complete bullshit.”

“I…” Had no idea what to say to that. Struck dumb by Sourplum. Ha. That rhymed. Watch your back, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

I was still trying to think what to say when Gretchen turned and walked off. No leaping, just walking. Which seemed wrong, somehow. I guess I’d gotten used to the leaping.

But her thesis was not wrong. It wasn’t better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I learned that early from dear old Mom.

At the end of week one, I was beginning to think I’d made a mistake coming here. Not only had I done zero songwriting, I was up to my eyeballs in children.

There were eighty kids at this camp, and they all had a declared area of focus. Like college majors, except at camp. I felt a little bad for them. My childhood had been shitty in many ways, but I wouldn’t trade the wide-open, unprogrammed summers of my youth for anything. Auden and I had had the city at our feet, and we’d gleefully abandoned both the strictures of school and the unpredictability of Mom in favor of roaming free.

Fifteen kids were doing music, and I was supposed to meet with each of them at least once. Which on paper seemed reasonable enough, but it also meant I was seeing three kids a day that first week, Marion having suggested we try to do our one-on-ones early in the month so the kids could benefit from our wisdom or some shit as they planned their end-of-camp performances. I was keen to get this obligation over with, as after this week, all I would have to do was show up at a few sunrise circles and hold twice-weekly “office hours” in the music studio, where kids could come see me for… I wasn’t even sure. Help tuning their guitars? Straight talk about the music industry that would crush their fragile little dreams?

By Friday afternoon, I was exhausted by the week’s tsunami of teens. They were so oily and awkward. But I’d almost made it; I’d survived fourteen kids of wildly varying abilities. And honestly, I’d done it by putting into action Gretchen’s advice about treating them like adults who were less far along in their careers than I was.

Kid number fifteen was—I consulted my schedule—Anna, going into tenth grade at St. Paul Academy. I think they told us the kids’ schools because it was supposed to mean something to us. I, of course, was clueless. Anna could be a Juilliard graduate for all I cared.

“Hi,” she said shyly, as she appeared in the studio.

All right. One more kid, and it was the weekend. I tried not to look as unenthused as I was. It wasn’t her fault she was stuck with me. “Tell me about you and music, Anna.”

“Um, I love music.”

Great. Don’t we all. I raised my eyebrows.

“I play piano, guitar, and banjo,” she added.

“Banjo!” I exclaimed. I couldn’t help it. So far this week, I’d seen guitar and piano and drums, which I could work with, and a saxophonist who would be better off with YouTube than with me—woodwinds were not my forte. Then two kids who only sang, which was fine for them, but I didn’t know what they expected from me. I’d only sung backup for Concrete Temple, though I supposed that was going to have to change if I intended to put out a solo record.

I gestured Anna in—she was still hovering near the doorway—and pointed at the empty stool next to me. The camp provided a piano and a drum kit, but the kids were supposed to bring their own instruments if they played anything else, and sure enough, Anna was laboring under the weight of a guitar case and a banjo case.

“Let’s hear something on banjo.”

She got her instrument out and said, “You want to hear a cover or an original?”

Well, hell. “Both. Why don’t you start with a cover?”

She proceeded to blow me away with a cover of the Eagles’ “Take It Easy.” I’d have thought that if a kid this age was going to cover music with actual banjos in it, rather than just banjoify a current pop song, she’d have gone with the Chicks or Mumford the kids were allowed to sleep in.

I knocked on Jack’s door to see if he was in the mood for a drink. We’d fallen into the habit of having one before dinner. “You want to go to your place, look out at the lake?” he asked. His cabin was on the forest side of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.

“Nah. Let’s just stay here,” I said, though I had no idea why. It was likely that soon the Sourplum Fairy, who always went swimming with Maiv before dinner, would come flitting home to change into her ridiculous swimsuit that made her look like a ruffly marshmallow, and did I want to see that?

No.

Mostly no.

It was complicated.

I liked the swimsuit, OK, as absurd as it was. I was capable of appreciating a pretty woman even if I didn’t appreciate the woman herself.

Soon we were set up on Jack’s porch with more of his sake, which wasn’t my favorite, but it had been a long week and a drink was a drink. Like clockwork, Gretchen appeared a few minutes later. She was only walking, not leaping or pirouetting or whatever the fuck, but she had a lightness and grace about her, which I guess shouldn’t be that remarkable given her line of work. I’d noticed, though, because I was an asshole, that the lower body that was the engine of all her light-footedness was hella strong. She had a sizable ass and big, muscular thighs. The combination of that physique and the ruffly swimsuit was… really something.

Maybe I would tag along for swimming today. Gretchen always asked Jack and me if we wanted to join—though she never seemed to actually want us to say yes. I used to love swimming, back in my McCarren Park days, and I’d been known to hit hotel pools for laps with some regularity. It had been a long time, though. When had tours stopped being fun and started feeling like such a grind? Had the switchover been gradual or abrupt, and how had I not noticed?

“Hey!” Gretchen called when she spotted us. “Just the gentleman I was hoping to see. Can I join you for a sec?”

We didn’t give her an answer, but she didn’t require one. She barged in and leaned against the railing of Jack’s small porch. “It’s about my dance girls and their end-of-camp show.” I belatedly wondered if I should give her my chair. Jack had one of the small porches with a single chair, and I’d dragged the chair over from Danny’s place next door. “They want to do Little Women .”

“Uh, OK,” I said, as Jack said, “ Little Women , like Marmee and Jo and Meg donate their Christmas breakfast to the poor and stuff?”

“Yep. Little Women , but with dancing.”

“ Little Women , but with dancing,” Jack repeated, a hint of mockery in his tone. More than a hint.

“So,” I interjected. “ Little Women , but with dancing. What about it?”

“I was hoping you could help us adapt it?”

“And here I would have thought Louisa May Alcott didn’t need any help,” I said.

I was trying to be funny, but she scrunched up her Disney princess nose, seemingly giving serious consideration to what I’d said. “You would?”

“Well, it’s a classic for a reason, isn’t it?”

“And here I’d have thought you’d have thought you were above Louisa May Alcott.”

“What?” What were we even talking about?

“Your self-esteem is very… robust,” she said. “You also don’t seem like the kind of person who’s into books about, like, sisterly bonds.”

“I have a sister. We have a bond.” A bond forged in the fire of parental neglect, not the unconditional love of a wise and loving mother à la Little Women , but whatever.

“Hang on, it’s going to take me a sec to process the idea of you as a sibling. As a child. As having a past that didn’t involve being birthed into the world as an adult man with a scowl and calloused guitar hands.” I looked down at my hands. I hadn’t thought my calluses were that noticeable. “Nope,” she went on. “That is not computing; I’m getting an error page. I’ll have to work on that later. In the meantime, I have Little Women , but I have nine girls and no boys. And I’m actually talking to Jack here.” She swiveled to face him.

Of course she’d been talking to Jack. She wanted help with a writing problem. Why had I thought I was “just the gentleman” she wanted to see? I stood, which caused her to swing her attention back to me questioningly.

“Why don’t you sit?” I asked.

“That’s OK. I’m not going to stay long.” She turned back to Jack. “I want everyone to have roughly the same amount of stage time. So do I make more little women? Or do I rethink completely?”

“I think if you’re redoing Little Women to make it a musical, you can do whatever else you want to it,” Jack said. Again, he was being kind of a dick, but in a way that was hard to put my finger on.

“I never said musical,” Gretchen said. “Although…” Her eyes narrowed and she swung back to face me. I was still standing, not having sat back down after she rebuffed my offer of a chair.

“Why do you want everyone to have the same amount of stage time?” I asked, though I had no idea why I cared. As was well established, she wasn’t here for me.

“Why wouldn’t I want everyone to have the same amount of stage time?”

“Because some of the kids are more talented dancers than others?” I posited. “Or smarter? Or just generally better? Because the world is, or should be, a meritocracy?”

She blinked. Yeah, that had been an odd thing to say. But I couldn’t square Gretchen’s plan with reality. Though I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to. I sat down.

“Sure,” she said. “But this isn’t the world. This is summer camp for teenagers. There’s plenty of time for meritocracy when they grow up. The world can crush their dreams later.”

“I thought you said to treat them like adults.”

She looked momentarily confused. But she had said that, that first day when she was talking about how to deal with teenagers, and it had been good advice. It had gotten me through the week.

She shrugged. “I guess I contain multitudes.” She turned to Jack, either not getting or not caring that he wasn’t interested in her show. “Also, what do I do about Laurie?” She paused. “Laurie is a boy character in Little Women .”

“I am aware,” Jack said, and there was nothing subtle about the snobbery in his tone that time.

“OK, sheesh.”

“Maybe you should talk to Caleb,” Jack said. He was dismissing her.

“I will find you a Laurie,” I said suddenly, because apparently I’d taken leave of my senses.

“You will?”

“Yep.” I had the perfect kid for the job. A self-impressed little shit who fancied himself a guitar god. He was the kid version of the accountant I’d imagined going to adult band camp. “He’s a music kid, but I don’t see why he can’t do double duty in the dance show.”

She eyed me skeptically, as if waiting for there to be a catch. I stared back until she shrugged and said, “OK, thanks.”

I waited for her to ask if we wanted to go swimming. A Friday-night swim was sounding good. But she took her leave and disappeared into her cabin. When she came out a few minutes later wearing the ruffled monstrosity, I thought surely she would invite us. She had every other day this week.

But she didn’t. She just waved and disappeared down the path.