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And so Mr. Saxon cleared his throat and, after waiting a full minute longer than what would have been merely awkward, he began. “Three years have gone by,” he said. “Yes, the sun’s come up over a thousand times.”
I continued to face the lobby as I had all morning, though now those two sets of double doors were closed.
Mr. Martin and my grandmother and the people sitting with them were far away, their backs to me, my back to them, and poor Mr. Saxon, who was dying a terrible death up there, was doubtlessly looking at the director and not the back of a high school girl.
Still, as a courtesy, I did not turn around.
He went all the way to the end of the page.
“There! You can hear the 5:45 for Boston,” he said finally, his voice flooded with relief.
The reading lasted two minutes and I wondered how anyone could have thought it wise to have picked such a long passage.
“Thank you very much,” Mr. Martin said, his voice devoid of encouragement.
Such a sadness welled in me. If Veronica had been there we would have played a silent game of hangman, adding a limb for every word Mr. Saxon hit too plaintively.
We would have refused to look at each other for fear of laughing.
But Veronica was in the hallway, and no one had come in late the way we’d been so sure they would.
As it turned out, the auditioners had all had the same idea: arrive promptly, register, and stand in line as directed—-thus proving themselves to be good at taking direction.
Mr. Martin called out for the second hopeful, Mr. Parks.
“Should I start at the top of the page where it’s marked?” Mr. Parks asked.
“That would be just fine,” Mr. Martin said.
“Three years have gone by,” Mr. Parks said, and then waited three years in order to underscore the point. “Yes.” He paused again. “The sun’s come up over a thousand times.”
Mr. Parks was playing to Maine, not New Hampshire.
Were I to turn around I no doubt would have seen a man in a yellow slicker, a lobster tucked beneath his arm.
Silently, I reached into the backpack hanging from my chair and felt for my copy of Doctor Zhivago .
This had always been the plan: they would audition and I would read, and when we got bored Veronica and I would swap our posts so she could read.
Mr. Parks was nowhere near the end of the page.
The good thing about Doctor Zhivago was that the plot was sufficiently convoluted so as to require all of my brain.
I didn’t much like the novel but I wanted to see what would happen to Lara.
Still, by the sixth time some aspiring Stage Manager announced that the sun had come up, I realized Pasternak was no match for my circumstances and I turned my chair around.
One after the other, the Stage Managers walked out onto the proscenium and began.
The awkward ways these men held their bodies, and how the paper trembled in their hands, were things no high school girl should ever see.
Some of them had decent voices, but tip them off the side of a boat and they would go down like anchors.
Zero buoyancy. Others were okay in their bodies, pacing around with one hand stuffed in a pocket, but they sounded out each word phonetically.
The dichotomy was neck--up neck--down: Some had one and some had the other, but no one managed both and several managed neither.
Put together, the Stage Managers were a car crash, a multiple--vehicle pileup, and I could not look away.
Despite all evidence, it was nearly springtime in New Hampshire.
My junior year was seven weeks from its completion but I kept thinking that this was the first day of my true education.
None of the books I’d read were as important as this, none of the math tests or history papers had taught me how to act, and by “act” I don’t mean on a stage, I mean in life.
What I was seeing was nothing less than how to present myself in the world.
Watching actors who had memorized their lines and been coached along for months was one thing, but seeing adults stumble and fail was something else entirely.
The magic was in identifying where each one went wrong.
Mr. Anderson, a loan officer from Liberty Bank, had brought a pipe, a prop that may have been all right to hold, but which he kept clenched between his teeth.
A person didn’t have to act to know that the ability to separate one’s jaws was helpful in speaking, and yet I knew it and he didn’t.
Then, in the middle of the two--minute speech, he folded the sheet of paper he was reading from, slipped it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket, pulled a box of wooden matches from the patch pocket of that jacket and lit the pipe.
The puffing it took to pull the fire into the tobacco, the little flame flashing up from the bowl, it was all part of his audition.
Then he put the box of matches and the spent match back in his pocket, removed the page of script, unfolded it and resumed his performance while the sweet pipe smoke drifted towards the rafters and worked its way back to me.
That Mr. Martin didn’t just stand up and say forget it, I have no interest in directing Our Town , was a testament to his fortitude. Instead, he coughed and thanked Mr. Anderson for his time. Mr. Anderson, nodding gravely, departed.
Every Stage Manager came with an unintended lesson: clarity, intention, simplicity.
They were teaching me. Like all my friends, I was wondering what I should do with my life.
Plenty of days I thought I would be an English teacher because English was my best class and the idea of a life spent reading and making other people read appealed to me.
I was forever jotting down ideas for my syllabus in the back of a spiral notebook, thinking how we’d start with David Copperfield , but no sooner had I committed myself to teaching, I wrote off to request an application for the Peace Corps.
I loved books, of course I did, but how could I spend my life in a classroom knowing that wells needed to be dug and mosquito nets needed to be distributed?
The Peace Corps would be the most direct route to doing something truly decent with my life.
Decency, a word I used to cover any aspect of being a good person, factored heavily into my thinking about the future.
Being a veterinarian was decent—-we all wanted to be veterinarians at some point—-but it meant taking chemistry, and chemistry made me nervous.
But why was I always reaching for six--hundred--page British novels and hard sciences and jobs that would require malaria vaccinations?
Why not do something I was already good at?
My friends all thought I should take over my grandmother’s alterations shop because I knew how to sew and they didn’t.
Their mothers didn’t. When I turned a hem or took in a waistband, they looked at me like I was Prometheus coming down from Olympus with fire.
If you wonder where the decency is in alterations, I can tell you: my grandmother.
She was both a seamstress and a fountain of human decency.
When Veronica spoke about the jeans I diverted from the Goodwill bag by tapering the legs, she said, “You saved my life!” People liked their clothes to fit, so making them fit was helpful, decent.
My grandmother—-who always had a yellow tape measure hanging around her neck and a pin cushion held to her wrist with a strip of elastic (the pincushion corsage I called it) taught me that.
Watching these men recite the same lines so badly while polishing their glasses with giant white handkerchiefs really made me think about my life.
“Wait, wait, wait, you wanted to be a vet?” Maisie shakes her head. “You never wanted to be a vet. You never said that before.” Maisie will begin her third year of veterinary school in the fall, if in fact there is school in the fall.
“I did for a while. You know how it is in high school.”
“You wanted to be a pediatrician in high school,” Nell says to her sister in my defense.
“Could someone explain to me what any of this has to do with Peter Duke?” Emily asks. “What does sewing have to do with Duke?”
My girls have directed me to start the story at the beginning when they have no interest in the beginning.
They want to hear the parts they want to hear with the rest cut out to save time.
“If you think you can do a better job then tell the story yourself,” I say, standing, though not in a punitive way.
I stretch my hands up over my head. “The three of you can tell it to one another.” God knows there’s work to be done around here.
“Shush,” Nell says to her sisters. She pats the sofa. “Come here,” she says to me. “Come back. We’re listening.” Nell knows how to move people around.
Emily, the eldest, sweeps her magnitude of silky dark hair over one shoulder. “I just thought this was going to be about Duke. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Stop flipping your hair,” Maisie says, irritated. Maisie had her father cut her hair short in the spring and she misses it. Her little dog Hazel stands up, turns three awkward circles on the couch then falls over into a comfortable ball. They tell me they’re ready.
All three girls are in their twenties now, and for all their evolution and ostensible liberation, they have no interest in a story that is not about a handsome, famous man.
Still, I am their mother, and they understand that they will have to endure me in order to get to him.
I take back my place on the sofa and begin again, knowing full well that the parts they’re waiting to hear are the parts I’m never going to tell them.
“Duke,” Emily says. “We’re ready.”
“I promise you, he doesn’t get here for a while.”
“Is that all the Stage Managers?” Mr. Martin said finally, his voice tired.