16 #3
Sebastian went back for my crutches and leaned them against the foot of the bed.
He put my pills and my book on the nightstand.
Sebastian kissed my forehead with kindness, the same way my brothers had kissed me as a child.
He would get me a wheelchair. He would make sure someone took me to the play.
I think I was asleep before he was out the door, and then I was awake again and Duke was kissing me, the startling taste of tequila filling my mouth.
He must have come straight from the lake and into my bed.
He covered me with his pervasive dampness.
“You’ve been gone forever,” he said, pushing off his espadrilles.
“Did Duke come and see you before the play?” Emily asks, her brow knit with concern. Joe has gone off to the goats while the girls and I wash dishes. Cherries, cooking, goats, dishes, the past. Days are endless and the weeks fly by.
“He did.” I lean into the pan to scrub off bits of whitefish. “In between rehearsal and the performance.”
Maisie shakes her head. “Knock yourself out, Duke.”
“They were busy days,” I say.
“Not that busy,” Nell says.
I smile. “No, you’re right. Not that busy.”
“Your girlfriend’s laid up in bed,” Maisie says.
“And she doesn’t get to finish her run of Our Town ,” Nell says.
“In fact, she never plays Emily again,” I say, joining them for a moment in the third person. Nell had already come to this conclusion but I can see that Emily and Maisie didn’t know.
“Never?” Emily asks.
I shake my head.
“It’s just like Uncle Wallace,” Nell says, then catches herself. “I don’t mean that. It’s nothing like Uncle Wallace.”
Emily puts down her dish towel. “Never Emily or never anything else?”
“I stopped acting after that.”
“When you were twenty--four?”
“Twenty--five. I turned twenty--five in the hospital.”
“I really can’t stand this,” Maisie says.
“It redefines the quarter--life crisis,” Emily says.
“The what?”
“Quarter--life crisis,” Nell says. “It’s when your life falls apart at twenty--five or thereabout. The pandemic is our quarter--life crisis.”
“Ah.”
“But yours was so much worse,” Nell says.
“Not getting to act in Our Town again is not worse than the pandemic,” I say.
“Did you really go and see her be Emily?” Emily asks.
“Sure I did. All my friends were in that play. I had to be there for them.” I can’t remember if this is true, if this is the person I was at the time or the person I became later.
Certainly we preached it to the girls growing up: Work for the good of the collective, root for the team, get over yourself.
“You went in a wheelchair?”
No one is doing dishes now, and I clap my hands the way their father does to restart their engines. “I went in a wheelchair. One of the swings from Cabaret came to get me. This isn’t a Dickens novel.”
“So how was Pallace?” Nell asks. This is the question all three of them want answered: How was Pallace?
I tell them the truth. She was spectacular.
I knew Chan from the lake. He was easy to be around, a good swimmer with a solid connection to a guy who sold top--quality weed in Detroit.
He made me feel like he just happened to be walking past the cottage with an empty wheelchair in case I felt like riding along because he was going to the theater anyway.
The world isn’t full of people who can pull that off.
The sky was tipping into pink as he wheeled me down the path, what was left of the daylight shimmering gold on the lake.
“People are saying that you returned the serve and that it was totally magnificent,” Chan said to me as merrily we rolled along. “It cost you your leg but you did it.”
“It isn’t true,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter. All that matters is what people say. Hey, do you want some cherries? We don’t want to be the first ones there.”
I did want some cherries.
He set the brake so I wouldn’t roll backwards, down the grassy hill and into the lake.
“I found this tree last week,” Chan said.
“Sweet cherries. I don’t know what it’s doing here.
I mean, somebody must have planted it and then not stuck around.
Can you imagine bringing a sapling out here with no one to look after it?
Good luck, little tree . Maybe it was some kind of performance art.
” He went to a tree and picked off a few handfuls, then came back and put them in my lap.
I thanked him. I was new to the idea that trees were things that needed looking after.
“You look nice.” He stepped back to look at me in the golden light. “But not too nice. Not like you put too much thought into it. You look exactly the right amount of nice.”
That was the look I’d been going for and it had taken a great deal of effort, considering how hard it was to get dressed with a cast on your foot.
The part I hadn’t considered was that other people would know, Chan would know, but I couldn’t do anything about that.
I ate cherries all the way to the theater.
We arrived with the chickens, all looking for their seats. The curtain was up and Joe was sitting on the stage reading a book.
There were steps down to the rows of seats so Chan parked me behind the back row and went to get me a program.
Duke’s hair would be gelled and pinned by now.
He would read through his maniacal Editor Webb notes for the hundredth time and then go smoke a cigarette and stand on his hands.
Two slips of paper announced the change of cast: the role of the Stage Manager would be played by Joe Nelson, and the role of Emily Webb would be played by Pallace Clarke.
I folded them up and put them in my pocket.
I am ready, I am ready, I am ready I told myself, until finally the lights came down and it didn’t matter if I was ready or not.
“This play is called Our Town ,” Joe began, the Stage Manager began.
He might as well have raised a lantern because we knew we would follow him.
You listened to Uncle Wallace because he was mesmerizing, but you listened to Joe because he was telling you what you needed to know.
I thought about our first day of rehearsal—-years ago!
—-and how it was the same thing then. We knew he was trustworthy.
Joe had seen the entire story and stitched it together for us.
Now there he was as the Stage Manager, doing the same thing. “This play is called Our Town .”
Emily doesn’t come on for a while, and when she does she only has a single line.
I could see Pallace dancing in the chorus of the Kit Kat Klub, her leg flashing up and over the back of her chair and then sitting down hard.
I could see her in the lake, laughing, keeping her head above water.
I could see her stretched across a blanket by the shore of the lake, a tree above her, her head in Sebastian’s lap.
But I could not see her as Emily because when I thought of Emily I was still seeing myself.
Had I come with a knife I would have sawed the cast off my leg right there.
I could have made do without it. Only three more performances after this one. I could have managed.
But then all the children were there—-George and Rebecca Gibbs having breakfast stage left, which represents their house, Emily and Wally Webb having their breakfast stage right, which represents their house.
Pallace was a good head taller than I am, and she was Black, but Pallace was Emily.
I believed her from the moment she made her entrance, when she sat down at her mother’s table, saying she’s the brightest girl in school for her age.
Every sentence she spoke was sitting in my mouth.
I learned so many things that summer at Tom Lake and most of those lessons I would have gladly done without.
The hardest one had nothing to do with Duke or plans or love.
It was realizing that I wasn’t Emily anymore.
Even if I’d gotten to play the part on Broadway with Spalding Gray, there still would come a time when I’d be finished and someone else would take the role.
Many someone elses could do it just as well, because look, Pallace on her second night was every bit as good as I had been after years of practice.
Day after day she had watched me in rehearsal and then made the decision to do the part her own way.
She stamped her feet at times, found places to laugh I’d never seen.
She kissed her father, who was also my boyfriend, and when he says in response that he has never had a kiss from such a great lady before, he meant it.
When Pallace had come to her audition for Tom Lake, she wanted to sing and dance, but she wanted to play Emily as well.
People who could sing and dance and act and play the ukelele and walk on their hands were legion in summer stock.
You couldn’t swim in the lake without brushing up against one.
Pallace had practiced, studied hard. With the exception of Lee, the understudies ran neck and neck with the actors they were set to replace.
The only disappointment the audience felt was when someone like Uncle Wallace didn’t show.
His name was the draw, but they didn’t know a Lara from a Pallace.
So when that first Emily took off, why hadn’t they just given the part to the understudy?
“Emily isn’t Black,” I heard the woman in front of me say very clearly to her husband at the first intermission. Programs rustled all around, a collective murmuring like wind in leaves. Where was the slip of paper that had fallen out of their programs?
What had it said?
All those hours she had endured me, day after day as she watched from the back of the theater, all those lines she had wanted to speak for herself.
You don’t see the play when you’re in it, and you miss the chatter of intermission entirely.
Our Town has an intermission after each of the first two acts, and the second one felt like a break in a political rally or a tent revival.
The disbelievers were starting to lean forward.
They were listening. The message had made no sense at first but this Emily was eroding their notion of what was correct.
Her wedding day was played not for eroticism but for fear.
She didn’t want to leave home, keep house, make meals, endure childbirth, because childbirth would kill her.
She wanted to be her father’s girl, his birthday girl.
Growing up was a terrible thing—-a clear path to the third act.
Emily showed us that, all those moments in life we had missed and would never get back again.
The remaining few who’d managed to hold on to their belief that Emily could not be Black were destroyed by the third act.
We all were. When she went back to her mother’s kitchen I cried like I had never seen the play before.
I cried because she was that good. I cried because I would never play Emily again.
I cried because I had loved that world so much.