Chapter 3
June
Eight weeks until Opening Night
It’s been a couple of years since I’ve been back to North Lake.
I have a way of finding excuses not to go.
I lost touch with most people after high school, not that I was in touch with many people during high school.
I lost touch with the Tempest Theatre community after that last humiliating summer.
I lost touch with the me who used to belong there.
My parents usually come to the city to celebrate holidays, getting a hotel room and making it “festive,” as my mother likes to say, which just means an excess of alcohol so we can pretend to talk to each other.
But really, it’s so that the occasions are marked; we can say we did them in style but not run the risk of any kind of familial intimacy.
My parents always judged my TV show as the artistic equivalent of Styrofoam, but at least I was working.
At least they could say, She’s a working actor, yes, we’re very proud, yes, yes, yes.
But I knew they didn’t watch my show. My mother called it “unpalatable.” She wasn’t totally wrong.
But still, the show was my whole life, the people in it my whole community.
In their absence, I am realizing how little else there has been, how I have let my parents slip away from me.
How, without Listings, I am actually quite alone.
I am realizing, as I drive closer to a reunion with Theo, how much that isolation is on me.
I’m always surprised at how beautiful the drive home is.
It’s terrible getting out of the city; you crawl at a snail’s pace, red light upon red light, in slow motion as you creep toward escape.
It takes an hour just to get onto the highway.
Then there’s a slog through gray concrete walls with shitty industrial buildings on the other side, then subdivisions full of cookie-cutter houses that cost over a million dollars and all look the same, squeezed so tightly together, you could barely put your foot between them.
There’s the giant amusement park on the side of the highway, tall neon structures snaking over and around each other, sometimes a flurry of legs swinging as they run, a roar of dim screams as they pass.
But soon there are open green fields, then the pine trees start, and you reach one epic bend in the road revealing lakes and cottages, boats in the distance now in full view, and suddenly you’re in Canada again.
There are wide, man-made cliffs, the dynamite holes still ridged in little dips along the rock face, but it creates the illusion of high cliffs full of thick pine trees.
You cross bridge after bridge, and underneath each is some gorgeous lake stretched out.
You pass by small towns, then through marshes, where I always do a quick scan for moose, even though I’ve never seen one ever.
There’s something about knowing they’re just out of sight: The hope remains that maybe today is the day.
I’ll admit it, the drive home makes me feel romantic and nostalgic. It reminds me of somebody I used to be, someone I no longer am. All I know is, she used to be hopeful and happy.
As I drive, I play over last week’s chaos.
I think about Nick. I knew he was a bad idea from the start: He was too successful, too attractive, too rich.
All that was what got me to drunkenly sleep with him at the Christmas party.
But the next day, he sent me flowers with a cute note (badly spelled, but I appreciated the effort).
He was so much sweeter than I could have imagined.
He kept the cool-guy persona up at work, but I got to see the real him, the guy who was insecure, vulnerable, good, under all that bravado.
Once he went to this community outreach event to build a new playground in an under-resourced neighborhood.
A publicity thing, he told me. I assumed he was there for the photo op of him breaking ground and shaking hands with city officials, but he walked in ten hours later covered in dirt, ball cap soaked with sweat, beaming.
It was the most beautiful he ever looked to me.
That night over takeout, he told me how his single mom had raised him, how she sometimes worked three jobs, how he grew up in one of those subsidized apartments like the ones surrounding the playground that day.
He told me he’d decided he would get them out of there—he hadn’t known how at the time, but the answer was handed to him in high school, when he was spritzing body spray topless at Abercrombie at the mall and an agent approached him. He was in a movie three months later.
“So, you didn’t dream of being an actor?”
“I dreamed of being rich. And acting got me there.”
I’ve thought about that line a lot over the past few months, and I think about it now, half laughing to myself.
Nick, I always knew, was not an artist. His ambition was never creative, so this, I know, is why Lego Batman is a real win for him.
On the one hand, I feel smug. I am heading in the opposite direction to do Shakespeare with intellectuals.
On the other hand, I had hoped he’d offer to take me with him.
And then he had me fired. This, I know, was simply to punish me. This is the detail that snags in my brain. The fact that whatever sweetness Nick has in him, his default setting is asshole.
A text from Nisha comes through:
You’re really leaving?
Just for the summer, I reply, dictating to my phone. But, yeah, I’m off the show.
Fuckers! This is so shitty! I’m going to quit in protest! I promise to come see your Shakespeare play!
She definitely won’t quit, and she probably won’t come, but I appreciate the sentiment. I mute my notifications.
I wanted to get an Airbnb, but the truth is I can’t really afford one.
My pay for the show this summer is decent, but not compared to regular TV work, and I have no idea when my next real paycheck is coming.
The theater company puts up the guest actors in a rental for the summer, but Theo’s family is there, and he actually likes them, so he has opted to stay at home with them.
Arthur always stays at one of the small lakeside cottages walking distance from the theater.
My parents have given me two options: Stay in the rental or stay at home and take whatever money was budgeted for the rental as an amendment to my salary for the summer.
My getting paid is the main draw of the thing.
It’s awkward, if you think about it, how many people will be involved, will be working hard and giving their time and putting their hearts into something voluntarily that I had to be dragged into and paid to do.
I’m taking a real gamble, opting to stay under my parents’ twisted roof for another few thousand dollars, because frankly, now, I need it.
Luckily, it’s a big house. My parents own a gorgeous old home on a large corner lot on the oldest, prettiest street in town, sprawling Victorians with bay windows, towers, curling wrought iron fences.
The house is spacious enough that we won’t be on top of each other, but even still, I am dreading it.
They are at the theater when I arrive, a note on the door with a cryptic coded message in iambic pentameter, in my dad’s tight, slanted handwriting, directing me to the key, which is hidden under the fairy statue in the back garden, his idea of whimsy.
My parents don’t cook—they assemble food.
My entire childhood was essentially one big charcuterie board, which certainly impacted my disdain for set mealtimes and my penchant for perpetual grazing.
My mother has left a dainty saucer of fruit and cookies, an unusually tender gesture for her, as is the small bud vase of wildflowers on the bedside table in my bedroom.
My room is at the top of the house, the tower.
As a child, I loved it. I pretended I was Sara Crewe from A Little Princess and this was my attic.
I would sleep on a pile of clothes on the floor, rub brown eye shadow on my cheeks, and mess up my hair so that I looked like an orphan.
My mother would come in and look at me. “You’d think you didn’t have a perfectly lovely bed!
” she’d say, but I’d catch her little smile.
She did not want a normal child. She did not want a little girl who would brush her hair and sleep in the pink canopy bed.
If she indeed had to endure having a child at all, it had better be an interesting one.
Maybe that was when they recognized that I was also an artist and that I wanted to live in another world, even if that world was objectively worse than the one I was currently in.
There was romance in it. There was something aspirational, brave, daring to imagine life being worse than it is, and persevering.
The canopy bed is gone, replaced by a queen bed with an upholstered headboard in pink velvet, a weird homage to its predecessor, as if the bed grew up alongside me somehow.
I unpack my suitcases, noting that my dresser drawers have been emptied of my high school clothes.
I was not consulted on that, but also, I don’t care.
I have never been attached to objects from the past. My childhood books are in a neat row on a small white bookcase and on my old wooden desk, the one with the lid that lifts, inside which I hid sticker books and diaries and many, many glitter pens.
On top is a script: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare.
I sit down, open it, planning to highlight my lines, but my mother has already done it, as if to anchor me via neon yellow.
My parents arrive home a few hours later with sagging bags from the boutique cheese store and prepare the evening’s charcuterie while we have a glass of wine.
“Theo arrived a few weeks ago . . .” my mother says. “He wanted some time to settle in and reacquaint himself with the town.” My father coughs, a tell that there is more to it, but my mother hands him a plate and gives him a look, and they say no more.
Theo. There’s no denying his success and, though I am loath to admit it, his talent.
It’s a real coup that they got him. He’s one of the biggest stars they’ve ever pulled, and he’s their own hometown sweetheart.
It’s a marketing match made in heaven. They are graciously concealing their disappointment at losing Genevieve Chen and having to deal with me.
My reputation, unfortunately, precedes me in this town.
I’m not a sure thing, and we all know it.
I think they know that at any moment I could panic, bolt, abandon ship, and then where would they be?
I see right through them. The flowers, the tea tray, my favorite cheese .
. . They are staging this whole homecoming because that is what they do.
They are experts at setting a scene, establishing a tone, and maneuvering human behavior according to their psychotic whims. The director and the producer.
“So.” My mother waits until I have tucked into a surprisingly dreamy Camembert and my mouth is full. “We thought we would do your audition tomorrow afternoon after you settle in.”
I nearly choke on my cheese. “Audition?”
“Yes, well, you see, it’s a formality. It’s just really for appearances so that it’s all on the up-and-up.”
“Is this because of last time?”
“Goodness, no, Miranda, that was a long time ago.” It was, but we all know my doing this is a bit of a gamble.
“Would you have made Genevieve Chen audition?” I ask.
My dad snorts ambiguously.
“Well, that was different,” my mother says.
I don’t bother asking how. “And Theo did?”
“Oh, yes,” my mother says. “Oh, he was wonderful. He did that song from Company . . . ‘Staying Alive’?”
“‘Being Alive.’ Why did he sing? It’s not a musical.”
“I forget. Anyway, it was incredibly charming.”
“Who is he playing?”
“Puck.” She beams. “He’s going to be brilliant.” Of course he is. “And Arthur did his Hamlet.”
“Arthur only auditions with Hamlet,” my dad grumbles. “He’s still hoping we’ll cast him in it one day.” He shakes his head. “No one wants to see a sixty-year-old Hamlet. The man has no sense.”
“Arthur is a dream. I won’t hear a word against him,” says my mother. My dad shoots her a dark look. She looks away.
“Fine,” I say, to break the silence. “Okay, I’ll audition. I mean, I don’t have anything prepared. What do you need me to do?”
“Oh, just a comic monologue and a dramatic monologue,” my mother says. “It’ll look like nepotism if we just give you the part.”
“You mean I don’t have the part?”
“Of course you have the part.”
“Isn’t that nepotism?”
“Well, it’s an emergency.”
“Wow, thanks.”
“It’s more about optics, about what it looks like to the community,” my mother says. “We just want it all neat and tidy.”
Nothing my parents do is ever neat and tidy. I doubt this will be any exception.