Tom Lake(12)

Joe took all of this better than I did, but what else was new? Joe took everything better than I did. Emily seemed able to treat him as her father while at the same time endlessly declaring that someone else was her father. She wanted them both. Two fathers and no mother would have been the dream. To some extent, Joe blamed himself for the whole situation. And to a lesser extent, I blamed him, because it had been Joe who unleashed Duke on our girls. I certainly had no intention of telling them I dated a movie star for a summer in my twenties before he was a movie star.

Had it been before or after we took the kitchen wall out to make a family room that Joe told the girls about Duke? It must have been after. Emily must have been twelve, which would mean that Maisie and Nell were more or less ten and eight. Maybe it was Christmastime. I know it was winter. Maisie had dug The Popcorn King out of what we referred to as the movie basket. They had seen it who knew how many times before and that’s exactly what made the experience appealing to them, the repetition, the pleasure of anticipating what came next. They chimed in on the best lines, No BUTTER? and cracked themselves up. Winters were so long, and we leaned into the movie basket and the books on the low shelves beneath the window to save us. Yes, this was definitely after the expansion because I remember standing at the wide white sink doing dishes while the three girls braided their hair into a single fat rope. Their conversation consisted of one of them telling the other two to hold still, and then another one complaining the others were pulling and would mess everything up. The movie’s soundtrack became their soundtrack, the insistent violins that lagged half a beat behind Duke’s feathery alto. Mostly his voice was lost to the water running in the sink and the girls’ laughing, though every now and then I heard him sing the word Popcorn! quite distinctly. He’d done a lot of family movies after the cop show, after the astronaut movie, before he reinvented himself as a Very Serious Actor, though the popcorn movie was already old on the night of this particular viewing, and he was already a Very Serious Actor. We’d lost the cardboard sleeve to the VHS tape. This was the only one of the family movies in which he’d been made to sing and dance, and while he didn’t do either of those things naturally, the immensity of his charisma provided sufficient cover.

I knew the movie as well as the girls did. I knew that we were at the scene where he was dancing on a floor covered in unpopped kernels, dancing and sliding, arms windmilling wildly, nearly falling and never falling, his perfect physicality overwhelming in its abandon. I used to watch that scene and wonder how many times they’d made him dance on popcorn. How many days did they ask him to do it again so that there would be enough footage to splice the number together? On that night I struggled to scrub a crust of lasagna off the bottom of a pan. Baked--on, burnt--on mess. What was that a commercial for? Some tool meant to free me from labor. I did not turn around to watch him in his bowler hat and pearl--gray suit. I was staring out the window above the sink. I did not turn towards his voice, nor, had I been facing in the direction of the television set, would I have turned away. Duke had been famous for as many years as we had been apart. Had every sight or sound of him sent me off on a pilgrimage of nostalgia or excoriation I would have lost my mind years before. We coexisted peacefully, Duke and I, or I coexisted.

Into this scene of braiding and scrubbing and movie and dancing came my husband, stamping the snow from his boots. He stood behind the couch where our three girls were firmly tethered together as one daughter, Nell facing the television and Maisie and Emily each facing out to the side, the backs of their heads touching. They were thrilled by what they had accomplished, the end of the braid secured by a rubber band. Joe stood and watched the screen with them for a minute. The kernels beneath Duke’s feet were just starting to pop and he scooped up handfuls and flung them into the air like snow. That was when Joe said, “You know your mother used to date him.”

Imagine braiding the tails of three mice and then throwing in a cat. I don’t think he realized their heads were fastened, or that they would all begin to scream and claw so violently in an attempt to separate themselves and get to me. I don’t think Joe was thinking. He had seen Duke dancing on popcorn as often as the rest of us, but for whatever reason on that night he offered commentary. One of the girls, I’d bet it was Maisie, thought to tug off the rubber band, and in a matter of seconds they were apart, their long hair flashing into shields. They were loud in that piercing way of girls, and Joe, as if to amend his poor judgment, picked up the remote and paused the movie, thus silencing not the children but the topic of discussion. Duke froze there, the bowler nearly slipping off his loose, dark hair, his mouth open, his eyes half--closed in a moment of mock--sexual ecstacy I could have done without. Emily said that Daddy was making it up. Nell wanted to know if Duke and I had gone to school together. Maisie asked when he was coming to our house, the very thought of which lit the three of them from within, their favorite movie star soon to arrive on a winter night because why else would their father have picked this moment for the great reveal? When is he coming? they cried.

What was it Lear says at the end? Never, never, never, never, never.

We might as well have cut each girl a heavy slice of chocolate cake soaked in espresso, then stood back to watch them lick the plates. They were relentless. How had it happened, they wanted to know. Why hadn’t I married Duke instead?

On that long ago night our girls were still years away from having boyfriends of their own. I tried to remember what I thought dating meant when I was their age: ice cream, movies, walking home from school, the dread and desire that surrounded the mystery of kissing. In summer stock, Duke slept in my bed because I had the infinitely superior room—-a closet, a dresser, a window that looked out over Tom Lake, my own tiny bathroom with a shower we could just barely fit into together. We lay in that double bed and ran each other’s lines. We lay in that bed. When ambition overcame us, we played tennis or swam in the lake. We got drunk after shows or got high. We ate the pita bread I kept in the nightstand for the times we were hungry and couldn’t bear the thought of getting up. Sometimes he would go for coffee and bring it back to bed, or I would go. We were on the stage or in that bed, forgotten cigarettes burning down to the filters in the ashtray. We were dating.