Tom Lake(19)

Emily’s future, the one in which her father and I grow old and she takes over the farm, has been decided. Maisie’s veterinary classes at Michigan State are online but she finds no shortage of practical application for her education in this neck of the woods. She takes all comers: helpfully administering deworming paste on one farm, castrating the spring kids and lambs on another, and giving Hazel a multitude of physicals. Neighbors a mile away call in the middle of the night to ask if she can turn a breeched foal, and she does, then delivers it. “Turns out I’m better than nothing,” she says, walking in the back door the next morning, bloody and reeking of afterbirth.

But Nell has no such opportunities, no breeched foal equivalents. She spent her last spring of college picking cherries and reading plays in her childhood bedroom. She and her friends balance their laptops on stacks of books and practice monologues for one another. Because they want to act and to learn about acting any way they can, she begs for my stories even though they are wildly out of date. Even though they wind up depressing the hell out of her.

“What was it like?” she asks me again.

It was like being a leaf in a river. I fell in and was carried along.

Nell begins for me. “So you left Los Angeles and went to Tom Lake,” she says.

We are back on our feet again, back to work. “I went to New York first. New York and then Tom Lake.”

Emily shook her head. “Los Angeles, Tom Lake, and then New York.”

These girls are so certain about the things they do not know. “New Hampshire, California, New York, Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, Michigan. I promise you.”



When three years had passed and the movie still wasn’t finished, I wondered if it wasn’t time to stop relying on the charms of my unpierced ears and take some acting classes.

Ripley shook his head. “You’ll ruin yourself,” he said.

It had been a long time since we’d seen each other and I’d called him up, looking for advice. We were sitting out by the pool behind his house, our teak lounge chairs shaded by a giant red umbrella. It was a Tuesday or a Saturday, March or October. That was the problem with L.A., I could never remember. “You’re telling me no one here takes acting classes?”

“You’re fresh, unspoiled,” he said. “That’s your thing. People take acting classes to learn how to do what you’re already doing.”

“So by studying acting I’ll spoil my unspoiledness?”

“Exactly.” He was drinking Perrier with crushed ice and lime. A Hispanic woman came out of the house to put a bowl of kumquats on the table between us, then went back without a word.

“I just want . . .” I began. But I had no idea what I wanted. All I knew for certain was that the day was hot and the pool looked like heaven.

“What?” Ripley asked. “To be a movie star?”

I smiled. “Swimming pools, movie stars.”

Ripley felt some responsibility for me, I guess, having brought me there to be in a movie that was sitting in a can. Still, he offered up his next sentence with hesitation. “I know a guy,” he said. “They’re starting to put together a production of Our Town.”

Just that fast I felt the words rise up in me—-clocks ticking and sunflowers and new--ironed dresses. They were always there, like some small animal hibernating in my chest. I said nothing.

“You could try,” he said, making it clear that my impending disappointment would not be on him.

“Where?” I popped a kumquat in my mouth the way bored girls in L.A. will do. The sourness was akin to being electrocuted but I betrayed nothing. Maybe I was a better actress than I thought.

“New York.” Then, a kumquat later, added, “Broadway. They’ve signed Spalding Gray for the Stage Manager.”



“No!” Nell says.

“I didn’t get the part.”

“You tried out for Our Town on Broadway with Spalding Gray!”

“Spalding Gray wasn’t there when I auditioned and I didn’t get the part.”

Emily lifts up a branch and peers beneath it, trying to decide if it needs to be tied. “I’m starting to understand something here,” she says, and all of us think she’s talking about the tree. “Every thing leads to the next thing.”

Maisie stops to look at her sister. “That’s called narrative. I guess they don’t teach you that in hort school.”

“I understand narrative, idiot, but when you see it all broken down this way, step by step, I don’t know, it’s different.” Emily looks at me. “Your grandmother asks you to register people for a play and you wind up starring in the play, which gives you the nerve to try out for the same play in college, which means that Ripley gives you a part in his movie, but the movie doesn’t come out, so you wind up in New York to try out for the play again—-”

“But you don’t get the part,” Maisie says.

“And so you go to Michigan,” Nell says, “which is how you get to us.”

“It’s just that I thought this was going to be a story about Duke,” Emily says, her dark braid down her back, the bill of the Michigan State cap shading her eyes. “And then I thought you were just taking us on some wild--goose chase to amuse yourself.”

It’s still there, though you have to tune your ear in order to hear it: the last hissing ember of Emily’s bygone rage and desire.