Tom Lake(77)

Now Maisie’s quiet. Her long--distance boyfriend has recently told her he needed space, as if there had been some shortage of space. Nell has told me this in strictest confidence. From Maisie I’ve heard nothing. She lies back out on her stomach. “Hazel?” she says.

“Emily doesn’t understand anything about the way the world works,” Nell says. “Benny’s been in love with her since she was three.”

“Faithfully in love,” Maisie adds.

“She says, ‘You’re so lucky. You get to date lots of people. You get to go out and have experiences and all I’ll ever have is Benny.’?”

Maisie stretches her arm further, the cheese in her upturned palm. “Which is like calling a marine in Afghanistan to tell him that you wish you got to go to war, too.”

Nell shakes her head. “She’s only been in love with Benny and Duke.”

“So maybe it would help her to know that Duke was unfaithful,” Maisie says.

“Maybe we don’t need to talk about it at all,” I say. “That works for me. Duke ended up with Pallace for a while. What else is there to say?”

“I feel so bad for Sebastian,” Maisie says.

“I feel bad for Pallace,” Nell says.

I smile to think that neither of them feels bad for me because here we are, together in this tight house with the rain lashing at the trees.

“Did it happen right away?” Maisie asks.

“I don’t know. What constitutes right away?” We are still on summer stock time, after all, four performances of Our Town left when I came back from the hospital, Fool for Love opened four nights after Our Town closed. I would say within the first five minutes of Fool for Love I knew they’d already had sex and were planning on having sex again as soon as the curtain came down. I knew it, Sebastian knew it, the audience knew it. When she tipped the bottle of tequila back, I could see it going down her throat. When he threw her to the floor and covered her with his body, I could hear people gasp. Sebastian and I gasped. “I think by the time Fool for Love opened things had changed,” I say diplomatically. “I’m not sure. They never told me.”

“What do you mean, they never told you?” Nell asks.

“I mean one night Duke was there and the next night he wasn’t. I couldn’t exactly go out and find him. Having a giant cast on your ankle really does impede your ability to hunt your boyfriend down. They don’t do casts for Achilles ruptures anymore, did you know that? They put you in a walking boot that you can take off in the bath.”

Did it happen before Fool for Love? Did it happen while I was in the hospital? Would it have happened if my ankle hadn’t swollen and I had stayed only one night instead of two? Two nights was one night more than Duke could sleep alone. They don’t even keep you one night now. It’s outpatient surgery. These were the things I used to think about, how with a slight shift in circumstances the outcome might have gone another way. Then I realized it would have gone that way eventually. Then I stopped thinking about it.

“So what did you do?” Nell asks. She abandons the spinach pie before she starts it, coming out of the kitchen to sit across from me in the big green chair. Her red lipstick makes her look French. Maisie gets off the floor and lies down on the sofa. When the next round of thunder shakes the floorboards, Hazel darts out and cries to be picked up.

I look at my girls, my brilliant young women. I want them to think I was better than I was, and I want to tell them the truth in case the truth will be useful. Those two desires do not neatly coexist, but this is where we are in the story.



I’d latched on to Our Town when I was sixteen and stayed fastened tight until the hour Pallace took the stage and said the words I’d thought of as mine. After that the whole thing just blinked out. Ripley thought a good therapist could turn me around but I never tried. My confidence had snapped and left me self--conscious, semiconscious. I don’t think much could be done about that. I needed to come up with a plan, not for my life necessarily, just for these days, something that would justify my staying at Tom Lake until I could walk out on two feet.

I wheeled myself over to the wardrobe department to talk to Cat. Cat was the busiest person I knew that summer. She made the costumes, altered the costumes, mended the costumes, and did it with half the staff she needed. She made the calico dress I wore in the first and second acts, and the white wedding dress for the second and third acts, then she made replicas for Pallace on the off chance I would rupture my Achilles on the tennis court. Once when she was zipping my dress, Cat told me she’d stayed up half the night sewing spangles back onto the glittery bits of the Cabaret wardrobe. She said no matter how tightly she knotted the sequins down, the cast would dance them off again.

I had believed that Tom Lake was more enlightened than the average small town in Michigan, but the longer I stayed, the more I could see how it operated like the rest of the world. The directors and the choreographers were men. The men chose the plays, made the schedule, and ran the lights. The women made the food, styled the wigs, and glued false eyelashes onto eyelids. Cat was the woman with the needle and thread.

There were three steps going up to the large room full of sewing machines and dressmaker’s dummies where she worked behind the scene shop. I tried to calculate a way to get out of the wheelchair and onto the ground and then scooch up the stairs backwards on my rear end while keeping my cast more or less off the ground. That’s when a girl walked by in a striped T--shirt, she couldn’t have been twelve, and asked if I needed help.