Nell sits down in the grass. “I can’t stand this anymore,” she says.
Emily leans over and puts a hand on her sister’s head.
“What?”
“The whole thing,” Nell says. “That someone just knocked on your door and gave you the part in this really great movie, and when the movie didn’t come out you still got jobs. You were making money even if you weren’t making art. I mean, I understand you had to go swimming first and that wasn’t great but did you even really want it?”
What had I wanted? To fly on a plane? To get out of New Hampshire. I sit down in the grass beside my daughter. “I did, I guess. By the time the movie started shooting I wanted it, but not in the same way you would have wanted it. I get that.”
“I want to go on an audition. I want to act. I want to get the hell out of this orchard. It’s like the universe conspired to make you an actress and the universe conspired to make me pick cherries.”
“But you do that really well,” Maisie says to her. “You have an excellent technique.”
It is sentimental and useless to tell someone you would gladly give them your past because the past is nontransferable, and anyway, I would have wanted to give her only the good days. When seen through Nell’s eyes it’s hard not to think those good days were wasted on me, and that she would have done a better job of it. “We should stop this. There are plenty of other things to talk about. Or we can talk about nothing. Or we can go back to podcasts for a while.” We could listen to podcasts until the hour of our death and not make a dent in the stories that are available to us.
“You can’t stop,” Emily says. “We haven’t even gotten to the part that matters yet.”
“The part that matters?” I ask, though I know.
“Duke. The whole reason you’re telling us about the past is that you’re eventually going to get to Duke.”
“He isn’t the reason for the past,” Maisie says darkly.
Nell rests her head on her knees. “Go ahead. I’m not shutting us down. I’m sulking. There’s a difference. I want you to keep going.”
“Keep going while acknowledging that life is unfair and it should have been you in the movie even though you were still more than a decade away from being born,” Maisie says.
Nell nods against her knees. “That’s all I’m asking for.”
“I have no interest in making you miserable.” If the story was going to end, this wouldn’t be a bad place to end it.
“The circumstances of my life are making me miserable, not the story. It’s not the same thing even when it feels like the same thing.” Nell flops back in the grass, spreading out her arms like a starfish, like a girl for whom hope is lost. The next thing I
know we are all lying in the soft and very green grass, staring up through the branches and cherries and leaves at the Michigan sky, little clouds tumbling high above us. How many years has it been since we have lain in this grass together, beneath these trees, the four of us, discussing which of the clouds were duckies and which were bunnies?
“You should have been famous,” Nell says finally. “I think that’s what kills me.”
I raise myself up on my elbows, taking a moment to admire the sun in my daughters’ hair. “Famous? Are you serious?”
They stir the grass very slightly with their nodding heads.
I lift up my hand to the lushness of trees. “Look at this! Look at the three of you. You think my life would have been better spent making commercials for lobster rolls?”
At that moment Benny comes flying down between the rows, riding his same old bike from high school. Hazel sounds the alarm but we scramble into seated positions too late. He has seen us in repose.
Benny skids to a stop. “You’re sleeping? It’s not even ten o’clock in the morning.”
We all know he’s come to find his girlfriend’s father and not his girlfriend. He wants to borrow a saw or a spool of wire, or he’s come because Joe has called and asked for help fixing something none of us would know how to fix. Benny is thin because he doesn’t take time to eat and his hair is a mop held up by a rubber band because he doesn’t take time to cut his hair.
I wave at him. “We’re solving the problems of the world.”
He gets off his bike long enough to kiss Emily, and we appreciate this: Maisie, whose vet school boyfriend is stuck with his own family in Oregon; Nell, who has no boyfriend; me, who loves love.
“Don’t let your father see you like this,” Benny says, by which he means asleep mid--morning. He doesn’t understand that it’s the weight of the past that’s pinned us there, and before we can explain he rides off again.
We should get up. We should get back to the trees, but we don’t. We sit and watch Benny fly away, our heads still full of movies.
5
In this summer which can at times be mistaken for the end of the world, we are the ones who pick the fruit and send the fruit to the processor and tie up the branches and take the goats out to eat the weeds. We work from the moment we wake until we close our eyes at night. Sometimes one of us says something about how it would be fun to watch a movie but it never happens. We fall asleep with books in our hands. I fall asleep with a threaded needle in my hand, sewing face masks out of pillowcases. And then in the morning the whole thing starts again and we are standing between the rows of trees, telling stories to pass the time. Oh, how we miss the people who have worked on this farm year after year, generation after generation, the kids who went to school with our kids for half the year, every year, from the time they were little, always leaving and coming back, until they come back with kids of their own.
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.”