“You’ve got an hour,” he said, holding up a second page. “There’s a map.” He took one large step forward and laid the papers gently on the bed, as he might have picked me up and laid me gently on the bed.
This is a story about Peter Duke who went on to be a famous actor.
This is a story about falling in love with Peter Duke who wasn’t famous at all. It’s about falling so wildly in love with him—-the way one will at twenty--four—-that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight. There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end, nor did it occur to me to care.
I have long been at peace with Duke the famous actor, but my feelings for the person who walked into my bedroom that first day at Tom Lake are more complicated. I’ve made a point never to think of him at all, except that now I am thinking of him.
I am making one part of my life into a story for my daughters, and even though they are grown women and very forward thinking, let’s just assume I leave out every mention of the bed, even the two sheets of paper that are resting there on top of the covers.
“I feel like I’m on the verge of anaphylaxis,” Maisie says. “I’m serious. My throat’s closing up.”
Emily and Nell just look at me, their throats already closed. The four of us are back among the cherry trees where the rain is falling so gently we don’t even acknowledge it.
“How do you ever get over someone like that?” Maisie asks. What she means is that I must not be over him still, and I must never have loved their father as much as I loved Duke.
“Do you remember when you would beg us to take you to the county fair every summer?” I want so much to make them understand this. “How the three of you would not shut up about the fair. The fair! Oh my god, I wanted to drown the whole lot of you in a bucket. You would needle and whine until finally we gave in. Your father and I would try to get you to come to the community hall and look at the quilts and pet the angora rabbits, but you wanted to eat chili corndogs and cotton candy and then get on one of those god--awful rides that had been put together by three heroin addicts with a sprocket wrench, the rides that made you feel like your head was going to be flung off your neck by centrifugal force. One of you would vomit on the other two in the ride and then the next one would vomit on me in the parking lot while I was trying to clean you up and the next one would vomit down the back of Daddy’s neck in the car. And then in the morning you were all bright as daisies, begging to go back. Do you remember that?”
“I loved the fair,” Maisie says, her sisters still mute with wonder.
I turn to face my middle child. “Would you want to go now?”
“Maybe,” she says, but she is twenty--four, the age I was at Tom Lake.
“Would you say that the ride was better than being a veterinarian? That you’d rather be whipsawed by something called the Zipper than you would deliver that foal in the middle of the night?” I can argue with Maisie because Maisie is logical and strong. I will always be afraid of waking up the part of Emily that has long been dormant. I will always be afraid of accidentally breaking something in Nell that is fragile and pure. But Maisie is up for it; no one will ever have to worry about Maisie.
“I don’t see why you have to give up one for the other,” she says.
“You don’t have to,” I tell my daughter. “You want to. You wake up one day and you don’t want the carnival anymore. In fact, you can’t even believe you did that.”
Nell turns her face away. Emily is holding on to her own braid with both hands. They aren’t buying it. “We’re not talking about a carnival,” Emily says. “We’re talking about Duke. I believe in Duke.”
I want to tell her she used to believe in the Easter bunny, too, but I don’t. I could say that to Maisie but not the other two.
7
Wondrous god, I had the presence of mind to stick a chicken in the Crock--Pot with some onions and carrots this morning, and the kitchen garden needs only to be picked, rinsed and reassembled in order to have salad. Emily has made bread and pie and after a day of work, bread and pie are really all we want. We scrub our hands up to the elbows and throw water on our faces to dilute the paste of sweat and sunscreen and bug spray. Sometimes we will deem ourselves too disgusting to sit at the table and so we run up for a quick shower, forgetting we can’t stay awake after a shower, we can’t go back downstairs to eat. And so we eat first, the five of us together, something I would have sworn had gone the way of childhood—-a beautiful memory forever outgrown except for holidays and the occasional birthday, but I would have been wrong because look, here we are at the table talking over the progress of the day in terms of pounds picked and rows cleaned. Benny eats with us on Wednesday nights, and Emily goes to the Holzapfels’ on Sundays. Other than that they’ve decided to eat with their families of origin, at least during harvest, then meet up later in the bed they share.
From our never--ending conversation about stone fruit, Nell veers away. “Daddy,” she says, her fork hovering above lettuce. “What did you think of Duke?”
Her sisters blink. They look at Nell, then me. They hadn’t realized they were allowed to call their father to the stand.
Joe has just taken a bite of buttered bread and for that reason he is slow to answer. “He was a very talented man.”
“Did you like him?”
I can see my husband remembering. Isn’t that the way long marriages are? You can turn off the sound and still know the answer. “Everybody liked Duke. Everybody including me.” His eyes wander back to his plate. He’s starving, and I’ve made potato salad, potato salad being my husband’s truest love.
“You ‘liked’ him?” Emily asks. “There has to be more than that.” The girls’ need for information is voracious, limitless, and Nell has just tapped what they had assumed to be a forbidden line—-did their father like their mother’s boyfriend?
Joe smiles. “Okay, something else about Duke.” He thinks about this and then comes up with the necessary detail. “He could stand on his hands.”
I look at my husband in amazement. “Oh my god, how did I forget that?”
“He could hold on to the seat of a folding chair and go up straight as a ruler. You’d be talking to him and the next thing you knew he was fully inverted. He even pointed his toes. I’d never seen anyone do that before and I haven’t seen anyone do it since. Duke was an athlete, you know. It’s all over his films.”
Duke used to say it was better than caffeine for waking up, all that blood rushing to the brain.
“If it hadn’t been for Sebastian, I bet he wouldn’t have gone for acting at all,” Joe said. “I think he would have played some sort of sport.”
“Sebastian?” Maisie asks.
“Duke’s brother,” Emily says.
“How do you know Sebastian is his brother?” Nell asks.
We are so tired and still, here we are, amazing one another.
Emily fixes her sister with a look and then we remember, of course, that even if she’s outgrown her condition, Emily is still the clearinghouse of Duke information.
“Sebastian was a tennis player,” Joe says. “He was ranked for a minute, wasn’t he?”