“You slipped the harness,” Nell says.
“You’re a fucking genius,” Maisie says, her voice gone soft with wonder.
Emily stands radiant before our adoration. “Dad doesn’t know this, does he?”
We shake our heads.
“Hold off for a minute, will you? Let me tell him. Benny’s going to want to talk to him. I want to talk to him. He’d be hurt, you know, if he thought we’d worked the whole thing out without him. We’re together all the time.”
Emily! I want to say. This sorrow at the thought of exclusion you wish to protect your dear father from, that’s what I’ve been feeling all morning. But I have been here long enough to understand the difference between daughters and mothers and daughters and fathers. We promise to wait. Secrets are at times a necessary tool for peace. “Take as long as you need.”
“I’ll tell him,” she says, then opens up her arms to take the three of us in.
When all of this is done we feel that we have lived enough for an entire day. We’ve done enough. Now we should be able to go home, sit on the porch or in the bathtub, go back to bed with our books and our dog and our sewing, but the truth is the sun is ticking up and we’ve barely started to work. Sweet cherries must be picked today and every day until they’re gone. We’ll start shaking the tarts before the sweets are finished. They overlap at the end. When all the cherries are harvested there will be just enough time to get the trees pruned and finish up the farm maintenance and take care of equipment repair before we start in on the apples. And the pears. Only a few acres but still, we have pears and they will have to come off the trees. Everything does.
“Did you ever think that you were going to marry Duke?” Emily asks, bringing the story back to me.
Given that marriage is Topic A, I try to remember. Did I ever look at Duke in my bed asleep, the cigarettes on the nightstand, his arm thrown out across my chest, and think, yes, you, every morning, forever?
“No,” I say.
“But you loved him,” Emily says.
“I was twenty--four.”
“That’s a yes,” Maisie says.
Did I ever wonder if my parents had been in love with other people, or think of them as having lives before their lives included me? Maybe it’s just that my girls are modern, or that Duke was famous, or that we’re mired down in work with only the past for distraction. I have no idea.
“So you did your first table read and then you went for a walk along the lake,” Nell says.
“And you smoked!” Maisie says. “We haven’t talked about the smoking. I can’t believe that. You’d kill us if we smoked.”
I nod, picking, picking, picking. That is all I have told them, and now I can feel them bearing down on me as if they are once again crawling into my lap, pushing my book aside, trampling my sewing. Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, they cry.
The most amazing thing was how well I slept—-in a new state with a new job and a naked man I scarcely knew in my bed—-I went through the entire night without so much as a dream. The window had no curtains, and when I opened my eyes to the brightness of Michigan I felt myself to be newly and fully adult. Certainly I hadn’t been an adult in New Hampshire, and in L.A. people made money by herding me around, Ripley or Ashby, my agent, a producer. But I’d gotten to Michigan all on my own, into the play and into this bed. “Hey you.” I tapped the small dip in the middle of Duke’s chest.
He kept his eyes closed, smiling as he pulled me to him. “Oh, perfect. This is perfect.” He snuffled into my neck. “I was hoping you’d still be here.”
“Where else would I be? It’s my room.”
“And you’ve been nice about sharing. What’s the time?”
I lifted up enough to see my travel clock, which was on his side of the bed. His side, my side. “Eight--seventeen.”
He yawned like a lion, showing me his molars, his fillings. “We start at nine.” He took my face in his hands and looked at me with great seriousness. “You shouldn’t be late, the star, her first morning. You’ve got to be disciplined. Either breakfast or sex. Not both. You have to choose.”
I was making good choices these days, which meant that by the time we rolled apart there wasn’t even a moment for coffee, and no time for Duke to go back to his dorm to change. “Lend me something,” he said.
I was pulling my favorite dress over my head, the smocked one with the daisies and the wide pockets that my grandmother had made for me to take to Los Angeles. “You can’t wear my clothes.” Small female, large male, I could think of so many reasons why it was inappropriate.
“I’m not going to rehearsal dressed in something I wore yesterday.”
I looked at him. “No one remembers what you wore yesterday.”
He threw off the sheets, leaping up. Duke, naked and twenty--eight, opened the dresser: underwear, socks, and two nightgowns in the first drawer, T--shirts, shorts, and two swimsuits in the second. “Your organization is impeccable.”
“Put your clothes on,” I said. “We have to go.”
He chose my Disneyland T--shirt, just that word in swooping pink script on a bright white background. I had wanted to go to Disneyland when I first went to L.A. and so Ashby had taken me. The two of us spun in teacups and had our picture taken with giant mice. “This,” he said, tugging it over his head like a butterfly trying to stuff itself back inside the papery chrysalis.
“I don’t think—-” I started to say, but it was already done. He was back in his surgical scrubs, his espadrilles, the T--shirt straining to hold itself together across those wide, bony shoulders where so recently I had slept. He took my hairbrush from the dresser, my toothbrush from the sink.
“You’re using my toothbrush?”
He stopped his brushing. “This is not intimacy,” he said, holding the toothbrush up, the toothpaste foam sliding down his hand. And he was right, of course. He was even right about the Disney shirt, which was cute on me but was on him both scandalous and spectacular.
We came down the hall behind a Black girl wearing shorts and a Boy Scout shirt. I remembered her from the table read, her face but not her name. Or not even her face—-I remembered her legs. Never had one person been in possession of such preposterous legs. She was an average height—-by which I mean taller than me and shorter than Duke—-but all that height was in her legs.
Nell raises her hand.
“What?”
“You’re objectifying her.”
“Pallace? What am I doing wrong now?”
Maisie agrees. “She’s a person. She isn’t a great pair of legs.”
“If you’d give me another minute I plan to establish that.”
“But you can’t just lead with a body part.”
“Have you ever met dancers? Have you ever heard them talk about their legs? About other people’s legs?”
Nell thinks about this for a minute. “She may have a point.”
“Get back to the story,” Emily says.
Pallace dropped down the stairs three at a time, and when she got to the bottom, turned around. “Are we late?” she asked Duke.
“Right on time,” he said.