Then she saw me, one stair behind him. “Emily!” she cried.
“Pallace,” Duke said, holding his hand out to her by way of introduction.
She looked at us standing there together. “Seriously?” she said to Duke. “She must have been here for what, twenty minutes? Did you go to the airport and stake out the plane?”
“I didn’t like my room,” he said, his voice oddly prim.
“That explains why he didn’t try to sleep with me,” Pallace said. “The dancers are in the attic. The view is great but it gets really hot up there.”
“Walk, please,” Duke said, lighting the morning’s first cigarette.
I was trying to keep up. My room? “You’re a dancer?” Of course she was a dancer.
Pallace extended her left leg at a ninety--degree angle from her body and lifted up on the ball of her right foot, her little red tennis shoe straining in the point.
“Showboat,” Duke said.
“Not Showboat, you fool, Cabaret. But I’m studying acting, too. Right now I’m studying your acting.”
“Pallace is your understudy,” Duke said.
I hadn’t thought about that. Of course there would have been an understudy in place already. “So why aren’t you playing Emily?”
“Because then I’d be in Cabaret four shows a week and Our Town three shows a week and at the end of the summer I’d be dead. Anyway, Tom Lake’s idea of racially progressive casting is to let me be the understudy, not the lead. It’s a big step for them.”
“Better not get sick,” Duke said to me.
“That last Emily—-” Pallace began.
“Piece--of--work Emily,” Duke offered.
Pallace nodded. “That piece of work dropped out soon enough for the company to find a nice new white Emily.” She held an open hand in my direction.
“New and improved.” Duke put his arm around my shoulder.
“Very improved.” Pallace tossed me a smile. “And anyway, can you imagine it? A stage full of Caucasians with me standing right in the middle looking all lonely?”
Duke lowered his eyebrows, lowered his voice. “Whose town is this, anyway?”
“Not our town,” Pallace answered brightly.
“I don’t think—-” I started to say. What was I going to say?
“If you like things just a little weirder, I’m also your understudy on Fool for Love. Oh! and I’m the understudy for your mother, which is stupid. Your mother should have gone to a swing.”
“My mother?” My mother in New Hampshire?
Duke took back his arm. “I didn’t know that! That means if Mrs. Webb gets sick you’ll be my wife.” The kiss he gave her then had more intention than the kiss he’d given to the woman who was presently playing my mother. “Someday we’ll have to tell Emily she’s adopted.”
“What happens if Mrs. Webb and I are both sick on the same night?” Mrs. Webb, my mother. I couldn’t remember her name.
“Then whichever one of you is less sick will pull your shit together and go on anyway,” Pallace explained. “Dancers always go on. If you ever see a notice that a dancer’s out, you can bet money that she OD’d on whatever painkillers they gave her to keep dancing.”
“The show really must go on,” Duke said.
I stopped on the path. We were almost to the theater, actors arriving from every direction, understudies and swings, all of them with coffee in hand. I would have given a lot for a coffee.
“Do you two know each other?”
Duke and Pallace looked at each other. “Do we?” she asked him.
“No more than we know anyone else.”
“But not less than we know anyone else,” Pallace added.
“The way you talk.” I turned from one to the other. They were both beautiful, unusual, overly animated, the way actors and dancers are. This was something else though. “It’s like you’ve come out of the same improv group.”
Pallace laughed, her teeth as perfect as Duke’s were stricken. “Do you think? Maybe that’s because we came out of the same improv group.”
“The great state of Michigan,” Duke said.
Duke and Pallace had known each other a week but they were both from Michigan.
The small New Hampshire town where I’d grown up was as white as Grover’s Corners. In my class at school we only had Aly, who came in the ninth grade. We treated her the way we might have treated an alpaca, which is to say with fascination and solicitude but no actual friendship, so while I could give a comprehensive description of her hair, clothes, and patterns of speech （she said pop instead of soda） I had no idea why her family had moved there or where they had come from or why they had left abruptly in the middle of our junior year, though that last one probably wasn’t such a mystery. The University of New Hampshire was only slightly better than our high school, and Hollywood was only slightly worse. The Black makeup artist at my first screen test turned out to be an anomaly. Hollywood had nothing on New Hampshire when it came to the intermingling of the races.
So I followed the dancer in the snappy Boy Scout shirt towards the building, running ahead to open the door because the way she and Duke were talking they would have walked straight into it. I was going to have a boyfriend who crackled like a downed power line and a girlfriend who was Black. I was even more of an adult than I could have imagined.
It turned out the summer stock in the middle--of--nowhere, Michigan, beat both the University of New Hampshire and a Hollywood backlot by a mile when it came to diversity. A low bar but still, Tom Lake won. As all of us hustled off to our various rehearsals, we nearly resembled an American city. Most of the actors came from Chicago and Detroit, a few had come from as far away as D.C. and Pittsburgh. The cattle--call auditions for summer stock—-the auditions I had been spared—-drew from conservatories and regional theater companies. Theater people were always looking for work, and while they might not have chosen to build a life in Tom Lake, they were happy to get out of the city for the summer. Gene, the assistant director of Our Town, was Black. Gene checked to see if we had our scripts. Did anybody need a script? Auden, one of the other understudies, was Black as well. He was also a dancer, and he and Pallace started dancing at the far corner of the stage, executing an intricate, old--fashioned swing without benefit of music. They looked only at each other and didn’t seem to care that we were watching. Whether they were rehearsing for something that wasn’t Cabaret （which I was pretty sure didn’t include swing dancing） or killing time because Uncle Wallace had yet to arrive, I couldn’t say.
I did know that diving into Our Town without a Stage Manager on the first day of rehearsal would be a trick, and after waiting for twenty minutes （in which we all finally just sat on the floor and watched Pallace and her friend dance, hypnotized by the regular squeak of their tennis shoes）， Nelson dispatched Gene the A.D. to find out what the hell was going on.
“He might have misread the schedule,” Duke offered, even though the top of the schedule said REHEARSALS BEGIN PROMPTLY AT 9:00 A.M. in a typeface large enough to be scolding.
The collective desire of every person in that theater was for the play to succeed. Emily had skipped out. Emily had been replaced. New day, let’s get to work. The A.D. returned, too quickly I thought, and the director met him in the aisle for a brief consult. The director, Nelson, already looked tired.