The Peace Corps would be the most direct route to doing something truly decent with my life. Decency, a word I used to cover any aspect of being a good person, factored heavily into my thinking about the future. Being a veterinarian was decent—-we all wanted to be veterinarians at some point—-but it meant taking chemistry, and chemistry made me nervous.
But why was I always reaching for six--hundred--page British novels and hard sciences and jobs that would require malaria vaccinations? Why not do something I was already good at? My friends all thought I should take over my grandmother’s alterations shop because I knew how to sew and they didn’t. Their mothers didn’t. When I turned a hem or took in a waistband, they looked at me like I was Prometheus coming down from Olympus with fire.
If you wonder where the decency is in alterations, I can tell you: my grandmother. She was both a seamstress and a fountain of human decency. When Veronica spoke about the jeans I diverted from the Goodwill bag by tapering the legs, she said, “You saved my life!” People liked their clothes to fit, so making them fit was helpful, decent. My grandmother—-who always had a yellow tape measure hanging around her neck and a pin cushion held to her wrist with a strip of elastic （the pincushion corsage I called it） taught me that.
Watching these men recite the same lines so badly while polishing their glasses with giant white handkerchiefs really made me think about my life.
“Wait, wait, wait, you wanted to be a vet?” Maisie shakes her head. “You never wanted to be a vet. You never said that before.” Maisie will begin her third year of veterinary school in the fall, if in fact there is school in the fall.
“I did for a while. You know how it is in high school.”
“You wanted to be a pediatrician in high school,” Nell says to her sister in my defense.
“Could someone explain to me what any of this has to do with Peter Duke?” Emily asks. “What does sewing have to do with Duke?”
My girls have directed me to start the story at the beginning when they have no interest in the beginning. They want to hear the parts they want to hear with the rest cut out to save time. “If you think you can do a better job then tell the story yourself,” I say, standing, though not in a punitive way. I stretch my hands up over my head. “The three of you can tell it to one another.” God knows there’s work to be done around here.
“Shush,” Nell says to her sisters. She pats the sofa. “Come here,” she says to me. “Come back. We’re listening.” Nell knows how to move people around.
Emily, the eldest, sweeps her magnitude of silky dark hair over one shoulder. “I just thought this was going to be about Duke. That’s all I’m saying.”
“Stop flipping your hair,” Maisie says, irritated. Maisie had her father cut her hair short in the spring and she misses it. Her little dog Hazel stands up, turns three awkward circles on the couch then falls over into a comfortable ball. They tell me they’re ready.
All three girls are in their twenties now, and for all their evolution and ostensible liberation, they have no interest in a story that is not about a handsome, famous man. Still, I am their mother, and they understand that they will have to endure me in order to get to him. I take back my place on the sofa and begin again, knowing full well that the parts they’re waiting to hear are the parts I’m never going to tell them.
“Duke,” Emily says. “We’re ready.”
“I promise you, he doesn’t get here for a while.”
“Is that all the Stage Managers?” Mr. Martin said finally, his voice tired.
Veronica’s dear head popped out from the edge of the curtain. “That’s all of them,” she called, and then her eyes caught mine. She jerked her head back a split second before starting to laugh.
Mr. Martin picked his thermos off the floor and unscrewed the cap while his cohorts whispered among themselves. “Onward,” he said.
While the Stage Manager is a solitary character, George and Emily exist in relation to each other and to their families, so the Georges and the Emilys auditioned in pairs. Again, Mr. Martin had chosen readings from the second act, which, in my opinion （and the high school girl at the back of the gym was newly loaded with opinions） was the practical choice. The first short exchange showed off more of Emily and the second one showed more of George, unless you were taking into account a person’s ability to listen, in which case the primacy was reversed.
I wondered if the pairs had been put together based on any two people standing next to each other in line, or if Veronica was back there doing something funny, because the first George looked to be about sixteen, and the first Emily, not that I knew, looked every hard day of thirty--five. Rumor had it certain women wanted to play Emily forever. They criss--crossed New Hampshire town to town, year after year, trying to land the part. This one wore her hair in pigtails.
Mr. Martin asked if they were ready, and straightaway George began.
“Emily, why are you mad at me?” he said. I had the page from the script in my lap.
Emily blinked. Clearly, she was mad at George, but she struggled to decide whether or not to tell him. Then she turned and looked at Mr. Martin. She shielded her eyes with her hand the way you see people do in the movies when they’re talking to directors out in the audience, but since there were no stage lights to squint into, the gesture failed. “I wasn’t ready,” she said.
“Not to worry,” Mr. Martin said. “Just start again.”
I imagined him talking to people about car insurance, life insurance, how State Farm would be there if their home burned to the ground. I bet he made it easy for them.
“Emily, why are you mad at me?” George said again.
She looked at George like she might kill him, then turned back to Mr. Martin. “He can’t just start like that,” Emily said. “I have to be ready.”
I didn’t understand what was happening, and then I did: She had lost. Like a horse that stumbles straight out of the gate. She hadn’t even started and it was over.
“We can do it again,” Mr. Martin said. “No matter.”
“But it does matter.” Would she cry? That’s what we were waiting to see.
The boy was tall with a crazy thatch of light--brown hair that looked for all the world like he’d cut it himself in the dark. The expression on his face made me think he’d been working over some aspect of baseball in his head and just now realized he was in trouble. “I’m awfully sorry,” George said, exactly the way George would say it—-sorry and concerned and slightly buffaloed by the whole thing. In short, this guy was going ahead with his audition, and Emily knew that, too.
“I want to get back in line,” she said, teetering. “I want to read with someone else.”
“That’s fine,” Mr. Martin said, and before she had so much as turned, he called out in a louder voice, “We need another Emily.”
We were rich in Emilys. So many more Emilys than Georges. I knew that from registration. The Emily going out passed the Emily coming in, a girl some fifteen years younger whose yellow hair was loose and shining. She put a little swish in her hips so that her pretty skirt swayed. It was scary to see how fast time goes. I knew the first one would not be getting back in the line.