Good for you, I want to say to him. I who knew nothing and have nothing to say. I can remember very clearly when Emily was eight and Maisie was six and Nell was four, the big girls were in school all day and Nell came home from preschool after lunch. The sweetness of those hours when it was just the two of us never left. What would life have been without Nell? Who would Emily and Maisie have confided in once they were grown? We had a younger sister.
Nell puts her hand on my shoulder, Nell who reads my mind. “Go back to the lake,” she says to me. “Tell us about Sebastian.”
I didn’t know Duke had a brother, and while later I could see some resemblance, it wasn’t immediately evident. When I was close enough to really see him I didn’t think, he must be my boyfriend’s brother; I thought, this guy’s not a drug dealer. He was talking to Pallace, making her laugh, and Duke had on his biggest possible Duke smile. My swimsuit was seersucker, blue and white, with a tiny, heart--shaped button sewn between the cups with red thread, a lovely, unnecessary detail that spoke to how much the stupid thing must have cost. I shivered slightly when I walked out of the water even though the day was so hot. Pallace had to get to her Cabaret rehearsal and it was late but she waited for me. She took the towel from around her waist and draped it over my shoulders, like she knew I’d forgotten my towel. Maybe she did know. We were so naked, the two of us.
Duke put his arm around me. “This is the one!” he said. “This is Emily. Emily, this is my brother, Sebastian.”
“Lara.” I shook his hand.
Sebastian smiled. “He forgets.”
Sebastian was a man, that was the thing. Sebastian, scarcely a year his senior, was a man and Duke was a boy and Pallace and I were girls.
Everyone else had already left. Pallace tugged her sundress over her head and I was trying to pull up my shorts, suddenly envying Mother Gibbs her dry underwear. I rubbed quickly at my torso, my hair, so I could give Pallace her towel back.
“Maybe I could have come at a worse time?” Sebastian asked.
“Are you kidding me? It’s the perfect time!” Duke said, his voice exalted. “We’re working on the third act after lunch. It’s all Emily. You won’t believe how great she is.”
“Are you in the third act?” Sebastian asked Pallace.
“Not the third act you’re talking about. I’m in a different third act and I’m going to be obscenely late if I don’t leave right this second.”
I gave back the stripey beach towel. “Go.”
She looked at all of us, making it clear she wanted to stay. She smiled at Sebastian. “I’m so late,” she said, and then she turned around and ran. She was wearing flip--flops, a bag over her shoulder. She bounded off to the rehearsal studio while the three of us stood there, watching her go.
“My god,” Sebastian said. “Is she a runner?”
Duke gave the question serious consideration. Was Pallace a runner? “I would say she is everything.”
We headed back up the hill to the theater, Duke lit up in his happiness. He carried his shirt and espadrilles in one hand, and kept his other hand on his brother’s back. How was the drive and had he had lunch? Sebastian could sleep in his room in the dorm because he was bunking with me. Duke hadn’t dried his feet and now they were coated in dust. He never brought a towel to the lake because he always just used my towel, but today, for whatever reason, I’d forgotten.
“Are you in the third act?” Sebastian asked Duke as he held open the door to the theater.
“Where’s my girl?” Duke called out as we walked into the darkness. “Where’s my birthday girl?”
None of us knew we were at the beginning of anything but this was where the four of us started. After rehearsal, Duke took his brother back to his room to get him settled, and for the first time it struck me that I had no idea where Duke’s room was. My room—-he was always telling me this—-was so much better. I walked out of the theater alone and thought about what I should do with my time. I never had time. I should write letters, or at the very least postcards, and let everyone know how well things were going. My intention was to go straight to my room but I heard music through an open window. “What good. Is sit--ting. Alone in your room?” the singer asked. The accompanying piano felt tinny and stale, exactly right. The words were less a question than a directive. “Come to the Ca--ba--ret, old chum . . .” I went inside and stood against the back wall of the rehearsal room.
I’d left Grover’s Corners, where we sat in a row of chairs in the cemetery, staring ahead, and arrived at the Kit Kat Klub, where the dancers straddled their chairs with intention, stood on chairs bending forward, asses offered to the light. Pallace draped backwards across the seat of one, the top of her head touching the floor, her legs scissoring up in time with the music. She was still wearing her red swimsuit, all the dancers were wearing some variation of swim wear, and it all looked vaguely obscene so far away from the lake. Upside down and sideways they were singing, dancing, grinding away while a man at an upright piano played along, darting up a hand to turn the sheet of music then coming right back to playing again.
It would be easy to describe Pallace as the most beautiful, most talented person I had ever seen, but Tom Lake was bristling with her equals. I suppose a few attractive duds had snuck in here and there, the kid playing George being one, but for the most part the performers had a magnetism that required no practice whatsoever—-either you’ve got it or you don’t. Duke had a truckload of it. He had it when he spoke the dullest lines of Editor Webb, or ordered coffee, or took me to bed. If Jimmy--George from high school knew how to look at a person, Duke knew how to make a person look at him. The Kit Kat girls were no slouches in that department either. I had come in to watch my friend, but confronted with the whole lot of them I hardly knew where to rest my eyes. They all looked hungry. I went from Pallace to some others I’d met at dinner or in the lake, a few I didn’t know, and finally came to rest on Sally Bowles, who stood in the middle of the stage like a diamond set in a ring. Sally Bowles, her leg slung shamelessly over the back of a chair, extended an invitation to the cabaret that no one could refuse.
Just as I’d started to think I could act, I found myself wishing I could sing and dance. I wanted to climb up on one of the Kit Kat chairs, to be a woman rather than a girl.
When they were finished, Pallace used that same striped towel to dry herself again, laughing with the other dancers as she pulled on her dress. I waved to her, and when she saw me, she smiled like I was the person she was most hoping to see. “You’re here!” she said.
“I want to be your understudy,” I said.
She fell breathless into the folding chair beside me, bending over to unbuckle her high--heeled shoes. “How much do you know about the brother?”
“Until a few hours ago I didn’t know he had a brother. That’s how much I know about the brother.”
“Did he say anything?”
“He’s staying for a couple of days.”
“Did he say anything about me,” she said, the perspiration shining at her hairline.
I thought for a minute. What had Sebastian said? “He was impressed with your running.”