That George though, I liked him. The Stage Managers had set a very low bar. That George stayed through three more rounds and each time he did something different, something particular that was in response to the Emily he was reading with. When the Emily was shrill, he was matter--of--fact. When the Emily was timid, he was quietly protective. The third one—-who knew how she managed it so quickly—-started to cry. Just a few tears at first, impressive really, but then she lost control of herself and was bawling. “George, please don’t think of that. I don’t know why I said it—-”
George pulled out his handkerchief. Did they all carry one? He dabbed at her face, making a single shushing sound that somehow, miraculously, shushed her. At the back of the gym I shivered.
Many of the Georges who followed read their lines as if they were trying out for Peter Pan. The older they were, the more they leapt in a scene that did not call for leaping. The Emilys were tremulous, emotive, cramming the breadth of human experience into every line. They were Angry and Sorry and Very Moved. I started to wonder if the part was more difficult than I’d imagined.
Listen to yourself, I wanted to call out from the back of the gym. Listen to what you’re saying.
A mediocre George could stay through three or four Emilys simply because he was needed, though if he was hopeless he stayed for only one. The Stage Managers had embarrassed me, and the Georges, at least after the first one, bored me, but the Emilys irritated me deeply. They were playing the smartest student in her high school class as if she were a half--wit. Emily Webb asked questions, told the truth, and knew her mind, while these Emilys bunched up their prairie skirts in their hands and mewled like kittens. Didn’t any of them remember what it was like to be the smart girl? No high school girls had come to try out for the part, at least no girls from my high school, probably because there would be too many rehearsals on nights better spent doing homework or waiting tables for tips or hanging out with friends. No one had come to speak for our kind.
And so when Emily and George left the stage, in the moment before the next Emily and George arrived, I turned my chair around. For a minute I told myself I would go back to Doctor Zhivago, but reached for a registration form instead. It wasn’t that I wanted to be an actress, it was that I knew that I could do a better job. Name the form said. Stage Name if Different. I printed my name: Laura Kenison. Other than my address, phone number, date of birth, I had nothing to offer, no way to turn my after--school job at Stitch--It into theatrical experience. I listened to the audition behind me. “Well, UP unTIL a YEAR ago I USED to like YOU a LOT,” Emily sang. I folded up the registration form and put it in my copy of Pasternak, then took a fresh sheet and started again. This time I spelled my name L--A--R--A, tossing out the “u” my parents had given me at birth because I believed this new spelling to be Russian and worldly. I decided Mr. Martin had been right. I decided that I would be the diamond.
2
“You had a ‘u’ in your name?” Emily looks at me skeptically.
“For sixteen years.”
“Did you know she had a ‘u’？” she asks her sisters, and they shake their heads, mystified by what I’ve withheld from them.
“There’s a lot you don’t know,” I say.
Hazel the dog looks at me.
“I didn’t know it was going to be funny,” Maisie says.
“No idea,” Nell says.
“It isn’t funny,” I tell them. “You know that. It isn’t a funny story except for the parts that are.”
“Life,” Nell says, dropping her head against my shoulder in a way that touches me. “Keep going. I’m thinking the hot George is still going to be there.”
I waited for the George and Emily on the stage to finish before going out to the lobby, the application in my hand, the Polaroid camera around my neck. Somehow I’d forgotten there would still be so many people waiting to try out for the other parts: the Gibbses and the Webbs. Men and women and children were pacing, silently mouthing the words on the pages they held. I was one of them now. I was about to tell George I was disappointed in him because all he ever thought about was baseball and was no longer the boy I considered to be my friend.
A scant handful of Georges and Emilys sat in the hallway that went back to the stage. Everyone had a chair except for Veronica and the first George, the good one. They were sitting together on the stairs and he was making her laugh, which, I can tell you, was not the hardest thing in the world to do. Her black hair swung down across one flushed cheek, and I realized that we should have swapped our posts two hours ago. I had forgotten because I’d been studying at the school of theatrical auditions, and she had forgotten because she’d been talking to George. You really couldn’t hear the stage from the hallway, which was why she stayed close to the door, propping it open just a little bit with her fat Stephen King novel. Whatever else was going on, Veronica never stopped paying attention to the stage.
When she looked up and saw me there with the camera she raised one magnificent eyebrow. Veronica’s eyebrows were thick and black and she tweezed them into delicate submission. She could get more information across with an eyebrow than other people could with a microphone. She knew I was going to read for Emily, and that I would get the part. I used to say Veronica could never play poker because her thoughts passed across her forehead like a tickertape. She realized that she could have read for Emily, and then she could have been the one to come to rehearsals with this guy. They could have practiced their lines in his car, and raised their clasped hands above their heads at the end of every performance, bowing one more time before the curtain came down. But Veronica almost never got to go out at night because her mother was a nurse who worked the second shift and her stepfather was long gone and she had to look after her brothers. We both had two brothers, yet another bond between us, though mine were much older and hers, technically half brothers, were little kids. If it hadn’t been for those brothers, Veronica would have made a truly great Emily.
“Really?” she asked me.
I nodded, handing her the camera. She stood to take the clip out of my hair.
“You have to go last,” she said. “No jumping line. If Jimmy’s still around he can read with you.”
Jimmy looked me dead in the eye and reached out his hand. We shook on it. “No place I’d rather be,” he said.
I went back down the hall and took my seat. I didn’t want anyone to think I was getting preferential treatment, which, of course, I was. I didn’t have to run to the bathroom with Veronica to know what she was doing. Mr. Martin needed to find an Emily in a field with no contenders. All his hopes would be pinned on whatever girl came last. I had audited over four hours of AP acting classes, which didn’t mean I knew how to act, but I sure as hell knew how not to. All I had to do was say the words and not get in the way.
When the last pair had gone and it was just me and Veronica and Jimmy--George in the hall, I asked Veronica to braid my hair.
Jimmy--George shook his head and Veronica agreed with him. “It’s prettier down,” she said.
I was wearing jeans and duck boots and my brother Hardy’s old U. New Hampshire sweatshirt. Go Wildcats.