“You look nice.” He stepped back to look at me in the golden light. “But not too nice. Not like you put too much thought into it. You look exactly the right amount of nice.”
That was the look I’d been going for and it had taken a great deal of effort, considering how hard it was to get dressed with a cast on your foot. The part I hadn’t considered was that other people would know, Chan would know, but I couldn’t do anything about that. I ate cherries all the way to the theater.
We arrived with the chickens, all looking for their seats. The curtain was up and Joe was sitting on the stage reading a book.
There were steps down to the rows of seats so Chan parked me behind the back row and went to get me a program. Duke’s hair would be gelled and pinned by now. He would read through his maniacal Editor Webb notes for the hundredth time and then go smoke a cigarette and stand on his hands. Two slips of paper announced the change of cast: the role of the Stage Manager would be played by Joe Nelson, and the role of Emily Webb would be played by Pallace Clarke. I folded them up and put them in my pocket. I am ready, I am ready, I am ready I told myself, until finally the lights came down and it didn’t matter if I was ready or not.
“This play is called Our Town,” Joe began, the Stage Manager began. He might as well have raised a lantern because we knew we would follow him. You listened to Uncle Wallace because he was mesmerizing, but you listened to Joe because he was telling you what you needed to know. I thought about our first day of rehearsal—-years ago!—-and how it was the same thing then. We knew he was trustworthy. Joe had seen the entire story and stitched it together for us. Now there he was as the Stage Manager, doing the same thing. “This play is called Our Town.”
Emily doesn’t come on for a while, and when she does she only has a single line. I could see Pallace dancing in the chorus of the Kit Kat Klub, her leg flashing up and over the back of her chair and then sitting down hard. I could see her in the lake, laughing, keeping her head above water. I could see her stretched across a blanket by the shore of the lake, a tree above her, her head in Sebastian’s lap. But I could not see her as Emily because when I thought of Emily I was still seeing myself. Had I come with a knife I would have sawed the cast off my leg right there. I could have made do without it. Only three more performances after this one. I could have managed.
But then all the children were there—-George and Rebecca Gibbs having breakfast stage left, which represents their house, Emily and Wally Webb having their breakfast stage right, which represents their house. Pallace was a good head taller than I am, and she was Black, but Pallace was Emily. I believed her from the moment she made her entrance, when she sat down at her mother’s table, saying she’s the brightest girl in school for her age. Every sentence she spoke was sitting in my mouth.
I learned so many things that summer at Tom Lake and most of those lessons I would have gladly done without. The hardest one had nothing to do with Duke or plans or love. It was realizing that I wasn’t Emily anymore. Even if I’d gotten to play the part on Broadway with Spalding Gray, there still would come a time when I’d be finished and someone else would take the role. Many someone elses could do it just as well, because look, Pallace on her second night was every bit as good as I had been after years of practice. Day after day she had watched me in rehearsal and then made the decision to do the part her own way. She stamped her feet at times, found places to laugh I’d never seen. She kissed her father, who was also my boyfriend, and when he says in response that he has never had a kiss from such a great lady before, he meant it. When Pallace had come to her audition for Tom Lake, she wanted to sing and dance, but she wanted to play Emily as well. People who could sing and dance and act and play the ukelele and walk on their hands were legion in summer stock. You couldn’t swim in the lake without brushing up against one. Pallace had practiced, studied hard. With the exception of Lee, the understudies ran neck and neck with the actors they were set to replace. The only disappointment the audience felt was when someone like Uncle Wallace didn’t show. His name was the draw, but they didn’t know a Lara from a Pallace. So when that first Emily took off, why hadn’t they just given the part to the understudy?
“Emily isn’t Black,” I heard the woman in front of me say very clearly to her husband at the first intermission. Programs rustled all around, a collective murmuring like wind in leaves. Where was the slip of paper that had fallen out of their programs?
What had it said?
All those hours she had endured me, day after day as she watched from the back of the theater, all those lines she had wanted to speak for herself.
You don’t see the play when you’re in it, and you miss the chatter of intermission entirely. Our Town has an intermission after each of the first two acts, and the second one felt like a break in a political rally or a tent revival. The disbelievers were starting to lean forward. They were listening. The message had made no sense at first but this Emily was eroding their notion of what was correct. Her wedding day was played not for eroticism but for fear. She didn’t want to leave home, keep house, make meals, endure childbirth, because childbirth would kill her. She wanted to be her father’s girl, his birthday girl. Growing up was a terrible thing—-a clear path to the third act. Emily showed us that, all those moments in life we had missed and would never get back again.
The remaining few who’d managed to hold on to their belief that Emily could not be Black were destroyed by the third act. We all were. When she went back to her mother’s kitchen I cried like I had never seen the play before. I cried because she was that good. I cried because I would never play Emily again. I cried because I had loved that world so much.
17
We do not stop for snow in northern Michigan. Schools open, buses run. Knuckling under to snow means condemning yourself to an uneducated populace. Joe gets up early to drive the tractor with the blower attachment down the rutted drive while I shovel the steps. All those years I pulled the girls out of their beds one at a time and rushed them to the warm kitchen to begin their layering, red tights beneath pink long underwear. What difference did it make? I filled them with oatmeal, gave them hot chocolate, finished them off with hats and mittens and boots, then sent them out into the drifts. Had it been snowing this morning we would be in the orchard now, pulling frozen cherries off the trees.
But on this July morning it is raining, great white sheets of water pounding every side of the house. The lightning flicks like a strobe, filling the kitchen with a single second of blinding brightness before flicking off again. We wait for the low crash of thunder, counting one, two, three before it comes. We will work in the rain, but every member of our family has sense enough not to stand beneath a tree in lightning, which means that lightning, at least for an hour or so, is our favorite weather of all.
“Will you look at it,” Nell says.
I look just in time to see a jagged bolt split the sky in half, leaves torn from the trees shooting sideways. “Do you have to stand right in front of the window?” I say to my youngest. She clasps her hands behind her back, cutting a small silhouette in the frame.
“Do you think the lightning’s going to get me?”