Or it didn’t until my junior year, when I saw an audition notice for Our Town tacked to a cork board in the student center. I was there to tack up my own notice: Stitch--It, Speedy Alterations. My first thought was that it would be fun to register people for the play, and my second thought was that I could try for Emily. There would be so much pleasure in saying those words again, and I understood the metrics by which one’s social sphere was enlarged by theater. Even as a junior, most of the kids I knew in college were the kids I’d gone to high school with.
In any given year more girls who had once played Emily attended the University of New Hampshire than any other university in the country, all of us thinking that we had nailed the part. What I wouldn’t have given to be in the room for their auditions, but this time I lacked a plausible excuse. I waited in the hallway with my number, wearing my brother’s Wildcats sweatshirt for luck.
Luck was everything.
Bill Ripley was in the audience on the night of the third performance. He was a tall man with perpetually flushed cheeks and a premature edge of gray in his dark hair that gave him an air of gravitas. He sat in the fifth row with his sister, his voluminous wool dress coat draped over his lap because he hadn’t wanted to wait in line for the coat check.
I called him The Talented Mr. Ripley because I’d seen the paperback once in a bookstore and liked the title. I thought of it as a compliment. Everyone in my family referred to him as Ripley--Believe--It--Or--Not. Both sobriquets contained an element of truth, which is not to suggest that Ripley was a sociopath, but rather that he had an ability to insert himself in other people’s lives and make them feel like he belonged there. The believe--it--or--not part was self--evident.
People don’t get scouted in Durham, New Hampshire, and Ripley was no scout. His sister lived in Boston, and he’d come to visit for her birthday. What she wanted, what she’d specifically asked him for as a present, was that they drive up to Durham so that he could see his niece, her daughter Rae Ann, in the role of Mrs. Gibbs. Ripley’s sister believed her daughter had talent, and she believed her brother owed her the consideration of a look.
I hadn’t known Ripley’s niece before the play, and even after a slew of rehearsals and three performances I still wouldn’t say I knew her. She played my mother--in--law, and like every other girl in that production, Rae Ann had wanted to be Emily and so held my success quietly against me. That she won the role of Mrs. Gibbs spoke in her favor, and that she was completely flat in the part was hardly her fault. It’s tough for a nineteen--year--old to be successful as a middle--aged mother pantomiming the feeding of chickens. Ripley cut her plenty of slack and still, he never turned his eyes to her. He hugged her after the curtain call and told her she was magnificent, then sent her off to the cast party with her mother, saying he would be along shortly. He loitered in the hallway with his coat, and when a girl came along he asked her where he could find Emily.
Nineteen eighty--four was nothing like what Orwell had envisioned and still it was a world nearly impossible to explain. A strange man in a suit knocked on the door to the dressing room before I’d had the chance to change back into my own clothes, and when I stuck out my head he said he wanted to talk to me and could we go somewhere quiet for a minute? I said sure, like a child taking instructions from an adult, which was the case. A small rehearsal room down the hall had a piano in it and a couch and a couple of folding chairs. I knew no one would be in there so late. I opened the door and ran my hand over the cold cinder block wall, feeling for the light switch. What was I thinking? That’s the part I can’t retrieve.
But this is a story about luck, at least in the early years, and so my luck continued to hold. Bill Ripley had not come to rape or dismember. He sat down on one of the folding chairs, leaving the couch for me. He told me he was a director. They were casting a new movie and this movie had a part for a girl, a critical part, really, but they hadn’t found the right person yet. They’d been looking for quite some time but they hadn’t found her.
I nodded, wishing I’d thought to leave the door open.
“You might be the girl.” He was looking at me hard, and because I’d just come offstage and was not feeling particularly shy, I stared back at him. “What I mean is, I’m pretty sure you are her. I need you to come out to L.A. and take a screen test. Can you do that?”
“I’ve never been to Los Angeles,” I said, when what I meant was, my family went to Florida once for spring break when I was ten and that was the only time I’d been on a plane.
He wrote a number down on the back of a business card and told me he was staying with his sister in Boston, and that I should call him the next morning at nine.
“I’m in class at nine.” I could feel myself starting to sweat in Emily’s long white dress.
He looked at his watch. “They’re going to wonder where I am.” He stood up and held out his hand so I shook it. “Let’s keep this between us for now,” he said.
“Sure,” I said, wondering who I shouldn’t tell.
“Rae Ann is my niece.” He answered my question as if I’d asked it.
“Oh.” Rae Ann. That made me feel better somehow.
“Tomorrow,” he said, and I said, “Tomorrow” like I was a myna bird.
I did not lie awake in my dorm room that night wondering if I’d get the part. I wondered how many quarters I’d need to call someone in Boston during peak rates. Where could I get enough quarters? I wondered how much a plane ticket to Los Angeles would cost in terms of pairs of pants hemmed, and then on top of that the cost of the taxi from the airport and the hotel. Of course all of that was taken care of, though not as quickly as one might think. Bill Ripley straightened everything out, for a while at least. I had dithered around trying to decide what to do with my life for such a long time that he stepped in and made the decision for me. I was going to be an actress.
“Show me where the decency is in that!” Nell shouts, and we all break up laughing.
All three of our girls are home now. Emily came back to the farm after she graduated from college, while Maisie and Nell, still in school, returned in March. It was an anxious spring for the world, though from our kitchen window it played out just like every other spring in northern Michigan: wet and rainy and cold, followed by a late heavy snow, a sudden warm spell, and then the spectacle of trees in bloom. Emily and Maisie and Nell ignored the trees and chose to chip away at their sanity with news feeds instead. I finally put an end to the television being on in the evening because after we watched it, none of us slept. “Turn your head in one direction and it’s hopeless despair,” I told them. “Turn your head in the other direction—-” I pointed to the explosion of white petals out the window.
“You can’t pretend this isn’t happening,” Maisie said.
I couldn’t, and I don’t. Nor do I pretend that all of us being together doesn’t fill me with joy. I understand that joy is inappropriate these days and still, we feel what we feel.
As we moved into summer and blossoms gave way to fruit, our circumstances shifted from Here are our daughters and we are so glad to have them home, to Here are our daughters, who spent their childhood picking cherries and know how to do the job when only a fraction of our regular workers have come this year for seasonal employment. Their father identified the girls sprawled across the furniture pecking at their phones as the hand--pick crew he needed.