But back up and picture this: Fantastic reviews when the show opened. Lena’s face all over town on posters and on television—such a lovely interview she gave the local TV station, saying she did not think of her character Laura as a feminist, she thought of her as a woman deeply in love with her husband; in other words, Lena charmingly gave answers no one expected. She did have this “thing”—that could not be denied.
The “thing” was not traditional star power. It was sweeter than that sort of blazing charisma. She was, as her poor mother said, darling. She was adorable. She was disarming. Her active, pretty face held genuine expressions as she spoke of her past, how she had been Miss Cornflower at the age of three, how she had been Miss Baton Champion at the age of five, how she had been the mascot to the football’s marching band at Buffalo State when she was seven—all accompanied by snapshots moving across the television screen of this darling little girl raising that tiny leg with the tasseled boot. Some people you can’t stop looking at, and you don’t know why. This was the case with Lena.
It was raining the night of the incident, as nature would have it. Pouring from the heavens in sheets. And yet the house was full. People checked their umbrellas and coats with the sopping wet shoulders, or else folded those coats under their seats, though there was barely room. The place smelled a bit like boiled wool and wet dogs—I hate that smell.
The lights went down, the stage lights came up on the rather traditional set. But they did not have a curtain for the show, it was at a time when curtains were going out of fashion; that attempt to keep the audience in the dark, so to speak, was going out of fashion; the idea was to make things more intimate with the audience, not to leave them out of the make-believe. Or so Lena said. You would have thought she was the first person to have heard of any of this—she got a little high on her horse when she spoke to me about it—and I did not tell her that these changes had been going on for decades before her. But young people are like that, and her mother was like that too, only worse, because she knew less. The only thing Carina knew was what her daughter needed: the face lotion, how much to eat, how much to sleep, how to put hemorrhoid cream below her eyes after a night of drinking. Close as two peas in a pod, that’s how they were.
Carina was at the show that night too. She almost always went, so she and Lena could talk the next day, or maybe well into the night, about every line, every audience reaction; they loved it all, I will say. I don’t know that I’d have had the energy, had I been a mother, though undeniably Lena was more needy than most daughters would be. I thought about it sometimes, how could I not, their infectious love and excitement right there in my house.
Do you have children? Lena had early on turned and asked me one night, her brown eyes round and warm and curious. I told her I did not, and she said she was sorry. No need to be sorry, I said. Life hands you what it hands you, and in that department it handed me an empty plate. They exchanged a fleeting glance then, mother and daughter, and it was hard to be seen as I felt they saw me, a barren woman with a thickening waist serving people oatmeal every morning. And then Carina couldn’t help herself and asked if I had been married, and they got the story out of me, my twenty-year marriage, all the miscarriages, my husband endlessly kind and then distant and off with a woman half his age—I became a statistic; you never expect to, but you become a statistic, and yes, before Lena and Carina could ask, I said yes, yes, he had his children now. It’s a story to scare any woman, I know that. And they laughed and said, oh, men are so awful, just awful, they only want one thing, and I began to think these two were not my . . . caliber. Well, I had known that all along. But I had to take an extra sleeping pill that night, one of the many I got in Mexico on a vacation there, since there is no need for anyone in this talking town to know the B&B proprietor needs nerve assistance some nights. I could hear them whispering late, on and on, and perhaps it was egotistical of me, but it was my life I felt they were discussing with that energy. On and on it went.