“But here I am,” Mr. Nelson said.
“I can’t remember when I last worked with a real director,” Uncle Wallace said, pitching to the room. “There’s always a director, of course, or someone claiming to be a director even though they have no interest in your performance. But not this one! Nelson is a man of ideas, of insight. I thought I knew everything about the part, but he’s opened it up for me again, invited me into the very soul of the Stage Manager.” Uncle Wallace turned to me. “Makes it feel like my first time.”
George picked up his script and tapped it on the edge of the table like maybe he was thinking about leaving.
“Drinking,” Duke whispered as we took our places at the table.
“I’m afraid I already gave my terrific introductory speech last week,” Nelson said to me. “Went over the themes we were highlighting. I don’t want to make the rest of the company listen to it twice.”
“We loved it!” Uncle Wallace said. “We’d be happy to hear it again.”
Nelson shook his head. “Let’s go ahead and read through. Lara, I’d be more than happy to catch you up later if you’d like. I’ve been told you know what you’re doing.”
I looked at the director and smiled. I was ready.
I was sixteen when I installed Our Town into my brain, back when my brain was spongy and fresh and capable of holding on to things forever. Thanks to all those nights in Jimmy--George’s car, I could recite George’s lines as easily as Emily’s, and if I didn’t think about it too much I probably could do the other parts as well. Maybe not all of the Stage Manager, but most of it. Three years have gone by. Yes, the sun’s come up over a thousand times. At not quite twenty--five, this would be my third production of the play. I kept the script on my nightstand to read when I woke up in the middle of the night. I’d spoken the lines over traffic while driving Ripley’s MG down the Santa Monica freeway to spend the day at the beach with friends. I ran scenes in my head on the plane going out to New York, on the plane coming to Michigan. I repeated the words like Catholic girls with their rosary beads, clicking through Hail Marys until they were muscle memory. So it was easy for me to be there in Tom Lake, to be Emily again, to be myself. I had enough room in my brain to think about work and wonder about Duke at the same time.
Having known him for all of an hour, I assumed Duke would be a ham, but his Editor Webb was perfectly restrained, a dignified, matter--of--fact man, even when he had to say words like Satiddy, likker. It’s hard not to make hash of those things, but Duke was the kind of natural Ripley would have liked. Not only was he natural, he remained present for the whole reading, unlike George, who managed to check out the very instant his lips stopped moving. Duke paid attention to the other actors, and I flattered myself by imagining he paid the most attention to me.
If it was my gift to play younger, Duke came off older than he was. He was twenty--eight that summer, but as my father, anyone would have thought he was on the other side of forty. Over the course of his career, Duke played older, then for a stretch he played his age, then he played younger, all the while staying in the same exact place. I never knew how he pulled that off.
It hadn’t occurred to me until we started reading the funeral scene that I was now the age of Emily in the third act, and that no matter how young I looked, I would age out of the part in time because time was unavoidable. I thought of all those women dressed as girls who’d showed up to audition at my high school. No one gets to go on playing Emily forever. That’s what I was thinking at the table read, how I would lose her.
I said my lines with my script closed. I thought that Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb were teary, though their voices held. Even George, who doesn’t have a line of dialogue in the third act, turned to look at me. If this was going to be my last time in the part, I was, as Veronica would say, going to kill it. Plus, I held out a flickering hope that if I did my very best work at Tom Lake, word would get back to New York, and that the Emily they’d chosen for the Spalding Gray production would be gently done away with, and even after this I’d have the chance to play her one more time.
When we finished, Mr. Nelson smiled. “Friends, let us breathe an enormous sigh of relief. We’re going to have a play after all.”
We clapped for one another, and the swings and the understudies clapped with us. The people who’d shaken my hand three hours before came back to shake it again. My mother--in--law, Mrs. Gibbs, who’d been especially good in her part, held onto me a minute more. She told me she’d been Emily once. “Probably before you were born,” she said. “I was nothing like you. You’re one of those Emilys that people will talk about for years. They’ll say, ‘I saw Lara Kenison at Tom Lake when she was a child’ and no one will believe it.”
Maisie’s phone rings. The house rule is no phones at the table but we’ve made an exception for Maisie who keeps getting calls from neighbors asking for help, and we made an exception for Emily so that Benny can text her and tell her what time he’ll be back at the house, and so of course we extended the exception to Nell, because why would we let her sisters answer their phones at the table and make her turn hers off? Joe and I turn off our phones because everyone we want to talk to is here.
“Sure,” Maisie says, stepping into the kitchen while we listen. “No, no, it’s fine. We’re finished. I’ll come over.” She ends the call and looks at us. “The Lewers have a calf with intractable diarrhea.”
“Does it ever occur to you to try to protect us while we’re eating?” Nell asks.
“Protecting you means putting my clothes in the wash and taking a shower before I come into our room. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to tell you what happened.” She turns to me. “Pause the story, will you? I don’t want to miss the part about Sebastian.”
Emily stands up from the table. “If you’re stopping the story then I’m going home. You just reminded me I haven’t done laundry in two weeks.”
“Then I’m going to go to help Dad.” Nell stands as well.
“Good night, ladies,” I sing. “Good night, ladies, good night.”
“Keep Hazel here, will you?” Maisie asks. “I don’t want her getting into this.”
“Understandable. The three of you go. I’ll clean up.”
They stack their dishes in the sink and head out the door together, Maisie holding the end of Emily’s braid the way one elephant will use its trunk to hold another elephant’s tail. Nell slips her finger through Maisie’s belt loop. Joe and I used to say that if lightning struck one of these girls all three would go up in flames. “How did you never tell us Duke had a brother?” Nell says to Emily.
“At the time in my life when I found out about Sebastian I wasn’t speaking to you,” Emily reminds her.