While the Stage Manager is a solitary character, George and Emily exist in relation to each other and to their families, so the Georges and the Emilys auditioned in pairs. Again, Mr. Martin had chosen readings from the second act, which, in my opinion (and the high school girl at the back of the gym was newly loaded with opinions) was the practical choice. The first short exchange showed off more of Emily and the second one showed more of George, unless you were taking into account a person’s ability to listen, in which case the primacy was reversed.
I wondered if the pairs had been put together based on any two people standing next to each other in line, or if Veronica was back there doing something funny, because the first George looked to be about sixteen, and the first Emily, not that I knew, looked every hard day of thirty--five. Rumor had it certain women wanted to play Emily forever. They criss--crossed New Hampshire town to town, year after year, trying to land the part. This one wore her hair in pigtails.
Mr. Martin asked if they were ready, and straightaway George began.
“Emily, why are you mad at me?” he said. I had the page from the script in my lap.
Emily blinked. Clearly, she was mad at George, but she struggled to decide whether or not to tell him. Then she turned and looked at Mr. Martin. She shielded her eyes with her hand the way you see people do in the movies when they’re talking to directors out in the audience, but since there were no stage lights to squint into, the gesture failed. “I wasn’t ready,” she said.
“Not to worry,” Mr. Martin said. “Just start again.”
I imagined him talking to people about car insurance, life insurance, how State Farm would be there if their home burned to the ground. I bet he made it easy for them.
“Emily, why are you mad at me?” George said again.
She looked at George like she might kill him, then turned back to Mr. Martin. “He can’t just start like that,” Emily said. “I have to be ready.”
I didn’t understand what was happening, and then I did: She had lost. Like a horse that stumbles straight out of the gate. She hadn’t even started and it was over.
“We can do it again,” Mr. Martin said. “No matter.”
“But it does matter.” Would she cry? That’s what we were waiting to see.
The boy was tall with a crazy thatch of light--brown hair that looked for all the world like he’d cut it himself in the dark. The expression on his face made me think he’d been working over some aspect of baseball in his head and just now realized he was in trouble. “I’m awfully sorry,” George said, exactly the way George would say it—-sorry and concerned and slightly buffaloed by the whole thing. In short, this guy was going ahead with his audition, and Emily knew that, too.
“I want to get back in line,” she said, teetering. “I want to read with someone else.”
“That’s fine,” Mr. Martin said, and before she had so much as turned, he called out in a louder voice, “We need another Emily.”
We were rich in Emilys. So many more Emilys than Georges. I knew that from registration. The Emily going out passed the Emily coming in, a girl some fifteen years younger whose yellow hair was loose and shining. She put a little swish in her hips so that her pretty skirt swayed. It was scary to see how fast time goes. I knew the first one would not be getting back in the line.
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.”