“But when did things change? Did it happen the day you brought him to the orchard?” Emily asks me. “The happiest day of your life?”
“Let’s strike the whole happiest--day--of--my--life motif,” I say. “You three refuse to understand what I’m saying.”
I can see that Emily is both irritated and making an effort not to be. We’ve had a good day so far, some real sweetness, and we both want to keep it that way. “You come up to the farm with Duke and Sebastian and Pallace and you leave with Daddy. Something must have happened.”
Joe looks over at me as if he might have missed some pivotal piece of information himself.
“I came up with Duke and left with Duke. I didn’t leave with your father.”
“Okay, so maybe not on that day but eventually you did. You were with Duke and then you were with Dad.”
I shake my head. A child’s ability to misunderstand is limitless, even when she is no longer a child. “I didn’t leave Duke for your father. Your father and I were never together at Tom Lake.”
Now Maisie is squinting at us as well. “But you and Dad met at Tom Lake. You fell in love at Tom Lake.”
“We met at Tom Lake and didn’t fall in love, and then we met again a long time later and we did fall in love,” Joe says to them. He looks at me. “I feel like I need a lawyer.”
Because now we feel the shift from Lara and Joe and Maisie and Nell on one side and Emily on the other, to Lara and Joe on one side and Emily and Maisie and Nell on the other. The jury does not believe us.
“You fell in love at Tom Lake,” Nell says, of this she is certain. “That was always the story.”
“It was never the story!” I say. “It may have been the story you told yourselves but it wasn’t the story we told you.” Over the years I told them I had dated Duke at Tom Lake. Over the years I told them their father and I met at Tom Lake. What I realize in this moment, and Joe realizes it too, is that maybe we’ve never told them more than that. Or maybe they are children looking at their parents and so our lives began when they began and everything else they colored in with fat crayons any way they wanted.
“The four of you can sort this out. I’m going for a swim.” Joe pulls off his boots, his shirt, his jeans. He had gone to the house and put on his swim trunks before coming to the beach, proving once and for all that these girls are his.
13
Duke was somewhere. He was getting his hair pinned, or he had already gone outside to read over his obsessive Editor Webb notebooks and smoke a final cigarette and then stand on his hands. He said it cleared his mind before a performance and I wouldn’t doubt it. All the actors were in costume, swinging their arms around, trilling through scales. Only Uncle Wallace and I were still. If we were not exactly standing together we were very near one another. We were waiting to begin.
“I still get scared,” Uncle Wallace said. He was looking straight ahead and his voice was so quiet I barely heard him. I don’t think he was talking to me anyway. Backstage was dark and the houselights were up. From where we stood we could see the people milling around, looking for their seats. They always made me think of chickens, like a truck had backed up to the theater door and emptied four hundred chickens into the house. They pecked and clucked aimlessly, found one place to roost then changed their minds and went off in search of another. Our Town does not have a formal opening; when the audience enters the theater the curtain is up and what little set there is is in place and soon Uncle Wallace would wander out and wait for the chickens to settle, even though the very fact of him standing there, the much beloved television star of another era, impedes the process considerably.
“You’re the Stage Manager,” I whispered to him, “same as I’m Emily.”
He reached down and took my hand in his large, warm hand and we didn’t say anything else. That will always be my memory of Albert Long, the two of us holding hands in the dark until it was time for him to go on.
Nothing about going out onstage as Emily scared me, but playing Mae in Fool for Love made my feet cold. The expression came from a literal condition: every time I spoke her first line, which was nothing more than the single word No! all the blood in my body surged to my heart in an act of self--preservation. My heart needed the blood in order to survive, and so my bloodless extremities were left to freeze. Fear would be another name for it. I was told the last Emily—-the one who’d dropped out and made a space for me—-had had to audition for both parts. Her Mae, from all accounts, was searing. Pallace had auditioned to understudy both of the parts, and I had no doubt she had been searing as well. But I had never been asked to audition for anything at Tom Lake. I’d been asked to plug two holes in the summer schedule. “Look how good she is!” was what the management said when they came to those first rehearsals of Our Town, not realizing there was a difference between a first--rate Emily and a first--rate actress.
We had started rehearsals for Fool for Love the week before Our Town opened, and now I had some sense of what Pallace had been talking about. During the day I played a grown woman who was damaged and clear--headed and afraid, then three nights a week I was Emily again. The result was whiplash, and not just because the characters were so wildly different, my ability was so wildly different. I’m not sure Duke fully understood how bad I was. He was a full fathom five into his own performance. Duke was Eddie through and through, swinging his lasso, walking like he’d just come off a horse. He radiated his talent and intensity all over me but it did not make me better. The director, a Sam Shepard enthusiast named Cory, saw my failures clearly enough, as did the other two actors in the play, but it was still very early. Everyone regarded me as talented so maybe it was just taking me a minute to shift gears. But I didn’t have another gear. Ripley had told me not to take acting classes, but he’d also given me a part in a movie in which I was essentially Emily again, and a part in a sitcom in which I was essentially Emily. Even hawking Diet Dr Pepper I was Emily, because she was the only thing I knew how to do. I had the range of a box turtle. I was excellent, as long as no one moved me.