Cody, nibbling the end of his pencil, was intrigued. “It’s verisimilitude.”
“It is not verisimilitude.” I looked to him to be the adult in the room, like Joe had been the adult. “Verisimilitude is the appearance of something being real. Verisimilitude means putting tap water in an empty tequila bottle.” The problem with being the only woman in a play in which the three other characters were men and the playwright was a man and the director was a man was that no matter what I said, I sounded petulant, female. “It’s one bottle. It isn’t one bottle for Eddie and one for Mae. If you’re drinking yourself blind then you’re consigning the rest of us to the same fate.”
Homer shrugged, and the Old Man, who was played with great authority by a former junkie named Sal, said he was all in. The prop master should bring him a bottle of whiskey, preferably Jim Beam.
“I guess it wouldn’t kill us to try,” Cody said. Early as it was in rehearsals, Cody already hated me.
Duke smacked the table. “Now you’re talking!”
I looked over at Pallace, who was sitting in the corner doodling on her script. “Help,” I said very quietly when she raised her eyes.
She shook her head. Doomed, she mouthed to me.
The introduction of Jose Cuervo into morning rehearsals made me even worse in the part than I was, if such a thing were possible. Instead of tossing it back and slamming it down, I fiddled with my glass and tightened my lips. As hard as I tried to relax, I never stopped looking like I was faking it, because I was faking it. I was thinking about the evening’s performance of Our Town. Nobody wanted to see a drunk Emily.
The men, however, were another story. All three of their performances were radically improved by alcohol. They blossomed. They were lit. They raged when rage was called for, and then retreated to their moody silences. Duke, who’d been good in the part all along, was roaring now. He was taller, looser, stronger. He was dangerously real. He lassoed the bedposts one at a time. He threw me to the ground and covered me with his body. I could feel his erection pressing into my leg through his jeans. I was miles behind.
“Try drinking,” he said when I screamed in frustration.
And so I tried. I drank a fraction of what the men drank and still I wobbled and forgot my lines. Cuervo didn’t have those sad little worms curled up in the bottom of the bottle but I thought about them every time I tipped the bottle back, the bile rising in my throat.
I won a single battle in that war, and it may well have been the battle that saved us all. The directions say a bottle of tequila but they don’t say what size it is. Duke swore it was a fifth. I said a pint.
“A pint?” Duke asked.
“Or maybe it’s a half gallon,” I said. “Get something with a handle.”
Cody, for once, took my side. “I think a pint makes sense.”
Duke put up a little argument then let it go. A fifth was hard to control, even if he wouldn’t admit it. I wasn’t drinking my share and he was left to pick up the slack. Like it or not, the bottle had to be empty by the end of the show. “Drinking is a muscle,” Duke liked to say. “And you have to keep that muscle in shape.” He had no end of theories as to how to avoid the repercussions, though mostly it came down to gallons of water and three prophylactic aspirin, which he insisted on chewing for best results. After his incandescent rehearsals, he took a long swim and pulled himself together for the evening’s performance of Our Town. I always went with him to the lake to make sure he didn’t drown, having no idea what I would do if he did. My swimsuit was never completely dry in those days. Whenever I pulled it on it was still clammy from the swim before.
I had no idea how Duke managed to drink so much and be so good. I was desperate to be good, but all that did was make me look desperate.
After we finish cleaning up, Joe says he’s going to check on the goats and just take care of a few more things out at the barn. He says he’ll only be a minute and I say, okay. I say, tell the goats good night for me. After a respectable amount of time has passed, I take a flashlight from the basket by the door and head in the direction of the Otts.
The leaves on the cherry trees are silvered with moonlight, with flashlight, the branches bent beneath the cherry weight. They make me think of cows aching to be milked. I take the quickest way, not on the road but through the orchard, feeling like I’m doing something I shouldn’t be doing. But what shouldn’t I be doing? Going to see a movie? Joe wouldn’t care.
Joe would have come with me had I asked him, and the girls would gladly make room for me on their blanket. But I want to have a thought, an action, a memory that I haven’t run past anyone. I want to see a little bit of the movie by myself.
At the bottom of the hill I go past the pear trees, those difficult, unlovable pears. The Otts have five children, and when they were young each of my girls had an Ott of similar age to play with—-sleepovers back and forth, campfires and homework dates, all of them ultimately disrupted by the gnarled pear trees. One by one our girls became evasive about the Otts. They loved them in the summer, but as the days got shorter and colder, they started to cancel their plans at the last minute, and in the winter they would have nothing to do with the Otts outside of school. I might have suspected something amiss at our neighbors’ house were it not for the fact that the seasonal disenchantment worked in both directions: Young Nelsons would not visit young Otts, and young Otts wouldn’t come to see young Nelsons once the weather turned cold. One day I picked up two of the Ott girls from school and brought them home with us. I don’t remember why but it wasn’t an uncommon situation: We all picked up other people’s children and they picked up ours. Maybe Patsy Ott was taking her older boy to have his braces tightened or maybe two of our children had partnered on a science project, but when it came time to go home they cried. They could not stop crying.
“What?” I asked them. “I’ll walk with you.”
They would not be walked and would not be consoled. Finally, Maisie, who might have been nine, gave me a high sign to follow her to the bathroom. She shut the door quietly behind us and sat down on the toilet lid, pulling up her knees to make herself small. “Drive them,” she whispered.
“Drive them next door?”
She looked at me, her green eyes huge. Maisie was about to cry herself.
“Why? What’s out there?”
Some kind of oath was involved in all of this. I never got that part straight. The dangerous thing was infinitely more dangerous if you spoke its name. But Maisie was hard up against it now, and she wanted to save her friends. “Pear trees,” she said.
“What about them?”
She closed her eyes, shaking her head in despair. “We can’t walk past them and there’s no other way to get there.”