“She’s not in Quebec,” Ripley said, not bothering to lower his voice. “She just got wind of how good you are.”
I was good, or the person in the film who strongly resembled me was good. She had just finished playing Emily in the University of New Hampshire production of Our Town. She had taken a leave of absence from school four weeks before finishing her junior year and still had every intention of going back. She had never heard of Duke or Sebastian or Pallace, did not know Tom Lake existed. Seeing the movie made me think that it wouldn’t be so hard to get back to that place. Three years wasn’t such a long time.
I did the interviews on crutches and everyone was charmed. I crutched out on The Tonight Show in a hot--pink sleeveless dress, my good foot in a ballet slipper, my arms all muscle and sinew. I crossed a stage with a nice, rhythmic swing and dropped down in the chair next to Johnny Carson. Carson was old by then, tired of the job, but my crutches and cast sparked something in him. “Wow! Will you look at her?” he said. Then I smiled and waved. I’d nailed it before I ever opened my mouth.
The next morning when I called my grandmother she started crying on the phone. “Everybody’s calling me,” she said. “Like I did something.”
I did help the movie, Ripley was right about that. Even if it wasn’t a summer blockbuster, it did better than anyone thought it would and I got the credit, me and my ruptured Achilles. Every interviewer wanted to talk about my tennis game, ask if was I planning to take on Steffi Graf once the cast came off, and every time I laughed like no one had ever made the joke before. Publicity was the most acting I’d ever done in my life, and it did nothing to dissuade me from the idea that I was finished. I didn’t want anyone curling my hair or straightening my hair or telling me to look up while they applied my eyeliner. I didn’t want anyone touching me. All the things that feel reasonable when you’re trying to be an actress feel unbearable once you’ve stopped. Jane Pauley said I was America’s daughter, and I said that was good because I was going home.
Ripley took me to the airport himself in the MG. He was being nostalgic. He never drove the MG. He parked the car and walked me in, pitching ideas all the way to the gate. “You’re making a big mistake,” was the very last thing he said to me. I didn’t know if he meant it or if he was lonely. I knew he liked having me around, but surely other actresses could be found for the pool house. I was done. I gave him a kiss and crutched off into the sunset.
19
A cool breeze stirs the trees and brushes off the rain left clinging to cherries and leaves. The orchard is glistening, and I am done. I’ve laid out the entire summer at Tom Lake with bonus tracks on either side. I’ve given my girls the director’s cut.
Nell shifts her feet in the wet grass. “You don’t ever think you made a mistake?” she asks.
“Oh, come on. All that and you still think I should’ve been an actress?”
“I think being an actress sounds like a nightmare,” Emily says.
The three of us look to Maisie to break the tie. “I’d take the shitting calf any day,” she says.
So I have won over two of my girls. As for the third, Nell thinks everyone secretly longs for the stage.
“Did Ripley wind up giving Duke a job?” Nell asks.
“Rampart!” Emily is forever astonished by the depths of our ignorance, though I knew the answer to that one. “It was Ripley’s show. It won ten Emmys.”
“Did Duke win?” Maisie asks.
Emily shakes her head. “Two nominations, no wins. No one understood him in those days.”
I can remember watching the awards show with my cousin Sarah back in New Hampshire, the two of us sitting in my grandmother’s bed because the better television was in her room. The camera panned regularly back to Duke. Even in a roomful of television stars he was the glittery thing. “Him!” I pointed to the screen. “That’s the guy I used to date.” They showed him in profile, laughing, his tuxedo slim and immaculate, the tie undone.
“Then who’s the girl he’s with?” my cousin asked, like Duke had been busted for cheating.
“I’m not dating him now. I have no idea who she is.”
She is a creature of inestimable beauty, I wanted to say. That’s who she is.
“What I want to know,” Nell says, the bucket around her neck half--full of cherries, “is what became of you.” She is wrestling with the knowledge that I’d been given everything she’d ever wanted, and that I’d given it away.
Emily and Maisie look over at their sister, then they look at me.
“What do you mean, what happened to me? I married your father. We came here. We had the three of you.”
“But how? I always thought you and Daddy fell in love at Tom Lake, that you dumped Duke for Dad and then the two of you went from there. But you left Michigan without even calling Dad from the airport. When you went to Los Angeles, did he stay here?”
“He stayed the rest of the summer helping Maisie and Ken, then he went to Chicago to direct a play.” Was it Chicago?
“Did you write to him?” Emily asks.
I shake my head. I didn’t know enough to write to Joe in those days.
“How long was it before he found you?” Maisie asks. Something in the construction of her question touches me, as if Joe had gone door to door, searching for me all that time.
“Three or four years,” I say. New Hampshire was its own eternity, as was New York. I did not tally up those days.
“So tell us about going back to New Hampshire,” Emily says, cheerful at the thought of additional chapters. “Tell us about New York. Tell us about when you met Dad again.”
“No, really, I’m done.” They are reminding me of the years when they were small and it was just me in the house beneath all that snow and Joe was in the barn trying to fix a tractor he didn’t know how to fix, and I felt like the children would eat me. Nell was eating me, still at my breast, and the other two rushed to crawl in my lap whenever I sat down. I thought, Joe will come home and find the three of them framing out a playhouse with my bones.
“You said it wasn’t a story about a famous man,” Nell reminds me. “It was supposed to be a story about you.”
“It was a story about me, the whole thing. But I can’t tell you every minute of my life. We’ll die of boredom.”
Maisie faces down the long row of trees, every one of them covered in cherries. “We’ll die of boredom anyway.”
I would pull off every last bit of fruit myself rather than go back there.
“A sentence,” Nell says, as if this were an improv class. “Start small. See where it takes you.”
I think about it. Those hard years can, in fact, be distilled to a single sentence, and so I try. “I went back to New Hampshire and stayed with my grandmother until she died.”