“You’re doing too much.”
She shook her head, looking out toward the fields. “They gave me everything. They loved me better than any child could hope for . . . and this is what I can do now, the only way I can show them that love back.”
“We need some help. There are other ways.”
“It’s fine. I’m fine.”
“You can’t even enjoy a dinner away from her. Look what this is doing to us.”
She looked at me then with an expression I’d never seen on her face before. It was cold. My Mary, my sweet and generous, vintage-loving, apple-cheeked Mary looked at me like I was some annoying stray begging for scraps.
“I’m sorry I can’t take care of you right now, Peter.”
“I don’t want you to take care of me. Jesus, I just wanted us to have fun tonight.”
“Don’t say Jesus like that.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” It wasn’t, maybe, the most eloquent response I could’ve made to an attempt to censor my language.
“My mom”—she shook her head, glancing at the house—“has gone to church every Sunday her entire life. Her faith is important to her. Can you please respect that while we’re here?”
“I don’t see Elsa here now.” But even as I said it, I knew she was. She was everywhere, sitting in the movie theater between us, sniffing at the prices on the restaurant menu, and pinching Mary’s profile tight and unrecognizable here where the ammonia stink of chicken shit seeped in from the yard.
“I’m just saying.”
“Fine.” I got out of the car and slammed the door, which brought squawks from the chicken barn.
The house was dark, with only the stove light on to welcome us back. Elsa must have gone to bed early, maybe trying to be considerate of our date night. Usually Mary tucked her into bed and brushed the wispy strands away from her face while Elsa looked at photo albums and told stories about people I didn’t know and the two of them laughed and reminisced. There was never a place for me during these nightly rituals.
“I’m going to check on her quick,” Mary said.
“Okay.”
Mary disappeared and I went upstairs to our bedroom. Soft voices drifted up through the heating vents and I could picture Mary perched on Elsa’s wedding quilt as they filled each other in on the last three hours, both of them refusing to look at the empty place on the other side of the bed.
My shooting star wish had been for Mary and me to be happy again. Maybe it would never be like before, but there had to be a new happiness somehow, a way for us to thrive that I couldn’t see yet. I got undressed and lay down, staring at the water-stained ceiling while waiting for Mary to come up, and that’s how I fell asleep. Waiting.
HATTIE / Monday, August 27, 2007
MOST PEOPLE think acting is make-believe. Like it’s a big game where people put on costumes and feign kisses or stab wounds and then pretend to gasp and die. They think it’s a show. They don’t understand that acting is becoming someone else, changing your thoughts and needs until you don’t remember your own anymore. You let the other person invade everything you are and then you turn yourself inside out, spilling their identity onto the stage like a kind of bloodletting. Sometimes I think acting is a disease, but I can’t say for sure because I don’t know what it’s like to be healthy.
The first character I remember playing was Fearless Little Sister.
Even when we were little, my brother, Greg, had all the gleeful meanness of a teenager with a sack of cherry bombs and one of his favorite games was trying to terrorize me. He’d hide things in my room—frogs, chameleons, spiders, snakes, everything in a farm kid’s arsenal—trying to get me to scream and that’s exactly what I wanted to do. Instead, I made myself scoop up each wriggling, disgusting little critter and I carried them back to his room, asking him questions, calm as peaches. Where’d you get this snake? Look at the stripe on its belly. What should I name him?
He tried to spook me by telling me it was going to turn my hands green or make my hair fall out, but I just laughed and called him a liar. Oh, I was still scared. I hated the sight of a shoe box, because I knew he’d trapped something slimy or scaly inside it, but I learned how to turn a cry into a grin and how to talk loud when I wanted to curl up and whimper.
I didn’t mind when Greg signed up for the army right after graduation and shipped off to Afghanistan. I knew he’d come home changed; I just didn’t know if it would be changed better or changed worse.