by Amy Jo Burns
“I know what you did,” says the angry visitor when Mr. Lotte greets him. “I know what you did to my daughter, and I’m calling the police.”
The visitor is Mr. Tierney, and he is angry because his daughter Aria came home crying from her weekly piano lesson. The day after she tells her parents that Mr. Lotte slipped his hand up her shirt while she practiced playing the theme to The Young and the Restless, Mr. Tierney speeds across town and bangs his fist against the piano teacher’s front door.
Is this really how it happened? Probably not, since it reads like a perfectly plotted scene from an episode of Mrs. Lotte’s soaps. But the event itself isn’t nearly as important as the accounts given of it. You can get away with just about anything if you punctuate your story by shrugging and saying, “It’s just what I heard,” as if the rumor you’re spreading is an old dryer sheet stuck to your pants that common decorum insists you discharge. After all, isn’t Mrs. Henderson down at the library the most reliable person you know? She wouldn’t hurt a fly, for Pete’s sake, and our mothers heard this straight from her mouth. Or what about Bill who packs our groceries down at Rip’s Sunrise Market? Someone who nestles every carton of eggs in its own brown paper bag is incapable of spreading falsehood. The people of Mercury guarantee it.
Everyone around town knows Mr. Tierney. He’s good with his hands, and he can be counted on to referee an afternoon soccer game as well as serve as a makeshift usher on Sunday morning if the need should arise. His son Simon is bound to make the varsity basketball team by the time he’s a sophomore. No one would dare question Mr. Tierney’s integrity. It’s his daughter the town isn’t so sure about.
How did Mr. Lotte respond to Aria’s father’s claims? That part of the story is rather murky. Decades later, we can’t help but wonder if Mr. Lotte knew the jig was up when he opened the door and saw the expression on Mr. Tierney’s face. If, even just for a moment, he considered the meager benefits of honesty before proffering an outraged denial.
But for the time being, no one seems to care much about his response at all. Instead, the spotlight is thrust on a flock of young girls who are just learning to play the piano under Mr. Lotte’s careful tutelage. The benefit of being a girl is that no one expects much from you aside from a few graceful performances now and then, and as the summer comes to a close, the curtain rises. An entire town holds its breath as one question scorches its collective mind.
Which of these girls will find her voice next?
Figurante
IN THE YEARS AFTER Mr. Lotte’s scandal, I welcomed the way life in Mercury could so easily become a charade. Pageantry, as I came to think of it, promised safety among my intimates. I would determine what others saw when they regarded me. And yet it felt as if I’d stolen away on the ship of someone else’s life, estranged from who I once was. Only one tonic could sate my stowaway heart more than a charade, and that was a charade with an audience. With an audience, a lie was no longer deceitful. An audience turned a lie into a performance. And a musical? Every small town loved a good musical. Like this:
On the opening night of Anything Goes, an appetent crowd shoved into the lit auditorium to hunt for a good seat. During daylight, the theater stayed cool and ghostly, a forgotten space where kids escaped to steal kisses. At night, the temperature spiked as the bodies packed themselves around center stage. During a cold winter, it was the only spot in Mercury that gave off any heat.
Behind the stage curtain, the cast rustled around. We heard the crowd’s murmurs, and our own anticipation mounted. To think—at this moment all of Mercury was spinning around us, waiting for us to appear. Our audience needed a performance as much as we needed to perform, and as a town, we’d never felt so complete.
Opening Scene. From backstage, Nora, Pete, and I spied the yellow spotlights pushing through cracks in the curtain. My sister Julia, acting as debutante Hope Harcourt, wafted in from stage right with her fiancé, a man named Evelyn who wouldn’t be her fiancé after the play’s denouement. Crooner Reno Sweeney appeared with her floozy band of Angels: Virtue, Chastity, Charity, Purity. These girls knew enough about the world to pretend to be naïve.
Spotlight. When the light first hit me, I became better than myself, larger than this town, truer than my lies. Nora and I arrived from stage right, whispering our fake secrets. We were two rich, young coquettes, but it wasn’t having money that gave us the thrill. The high came from not needing it, not needing anything more than each other. We wore those roles as easily as the faux stoles at our necks—look first, and you’d see an accessory. Look closer, and you’d find protection. Closer still, you’d uncover our disguise.
Pete stepped on stage in a sailor suit and hat, swiping his broom back and forth. Nora and I mounted the stairs to the upper deck where the docks of Manhattan stood at our backs. We looked out into the audience, which doubled as the Atlantic Ocean. We stared into their shadowed expanse, the people of Mercury who lived and swam in deep water.
Subplot. My coy, theatrical analogue faded as I floated down the steps and then made my exit on stage left. Pete was waiting for me in the dark. Here it was, that hidden part of me that was so hungry, so impossible to satisfy. Pete wrapped his fingers around my wrist and pulled me behind the staging area into a thin tunnel cordoned off with a thick black curtain. A bunch of prop crates were stacked by the wall. It was black as pitch there, darker than any night of Spotlight, any basement kept in isolation. Pete gently pushed me against the crates. He threaded his fingers at the base of my back, right below the band of my dancer’s tights. He ran his nose along the line of my jaw.
I heard my cue and rushed back onstage to meet Becca by the base of the steps. Over and over, the two of us performed the magic trick of speaking without words. She showed off the veil on her pillbox hat, and I fawned over her long string of plastic pearls. I twirled in the dowdy floral dress that I fished out of a Salvation Army bin. At the front of the stage, Hope Harcourt’s secret love schemed to find a place to hide away.
I exited. In the dark between shafts of stage light, Pete ran the tips of his fingers up the back of my arm. The shock was electric. We said nothing and let our bodies speak.
I entered again, and Pete followed close behind. He swabbed the deck. I climbed the stairs and played with my pearls. He wiped down a porthole while I gossiped with the extras.
Offstage again, my back was flush against the crates. Pete kissed my cheek, the ridge beneath my chin. His thumbs pressed lightly into my rib cage. The eyeliner and mascara made his dark eyes pop even more in the dark. Virtue, one of the Angels, had helped him apply it. When Pete’s lips finally clung to mine, I opened my eyes.
My kisses with Pete were chaste but not cleansing, a portal but not a destination. I craved those moments, those kisses, when I was thrust between light and its absence, between private moments and public shows. It seemed the only true measure of myself I could conjure—a girl who was the sum of her parts but not a whole, a girl whose hidden appetites became the maw that fed her outward persona. I could only transform into the figurante in the limelight because of the human I became in the dark.
“All ashore who’s going ashore! All ashore who’s going ashore!”
That was our cue for the “Bon Voyage” scene. At the last moment before stepping into the light, my fingers slipped from Pete’s. He joined the rest of the sailors and I took my place next to Nora at the top of the stairwell.
Plot Twist. We sang. Bon Voyage, New York City. Pete marched to the front of the stage with the other sailors. The six of them stood in a line. For the song’s coda, the sailors weaved themselves among the Angels. Virtue wrapped her arm through Pete’s and squeezed, pressing the profile of her curvy body against his. I smiled and sang with my mouth wide open, but my eyes tracked the cradle of her hips. She and Pete liked to flirt with the reality of their onstage aliases, and consumed by the bloom of my own counterfeit self, I had let them.
Virtue’s white denim shorts glowed beneath the lights. Her stomach was f
lat, a perfect, round belly button peeking out from the top of her waistband. A soft line ran down the length of her torso from between her breasts to her belly button, and it was so smooth she could roll a quarter down it. She cocked her hips toward Pete and his eyes meditated too long on the virtues of her body. Watching the two of them exposed a lie I wanted to believe about secrets—that I was the only one keeping them.
Bon Voyage. The entire cast raised their right hands and waved at the make-believe people standing on the docks of Manhattan. In those final, ephemeral chords, I couldn’t determine what it was I wanted so badly. Did I want someone to help me forget what I’d hidden—not just about Lotte, but about this town, about what it means to be a quiet girl—or did I wish I’d told my worst secrets to Pete, to someone, to everyone?
The song ended, the crowd cheered, and the stage went black. Perhaps it was already too late to save myself from becoming just another girl in Mercury.
In the final scene of Anything Goes, the entire cast crowded the stage for a wedding about to be interrupted. We all attended the event in our best estimation of appropriate wedding attire for a boat: hats with wide brims, fake fur to stave off the chill, our fictional family heirlooms (rhinestone necklaces bought at Claire’s, gold chains and pins from Sears). My sister, as Hope Harcourt, trudged into the light from stage right in a yellowed wedding gown that was two sizes too big. It belonged to one of the cast member’s grandmas. Her netted veil was torn. She clutched a fake bouquet of daisies with nylon petals and plastic stems. The scene carried on more like a funeral than a marriage ceremony. Our somber faces remained stoic as the organ piped out a run of minor chords.
In just a few moments, after the vicar finished his long-winded speech, giving sufficient time for suspense to mount, Hope’s secret love would burst in and proclaim that his boss made a business deal that nullified the need for Hope and Evelyn to marry. Evelyn would reveal his affair with Reno Sweeney. The Angels would coo. The wedding guests would gasp and then rejoice. We’d belt out the closing chorus of Anything Goes before hitting our final poses and the applause would douse us.
But first, from my mark in the back, I could see most of the cast, fifty chins all pointed toward the priest. After two hours of performing beneath hot lights, the thick, drugstore foundation caked on all our faces started to mix with sweat and slipped down our temples. It lingered along the ridges of our jaws. The stiff white collars of men’s dress shirts started to soften and yellow at the creases. I looked down at my own outfit, a plaid dress that, when inspected, revealed how badly the fabric was pilling. From a distance, we were elegant. Cloche hats. Velour clutches. Herringbone blazers and skirts. Up close, we were fraying at the seams.
The actress who played Hope Harcourt’s mother poised herself as if listening to a death fugue. The tight French twist in her dyed blond hair was too fancy for any other place she frequented, and the matted fur slung around her neck was secured with a fake gold brooch. The faded black skirts, the snagged pantyhose mended with hairspray, the thin-soled, white-washed shoes. Even the portholes, the brooms, the purser’s list of passengers. Impostors, all of them. The purser’s clipboard supposedly had the ship’s manifest on it, but it was nothing more than a blank sheet of paper. Soon, we’d mourn our loss, but not because the play was dead. We’d mourn because it had never lived.
On the final night of the performance, we didn’t have to fake the closing scene’s sober sentiment. Since rehearsals first began, we’d dreaded the disappearance of the spotlight. This play wasn’t just something to do to pass the cold winter months. It wasn’t just another show. It was another life.
As with the two performances before it, after the last bow of the last show, the audience would applaud. Some would stand, some would whistle. The houselights would come up. The curtain would be drawn. The play’s leads would get bouquets. The cast members would change their clothes.
They’d throw their costumes into a bin bound for the Salvation Army. After the last person left, the auditorium lights would go out. Folded programs would be left in the aisles. No one in the audience would realize that the SS American never actually made it to London.
Flash forward. Ten years from now, half of us will be married, many to each other. The play will become “that thing I once did.” Most of the Angels will become housewives. Becca will be pursuing her principal’s certificate. Nora will be running a nonprofit out of state. Pete will get an excellent job in sales. I won’t have spoken to Nora or Pete in over five years.
Some of the boys will enlist. Some of the women will become very good cooks. Many of the cast members will attend Saturday night drag races on the outskirts of town, just as they did when they were teenagers. They’ll sign their kids up for Little League. They’ll take them to the pool. They’ll wonder where the time went. Some will achieve what they set out to: they will be teachers, coaches, parents, small business owners. One will open the hair salon she always hoped she would. One or two will survive four-wheeler accidents. Some will forget to buckle their seatbelts.
Some will stay and wish they’d left. Others will leave and wish they’d stayed. I will always be looking back.
It should come as no surprise that the plotline with Howard Lotte is rather musical in its execution. Every small town loves a good musical, after all.
Everyone knows the middle-aged sixth-grade teacher who gives piano lessons in the brown basement of his white house. We’ve seen him sporting his brown beard on walks through town with his white-sneakered wife. We’ve seen him every May on the day of his annual recital when he turns the pages for his students as we play the songs we’ve practiced all year. We’ve seen him each August on the first day of school, standing outside his sixth-grade classroom door as children rush inside.
Who doesn’t love Mr. Lotte? All of us do, surely, even though his dull-penciled handwriting is impossible to read and he has tea-breath halitosis. But he lets us attempt songs far beyond our skill level just for the fun of it, like “Jingle Bell Rock” and the theme to Fame. He doesn’t shame us when he assigns the same song for the third week in a row because we just can’t get the hang of it. He doesn’t charge too much for lessons, God love him, because he understands every father wants to give his daughter a chance to learn from the best.
Mr. Lotte likes to use the blinking metronome to keep the time, his female students have said. Or slap his knee. That’s where it begins, at least. His hand roams to the steady progression of a well-played sonata. His knee, your knee, his thigh, your thigh, your back, your shorts, your top. A song in 4/4 time. ONE, two, three four, ONE, two three four. For him, the students wait in line.
To her parents, a young girl comes forward. “He put his hands on me,” she says. “To the beat of the metronome.” Then another comes forward, then another, then another. ONE, two, three, four. ONE, two, three, four. TOCK tock tock tock.
Over the years, he’s taught close to a hundred students. Seven speak up; the rest of us remain silent. On the elementary school playground by the overturned basketball hoop, the spot where infatuation used to go to seed, boys and girls are now trying to snuff the snitches out.
Was it you? Was it you? Was it you? Was it you?
Word travels fast, and the culprits become known. Carly, with her sweet voice and her buckled shoes. Layne, with her piercing eyes and her basketball. Aria, with her fair skin and sheaves of drawing paper.
As Mr. Lotte goes, so goes the town. His first task was to separate us from each other, and Mercury follows suit. From this moment, all of Lotte’s students stand on opposite sides of the yes-no boundary line, one side choosing what the other has not. For our silence, we’ll remain safe and anonymous, the musical’s figurantes who don’t have any lines.
For their honesty, the other girls’ reputations will be stained. They’ll be called liars, even though they told the truth. All of us will think that girls just weren’t meant to trust each other. There used to be an “us,” the girls who once spent our afternoons at the
park, our evenings reading books, and our phone conversations talking to each other. But that was before girls stopped being girls and started being targets. We had no choice but to scatter. Nineteen ninety-two marked the year of a great diaspora borne from a shared secret we’ve never spoken of. We have to believe there must be others like us who never said a word. There must.
Denouement
IT WAS EARLY EVENING by the time our last performance, a Sunday matinee, ended. The audience cleared out quickly, eager to return home before nightfall. In winter, we tended to stay in after dark. Hurry home, close the door, turn on the lights, stoke the fire.
After I packed away my scuffed shoes and damp tights, I began the process of unbecoming, unzipping the dress, letting down my hair. Now in jeans and a sweatshirt, I stood over the clothing donation bin and tossed my costumes inside. Julia stood at the opposite end of the emptied hall, motioning for me to hurry up. It was time to go; the cast party at the new house of the choir director, Mrs. Todd, had already begun.
We hopped inside my sister’s friend Beth’s car and shivered.
“It’s gonna take a few minutes to warm up,” she said, turning the defrost knob all the way up.
We stayed silent as we drove. The town lampposts whizzed by us, their glaring reflections slippery on the backseat. Nighttime in summer had felt like a deep well I could swim inside of, but this winter night kept its distance, a wide, black sheet not to be penetrated.
The road that led us toward Mrs. Todd’s house wound through the frozen countryside to the farthest edges of town where a housing development had been built around a large manmade lake. It was a portrait of 1980s glamour—the cabins, clubhouses, boats, Jet Skis, and private docks—an ideal location to shoot a low-budget horror flick. Picture it: a group of unsuspecting teens spends a weekend in the woods, skiing, drinking, swimming, hoping for a relaxing getaway. It’s all fun and games until a dead body washes ashore. A classic whodunit. The clock is ticking for the remaining teenagers to figure out the killer’s identity before it’s too late.
