But she stood rooted to her spot, feeling they wouldn’t remember her from the year before. She had the wood from the wreck in her backpack. Its weight was a joy compared to that of the usual textbooks. It had been a long, stupid day at school, though no different from any other. LaRee always asked about her day, but she would never really get it. High school, if it were a painting, would be a Hieronymous Bosch, where children worked feverishly to operate the immense bodies and egos they had suddenly grown, stumbling through a world of terrors, grasping at whatever support they could find. Would LaRee guess, for instance, that there was always, always one girl or another crying in the corner of the ladies’ room? Today it had been Kayla, and Vita had made the mistake of asking what was wrong.
“This, that’s what’s wrong,” she’d said, smacking the bulge below her waist hard with the flat of her hand, then wiping her eyes. She was pregnant, and proud of it, as she’d tell you defiantly, just as she’d been proud to lose her virginity, proud of beating up Teresa Matos when Teresa slept with her boyfriend, and proud that she didn’t care when that boyfriend left her. So it should take something pretty dire to make her cry. “Ugh, you have no idea,” she’d said, pushing past Vita to the mirror to redo her makeup, which was as thick as armor. Dorotea Machado came in then, set her backpack down with a grunt, and she and Kayla had glanced at Vita and then at each other, laughing.
“You just have no idea, do you?” Kayla asked her.
“No idea about what?”
They looked at her again, and at Kayla’s belly. Where to begin with the things Vita didn’t know? The whole world of things a girl named Vita Gray would have been sheltered from—who could name them all? It was clear, though, from her name and her way of crossing her legs, and the little book she carried with her (The Tempest; George Lyman Kittredge, ed., on loan from Orson Desroches—the physical proof that she would one day cross the bridge and escape Outer Cape High) that she had never been slapped, never been fucked. She didn’t have the faintest notion what real life was.
And they were right in their way. They knew things she didn’t know, that she never would know. Back in middle school Kayla had offered to teach Vita how to beat up a girl. And on that one day back in kindergarten Dorotea had taught her plenty, about the way people saw danger in others, even when the others were five years old. They rode the same bus, they were in the same math class, but the invisible fence laid in place back then was still live, and neither of them thought of crossing it. Dorotea had not been allowed to be friends with anyone except Teresa Matos, but now Teresa was on the soccer team, which traveled together like a school of fish while Dorotea dragged around as if hobbled, her thick curls gelled so heavily it looked like she’d dunked her head in oil. Her mother worked double shifts at Infinite Horizons nursing home, and Vita had come to feel protective of her. Which Dorotea saw as an insult. Vita Gray had no reason to feel sorry for her; she was supposed to feel sorry for Vita Gray.
“No idea about anything,” Dorotea said. “And you’ve got toilet paper stuck to your shoe.”
There had indeed been toilet paper stuck to Vita’s shoe, and she pulled it off, and standing up she almost started to tell them what she knew that they didn’t. But that would have been cruel, so she gave up and went back out into the cacophonous hall, counting the minutes until she would be here at Mackerel Sky. She was playing the very smallest part in The Tempest, but who cared? What did it matter? For the next three months she was a member of the company, and she would have a role, an essential role, to play. The show opened on June 21 and didn’t close until August. And during that time they would all be safe in a bubble of art, thinking together about life, creating a communal vision and through that vision traveling back in time to live lives William Shakespeare had imagined.…
Hugh smiled to see her, with the backpack full of wood and the driftwood branches under her arm. He liked her, for qualities nobody noticed at school. “Hello,” she said, two notes like a songbird.
“Hello, my little one!” Hugh was a tall man, with a thin, sharp face and deep-set, piercing eyes. He had been retired and living in Oyster Creek for three years now, but he still smelled professorial: old books, chalk, stale pipe smoke. He kissed Vita’s left cheek, then her right.
“You’re ready for more Mackerel Sky, are you? A glutton for punishment.”
“I can’t wait,” she said, though now that she was here she was tongue-tied. It seemed too much to hope that these men could really be glad to have her among them. They were too grown-up and accomplished. Hugh always said he’d founded Mackerel Sky Theatre in order to atone for the sins he had committed as the Charles Emerson Bray Chair in Shakespearean Studies. From that august position he had bloviated to generations of collegians, his all-knowing palaver overruling every youthful notion, every fresh idea. He was a revered authority, but as he grew older, small regrets had begun to haunt him. How deftly he had skewered the young students whose naive passions he’d found so irritating. He had shown them who was more knowledgeable—oh yes, he had. And one by one, they had drifted away, feeling a bit too small for Shakespeare and for Hugh Shiverick. Hugh had taught for twenty-eight years, but walking through the park in June a few years back, with the locust blossoms snowing down, he’d noticed a clump of violets in the grass, bent down to pick one, and it had come to him: These plays were meant to be staged, not studied. Why not do that, here in Oyster Creek, give the plays back the life he had been flogging out of them in the classroom all these years?
He had started with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, gathering a company of the hopeful and the disappointed, some of them talented, some only loud. He was lucky to have Sam Rosenmayer, who had just graduated from the conservatory and was so very beautiful that Orson would have done anything to be near him. And Sam’s boyfriend, Leo Ward, a dancer who’d come to Oyster Creek for a weekend, seen Sam spinning dough into pizza, and known right there that his life was going to change. Others might not have classical training, but they were real people with real faces. Orson’s spider veins and hunched back would make him a perfect Caliban.
And here was little Vita Gray, whom he had cast as a fairy because she came to the audition and he didn’t like to disappoint a child. He’d expected she would drop out after one or two rehearsals, but instead she’d been there every minute, proudly carrying Peaseblossom’s gossamer train and taking on any other task that was asked of her, just grateful to be one of the group.
“Who is this young person?” Orson asked, lifting an imaginary lorgnette to his eyes. “Not our very own Vita Gray, a small child I used to know?”
“Yes, Orson, it’s me.”
“A most impressive transformation,” he said. “Are we of age, suddenly? Ah yes, and blushing! A formidable addition to your womanly arsenal.”
“Orson, you don’t care about womanly arsenals!” Vita blushed deeper, hearing the flirtation in her own voice. It was the way girls talked to boys at school, and it made her think they were fools.
“Or, you might say that my appreciation of women is so great that I do not care to remove them from their pedestals and—what is the phrase?—rip their bodices.”
Orson said “rip their bodices” with such precise Victorian gusto that he seemed to be committing satire on the whole of heterosexual life.
“Orson, Orson, I’m sixteen!”
“Exactly what I was afraid of, my dear. But it does become you.”
Vita glanced over to Hugh, who came twinkling to the rescue. “Down, Orson. You are well cast as the rainbow goddess, Vita, no question. And you come bearing flotsam!”
“Look.” The branches, worn to points like antlers, she laid on the table, but she had to struggle to get the wood out of her pack.
“Hmm… a stump,” Hugh said, feigning interest. Of course. It wasn’t right. The driftwood would look perfect as part of the hut, but this was just a piece of junk. And she’d worked so hard to break it off and lug it back up that endless stairway, over the Shillicoths’ deck.�
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“Don’t know if we can find a use for that,” Hugh said, “but these will be perfect. I’ll make a structure of chicken wire and we can attach them.”
“And this…” The hurricane flag was wadded in her pocket like a used handkerchief.
“Hah,” he said, “the real thing! This must be twenty years old, if not forty. Can’t have been in the water too long, though, or it would never be this whole. I can always count on you, Vita.” He flapped the pale rag in the air. “Caliban’s family crest, this would be,” he said to himself, pulling it taut between his hands.
Vita had to look at the ground. Her smile gave away something far too important for anyone to see. If anyone at school saw, it would just confirm the general opinion.… They all moved like a school of fish, turning together, diving together, at some invisible signal…. They laughed at the same things, sneered at the same things… and then there was Vita, searching out rags on the beach in hopes of pleasing some old man.
At school, honestly, she was too frightened to pay attention. The teachers were just waiting to pounce; when she had said that Odysseus’s bed was carved from a tree, the English teacher had asked, “What kind of a tree?” as if she were prosecuting a murder and Vita was the defendant. Vita wondered about the man who killed her mother—she tried to push him out of her mind but he would creep in through any opening and she’d find herself wondering who he had been, how he could have come to kill, what it would have felt like to be sentenced to life in a prison by people who hated you. LaRee had said he’d been passing through town, had broken into the house intending to rob them, but that couldn’t be true. If it was, people would still lock their doors; they would still talk about it, warn their children. Look how afraid they were of strangers and kidnappings, and as far as Vita knew, such a thing had never happened on Cape Cod. And phrases dropped from LaRee’s phone conversations, things like “Sabine always said no man would get the best of her.” When Vita’s mind wandered, this is where it went—back to something that she had no memory of. When she turned eighteen she was going to find the murderer, visit him in jail, make him tell her the truth.
And he would, because he was an outcast, like she was. At lunch, Brandon Skiles had told her he had a bottle of whiskey hidden in the National Seashore forest behind the school; he’d invited her to come drink with him at lunch. She was lame, he said, and everyone knew it, but if they saw her with him they’d think she was cool. Her first impulse was to go with him; then she felt so ashamed that she said, “Brandon, I’d rather spend the rest of my life alone than be friends with you,” and ran as if for her life, down the hall toward her locker, nearly smashing into Shyanne Holtz, slut-goddess of the senior class, who had seemed to be posing for some imaginary camera in the middle of the hall.
Shyanne was walking toward her now, across the grass from the parking lot—walking with Adam no less. Vita edged closer to Hugh, wishing she could hide behind him. Adam had a beard lately, a soft-looking beard with two little peaks under his lips. He looked like a baby devil. His hair was curly, or at least springy, and she imagined the stubs of little horns growing on his head.
Just as Vita thought this, Shyanne reached over and tousled Adam’s hair, as if the same thing had occurred to her. He pulled away but he was laughing at the same time. Shyanne saw Hugh’s attention turn toward Vita and ground her hips against Adam to keep it. “You’re such a beanpole, you inspire a pole dance,” she said. He smiled, stupidly.
“Vita, do you know Shyanne?” Hugh asked. “She’s playing Miranda.”
Vita’s blood turned to vinegar. Of course. Shyanne was the star of the school shows, too. People said she was a natural, and there she was, as always, striding out to the center of the stage with none of Vita’s qualms, as if she’d been born with some protective coating, something that shielded her from the ordinary run of awkwardness and confusion so that she would always be loved and admired, and didn’t have to work for anything. Meanwhile, Vita stumbled, mumbled, blundered, apologized, shrank back for fear of being noticed, shouted her lines for fear of being ignored. Except at Mackerel Sky, where she had been safe. Until now. Shyanne could not be part of this; she couldn’t. Vita’s instinct was to run at her with bared teeth, but she managed to keep still. Shyanne glanced toward her, saw she was no competition, and turned back to Adam.
It seemed to be exactly at that moment that the foghorn sounded and the breeze swung west, over the water. Why couldn’t they have a real theater, instead of the plein air? In a theater you were all really together, enclosed in a building, like a family, safe and warm. Vita was wearing her red corduroy jacket from the church thrift shop; the wind cut right through it. She was afraid she was going to cry, and worse, she saw that Hugh realized she was hurt.
“Hi, Shyanne,” Vita said. “We know each other from school,” she explained to Hugh, but Shyanne was carefully ignoring her, afraid to become a loser by association.
“Vita’s in her third year with us,” Hugh said, trying to help. “She’s one of the most faithful members of the company. In fact, she’s spent the winter gathering properties…”
Oh dear God, he wasn’t going to… He wasn’t, was he?
He was. He pulled out the hurricane flag—a wretched rag—with a flourish and announced boomingly, “Caliban’s standard!”
Shyanne looked as if she’d stepped in something. At least he left “the stump,” as he’d called it, under the table—a bunch of old waterlogged wood crusted with barnacles. Vita could imagine Shyanne retelling this story tomorrow, the girls at her table turning to laugh at Vita, who in her third year at Mackerel Sky had a part with seven lines, while Shyanne played Prospero’s beloved, protected daughter, the star. She’d have a love scene with Adam, they’d kiss, he’d become her boyfriend, and fine, fine, that was fine. She could have Adam, and her father’s boat, the Sweet Shyanne, was tied up at the end of the wharf. But she couldn’t have Mackerel Sky.
Of course Franco was right there, too, at work in the harbormaster’s shack, which had been a mackerel shed about a million years ago, when there were still mackerel in Mackerel Bay. “Oughta call it Old Boot Bay,” Manny Soares, the old harbormaster, would say. When Manny retired he said he was moving south, and he did… to a folding chair about fifty feet down the pier, where he was available to give an opinion on anything from the price of cod to global warming. The back of the harbormaster’s shack was a garage bay, open onto the boat ramp at the base of the wharf, so Manny could keep an eye on Hank Capshaw and Franco. He wasn’t one to second-guess—he’d been around too long to think that one man’s decision could have much of an effect on the world, or even on the harbor. But he didn’t like to miss anything. Every morning Franco would arrive on his bike, unlock the doors, and take out the kayak to go out and collect water samples from the shellfishing areas. Manny would come in a bit later, get his chair out of the shack and set it up in his spot, which was protected from the west wind but open to the sun, and looked out over the entrance to the harbor. On a wet day he put up an umbrella. Fifty years ago, there would have been a constant commotion to watch, draggers loading and unloading, men lined up hoping for work as day laborers, tankers coming in to shelter from a storm, yachts through whose windows you could see liveried waiters serving dinner at night.
Vita didn’t turn her head toward the shack; she didn’t want to have any awkward moments with Franco. They had done their best, both of them, but though they lived in the same tiny, isolated town, knew the same people, inhaled the same air whose smell they could both parse like a poem, they were from different worlds, and every gesture seemed to go awry. LaRee told Vita he was proud to bursting and talked about her all the time, but she felt as if Franco was afraid of her in some way, afraid she was going to turn into her mother.
“So, are we all here?” Hugh asked. “Wait—Sam and Leo? Vita, would you…?”
Of course she would. She would consider it an honor. She ran in a giddy streak across the lawn to the little cottage, Sea Sp
ray, where Sam and Leo lived. “You guys, you’re late for rehearsal.”
Sam came around from the back with the towels he’d been hanging on the line. “Oh, it is! Leo—come on, we’re late.”
“I’m moussing my hai-air!” Leo replied.
“Well, mousse it la-ter!” Sam sang. “Everyone knows you don’t mess with Vita Gray!”
She stood there looking too shy to live, but in heaven nonetheless. Sam and Leo were a mesmerizing pair: in love and showing it off, and because they were actors they could do this with every slightest glance or move. Light flickered between them, and every time they touched, even to hand the script back and forth, Vita could feel it. And their cottage, another of the million little Monopoly houses for rent by the week on Cape Cod, was freshly painted, white with the shutters a seafoam green, and window boxes full of pink geraniums and cascading ivy. They were aware that they were blessing the others with their presence and Vita fell in behind them so as not to diminish the effect.
“There you are,” Orson said dreamily.
“A full cast… or nearly,” Hugh said.
The harbormaster’s boat was on its way back from Barrel Point. Vita could almost feel its progress, because Franco would likely be on it and she always kept close track of him. It was an old Boston Whaler, struggling through the choppy water. Every year they begged the town to replace it but the town wasn’t a seagoing place anymore and the voters barely understood what the harbormaster did. A new Crown Victoria for the police chief was one thing…
“We can double characters to a certain extent,” Hugh said. “But the boatswain…” He watched as the boat cut its engine, momentum propelling it silently to the dock. Franco came out of the shack, caught the boat’s rope and looped it around the bollard.
“Mr. Sipes might be good,” Vita said quickly. “He loves Shakespeare.” Mr. Sipes was a large, mushroomy English teacher with a great enthusiasm for iambic pentameter. She didn’t suppose he’d ever been on a boat, but it was bad enough having Shyanne here; she just couldn’t have them all going mad over Franco’s authenticity.
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