“Do you not like the Beatles?” Frank asked, sounding shocked, as we finished our cool-down and started walking back toward my house. “Do you also not like sunshine and laughter and puppies?” I just stared at him, waiting for Frank Porter to reappear and realize he was being a little crazy, but apparently Frank was just getting started. “I don’t think the Beatles get enough recognition,” he said, speaking fast. “I mean, when you look at their body of work and how they changed music forever. I think there should be federal holidays and parades.”
“Well, you can work on that,” I said, as we arrived back in front of my house. “In case you need another summer project.”
Frank laughed and looked toward the house, wiping his sleeve across his face. “Think you could spare a water?”
“Sure,” I said automatically, not thinking about anything except how thirsty I was as we headed up the driveway together. I opened the front door and we stepped into the dark and cool of the mudroom, and it wasn’t until the door was shut behind us that I suddenly realized what I had done—invited Frank Porter into my house.
He’d already seen my father in his robe, and I had just hoped—if he was going to come inside again—that I might be able to convince my parents to wear actual clothing. I suddenly realized I had no idea what Frank might be walking into.
I just crossed my fingers that the house wouldn’t be too much of a disaster, that my parents would be quietly typing in the dining room, and that Beckett wouldn’t be lurking in doorways, lying in wait to terrify us. “My parents are probably working,” I said. “So we might need to keep it down—”
But as soon as we’d crossed through the mudroom and into the house, the sentence died on my lips. My parents were not only away from the dining room and their laptops, but they were in motion, pushing the sofa against the wall while Beckett skated around the TV room on his sneakers that turned into skates when he leaned back on his heels. Stacks of plays were balanced in his arms, and the cat seemed to be deliberately as underfoot as possible.
“Um,” I said as I closed the door to the mudroom, causing everyone to stop for a moment and look over at me. I was very grateful to see that neither of my parents were wearing robes or sweatpants, but my mother had her hair in curlers and my dad was wearing two ties around his neck, so I wasn’t sure this was that much of an improvement. “What’s going on?”
“Emily, thank god you’re home!” my mother said. She grabbed a stack of plays and papers from the ground and thrust them into my arms. “Go put these somewhere. And then could you see if we have anything to eat? Is there something in the freezer? Mini bagel micro whatsits?”
“I finished those last week,” Beckett said, skating past me. “So no.”
“I should probably go,” Frank said to me quietly, but apparently not quietly enough because my dad straightened up from the couch and spotted him.
“A boy!” he said, relief in his voice. “Wonderful. Come help me lift this.” He squinted at Frank through his glasses. “Hey, don’t I know you?” he asked.
“Seriously, what is happening?” I asked, stepping slightly to the left to stop Frank from going to join my father. Both my parents looked at each other and then down at the floor and I suddenly worried that they’d really let the bills slide this summer while they’d been working, and everything in the house was about to be repossessed, or something.
“Living Room Theater,” Beckett finally piped up when it became clear my parents weren’t going to, as he skated deftly around the cat. “They forgot.”
“Wait, here?” I asked, my stomach plunging, as I suddenly understood why everyone was running around. “Tonight?”
“Tonight,” my mother said grimly, depositing another stack of plays into my arms. “We weren’t exactly prepared.”
“Living Room Theater?” I heard Frank echo behind me.
“Did someone cancel or something?” I asked.
“Well,” my mother said, “we technically did volunteer to host it this year. But that was before we knew we would be writing. And your father thinks that e-mail is interfering with his creative process, so he missed the reminders.”
I closed my eyes for just a moment. “How soon?” I asked.
My dad looked at his watch and winced. “An hour.”
“Um, what’s Living Room Theater?” Frank asked me, as this information seemed to panic the rest of my family, who all sprang into motion again.
“Well, unless you leave now,” I said, realizing it might even be too late as my mother dropped a stack of printer paper into his arms, “I think you’re going to find out.”
JULY
One year earlier
“Explain this to me again,” Sloane said as we—me, Sloane, my parents, and Beckett—walked up the driveway to Pamela Curry’s house. “You guys don’t get enough theater during the school year?”
My mother smiled and took a step closer to Sloane, linking her arm through hers. The two of them had gotten along right from the beginning, and a lot of times when she stayed over, I’d come downstairs in the morning to see Sloane and my mom sitting across the kitchen table from each other, talking, almost more like friends than anything else. “It started a few years back,” she said. “At a theater/English department meeting about parking, of all things. We ended up talking about all the plays we loved, and how they had to be so carefully selected at the college—not to offend anyone, to cast as many students as possible, come in under budget, all the usual concerns. And then someone . . .”
“Harkins,” my dad piped up from the other side of our group. “Remember? He got this thing going and then left when he got tenure at Williams.”
“Anyway, Professor Harkins suggested that we get together once a summer—both the theater and English departments—and put up a play that would have been impossible to do during the school year. No props, no costumes, everyone holds the book.”
“Sounds fun,” Sloane said as we reached the front door, and my mother knocked once and then just pushed it open and stepped inside. Living Room Theater tended to make things a little more casual, and there was usually enough chaos going on before the show that people weren’t bothering with details like answering the door.
We walked in and, sure enough, the downstairs was packed, mostly my parents’ colleagues from both their respective departments, plus their kids. Kids were always invited to Living Room Theater, unless it was Mamet, in which case there was a strict thirteen-and-over rule. People were milling about, tonight’s actors were walking around holding scripts and muttering, and everyone else was clustered around the food table.
I looked around, trying to be as subtle about it as possible, but apparently not succeeding, because Sloane leaned closer to me and whispered, “Seen him yet?” I felt myself blush as I shook my head. Pamela Curry and her two kids had moved here the year before, and she’d started working with my dad in the English department. Her son and daughter had been seniors when I was a sophomore, and I really only knew her daughter, Amy, because she’d shocked the whole school when she’d started getting all the leads in the plays, as a newcomer, right out of the gate. But I’d had an irrational and kind of gigantic crush on Charlie Curry, even though he went on to captain the tennis team and didn’t seem particularly interested in dating non-tennis-playing underclassmen.
“Andrea! Scott!” Pamela Curry rushed up to my parents, giving me and Sloane a quick smile—Beckett had already disappeared in the direction of the food. “We’re having a crisis.”
“It wouldn’t be Living Room Theater without one,” my dad said sagely.
“We’ve lost our youngest sister,” she said. “Susan Greene has the flu.” Even though Susan, one of my mother’s colleagues, was at least ten years older than my mom, Living Room Theater had always been cast age-blind.
“In Crimes of the Heart?” my dad asked, his eyes widening. “That is a crisis.”
“I know.” Pamela winced. “Babe is such a great part, too, but if it’s not done well .
. .”
“Why can’t your thespian daughter do it?” my mother asked, and Pamela shook her head.
“She and her boyfriend are backpacking across Europe,” she said. “Otherwise, I would have tapped her weeks ago.” She looked suddenly to me and Sloane, her eyes lighting up. “Maybe one of you two?”
“Um,” I said, trying to ignore my mother’s encouraging smile, “not me.” I looked at Sloane and raised my eyebrows. “Want to step in?”
“I’m happy to,” she said, looking from Pamela to me, her brow slightly furrowed. “But Emily . . .”
“Wonderful!” Pamela said, almost collapsing with relief. “I thought I was going to have to do it, and believe me, that’s something nobody wants to see. I’ll get you a script.”
A colleague called out to my parents, and they headed toward the other side of the room as Sloane turned to face me. “Why don’t you do it?” she asked. “I’m pretty sure you know this play much better than I do, considering I’ve never heard of it.”
“I didn’t want to be in it,” I said, even though this wasn’t exactly true. And I couldn’t blame it on not wanting to make a fool out of myself in front of Charlie, since he was nowhere to be seen. I just knew Sloane would do a much better job than I would.
“I’m not sure about this,” Frank said as he peered around the dining room door and into the TV room, where the couch had been pushed aside to create enough space for a makeshift stage, and all the chairs we had in the house—and then pillows in front of them, once we’d run out of chairs—were lined up in front of it. We were both still in our running clothes and sneakers. I could have changed, of course, but since it was because of my parents that he was doing this, I didn’t want him to be the only person there in athletic gear. It was five minutes to showtime, and Frank was looking a little pale. But given everything that had occurred in the last hour, I didn’t exactly blame him.
“I tried to warn you,” I pointed out, and Frank just nodded as he clutched his script. I had a feeling this was not particularly comforting at the moment.
When I had seen the tornado that was Living Room Theater approaching, I had pulled Frank aside before my dad could enlist him in any manual labor. “You need to leave,” I said seriously. “Now.”
Frank glanced into the living room, where my dad was yelping in pain. He had accidentally stepped on Godot, and the cat had wasted no time in enacting his revenge. “But it looks like your parents need help,” he said.
I shook my head. “Seriously, get out while you can.” Innocent bystanders had a tendency to get cast in these things, which was how two years ago, the plumber who’d come by to fix a leak had ended up playing Mercutio and had almost fainted.
“Em!” my mother said, rushing up to me and depositing a stack of plays in my arms. “Find something we can use, can you?”
“You haven’t even picked a play yet?” I asked, aghast things were running this far behind.
“Hi,” Frank said, holding out his free hand to my mother. “I’m Frank Porter, I’m a friend of Emily’s.” I looked over at him when he said this, and realized that it was true—he was a friend of mine, as much as I was still getting used to this.
“Oh,” my mother said, raising her eyebrows at me and shooting me a smile before she shook Frank’s hand. “So nice to meet you. You’ve been running with Em, right?” she asked, and I realized my dad hadn’t been quite as distracted as I’d thought the morning he’d encountered Frank on the steps.
Frank nodded. “She’s been getting me in shape.”
“Hardly,” I said. My mother gave me a significant smile, and I shook my head at her, not knowing how to convey nonverbally that he had a girlfriend and she had the wrong idea.
“Well, we’re so glad you could join us for this,” my mother said, and before I could tell her that he hadn’t joined us, he’d just made the mistake of trying to come in for a water—which he still hadn’t gotten—she was ushering him in the direction of the couch. “Do you have any back injuries?” my mother asked. “Might you be willing to lift some furniture?”
Go, I mouthed to Frank, but he was clearly much too well-mannered for this and was soon picking up one side of our couch, while I tore through as many plays as I could, counting speaking roles. As I tried to see if we could do Noises Off!, which had always been one of my favorites, I heard only snatches of the conversation that was going on as my dad and Frank tried to get the couch out of the TV room. “Your work . . . Bug Juice . . . Broadway . . .”
Then I heard a crash, and looked over to see my dad had dropped his end of the couch, leaving Frank struggling to hold one side of the couch aloft. “Andrea!” my dad yelled, as Frank lowered his end slowly, his face red. I had the feeling he was regretting that he hadn’t just gone home when he had the chance. “Fred here had a great idea!”
“Frank,” I corrected through gritted teeth. I couldn’t help but wish for the parents I normally had—the ones who never would have forgotten about Living Room Theater, the ones who weren’t bent on embarrassing me in every way they could.
“What’s that?” my mother asked, emerging from the kitchen.
“Bug Juice!” my dad said. “Emily, stop looking for plays. We’ll just put ours up. We have enough copies of the script.”
“Wonderful,” my mother said, her face relaxing. “I’ll figure out some food and you can cast it.”
My dad looked around, then pointed at Frank. “You can play Duncan,” he said, and Frank shot me a look.
“Dad,” I said, setting the pile of plays down and taking a step forward. Duncan was the second lead, after Cecily, and that was a lot to throw at someone who’d only come into the house in a futile attempt to get hydrated. “I’m not sure that—”
“And we need a Cecily,” he went on, talking over me. “Andrea,” he yelled in the general direction of the kitchen, “who can play Cecily?”
“Oh, god,” my mother said, coming back into the room and trying to run her hand through her hair, apparently forgetting there were curlers in it. “I have no idea. Maybe Pamela’s daughter?”
“If we don’t have a good Cecily, the whole play falls apart,” my dad said, shaking his head. “You remember what happened during that performance in Chicago.”
“I know,” my mother said. “Let’s see. . . .”
“I’ll do it.” The words were out of my mouth before I realized I’d even thought them. My parents turned to me, both looking shocked. Frank, though, was giving me a smile from across the room.
“Seriously?” Beckett asked, sounding deeply skeptical.
“I think that seems very appropriate,” my mother said, crossing past me to go back into the kitchen, giving my arm a squeeze as she went. “Thank you, Em.”
“Yes,” my dad said, after a small pause, still looking at me like he wasn’t quite sure who I was. “That’s . . . wonderful. Now let’s move this couch.”
This was how, an hour later, scripts in hand, Frank and I ended up standing behind the doors of the dining room, looking out as the audience assembled. If I hadn’t been so nervous about what was to come, I probably would have been much more embarrassed that Frank had been pulled so far into my parents’ world and then forced to act against his will. I was beginning to feel dizzy, and it was becoming clear to me that it was much easier to volunteer to do the brave thing, and much harder to actually have to follow through with it.
I could see Dawn sitting in the back, and when she caught my eye, she gave me a wave and a thumbs-up. When it turned out we had almost no food in the house that we could serve, I’d proposed just getting pizza, and my mother had instantly agreed, putting me in charge of it while she tried to get the house in order. I’d called Dawn’s cell, and told her we needed ten pies and assorted salads and breadsticks. Dawn then told me that she had just finished her shift, but if I called the actual restaurant and paid with a card, she could bring the order to me and then go home. When she’d arrived, she’d helped me set up the food, and when she
’d found out what was about to happen, had asked if she could stay, and had ended up helping my mother do the last-minute cleaning.
The crowd suddenly seemed much bigger than it had in previous years. And why had I never considered how disconcerting it was to have a room full of people staring at you? I rolled my script in my hands. I was hanging on to it for dear life, even though I really didn’t need it. Bug Juice had been such a part of our lives for so long that I had committed most of it to memory years ago, after seeing it performed over and over again.
“Two minutes,” Beckett said, sticking his head into the dining room and then skating away again. He was in charge of reading the stage directions and holding the book. Even though all of us would have scripts in our hands, I’d been to a number of Living Room Theaters where people lost their place and then fumbled through their script for what felt like hours, trying to find their line.
“We should probably go stand with the rest of the cast,” I said. The other main players were clustered in the kitchen, waiting for the play to start. The cast was big enough that people with one or two lines were just sitting in the audience and sharing scripts, and would make their way to the “stage” when it was time for their scenes. But the main actors—who included my mom’s department secretary, the Elizabethan scholar in the English department, the assistant costume designer, three of the set guys, and a few of my father’s grad students—had a green room for the night. Frank nodded but still looked nervous, and I suddenly realized that Frank Porter—who’d gotten up in front of the whole school, who was always making speeches, who seemed more together than anyone I knew—was nervous about performing a makeshift play in my TV room. It looked like he was much more nervous than I was—which for some reason made me feel brave.
“You’re going to do great,” I assured him.
Frank looked over at me, and gave me a half smile. “Thanks,” he said quietly. I smiled back just as Beckett stuck his head into the kitchen again.
“Places!” he yelled.
An hour and a half later, the play was starting to wind down, and no major disasters had occurred. My first few lines had been rushed, the script shaking in my hand and my voice high and trembly. And it was a good thing I had the lines memorized—it didn’t hurt that eleven-year-old me had pretty much written them—because in my first scene, my vision was too blurred and my script was vibrating too much for me to have read anything on the page anyway. But as the play continued, I could start to remember what it felt like to breathe normally again. And it wasn’t like I was acting with Broadway’s best, either—the Elizabethan scholar playing Camp Director Arnold said most of her lines with her back to the audience, and the grad student who played Tucker had lost his place four times in his first scene, which was impressive considering he’d only had three lines.
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