Elizabeth the First Wife (34 page)

My father and Sarah exchanged nervous glances. “Well, guess who called me this week?” he said uncharacteristically. He wasn't exactly a guessing-game sort of person. In fact, when I was a child, he'd often force me to reason out the answer to one of my own questions, and believe me, it was no game. He'd grill me for a full half hour, working my way backward through the logic, before I figured out how a remote control garage door worked or why the air pollution was worse in the summer. It was torture. And he wonders why I didn't go into the sciences?

“I can't imagine who called,” I said, shaking my head and hitting the brakes. One road into town and one road out meant traffic as Ashland filled with eager tourists searching for parking spots. “Who?”

“Duff Miller. My college roommate. The president of Redfield.”

My suspicion meter went up to eleven. “Really? Like an out-of-the-blue, how's-it-going-roomie kind of phone call? Or what?”

“Well, as it turns out, he heard about your involvement in the play through the news. And coincidentally, your mother had sent him your CV. So he happened to be coming to Ashland this weekend, as he does every year on the Fourth of July, and he thought he'd look you up. He has a place here. I thought I'd come up and introduce the two of you myself.” My father was talking at twice his normal speed, so it actually took me a minute or two to let the reality sink in. When it did, I looked in my rearview mirror at Sarah, who was grimacing and nodding. “Dad filled me in.”

“
Wait, what?”
I was literally speechless.

“Ah well. …” He went on to explain the timeline of events with a little prompting from Sarah. Apparently my mother didn't trust my father or me to take action on the possibility of teaching at Redfield. She was so convinced that I couldn't have changed my mind so quickly after my initial refusal that she took matters into
her own hands. She dug up a CV I'd sent her a few years ago when I was doing a speech at the Caltech Women's Club and she needed to introduce me.

According to my father, she updated it with a few items like my book idea and my work in Ashland and sent it to Duff's personal e-mail with a charming note, “in case he hadn't been made aware of my interest in teaching at Redfield.” My father concluded, “I'm sorry. I couldn't explain to Duff what had actually transpired, and it didn't seem right to explain it to you on the phone, so I got on the plane.”

The idea of my mother “freshening up” my academic resume was terrifying. With what? My groundbreaking research on Elizabethan Bad Boyfriends? And the reality of her sending it off to a college president, like I was a junior in high school looking for a summer internship, was simply humiliating. Couldn't she leave my career alone? Although really, I realized, my father and I had brought this on ourselves by not coming clean to my mother. I couldn't get mad. In fact, I was having a hard time not laughing. “So on top of everything else—like bringing down Ted's political career—I have a job interview this weekend? And my dad is coming with me? Super!” He started to chuckle, too. We were a pathetic pair.

Sarah joined us. “Don't think of it as a job interview, think of it as coffee. Dad already set it up for tomorrow morning.”

“Oh, good. Sarah, do you want to come along with us? We can wear matching outfits. Maybe Mom can get you a teaching gig there, too?”

“Are you kidding? My job is to distract Mom while you two get yourselves out of this mess. I'm taking her to the parade.”

“Hold on,” I said, looking at my brilliant, clueless father. “Mom doesn't know you're here, and she doesn't know this is happening?”

“I thought we could tell her together. Tonight. She'll be at dinner at your place, right?” Apparently he wasn't as clueless as I thought.

We arrived at the hotel. “You know, maybe I do want a job at Redfield. I'm beginning to think getting away from my family is a good idea.”

If I had any doubt that my Summer with Shakespeare monologue was indeed going viral, it was put aside when I heard the voicemail left by apoplectic junior agent Melissa Bergstrom-Bennett. “Elizabeth, love the video. Fantastic! Get that book proposal done now! Call me.” Followed by another from the producer of the Ron and Ben show, wondering if I'd like to come on the air for “a quick interview.”

I saved the first and deleted the second.

One of my mother's mantras was, “When the going gets tough, the tough get mowing.” As a teenager, I cringed every time she said it to my sisters and me. It was corny and not a particularly accurate pun, one of my persnickety pet peeves when it came to the English language. We never actually mowed our own lawn, the perks of living in an area with an endless supply of affordable gardeners, but my mother used the term “mowing” generically, as in anything that needed a little elbow grease. She'd hand us a broom or a vacuum or a trowel and require us to clean the house or wash down the patio furniture to get ready for some big event at the house. It seemed like our childhood was an endless round of preparations for an endless number of faculty dinners and holiday parties.

True to our characters, the Lancaster sisters interpreted “the tough get mowing” differently. Sarah did one small task thoroughly and completely over the course of an afternoon. Bumble hid in the bathroom applying lip gloss until the hard work was over. And I
did the bulk of the chores and then put away the supplies. Like my mother, I found inner peace in physical labor.

Now, as an adult, I often find myself muttering, “When the going gets tough, the tough get mowing.” Like at that very moment, in the backyard of Sage Cottage, as I did a quick clean up and set up for the barbecue. Let others worry about political ramifications; I preferred to spend my energy raking stray leaves and setting out the high-end paper goods I secured at Prize in Ashland. Like my mother, I coped by planning. Plus I was hoping the lilac-themed cocktail napkins might distract the guests from the crisis at hand. Or at the very least send a subliminal message to Rafa that I was sorry for any trouble I had inadvertently caused.

“More of these, please—they're divine.” Mary Pat stood before me, holding an empty serving platter, which had been filled with my patented grilled pizzas. “You make them, I'll toss them on the fire.”

“Thanks,” I said, taking a moment to look out on the scene in the backyard. Miraculously, it was a simple family party, like I had suggested and Ted had wanted. My parents sat in the corner, chatting with Dependable Jane and Sarah, who was blissed out from her afternoon of pampering. I could see they weren't speaking to each other, though; my mother's laundry list of grievances included my father's appearance overshadowing her big moment and her girls' weekend simultaneously; my YouTube appearance trumping her front-page interview with
Look Out Pasadena!;
and my father forbidding her from joining the coffee/interview with Duff Miller, even though she'd made it happen. It was clear his strategy for the evening was to wait out her bad mood and keep replenishing her wine glass, not a bad call.

In that moment, the two had appeared to reach détente and were listening to Dependable Jane recall her Greatest Moments in Real Estate, the foreclosure version. Dependable Jane really didn't subscribe to client/realtor confidentiality, at least not after her self-imposed six-month statute of limitations had expired. She started a lot of stories with, “Well, you know, I held my breath hoping the sale would go through, and I really shouldn't say, but the sellers…” and ended many a story with, “but you didn't hear that from me.” In fact, she really shouldn't have said, and we did hear it from her, but the tales were often so juicy we didn't care.

In the other grouping, Ted and Bumble were doing some grilling of their own. They had poor Dylan of Klamath Falls in their sights, but he appeared to be holding up under questioning from the congressman and the flack. I gave him credit for that, as those two intimidated me on occasion. Maddie, a student of her stepmother's, had done an excellent job prepping Dylan on safe areas of conversation while the two of them were setting up the bar for me. It seemed that both Dylan and Ted were fans of Lou Reed's music and admired his influence on world political leaders like Vaclav Havel. (That must have been a short detour in Ted's musical journey, because most of his campaign theme songs had come from one-name, early '80s bands like Kansas or Styx.) How Maddie had happened upon this conversation starter, I'll never know, but the foursome was deep in conversation.

So far, none of the rest of Team Ted had shown up, including Rafa. I hoped my face hadn't fallen too far when I opened the door to just Ted and Bumble, searching beyond them for the man in the white shirt. Bumble mumbled something about a new press release and “maybe later,” then thrust a couple of bottles of wine into my hands and made her way to the backyard.

All that waxing for nothing.