Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (2 page)

T
he first play of the summer was an original, which the audience never liked as much as one it knew, but John thought the story was relevant and so said to hell with it. They would do
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in August like they always did, and that would satisfy the fogeys. The new play,
Come Home, My Angel
, was about a wounded soldier returning from war to find that his girlfriend had married his best friend. In the end, the soldier shot himself, but the couple was happy. It was dark, but sometimes people liked that. John had found exactly the right actor for the wounded soldier, a young man from Chicago who looked hurt all the time, but never without looking handsome. His name was Cliff, and he was a brooder. Hildy was in love with him the second he walked into the house. The feeling, if feelings could be judged by noises coming from Hildy’s bedroom in the middle of the afternoon when no one else was around, was mutual.

The Tastee Custard Shack couldn’t compete with Cliff’s sturdy biceps, and so Hildy was once again home for the summer, running lines with the actors and helping her mother with the sewing. Elsa
quickly won a new job as well—she became the messenger, and would deliver hastily handwritten notes to and from the young lovers, dashing between the barn and the house, running up and down the stairs. She was filled with urgency, and would sit, panting, once she arrived, her ragged breath proof of her dedication. Hildy would draw her close and set Elsa on her lap while she read the newest missive, sometimes reading bits out loud, but only if it was something she thought Elsa was old enough to hear. That meant that there were long pauses in between when Hildy just read to herself, sometimes covering her mouth with her fingers, or sticking a knuckle in between her teeth. During those sessions, Hildy hadn’t forsaken the theater at all, only reduced her audience to one. The point was still the reaction, the tailoring of the performance to the crowd. Later on, it was clear to Elsa that Cliff had practiced this particular art before, but at the time, neither she nor Hildy could see it, and the girls were desperate in their hope that Hildy’s own juvenile attempts at love on paper would match up.

“‘…and then, at last, the sweet and creamy skin of your upper thighs…’” Hildy read aloud. Cliff was slowly working his way up her body, and Hildy stopped there. She lay on her stomach with her knees bent, her pointed toes waving back and forth with pleasure. Elsa sat in the small chair at the foot of the bed and tried to imagine Cliff without his shirt on. His hair was so dark that it was almost black, with curls the size of quarters. “Oh, my God, Else,” Hildy said, and grabbed Elsa’s wrist. “Oh, my God.” Then Hildy flipped over onto her back and snapped her fingers for Elsa to bring her a new sheet of paper, on which she immediately began her response. Relationships with the cast and crew weren’t forbidden—it had simply never been an issue. The girls had always been just that, girls—their parents seemed not to have noticed Hildy’s swift ascension into womanhood. Though Josephine was older by a year, she had not
transformed the way Hildy had, and seemed to still be plodding her way through life without a sudden influx of feminine hormones.

It was warm in Hildy’s room with the door shut, and there were pockets of sweat behind Elsa’s knees. Even so, Elsa loved summertime best of all. In the off-season, Door County emptied out and got so quiet that Elsa sometimes forgot that there were other people living in other houses, that the kids at school went home to other families. Everything was cold and tight. Her entire world got bigger in the summer—when the ground went from white to brown to green, when the birds started talking to one another at dawn, when the trees all around the house would sprout new leaves and flowers and just beg her, beg her to climb them. Elsa knew every inch of the land her parents owned, every rock and root. Hildy and Josephine were too old to have any interest in running around with her, too wrapped up in their own teenage lives, and so Elsa had to do it all herself. She counted butterflies and fireflies and made bouquets for the weddings of her dolls. But when the actors arrived—that was the best of all. Even though Elsa loved her parents, her father in particular, she sometimes wondered when one of the actors would see her and recognize her as his own, and she would be rescued. In her daydreams, there were never any brooms or washcloths; there was only the theater, with a full house, everyone clapping for her.

C
liff was living in the cabin, which was about fifty feet from the main house, on the other side of the barn. He had requested it, though John had offered him a room in the house. When pressed, which of course never took much pressing at all, Cliff said that he wanted to live as the character would live, apart from everyone else. He wanted to spend the summer in isolation. Elsa’s father had built
the cabin himself the previous summer, nailed together each wooden plank until the planks came together and were entire walls. Josephine had helped, her thin hair pulled back, her pale eyes squinting in the sun. Unlike Hildy, Josephine never worried about whacking her thumbnail with a hammer, or being out in the sun for too long; she just kept her head down and worked. The cabin was of a modest size—just one room, with a basin sink and no toilet—but it was private, and the door faced away from the house, into the woods, which meant that Cliff could come and go as he pleased.

Elsa was wary of Cliff. The first time she delivered one of Hildy’s notes she knocked on the cabin’s door and thrust the note toward him with her arm outstretched over her head, so that she didn’t have to look him in the eye. Once he plucked the letter from her hand, she turned around and ran into the trees, as if she were a nymph or a sprite and could vanish into the leaves just by wishing it so. The second time, though, Cliff grabbed her by the wrist, not hard, but insistently, and made her come inside.

It was strange to be in the cabin when it was occupied. The place was the same, of course, all the knots in the planks in the same places they’d always been, the same view of the barn on one side and the trees on the other. But the whole cabin was different now that it was where Cliff lived. In just a matter of days, the room had taken on his smell. Elsa breathed it in, flaring her nostrils like a dog.

“Be careful,” Cliff said. “If you keep doing that, your nose will stay that way.” He winked. Elsa backed up until she hit the folding chair at the small dining table, and then tucked herself in against the wall. Cliff watched her, an amused look on his face. He was wearing a plain white undershirt, and Elsa could see the curly hair under his arms, bits of it snaking out from under like the climbing ivy that her father cut off the house every year. As though he could hear Elsa’s thoughts, Cliff lifted his arms over his head and stretched from side
to side. She knew he was testing her, seeing how long she could last. Elsa thought of the tabby cat who lived in the barn and how fast she ran out of there every night when the audience showed up.

The room smelled like dirt, like Elsa’s undershirt after she’d been running around all day, like her father’s coffee. Elsa crossed her arms on the table and squeezed her elbows. Cliff unfolded Hildy’s most recent note, and paced back and forth while he read. Every so often he chuckled. When he was through, Cliff folded the note back up and slid it into his pocket.

“Your sister is a wild one,” he said. “But I’m sure that’s no news to you.” He stroked his chin with his thumb and pointer finger. The room seemed small, smaller than usual, as if Cliff’s body was too big for the space to hold, but Elsa knew that wasn’t true. Her father was always taller than the actors, and he’d made sure that the cabin was big enough for him.

“Hildy likes you,” Elsa said. “She told me.” Her face burned. Hildy wasn’t wild, not really. Elsa wanted to tell Cliff the truth about her sister, about how she’d sometimes lock herself in her room for days, how she would often cry for no reason, and her pretty face would crumple into something red and ugly. She shouldn’t have told him anything—Hildy wouldn’t have wanted her to. Elsa had just needed something to say, something to prove that she knew a fact that he didn’t.

“Did she say that? I think she about more than likes me,” Cliff said, coming closer. He leaned down, so that his face was only a few inches away from Elsa’s. She could see the tiny beard hairs starting to push through his skin. There was a bump in the middle of his nose—he’d broken it once; Elsa had seen that kind of nose before. Had someone punched him? She felt her pulse begin to speed up inside her body, until all the blood was shuttling back and forth and up and down and she could hardly keep her mouth closed. “Don’t you think
so?” Cliff straightened up and laughed. “I don’t blame her, do you?” He looked back at Elsa, who had drawn her knees up to her chest, thereby turning herself into the smallest ball possible.

“Sure,” Elsa said, not really understanding. She recognized the smell in the cabin—it wasn’t her father’s coffee Cliff smelled like, it was her father’s beer. You couldn’t get beer just anywhere, but in Wisconsin, the rules were looser. The deliveries came once a month, late at night, not that anyone was watching so much anymore. She loved that smell, slightly sour, like her mother’s bread when it was rising, but it was different coming out of Cliff. Elsa let her legs down to the floor one at a time, and slid out from behind the table.

“Leaving already?” Cliff asked, and jerked back his head in laughter. The sound wasn’t at all soft, like laughter should be, but hard, like a barking dog that knows no other way to get attention. Elsa tiptoed toward the door, in hopes that Cliff wouldn’t follow, and he didn’t, but instead let her go without moving an inch. She could hear him laughing as she ran back to the house.

T
he season always started on the first Thursday in June. Elsa accompanied her mother and Josephine to the grocery store and the old tavern that now served only lunch and dinner and the Lutheran church and the restaurants with the best fish boil to drop off flyers they’d made at the kitchen table. Everyone in town knew the Emersons. Mary had taught school before starting the playhouse with her husband, and so she was always patting some young person on the back of the neck, as roughly as a cat picking up a kitten by its scruff. This was why Hildy never went along on these trips; she found it so deeply mortifying to see their mother socialize. It was better when she was at home, behind the scenes. Hildy told Elsa this a thousand times:
that their mother talked too much, which Elsa thought was strange, because their mother hardly ever talked at all. Elsa often felt like she and her sisters had two entirely different sets of parents. It was one of the things she wondered about, late at night, after everyone else was asleep. Josephine seemed not to notice, and just sat patiently in the truck, staring out at God knew what, while Elsa twirled around their mother’s stiff body, holding on to one hand and then the other and dancing in place until everyone noticed and told her what a good dancer she was, and how beautiful.

Come Home, My Angel
was up every weekend, four shows a week. The
Door County Courier
came on the first two nights, and wrote a review that heralded the “vision of John Emerson, Door County’s preeminent theatrical director, for bringing Clifton Parr to roam the boards this summer. Parr delivers a masculine edge to his character’s wounded body and pride. Ladies in the audience will swoon.” Hildy ripped the review out of the paper before anyone else could see it, and read it to Elsa in the privacy of her bedroom. “They’re damn right he’ll make audiences swoon.” She twisted her hair around her finger, a coquettish tic she’d picked up from Suzanne, the actress playing Cliff’s former love. “They’d just better stay away after that,” she said. “Or I don’t know what I’ll do.” Suzanne was married to one of the other actors, a half-gimpy guy named Walter, otherwise Hildy wouldn’t have spoken to her. After three long summers away from the theater, Hildy was once again in the audience every night, though Elsa knew it was that she wanted to make sure no one else got any fresh ideas about Cliff, and not about seeing the same thing over and over again. Josephine had covered her shifts at the Tastee Custard Shack and was gone until ten o’clock every night, which meant that it was only Mary and Elsa cleaning up after each show.