Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (3 page)

“It’s going to be tonight,” Hildy whispered to Elsa during the show one night. Cliff was off changing into his bloodstained costume.
They could see him through the stage door, which wasn’t a door to anywhere but the outside of the barn, where actors waited for their cues. Cliff pulled down his suspenders and lit up a cigarette. He was talking to Warren, one of the other actors, the man who played his rival. Offstage, in real life, the actor couldn’t have held Cliff’s cuff links. The inferiority was laughable—Warren was short, he was slight, he was blond like everybody else in Door County. How could anyone choose him over Cliff? That was why they got along. Elsa understood that much about human nature: No one in the theater liked to be around people who were better-looking than they were.

“What’s going to be tonight? He dies every night, you know.” Elsa had already seen Cliff shoot himself twice. After the big, loud
pow
, which always scared her, there were a few moments when the whole audience held their breath, wanting to make sure that even though Cliff was limping, collapsing, heaving, he was actually okay, and would stand up again in time for the curtain call. Elsa hated those few minutes, when no one was breathing, but only until those minutes had passed, and the audience erupted into applause, shattering the worried quiet. After that, that silent pause was her favorite part of the show. The theater was made for holding your breath, and for forgetting what was real and what was fake. It was better than the pictures, where everything was so far away and perfect.

“Not that, Else. Me and Cliff. It’s really serious. You know about that stuff, right?” Hildegard got to be Hildy, but Elsa only got to be Else, as in Someone Else, a human afterthought. Hildy bit her fingernail. It wasn’t like she could talk to their mother, or to Josephine, who would rather talk about the procreation of cows and cherry trees. She certainly couldn’t talk to their father, who would lock her bedroom door and throw away the key. “I think tonight’s going to be the night. Don’t tell anybody, okay?” Hildy’s blue eyes looked as wide as full moons. She was nervous.

“Okay,” Elsa said. Hildy had had boyfriends before, boys from town, but next to Cliff they seemed like pictures from a magazine, easily ripped into pieces. Elsa didn’t like the idea of Hildy alone in the cabin with Cliff, who seemed so strong that he might snap her in half by accident. By the barn entrance, their mother flickered the lights, and the audience got quiet again. Outside, in the dark, an owl gave a series of long hoots, as though it were the ringmaster announcing another round. After the show, Hildy told their mother that she had a headache and didn’t want to be disturbed. Elsa watched as she went out the door of the barn and turned right instead of left, heading straight for the cabin, where she was going to do something that couldn’t be undone, even if Elsa never told anyone. The truth would still be there, pulsing like a heartbeat. After her parents went to bed, Elsa sneaked back downstairs and sat by the window until Hildy came home, her teeth chattering and a wild look in her eye. She reminded Elsa of a spooked horse, one you couldn’t touch behind the saddle without fear of being kicked in the gut. When Hildy saw her sister sitting in the dark, she tucked a hand behind her back.

“What is that?” Elsa asked.

“Shh, go to bed! What are you still doing up?” Hildy asked, though the look in her eye told Elsa that she knew the answer.

“What’s behind your back?” Elsa scrambled out from behind the kitchen table and grabbed at Hildy’s hands.

Perhaps thinking that a struggle would make more noise than a whispered explanation, Hildy handed the thing over. It was a ball of wadded-up fabric—her underwear, the faded blue rosettes the same as Elsa’s. Elsa quickly handed them back, but not before seeing the bloodstains that Hildy would no doubt try to rinse out before their mother saw them.

“Did it hurt?” Elsa asked.

Hildy shook her head. The kitchen was completely dark except for the moonlight coming in through the windows. Elsa couldn’t see the expression on her sister’s face, but she knew enough not to trust her denial.

“Go to bed,” Hildy said, her voice low and gravelly. She closed her eyes, despite the darkness, as though Elsa would be able to see inside Hildy’s head if her eyes were open. Elsa understood: There were a lot of things Hildy would want her to ignore. Whatever had happened in Cliff’s cabin, whatever had made her bleed. Hildy didn’t want to find her sister waiting for her. She didn’t want to stand in her parents’ kitchen with no underwear on and a new place open inside her. She didn’t want to feel different, to be different, to be something less than she was before. Elsa wouldn’t sleep with a man for the first time for nearly a decade, but she would always remember the look on her sister’s face that night. Hildy was only pretending to look outward, into the world. Inside, she could only think about her own body, and the change that had just occurred.

“Good night,” Elsa said. “I’m glad you’re home.” She wanted to kiss her sister on the cheek, and to say something more, something better, but those words didn’t come. Elsa and Hildy climbed the stairs together, both stepping on only the quiet planks, silent as ghosts.

I
t wasn’t even July when things started to go wrong between Hildy and Cliff. At the breakfast table, Hildy was even crankier than usual, and Josephine had to go into town every morning to buy whatever the actors had finished the day before. John was so engrossed with the opening rehearsals for the next play that he didn’t even notice until Mary pointed out Hildy’s behavior.

“Hildegard,” John said, his hands clasped together on the table. “Is there something going on? Would you rather be back at the Tastee Custard Shack with your sister?” Josephine’s unblemished work record was the gold standard, the measuring stick for all three Emerson girls. Next to their sister, both Elsa and Hildy looked like layabouts.

Hildy stared at her father, hiccuped once, and let one low moan escape into her napkin. “It’s Cliff,” she said, and began to sob so vigorously that her shoulders rocked back and forth with a force that could power a steam engine. Their mother was so startled by Hildy’s histrionics that she got up and walked out of the room, uncomfortable as she was with great showings of emotion. Elsa, her father, and Josephine all sat still for a moment, wondering what to do. In the end it was Josephine who stood up and hooked her heavy arm around Hildy’s shoulder and made shushing noises until her sister’s wailing subsided.

C
liff had been honest with Hildy from the start. Well, maybe not from the start, but after the flowery love notes had stopped and the actual visits had begun, first in his cabin and then in her bedroom, in the barn, on the stage, in the hayloft, in the still-freezing-cold waters of the bay, on the rocky beach, on the kitchen floor, and in any number of undisclosed locations, he’d started to see other women.

Cliff’s conquests around the theater were legion; it was Suzanne, whose marriage was less solid than Hildy thought; it was Fay, who helped Mary with the costumes; it was Virginia, who played a teenage girl and had the flat chest to show for it. Elsa knew how proud her sister was of her breasts, two giant mounds that had appeared under her nightgown four summers ago. The only woman around
under the age of thirty whom Cliff hadn’t slept with was Josephine. They weren’t even halfway through the season—John couldn’t replace Cliff, though he said he’d like to be rid of the lug; they were stuck with him. Once Hildy stopped crying, which took an entire day, her headache came back, and she went straight to bed. Elsa was her meal delivery service, which meant that she got an earful at least three times a day.

“Have you seen him?” That was how Hilly would start, without even a hello or a thank-you, after Elsa had carried a tray piled high with sweet rolls and juice and cold cereal up the stairs.

There was only one window in Hildy’s bedroom, and she kept the shade down, which meant that Hildy’s summery skin, which had started to freckle and brown in spots, had once again returned to its natural state, the color of fresh milk. The skin under her eyes had darkened, though, to a mossy green, like a bruise. When prompted, Hildy counted her number of sleepless nights on both hands. Elsa wondered what she did in her room for so many hours, if not sleep.

Hildy piled up all the pillows on the bed, each one made of some fabric scraps and sewn and stuffed by their mother. They all sat behind her, so that when Hildy leaned back against the wall, she looked like the princess and the pea.

“No,” Elsa said, and put the tray down on the floor next to Hildy’s bed.

“Then I’m not hungry,” she said, and began to examine the skin on her arms with great interest, as if each beauty mark might give her the answer. She scratched her forearm, and Elsa saw fat red lines where her nails had been.

“
Okay
,” Elsa said. She sat down next to the tray and started picking at one of the rolls. “Of course I see him—there’s nowhere else to go.” She wished that it weren’t true, that she could ignore Cliff all
day and night, but the fact was that she liked the play, and the rest of the actors, and the way the grass smelled just offstage. It didn’t seem fair that Hildy was asking her to choose.

Hildy reached down and snatched the roll out of Elsa’s hands. She took a big bite and brown sugar clung to her lips. “Go on.”

“That’s all, Hildy! He dies every night. What else do you want me to say?” Elsa turned away from her sister and scanned the rest of the room, overflowing as it was with stockings and shoes and pieces of lace that Hildy was forever meaning to do something with. The room was a fort made of girlish things. Maybe it wasn’t Hildy’s fault that she was so dramatic—maybe it was that she’d always had this giant room to use as her stage. Elsa’s bedroom had been a closet, and was big enough for only her small bed. John had taken the door off its hinges and replaced it with a heavy sheet that slid back and forth on wooden rings. Whenever Mary cooked anything smelly, bacon or stew or an unidentified roasted thing, it clung to that sheet for days, and to Elsa’s pillowcase, and all her clothes. If Hildy or Josephine ever got married, she could have a proper room, with a door made out of wood.

Hildy unpeeled the outer layer of her sweet roll and stared at it. Her narrow wrist twisted back and forth, sending caramelized bits of sugar and dough onto her quilt. She was bored. “Oh, come on, Elsa, you must know more than that. You’re not a baby.”

In fact, Elsa had seen Cliff bend Virginia-the-pretend-teenager backward over her favorite tree stump, a ten-minute walk into the woods, and kneel down on the mossy ground in front of her and stick his face up her skirt. But she couldn’t tell her sister that, not in a hundred years. “I think you should find another boyfriend.”

“Sure, because they’re so easy to find! Else, in case you haven’t noticed, we live way out in the middle of nowhere, and the only interesting people who come here are people who then turn around
and leave.” Hildy’s voice got higher and higher. “I really thought that he was the one who was going to get me out of here.” She threw the piece of sweet roll she’d been playing with back toward the tray, and Elsa watched as it knocked over the glass and sent orange juice seeping out onto the floorboards. Hildy started to cry, but it wasn’t until Elsa was on the other side of the door and halfway to the kitchen to get a rag to clean it up that she heard Hildy start to make even bigger, scarier noises, like she was being attacked from the inside out. When Elsa made it back up the stairs, Hildy was curled up like a cat and facing the wall. She didn’t flinch when Elsa picked everything up and pulled the door shut behind her with a good, solid thunk.

It was news to Elsa that someone would want to get out of Door County. True, she’d never been anywhere else except for Green Bay and a few other small cities farther south in Wisconsin, but Elsa thought that Door County was the most beautiful place on earth. Whenever she read a book about a little girl, and they showed a picture of where she lived, Elsa thought,
Wow, that looks just like home
. The house her parents had built was the perfect size for a little girl, with rooms and hallways and closets and endless places to hide. There was a cellar full of jars of jam and summer tomatoes. There was an attic full of Hildy’s and Josephine’s old things, the clothes that Elsa hadn’t grown into yet. There were the woods and the lake and the bay and the boat and the cherries! How could Hildy want to go somewhere else when there were so many cherries right here? Elsa thought Hildy must have made some mistake when she was thinking about leaving. Sure, Elsa liked to imagine the actors scooping her up like a caravan full of Gypsies and carrying her off into the night, but those daydreams always ended with her coming home the next morning, to her sisters, and the theater, and her father. It was all playing pretend—wasn’t that what Hildy was doing too, when she had her headaches? Surely Hildy didn’t want to stay away for good.