Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (4 page)

T
he play was doing well—some people came back two or three times. Without Hildy squeezing her hand every time Cliff was onstage, Elsa got to move around more. She watched from the last row, from the front row, from the grassy backstage. There was a crowd scene toward the end, where Cliff’s character imagined the wedding he and Suzanne’s character would have had. The actors all decided that there should be a flower girl added, just for Elsa.
Wouldn’t she like that, being onstage?
After all, they said, to her and to John, Elsa knew every inch of that barn. She could toss paper flower petals out of a basket, easy. She could turn around and look at the audience and smile.
Don’t you think so, John?

Her father loved the idea so much that he made the cast reblock the scene the very next morning. Elsa put on her fanciest dress, navy blue cotton that was tight around her chest and then flared out to her knees, with a white sash around her middle—it had been Hildy’s, a costume from years ago, no one could remember what play—and waited backstage for her time to go on. Suzanne was running her lines over and over, mumbling them under her breath. She did it every night, Elsa knew, talked through the entire show before she went out onstage. She was the most direct match for Cliff: similarly tall and dark haired—they could have been siblings. Elsa watched Suzanne’s mouth, her red lips opening and closing with each silent syllable. There was power in pretend. That was what Hildy didn’t understand—for Suzanne, getting into bed with Cliff was probably just another exercise, a way for her to better understand a woman who thought she’d been widowed by the war. How had she loved that man before he went away, when he was all bravery and hope? Suzanne didn’t love Cliff. It wasn’t a competition. Elsa would try to explain that to Hildy later.

John hustled backstage from his spot along the side of the theater, in the very last row, to give Elsa some words of advice. He crouched next to her and whispered, “Honey, you’re going to be great. Break a leg.” John kissed Elsa on the forehead, and then wiped off the moisture he’d left behind with his thumb.

“I just turn around and smile at the audience? Then throw my petals and walk to the back of the stage?” Elsa knew her part, but wanted to say it a few more times to make sure she had it right.

“That’s exactly right, Else. Let me see your smile. Pretend I’m the entire audience.” John sat back on one knee and held his arms open wide. It was dark, and Elsa could make out only parts of his face. She saw his eyes, little wet pools, and his teeth, tall and white.

Elsa closed her eyes and pictured a chapel with wooden pews and a high white ceiling. There was going to be a wedding, and she could smell dozens of roses. They were clustered at every aisle, and the bride—oh, the bride! She held half a dozen in her small, gloved hands. Elsa felt the patent-leather shoes pinching at her toes, the anxiety of being first into such a magical space. She opened her eyes and smiled at her father, who wasn’t her father anymore but a chapel full of people who had come to this place for the blessed event.

That night, when the audience stood on their feet to clap at the end of the show, Elsa came out onstage with the rest of the actors and knew that she had done it. They were all clapping for her. The sound of the applause was the most beautiful song she had ever heard—no matter how many times she’d heard it before, it had never been like this. So loud! So happy! Even Josephine had stayed to watch the show, rather than clomp back to the house and wait for it to be over. The people were on their feet, and they were smiling at her. Elsa knew that she was the one who had invited them in. She couldn’t wait to tell Hildy. Cliff and Suzanne walked forward for their bows, and after he turned to rejoin the rest of the cast, Cliff caught Elsa’s
eye and winked. A part of her stomach clenched, but once Cliff was back with the rest of the cast, and Elsa couldn’t see him anymore, she was high again, as light and full of air as an escaped balloon vanishing over the treetops.

H
ildy!”

Elsa opened the door to her sister’s room without knocking. It was just before breakfast, when the cast and crew were all still sleepy eyed and pleasantly quiet. Mary was out in town, running errands, and Josephine was at work, plugging cone after cone into the stream of soft, icy custard. Elsa couldn’t wait to tell Hildy about her triumph, her conversion! It was that clear to Elsa that she now knew what she wanted to do. She was an actress. Elsa said the word to herself in the mirror—
actress, actress, actress
—just to see how it looked coming out of her mouth. It looked like gold.

The door swung open with a creak. Instead of moving quickly into the already dented wall, though, the door stopped short and swung back toward Elsa. She pushed it open again, until she saw that Hildy’s bed was empty.

“Hildy?” she said. The room felt abandoned, which didn’t make any sense. Elsa would have seen her sister if she’d left the room—Hildy would have made noise in the bathroom; she would have complained about not having strawberry jam, only blueberry. The door was hitting something before it was hitting the wall. A tiny sliver of Elsa’s brain knew what she was going to find when she looked on the other side of the door, but the other part (the larger, more hopeful part) knew that that couldn’t be true. She stepped around, putting each foot in front of the other slowly and carefully, as though the floor were covered with poisonous snakes and any step she took might be
lethal. Elsa stared at the ground, which was why she saw the stool first, a rickety wooden one for household chores that their mother had long since abandoned. Then Elsa saw Hildy’s toes poking out from her nightgown. Then she saw the rest of Hildy, all the way up to her neck, which was strapped to a crossbeam of the house with a leather belt of their father’s. Hildy’s eyes were open, and Elsa looked at them for what felt like several hours before letting out her first truly bloodcurdling scream, the kind of noise that could mean only that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

C
liff was gone by dinner. He agreed that losing the rest of the summer’s paycheck seemed fair, and hightailed it out of town before John and Mary could change their minds about involving the police. It was a family matter. Hildy’s moods had always been as unpredictable as the undertow of the ocean, as deep and dark, but this was something else entirely. Elsa watched as her father and Josephine limped around the house, sometimes unable even to get out of bed. She herself tried to be good, as good as possible, as if behaving perfectly would change what had happened. She washed her own dishes and cleaned her room, did the laundry, swept the floor. Her mother didn’t even seem to notice, offering only a small thank-you when Elsa made her breakfast in the morning, cracking an egg into a frying pan all by herself. Josephine wrote a sign that hung on the barn door, canceling two weeks of shows, maybe more. No one knew for sure when everything would be back up and running, so the actors and the crew all hung around, walking the grounds slowly with their heads pointed toward the grass, their hands clasped behind their backs. They were all playing at mourning. What else could they do? Get on a train and leave? There was nowhere else to go.

The house was quietest of all. Elsa often thought about an old, ramshackle place two farms over, a house no one had lived in for at least her entire life. It was probably noisier in there, what with the birds roosting in the bedrooms, the raccoons burrowing through the kitchen cabinets. As a family, the Emersons tried not to make a sound. Mary cleaned the dishes with a rag, and nestled them carefully in the drying rack so that the plates didn’t knock against each other. Josephine concentrated on keeping her lips closed all day long, and succeeded at least three days in a row, communicating with only nods and shrugs and shakes of her head. John slept in the barn on the pile of pillows that were stacked in the corner. Elsa sometimes hid there during the day, letting the calico and burlap and tiny scraps of old sheets rub against her skin. She nestled her body in against the wooden floor and then pulled the pillows over her until she was buried in them up to her shoulders. She never wanted to let anything touch her neck ever again, for fear that she might strangle too, by accident. But no one said the word
strangle
, no one said the word
suicide
. John said
accident
and Mary said
fine
. It was sad enough already without adding that on top. How were people ever supposed to come back, to laugh? Years later, Josephine admitted that one of her first thoughts was,
At least Hildy didn’t do it in the barn
, and then covered her face with her wide fingers.

The plays were put on hold for three weeks, until it was nearly August, the busiest time of the summer. The entire peninsula was crazily in bloom, with berries and pies and girls on bicycles, their short hair flapping behind them like miniature flags. Eventually Suzanne and her husband approached John about taking over, in the interim, until he was ready. Too afraid to feel the loss of the theater on top of the loss of his most beautiful daughter, John acquiesced, and
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
began as scheduled. The Emersons
sat at their kitchen table in silence and watched the people file into the barn. They heard the laughter and the other happy sounds swelling out of the barn’s open windows. Josephine’s face was as solid as stone, and she parted her lips only to insert a fork or a spoon. Elsa thought Josephine could probably kill a bear with her teeth with one hard
snap
, and she started to cry. Mary fixed her a drink, something warm to help her sleep. It coated her throat and that was enough—Elsa imagined the thick liquid formed an impenetrable barrier between her and the outside world. She became unbreakable, a human fortress. John was staring out the window at the barn and at the actors, in frilly new costumes, talking and laughing on the grass.

“People are going to ask you about your sister,” John said, still looking out the window, but Elsa knew he was talking to her. She stayed quiet, waiting to hear the rest of the sentence. “And you’re going to have two choices. You can either tell them the truth, which will make them uncomfortable and awkward, or you can pretend that everything is okay.” He turned his face back toward Elsa for a moment, and then jerked his chin down to his chest, as if examining the bottom of his coffee cup. “People won’t know how to react if you tell them the truth.”

“Like in the play?” Elsa watched her father’s hands, his large fingers clasped together around his mug.

“Just like in the play,” he said. “You’re an actress now.” Despite it all, Elsa could swear that there was some pride in her father’s voice. It was good for all of them to remember that there were actors in the world, people whose job it was to pretend. For Elsa, there was no other option after that moment—she saw her future as clearly as she saw the water of Green Bay. Even if she wasn’t happy on the inside, the outside could be something else entirely. There was always another character to play.