My Jane Austen Summer (8 page)

While I sifted through dust bunnies seeking a tiny gold circle of metal, Bets explained how she did odd jobs for a soon-to-be-appreciated band. They specialized in emotionally intense pop rock with a Teutonic edge, thanks to a talented guitarist from Frankfurt.

"So you're leaving the band to do this?" I asked, exploring a small pile of grit.

"That's the problem." She zipped the pants. "The Wallet made a deal that if I came here for the summer, he'd finance the band for another year."

"The Wallet?"

"My father. He's on the board of this place and he thinks three months away from the band will cure me."

"Wow," I said. "I bet the band appreciates the Wallet." I sat up; unable to find the missing link.

"Let me get that fixed for you," Bets said.

"No." I waved her off. "Thanks, but I'll take care of it." I slipped the broken chain and the cross back into the jewelry pouch and closed my drawer. "I can pick up a new link in town." I would not let her take it for repair, regardless of her sad expression. What part could she possibly play in a Jane Austen production? I asked her. "What role are you assigned?"

"I am"--she put her fist in front of her mouth, and cleared her throat--"not sure." She pointed to a brown envelope on the bureau. "It's all in there, but I haven't looked."

"Which Austen book is your favorite?" I asked.

She was caught in the headlights. Silence. "Um. The one about the guy who marries the nanny?"

"Yeah," I said, nodding. I hoped My Jane Austen was getting all of this.

Her phone rang and she hissed into it, "Just tell him to call me," and snapped it off. Then she moaned, "I'm not very good at this sort of thing."

"What sort of thing?"

She lifted her hands in helpless supplication and moaned dramatically, "Take my cell phone away and lock it up somewhere; it's so distracting." She smiled again.

"Okay," I said, reaching to take it. But it rang, and she spoke.

"Tommy." Her voice thick, I pretended not to hear. But before I could find anything to pretend to do, she pulled the phone away from her ear, looked at me, and squinted. "Would you mind?"

"Excuse me?" Certain I'd misunderstood; the fog in my brain had clogged something.

"I'm sorry but I need to have this conversation," she said, pointing at the phone. "Could I have some privacy?"

A little put out, I walked into the hall. Through the open transom, I heard one side of the whole argument and gathered the deal with the Wallet accounted for only part of the reason Bets had shown up at Literature Live. It sounded like Tommy wanted Bets out of the way so he could concentrate on writing music; Bets was a distraction. The angst of the argument drained my remaining energy and I slumped against the wall. After a while, I left the dorm and walked toward the town, where I discovered the quaint pastel doors merely fronted for the usual suspects: The Gap and Victoria's Secret. My Jane Austen stayed behind in the room to listen, of course.

∗ ∗ ∗

A note waited on my pillow when I returned, "Gone to London." I turned the paper over and wrote my response, "Please move your things out of my spaces ASAP." I put the note on her pillow and stood alone in the room. Bets and her cell phone gone. Just me and her brown envelope alone in the room. Unable to restrain myself, I grabbed the envelope, unfastened the clasp, and removed the stack of papers welcoming Elizabeth Banks to Literature Live. I flipped through a schedule, calendars, directories, and a welcome letter signed simply, "Weston." Was that a legal name? Could he sign that name on credit card receipts? A note from Magda Habibi offered Bets the part of Mary
Crawford. Wow! Having a father on the board didn't hurt her in the casting department.

I flipped open the script, and read:

∗ ∗ ∗

Mary Crawford:
Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope of a cure.

∗ ∗ ∗

I straightened the papers and pushed them back into the envelope, refastening the clasp and placing it exactly where I had found it. What if Bets didn't come back from London? She seemed like the type who did whatever it occurred to her to do. Not a team player. I imagined myself in the role of Mary Crawford.

∗ ∗ ∗

Before retiring for the night, I opened the drawer where I kept the jewelry pouch, feeling the need for a reassuring look at my cross. But the pouch lay open and my necklace--the last gift from my mother--was missing again.

T
he Literature Live offices in the east wing of Newton Priors included a room full of books called the library, furnished with two mismatched hand-me-down tables. I was in the library affixing address labels to invitations on the morning Bets was scheduled for her costume fitting.

How hard would it be to organize a tea party for Janeites?

Vera had given me some administrative donkeywork, including mailings for the Founder's Night Dinner and Follies, and reminded me to get started on the business plan. I'd written a business plan in college. If I could only remember how I did it. Vera said she would pay me something. Omar, my new best friend, leaned back on two legs of the library chair--his feet perched on his toes--chatting about the national mood toward historic preservation. Wagging a pen, Omar said, "Politicians are campaigning to respect
all
cultural identities, not just those identities belonging to stately manor homes."

"And what does that have to do with us?" I removed ten labels and stuck them on the table's edge.

We would need hot water for tea, of course.

"The national mood matters to us to the degree tax policy is influenced."

"Oh?"

And scones.

"Whoever is steward of Newton Priors will care about tax policy."

"I see." I thought of Randolph's receding hairline and how it would look furrowed over tax policy as I slapped the ten labels on envelopes in rapid succession.

Cucumber sandwiches.

Tax policy sounded like something to address in a business plan, which I would know if I had paid more attention in school. When I had asked Vera if not having a part meant I would eventually have to go home, she assumed her impatient tone and told me to "write my own part." She warned me not to be hasty. With my future tied to the bottom line, I'd better generate some persuasive ideas to employ myself if I wanted to stay. As in: the Business Plan.

"Actually," Omar said, "Lord Weston and his sister are cozying up with the Architecture League these days. Parties to save car parks."

"Car parks?" I imagined Randolph's picture in the paper, published in black and white society pages, laughing over wineglasses in a greenbelt for cars.

"Parking garages, to you."

Then, with no warning Magda blew in. We both flinched and Omar fell off his toes. Magda had spent two solid days in the ballroom fussing at actors, writers, and conservationists, bangles making a racket, her own personal Middle Eastern turmoil. Now she scanned the library as Omar made a hasty
exit. I could rest in peace knowing she wasn't seeking me; I'd already been cast off by her. I cringed anyway.

"Lily," she said.

I wondered if her toes were as long as her fingers and what she could possibly want with me. "Yes?" I said.

"Where is Bets?" she asked, looking at my stack of invitations.

"I don't know," I said, sticking the last label. "Probably London."

"Are you aware she missed her fitting appointment?"

I stacked the pile of envelopes on Claire's desk, angry that Bets had taken my necklace to her London repair shop even though I'd told her not to. She'd smiled and asked me not to be mad, a pretty good indication of how she interacted with the Wallet. I glared at Magda. "I haven't seen her."

∗ ∗ ∗

The next day, I was folding Founder's Night invitations, stuffing them into the envelopes I'd already labeled for Claire.

What china would we use for the tea party?

Omar was tipped back in his chair holding forth on one scholar's suggestion that Jane Austen was an incestuous lesbian, when Sixby entered wearing a cap turned rakishly backward. "Have you seen Bets?" Sixby asked as My Jane Austen yawned.

"No." We both shook our heads.

Sixby nodded toward the conference room. "We're getting ready to start a read-through," he said. "She's missed each one."

I felt a secret thrill, another step in the right direction.

Omar asked, trembling theatrically, "Is Magda coming?"

"No, she's at the visa office with her brother; I'm running the read-through." Sixby started for the conference room and then hesitated, remembering to ask Omar, "Are the scripts ready?"

"Oops." Omar's chair returned to ground level and he jumped up to complete his task at the copier.

In light of Bets's irresponsible behavior, Vera's remark about not being hasty began to make sense. "Sixby," I said, "if Bets doesn't show, can I read her part?"

"Absolutely," he said.

∗ ∗ ∗

Bets didn't show and I joined the cast, sitting next to Sixby at Nigel's conference table where everyone waited for Omar to finish copying scripts. Nikki the actress demonstrated plummy diction for me. "Like your mouth is full of plums and you have to talk around them."

I tried to copy her, imagining big balls of fruit displacing my jaw; the actor next to Nikki laughed.

"No, actually that's much better," Nikki said.

Enjoying my place in this group, I felt hope revive. Omar arrived panting; his arms full of paper, his glasses sliding down his nose as he circled the table distributing the scripts, running out before Sixby got one. "I thought you kept the revisions from yesterday," Omar said, adjusting his glasses.

"I'd like a fresh script," Sixby said, drumming his fingers.

I'd gotten my copy from Omar earlier and slid it over to Sixby, scooting closer to share with him. I watched as he crossed out all the italicized acting directions associated with his lines, words like
gently
and
loudly.
Perhaps he didn't need anyone telling him how to act. I read my lines in what I hoped sounded plummy--My Jane Austen mouthed them painfully with me. When I looked up, Nikki nodded and Sixby whispered, "Excellent. Don't forget we're partners for the follies," and he patted my arm. My Jane Austen took a deep breath. How could I forget? He didn't coach me as he did the others, probably because I was just standing in. We were reading the scene where Mary Crawford is recruited to join
the theatricals, and in the middle of reading my line where I say, "What gentleman among you am I to have the pleasure of making love to," the door opened. Magda's terrible presence filled the room and she interrupted me. Had an actual plum been in my mouth, I would have choked to death.

"Thank you, Lily," she said. "You aren't needed here."

She couldn't even let me finish my line. My blood boiled and stress shaved moments from my life as they continued reading. No one watched me walk out.

∗ ∗ ∗

That evening, I took a seat next to Omar in the conference room where a small audience gathered for an impromptu talk entitled, "
Mansfield Park
: Convention or Invention?" A lecture idea born at lunch over a bottle of Cabernet Nigel drank with his friend, a professor from a women's college near London. All the writing students were here as well as a representative in Regency attire who occupied the front row, strategically positioned to snag Nigel for a word about ball dates as soon as the talk ended.

Where would we get enough china for a tea party? Paper cups were not an option.

No actors were present since Magda was rehearsing them to death in the ballroom, the opening only two days away. Nigel and the speaker, a white-haired gentleman with watery eyes behind round tortoiseshell spectacles, sipped red wine from oversized glasses.

Omar leaned toward me and said, "Magda was looking for you."

"Me?"

Claire closed the conference room door and gestured for Nigel to begin the introduction.

Omar whispered, "Maybe she has an opening for you."

"Right." I nodded. Everyone applauded the speaker.

"So what are you going to do, stuff envelopes all summer?" he asked as the speaker adjusted his spectacles.

"Or go home," I said, not wanting to chat, looking forward to this lecture. I couldn't go home now, couldn't leave this world where every new thing took me one step farther from my old life. "I'm going to write a business plan," I whispered. And organize a tea party. And get my necklace back.

"Business plan? For what?" Omar whispered back.

The speaker cleared his throat.

"Literature Live."

Omar pointed at the floor. "This place?"

I nodded.

"Do you know how?"

"I wrote one in college."

He grimaced as I turned away to listen.

The professor began his talk, building his case that today's thoughtful reader often applies twenty-first-century issues to
Mansfield Park
, such as slavery and feminism while dismissing the issues of Austen's contemporary society, concerns like amateur theatricals, ordination, and "family values" (air quotes his). The speaker had just introduced Austen's contemporaries: Walter Scott, Frances Burney, and Maria Edgeworth, when the door opened behind me. I ignored the disruption, concentrating instead on the disturbing news that "
Mansfield Park
was written using plot and structure of the sentimental novel that Austen inherited from her literary predecessors."

Say it isn't so, Jane Austen
.

The professor put his hands in his pockets and rocked forward on the balls of his feet. "In 1814," he said, "women writers wrote about education, love, and marriage."

I jumped as a set of gold bangles entered my peripheral vision, headed for my lap. Omar saw them and looked up.
The bangles were attached to Magda's arm. Magda's face came close. She dropped a note and touched my shoulder, miming the word
tomorrow
, and turned away. Unfolding the paper, I lost track of the speaker's thread.

She didn't even say please or thank you. I offered the paper to Omar; he looked at it but gave it back without a reaction, too intent on the speaker's thread. The nerve of Magda assigning me to be Bets's keeper. I sat there fuming as the speaker went on. "All the characters," he said, "engage in self-deception except Fanny Price. Is it unusual in 1814 to have a character who examines her motives?"

I couldn't answer his question because a really good reason to deliver my roommate to the fitting appointment presented itself: if I helped Bets select her costumes, I could be sure she took one that would fit me. I imagined a white gown trimmed in blue with a matching pelisse and reticule.

The professor touched the stack of his newly published books he'd brought to sign. "Jane Austen used the eighteenth-century novel conventions. But she invented a protagonist who struggles for self-knowledge.
Mansfield Park
dramatizes the emotional pain and reward of endurance."

Everyone clapped; the talk was over.

∗ ∗ ∗

"We need to hurry," I said, headed for the fitting appointment. "We're late." Bets and I passed an actor walking to rehearsals wearing headsets to help memorize lines. Once the word got out that I didn't have a part, the cast ignored me; I might as well have been invisible. When I ran into Alex, the actor of the antique record player, he said, "I thought you were gone."

Bets stopped to light a cigarette the minute we hit the pavement and waved to Gary, who walked on the other side of the street hauling supplies for Claire. "There's Gary," Bets said, exhaling, adjusting the sunglasses she wore even though it was completely overcast.

"I see him," I said. "Do you know your lines?"

"No," she said. "Why don't you wave? He'll think you don't like him."

"Where's your script?" I asked.

"Not sure." She yawned. "I think it's in your JASNA bag."

"
My
bag?" The bag Vera gave me when she sold me
Mansfield Park
. My Jane Austen Society of North America bag.

"At Tommy's."

"I've been looking for my JASNA bag everywhere, Bets." And then I asked, "When will I get my necklace back?"

"Oh!" she said, clapping her hand to her mouth and then feeling for it around her neck. "I must have left it at Tommy's, too."

"You
took
my necklace after I asked you not to and then
lost
it in London?" The brazen entitlement.

"I can find it," she said. "And in the meantime, you're welcome to anything of mine." She gestured grandly.

"You have to get it back to me," I said. "And my JASNA bag."

"Maybe the bag's in my car." She threw her cigarette on the cement; I stopped walking and faced her as she stepped on it.

"I'm serious, Bets. That necklace is one of the few things I have to remember my mother. She gave it to me; she's dead. She can't
ever
give me another necklace." It made me sick to think I might never see that necklace again, not only a necklace; but her wedding band, a gold pin she won in high school, and a baby ring, all melted down and reformed into the shape of a cross, a reminder for my sister and me of what our mother found to be important at the end of her life. Not a necklace; but my mother.

"Tell you what," Bets said, lighting another cigarette. "If I can't find it, I'll give you my mother."

∗ ∗ ∗

Suzanne, the tiny wardrobe lady, presided over the damp and musty second floor warehouse of costumes inherited from various sources, various sources being a euphemism for dead volunteers in period attire. She pulled an armful of dresses for Bets to try, while another actress changed behind a screen, throwing gowns into separate "take" and "no take" piles. Bets handed me her six-hundred-dollar designer purse and disappeared behind a screen. Maybe Bets could persuade the Wallet to rent china for our tea. Or sentence Bets to another season of Literature Live in exchange for china.