The Actor and the Housewife

by Shannon Hale

  Then everything changed, fast as a snap.

  Mike kept rubbing his lower back, sometimes wincing, and she accused him of hiding pain until he confessed. They wasted a couple of months going to a physical therapist and an orthopedic surgeon, until Becky happened to mention Mike’s pain to a neighbor.

  “That’s how it started for my uncle,” said the neighbor. “Lower back pain. But it was cancer.”

  Those words could’ve been the most annoying, doomsdayish, fl a-grant scare tactic ever applied. Instead, Becky came to believe, they were an inspired warning.

  Becky made an appointment that afternoon. In two weeks Mike was being examined by an oncologist. He had cancer. Cancer cancer cancer cancer . . .

  She couldn’t say the word aloud. It was the dirtiest, most vulgar, basest swear word imaginable. Pronouncing it seemed to scorch her lips, fill her mouth with filth. She hated it. Hated, hated, hated it, that word, that thing, that reality. She wanted to punch it. Really hard. No, worse. She was murderous. She would’ve taken a sawed-off shotgun to cancer’s middle and pulled the trigger. She frightened herself with the hot loathing that filled her for that evil creeping disease.

  But only when she was alone—in the shower, in the car after dropping Mike off at a doctor’s appointment, wandering the house after the kids had gone to bed. When she was with Mike, she was a rock. She was undefeatable. She was calm and wise and meticulous and hopeful. She was Becky Jack.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, snuggling next to Mike. “We’ll beat this. Easy peasy.”

  “I’m not worried,” he said. “Well, I’m worried about you and the kids. This is a lot for you to handle. I feel fine, I do. I’m okay. I just wish I wasn’t putting you all through this.”

  “Pshaw. Don’t you dare worry about me. And the kids are tough. The doctor said it would be good for you to avoid stress, so I’m creating a stress-free zone. This household is all about your constant peace. And what could be more calming, to a near-state of zombification, than televised golf ? That’s right, honey, you are the proud recipient of the PGA cable package! No, no, don’t argue. It’s the least I could do.”

  “Wow, you must be preparing for my death if you stooped to that extreme.”

  Even though she seemed to have adrenaline shooting through her body at all times and there were many nights when she lay staring at Mike’s sleeping face and whispering prayers in her heart, she wasn’t as worried as she thought she should be. At moments when she stopped to let herself sense for truth, there was a core of calm that ran through her, an assurance she associated with God that everything was going to be okay.

  It wasn’t a picnic. Mike had one kidney removed, followed by radiation treatments. Sam was three and so easygoing and stinkin’ cute that Becky and Mike had toyed with the idea of a fifth child, if one happened to come along. But now there would be no more toying.

  Everything was about Mike and the cancer. Everything. The entire world was turned upside down and shaken for loose change.

  Imagine months of tests and treatments and anxiety over the unknown. Imagine them, because we won’t enumerate. It was depressing a lot of the time, and Becky really hates a downer. But she and Mike refused to succumb to the gloom.

  “Now stand sideways and put your arms up,” the radiology technician said, trying to get a good angle for the X-ray. “Stretch them over, now hunch just a little . . . a little more.”

  “Now I want to see pouty,” Becky said. “That’s right, fl irt with the X-ray, make it want to come back for more.”

  The technician cut her eyes at Becky before exiting to the booth to take the shot. After a few more poses, she left them alone while she developed the film. Mike sat on the edge of the bed. Becky sat across the room on a stool. They were waiting to hear if there was postsurgery pneumonia or (the doctor didn’t say this part but they were both aware) there were unpleasant dark areas that might mean the cancer had spread to his lungs and might kill him within the year.

  Becky took a breath. “I want to acknowledge the artistic choices you made in that last round. I don’t know a handful of men in all the world who can pull off the sexy zombie pose.”

  Mike nodded sagely. “Did you notice what I was doing with my feet?”

  “The parallel-with-jaunty-angled-toe? That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You take the impossible and make it look easy.”

  Lately when Becky made Mike laugh, he sounded grateful—that’s what almost broke her heart.

  In the middle of this cyclone, Felix drifted away. There was nothing she wanted besides being with Mike and making sure those kids felt love and stability in every cell of their bodies. At first she let Felix know what was going on, but soon she stopped calling, and sometimes she couldn’t answer when he called. Eventually he stopped calling too. The world outside their home seemed irrelevant. All that mattered were the test results, treatments, and the kids’ happiness. Tests, treatments, kids. Mike beside her, holding her hand. Family. Oh, it was so good, that family. Pain came with goodness, she realized now as she never had before. But even inside that shocking pain, that worse-than-labor pain, that nearly frightening-to-death pain, still, her family was so, so good.

  And right now, Felix just didn’t make sense.

  Becky was in crisis mode perhaps, and all her peripheral needs shut down. So is that what Felix had been—just a side dish? Nice to have around but nothing necessary? After the trauma of losing his friendship, how was it possible that he could slip away so easily? Becky didn’t ponder it long. She just kept that house hold running, kept loving Mike, kept each day moving forward.

  At last, the definitive word from the radiation oncologist.

  “It wasn’t too bad. It was localized in the kidney, and anything left we zapped to bits. Congratulations, Mike. Your cancer is officially in remission.”

  Remission. Remission! There should be a parade for remission, a ballad to remission—no, a marching-band number, something proud and excited and full of life. She made up a song called “Remission,” sung to the Fiddler on the Roof tune “Tradition,” and taught it to the kids.

  Becky was dumbfounded by the normalcy around her. Why wasn’t there a nationwide gala for remission? At the very least a bank holiday? Maybe it was the word itself. “Remission” just didn’t convey the feeling for such a beautiful, graceful, hopeful thing. They should call it “rapture” or “bliss.” The cancer wasn’t in remission—it was struck down, decimated, defeated, obliterated!

  Every day was a party at the Jack residence. Balloons and banners filled the house, carols sang out from the speakers. “I don’t care if it isn’t Christmastime,” Becky said. “I’m in the mood for some hallelujahs.” She wrote a little play that the kids performed at a family reunion. They donned armor and swords and fought a cancer monster, played by a one-eyed teddy bear that Becky had always found creepy. They slew that teddy bear. They tore its stuffing out.

  Mike returned to work but was home by five each night, throwing a ball to the kids in the backyard, grilling burgers, coming up from behind and wrapping his arms around Becky for a quick kiss.

  Becky was on her knees hourly, just giving thanks.

  “Thank you, Father, thank you for blessing us so mightily. Thank you for curing Mike. Thank you for sparing him and keeping him here. Thank you, thank you, thank you . . .”

  ACT 2

  Stage Kisses

  It takes a lot of experience for a girl to kiss like a

  beginner. Ladies’ Home Journal, 1948

  In which a peculiar plan becomes possible

  It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Becky began the happiest year she had ever known. She’d never considered that she might have fallen a little out of love with Mike. When the kids came along, their relationship had just changed, their focus split. But suddenly—man, she was head over heels for that fella. He was—she even thought the word—he was sexy. And they had so much fun together. Had they always had this much fun? Or had surviving the hor
rors of the past year just helped her realize it?

  Several times a week, they had cause to lock their bedroom door.

  Besides this renewed love affair with her husband, the kids were at such fantastic stages. Fiona was cracking the boundaries of in dependence, and Becky was constantly amazed by her intelligence. Polly was ten, that unique age for girls when their personality snaps into place. She was reading, asking questions, comprehending more of the big picture, but hadn’t lost that little-girl innocence. Hyrum was full of energy and began to discover how fast he could run, how far he could throw, how high he could jump. (The answer: pretty fast, really far, impressively high.)And Sam so thrived on social interaction, Becky reluctantly signed him up for preschool three mornings each week. (Her boy! Her baby! Her littlest one, out of the house, engaging with that big scary world, on the move, never to return fully again. Aa!)

  With everything perfect in her home, in her marriage, in the world, Becky was scarcely aware of the tiny void tickling her heart. At the video store, she saw Felix’s photo on a movie for rent, and she felt a cold jolt run through her, an unearthly sort of fear or thrill, as if she’d just seen her own self walking down the street.

  I used to know him, Becky thought.

  It was a pleasant reflection, but she didn’t rent the video. She might have stopped to read the synopsis, but Hyrum was teaching Sam how to do an army crawl through the Drama aisle, leaving a trail of fallen videos behind. Well, at least the brothers were playing together.

  That afternoon the family drove the grueling hour and a half to Mike’s sister’s house because her family had inexplicably up and moved to Spanish Fork. Rounding the point of the mountain on I-15, Becky gazed down the hill to their right at the severe gray rectangles of the prison. Above the brown hill to their left was the local mecca for wind-sport fanatics. She could spot about twenty-five paragliders, bodies dangling from curved, parachutelike tops.

  “Seems cruel, doesn’t it?” she said.

  “Yeah,” Mike said, guessing her thoughts. “Floating around within view of the prison, kind of taunting them.”

  “Like riding your bike back and forth in front of the house of the kid who broke his leg.”

  “That was a pretty specific example. I don’t suppose when you were a kid, you ever—”

  “Me? Never.”

  Becky watched the wind riders, moving so slowly they appeared still, hovering in the ocean blue sky like a swarm of jellyfish. But for some reason, all she could think about was Felix.

  “I wonder what Felix is up to.”

  “Who?” Mike kept his eyes on the road but couldn’t hide a little smile. Becky found him adorable when he thought he was being funny.

  “I used to feel so sure he needed me in his life, and then . . . I wonder if I should call him.”

  “Call him. Why not?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  She didn’t call. The prospect of committing to something so grand was a little unnerving. She wasn’t sure she was ready to be Felix’s best friend again, with her soul still skinny and tired from the exertions during the illness. Mike was in remission (in ecstasy! In serenity! The cancer routed, humiliated, vanquished!), but she had been living on reserves for months, in survival mode, and she needed to beef up before she could take on so much as a PTA assignment.

  A few months later when she was feeling stronger, she tallied up the time since their last contact. It had been almost a year, just after the doctor’s final word. She’d come home to a message from Felix, inquiring after Mike’s health. She’d called back, relieved to get his voice mail, and left the good news (if completely inappropriate word) of remission. How could she call now out of the blue? Maybe he would be upset that she had dropped him so summarily. Maybe he would be sad that he hadn’t been important enough to her.

  And maybe he didn’t miss her.

  Now her reason for not calling was that it was summer, the Season of Becky, and there was a world of playing to do. And then she didn’t call because the kids were back in school and she was listless and had nothing interesting to report.

  Then she started to go a little crazy.

  All this time alone is a curse, she thought. A blight. An abomination. Maybe I should take up knitting.

  Sam was so crazy for preschool she let him go five mornings a week and suddenly there was an entire half day free. Well, no time is actually free with four school-age children. After all, there was housecleaning and shopping, managing the finances, getting that gum out of the carpet, locating Sam’s lost shoe, carpooling to dance classes, soccer, chess club, tennis lessons, piano, co-oping in the classroom, tracking down that necklace-making kit for Polly’s birthday, making dinner for a sick neighbor . . .

  But there were, incredibly and increasingly, moments of stillness, an hour without panic, a time to sit and think and wonder if she was becoming unessential. How many more years would she have before she ceased to be the sun in her children’s solar system? How long until she and Mike began to wither and were set aside? They talked about such things in muted tones when the bedroom lights were off . But it was not something that she would mention to Felix. Besides, how could he, in his Hollywood limo, with a whiskey sour and French model wife, surrounded by autograph seekers, understand what it meant to fear the quiet, to feel like a mother, a function, and worry that one day she would be nothing at all?

  No, she was not going to call.

  Instead she stuck a small television set on the kitchen counter and left it on all day. And the next. And the next. The seductive numbing was like a drug, the noise filling up the house with false energy. As soon as all four kids were out the door, on it went, always sputtering and complaining in the background. It became her routine for a week and might have continued in Definitely, but one Tuesday morning airplanes fell out of the sky.

  Becky sat on the floor in front of the television watching the towers crumble again and again, her stomach plummeting with them. For some time it was all she could do, the haunting voices of newscasters repeating the same bad news all day long. She kept Mike on the phone for two hours until she couldn’t stand it anymore and went to the kids’ various schools to bring them home. It was a day for hugging and holding close.

  They ate delivery pizza. The laundry stacked up. Becky didn’t hand-wash a single dish for a week. Still those newscasters’ voices crackled in the background, and the image of those towers falling and falling, mythical, like the phoenix rising from the ashes only to fall again.

  Then Polly had a nightmare about an airplane crashing into their house. Becky unplugged the television.

  That evening, thinking of the Blitz and darkened London homes, Becky turned on every light in the house. They ate breakfast for dinner under the blazing lamps and played Chutes and Ladders and Life until well past bedtime. Take that, terrorists.

  After dropping off Sam at kindergarten the next morning, Becky entered her hollow house and shivered. It was habit to switch something on. She glanced at the television set but went instead to the office and clicked on the computer to check e-mail (yes, she’d had e-mail for almost a year now—she was so high tech). That didn’t take up quite enough time. She needed something more distracting, something that muffled the sensation that the whole world was coming apart, something that dulled the twinge of emptiness.

  She opened old word processing files and read a couple of screenplays she’d written over the past few years, rediscovering one she rather liked. During the following weeks she fiddled some more, and fussed and puttered and dabbled, until she thought, this is pretty darn good. So she sent it to Bub and Hubbub. Gypsy Annette, the producer who’d bought Arm Candy (only to see it languish in development hell until its option expired), had moved on to a career in convention management, but another producer named Karen read it and made an offer.

  “Does this seem impossibly lucky?” Mike said.

  Becky nodded, still spinning after the phone call from Karen.

  “I mean, it�
�s supposed to be really difficult to sell a screenplay, isn’t it? And here you’re two-for-two.”

  She nodded. Still spinning.

  “You must be really good.”

  “Or lucky. You should take me to Vegas.”

  Karen invited Becky to have lunch in Los Angeles and talk business. Should she call Felix? Just in case he was in town?

  She didn’t.

  Becky exchanged the deliciously cool sweater weather of Utah for sunglasses and a T-shirt in the City of Angels. It was faux-summer, but Becky couldn’t relish it, because summer didn’t mean heat—it meant kids out of school, the zoo, the amusement park, a household run like a summer camp. She was determined not to enjoy this trip; it was business. She would suffer through it then hurry back home to endure non-summer with her family and tuck herself in beside Mike and smell his wonderful smell.

  But from the moment she met Karen, Becky felt a tickle of hope that this experience would outshine the previous Bub and Hubbub meeting—no pretentious high-rise office this time, no jangling bracelets or expensive bathroom with no place to perch a purse. They met instead at a café near the production office and sat outside in the sunshine, barely talking business at all they were so enjoying each other’s company. Karen was darling, skinny and tall with strawberry blonde hair and the sweetest freckles just so across her nose and cheeks.

  The meeting wasn’t totally necessary, Becky came to realize. Karen had recommended Becky to an agent, a white-haired, bug-eyed woman named Shelley, whom Becky had met that morning over breakfast. Shelley and Karen would hash out the details and make official counters and addendums. But Karen liked to meet the writers she signed, so they sat and lunched and chatted, and were just easing into the topic of movies when Becky heard someone call her name.