“Now there’s a play that ends with a bang,” Dad said.
“That’s a heavy one!” Mom said. “It’s got suicide—no, two suicides—World War II, negligent homicide. Smothering mothering. Usually when high schools do Arthur Miller, it’s The Crucible.”
“Is Chester the Molester still running the drama club?” Dad asked.
“I don’t know who you mean,” said Lauren, although she did.
“Patron saint of handsy drama teachers,” Mom said.
“Mom knew Treadwell very well,” Dad said.
“I did one play,” Mom said, “and he’s harmless, anyway. Big hugger. But that’s all.”
“It’s a new guy,” Lauren said.
Lauren tagged along to the All My Sons tryouts with Paula to “keep her company,” by which she meant that her audition would give her a legitimate excuse for being late to swim practice. Lauren had been swimming competitively for so long that when she imagined quitting it was like imagining dropping out of school or eloping with Evan Lewis. She got her best times in relays, where three other swimmers were depending on her and judging her performance, but she honestly didn’t care where she placed when she swam on her own.
“You were so smart about your audition,” Paula said afterward. “Play it big and silly.”
Lauren couldn’t remember the audition very well. It was a blur of loud talking and arm-flapping and trying not to laugh or look down at her script.
“Like they say about kittens and puppies at the ASPCA—the ones that go crazy and throw themselves against the cages are the ones who get homes,” Paula said.
“Blah, blah, blah,” Lauren said.
“How you kept moving around, pacing around the stage even when it wasn’t your line—like Look at me, look at me,” Paula said.
“Well, I mean—wasn’t that the point?” Lauren asked, raising her chin with the effort of keeping her voice buoyant, unserious. “The whole point of the audition? To say, Look at me?”
Paula didn’t answer. She wore a smile like she had won the game, upper lip pulled down, nostrils flaring. Her satisfied-piggy smile. She did that a lot. The smile was like Paula wanted you to know she had a secret that she’d never whisper in your ear.
The cast list for All My Sons was posted outside the band practice room first thing Monday morning. There was an exit door just down the hall, so Lauren could just happen past on her way out and take a peep at the list, out of idle curiosity. Abby and Claire were peering at the paper tacked to the wall as she approached. Claire smiled at Lauren. “So you’re the designated freshman,” she said, batting her eyelashes like Lauren had done something deliciously naughty.
“Who, me?” Lauren asked.
“There’s one in every play—it’s a tradition,” Claire replied.
“It’s a good thing,” Abby said. “Mr. Treadwell always reserved one big role for a freshman, and Mr. Smith seems to be doing it, too. Take a look. And congratulations.”
Lauren looked at the list. Claire was Ann, obviously, and Abby was the director, obviously, and Lauren was Kate, the matriarch.
“There must be some mistake,” Lauren said.
“The designated freshman always thinks that,” Abby and Claire said in unison.
After English class was over, Lauren hugged her books to her chest and stared at the corner of the desk Mr. Smith sat behind.
“I don’t want to play this part,” Lauren told him. “I’m grateful and everything. But I think another person would do a better job.”
“You don’t want to play the mother?” Mr. Smith asked. He was talking like Claire had told him the deliciously naughty thing that Lauren did. He leaned back in his chair. “That surprises me. Kate is arguably the most complex and fascinating character in All My Sons.”
“Mm.” Lauren nodded. Mr. Smith talked so fast that it was like she had to start responding before she figured out what he said.
“So you agree?” Mr. Smith asked. A friendly challenge.
“Um.” Lauren offered a pained smile that showed all her bottom teeth, like Mr. Smith was in a pickle and she was so terribly sorry that she couldn’t help him get out of it.
“What are your objections?” Mr. Smith asked. “About Kate. Be specific.”
“She’s just—she’s deluded,” Lauren said. She was mumbling. “She’s dumb. And old, although that’s not her fault.”
“Okay. What’s so dumb and deluded about her?” Mr. Smith asked, straightening up and adjusting his glasses.
Lauren frowned. “She just lies to herself and her family about everything. She pretends her child isn’t dead, and she pretends her husband is a good person. She’s in total denial. She thinks she’s protecting her family, but she’s wrecking it.”
“That’s perceptive—I can see why you’d say all that,” Mr. Smith said, “but I’m not hearing you say why you don’t want to play her.”
“Well, I also have swim team after school every day,” Lauren said. “I can’t go to swim practice and rehearse the play at the same time.”
“Swim team will wrap up in, what, two or three weeks?” Mr. Smith asked. “We can nail down other parts of the play in the meantime and concentrate on your scenes later. Also, you were aware of that conflict with swim team when you auditioned. It didn’t bother you then, did it?” Mr. Smith’s grin was like he had caught Lauren in a fib but he wouldn’t tell on her.
“I just . . .” Lauren shrugged, first one shoulder and then the other, her body corkscrewing on itself. She wanted to take up less space in the room. “I don’t feel comfortable with this. I just don’t. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry—this is great!” Mr. Smith said, leaning forward and clapping his hands together in glee. “Feeling comfortable is the last thing an actress should want. This should push you out of your comfort zone. You know you’re doing something right,” he said, tapping one finger in the air, “when it hurts. When you think, Wait—should I even be doing this?”
“Yeah,” Lauren said. Dad would say that Mr. Smith was as oblivious as a bulldozer.
She stared over his shoulder at a collage of old political cartoons. Woodrow Wilson blowing a soap bubble out of a pipe inscribed league of nations. She pushed her books into her chest. Her breasts had come later than the other girls’, and sometimes she was still taken aback to discover them there. “Also, I’m—I’m only a freshman? It feels weird to play the mom.”
“Weird how?”
“Not believable. I won’t look like her.”
Mr. Smith frowned and shook his head. “That’s up to you. The audience wants to be told what to see. They give you their consent when they buy a ticket.”
Lauren nodded and stared at the carpet. “So . . . um . . .”
“Were you hoping to play Ann, perhaps?” he asked. Ann, the would-be bride of the dead son. After he dies, Ann falls in love with his surviving brother, much to the distress of Kate the matriarch. “What’s the first thing anyone in the play says about Ann?” Mr. Smith asked. “Do you remember?”
“No . . . that Ann’s boyfriend died in the war . . .” Lauren murmured.
“That she’s beautiful,” Mr. Smith said. “Before we know her name, she’s the beautiful girl. Well, who wouldn’t want to play the beautiful girl? Beloved by all, widowed before she could become a bride, thwarted by tragedy, bearing up despite everything . . .”
Mr. Smith nodded expectantly, waiting for Lauren to pick up the thread, raising his eyebrows above his glasses. Lauren sensed that he was saying something else without saying it, or that he wanted her to say it, whatever it was, and she would only be able to figure it out later. President Woodrow Wilson was sneering at her from behind his pipe, and AP American History students were filing into class.
“Listen, any pretty girl can play Ann,” Mr. Smith said, gathering up his things and standing up. “There are very few actresses, young actresses, who can play Kate. You are one of them.”
“I don’t have to do the play if I don’t want to,�
� Lauren said to the corner of the desk.
“How does your friend Paula feel about the whole thing?” Mr. Smith asked.
People already thought of Lauren and Paula as a pair. Paula was assigned to be property mistress. “She told me she’s not even jealous,” Lauren said, looking up. They both smiled like they were finally sharing something.
“And are there people in your family who object?” Mr. Smith asked.
Mr. Koslowski, the AP American History teacher with the comb-over, was standing beside Mr. Smith. He looked at his watch, looked up at the clock on the wall, sighed.
“My mom is super religious,” Lauren said, frowning on one side, glancing back at the AP American History students to see who might be listening, “but no, I doubt she cares one way or the other.”
“She’s Catholic?” he asked. Lauren nodded. “Ah, my people,” he said. “So full of remorse, so excited to do things to feel remorseful about.”
“She’s only Catholic for herself,” Lauren said. “She doesn’t make me go to church or anything.”
Mr. Koslowski half placed, half tossed his things onto the front desk and started writing on the blackboard, hitting the chalk against the slate with extra dismissive force. Mr. Smith, still standing beside the desk, feigned that he didn’t notice.
“Well, I’m glad we talked,” he said. “An actress should get down and dirty and fight with her character and argue with her playwright. I admire that in you, Lauren.”
Lauren tucked her chin against her chest, her hair falling in her face.
“Okay, you are now in physical pain due to this conversation, so score a hundred points for me,” Mr. Smith said. Lauren laughed weakly and stood up straighter. “But just do me this favor,” he said. “Before you decide—”
“I already decided—”
“Before you do that, ponder what Arthur Miller says about Kate in the stage directions. He calls her ‘a woman of uncontrolled impulses, and an overwhelming capacity for love.’”
“Not impulses—uncontrolled inspirations,” Lauren corrected him. She felt both pride and irritation with herself for pointing out his error.
“See, you know her better than I do,” Mr. Smith replied, bowing in a joking way to Mr. Koslowski, who was now scowling at the two of them. A few students behind Lauren tittered.
“I need to start my class now,” Mr. Koslowski said.
“Just trying to embrace some of that old open-plan spirit, Koslowski,” Mr. Smith said. He danced his hands in semicircles, like a pitchman on a late-night infomercial. “Overlapping conversations, cross-disciplinary collaboration, hybrid vigor.”
Lauren was inching away as Mr. Smith turned back to her, gathering up his things from the desk. “‘A woman of uncontrolled inspirations,’ right,” he said, starting to walk alongside her. “Think about what an uncontrolled inspiration might look like. And think about the people in your life whom you could describe in the same way. We can’t condemn anyone with that much inspiration and that much love to give. Even if they drive us crazy.”
Right before everything changed, during those first weeks of high school, there were signs at home of what was to come. Stacks of paperwork left on the kitchen counter in the morning, then silently whisked away. A pamphlet titled Adoption: The Ultimate Journey of Faith, on top of the refrigerator: Lauren accidentally swept it to the floor when pawing for a banana. Mom’s general state of distraction, her spaciness, was nothing new, but now it was a single, distant object that seemed to hold her.
Mom was driving her home from swim practice in their wood-sided station wagon. The Chappaquiddick, Dad called it, because he said it was the same model some drugged-out blond newscaster had drowned in, “just like a Kennedy girl.” The dragon wagon, Sean and PJ called it, for reasons lost to time. Past sunset, mottled lights fell on the hood and dashboard, painting geometric patterns on the backs of Lauren’s hands. Whenever Sean and PJ weren’t in the car, Mom padded out these commutes with some nonessential errand, or a drive through a neighborhood they hadn’t seen in a while. Lauren liked the serene pointlessness of these detours. She could have walked or biked home or picked up a ride from a teammate, but here with Mom there was a privacy in the dark, a privacy-with-another she otherwise could find only with Paula. A key to feeling alone-yet-together was that they couldn’t look directly at each other: Mom’s voice trailing off in concentration as she made a left-hand turn against four lanes of Transit Road traffic; Lauren watching Mom’s hands on the steering wheel and the stick shift, her long piano-player fingers, the veins flat and faint. She had a young person’s hands, smooth and soft and musical. The other moms didn’t have hands like hers.
They used to get this kind of intimacy on nighttime strolls around their neighborhood, but Lauren had grown sheepish about them. “We’re not walking anywhere,” Lauren said. “We start at home and then we just walk home.” They could pretend the car trips had a point. Lauren did not want Mom to know how much contentment she took in these evening errand runs. She wanted Mom to see them as an act of daughterly generosity, almost condescending. She could keep her desire for her mother a secret from her mother.
Lauren curled up in the front passenger seat, knees drawn to her chest, her hair smelling of chlorine and burrowing a warm damp patch in the headrest. On the radio, AIDS activists chanted on the White House lawn.
“That’s the same group that locked themselves to the pews in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral,” Mom said. “The famous church in the Big Apple.”
“Why did they do that?”
“To get attention for their cause. Anything they would do in a church will cause a hullabaloo.”
“So you must hate them,” Lauren said, rolling her eyes.
“I don’t hate anybody. Certainly not them. Jesus would have sat down there in the pews and heard them out. And here we are out in the boonies, talking about them, right? That’s a good result for them.”
Honeycombs of shadow and light moved across the dashboard and Mom’s hands. “Mr. Smith is so weird,” Lauren said into the half darkness.
“Who?” Mom asked.
“Mr. Smith. Remember when I told you about the Drama Club adviser?”
“Oh, yes, I’m sorry, I remember.”
“He says that during rehearsals we should feel free to call him Ted.”
“Hm.”
“Not in class. Just when we’re working on the play.”
“Still. Do you think that’s appropriate?”
Lauren shrugged. “I mean, I guess it’s up to him what he wants to be called. Right?”
Mom didn’t say anything.
“Some of the kids call his office the Tedquarters and hang out in there all the time,” Lauren said.
Lauren considered whether or not she should tell Mom that Mr. Smith let kids drink in Tedquarters. Or didn’t let them, exactly, but he “looked the other way”—that’s what Dad would say whenever the Town of Amherst let him slide on a certificate or a piece of insurance or something. Lauren turned it over in her head. It seemed childish to tattletale, but it also seemed childish not to tell Mom—or not childish so much as sneaky, somehow ungenerous.
“I think it’s weird,” Lauren said, “because—”
Mom was turning up the volume on the radio. “Sorry, honey, just a minute, I want to hear this—”
The radio announcer called it a hospital siege, in a suburb of Salt Lake City. The perpetrator’s wife had given birth to ten children. Two of them died shortly after birth; delivering one of the surviving babies, the youngest of them all, had nearly killed the wife. After recovering, she had “gotten her tubes tied,” Mom was explaining.
“Is that the same as a test-tube baby?” Lauren asked.
“It means she couldn’t get pregnant again,” Mom said. “The egg wants to travel down a tube to the uterus, but the tube is tied off and there’s nowhere for that poor little egg to go. That’s why her husband was mad—not that he—I mean, there’s no excuse for what he did. But he wanted more
children. He thought God wanted them to have more children.”
One night, the husband went to the hospital where his children were born. He had two guns and a bomb. He was looking for the surgeon who he thought had hurt the mother of his children. He took hostages: nurses, babies, new mothers, a woman in labor. In the end, a nurse—also a mother—was dead, shot in the back, and a baby was born while the man held a gun to her mother’s stomach. Mom talked about the man and his wife like she knew them. She called them by their names, Rick and Karen. Before Rick went to the hospital with the guns and the bomb, he brought home ice cream bars for all his children.
“What kind?” Lauren asked.
“Rick said he and Karen had one more baby in heaven waiting to be born,” Mom said. “It drove him crazy that he couldn’t reach that baby. What kind of what?”
“How did he know that?” Lauren asked. “That there was another baby?”
“He just felt it, I guess. He probably couldn’t explain it. He knew there was someone out there just waiting for him.”
“They could have adopted, if they wanted more kids,” Lauren said.
Mom took in a sharp breath. Startled, happy.
Lauren looked up at Mom. Her light brown hair in a ponytail, the J of its tip resting on one shoulder. The other moms wore bobs and pageboys, not ponytails. The night patterns moved across Mom’s face like the veil on a film-noir heroine.
The next night, her mother was gone.
It would be two weeks, Dad told them. Or maybe more. No return date set in stone. If Mom was gone two weeks, she would miss Lauren’s Erie County Interscholastic Conference swim meet—Lauren probably wouldn’t make sectionals, not even for the relay, so that would be it for the season. She would miss five of PJ and Sean’s soccer games, and if she was gone two days longer than two weeks, she would miss Sean’s science fair.
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