The Rehearsal

by Sarah Willis

  “Acting is a learning process, Beth,” he says, waving his free hand around for emphasis, as if she were sitting ten rows back instead of standing right here in front of him. And it hits her, the déjà vu of having this conversation with her dad while he waits on the phone for someone else to talk to, stuck, unable to do anything else but fill in the time by talking to her—lecturing her, really, as if she were listening to him on the other end. Then, once he’s had his say, he hangs up on her and moves on. Conversation over. Time to go do something adult. She is important only in the idle moments of his life, and there aren’t that many, because he likes to keep busy. It’s a weird thought, and it makes her think … but she can’t, because he’s talking louder and louder.

  “You have to play the spear-holder first, then the maid with two lines. It can take years, even for an actress out of college, to get a decent role in professional theatre. You have to take what you can get and do the best you can. You’ll get there. You have theatre blood in you, but you have to have patience.”

  Yeah, Beth thinks. I have good acting blood on one side, and bad acting blood on the other, and that makes me a big zero. Well, I’m not going to walk through life doing nothing.

  “But what am I supposed to do right now?” Beth says, hating the whine in her voice. “I’m bored!”

  “Good—you can come to the store with me,” her mother says.

  Her mom’s standing in the doorway of the kitchen. There is no privacy here at all. Everything is heard by everyone else, because there’s nothing else going on.

  “I don’t want—”

  “You’re coming,” her mother says. “You’re your father’s right-hand man, I hear, and since he’s apparently not going to the store, you get to. Right, Will?”

  “Good idea. Beth, you assist your mother, and bring me the receipts. Then you can establish an accounting list of our expenditures.”

  Yeah, like using big words is going to make it seem like a cool job, Beth thinks.

  “Go on now. I need to make a call.”

  Beth and her mom look at Will. He’s still holding the receiver. They can hear the ring, nothing, then the ring, like the refrain of a sad song.

  The grocery store is a big joke. It’s a tenth the size of the grocery store back home. To get any kind of good selection, they have to drive forty-five minutes into Jamestown, which her mom hardly ever does, but watching her mom frown at the grocery list, Beth bets she’ll have to go to Jamestown. God knows she won’t ask Beth to go with her on that trip. Beth would pile up the cart with ten different sugar cereals and a dozen types of cookies. Beth has a real sweet tooth, especially now that she’s discovered pot.

  She’s not stoned right now, even though she’s brought a nickel bag with her this summer. She’s very good at waiting for the right moment. The right moment is going to be when she and Greg Henry are alone.

  “Get a dozen frozen orange juice,” her mom says. “I have to find canned artichokes. Have you seen any?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Beth says. “Back in Pittsburgh. Give me the car keys, and I’ll go get some.” Beth walks away, toward the frozen foods, without waiting for her mom’s reply. The car is a bone of contention. A big bone that Beth hopes her mom will choke on. Even though Beth is now sixteen and took driver’s ed in school, she isn’t allowed to go out for her license. There are more excuses for this than stones in the road, and they grow more numerous every time Beth complains. First, there was just no time to make the driver’s test, because her dad needed the car for work. Then, when Beth pointed out a possible time, they decided the extra insurance would be too much. When Beth found a part-time job at the drugstore near their house, they decided it was too chancy to risk their only car on a new driver. (No one mentioned risking Beth’s life until about twenty excuses down the line.) They have agreed to allow Beth to drive down the lane to get the mail, but Beth won’t let them imagine for a moment that something that moronic might appease her.

  Beth finds a new treasure in the frozen food section. Chocolate éclairs. She piles three boxes into her arms, along with the orange juice, and puts them in the cart, which is now full, even though the list is not even half finished. The éclairs make her think that maybe she could smoke just a little of that pot today. She hasn’t tried out this batch yet, and she better make sure it’s good before she offers some to Greg.

  “Well, if he wants artichokes,” Beth’s mom says, crumpling up the list, “then he’ll have to go get them himself. I’m done.”

  The cashier at the check-out line is one of the townies whom Beth played with when she was younger. Bucktoothed and maybe six feet tall. She says hi to Beth with that look of Don’t I know you and aren’t you a nobody? This look, coming from a six-foot, bucktoothed, scraggly-haired townie, solidifies Beth’s decision to try out that pot as soon as she gets back to the farmhouse.

  The total is eighty-two dollars and forty-two cents. Her mom starts muttering under her breath, and Beth is so embarrassed. Her mom looks like a mental patient. What will people think of them?

  When her mom starts the car, Led Zeppelin blasts out of the radio, and she turns the station to another channel, where some dumb, slow song is playing. Beth reaches over and turns the station back to Led Zeppelin. Her mom turns the car off, right there in the parking lot.

  “What is your problem?” Beth asks.

  “You really want to know?” her mom says.

  No, Beth thinks, but she’s not dumb enough to say it. “What?” That’s neutral enough. It’s not like saying, Sure, tell me all your problems, Mom. I’ve got a few hours.

  “You.”

  Beth can’t believe her mom said that. She can feel her eyes get hot.

  Her mom closes her eyes in that pained way she always does, then shakes her head slowly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. Look, Beth. I don’t like your music. It sounds like noise to me. I know you like it. I can’t believe you listen to it just to annoy me. But it gets on my nerves. I know you don’t like my music. Frankly, I’m sick of it. It makes me feel old. I’m stuck here, in the middle, with no one playing the songs I want to hear. You know what?” She reaches over and touches Beth’s cheek, and Beth tenses. Her mom takes her hand away. Beth feels kind of bad, but it’s too late now.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are, to have everything ahead of you. You can do anything you like. You don’t have to be an actress, just because your dad’s a director. Sometimes when you do those monologues, you look so desperate. You can do anything, Beth. Find something you love, and just enjoy it. And try to be nice to people. Like me. I could use it.”

  Beth is embarrassed and fascinated. Her mom does this, sometimes, as some kind of lesson for Beth, a mother-daughter talk, spilling out emotion like a train wreck or something. And Beth is always drawn in, but then her mom will say something she thinks is all wise, that’s really just putting Beth down.

  “I don’t have to be nice to someone who says I can’t act!”

  “I didn’t say you can’t act.”

  “You said I look desperate. That’s not a compliment, is it?”

  “I just mean you try too hard to—”

  “Oh, thanks. Maybe I shouldn’t try at all, like some people I know.”

  “Look, Beth, I made a home for us. That’s nothing to scoff at. I’m your mother, and I’m going to tell you when I think you’ve got an attitude that’s going to hurt you. And hurt me.”

  Beth knows her mom added that last bit for sympathy. But it won’t work. “I’m doing just fine, so leave me alone. I’m not so bad.”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “I know what you said, Mom. Maybe you should listen to yourself sometime.”

  Her mom stares at her for the longest time, with that look like she wants to say something that would make Beth a better person just by hearing it, but now she’s just going to make Beth imagine what great words of wisdom she’s missing out on.

  “Some lady wants your spot,” Beth says, poi
nting to the new red car waiting for them to pull out. Myra starts the car, and the radio comes on. Simon and Garfunkel are singing “Bridge over Troubled Water.” As they drive away, Beth figures something out. Her dad lectures to her when he can’t escape, and her mom lectures to her on car rides when Beth can’t escape—which means her mom really wants to talk to her and her dad doesn’t, but either way, what they really want is to hear themselves talk. So why don’t they talk to each other and just leave her alone?

  When they get home, Mac runs to the car shouting. “Don’t leave the doors open! Just open and shut them real fast! Here, I’ll do it for you. Why didn’t you tell me you were going? Did you leave the windows down? Did you?”

  “You’re such a wimp,” Beth says, leaving the side door open. Mac runs around the car and slams the door shut. Then he runs to the back of the station wagon and slams the rear door shut before their mom can even get out of the way. The door catches her elbow, and she yells, dropping the bag of groceries, which rips open and spills frozen orange juice cans across the yard.

  “Oops,” Mac says.

  “Pick them up right now,” Myra says, teeth clenched.

  Beth is amazed at the way her mom can change words into slaps. Beth will have to try that sometime.

  An hour later, out in the woods, flying high on half a joint, Beth grins at a bulbous growth on a tree. It looks like her Grampa Bartlett. He had a big nose with bumps all over it. He was pretty nice and kept peppermint candies in his pocket, but even with all that peppermint, he smelled like foot powder. Beth didn’t know what it was he smelled like until after he was dead. By mistake, she walked in on her father in the bathroom while he was pouring this white powder all over his feet, and the whole bathroom smelled like Grampa, which made Beth suddenly sad, and afraid, since now her father smelled like foot powder, which reminded her of an old, dead man. If she ever gets married, she’s going to make sure her husband never uses foot powder.

  After looking at the knot on the tree for a while, she notices a fern nearby, just beginning to uncurl. It’s so intricate, so completely far out. She kneels on the ground and watches to see if she can catch it opening. She stares at it for the longest time, and just as her head begins to nod and her eyes shut, she thinks she can hear the fern singing to her. Yes! It is. Her eyes open. Someone is moving through the woods, up near the top of the ridge. A woman with blond hair flowing around her face. Dancing. Arms moving about like wings. Singing? Jesus, it’s her mother.

  If she didn’t know it was her mother, Beth would be interested in this vision. A woman alone in the woods, communing with nature, just as Beth is doing. But it’s just her mother.

  Myra thinks this land is like a person. It changes each year—growing thicker in places, just as she has. It needs to be admired, and it needs to have some privacy. And it has secrets; there are things Myra will never know about these woods no matter how closely she looks, but there are also places in these woods she knows as well as the faces of her children. There is the top of the hill, where the maple and birch are spread out, the ground covered in pressed brown leaves. A person can move about freely yet stay snug in the deep of the woods, where there is no view of a house or a road. This is the place that listens to Myra, and for that she loves it most.

  Last year, in those moments when everyone had gone off, she would sing in the field behind the house, because there was something special about the way her voice carried for miles on a breeze. This place, on the hill, was where she came to think quietly: to sit on the large humpbacked boulder, knees tucked up, her head cupped in her hands. The woods listened—it was just something she believed. But today Myra walked into the woods, to this spot, and found that she could sing here too. Her voice filled this space differently than the field; it echoed off the trees, as if her notes were bright and colorful birds let loose. It’s a wonderful feeling, and she never wants to leave, but after a while she feels she has overstayed her welcome, and she says good-bye to the hill and heads back home.

  When she arrives at the house, the kids want dinner, while Will still paces between the barn and the house. Myra loses whatever it was she found in the woods and becomes a mother and a wife. She peels potatoes, and finds the silver hairclip for Beth, and carries the blankets to the car for Mac, being sure to shake them before placing them on the backseat of the station wagon. She does all these things well, as graciously as she can.

  Through the kitchen window, Myra watches Ben climb out of his car, and it’s like the curtain opening on the first act. The actors have begun to arrive and there is no going back. The two men vigorously shake hands, grinning. They’re like two little boys with their first cap guns, going off to play cowboys and Indians. Myra has the urge to yell, “Oh, grow up!” and that’s when she understands that for the next month she will be something like the mother of a Boy Scout troop. What is it about actors that they never grow up? With this thought, she realizes she has excluded herself from this group. There is a tug from somewhere under her rib cage, and she bends over slightly as if hit.

  Only last month her best friend, Hattie Luoma, who was taking an oil painting class, asked Myra why she didn’t try something else creative. Myra had retorted that she was an actress who couldn’t act anymore, and she had no intention of being anything else. She didn’t explain that after acting nothing else seemed important enough to bother with, that acting was the only credible art, and everything else seemed silly. Or that she still dreams of acting, that’s it’s hard to watch plays, that sometimes she thinks maybe, maybe she’ll try it again. But right now, watching Will and Ben disappear into the weather-beaten barn as if it were some grand arena, Myra wonders what it was about acting that seemed so important. Surely other things are just as important, like being a doctor, or a scientist, or a teacher. Or maybe something she could do, really do: teach voice lessons, write theatre reviews. There must be something she could do that would fit their seasonal life. Will had suggested, only once, that she work backstage, maybe in the costume department. She had cried, and he never mentioned it again. But it doesn’t sound so bad, now, does it?

  These thoughts are so new, it’s like opening up Pandora’s box; the possibility of other careers frightening because it means that there are more things she might try and fail. Possibilities tease her with a sly meanness that makes Myra want to go upstairs and crawl into bed and maybe never get up again.

  Screw that, she thinks fiercely, fighting off self-pity. It works. She nods to herself and goes outside to say hi to Ben.

  While driving here, Ben had a long discussion with himself. Since he’s alone much of the time, he puts his thoughts into different voices inside his head, just to keep himself company. All the voices agreed: Will’s idea is a bit strange, but Ben will do everything in his ability to make it work. His biggest fear is that they will all get bored in the next month, or end up hating each other. He decides his job is to keep everyone happy. He doesn’t mind seeming a bit foolish in order to make someone smile.

  Will leads him into the barn, talking a mile a minute. Ben just listens. He doesn’t have to do anything to make Will happy. It’s Myra who will need to be cheered up today. Will must be driving her nuts with all this energy. Ben’s always felt a little sorry for Myra having to put up with Will at times like this—which is damn well pretty much always. He’s a great guy and all, but Will can be a bit overpowering. Even Ben can get exhausted by all that unbridled enthusiasm. The man can direct, though. Sees visions in his head unlike any other director, then gets the actors to bring them to life. Takes more talent than Ben has, that’s for sure. Ben’s just glad he can act.

  Will’s talking about the problem of getting the scenery and props sent up. “Trent says he’ll take care of it, but you know what that’s worth. We’ll just have to hope. The real problem’s the bunks might not arrive before the actors. I don’t know where anyone will sleep.” Will shrugs, then rubs his hands together. “Hell, we can sleep out on the lawn under the stars for a few nights. I
haven’t done that since I was a kid.”

  “I slept out on your lawn last summer, but I was dead drunk.” Ben was pissed that no one had awakened him and driven him home. He’d sworn off drinking that day, and many days since then.

  “Did I mention the creek?” Will says, changing the subject.

  “Yeah, you told me about the creek, Will, and you’re right, that’ll be perfect, but let me tell you, there are limits to this reality stuff you’re handing out. No loaded gun. Got that? Just pretend bullets, okay?”

  Will laughs, and a funny thing happens. Will’s laugh doesn’t bounce off the old walls of the barn—it just dies, as if it got sucked into all that wood. It’s nothing like the sound of voices on a stage, with concrete walls and a high ceiling. The lack of resonance is unnerving. Will’s laugh has disappeared like a forgotten dream.

  “Well, it’s not Radio City Music Hall,” Ben says, noticing the frown on Will’s gaunt face. “But I sure wouldn’t mind the Rockettes. This place needs some life.”

  With that, as if on cue, Myra walks into the barn.

  During dinner, Beth is on her best behavior because this is it, the beginning of her career in the theatre. Tonight is, as her father says, the real start to the summer season, because Ben is here, and the rest are coming. He toasts it with a glass of bourbon. “To the summer of ’71. To great theatre.”

  Beth pretends her grape juice is wine. It’s good practice. Actors don’t drink real alcohol on the stage, it’s just colored water. They recall the flavor of alcohol from memory, and the feeling it brings. And they act drunk wonderfully. They’ve had more practice at drinking than she has, but she’s had her share of gin and whiskey from her parents’ cabinet, so she has something to base her pretending on, and she’s still a bit floaty from the pot. When she lowers the glass to the table, she feels a warm flush. She’s going to be a great actress someday, with her father’s help.