by Lise Saffran
On Jenny’s other side, Lilly turned her face in Ariel’s direction and smiled winningly. He stared back and then, without changing his expression or reaching for another peppermint, he looked down at the play on the table in front of him and began to read.
Within a week all of their lives had been reordered to correspond to Peg’s call sheets. Scene stagings, costume design and fittings, music and transitions were all central to their existence. Everything else became secondary. Work, outside friends, and spouses receded into their shadow lives. As a group they began to develop habits (the nonsmokers kicked a Hacky Sack while the smokers smoked), favorite snacks (sunflower seeds and Mary Ann’s home-baked intergalactic bars), and self-referential in-jokes that circled back in various permutations (Miranda’s cleavage at the table reading, Lilly’s tendency to disappear when needed—did she have a studio apartment hidden somewhere? Did she hold office hours?). Still, by the second week of rehearsals, not all mysteries had been solved.
One morning Frankie stirred her oatmeal carefully, watching the brown sugar dissolve with intense concentration, and mused aloud, “What if the naked rehearsal is really, you know, without any clothes on?”
“It is.” Lilly scooped up a handful of raisins from the box and shoved a chair back from the table with a foot that sported, to Jenny’s horror, toenails so long they curled.
“No, it’s not, Franks. Don’t worry,” said Jenny, wishing she were sure. “Lilly, your toenails. If you don’t trim them this instant, I’m going to lose my breakfast.”
“I’m eating.” Lilly lifted her spoon by way of demonstration. “And by the way, I don’t know why you are telling your own offspring things that aren’t true.” She raised her eyebrows in reproach.
“I always tell you the absolute truth.” Jenny plopped down next to Frankie and reached for the raisins. She’d eaten at five when the girls were still sleeping, and it was almost nine-thirty now. She figured as long as she didn’t look anywhere in the vicinity of Lilly’s knees or below, she could manage a bowl of oatmeal. She poured soymilk on the raisins and stirred, adding, “At least as far as I know it.”
Lilly dropped her bowl on the table. “You’re lying now. When you say that.”
“When have I ever told you something that wasn’t true?”
“Omission is lying.”
Jenny flushed. “Omission. Nice word. Is that what you were up to all those days you skipped class then, during senior year? Vocabulary?”
Frankie looked back and forth between them, a speck of oatmeal clinging to her cheek. “Stop it, you guys. Just stop it!”
Jenny focused on a row of jars containing dried beans and rice and millet and black-eyed peas and tried to remember the yoga she’d taken for six months before the prices had gone up and she’d had to quit. Breathe, release, breathe, release, breathe. Maybe she should have continued the class, she thought, because the exercise would have helped to hold back the tears that were pressing against the backs of her eyes. Instead of this harsh, hurtful stranger, she forced herself to picture Lilly as she had been at four. They had a ratty old green couch then, with sagging cushions and a rip in the back that they covered up by pushing the couch against a wall. Jenny had collapsed onto that couch, leaving the broken crockery all over the floor, and held her breath while Monroe backed out of the gravel driveway toward the road.
Little Lilly, in a boy’s striped T-shirt and tights (Lilly was so attached to her three pairs of tights back then that Jenny used to wash them by hand at night), crawled into her lap with a dirty kitchen sponge and a pack of Sesame Street Band-Aids to tend to the cut on her mother’s jaw. “Daddy hurt you on accident,” she’d said, patting Jenny’s tears away with the smelly sponge. For all her righteous indignation now, Lilly had been a skilled liar for a very long time.
“Telling the truth is good,” said Jenny slowly. “But that doesn’t mean you have to be as mean as a badger when you do it.”
“Sorry.” Lilly carried her bowl to the sink. “It’s just that I happen to be someone who finds stuff out.”
She paused to give Jenny a look that could have been merely dramatic—proving her appropriateness for the stage, as it were. But it also could have been intended to convey to her mother the worrying notion that she knew even more than she was telling. About what? Jenny found herself wondering. Monroe?
Lilly continued, “See, a little bird told me last year that the super-secret naked rehearsal is just that. Butt naked.” Her own butt was covered thinly in tie-dyed long underwear that had holes in the knees. She shook it for emphasis. “In front of God and the world.” And though she loved her sister, she couldn’t help adding, “In front of Dale.”
Frankie grew pale. She looked like she might throw up.
Jenny placed her hand on the back of Frankie’s. “Nobody’s going to make you take your clothes off,” she said firmly. “And if for some reason that’s a condition of being in the cast, you won’t have to be in it.”
She did not think it was the right time to point out that both girls cavorted naked in front of half the island on various hot summers when they were little or to remind Frankie that most of the grown-ups she knew, including Dale and Peg, thought nothing of a naked soak in the tubs on Doe Bay. Worn-out hippie norms meant nothing when you were a thirteen-year-old girl who had had her period for less than a year.
“But I want to be in the play,” breathed Frankie. She sounded like she was three.
“We’ll work something out,” said Jenny firmly.
Her children had no idea how precious they were. Neither of them.
“C’mon, sweet pea. Get the brush and I’ll help you fix your hair.”
Frankie didn’t move. It was clear she was still picturing herself stripped bare and offered up like a piece of freshly caught halibut.
“Chill out.” Lilly gave her sister a half-tender, half-annoyed tap upside the head on her way into the bathroom. “Dale isn’t going to be looking at you.” She eyed Jenny slyly. “He’s going to be looking at Mom.”
Jenny shot Lilly a glance. “Gee. Thanks, Lil.”
Lilly smirked. “The human body is beautiful in all shapes and sizes,” she said, parroting back to Jenny the words she had repeated to her daughters over the years. “I couldn’t care less who looks at me.”
Jenny supposed if she still had a body like Lilly’s she might welcome the opportunity to show it off, too.
Frankie did not appear to be listening. “But … Well …” She took a deep breath and looked at the wall in panic. “Ariel.”
Lilly circled back to stare at her sister in astonishment. Jenny set down her spoon. The glance that passed between her and her older daughter when they met each other’s eyes surpassed understanding. It was a cosmic blend of experience, love, dawning awareness, and incredulity that only women of the same family, living under the same roof, could muster. Lilly spoke first, with her usual careful reticence.
“Are you blind or something? Ariel plays for the other team, Frankie.”
“What?” She looked to her mother for confirmation. “He’s gay?”
Jenny nodded. “I think so, hon.”
“Of course he is,” said Lilly. “You could smear your boobs with chocolate sauce and hold a cherry in your teeth and he wouldn’t notice.” She shook her head and held her toothbrush under the faucet. “Of all the guys in the world,” she growled around the plastic in her mouth, “how funny that Frankie would go for a gay guy.”
Red-faced Frankie looked down at the table as if she might cry.
Jenny brushed her hand over the back of Frankie’s head before beginning to gather the dishes. “He is very beautiful,” she said softly.
Frankie looked around wildly, jumped up from the table, and then suddenly Jenny was watching the hunched figure of her daughter trudging down the dirt road. To the bus stop, no doubt, and then to Phoenix’s. The two girls had achieved some kind of tentative, polite peace ever since Phoenix had promised, on her dead dog Bear’s grave, tha
t she would be there for the San Juan opening of The Tempest in July.
Jenny pulled her alpaca sweater close around her pajama top. It still didn’t get her warm, so she walked across the room and stood full in a shaft of light coming in through the window. She rubbed her toes together in thick socks and watched the dust float in circles. It might be funny to Lilly, perhaps, that Frankie would fall first for someone who wouldn’t love her back, but it should not have been altogether unexpected. Frankie was an island girl. What did she know? There weren’t enough people of any particular type to allow for broad categories and generalizations. They were just individuals up there, each as quirky and unique as the next. Jenny sighed and touched her fingertips to the still, cold glass of the window.
Finally, Jenny left her spot of warmth to begin piling the dishes in the sink to do later, after work. Also in socks, Lilly padded up behind her and began, unexpectedly, to help. Jenny thought about pressing her hand to her daughter’s head to check for fever, and instead moved aside and began wiping down the counters. Lilly turned the faucet on and ran water in the sink.
“Speaking of love,” said Lilly. She filled a bowl with water until it overflowed and then tipped it, grimacing, into the sink. “Or not love, actually. Well, I don’t know. Crap.” She wiped her hands on her sweatshirt.
Jenny watched her curiously. It was rare to see Lilly thrown into this kind of confusion.
Absentmindedly, Lilly poked a knife in the water. “It’s always been pretty easy to tell, in the past, whether a guy liked me or not.” She met Jenny’s eyes and then looked away with an embarrassed smile. “Well, cause they did, mostly. Like me. But those were island guys, you know. It’s so different with him. He’s not from around here. He’s older and stuff. Sophisticated.” She said the last word with self-mocking, as if she were simultaneously aware of her relative innocence but hoping that her own awareness of it took the edge off.
Jenny’s heart began to pound. “Who do you mean?” she asked, buying time.
“Duh. Trinculo.” Lilly examined her own jagged fingernails with great interest. “Trinculo is all I can think about these days, practically. And I’m thinking maybe, well if it’s not too conceited, that maybe he’s thinking about me, too?” She got the sly look that was more characteristic of the Lilly that Jenny knew. “Didn’t you see how he blushed when I sat down next to him at the table reading?”
Jenny found herself looking anywhere but at her daughter. She felt like the hummingbird that had found its way into the cabin a week or so before. Its little frantic body revving the engine while it scanned for a way out.
Lilly did not appear to notice. “The other day when we were alone in back of Dale and Peg’s barn, you know, during the long scene with Alonso, Sebastian, and all those guys? When they’re going on and on about the wedding in Afric? Well, I just went for it and kissed him and I could tell he liked it. I could tell. The thing was, he didn’t really kiss me back or put his arms around me or anything. I mean, what’s that about? I’m going to be eighteen in two months, so it can’t be the age thing. Can it?”
Jenny could not speak. Here she’d been dreaming of kissing Trinculo and Lilly (Lilly!) had been doing it. Her chest was a tangle of emotions. She couldn’t tell whether she was furious with Trinculo, protective of Lilly, embarrassed, or just plain jealous. She could remember sitting with Frankie on the grass during that scene and wondering where Trinculo was.
Finally, she sputtered, “He’s too old for you.”
“I knew you were going to say that. You’re so predictable!”
“I’m looking out for you.” Jenny did not need to press herself to know that it was a bit more complicated than that. Still. Lilly was seventeen.
“He does like me, though. He’s just trying not to.” Lilly stretched her arms toward the ceiling to reveal a flash of breasts and the glint of her silver belly-button ring. “He won’t be able to hide it at the naked rehearsal, though.” She smiled. “Everything will be out in the open then. And you know guys …”
“That’s enough!” Jenny pulled her hair back and twisted it like a rope behind her head. “Geez, Lil. Give it a rest, will you? And look at this.” Jenny began frantically tossing silverware, dishes, and even kitchen towels toward the sink. “Pick up after yourself for once, okay? None of us is a wife here, you know.”
Lilly looked at her with injured surprise. “Okay. Sorry.” She tipped dish soap onto the sponge and began, tentatively, to clean the dishes.
Jenny stood and watched her for a moment and then, pulling herself together, reached for a towel to dry.
They worked in silence until a horn sounded in the drive.
Lilly dropped the sponge and ran past Jenny to the front door. She slipped through it without a word. Jenny watched her tromp down the drive toward where Elliot would turn in, stuffing her phone in her back pocket. She had failed to close the door in her hurry, and it swung back open, wide on the brightening morning. Jenny gazed out in the direction her daughter had gone and without realizing what she was looking at, slowly focused her eyes on a fawn, standing in the woods. She stood still for as long as she could and then, when she shifted, the fawn bolted.
She sighed and pushed the hair from her face. In the now familiar play that was consuming their attention and their imagination, the chronology was clear. Prospero conjured a storm and a company of men was washed ashore. In the experience of her little family, it was just the opposite. The men had brought the storm.
The empty house seemed stunned and sleepy after the morning’s racket. Her loom called to her from its tranquil, sunny corner, its threads as poised as guitar strings waiting to be plucked. Yet she did not move from the window looking out onto the yard. It occurred to her that she and her girls were, all three of them, in a new way now in a world of men.
Poor shipwrecked Miranda had seen just two such creatures, her father and Caliban, before Ferdinand arrived, reflected Jenny. And then suddenly, it seemed that the entire island was full of them. “O brave new world,” she had exclaimed. “That has such people in’t!”
Jenny doubted that the Neapolitans, even Ferdinand, were as different as all that, really. Men were men, after all. It was Miranda who had changed. Jenny could well understand what it was that Prospero had said to his daughter then, to this girl looking out onto a world no more fresh and new and, yes, even brave, than the one that her own daughters had just disappeared into. What he had said, this father who had raised her, alone no less, from babyhood was, Tis new to thee.
CHAPTER 7
Lowering the Flag
A new wine bar opened in Friday Harbor. Jenny and Mary Ann closed the shop early so they could get there in time to get a table near the door. Peg had been called away to Vancouver, where her aged mother lived, and had given them all the weekend off from rehearsals. A bunch of the actors rode the ferry to the mainland to spend the weekend in Seattle. Phoenix had taken Frankie with her to visit the cousins in Mount Vernon. Now that the move was in the works, even Theresa had been onboard with that plan.
The new bar was called Swirl and it was decorated in light maple, with bamboo on the floor and large windows that let in the early evening light. It was only five-thirty, but the tables were already filling up with tourists and a few locals. Jamie from the gas station stopped by to chat before heading toward the back where the owners, a tech couple from Northern California, had put up some ping-pong tables. Jenny and Mary Ann sipped Chardonnay from delicate glasses and munched on candied pecans and walnuts from a little ceramic bowl.
Jenny tapped the side of the bowl with a fingernail. “I wonder if Phinneas made these.”
“I think Ivy made them. You know Ivy? From Lopez?”
Jenny popped another nut in her mouth. “Oh, sure. Well, that’s good then. She has kids and all. Unlike Phinneas.”
Mary Ann poured them each another glass. “That he knows about,” she added drily, and they both cracked up. “Oh, God, poor Miranda,” sighed Mary Ann. “I think Phinneas
was the one who put himself in charge of ‘showing her around’ Seattle.”
“He wouldn’t!” Jenny’s eyes widened over the rim of her glass. “What is she, Lilly’s age? Not much older, in any case.”
“You’d have to watch him around Lilly, too, if she weren’t your daughter.” Mary Ann plucked the appetizer menu from between the salt and paper shakers and spread it on the table carefully.
“I’d have to watch Lilly.”
Jenny peered at the room through the gold liquid in her glass. The wine was cold and a bit sweeter than she was used to. She could tell her cheeks were getting rosy. She felt good. As Iris, Ceres, and Juno, she and her daughters had few lines, but she was finding that there really was a difference being in the play, rather than just supporting it from the outside. Whenever the actors lounged around on the grass in the sun, she lay around with them and listened to the gossip about New York and L.A. and Seattle. Miranda and Lilly would giggle together or start up a game of Ultimate Frisbee on the pasture by the road, and one of the others, usually Trinculo, would pull Jenny to her feet and urge her to play. She’d acted modestly surprised that first game when Caliban gaped at her ability to leap in the air and catch a long pass.
“Clearly you haven’t spent enough time around hippies,” she’d said, bending into a low toss.
He’d smiled. “Clearly not.”
Everyone had noticed the change in Caliban lately. He’d begun to sing along with what they’d taken to calling the Egg Lake Jam Band and even beat out a percussion rhythm with a couple of sticks. He hadn’t worn a tie in weeks.
Now, Jenny raised her hopeful eyes to Mary Ann. “Lilly decided to stay on the island this weekend, can you believe it? Instead of going to Seattle with the others. I grounded her a few weeks ago, but if she’d begged, I probably would have let her go. She said she wanted to stay home this weekend and work.” Jenny tapped her glass lightly against Mary Ann’s. “It could be we’ve turned the corner with Lilly.”