by Sands Hall
The bulletin board outside the store was crowded with flyers, ads for apartments, roommates wanted, skis for sale, massage therapy. A long, bright orange poster advertised a series of bands at Farquaarts. On a visit a few years ago Maud had gone to Farquaarts with Lizzie to watch Lizzie’s boyfriend’s band: Jake’s Blakes. She recalled a pleasant haze of pizza and beer, music and dancing.
According to an attractive black-and-white poster, Fable Mountain Stage Company’s production of Three Sisters had just closed its month-long run. Maud, impressed with the quality of the poster, wondered what sort of audiences Three Sisters had pulled. She would not have thought there would be a market for Chekhov in a town like Marengo. Although perhaps that wasn’t fair to Marengo. When some students in her acting class had done a scene from Uncle Vanya, Nikos had never gotten around to critiquing their work, just bawled them out for doing Chekhov at all.
“Why not? Why not? That you have to ask shows why you mangled him, this poor playwright. Why not? Because American actors think his plays are about plot. Plot! Americans are addicted to plot,” Nikos shouted. “This is so you don’t have to think. You don’t have to work, to make connections—why is this character behaving in this way?”
Others besides Maud had their journals and notebooks out, pens skidding across the page. “A story is not about plot. A story is about character. Character is plot. Chekhov knows this. This is why actors love to work on Chekhov, although most of them, unless they are very smart”—he tapped the side of his head—“don’t know that is why. It is all about inner life.” Inner life, Maud underlined so hard the pen tore the paper: Character is plot.
The next production of Fable Mountain Stage Company would be Charlie’s Aunt. They would finish the season with A Christmas Carol.
She dawdled through the aisles of the store. The only interesting cheese she could find was a mild cheddar. There was no “interesting” bread, as her mother called it. What French bread there was came presliced. “A good play is like holding a great hunk of rye in your hand,” Nikos said. He held an imaginary loaf in his huge paw and ripped at it with his teeth. “You take a bite, you chew for a while.” He did this, gnawing exaggeratedly on air, then stopped, looked at the imaginary loaf, widened his eyes. “Aha! You get it! You find yourself! But in America, audiences don’t want to find themselves, they want to lose themselves, be taken away from themselves. They want to laugh, but not at the foolishness of their own lives. No, they like pratfalls, humor that is prepackaged, presliced. Humor that won’t reflect their own absurdity. How many of us have ever actually slipped on a banana peel? Ha ha ha.” He made a big show of laughing, holding his hands to his sides. “But it can mean so much! The slip-ups we all make. Et cetera. But no! Don’t think about what something might mean. Just laugh along with the sound track. Real humor takes some chewing. Then you get it. Chewing!” He shook the loaf. “You understand?”
Murmurs, agreement. “No you don’t. You want to dance up the aisles. You want to go out singing a pretty little song. A Greek audience, they like to leave a play feeling troubled. They go and drink coffee, ouzo, talk until the stars are fading. They go home, they can’t sleep, they are worried. We love to worry as much as you love to laugh. We laugh at people worrying, we laugh when things are sad. Because this sadness is a true thing. We recognize it. It’s just a different kind of recognition, which is all laughter is.”
Maud scribbled: Laughter = recognition.
“The play makes them think about their life. Maybe they change something. Maybe they just drink more.” Laughter from the class. “But you Philistines don’t want meaning, you want to be reassured—that life will give you a happy ending.”
Maud pushed the cart up and down the aisles, pausing in front of the cleaning supplies for Comet, a mop—which she would carry home over her shoulder like a boy with a fishing pole—and another packet of sponges. With a flick of her wrist simultaneously flippant and furious, she tossed a box of Tampax, slender regular, into her cart. She would clean her house, as her body flushed away the wasted bloody home, changing that as she’d changed her life, as she’d left L.A.
She paused in front of the apple juice, wondering if Noah would prefer Coke, and if his parents would care in either case. And she should buy beer, in case Lizzie came to visit.
God is in the details. She’d heard the saying before, but it slipped suddenly into focus. An antiquated slide projector, with a recalcitrant focus button, finally made an image clear. God is in the mundane, the specific. God is in the little things, the dots we connect to get us through another day.
CHAPTER 15
LIZZIE
NOTES FROM BENEATH THE MAGNETS ON LIZZIE’S FRIDGE
Heater filters
Call Burt—2 cords oak—DRY
Summer—dentist
closet doors
clean gutters
SAM
“Two! Four! Six-eight-twelve!” a chorus of high voices yelled. “Who do we love besides ourselves? Prairie Dogs! Prairie Dogs! Yaaay!”
Lizzie stood with a clipboard on the side of the field, working out positions. Michael Porter, soccer dad for the day, waved his hands at their own motley team, which looked pathetic next to Fairfield’s stalwart Prairie Dogs. “Let’s hear from you guys,” Michael yelled. “Come on, Jackrabbits!”
“Two! Four! Six! Eight!” The voices came high and ragged, too thin to inspire confidence. “Who do we appreciate? Jackrabbits, Jackrabbits, yaaay!”
This effort at inter-team spirit accomplished, the third-grade soccer teams ran towards their respective coaches. The Prairie Dogs waved their hands in the air and whooped. The Jackrabbits, cowed and quiet, crowded around Lizzie. She swaggered her way into a coach’s posture: feet spread apart, hands on bent knees, ignoring Michael’s wink of approval.
“Peter,” she said to a boy wearing green-framed glasses, “you’re center. Cory, play left. Doreen, right.” She went through the other positions. “Summer,” she said, looking down so that she wouldn’t see her daughter shake her head. “Summer, this quarter you’re goalie. Your job, your whole job, is to keep that ball from getting past you, okay?”
Shoulders hunched, Summer wandered towards the goal. Her shin guards, covered with turquoise knee-high socks, made her look like a diminutive version of a Greek warrior. What were they called, the ancient Greek version of shin guards? Maud would know. She sat on the grass to one side of the soccer field. With Theo on her lap, she looked only vaguely out of place amongst the mothers of the third-graders convening on Fenley Field.
“Summer, close it up!” Michael Porter yelled. Summer shot a glance filled with resentment and woe at her mother and slouched over to stand in front of the goalposts.
Lizzie blew her whistle. The ball dribbled into play. Little feet, little calves, little muscled thighs chased after it. The ball rolled out of bounds, penalty Jackrabbits. A Prairie Dog’s father threw it back in, yelling, “Get ’em, Buddy!” Buddy looked like a miniature football quarterback in training. He would grow up to drink too much beer, defend any decent American’s right to buy guns, be taciturn and uncommunicative when faced with emotion, and now he was heading straight down the field towards Summer. She stood slack-mouthed as the bodies came rushing towards her.
“Close it up! Summer, guard your post!” Michael Porter yelled. Lizzie, loping along the sidelines, seconded: “Come on, Summer!” But Summer, dancing back and forth in an agony of indecision and fear, let the ball whisk by. A groan went up from the assembled Jackrabbit mothers.
Summer wiped her arm across her face. Lizzie trotted over to stand beside her.
“I hate this game. I hate it.” Summer’s braids were their usual frizzy mess. Reluctant tears stood in her eyes. “I never wanted to play it. Why do you make me?”
“It’s just a game.”
“You’ve said that sixteen zillion times. We have two games left. We’ve lost every one because of me.”
“Not because of you.” The rest of the team w
aited to play ball. Lizzie couldn’t have this conversation now. “Do your best, Summer. That’s what counts.”
“It doesn’t count.”
Lizzie blew her whistle and jogged to the center line. Michael Porter sidled up to her. “Tough when your own kid’s screwing up. Like my Mikey, last year. Impossible.” A black forelock fell into his eyes. He tossed it back, smiling through dark Irish eyes.
“She’s not screwing up.”
“Okay, okay.” Michael dropped back, holding up his hands in protest. “Just a thought.”
At halftime Lizzie dropped to her knees beside Maud, who was holding Theo and chatting with Jane Kirchenberg and Stella Lytton. Maud looked like the dancer she was—erect back, one leg folded under a long jean skirt, the other stretched out to one side. Maud had never had a problem charming people, and already Lizzie could see she had several fans among the women. Their faces were animated as they spoke with her. Lizzie had forgotten how much this difference between them bothered her. “Hi, Jane,” she said, “hi, Stella,” but was not surprised when the women found a reason to wander away.
Theo spilled out of Maud’s lap and into Lizzie’s, plucking at her shirt. Lizzie had a bottle in her bag but she resorted to the easy way out, loosening her shirt and giving him a breast. She saw Jane give her a look. Still nursing. At sixteen months. Lizzie sighed. “What were those things Greeks wore on their lower legs?”
“Greaves,” Maud said. “I was thinking the same thing. All these little Southwestern warriors running around with their turquoise and pottery-red greaves.”
“I knew you’d know.” Lizzie sounded grumpy, even to her own ears. She looked away from Maud’s puzzled glance and adjusted Theo’s pull against her breast. In apology she said, “Come for dinner?”
“I have to work. But thanks.”
“You sleeping any better?”
“Sometimes.”
Before Maud had moved out Lizzie had more than once found her downstairs gulping a double-bagged cup of chamomile tea at two, three, four in the morning, heard her rustling around in the den, saw the light seeping from beneath that door. After she’d moved into town she’d called in the middle of the night, crying, needing to talk, apologizing.
“Five minutes,” Michael Porter yelled. “Get those snacks down your gullets, now!”
The kids clustered around Mrs. Porter, who handed out slices of orange, cups of apple juice. Summer stood alone, sucking an orange slice. Lizzie’s heart ached: by avoiding her teammates, her daughter convinced herself she wasn’t being avoided by them. Theo pulled his mouth away from her nipple and pointed. “Eye.”
“Eye,” Lizzie repeated.
“I wish I’d played more team sports.” Maud bent over her outstretched leg, pointing, then flexing her booted foot. “But The Parents always had a class to teach, or a lecture to attend. They weren’t about to drive me around to softball games. Mom had more time when you got to that age—”
“Yeah,” Lizzie said, wanting to interrupt this.
“Maybe because in those two years they’d found some friends who were also parents. Parenting wasn’t just an intellectual exercise anymore—”
“Maybe, yes.”
“Lizzie,” Maud said.
“What?”
Maud let the tone of Lizzie’s voice resonate and then shrugged.
“Summer doesn’t get a chance to get good at anything.” Lizzie changed the subject. “They rotate positions every quarter. It’s Michael’s idea. The other teams don’t do it. I think it’s why we never win.”
“But I think that’s great! They learn that every position is equally important. That’s a good thing to know. Going into life.”
Lizzie wiped Theo’s face with the tail of her shirt. When Maud got going—comparing one thing in life to something else, or to life itself—she found herself getting tired. Compost, ball games, rug weaving. What had it been the other day? That aspen trees are the oldest trees on the planet. “Virtual immortality,” Maud told Lizzie.
“What we see as aspens are actually the branches of a larger organism. The actual tree is underground. What we call aspens are its branches sticking up out of the earth.” Maud had made a lot out of that one. Interconnection. Communion. Lizzie burrowed in Theo’s diaper bag for a cracker. What on earth difference did it make? You lived life or you didn’t, some good things happened and some bad, but there was no particular place to put the credit or the blame. Maud seemed to crave an intimate relationship with some higher essence, and worked harder to create it than Lizzie could ever remember working on—or even wanting—any of her own far more temporal ones.
“On the field!” Michael Porter yelled.
Lizzie groaned. “I can’t wait for this to be over.”
Maud gave her a look. “That seems unlike you.”
“I hate that phrase.” Lizzie was startled by the red rage traveling up her throat. “I hate it. Mom used to say it: ‘You’re just not acting like yourself, Lizzie.’ I wanted to scream, ‘Then who in hell am I acting like?’ ”
Maud laughed, nervously. Lizzie said, “I mean it. It’s myself that’s doing the acting here, except I’m not acting—I leave that up to you. I’m just being exactly who I am. Who else would I be?”
“Sorry,” Maud said.
“Sorry,” Lizzie imitated. She blew her whistle and trotted back to the middle of the field. She put Summer left this time, refusing to bend to her daughter’s clear appeal to be benched.
The tangle of limbs chased each other up and down the field. Lizzie had a hard time holding her mind on the game and was glad she could count on Michael to keep track of the score. Recently, driving into school, she’d heard a woman on a radio talk show remark, “Well, as they say, the unexamined life is not worth living.”
Lizzie had slapped her steering wheel. “Yes,” she’d said gleefully to the radio, “but an overexamined life isn’t being lived.” She’d been thinking of her sister at the time, but the phrase—both phrases—stuck in her head. She looked about now—at the children running down the field, at the trees going yellow and red in the woods next to the park, at the wink Michael Porter threw her, felt the seam of her blue jeans tight against her crotch, and thought about what was in the fridge that she could feed the kids for dinner. At the same time she wondered how one started such an examination. She didn’t want to be like Maud, who saw signs in everything—what it meant that she couldn’t find a parking space easily, the significance behind the phone company’s taking only three days instead of five to turn on her service.
“Go, Summer, go!” she heard Maud yell, and realized that the ball was heading toward her daughter.
“Go, Jackrabbits!” she shouted. For a moment Summer came alive, flying into the melee of bodies with something even approaching enthusiasm. But Buddy, the miniature football quarterback, slipped a deft foot into the swarm of limbs, got the ball away from Summer, and kicked it into the net. The Prairie Dogs went crazy. Summer turned her back on the field.
“Play ball!” Michael yelled, stopping Lizzie, who had started towards Summer. Maud was up on her feet, yelling, “Atta way, Summer! Good, good try!”
Mercifully soon, the game was lost and over. They walked to their cars, trailing a sulky Summer. “Why don’t you just take her home?” Lizzie said. “Adopt her. She likes you better than me anyway.”
“Lizzie, have I done something—”
“Don’t start. You keep saying you’ll never catch up, that everyone got started so long ago, what a mess you’ve made of things, but sometimes, I’ve got to tell you, your unencumbered circumstances look pretty damn good.” She held up a warning forefinger. “And don’t you dare say you’re sorry one more time.”
She picked up Hannah and her friend Stephanie from gymnastics on the way home. Their chatter in the back seat made her feel as if she drove a cage full of large parakeets. Summer sat morose in the passenger seat, staring out the window.
Stephanie paused as she was sliding out of the car. “My
mom saw an ad about piano lessons your aunt is giving and I get to take them.”
“Aunt Maudie?” Hannah said.
Lizzie felt oddly betrayed. Maud hadn’t told her.
“Yeah,” Stephanie said, excited. “She’s an actress.”
“I know that. I’ve seen her. On TV!”
“I saw her die,” Summer said.
“I’m her first student.”
“Can I do that, Ma? Take lessons from Aunt Maudie?”
“Perhaps. Would you like that too, Summer?”
Summer folded her arms, pushed her lower lip out.
Lizzie pulled the mail out of the letter box at the head of the drive. Amidst the collection of Christmas catalogues already beginning to arrive, she noticed a blue aerogram with familiar slanted handwriting. “A letter from Grams,” she said. Hannah demanded to read it right away. Summer said, “Let me,” but without much energy, and went back to staring out the window.
Sara’s yellow boat of an automobile was parked between Jeep’s car and Sam’s pickup in front of the house.
“Sara’s here! Can I go see them? Can I?” Summer danced in a panic of desire.
Lizzie raised her hands in submission. Summer raced up the hill. Hannah went into the house, saying, “Hi, Jeep,” as she closed the door behind her.
The wind blew Lizzie’s hair around her face. She stared up at Sam’s caboose. Sam had called it home for at least three decades, had been living there when Lizzie purchased the property. His presence, guaranteed in the sale, made the twenty-acre parcel extremely cheap. Few people visited him. For some years now only Sara ever came, although Summer ran up to the trailer almost daily.