Catching Heaven

by Sands Hall

  A single light burned on a table beside the chair. She stared at her reflection in the window. The white orb of breast emerged from the dark shirt, Theo’s head obscuring most of it. One of her hands curved under his body, the other, fingers splayed, cupped his head.

  “Ma?” In the window, Lizzie saw Summer’s figure in the doorway of the living room, papers in her hand. She watched Summer’s approach in the window.

  “I can’t figure out what I’m supposed to do.”

  Lizzie took a look at the papers Summer held out to her. Something to do with matching lower-case letters with their upper-case equivalent. She explained this and then watched Summer’s reflection cross the room and disappear in the rectangular light that was the door. She heard the creak of the kitchen chair, an irritated murmur from Hannah.

  She should get up and close the curtains, she thought. She was letting precious heat out into the cold and storm outside. But she stared at her reflection, listening to the howling prowling outside.

  There had been a time when Summer would not leave the room at all without her. She hadn’t noticed it as much with Hannah, perhaps, being busy with other aspects of first motherhood, but she had become aware of Summer testing her boundaries, again and again, leaving her mother but never leaving all the way. And when she did extend the compass of her wanderings to include rooms her mother wasn’t in, she would always check back over her shoulder, around the corner, a variation on the game of peekaboo.

  And then came the day when she hadn’t checked. She’d toddled to the door, legs wide around the bulge of diapers, and left without looking back. Lizzie had waited in vain, tears in her eyes, for Summer to peer back around the edge of the door. But Summer had found activity in another room. Lizzie, in a kind of desperation of loneliness, had eventually gone looking for her. Summer had squirmed away from her kisses and shouted, “Down!”

  Everyone left, Lizzie thought. She wasn’t sure why this would make her think of her mother, bravely having a sherry and a chocolate digestive alone in a shoppe in Oxford, waiting for Leopold to be done with his endless work. Or of Leopold, stooping to get through the shabby, unpainted doorway of her studio to cluck at her paintings.

  So they would go, her parents who were gone all the time anyway. The thought raised tears in her eyes. And in a different sense Theo would go. In yet another the girls would go—boys and perfume and secrets. And she no longer had Sam, alone above them in his windswept trailer. She had never paid attention to his being alone, whatever it was Driver had said. He hadn’t been alone—he had them. She hadn’t felt alone, she only now realized as a gust of wind rattled the windows, because she had him. “Sam,” she said, surprised at how still her reflection remained even as the wind howled and blustered around outside. For the first time she knew what Maud meant when she said she had no one to call. She couldn’t call Maud because Jake might be there. She couldn’t call Jake—which she just might be motivated to do on a night like this—because Jake was with Maud. And on such a night, with such an emptiness, she had been known to visit Sam. But Sam was not there. Would he ever be again?

  And Jeep and Rich were no doubt parked along a road somewhere, the windows all steamed up. Rich would have asked Jeep to give him a blow job. She thought of the car stopped by the steps of the Art Building, that long pause after Cal had practically slid down the steps and before the car had driven away. Amorphous shapes that were Jake and Maud moved on Maud’s futon, swelling and melding and burrowing and billowing beneath a feather comforter.

  She was startled when Theo pulled away from the nipple. She rotated him to her other breast, wondering how Cal was making out tonight. And Aaron, and Yvette. Everyone had someone. I’m gonna go eat worms.

  Which is what she’d wanted to yell out the window at Jake the day they’d fought about what was now Theo. “I miss having a baby around,” she’d told him when he’d pointed out that she already had two kids. “They haven’t figured out yet they can leave.”

  And then Jake had left.

  Sitting on her bed, she listened to him go down the stairs. She heard the kitchen door slam. His feet crunched ice on his way across the potholed driveway. She kept thinking she was going to run to the window and shout, “You going to go eat some worms, buddy?” It would have made him laugh. Summer had played the stupid little tape with that song on it—she’d gotten it from Sparky, plus tape player, for Christmas—so many times that Lizzie and Jake had spent a long, hysterical hour in bed one morning dreaming up ways to mangle, crush, bend-fold-and-mutilate the tape out of existence. Big ones little ones fat ones skinny ones, I’m going to go eat worms, they’d warbled in harmony. But in spite of the sound of Jake’s car starting up and then idling in the driveway, she hadn’t moved. For days afterward she’d held the phrase ready in her head, in case he should call. “You been eating worms?” and then, after the days went by, “How’re those worms you’ve been eating?” and other variations until the phrase no longer made any sense and like some irritating commercial jingle had gone round and round in her head, absurd, inappropriate. By then she was feeling relief, not remorse. No one else would call the shots. She could do exactly as she wanted. She’d had a kid before. She didn’t need help. Although, she had to admit, Theo’s labor had been hard, fast and fierce. She could have done with a hand to hold until it bled.

  I like them small, dependent. They haven’t figured out yet they can leave.

  What would have happened if Jake had asked her what the hell she meant? She hadn’t known at the time. But maybe now, too late, she had some idea. Until Summer, she hadn’t known how to love someone through their changes. Until Jake, she hadn’t thought she wanted to.

  “You just want what Maud wants,” she told herself.

  Theo’s breathing indicated he was asleep although his lips still worked around her nipple. She carried him up the stairs, lowered him into his crib, pulled the comforter up around his chin. All life was a process of leaving, she thought, staring down at him. She couldn’t keep having children forever. And what on earth would she do when Theo headed out that door and didn’t look back?

  CHAPTER 26

  MAUD

  This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,

  That presses them and learns them first to bear

  Making them women of good carriage.

  —ROMEO AND JULIET

  “Hold, Toby!” Maud shouted as she ran. Her skirts flared around her ankles. “On thy life I charge thee, hold!”

  The two men lowered their swords and backed away from each other. A third wrung his hands and whimpered. Toby looked sheepish. His chest heaved. Heavy but nimble, he brandished his sword one last time in the direction of the very handsome Sebastian, who stood to one side, eyeing Maud with admiration.

  Maud whirled on Toby. “Ungracious wretch! Will it be ever thus?” She reined herself in from the rest of this scathing diatribe when she heard two claps and an “Okay!”

  “That was better,” Chris Daugherty said from his place halfway back in the auditorium. “Toby, it’s harder for you to stop fighting. Once your blood lust is up, you’re hard put to rein it in. Remember. Your swordsmanship is legendary.”

  Ron Bartlett saluted with his foil and lunged, expertly. “I shall obey.” He burped, swerved in the direction of Henderson, playing Andrew Aguecheek, and draped himself over his shoulder. “How now, sot!”

  In an effort to keep warm in the cold theater, Maud wore an enormous sweater, and leggings under her rehearsal skirt. She watched Chris walk towards the stage, checking his notepad. “Sebastian. You’re on the right track ogling Olivia. But wait a bit. You’re doing it too soon. Sir Toby has accosted you for no reason as far as you can see. You need to answer this assault on your manhood. Let Olivia’s charms work on you more slowly.”

  Peter nodded. Chris had done well casting Peter as Viola’s twin brother. Like Bobbie, he was tall, slim, dark-haired; even the length of their hair was similar.

  “That’s just right, Henders
on.” Chris pointed at Andrew Aguecheek. “You obsequious little fuck.”

  A hoot of laughter came from Bobbie, sitting in the back of the auditorium.

  “But you haven’t quite given up hope that Olivia may fall in love with you. So you can resent the hell out of this little Sebastian fellow, especially when it becomes clear that Olivia has the hots for him.”

  Chris turned to Maud. “Sorry we keep stopping. We’ll get past this entrance one of these tries. You need to crank up the voltage. Whip Sir Toby with your rage. He’s walking on thin ice. He’s only here on your forbearance. And keep in mind, Toby—without Olivia’s generosity, you have nothing in the world. Except your swords.”

  “Both of them,” Ron cackled.

  “Both of them. And that for some reason Maria loves you.” Chris leapt up onto the stage. He had studied fencing and broadsword extensively, and held a diploma in fight choreography. “Try this,” he said, taking Ron’s foil. He demonstrated a deft wrist-cocked, upward-moving block.

  Peter was peering at his script. “What’s ‘Lethe’? At the end of this I say I’m happy to steep in Lethe. It can’t be some kind of tea—some kind of water?”

  “River of forgetfulness,” Maud and Chris answered simultaneously. Chris waved in Maud’s direction. “Ask her.” Maud went over the script with Peter while Chris finished up with Ron. “Once more,” Chris said as he jumped back off the stage. “I know you have to get to work, Maud. This time I’ll let it run to the end.”

  They started the scene again. Maud rode the tide of verse to the end of the speech:

  Will it be ever thus? Ungracious wretch,

  Fit for the mountains and the barbarous caves

  Where manners ne’er were preached. Out of my sight!

  Arms extended, she swayed towards Sebastian. “Be not offended, dear Cesario.”

  Sebastian pulled back, repeating, “Cesario?” Maud finished the rest of her speech to him, stroking his face, making as much of him as she dared, and was gratified when Bobbie’s merry laugh rang out. “Good, good,” Chris called.

  “How runs the stream?” Sebastian said, weaving.

  Or I am mad, or else this is a dream.

  Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep.

  If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!

  Maud touched his arm. “Would thou woulds’t be ruled by me.”

  Sebastian stared. “Madam,” he said slowly, “I will.”

  Chris clapped again. “Much better. Get out of here, Maud. Hope we didn’t make you late.”

  Maud pulled off the rehearsal skirt and stuffed it, her thermos of tea, and her script into a large bag. On her way up the aisle she paused next to Chris, who was ticking off notes on a pad filled with scribbles. “I need a day and a night off to go visit a sick friend. It’s pretty important.”

  Chris nodded. “Not a problem until we start doing run-throughs next week. Call me at the office.”

  Maud waved to the men still up on stage. “But there the lady goes,” Peter called. Ron tried another burp. Bobbie, studying lines at the back of the auditorium, looked up to say, “Farewell, fair cruelty.”

  As she walked through the lobby Count Orsino executed an elaborate bow in her direction. His courtiers, waiting to rehearse the first scene, strode about, strutting, posing in the attitudes Chris had drilled into them.

  She paused by the lobby doors, reluctant to leave, watching an actor angle a foot just so, another recover fallen juggling balls, another try on a line reading, tell an exuberant anecdote. Beyond them, through the open double doors into the auditorium, gleamed the box of light that was the stage. Chris was the dancing figurine found in a musical jewel box, demonstrating another piece of elegant swordplay.

  Outside, the high lamps of streetlights swam in mist-induced halos. She walked to the Red Garter through snowflakes so tiny as to be almost invisible, delicate as confetti against her face.

  Green garlands, interspersed with paper four-leaf clovers, twisted along the stairs and balcony of the Red Garter. One of the cocktail waitresses, a new one, moved through the tables. Bart winked at Maud. “Tell those girls to get down here before Barney’s wrath erupts.”

  Maud clocked in and ran up the stairs to the dressing room. Ginger was in the position she took habitually while she was on break: lying on the bench, smoking. Two of the new waitresses, Kathie and Trixie, hired for the crowds that ski season brought, dressed near their lockers. Maud banged her own locker open, stripped out of her leggings and sweater, pulled on the fishnets and boned leotard. As she jostled her way to a place in front of the mirror, she admitted to a sudden chord of contentment. The spraying of hair and the brushing of blush, the shy murmurs of the new waitresses, Ginger’s occasional drawled ironic comment took her backstage: the same camaraderie, the same sense of heightened excitement about what the night ahead would bring.

  Ginger had one arm thrown over her eyes. Without lifting it, she said, “There’s a guy down there looking for you.”

  “For me?”

  “For you.”

  Applying mascara, Maud questioned her own face in the mirror. It wouldn’t be Jake. They’d spent a pleasant evening having a few beers, but they’d mostly talked about Lizzie—surreptitiously, as if she might be in the next room. She watched her eyes widen as she thought about Driver. Had he somehow found out where she worked?

  “It’s a producer,” Trixie said. “He’s just discovered you left L.A. and come to fetch you back.”

  Maud laughed, once, and popped the top off her lipstick.

  For some reason Trixie and Kathie seemed to find this response hysterical. Maud was puzzled, but gratified. The two girls, both barely twenty-one, made her feel cool and experienced, a woman with an “attitude.” At times they even made her feel wise, as if her opinions about men and life and Hollywood and even breathing were items they would write into a notebook if they happened to be carrying one.

  “Maybe it’s an L.A. agent,” Kathie suggested. A pile of moussed and sprayed hair above her forehead shifted like a tangle of tiny horns with any movement of her head. “Maybe they heard how good you are in your play.”

  Maud pulled her fishnets tight. “By leaving Hollywood I’ve cast myself on a dustheap. I’m a cracked plate, a damaged light fixture, a burned mattress. No one wants me anymore.” She was touched at the look on Kathie’s face. “I’m not putting myself down, I swear. No one follows a career the size of mine. Out of sight, out of mind. If you don’t constantly put yourself in their face, they forget you.”

  “But you were making it. You were on TV,” Kathie said. Trixie nodded.

  They looked so much alike—brunette, petite, pretty—that Maud sometimes had to resort to the color of their leotards to tell them apart. She waved her mascara wand at them. “Do you know how many leggy brunettes are invariably waiting in a casting director’s office? Do you know how often characters I auditioned for were named Kate, just as the blondes are called Marilyn? They’re looking for types: the Kate type, the Marilyn type. That’s what’s so hard to fathom. They’re not looking for you. And you think they are.”

  “But you don’t all look alike.”

  “I bet we do if you’re on the other side of the casting table. If the character breakdown calls for her to be in jeans and a tank top, or in a tailored suit, we all show up in jeans and tank tops, or tailored suits. What does it take to stand out? Tits? Connections? Talent?” She shrugged. “Who knows? Sometimes you know you nailed it, and that’s magical. But mostly, on the way home from an audition, you pound the steering wheel. Or drive dully along the freeway with a million other souls alone in their cars. You’re just normal. You didn’t knock their socks off. And you wonder who did.”

  Trixie touched the swarm of hardened hair above her forehead. “Well, we still can’t believe you just left. You had agents and everything. As soon as Kathie and me get enough money together we’re heading for Hollywood.”

  “Out with the old, in with the new.” Ginger drew on
a cigarette, her lowered eyelids a brilliant parrot green.

  “Thanks so much,” Maud said, a little shocked.

  “She’s not old,” Trixie and Kathie chorused.

  “And you girls better hustle your sweet little butts or you’ll be fired before Ms. Hollywood here has a chance to offer any more of her priceless bits of advice.”

  Even from the heavily ironic Ginger this comment seemed barbed. Kathie and Trixie fled. Maud thought about asking Ginger what was bothering her, but decided to drop it. She inserted a last hairpin to anchor her antennae. The conversation made her realize how little she’d heard from anyone connected to her L.A. life, in spite of the occasional postcard mailed to agents and friends. She had not disturbed the waters with either her coming or her going. It had been months since she and Miles had spoken.

  She turned to look at her own startled eyes in the mirror. Was it Miles who waited for her to emerge through the door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY? Had Miles tracked her down at the Red Garter? Would he place her, fishnet stockings and all, on the back of his Rock’n Roll’n horse, to ride off into a glorious sunset? Curious that it was not an appealing idea.

  Rapid footsteps sounded on the carpeted stairs outside.

  Ginger sat up. “That’ll be Jeep.”

  Jeep banged through the door. She looked awful. She’d slathered heavy base onto her skin, and her eyes were limned with black, the result—Maud recognized it immediately—of crying over eye makeup and having to replace it.

  Maud moved to put an arm around her.

  “Don’t.” Jeep twisted away, banged open her locker, and began to strip.