My Life

by Maryrose Wood

AURORAROX: ooh, Marlena’s singing “Never Be Enough”

  BwayPhil: First act version or second act reprise?

  AURORAROX: first act.

  AURORAROX: i’ll hold my headphones to the screen

  AURORAROX: so you can hear

  BwayPhil: Funny.

  BwayPhil: Hey, I ***can*** hear it.

  AURORAROX: course you can, listen—

  “forever will have to be enough,

  not one day less will do,

  But forever will never be enough

  to celebrate allllllll

  myyyyyyyy

  loooooooooove—”

  BwayPhil: “for yooooooooou!!!!!”

  AURORAROX: *thunderous applause*

  BwayPhil: It’s Wednesday.

  AURORAROX: they did the show twice today

  BwayPhil: Sometimes I hate that they do it without us.

  AURORAROX: me too

  AURORAROX: but we will be there again soon

  AURORAROX: sleep tight now

  BwayPhil: Night, Em—thanks for the song.

  AURORAROX: don’t thank me

  AURORAROX: thank whoever

  AURORAROX: thank Aurora

  BwayPhil: Okay I will.

  BwayPhil: Thank you Aurora, whoever you are!

  5

  “THE TELEPHONE HOUR”

  Bye Bye Birdie

  1960. Music by Charles Strouse, lyrics by Lee Adams,

  book by Michael Stewart

  Although Emily and Philip always called it Philip’s house (as in, “See you later, Mom, I’m going to spend Saturday prepping for the PSAT at Philip’s house”—sometimes little white lies like this were necessary to explain what it was exactly the two of them did together every Saturday), the term “Philip’s house” was not technically accurate. Unlike most of the kids he knew, Philip and his brother, Mark, and their mother, when she was around, lived in an apartment, not a house. A “garden apartment,” it was called, in a complex called Birchwood Gardens.

  But there were no gardens, nothing that bloomed or smelled good or was nice to look at. The main geographic feature was a long, snaky parking lot that meandered like an asphalt stream around all the separate buildings of Birchwood Gardens, providing each apartment with two of its very own parking spots, whoop-de-doo. Like Philip would ever have his own car.

  Philip’s family had one of the upstairs apartments in D building, which was really a pair of attached duplex town homes. “Fastest gun in D-West!” Mark would joke, when he was acting stupid. That was pretty often.

  Mark was nineteen and enrolled in community college in alleged pursuit of a business degree, but he rarely attended classes. He liked to play video games, chase girls, and hang out with his equally boneheaded friends. Sometimes he did these things at his friends’ houses, but often they came over to Birchwood Gardens, apartment D-West, since Mrs. Nebbling was rarely home.

  Not that Philip’s mother was a bad parent; at least, Philip didn’t think she was. She had a solid track record of being a perfectly adequate and occasionally standout mother (homemade Halloween costumes were a particular strength, though Philip was too old for that now). She’d been home practically all the time when Philip and Mark were young.

  But that was before the divorce. Now, after three years of heroic effort, she’d finally passed the bar exam and gotten a job as an actual lawyer. She was making decent money, but three years of living off credit cards, student loans, and part-time jobs had dug a pretty deep hole for the remnants of the Nebbling family to climb out of. Nevertheless, Mrs. Nebbling refused to let Mark get a job until he finished school.

  “It’s bad enough I had to work my way through college,” she would say when Mark batted his bleary eyes and sweetly offered to drop out and apply for a graveyard shift at the local Dunkin’ Donuts, precisely because he knew she would never allow it. “You boys are going to have an easier time of it.”

  Of course, Philip would think bitterly, she has no idea just how easy a time Mark is having. That was because Mrs. Nebbling spent days at a time at the AllChem industrial storage facility in Wilmington, Delaware, wearing a hazmat suit and shouting questions through her mask to similarly dressed employees of AllChem. Some very nasty stuff had been dumped in the Delaware River, apparently. Now there was a lawsuit. Mrs. Nebbling’s firm represented AllChem, and her task was taking depositions.

  If my life were a musical, Philip sometimes thought, there would be a song called “Allied Chemical versus the State of Delaware.” It would start with twenty dancers dressed in hazmat suits, which they would soon tear off to reveal the spangled leotards underneath. The final chorus would have the dancers tapping and splashing their way through vats of noxious chemical goo.

  Sort of like “Singin’ in the Rain,” he would think. Only carcinogenic.

  Mark was far from an ideal big brother, but this didn’t mean he paid no attention to Philip. Quite the contrary: Mark had made it his personal mission to hound Philip into admitting that he was gay.

  “Look around you, dude. There’s just a lot of queer-type crap in this room, you know?” This was the conversation that made Philip later complain to Emily about Mark being a jerk.

  “They’re Playbills, you idiot. I collect them. They could be valuable someday,” Philip added, though he wasn’t really sure about this.

  Mark shrugged. “I’m just saying—you’re not showing a normal interest in girls.”

  “But I don’t like boys, either.”

  “That’s because you’re latent,” explained Mark, patiently feeding a fresh supply of fake IDs through the laminating machine he kept stashed under his bed. He sold these for a tidy profit. In most areas of his life Mark was lazy and dishonest, but when it came to his antisocial pursuits he was nothing short of entrepreneurial. “You’re gay, dude. You just don’t know it yet.”

  Philip found this kind of logic hard to refute, but talking to Mark was a waste of time anyway, so he didn’t bother to try.

  “Look who it is! Hey, guys! Are you seeing a show today? We’re seeing Mamma Mia! Oh my God! We heard it was great. Have you seen it? Was it great?”

  Five squealing girls from Eleanor Roosevelt High School had boarded the same Long Island Rail Road car as Emily and Philip and plopped themselves in the seats directly across the aisle. Now they would all be together for the full thirty-eight-minute ride.

  Emily knew their names. Michelle, Cindy, Chantal, Lorelei, and Beth. She’d had classes with some of them last year, and Beth was in the same period of Mr. Henderson’s English comp class.

  How did we not see them on the platform? thought Emily. We could have ducked into another car. Now I have to listen to them go on and on and on—

  “First we’re going to go shopping at H&M! And then we’re having lunch at Planet Hollywood. And then we’re going to the show. It’s at, um, three?”

  “Saturday and Wednesday matinees are at two,” said Philip dryly. “Sunday matinees are at three.”

  “Well, that’s confusing!” said Cindy.

  “It’s because the actors have another show to do at eight on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and they have to have a dinner break.” Philip explained. “It’s a union rule.”

  Michelle smiled and tossed her hair. “Okay, so then we’re seeing Mamma Mia! at two. And then if we really really love it, which we will because I hear it’s great, we thought we would go to Virgin and get the soundtrack CD.”

  “You mean cast album,” said Emily, trying not to sneer. “Soundtracks are from movies. Shows have cast albums.”

  “Same thing!” giggled Michelle. “And then we’re getting pedicures! Because it doesn’t have to be summer to have pretty feet, right?”

  “Pedicures, pedicures, pedicures!” Cindy and Chantal and Lorelei and Beth chirped in unison. Well, not really, but that’s what it seemed like in Emily’s head. Like they were starting a chirping, squealing musical number, like the one from Bye Bye Birdie where all the teenagers go crazy because some big singing star is co
ming to town. It was called “The Telephone Hour”; Philip had played it for her once.

  “Spring! Oh my God!” Cindy shrieked. “Did you hear? Evelyn told me that Frankie Russo told her that Mr. Henderson told him what the spring musical is going to be!”

  Chantal and Lorelei and Beth and Michelle started bouncing up and down on the seats. “What what what what what what?”

  Cindy frowned. “She said it was going to be Fiddler on the Roof.”

  A collective, disappointed sigh escaped the girls.

  “A classic,” said Philip. “One of the best shows ever.” Emily nodded in agreement.

  “Yes, but the costumes,” Chantal moaned. “Aren’t the characters, like, peasants?”

  “I guess we won’t be driving the football team wild with our Hot Box Girls costumes this year!” Lorelei quipped.

  At that, the five girls started spontaneously singing “A Bushel and a Peck” from Guys and Dolls in their highest, squeakiest voices.

  Emily slumped in her seat and hid behind her Week in Review section from last Sunday’s Times, which so far had not provided any inspiration for her persuasive essay, other than to argue that newspaper ink should be made less smudgy. And Philip wished he’d brought some aspirin. Didn’t these girls realize how idiotic they were? He’d seen them in Guys and Dolls last year, out of morbid curiosity. The band had sounded like—well, like a high school band. The voices were uneven. The dancing, embarrassing. The acting ranged from soap opera to nonexistent. And those tacky, sequined, far-too-revealing Hot Box Girls costumes—the stuff of nightmares! On Broadway, at least, if you were wearing a skimpy costume, it was because you actually had a great body. In high school, this was not always the case.

  “Hey, Emily!” said Beth. “Mr. Henderson is always saying how you’re some kind of theatre fanatic. How come you guys don’t try out for the shows?”

  Because you are deluded, Emily wanted to say. Because we know people who are trained actors, who are on Broadway, who are actually talented—who carry on like fools just like you do, but they’ve earned the right because they are really good at what they do!

  What she said was, “Because they su—”

  “We prefer,” Philip said, carefully interrupting Emily before she finished the last word, “the professional theatre.”

  “Huh,” said Michelle. “Whatever. So what show are you seeing today?”

  Emily smiled. “Aurora.” The word itself made her happy.

  “Aurora.” Michelle’s face looked semiblank but her voice maintained its high-pitched, overexcited tone. “Awesome! I haven’t seen that but I hear it’s great! Oh my God, have you seen Avenue Q? Have you seen Wicked?”

  The other girls started chattering.

  “I totally saw Wicked! It was great!”

  “I thought Phantom was great, too!”

  “I hear the food at Planet Hollywood is great.”

  “Our Mamma Mia! seats are really great!” added Cindy. “My mom bought the tickets. She said we were in the downstairs part.”

  “You mean the orchestra section?” Philip said.

  “Oh my God, I hope we’re not sitting with the band!” Cindy pretended to faint and the other girls giggled. “Though if we’re going to meet some cute musicians, maybe we should get our pedicures first!”

  Then they kicked off their shoes to compare feet, each one claiming hers were the absolute worst. Soon there were ten girlish legs waving around in the air, like the June Taylor Dancers.

  Not that they’d know who the June Taylor Dancers were, thought Philip. He looked over at Emily to catch her eye and share a moment of “Can you believe these dum-dums?” but Emily had propped her head against the window in despair and her eyes were closed.

  Philip glanced back at the giggling centipede and decided to follow Emily’s lead. Thank God for Fiddler, he thought, leaning back in his seat. Put these five in some ankle-length peasant dresses, quick.

  6

  “DIAMONDS ARE A GIRL’S BEST FRIEND”

  Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

  1949. Music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Leo Robin,

  book by Joseph Fields and Anita Loos

  As she and Philip walked from the Rialto Theatre to the Café Edison for their prematinee lunch date with Ian and Stephanie Dawson (their precious Aurora rush tickets had already been purchased and tucked into Philip’s backpack), Emily added up the expenses that would be incurred that day by the five-headed, shrieking spending machine that was Michelle, Cindy, Chantal, Lorelei, and Beth.

  A hundred dollars each for orchestra seats to Mamma Mia!

  Twenty-five dollars, easy, for lunch in that overpriced tourist trap.

  A trip to the Virgin Megastore to buy “soundtracks” (duh): another twenty-five dollars each.

  Pedicures? Who knew? Twenty dollars, Emily figured.

  Shopping? At least fifty dollars each, maybe more.

  Plus the fourteen-dollar round-trip train fare from Rockville Centre to Penn Station. And these girls would probably take taxis everywhere.

  Conservatively, then, each one of those squealing dimwits would be spending close to two hundred fifty dollars today.

  Two hundred and fifty dollars each! One thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars total!

  That was fifty discount rush tickets to Aurora. Practically a year’s worth.

  Thank goodness for Grandma Rose, Emily thought, and she resolved to spend no more than seven dollars at the Edison: that would cover a cup of soup, tax, and tip. She was craving a cheeseburger, but unlike Michelle, Cindy, Chantal, Lorelei, and Beth, Emily was on a budget.

  The very first time Emily had seen Aurora, it was her father’s brother, crazy Uncle David, who’d given her the tickets. Emily was thirteen at the time and too young to go by herself, so Grandma Rose had taken her.

  It was a fateful night, for her and for Philip as well—really, what were the odds of both of them being there at the first preview of a new musical hardly anyone had heard of? It only took one performance to forge their special, permanent bond—a bond as indelible as an autograph signed in the bold black ink of a Sharpie. . . .

  “Who is this Marlena Ortiz?” Grandma Rose had said as they gathered up their coats. The show was over and everyone was leaving, but young Emily, tears still wet on her cheeks, was frozen in her seat, staring at the empty stage. “Marlena Ortiz, she’s all right,” Grandma Rose decided. “No Ethel Merman, but cute. So, what did you think? Did you like it? I thought it was pretty loud. But that’s what the public goes for these days. Come on, darling, people want to get out.”

  Grandma Rose kept chatting as Emily stood up like a sleepwalker and allowed herself to be led out of the theatre. In her head it was all still going on. The story. The music. The dancing. Emily had seen a lot of Broadway shows, maybe even more than most girls from theatre-happy families in the New York metropolitan area, but she had never seen anything that touched her like this.

  Never be enough,

  My love for you could never be enough,

  Ten thousand years could never be enough

  To say what’s in my heart—

  “Come on, let’s get her autograph!” said Grandma Rose, waving the souvenir program she’d purchased for Emily. “Who knows, that Marlena Ortiz, maybe she’ll be a big star someday.”

  Emily and her grandmother pushed their way through the chattering mob outside the theatre. The air tingled with the collective excitement of 1,545 people who’d just been the first human beings on the planet to see a new Broadway musical:

  one that had the rare, intoxicating smell of a hit.

  The stage door of the Rialto was on the side of the theatre, down a short alley. The crowd waiting there numbered at least thirty and seemed to be mostly pros—professional autograph hounds who’d already amassed stacks of first-night Playbills, with Sharpie markers at the ready to thrust at whichever actor emerged first.

  “I know him,” Emily blurted out. One of the people in the front of the crowd, nearest th
e stage door, looked really familiar. In fact, she was sure he went to her school.

  “Philip, right?” she called over the din. “Philip?” She had to call again even louder, because the stage door had opened and everyone was screaming. But it was one of the musicians, dressed all in black and grinning with embarrassment that he wasn’t who the crowd wanted. “Philip Nebbling?”

  Finally hearing his name, Philip turned around. Thirteen years old but looking older because he was tall for his age, even skinnier than he’d be a few years later, eyes rimmed red from crying through the last twenty minutes of the show—Philip Nebbling had run off to the city by himself that night because he couldn’t bear to stay home and face what he’d just found out. (“A garlic farm?” he’d screamed at his mother as she’d tried to explain, the phone still in her hand. He’d lost his father to a woman with a garlic farm?)

  Now the show was over and he was standing at the stage door, waiting for what exactly he wasn’t sure. All he knew was that the worst day of his life had turned, improbably, into the best, and he wanted, he needed the magic of this night to last a few minutes longer. And now somebody was calling his name.

  From the expression on his face when he finally looked up and saw Emily calling to him, Emily could tell they were about to become best, best friends.

  Aurora.

  He got it, too.

  Afterward she and Philip had had to make do with only occasional visits to the show, funded at first by Emily’s accumulated birthday and Hanukkah money and later by Grandma Rose’s generosity. Unlike Emily’s parents, Grandma Rose didn’t need to be convinced that seeing the same show over and over again was a valid expense.

  “When your father was a baby,” Grandma Rose liked to recount to Emily at the dinner table, “once a week I left him with my sister for the afternoon, and you know what I did? I saw Fiddler on the Roof! Every Wednesday afternoon! With Zero Mostel, every Wednesday!”

  Mrs. Pearl would ladle more mashed potatoes onto everyone’s plates in an attempt to change the subject, but Grandma Rose was tenacious. “What a performance!” she would crow, gesturing with her fork. “So sad! So funny! So true!” Then she would sing: “If I were a rich man! Ya-hah-deedle-deedle-bubba-bubba-deedle-deedle-dum!”