Missing Mr. Wingfield

by E. Christopher Clark

  I suppose, in some way, you must still love Des too. Right? I mean, that was puppy love or whatever, but still.

  And, I mean: do you ever stop loving the people you’ve loved anyway? Ever completely stop, that is? I mean: how could you? Love is like a horcrux, isn’t it? You know what I’m talking about, right? Horcruxes are those awful left-behind bits of bad guy we found about in the latest Harry Potter. Love is like a horcrux, I say, only not as evil. You carve off a piece of yourself for every person you love and you leave it behind, just like Voldemort does when he kills someone. A souvenir that’s forever. That’s what love is. At least I think so.

  Anyway, I’m so sorry that Robin is gone, Uncle Michael. I guess that’s all I wanted to write you about. I know we’ll talk on the phone tonight, but I know you’ll move right past the uncomfortable stuff and into wishing me a happy birthday and reassuring me that I didn’t steal any birthday thunder from you, none at all. I know that’s what you’ll do, and I wanted to get this out while I was feeling it as hard as I’m ever going to feel it. After all, that’s what she would have done. Right?

  Love,

  Tracy

  To: Michael Silver

  From: Tracy Silver

  Subject: Nancy Sinatra

  Date: November 22, 2010

  * * *

  Dear Uncle Michael,

  Attached is the essay I wrote about your band last year. I’m sending it now because I know, when I arrive in Honolulu this week, you’re going to do nothing but pester me until I hand it over. And, apart from visiting the college and prepping for my interview and all that, I don’t want to look at a screen for the entire time I’m there. I want to lie on the beach, perpetrating a tan, so that a brother with money might be my man. In a manner of speaking. I hope Jenna can get some time off to come with. A wingwoman is always appreciated, especially to keep overbearing uncles from ruining innocent fun.

  And, before you ask: no, I am not packing my one piece. The bikini is all I’m bringing. And you can just get over it.

  Anyway, look at me avoiding the subject.

  About the essay: the truth is, even though I’m using it as my writing sample, I’m not sure it’s very good. I’m not sure anything I’ve written is very good. Des tells me to shush when I say these things, but she’s not an artist. And I can’t go to Mom, because she might tell me that I’m right. She might put her hands on my shoulders, look me dead in the eye, and tell me that I suck. Just to spare me the life of the tortured artist, the life she longed for when she was raising me but that totally exhausts her now.

  So, I’m coming to you. And I want you to be as honest with me about my writing as you are about the angles of my Instagrams.

  Am I any good?

  And I know right now that you’re like: where is this coming from? I have never suffered from a lack of confidence. In fact, I’ve made others suffer because of my confidence. But, see, that’s the thing.

  You remember Brian Meltzer? I got suspended for pantsing him today. Right in the library, after I caught him checking out the ass of a girl we’d just been tutoring. And maybe it wouldn’t have been as bad, maybe I would’ve gotten just a slap on the wrist, if the dumb asshole hadn’t been going commando today.

  That’s right, after I pulled his pants to the floor, what I found myself staring at as I crouched there behind him, hoping the girl would turn around and see him in his tightie whities—what I found myself staring at was the dumb asshole’s dumb asshole.

  Or, well, it was really the hairy crack of his lily-white ass. But I’m a writer, so I couldn’t resist the repetition of dumb asshole. I mean, could you?

  Maybe you could. Maybe that’s what makes you a better artist than I’ll ever be. I mean, I’ve watched you stare at a canvas for an hour before making a mark. And when you were doing that portrait of my mothers a couple years back, I remember how you stood there after they told you it was done, just stood there before breakfast every day for a week, your English muffin going cold as you tried to figure out what was missing. Then, on the last day of your vacation, while Jenna was packing up your rental, you picked up your brush and made the bags under Mom’s eyes just a smidgen darker. I was standing in the doorway, and you turned to me, and I was ready to tell you that you’d done it, that you’d captured her exhaustion just right. I was ready to reassure you that you hadn’t fucked it up, that it was just the right amount.

  But you didn’t ask. You smiled, you gave me a quick hug, and you said goodbye.

  And you know what? When Mom and Des came back inside from waving you and Jenna off, they looked at it and they couldn’t tell the difference. Which made me wonder if I could tell the difference. So I sat there the rest of the morning looking at it, until my stomach started grumbling and the smell of the grill outside called me out to lunch. And it was only as I was digging into one of Des’ famous double-stuffed cheeseburgers, it was only then that I realized it didn’t matter if any of us noticed. You noticed. You knew it was done. And that’s all that mattered.

  But I’m sitting here, Uncle Michael, staring at this screen, pausing between each paragraph to click CTRL + A like you taught me (because people who need a mouse to Select All are wasting precious, precious time). I’m sitting here, thinking about how the principal made me feel like an idiot today when I tried to lord it over her about Mr. Wingfield’s role in The Glass Menagerie. I’ve only read that play like a hundred times, but she schools me without breaking a sweat? I’m a pompous bitch. Pompous and totally dumb. I don’t know what I’m talking about, even when I know what I’m talking about.

  So now, as I nibble the nails on one hand, the index finger of my other hovers over the Delete key. And I’m thinking about what I’ll do after I delete all of this, about how I’ll go to the airline’s website and cancel my flight, how I’ll go to the college’s application portal and withdraw myself from consideration, how I’ll withdraw myself from every goddamned thing. I’m thinking about how all I want to do is curl up in the attic above the barn, hiding amongst the costumes and the props until I become someone else through osmosis.

  A month ago, we put on Uncle Matt’s play about the day he came out. It starts with the hide and seek scene, the one where you’re hiding beneath the couch, the last to be discovered. And Mom’s hiding in the closet, because Uncle Matt is nothing if not on the nose. And Auntie Ashley is “it.” And she finds the two of them first, but she can’t find you, not until you sneeze from the dust of a thousand Silvers gone to ghost. Ashley leaps up onto the couch then and bounces up and down until you reveal yourself. “You should be nicer to your brother,” Mom and Uncle Matt tell her. But she doesn’t stop until you’re all called down to dinner, to the dinner where the whole family is going to fall apart.

  In the play, Uncle Matt lingers on you for a moment after everyone else is gone. The critics didn’t get it, and said as much in their reviews. But I loved it, because the actor playing you, the little boy, he sat there and, just as he was about to cry, he gave his head a violent shake and pulled a sketchbook from his backpack. I’m not sure that’s the way it happened, but I like to think it is.

  But when I think about that scene, it makes me cry. Because I don’t have anything like that. I don’t have any moment I can point to where I became a writer. And I’m worried that’s because I’m not a writer, because I never will be.

  The new one that Matt’s finishing, the one that’ll be playing when you and Jenna come to visit next spring, it’s about Old Silas and his goddamned boot. You know that old chestnut? The one about our ancestor who was lost at sea and the son who was terrified of the ocean as a result? Well, Matt’s put zombies and witchcraft and a murder most foul into it. Really juicy stuff, going for a grand guignol feel. And he asked me to take a look at it, give him some feedback. Which I suppose says something. But does it say that he’s pitying me, which is what the voices in my head want me to think, or does he trust my judgement as a fellow wordwright, which is what I’m sure you’ll say? Who knows?


  All I know is that, whenever I read it, I get this sneaking suspicion that it’s trying to tell me something. That I’m not brave enough to put on the boot.

  And maybe I’m not. And maybe that’s the problem.

  You’d put on the boot, wouldn’t you? Maybe not now, now that you’re a husband and a professor and a father figure and all that. But your band was a boot, right? And all the adventures with Jenna before you got married. And maybe even moving to Hawaii was a boot. You might have drowned at any moment, but didn’t, and you didn’t care.

  What’s my boot, Uncle Michael? Have I already thrown it away?

  Love,

  Tracy

  P.S. Stop laughing. You were melodramatic when you were 18, too.

  * * *

  P.P.S. You have to change your password, dude. I sent an earlier version of this by mistake and totally hacked in to delete it before you could see it.

  V

  What To Look for in a Man

  March 2011

  18

  The Weight of Your World on His Shoulders

  Once upon a time, they used the old barn as a garage and nothing more. But these days, the creaky old outbuilding was whatever they needed it to be. In the past year, it had been the office of a gesticulating attorney, the apartment of southern woman and her crippled daughter, the drawing room of an English manor, and, of course, an uninhabited island on which a Neapolitan ship had just wrecked. Tonight, this weekend, it was an approximation of the house that had once stood just up the hill, of that house’s parlor in particular. And tonight, more than any other night—and that was saying something—it seemed haunted by the spirits the actors had conjured. All was quiet, and all were gone, but Tracy Silver did not feel alone.

  She crept across the stage with a milk crate, tidying up. So many props in this one: there was an opened box on the coffee table, an overturned tea cup and saucer next to that, and a discarded apron beneath the ornate Victorian chair that sat center stage. Off to one corner rested a bloodied and muddied boot, the kind a mariner might wear—the boot her own ancestor had worn, it turned out. Tracy picked it up last, set her crate on the table, and then slumped down into the chair.

  She held the boot the way she might hold Yorick’s skull, if her mothers ever gave her the chance, and she looked upon it the way she imagined the Dane might look upon the final remains of that infinite jester: with puzzlement and melancholy and then, just at the end, with a hint of righteous anger.

  Tracy slipped off her own shoe and made to fit the boot upon her foot, but she was stopped short. Just outside the theater, there were voices approaching, four of them. She dropped the boot and hurried toward the back of the stage, making for the alcove that led upstairs to the dressing rooms and the attic. But she did not flee to the upper levels, not yet. She hid behind the door and listened.

  “What I’ve never understood,” said Desiree, “is why your grandfather’s sister—”

  “—Great Aunt Dottie—” said Veronica, yawning.

  “Yes,” said Desiree. “The cartoonist! That’s the one. I’ve never understood why she needed an alias in the first place.”

  There was another voice now, a man’s, Michael’s. He said, “Did you read my book?”

  “I tried,” said Desiree. “But, y’know, Professor Smarty-Pants, we needed something to replace the coffee table’s broken leg and—”

  There was laughter then, even from Michael, who went on to say something about lesbians breaking into comics in the 1940s. Tracy stopped listening, tried to tune him out. It was one thing to see him from across the way, as she had tonight,—and as she had, unbeknownst to him, on the night in Hawaii when he ruined everything—but it was another to hear him speak. She wasn’t ready for that yet, not after what had happened. Soon—the nip bottle in the cooler out back had been prepared especially for this confrontation, after all—but not now. Tracy looked down at her feet as she tried to summon a song, something to drown him out, but before even one note had hummed its way through her brain, another damned thing grabbed her attention. Her right foot, it was bare. Her shoe was still on stage.

  Without thinking, she raced back to grab it. And that, of course, was when they spotted her.

  “Hey,” said Michael. “There’s the girl of the hour.”

  “Hi,” said Tracy.

  “Where are you off to?” said Michael.

  Jenna nudged him with her elbow. “Can’t you see she’s striking the set?”

  “There’s not someone else who can do that?” said Michael.

  Tracy knelt to put her shoe back on. “It’s my job,” she said as she tied her laces.

  “Says who?” said Michael.

  “Says Mum,” said Tracy, pointing at Veronica, who had slumped into the chair, eyes closed.

  “Veronica!” said Michael.

  “Nnnwhat?”

  “Did you tell Tracy she had to clean up this mess?”

  “It’s her job,” said Veronica.

  Michael turned to face Desiree. “C’mon, seriously, you let her saddle the kid with—”

  “I’m just the stepmom,” said Desiree. “Veronica gave birth to her. She makes the rules.”

  Tracy stood, brushing dust off the knee of her stage blacks. “We run a theater out of our barn,” she said. “Everyone has to do their part, Michael. It’s fine.”

  “It’s not fine,” he said. “You’ve been busy over here since the moment Jenna and I got to town. I haven’t even had a second to congratulate you on—Hey, wait, did you just call me Michael?”

  Jenna chuckled. “That is your name, dear.”

  “No,” said Michael. “I know. But… what happened to the Uncle part?”

  “Technically,” said Tracy, “you’re not my uncle.”

  “Excuse me?” said Michael.

  “You’re my mother’s cousin,” said Tracy. “Technically, that makes you my first cousin, once removed.”

  “You’ve been calling me Uncle Michael your whole life.”

  Tracy sighed, exasperated. “Can I go now? Please?”

  Veronica waved her off as she curled up into the chair again. “Sooner you’re finished,” said Veronica, “sooner we can all get to bed.”

  And with that, Tracy picked up her milk crate and made her exit. But this time, she didn’t hang around to eavesdrop. This time, she hurried up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and made straight for the dressing room, dropping the crate onto the props table along the way.

  She rifled through the costume rack, searching for the outfit she’d hidden there, in plain sight, in a place neither mom would think to look. There was no telling how long it would take them all to clear out, but they wouldn’t wait for her forever, and the chances of them coming up here instead of just calling for her—if they even bothered with that—were slim. So, she might as well get dressed, get ready.

  Downstairs, a door opened. Tracy peeked out the window and saw Veronica, Michael, and Jenna step out onto the lawn. That was good. It was all good.

  She changed, transformed herself. The stage blacks were balled up on the floor now, replaced with jeans that hugged her hips, a sweater that bared one shoulder, and a pair of sunglasses so big they gave her back a sense of mystery the other garments gave away.

  “Sunglasses at night?” said Desiree, suddenly behind her.

  “What?” said Tracy.

  Desiree stood silent for a moment, sizing her up.

  “What?” Tracy said again.

  Desiree put a hand to her mouth and began to shake her head.

  “What?”

  “You’re pregnant,” said Desiree, falling backwards into a chair. “And don’t lie. I can tell. I was with your mom when she found out she was pregnant with you.”

  “I’m not—”

  “How did it happen? Did you use a condom? I mean, seriously, given the family history—”

  “For serious, Des! I’m not,” said Tracy, sitting now herself. “I’d cross my heart, but it’s two siz
es too small and awfully hard to find.”

  “Are you having sex?” said Desiree.

  “And what if I was, Mother Abigail?”

  “Who is Mother Abi—”

  “Never mind,” said Tracy. “Point is: I’m older than Mum was when Dad—”

  “That man is not your father,” said Desiree, leaning forward, shaking a finger at her, looking more like a mother than she ever had before. Every gray hair, all dozen or so of them, seemed to glint in the light as she shook that finger.

  “I’m sorry,” said Tracy, trying not to laugh at the beauty queen aging before her very eyes. “The Runt. I’m older than Mum was when the Runt knocked her up. And, anyway, I haven’t had it yet. I’m just thinking about it.”

  “Well, stop thinking. It is way too early for you to—”

  “This coming from the Handjob Queen of Roller Kingdom. Tell me again: how many pairs of leather pants did you stroke on metal night for free French fries?”

  Desiree ducked her head. “We were stupid when we were kids,” she said. “Our job as parents is to make sure you learn from our mistakes, not repeat them.”

  Tracy sighed a heavy sigh. “I did not choose wisely on this one,” she said.

  Desiree looked up again, her eyes wide, her jaw drooping. “You were going to tell me and not your mom?”

  “That was the plan, Jan.”

  Desiree set a hand on Tracy’s knee and squeezed. “You are too smart,” she said, “and you know this family too well to think you can get away with secrets like that.”

  “I came to you because I thought you’d understand,” said Tracy.

  “No,” said Desiree. “You came to me because you thought I’d give you permission.”