fiefoe | "Tom Lake"

Whoever suggested that Meryl Streep should narrate Ann Patchett's novel about a young woman's coming of age in the theatre world (mostly about that, but also about climate change) is a genius.

We were regular girls who would’ve had no idea how to make adults feel judged based on their lack of theatrical experience.
Parents must have been looking for childcare because what ten-year-old boy announces over breakfast that he wants to be Wally Webb?
And so Mr. Saxon cleared his throat and, after waiting a full minute longer than what would have been merely awkward, he began.
One after the other, the Stage Managers walked out onto the proscenium and began. The awkward ways these men held their bodies, and how the paper trembled in their hands, were things no high school girl should ever see... The dichotomy was neck-up neck-down: Some had one and some had the other, but no one managed both and several managed neither.
None of the books I’d read were as important as this, none of the math tests or history papers had taught me how to act, and by “act” I don’t mean on a stage, I mean in life. What I was seeing was nothing less than how to present myself in the world. Watching actors who had memorized their lines and been coached along for months was one thing, but seeing adults stumble and fail was something else entirely. The magic was in identifying where each one went wrong.
Every Stage Manager came with an unintended lesson: clarity, intention, simplicity. They were teaching me.
When I turned a hem or took in a waistband, they looked at me like I was Prometheus coming down from Olympus with fire. <> If you wonder where the decency is in alterations, I can tell you: my grandmother. She was both a seamstress and a fountain of human decency.
“It isn’t funny,” I tell them. “You know that. It isn’t a funny story except for the parts that are.” <> “Life,” Nell says, dropping her head against my shoulder in a way that touches me.
Emily has never been able to sit on furniture like a normal person. I lost that fight when she was still a child. Whoever installed her interior compass put the magnet in upside down.
“You can at least tell us which one of you ended up with him,” Nell says.
“We all ended up with ourselves.”
The girls groan in harmony. It’s their best trick.
“No,” Nell says. “No. At Tom Lake? Duke was George.”
“I was there. None of you were born.”
“But all three of us can’t have it wrong,” Emily says, as if their math outweighs my life.
In any given year more girls who had once played Emily attended the University of New Hampshire than any other university in the country, all of us thinking that we had nailed the part.
a sudden warm spell, and then the spectacle of trees in bloom. Emily and Maisie and Nell ignored the trees and chose to chip away at their sanity with news feeds instead.
I picture the farm as a giant parquet dance floor he balances on his head, the trees growing up from the little squares. The fruit that must be picked, the branches that must be pruned, the fertilizer and insecticide (just try growing cherries without it), the barn full of broken machinery along with the new tractor we can’t afford and the goats that seemed like such a good idea five years ago
Onstage he looked at me like someone had dropped a giant Mason jar over us and we were alone in the world. He was the one who taught me how not to look away.
You might want to do something else,” my husband echoed, but what he meant was Yes and Please and Thank you. The farm is either the very paradise of Eden or a crushing burden of disappointment and despair manifested in fruit, depending on the day.
The girls believed we were so old then, their father and I, that they took into account we might not remember our own lives. “We dated while we were in a play.”
And so back I went, this time sliding into the long black car like someone who was used to it; the first time is luxury, the second time privilege.
“Where?” I popped a kumquat in my mouth the way bored girls in L.A. will do. The sourness was akin to being electrocuted but I betrayed nothing.
I went through my options quickly, a feeling not dissimilar to my drink order: I could be indignant or offended, or I could just follow him to the elevator. Didn’t everybody have to sleep with somebody eventually in this business? Would I sleep with him if it meant I’d get to play Emily on Broadway opposite Spalding Gray? <> Yes. Yes I would.
We won’t look down the rows at what seems to be an unbroken field of red dots, a pointillist’s dream of an orchard. If we opened our minds to all the cherries waiting to be picked, we’d go home and back to bed.
Who can listen to complaints about actors in the presence of so many cherry trees, miles and miles of them in full ceremonial headdress?
Tom Lake turned out to be crushingly pretty... Fruit trees bloomed, paths meandered, hills swelled, like someone had clipped pictures out of a pile of magazines and then glued the very best ones together on a single page... The whole thing was a fragile ecosystem, as small towns and theater companies usually are, but as far as I could see it was thriving.
My mind did that quick mental calculation women must make when they find their exit blocked by a man who don’t know. How far down if I had to go out the window? Too far, I was guessing.
‘Tom’s Lake,’ he says, and what he’s telling her is that all of this is his, his and his family’s but eventually his because he’s the oldest son, and therefore hers in part, but of course that’s not the way she hears it. She says, ‘That’s so sweet. But really, what’s the name of the lake?’... And at that moment, standing there with his bride-to-be, he realizes that this body of water he has only heard referred to by his own name was not named for him at all, and that it did not belong to him. Worse yet, he has no idea what the lake was called... “He told her that he didn’t know the name of the lake, and that he had only this minute realized this fact, and that his nanny, and truly, his entire family, had infantilized him, not with malicious intent, but as a sort of sweet joke that was emblematic of both their love and how he had been coddled his entire life. .. “This would have been his Siddhartha Gautama revelation, the moment the prince casts off his wealth to go and live among the suffering and the poor to seek his spiritual path, but he loved her too much.”
Isn’t that the way long marriages are? You can turn off the sound and still know the answer. “Everybody liked Duke. Everybody including me.” His eyes wander back to his plate.
It hadn’t occurred to me until we started reading the funeral scene that I was now the age of Emily in the third act, and that no matter how young I looked, I would age out of the part in time because time was unavoidable. I thought of all those women dressed as girls who’d showed up to audition at my high school. No one gets to go on playing Emily forever.
The entire life span of summer stock is four months—four months birth to death—so time must move faster now. Duke was the person I knew best at Tom Lake. We had been alone together in my room. I had seen him act and felt moved and surprised by what he was capable of. He had seen me act and so waited for me at the door while the others said good night. We had known each other for a matter of hours, but they were summer-stock hours, which in the outside world would have translated to a solid six months.
Duke took my hand and started swinging it so as not to appear tender. I could feel the current of his life flow into my fingers and up my arm and travel into the muscle of my heart.
For so many years I have kissed him. For so many years I have not kissed another soul, and there is a deep and abiding comfort in this.
Maisie reads journal articles about small-animal vaccinations, and Emily reads journal articles about weed control and pesticides, and Nell reads novels and plays, each of them marveling at the other two.
“Outed by Pictionary,” Maisie says.
Nell looks from her sister back to me. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Of course you should have. How else would we have known?” I can hear the petulance in my voice.
Our eldest daughter is going to marry our neighbors’ son, a boy she loves, a boy we love, and I am mad at Duke, who, through no fault of his own, or through only the fault of his essential Dukeness over which he had no control, tore the fabric that bound me to my daughter. And though it has been repaired, expertly, repeatedly, this lumpy seam remains between us that keeps her from telling me she’s getting married.
When all of this is done we feel that we have lived enough for an entire day. We’ve done enough. Now we should be able to go home, sit on the porch or in the bathtub, go back to bed with our books and our dog and our sewing, but the truth is the sun is ticking up and we’ve barely started to work.
“Then whichever one of you is less sick will pull your shit together and go on anyway,” Pallace explained. “Dancers always go on. If you ever see a notice that a dancer’s out, you can bet money that she OD’d on whatever painkillers they gave her to keep dancing.”
I was going to have a boyfriend who crackled like a downed power line and a girlfriend who was Black. I was even more of an adult than I could have imagined.
Lee I remember less as a person and more as a story, and George I do not remember at all. There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.
Nelson interrupted the scene. Nelson who showed up for work in a collared shirt with the sleeves turned back and nice khaki pants, while the rest of us wandered the stage in cut-offs and Phish T-shirts. “Peter, Lara,” he said calmly. “If you could come up with a slightly more wholesome interpretation, it would be appreciated.”
Emily sighs and I worry that Maisie’s going to set her off. “Sebastian was the only one who called him Peedee. Peter Duke. And Duke was the only one who called him Saint Sebastian.”
Maybe she’s right. Saint Sebastian was twenty-nine when we met, and it was Duke who told me the story about McEnroe. At seventeen, Sebastian must have thought of himself as someone who would make it. The number of things I’d failed to grasp back then was as limitless as the stars in the night sky.
Maisie holds up her hand. “I’m sorry, I have to interrupt. You can’t say crazy.”
“And you really can’t say nuts,” Nell says. “Unless you’re talking about pecans.”
“So you want me to tell you about Duke without mentioning that he was crazy? I’m already leaving out the sex. I’m not sure how much of a story is going to be left.”
“This must be how England felt when Henry II married Eleanor of Aquitaine,” Maisie says.
Nell looks at Emily in horror. “You’re giving him France?”
“I’ll take the goats if I get France,” Benny says...
“By the time Richard the Lionheart is born, the two of you will rule all of northern Michigan.” The history of the British monarchy is Joe’s winter hobby, and it thrills him to see that his girls have been listening, in the same way I imagine it would thrill me if they could sew.
But Benny doesn’t stop. His voice comes without drama or demand and still, he keeps talking. “Sooner or later we’re going to have to stop putting in cherry trees.”
“No,” Joe says.
“I really cannot stand this,” Maisie says.
“It’s not going to be cold enough for them anymore. We’re going to have to start thinking about wine grapes, strawberries, asparagus.”
“So plant the grapes,” Joe says. “It doesn’t mean you don’t have children.”
“It sort of does,” Nell says. “Once you think about it.”
Emily picks up a fork and balances it on one finger. She looks at nothing but the fork. “I can eat vegetables and ride my bike and stop using plastic bags but I know I’m just doing it to keep myself from going crazy. The planet is fucked. There’s nothing I can do about that. But I’ll tell you what, I’m going to spend my life trying to save this farm. If anybody ever wonders what I’m here for, that’s it.”
He is thinking about the developers who relentlessly sniff the perimeter of our land, the strangers who knock on our door in February to ask if we wouldn’t rather spend the winter in Florida. They are the enemies of stone fruit. They would leave just enough trees in the ground to justify calling the place Cherry Hills or Cherry Lane, then pull the rest up and build pretty white summer houses with picture windows and wraparound porches, places we could never afford.
It’s true: Ignore the kittens and you’ll wake up one morning to find the cats outnumber the mice. But still, people need to kill their own kittens. You don’t ask your neighbors to do that for you.
I tell her that I wish it could, even though I know she means the temperature of the lake and I mean this summer, everyone home and together. As sad as I am for the suffering of the world, I wish to keep this exact moment, Emily on the beach in my arms.
“She died giving birth. I remember thinking about that when we read the play in high school, like it was a bad omen.” <> We had named our daughter for the plucky girl in the first act, the smartest girl in her class. We had not been thinking about the third act at the time.
I think you used to burn trees when we were in school or else you sent us to the neighbors’ or something. Dad said they were old, they weren’t putting out enough fruit anymore so he had them pushed out.” She turns to me then, her cheeks wet with tears. “Look at me!” she laughs, rubbing at her nose. “I’ve been to hort school and I still can’t talk about this.
“Farming is depressing,” Joe said. “But once it gets in you, you can’t put it down.”
“Farming is the new acting,” Duke said.
Then Joe Nelson was walking on my other side and slipped his arm around my waist. The director’s arm around my waist! Nothing but me in between him and Duke. “Your estate is thirteen miles from town,” he said. “They’ve run the railroad by it. Now if the cherry orchard and the land along the river were cut up into building lots and leased for summer cottages, you’d have at the very lowest twenty-five thousand rubles per year income.”
Pallace was laughing her head off. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Where were you people raised?”
“I understand why I know The Cherry Orchard,” Joe said to Duke. “But I don’t understand why you know it.”
For the record, neither man removed his arm from me.
people told me later it was very affecting, the Stage Manager sitting there among us, saying his final lines. And he did say the lines, every last word of them, even though the electrical current I had seen before had him in its teeth now. I didn’t move, none of us did. We used the full force of our lives to listen to what he was saying, as if the purity of our attention was holding him up. Uncle Wallace talked about the stars and how the earth was straining, straining to make something of itself and how it needed to rest. In all my life I had never heard anything spoken so beautifully, and I felt certain I never would again.
Funny how we never know. Uncle Wallace didn’t go onstage thinking it would be his last night. When my last night came I didn’t know it either, my last time to play Emily, my last swim in the lake.
“Why you?” Maisie asks.
“I knew the part.”
“You knew the whole part?” Nell is in love with her father, her actual father who has saved the play.
Joe gives the back of his head a ferocious scratch, the way Hazel would have scratched her own head with her paw.
“So wait.” Nell looks at me. “You dated George, and then you dated Editor Webb, and then you married the Stage Manager.”
“It is not verisimilitude.” I looked to him to be the adult in the room, like Joe had been the adult. “Verisimilitude is the appearance of something being real. Verisimilitude means putting tap water in an empty tequila bottle.” The problem with being the only woman in a play in which the three other characters were men and the playwright was a man and the director was a man was that no matter what I said, I sounded petulant, female.
Even this far away I cannot bear to see how afraid he is. That had always been Duke’s magic, that with all his beauty and charm he was able to let the audience see how small he was, how terrified, how deeply in love.
He has a pipe and he lights it and when the flame pulls down we can see the drug hit him, the color draining from his face, his nose and eyes streaming, and then the look of relief that breaks over him, a violent gratitude, like he wasn’t sure it would come for him this time and it came. <> I want someone to tell me how that was acting. I want someone to tell me how many people were on the set, and how many of them understood what was happening.
All these years later, I feel like I let it happen. I didn’t refuse to drink even though I knew what the drinking was doing to him. I didn’t pour out the tequila and replace it with water. I didn’t walk Uncle Wallace off the stage. It’s nothing but foolish self-aggrandizement, I know. No summer girlfriend ever changed the course of a movie star’s life. But still, I am sorry I didn’t try.
He drank his flooding amounts of water and shook the aspirin straight from the bottle into his mouth. He dove down into the bottle of tequila, dove down into the glittering lake, then swam back up, breaking the surface with the full force of his life.
“Pallace had to take your part,” Nell says. “She had to go on that night.”
Sapphire sky, diamond clouds, emerald leaves, ruby cherries. The magic with which Nell understands overwhelms me at times. Her sisters turn and stare. “You’re doing it again,” Emily says.
“What?”
“You’re thinking about the performance, the understudy, and not your own mother lying on the ground with a ruptured Achilles.”
“But why do you always care about the understudy? Why is the most important thing in life whether or not the show goes on?”
Nell is standing beside me. She puts her arm around my waist in solidarity. “You’re not getting it,” she says. “This is when everything changes. This is the beginning of the second act. She can’t walk.
though surely part of her is crying for herself. She has lost these months to the pandemic, being stuck on the farm with no idea how much longer she’ll have to stay. She is losing this time when she is beautiful and young in a profession that cares for nothing but beauty and youth. But really, she is crying for me. While her sisters stand and stare in utter bafflement, Nell the Mentalist has snapped all the pieces together. She knows I am finished.
Joe nods. “I can believe it. Our entire relationship was like that back in the day.”
“Two cars passing in the late afternoon,” I say.
“Did you go see her in the hospital?” Nell asks.
“I was only there two nights,” I say.
“I came,” he says.
“No you didn’t.” I turn to him. “Did you?”...
Oh, Joe, working all day on the farm and then driving down to play the Stage Manager and then coming to the hospital to sit in a vinyl chair and watch me sleep.
A girl in a pink striped smock came around with a book cart and I found a copy of The Bridge of San Luis Rey by one Thornton Wilder. Imagine that.
“I stopped acting after that.”
“When you were twenty-four?”
“Twenty-five. I turned twenty-five in the hospital.”
“I really can’t stand this,” Maisie says.
“It redefines the quarter-life crisis,” Emily says.
“The what?”
“Quarter-life crisis,” Nell says. “It’s when your life falls apart at twenty-five or thereabout. The pandemic is our quarter-life crisis.”
Pallace was Emily. I believed her from the moment she made her entrance, when she sat down at her mother’s table, saying she’s the brightest girl in school for her age. Every sentence she spoke was sitting in my mouth.
I learned so many things that summer at Tom Lake and most of those lessons I would have gladly done without. The hardest one had nothing to do with Duke or plans or love. It was realizing that I wasn’t Emily anymore. Even if I’d gotten to play the part on Broadway with Spalding Gray, there still would come a time when I’d be finished and someone else would take the role.
The disbelievers were starting to lean forward. They were listening. The message had made no sense at first but this Emily was eroding their notion of what was correct. Her wedding day was played not for eroticism but for fear. She didn’t want to leave home, keep house, make meals, endure childbirth, because childbirth would kill her. She wanted to be her father’s girl, his birthday girl. Growing up was a terrible thing—a clear path to the third act. Emily showed us that, all those moments in life we had missed and would never get back again. <> The remaining few who’d managed to hold on to their belief that Emily could not be Black were destroyed by the third act. We all were. When she went back to her mother’s kitchen I cried like I had never seen the play before. I cried because she was that good. I cried because I would never play Emily again. I cried because I had loved that world so much.
He always said he needed me to hem his pants. He called me his wardrobe mistress. He got such a kick out of that.” <> I smiled because I wanted Cat to think I understood the ways of the world. One person’s endured lechery was another person’s cherished summer affair.
Oh, Pallace, such a good actress, and yet she couldn’t fix her face to make me think that things were fine, that she was my friend and would return. She all but ran to get away from me. <> In retrospect, my inability to put it together was its own sort of gift. I would understand what they were doing soon enough, at which point I would finally understand what I had done to Veronica. Veronica had such a small part in the story and still I loved her more than everyone at Tom Lake put together. She stayed with me after the rest of them had faded, maybe because we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.
It is so clear to me now that he was the best of us. At first glance a person would have thought it was Duke who ruled the orbit, with Sebastian and Pallace and me as the circling moons. But Sebastian was the one who was necessary. His interest in what we said made us interesting, covered up our deficits. I missed the four of us and all the places we were together
Fool for Love is complete in one act. Sam Shepard in his infinite wisdom knew that, if given an intermission, too many people would make a run for the door.
I used the chair as a walker, pushing it through the door until I got outside and got myself seated and got myself very slowly back home in the dark. Funnily enough, this turned out to be the thing that saved me: the knowledge that I could get back by myself.
The rage dissipates along with the love, and all we’re left with is a story. Peter Duke is dead and I’m telling them my small corner of what happened.
The past need not be so all-encompassing that it renders us incapable of making egg salad. The past, were I to type it up, would look like a disaster, but regardless of how it ended we all had many good days. In that sense the past is much like the present because the present—this unparalleled disaster—is the happiest time of my life: Joe and I here on this farm, our three girls grown and gone and then returned, all of us working together to take the cherries off the trees.
Where do the periwinkles go in rain like that? It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and the soon-to-be-more suffering in the world, it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true. Our Town taught me that. I had memorized the lessons before I understood what they meant. No matter how many years ago I’d stopped playing Emily, she is still here.
His right eye’s shut, that would be the eye that’s facing me in the car. It’s got stitches in the corner. Three gears on the car and one eye and the drive takes an hour and a half during which time he never shuts up.”
She held my hand and later I held her hand. I called her Nell in those days because Nell, which was her own name, was all she answered to.
“I beg your pardon?” The woman at the desk found me sympathetic. I knew that. Being small is helpful sometimes. <> “Emily Webb. That’s the name I’m under. We were in Our Town together.”
Duke came into the bathroom a minute later and lifted me up on the sink. He was facing the mirror. I couldn’t stop thinking about that. He was looking at himself.
I was trying to get my bearings, trying to make a space in my mind for bus schedules while my mind kept wandering back to Duke trying to make a list of who he could call who might come to New England on a cold autumn night and fuck him in the unlocked bathroom of a locked ward. Pallace? What a preposterous thought. Chelsea? I didn’t know her, but why would she come if there were already lawyers involved? So many actresses and makeup artists and wardrobe mistresses to choose from, so many fans, and still, I was the only person he could absolutely count on.
I was starving. He drove quite a way, out of the small town the hospital was in and into the small town beyond it, like we were scraping the whole thing off our shoes.
We had been given an opportunity to make things so much worse, Sebastian and I, and no one would have blamed us except for Duke, and Duke never would have known. The flame of that little candle sat between us for the rest of the night but through some holy kindness we felt for one another, we let it burn out.
I didn’t have to call anyone. I didn’t have to ask anyone for permission or help. A nurse stood beside me and held my hand and I’m here to tell you, I felt nothing but grateful. There was always going to be a part of the story I didn’t tell Joe or the girls. What I did was mine alone to do. I tore the page from the calendar and threw it away.
after so many polite refusals he suggested a compromise: Would they sell him a place in the cemetery? Just a little place under the oak tree, he said. Duke would be cremated, after all. How much room would he need? Maybe just a small stone with his name but maybe not even that.
it doesn’t have anything to do with me. It was always about the farm, and how he thought he knew what it would be like to stay here based on just that single day. We all wanted to stay, me and Pallace and Sebastian and Duke and Joe. The difference being that Joe was a Nelson, and he did the work to make sure that there would always be Nelsons, some Nelson or another, on this land. The difference being I had the good sense to marry him.