Rain from a sudden storm hammers against the huge windows of the classroom. Cate walks among the bent heads of twenty students. None of them has hair that is completely an actual hair color, as opposed to green, or blue. A few years ago, every one of them would have been wearing a hat. And none of them—she doesn’t know why not—ever turns the lights on. They work by the light of their desk lamps, like old accountants. “Can someone flip on the ceiling lights? Raven?” Fluorescents flicker to life and Cate turns her attention back to a student’s computer layout of today’s assignment—the office set for Glengarry Glen Ross.
“You have to keep checking against your drawings for scale. This would be a desk for Paul Bunyan. And his blue ox.”
The student, Dequan Chang, looks up, blinks a couple of times, then asks, “Who’s Paul Bunyan?”
Cate is grateful to have this adjunct job. She only has two courses a year—one grad and one undergrad section of set design. The school is prestigious. Georgia O’Keeffe went here. Claes Oldenburg. Elizabeth Murray. The architecture department has interesting faculty and attracts talented students. It plugs her into the design community. She could not live on the salary, but it does come with health insurance. It provides her with the closest thing to a financial floor she has ever had. A full-time, tenure-track position would make her totally solvent, but then she would have too little time to design sets, a chronic dilemma.
From class she rushes north, surfing a water-lashed Lake Shore Drive, happy she let her father talk her into all-wheel drive, nice and grippy. With cars, she takes his advice along with his family discount.
At a red light, she checks in the rearview to make sure her face doesn’t have any glue smears or patches of sawdust from the classroom. She circles around Andersonville, looking for a parking spot in the baritone thunder, branch-cracking lightning. She texts Maureen.
parking nightmare. b there soon.
Maureen looked so good in terms of early impressions. She came with so many features, like one of those knives that are also bottle openers and screwdrivers. She’s financially solvent. A little older than Cate. Hot in a restrained way, which is to say, hotter than unrestrained. The play they worked on together was about the last days of Marie Curie, as she pressed on with her science even as she weakened from radiation sickness. Cate loved that Maureen spent an entire day hunting down a particular shade of green rubber for Madame Curie’s lab apron. A professional perfectionist. Everything happened so quietly, a small collegial friendship that opened into an attraction. A lucky break for Cate. She’s not much good at making the first move. She’s a lot better at standing still and waiting for whomever to show up and make her desire half of a coincidence.
In addition to their work, she and Maureen have a few ready-made, overlapping interests. They both love the same TV show, about a married couple of undercover KGB agents. They’ve started talking about a trip—Maureen’s treat—a small-ship cruise to the Inner Hebrides. Now, though, there is the sister to factor in. Maureen has arranged for the three of them to meet up this afternoon at Kopi; she loves the hippie atmosphere of the place.
Because of the storm, the place is underpopulated. She sees Maureen with a woman quite a bit blowsier, but definitely bearing a family resemblance. They are sitting at a back table, by the travel store that occupies the rear third of the place—racks of hemp clothing, shelves of Lonely Planet guidebooks, a stand of jaunty felt hats. As Cate approaches, Maureen’s sister stands and opens her arms. Frances is from Oregon; Cate has noticed a north-coastal (both coasts) phenomenon of unwarranted hugging. She tries to duck the incoming embrace.
“I’m afraid I’m a little wet for hugging.”
“Nonsense,” Frances says, a little too loud for how close she is to Cate’s ear. “Where I come from, this is a sprinkle.”
Maureen says, “We’ve been on the couch last night and today.” Cate can see she doesn’t mean for this remark to be alarming.
“We watched two seasons of Mad Men, which I never saw before,” Frances says.
Frances is in Chicago on her way south and east. She sells quilts as well as restores them. This expedition is a search for hidden troves, mint-condition quilts tucked away in hope chests for a hundred years, saved for “good,” a day that never arrived. Arkansas and Pennsylvania have been high-yield states for her on earlier scouting missions.
Frances is what Cate would describe as recently pretty. Her long hair, brown as opposed to Maureen’s red, is pinned up with clips of silver and feathers, then falls in other places onto the shoulders of a wraparound sweater. Everything about her clothing is complicated, swaddling. It’s hard to see where one garment leaves off and another begins. Vaguely spiritual jewelry is also involved, a shimmery shell on a leather string around her neck. Deep purple shoes with turquoise laces, and the ends of the laces have charms dangling from them. She appears to do most of her shopping at Renaissance fairs. Cate was expecting someone else entirely, someone sullen with something about her that could, with the right lighting, be irresistible. Patti Smith maybe.
Frances is very different from Patti Smith, also very different from Maureen. Cate thought maybe Kopi would be a little too corny. But it turns out to be perfect for Frances; she even orders one of the teas Cate and Maureen make fun of. Femininitea. She laughs at herself for ordering it. She’s a good egg. It’s hard not to like her.
Cate imagines Frances’s house, which Maureen refers to as a cottage. Woodland tones throughout, that goes without saying. An already overstuffed sofa further cushioned with large pillows, a couple of heavy throws. A rough-hewn table, its top a repurposed barn door. Set out on this would be an arrangement of rocks with words etched into them.
harmony. acceptance. purpose.
Two plump cats and a carpeted kitty condo. Cate doesn’t particularly like herself when she sums up strangers like this, by their decor—especially when it’s decor she’s imagining for them—but this doesn’t stop her from doing it.
“So, if you don’t mind me asking,” Frances says, taking Cate’s bad hand, turning it over, rubbing it between her own thumb and middle finger. “What happened here?”
This almost never happens. People are usually too polite, or squeamish. Or they don’t want to risk hearing something gruesome. But Frances inhabits a sharing culture; she has probably offered up a lot of her own private stuff in group therapy sessions and sweat lodges and the tents of tarot readers. By now, she probably expects returns on her investments.
“Workshop accident. When I was a kid,” Cate says.
“Oh, honey. That must’ve been the worst day of your life.”
“Really the worst day was when the fingers came out of the dressings, and the grafts hadn’t taken.”
“Oh. I’m so sorry,” Frances says, covering at once the accident, its aftermath, and herself for bringing it up.
“It’s an old story by now. And I can do almost everything with what I still have.” She picks up her teacup, sets it down as a little demonstration. “My two big pieces of luck were not losing the thumb and that it happened to my left hand.”
Maureen comes back from the counter with two enormous pieces of carrot cake. “I thought we could share,” she says to Cate, who’s wondering how three people are supposed to share two pieces of cake. Then she says to her sister, “What did you think of that yellow quilt on the back wall?”
Cate is distracted by the carrot cake, one piece of which she is already tearing away at. She worries that she eats like someone in a federal prison. Table manners are just one of a list of small social concerns she should probably have sorted out by now, but hasn’t. Interrupting is another. As soon as a conversation is behind her and she’s alone, she goes over it like she’s casting runes. She worries that she was finishing everyone else’s sentences, or lurching wildly off-topic. Also she often, after the fact, takes herself to task for the darkness of her humor, for not gauging if it will be welcome in the circumstances. Maybe this or that ironic remark was taken seriously. Or, worst of all, maybe she has bad breath. She never forgets this about someone; it always haunts her memory; she doesn’t want her breath haunting anyone’s impression of her. So she checks along the way of a day, breathing into her cupped hands to see if anything’s amiss, asking Neale, if she’s nearby, to take a whiff. She pops mints. No one is going to run into ambient garlic while in conversation with her. Or worse, that steel-mill aroma she sometimes picks up off others; she assumes this comes with heavy vitamin regimens.
While Cate is mired in these shallows of self-loathing, Frances freewheels into a long, extremely dull story about the difficulties of restoring an 1840s cross-stitch baby quilt. The problem is getting yarns to exactly match the historical colors. From the sound of things, Frances either gives away a lot of her work or trades it for firewood or honey or massages. Her house has only a woodstove for heat. In a way, hers seems a life full of small adventure; looked at from another angle, Frances seems to be about one step shy of slipping off the grid entirely.
If Cate met her with no backstory, she would only find Frances a sunny, placid woman hanging on to a ’70s lifestyle that was mostly over before she was born. She tries to catch a glimpse of some spark between the sisters, but can’t see anything. She tries to fit their affair inside a box labeled “stuff that happened years ago,” but that doesn’t neutralize it. The sisters are kind to each other; there doesn’t appear to be any rivalry. Which is nice to be around, but now, of course, tainted.
By how, and how often, they refer to their childhood, it’s clear this was a happy place for both of them. Their parents were in the movie business in L.A. Their mother was a seamstress at Disney. At home, she made clothes for her girls, often matching outfits, as though they were twins. Frances threatens Cate with home movies of them riding in their own Mad Hatter teacups, spinning around and around in a scaled-down carnival ride their father—a metalworker, a fabricator of special effects—set up for the kids in the acre of desert that was their backyard.
“Whee!” Maureen trills.
Cate can’t tell if they are being ironic about the teacup ride, or not. “Do the teacups still exist?” Cate asks.
Frances says, “Exist?! We still ride them when we go home. Round and round we go.” Cate assembles a mental picture of this, but she can’t make it a good picture.
“Danny refuses,” Maureen says. “He thinks it’s infantilizing.” Danny is the brother with a silly-seeming but fierce addiction to aerosols. He huffs. Maureen has barely mentioned him. Cate suspects there’s a fair amount not to mention.
So here’s a new piece, Cate thinks. She envisions Maureen and Frances, now too big, stuffed into their teacups, their brother high, spinning in his own way, in a lawn chair. She needs more anecdotes, more evidence on Maureen. She’s looking for extenuating circumstances. She’s not sure if the teacups are redeeming or damning.
Frances gets a call on her cell. The picture that pops up is of a guy in a camouflage balaclava. “My old man,” she says. “I’ll take it outside.”
“White Water Jack,” Maureen says, once Frances is outside. “He’s a guide. In a town as small as Maupin, he counts as a celebrity.”
Cate pictures Frances and Jack together in a yellow blow-up raft, shouting happily as they roar down the middle of a river.
“Can you come over tonight?” Maureen asks this shyly.
“Oh boy,” Cate says. “I’d feel a little uncomfortable, I guess.”
“Don’t. You don’t have to. Frances won’t mind.”
“Well, yeah? That’s the bad part, that you have to say that. That there’s a reason she might.”
“Oh, I think the teacups are worse than that thing. I honestly thought I was using good judgment not telling you about the ride.” She is speaking softly, close to Cate’s ear, and the smell of her breath—clove and smoke—is arousing. Cate has noticed this aroma during other intimate moments with Maureen, but only just now does she realize what it means. Maureen is a secret smoker. Or tobacco chewer, although that definitely seems less likely. She employs some clovey cover-up. She stands in the alley behind the Lyric exhaling plumes of smoke, in the company of her cohort, her shrinking demographic. Cate can see her so clearly, having a conversation in the alley with the theater janitor and a nerved-up soprano who’s one of the townspeople in the second act.
Something about her breath and the soft brush of her mouth against Cate’s cheek and the emptiness of the café and Frances being outside in the snow prompts Cate to turn to kiss Maureen, and then kiss her again. Maureen is a world-class kisser. Put that in the plus column.
Cate tells her, “I could probably kiss you all afternoon. Make a little spectacle in here. But instead I’m going home. I need to reflect.”
“Oh, don’t do that.”
As they stand on the sidewalk outside Kopi, Cate looks down and notices the purple of Frances’s shoes bleeding into the turquoise of the laces. Chicago is tough on whimsy. A small van speeds by, splashing them as it goes. The van is from Toaster, a diner quite a ways down on Lincoln (way out of this neighborhood) owned and operated by Dana, who is supposed to not be contacting Cate. This little bit of stalking is interesting, and should be annoying. Discouragingly, Cate is more flattered than annoyed, but then she doesn’t have time to be either, as the van keeps heading north up Clark and her phone starts ringing in her parka pocket. A 212 area code. Cate assumes it’s Love Salvage, a Manhattan prop house. They have the real 1950s venetian blinds Cate is scouting for the drill sergeant’s office, and they’re cheap. Of course the fat kind are being made again, but they look historically phony. The old ones are yellowed from all the smoking done in the offices where they once hung, their tapes nice and grimy. It’s a look that’s hard to create retroactively.
“Work call,” she tells Maureen and Frances as she gives them fist bumps, as a jokey good-bye to avoid hugging. “I’m going to have to take it.”
“Hey, Cate.” Not the salvage place. It’s Ty Boyd, artistic director of Ropes and Pulleys, a very good off-Broadway company. She’s met him a couple of times in her previous life as Graham’s wife. He tells her they’re putting up a play about Vita Sackville-West. “Do you know who she is?”
“Virginia Woolf’s girlfriend, yes? Lived in a castle? There. I’ve run out of knowing about her.”
“Woolf was just one in a long string of willing victims. Vita was a serial cad. It’s a good story. Lauren Mott wrote the play and so Molly Cracciolo is directing. They both liked what you did for Marie Curie. They wonder if you could come out and talk with them about doing the sets.” This is one of the eerie aspects of theater. You never know who’s blowing through town, dropping in on your play.
“Well, Jesus. I’m flattered to be called. They’re my idols,” Cate says. “Ever since Gauntlet.” Cate stands in awe of art that can work people into a lather of love and hate. That would be every one of Lauren Mott’s plays.
“Well here’s your shot at working with them. I’ll send you the script. We’ll need ideas for four sets. Just as a way of starting the conversation. They’ll be talking with a couple of other designers, so it’s a tryout of sorts, but a friendly one.”
She thinks, this is how the wind shifts. “Sure. I can push some other stuff out of the way.” This other stuff is pure invention. She has no further commitments, no employment for the foreseeable future. She was just about to hit up her father for a “loan.” She knows he will never turn her down. Because he loves her, but also because of her hand. She hates using this, even though it’s only ever tacit. But she does do it. If she actually gets this job, and the play goes big and that gets her more work with these two icons—
She’s way ahead of herself.