Cate knows most people are attracted to working in the theater because of the hubbub—the accumulating and quickening pace of getting something ready, the fluid (sometimes romantic) camaraderie of cast and crew, the excitement of having pulled together and done something as a team. The last-minute crises (lead actor comes down with flu, uncle’s mustache goes missing between acts) and their rushed resolutions (understudy steps in, passable mustache is cut out of an old fake beard). The thrilling sounds in the darkness beyond the stage—the satin shiver of coats being shed, the light flapping of programs being opened. The quiet that descends on the room as the stage lights come up. The hoped-for perfection of performance.
For her, it’s different. She’s not a particularly social person. Out of necessity she has developed into a team player, but for her the best part happens when she is alone, reading the play and imagining it at work on the set she will create. Filling in the negative space between the actors, giving them what they will require for whatever moves they make. She starts with inspiration drawings, then uses Vectr to make 3-D renderings of sets. She also makes models. Old-fashioned, but they still give the most reliable idea of what the finished set is going to look like.
For local shows in small venues, she roams around prop rental houses, or more often junk stores where the used this or rented that can be obtained. What she’s bought, she modifies with paint, hammer, glue. She’s a little skittish around saws, still.
What happens during the performance will then be snug inside its setting. Once the curtain goes up, Cate’s job, for the most part, is over.
Tonight, the opening night of At Ease, she lies up in the fly gallery with her assistant, Stig. From this perch, if she drops her head, she can see Neale and Joe in their seats. They come to opening night of anything Cate works on. If the subject matter is too adult (a revival of Bent when Joe was only nine), Neale comes alone. Tonight, Cate is embarrassed that they are going to witness this loser, but she couldn’t put them off. She tried. It’s hard enough just to lie above this play and see it herself. The company could have had a million-dollar budget and the play would still sink with the weight of its awfulness. Below, Eleanor Quinn is giving everything she’s got to one of the terrible lines she’s been dealt.
“I lahk a uniform on a man. Even bettah, I lahk the uniform on the floor next to my bed.”
Eleanor is playing Layla, the voluptuous nurse on the bleak army base. Layla makes the best of her situation by bedding enlisted men. The one she’s speaking to now as they pass an afterglow cigarette back and forth lazily in the midafternoon, in an empty barracks, is Corporal Mason, who will be murdered in the second act.
When Eleanor gets to this terrible, Mae West line, Cate and Stig cut their throats with invisible knives, hang themselves with imaginary nooses. The line is the cue for the closeted, jealous Sergeant Tragg—Corporal Mason is a hunk he’d like to bed himself—to come briskly through the door and discover them. Howard Foster, the mildly famous, occasionally Steppenwolf actor they’ve borrowed to add name recognition to the cast, is at the ready, behind the door, positioned to come abruptly in. He has a stomachache tonight and Cate is worried this will prevent him from bursting through with gusto. As often happens, it turns out she’s worrying about the wrong thing. What she should be worrying about is the crummy door, which is made of some pulpy wood that bloats in ambient humidity. They’ve planed it twice, but it appears to have swollen again and is now keeping Howard from doing any bursting at all.
“Fuck,” Cate says. Although they are so very close, only a few feet away, the distance they need to cover is, regrettably, vertical. They can’t drop straight down to help; they’d wind up in a pile of their own broken ankles. They have to run a gauntlet of steps and ladders to the stage.
Meanwhile, as Howard continues to give the door hearty thumps with his shoulder, Eleanor and Denny Cochran, who plays the corporal, at first pretend not to hear the thudding, and, with no further lines, start making out, then add some sexy moaning. A thin ripple of laughter lifts off the audience. After what seems like an hour but is probably no more than a minute, Cate and Stig reach the door. Stig nudges Howard aside while he hits the door with a brick wrapped in a sweatshirt. The scene lumbers on from there, a cart with a broken wheel.
Later, Cate is too dispirited to chew out the stage manager, who was smoking a joint out back when his door stuck.
“It was a dumb play anyway,” Joe says once he and Neale are backstage. “The door just made it a funny play.”
“Just put it behind you, honey,” Neale says, bracketing a hand around the back of Cate’s neck. “Come by in the morning. We’ll cheer you up.”
“We can make pancakes,” Joe says, which causes tears to loosen in Cate’s eyes.
Behind Neale, Cate notices Graham go by, toward the dressing room. What’s he doing here? But before this thought gets to its question mark, she knows it’s Eleanor.
“Nothing you did made that play any worse than it already was.” This is Maureen, who has found her way into the small huddle. Cate introduces everyone, then puts a stop to the general consolation. “I know the sticky door wasn’t my responsibility, but it was part of my set and that makes me look bad. If I keep working on plays this terrible, plus doing such a terrible job on them, I’ll probably eventually be banished. Lightly. Casually. I’ll have to do dinner theater in the Wisconsin Dells. Or dinner theater in the round. Where the stage revolves. Do they still have those?”
“In Florida,” Maureen says. “I think they still have them in Florida. But you won’t have to go there. This is just a small reversal, a small erasure on your résumé. You’re lucky it didn’t happen anywhere important.”
Cate thinks it’s good that Neale’s first impression of Maureen is seeing how kind she is, but almost immediately the moment evaporates and Neale is steering Joe outside, home to bed, waving over her shoulder as they go.
“I’m going to draw you a bath,” Maureen says once they’re at her apartment. Maureen has taken a particular direction with her apartment decor—Midwest by midcentury. Furniture blond as Doris Day. Breakfast nook in the kitchen. Rooster-print wallpaper. Cate flatters herself that there’s a subtle but distinct difference in the ways the two of them have taken up themes from the recent past—that she, Cate, is paying homage to the ’40s as a significant period in design while Maureen is just fooling around, being lightly ironic, stylistically winking. Cate knows she can be a terrible snob along these lines.
“You’ve started getting the Times delivered?” Cate notices a copy on the kitchen table, still folded in its blue plastic wrapper.
“Not really. Just I like that Thursday Styles section, so on Thursdays, I pick one up. You know, from someone’s doorstep.”
“Someone was doing that to me once in a while, so I got up really early one day and brought my paper in. I slipped it out of the wrapper, unfolded it, sprinkled a nice layer of cake flour onto the surface, then carefully folded it back up and slid it back into the wrapper. Then put it back on my doorstep. If the culprit picked it up I figured he wouldn’t open it until he was nice and settled in his bus seat.” Cate is trying to head off Maureen’s celebration of her shabbiness by gently implying that someone suffers in a small way from having their paper taken. This has no effect at all. Her reply is, “Oh, you sly devil, you.” And from there she quickly gets back to coddling Cate.
“A proper bath is just the thing when you’re upset. I’ll put in some soaking crystals I got the other day from Merz. Blueberry Blossom.”
“I don’t think blueberries even have blossoms, do they? And I never really take baths. I’m kind of a quick-shower person.” The prospect of getting undressed and into water is not, right now, particularly appealing.
“Come on. Give it a whirl.”
When Cate is finally obediently in the tub, Maureen sits on the toilet lid and de-pills an old sweater. She has a little shaver for this purpose. Maureen is encyclopedic in matters of fixing things. Her phone holds a compendium of go-to people for every possible small problem. She is also encyclopedic regarding do-it-yourself tricks, household hints. Many of these are from old books she has lifted from libraries and the kitchens of her friends’ mothers. So many of the fixes are for problems that no longer exist. No one really needs their hat blocked anymore (whatever that was), or their clothesline strengthened for extended use. No one has time to flameproof Halloween costumes by dipping them in a bucket of water and boric acid. On occasion, though, you might be interested in getting chewing gum off the back of your pants (soften with egg white, then put in the washer), and Maureen’s there for you.
When she’s done with the sweater, she brings out her stash of weed. Scrawled in marker across the top of the baggie is
WHITE WIDOW
She sits on the edge of the tub and sifts a teaspoonful of finely ground weed into her vape. When it’s ready, she takes a long, slow pull, then tilts the mouthpiece toward Cate.
“Thank you for all this,” Cate says, then takes a hit.
“I’m trying to do right by you.” She scrubs Cate’s shoulders with a puffy net thing. “I’ve misspent too much time on my way to you. You are a delightful person. Kind and thoughtful and, most important, you are not mentally ill. So I’m making a big play for you. I am squandering my blueberries.”
“What happened tonight just seems part of the everything going wrong in a larger sense. Maybe this new America won’t be as bad as I’m worried it will—”
“No, I’m pretty sure it’s going to be worse. But we’ll work at getting in the way.” In Maureen’s worldview, everything is fixable.
Cate lifts the comforter to get into Maureen’s expensive Swedish bed, and a sultry aroma escapes. Maybe she sprays her sheets with a signature perfume. Sexually, Maureen is more advanced than Cate, or maybe more jaded. Certainly more artful. Because she handles fabric all the time, the pads of her fingertips are rough as a dog’s paw. This is a nice feature she comes with. She also has a nightstand with a drawerful of lubricants, sex toys in lurid colors, with tricky protuberances. In their abundance, the toys embarrass Cate. They make her think of oppressed Asian women pouring hot-pink silicone into penis-shaped molds. Some of the toys are also a little scary. They look like they’d take you to a different place than a regular orgasm. Tonight Cate prevails and they have sex with just their bodies. Cate is too worried about her faltering career to get into it, although she pretends. She never wants anyone to feel bad in bed if she can help it.
Maureen’s affair with her sister is fading and blurring. There were, of course, mitigating circumstances, although maybe it’s just that circumstances usually mitigate. Frances is five years older than Maureen; she was off to college while Maureen was finishing up middle school. They almost didn’t grow up in the same family. Then, when Maureen was just out of CalArts, she got a job doing costumes for a summer theater production of South Pacific in Eugene, Oregon. She stayed on with Frances after the play opened. They went to a sweat lodge, also a massage workshop. That’s when the monkey business started.
And at that time Frances, from photos Maureen has shown Cate, was not seductive exactly, but had a definite ragged blondness to her. And the whole thing seems to have had very little carryover into the years since. It’s not like Maureen was molested by an archbishop, and ever since has had to get her sexual partners to wear vestments. What Maureen and Frances did was a now-and-then thing, a way of hanging out together like other sisters share jewelry or bleach each other’s hair. Except that it was having sex. That Cate is working so hard to find Maureen’s dark secret diluted by these additional facts probably means they are going forward.
She gets a text from Graham, who for no given reason—meaning he has hooked up with Eleanor—says he just took Sailor for a walk, but will be out for the rest of the night, can she get back soon?
“Can’t you stay over anyway?” Maureen says, reading the message over Cate’s shoulder. “It’s too cold out to go back to your place.”
“I can’t.”
“What would happen if you didn’t? Just this once?” The question is accompanied by Maureen placing her hand on the left cheek of Cate’s butt and gently pulling her closer. Cate sees she’s being subjected to a little test of her affections.
“Well, he’d probably hold it as long as he could, then he’d pee on the floor, which would shame him. And then he’d totally panic because I still hadn’t come home. But that’s not going to happen.”
It’s little stuff like this about Maureen, more than the sister business, that makes Cate slow down and take a harder look at her.
When Graham comes home two days later, all Cate can say is, “Oh, please.”
“I can explain.”
“How can you be doing this? After the rat? After telling me that what you really wanted was to hack her to pieces, then spread the pieces over a parking lot on a hot sunny day, then shovel lye over the whole mess?”
“It turns out we weren’t as far apart on things as we thought. Mostly it was a small cluster of misunderstandings. And it’s not like we’re getting back together. We’re just exploring the territory.”
Cate can’t see any point in bringing the discomforts of reality into this smoothed, burled vision. It would only mean a few tiring, reasonable conversations where he’d act as though he was listening and then go back to Eleanor anyway. Cate can smell a reunion a mile off, but there’s nothing to be done about it. It does say a lot about her opinion of Eleanor that she thinks Graham going back to her would be worse than him continuing to hole up in her spare room Skyping with Lucille Rae. Worse than him peering through the night at downloads in that tiny white type on a black background, what lives behind the smooth interface of the regular web. A marginless scroll of speculation.