“Yes.”
“So that’s all it is. And then it will be free booze and wealthy, well-intentioned people signing big checks. And it would just be so great. For me. If you could just whisper idealistic things in the corner. Especially about how I stack up against all of these very serious Royal Shakespeare people, I just don’t really hold a candle, and I’m very embarrassed.”
“Don’t be silly,” says Viola. “Of course you’ll be fine.”
“There, see, perfect. Just like that. Anyway, I thought you could be my nodding violet, or whatever. My talisman.”
“If that’s what you need.” His gaze, holding hers, is full of an inescapable past. Viola is certain now that he knows, that the fact of it is approaching barometric; they are too familiar with each other.
Jen, having had enough, gets up and leaves the room without a word.
“Is she okay?”
“Oh, sure. Just a bit moody,” he says. “Insecurities aside, if I didn’t take you to Shakespeare, I never would have forgiven myself.”
It’s coming up now, hot and inescapable—the fact throbbing between them.
“I’m sorry, I just—do you remember my—do you remember Susan Bliss?”
“Of course, I do.”
A long moment, the atmosphere thick with something, an end or a beginning, she can’t tell. She slides a hand across the table, touches one of his electric fingers. When he looks at her again, he looks older, furrowed with a need she cannot identify. The back of his hand reaches across, strokes the inside of her arm.
“Do you remember me?” she asks.
He shakes his head back and forth—noncommittal. “You’ve changed a bit,” he says, a smile cracking through the seriousness of it all. “I’m sorry I’ve got so old.”
“Don’t. You haven’t changed at all.”
His hand swirls her hair as he leans toward her, pushing gently at the back of her neck until his lips brush against her forehead. If he hesitates for a moment as she bends her cheek to him, she hopes it is because he is leaving behind the child and her mother, both long gone anyways, and surrendering himself to the woman here, now, who has come so far and waited so long for him to arrive.
1990
Kelp, Samphire, Gecko, Lime Rickey. Oh, Pistachio, Picnic. Killarney. Frosted Emerald. Pickle. Susan knows it has to be green, but has never really considered the sheer range, how each one might make the room feel. Even now, as the light shifts over the various patches of paint on the stripped walls of the bedroom that will belong to her children, she cannot tell which shade she prefers. The wall looks like America from above. Like a journey to another life.
“What if you did four different colors?” Sadie suggests. “Or stripes?”
An autumn breeze catches the opened window, and both sisters turn toward it. To Susan, the view still feels surreal. The old house, the new town. Her body, transforming daily, her appetite for spice. Twice a week, Al drives to Fortune Palace to pick up noodles drenched in chili oil, plastic jugs of hot-and-sour soup. He takes such joy in caring for her and it fills her with gratitude, an almost-peace about being here. But life still feels like it’s happening somewhere else.
“You could always just leave it like this,” Sadie says. “You know, let them gravitate toward whichever green they prefer. Get in touch with their inner greens. Maybe you could just let them crawl around the house and decide which room they want. You’ve got enough space.”
Sadie won’t stop bringing it up, the size of the house, the well-to-do area. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s a fixer-upper. That they have to start thinking now—somehow—about school districts, planning permissions. Or at least Al thinks they have to think about these things. They belong to a category that Susan has never considered before and still has not fully engaged with. All she can focus on is making the househer own: filling it with her music, making a phenomenal mess in the kitchen, taking up space in all the ways Hollywood hotels did not allow.
“Do you remember when Mom painted the whole house red after Dad left?” Sadie asks.
Of course she remembers. The story is so stale with retelling it doesn’t matter anymore whether or not it happened the way they tell it; what matters is the cadence and the stiff character assessments that it produces.It was like being inside an intestine.Someone said it once and nothing had been funnier. But the more it was repeated, the sadder it sounded.And then we had to wallpaper over everything… But Mom always used to say…Susan allows the conversation to traverse the dry, familiar riverbeds, to review the same, unchanged people. Their mother’s cirrhosis (worsening), their father’s absence (continued, unsurprising). Sometimes now with her sister, she feels their relationship is no more than a residue. As though they are only pantomiming how they used to be with each other before some invisible line was crossed. It’s the loneliest feeling.
“It could be worse,” Sadie says. “You could be waiting tables and living with your mom.”
“Oh stop,” Susie says. “You could do anything you wanted, if you worked for it.”
“Well, I can’t dance.”
“Oh, Sadie.”
Sadie has been frustrated for two years, ever since her knee injury. She’s been putting weight on as well, but that’s not something Susan can bring up lightly. It’s strange, the unspeakable sense of their universes pulling apart.It won’t be that way with the twins, she thinks. Underground rivers will run between them, currents carrying them in the same direction. They are beginning together, and together they will encounter the world.
“Look,” Susan says. “You just need to get creative. Limitations are key to innovation.”
