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  “Yes, I remember seeing her picture,” Susan’s mother said. “She had on so much makeup I hardly recognized her.”

  “Well, my father said she was what he called a success fou. That’s French for an extraordinarily great success,” Mary explained.

  “Is that so?” Susan’s mother said dryly.

  “Anyway, we had a party for those Little Theater people last night. They are very fascinating people. My mother hopes to get the lead in their next play.”

  “Oh, how devilish of her!” Susan’s mother giggled. “Tell her I’ll be in the front row opening night. What play are they doing? King of Hearts, I’ll bet. Little Theater groups always do King of Hearts. I don’t know why. It’s a lousy play.”

  In the back seat Jenny muttered things about people who didn’t take actors seriously.

  Afraid Susan’s mother might hear, Mary said in a very loud voice, “How do you like working at the bank, Mrs. Clay?”

  And Susan’s mother, holding her hand over her ear, turned to look directly at Mary, thereby narrowly missing a rear-end collision with a Ford pickup truck in front of her. The black Lab riding in the bed of the truck set up an indignant flurry of barks, telling Susan’s mother what he thought of her.

  “Easy, Mary,” Susan’s mother cautioned. “I can hear you, dear. No need to shout.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  On their return from the movies, they found their mother sitting on their father’s lap, nuzzling him behind the droopy curtain made by her hair. Their father looked perplexed. His long, thin hands lay dormant on either chair arm as he considered his next move. They were astounded and offended to find their parents in a pose of such intimacy. Suppose they’d brought Susan in with them? Or, worse yet, Tina. What then? How to explain such bizarre parental behavior?

  “It would only be for a few weeks,” their mother was saying.

  “What would only be for a few weeks?” Mary asked.

  “Your mother, it seems, yearns for a career on the stage.” Their father’s voice was noncommittal.

  Their mother leaped from her perch and twined her arms around them like honeysuckle growing on the back fence. The scent of her perfume was as heavy as honeysuckle.

  “The most exciting thing has happened!” she cried. “I’ve been offered a place in the Little Theater summer stock company. They’re traveling up the coast in the van doing Our Town, Auntie Mame, and Outward Bound.” She leaned back to get a good look at their faces.

  “Isn’t that heaven!”

  Before their very eyes, their mother seemed to grow younger, her face flushed as she tucked her hair behind her ears, her blue jeans tight as any tourniquet. She was one of them. She was their mother.

  They remembered the woman at the party with the stretched face who’d said their mother was very young for her age, and a sharp stab of apprehension seized them.

  “Are you going?” said Mary.

  “That’s a dumb question.” Jenny fought the urge to put her beloved thumb into her mouth. After a long struggle she’d given up sucking her thumb only last month. “Of course she’s going.”

  “Don’t look so forlorn, darlings. It will only be for a little while. You and your father will manage fine without me.” Their mother reached out her arms to embrace them again, and Jenny darted out of reach.

  “What will we eat? As I see it,” Jenny said, “we might starve.”

  Mary stuck out her jaw. “Daddy can only do Western egg sandwiches, and I can only make meat loaf.” By her side, Jenny groaned softly. Mary’s meat loaf was famous.

  “You’ve got a nerve!” Mary looked as if she might cry. “You learn how to cook then. You could learn if you weren’t so pigheaded.”

  “Come now, you’re my big girls.” Their mother couldn’t stop moving. Back and forth she went, then around in circles. Smiles kept breaking out, and her cheeks were brilliant, her eyes glowing. “Don’t you see, I’ll never have another chance like this!” she cried. “It’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me!”

  “I thought we were the most exciting thing that ever happened to you,” Mary said in a low voice. “Us and Daddy.”

  “Well, yes.” Their mother made herself stop moving while she considered this. “Of course. But think!” She flung wide her arms as if she’d just finished singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” “A stage career! Something I’ve wanted all my life. I’ve got to go. Don’t you understand? I’ve got to go!”

  Mary was silent, thinking, That’s what I said last week when Susan and I wanted to go to New York City on the train. By ourselves. She sounds just like me. I’ve got to go, I’ve got to go. But I wound up not going.

  “And as far as food goes, I’ll freeze stuff. Tons of stuff.” One by one, their mother bent back her fingers, ticking off the food she’d planned to leave. “Chili, stew, pea soup, all your favorites. You’ll be the best-fed family in town. You’ll see. Besides”—she sent around one of her dazzling smiles—“it’ll only be for a few weeks.” She had it all planned. They could see she was already in the van, barnstorming up the coast, radio turned up high, singing, laughing, on her way to the greasepaint and the roaring crowds.

  “Lucky it’s summer.” Their mother congratulated herself on her superb timing. “You won’t have to worry about packing lunches, clean things for school, all that jazz.” Another thought occurred to her, another good reason for her going. “And just think! You won’t have me around all the time, telling you what to do, what not to do. Won’t that be fun?”

  “Sure,” said Mary glumly.

  “I guess,” said Jenny.

  “If it weren’t summer,” their father observed wryly, “I guess there’d be no summer stock and the matter wouldn’t have arisen.”

  The next few days whizzed by slowly. The house was filled with the sounds of closet doors opening, bureau drawers closing, as their mother worked out what she’d take with her. One small bag was all she was allowed to take, she told them, making a face. They stood just outside their parents’ bedroom and watched the big bed fill up with rejects, things that simply wouldn’t do for the journey. They had never seen so many clothes.

  “Why don’t we have a tag sale and get rid of all this junk?” Jenny suggested. “I bet we could make a pile of dough.”

  “Over my dead body.” Their mother ran her hands lightly over Jenny’s head. “Darling, what have you done to your hair?”

  Jenny backed off. “I washed it in Tide,” she said. Jenny’s hair always looked as if she’d slept in it.

  “Oh, how am I going to manage with only one bag!” their mother wailed, Jenny’s hair now forgotten. The telephone rang, and it was, as always, for her.

  “Don’t tell Susan yet. About her going, I mean.” Mary frowned. “Or Tina. I don’t want them to know until I get used to it. I can hear them now. Sue will tell her mother, and the whole town will know.”

  “So what? Lots of kids would love it if their mother was an actress.” As she spoke, Jenny twisted a strand of her hair into a tight little corkscrew.

  “Quit that!” Mary said sharply. “Last time you did that we had to cut it out and you had bald spots. Remember?”

  But, once begun, Jenny found it difficult to stop twisting her hair. It took her mind off her thumb.

  “Tina will flip,” Jenny said. “And Sue will be jealous. All her mother does is work in a bank.” Tina’s mother was office manager in a ball-bearing factory. “Being an actress is very glamorous,” Jenny said. Mary wondered if this was so.

  “What will I do if I get one of my earaches?” Jenny said. Her earaches were sudden and severe and usually accompanied by a high fever. They crept up on her while she was sleeping, bringing her awake with a jolt of pain. No one had really suffered, Jenny said, until they had an earache.

  “Darlings, do me a favor and run up to the attic and bring down that big storage box, will you?” their mother said. “I’ll just hurl this lot of things in there and worry about them when I get back.”
r />   The telephone never stopped ringing. Even Susan gave up calling them. She complained she could never get through. There were, it seemed, many arrangements to be made. They had TV dinners three nights in a row. TV dinners had once been a treat. Now they were a bore. They felt left out, deserted.

  They began to brag to their friends.

  “She’s going in a van,” they said in a pseudo-lofty manner, as if stating, “She’s going on the Concorde.”

  “She’s acting in Auntie Mame. And Outward Bound. What’s the name of that other thing she’s in, Mary?”

  Mary tried to explain the complexities of Our Town, not too sure herself of what was what. But as none of them had ever before heard of Our Town, she operated from strength.

  Their friend Tina, who definitely had her snotty side, said, “I thought only hippies traveled in vans.”

  “Hippies!” Jenny screeched. “What are you, somebody’s grandmother? Only grandmothers say ‘hippies.’”

  Mary let out a huge sigh. “It’s going to be fun. You’re just jealous.”

  Tina, her face unfriendly, said, “What’s to be jealous of?”

  “You’re jealous because our mother’s an actress and we get to do what we want and you have to do what your mother says.” Jenny belched and scratched her stomach.

  Their mother appeared, looking frantic. “I simply don’t know how I’m going to get organized. There are so many things to think of.” She gave them a wan smile and spun off.

  “My mother said you should ask your grandmother to come and stay with you,” Tina said. “My mother said she certainly wouldn’t leave us on our own.”

  “We’re not on our own. Our father’s in charge. He’s taking us to McDonald’s practically every night,” Jenny improvised. “That and the movies.”

  “Every night might be boring.” Tina leaned over and, without bending her knees, grasped her ankles. Tina had platinum-blond hair and eyebrows and was very competitive. Tina and her mother took aerobic dancing lessons, and Tina was always stretching and bending and tying herself up in knots. “We are in terrific shape,” Tina told them every other day. “The instructor says she’s never seen two people in as good shape as me and my mother.”

  When they were alone, Mary said, “Maybe she won’t get organized. Maybe the van will leave without her.”

  “Want to bet?” Jenny said.

  At midnight the van came. The racket made by its muffler cut through the thick hot night. They had gone to bed to sleep fitfully, waking now and then to make sure the outside light was still on. Their mother had promised she wouldn’t leave without waking them. The van’s driver, it turned out, tended bar at the Bald Elbow and couldn’t get off any earlier.

  Carrying her one bag and looking pale, their mother kissed them all good-bye. Three times. They peered timidly inside the van, looking for the freckled man, but he was nowhere to be seen. Their father stood in the shadows, smoking. They could see the ash of his cigarette glowing. He had given up smoking the same time Jenny had given up sucking her thumb.

  Their mother introduced them to the three men and three women who were going with her in the van. They were all rather ordinary-looking people, Mary thought, disappointed. She always expected actors to look different, special.

  “I’ll be back before you know it,” their mother called out to them. “I’ll write every day.” Then she climbed in, and the driver, whose name was Bill, said “Ciao,” and revved the engine, eager to be off.

  They watched the van’s taillights recede. Still, they stood there, swatting at mosquitoes, listening to the silence. They went to stand on either side of their father, each holding one of his hands, which smelled of cigarette smoke.

  “We’re going to be fine,” Mary told him.

  “Yes,” he agreed, “but I’m not so sure about her.”

  They crawled into bed, still in their shorts and T-shirts.

  “She won’t, you know,” Mary said, her voice fuzzy, the way it got when she was on the verge of sleep.

  “Won’t what?”

  Mary yawned noisily. “Won’t write.”

  “I thought you meant won’t be back before we know it,” Jenny said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The day after their mother left, Mary started letting her hair grow and Jenny began to suck her thumb again in earnest. Mary’s hair seemed to grow faster in summer, she thought. With her baby-sitting money she bought a length of black velvet ribbon to hold it back from her face, and a pair of little flat black strapped shoes imported from China. Jenny bought nothing. One thing about sucking your thumb, Jenny reflected, it’s free.

  Several days later Jenny caught Mary staring in Breslow’s window at a white organdy pinafore.

  “What kind of an ass would be caught dead wearing that?” Jenny hissed, so close a tiny blob of spittle landed on Mary’s earlobe.

  Mary reared back and brushed at her ear. “You better not let Daddy hear you say that or he’ll let you have it,” she said, heading for home. Scuttling alongside, Jenny chanted, “Ass, ass, ass.”

  I’m telling, quivered on the end of Mary’s tongue. She knew she was too old for I’m telling, but she was sorely tempted. Instead, she broke into a run and sprinted away from Jenny. As she ran, she caught delicious glimpses of herself in shop windows, hair streaming out behind her like a horse’s mane.

  Mary played the piano and was also a track star. Next year she planned to try out for the freshman team at the high school. She shivered, just thinking about it. Of course, when the time came and she was actually there, she’d probably be too shy. Mary had made a vow never to smoke or drink. Her position on maintaining her virginity until marriage was somewhat ambivalent. Anyway, it was much too soon for that. She hadn’t even had a date yet.

  Mary planned to have a successful career and a husband and two children, a boy and a girl. She firmly believed she could have it all and intended to go for it. She would never get fat, she promised herself, and would give quite a lot of the money she made to charity. Her husband’s face was indistinct, but she knew he would be tall and kind and have a wonderful sense of humor. His name was unimportant as long as it wasn’t Harold. In her heart, Mary felt she simply could never marry anyone named Harold.

  Yesterday they’d had a postcard from Rhode Island. In their mother’s sprawling, hard-to-read handwriting, it said “Miss you all. Marvelous audiences!” The rest of the space was filled with scads of xxxxx’s.

  Today there was nothing.

  Just in time Mary skidded to the piano seat and arranged herself as if she’d been there for hours. She allowed her fingers to run up and down the keys in what she thought of as a somewhat artistic manner, and her feet worked away at the pedals as if she were warming up for Carnegie Hall. The piano, old and out of tune, trembled under her touch. When the windows were open, as now, old Mrs. Carruthers, peering from behind dusty draperies four doors down, could hear every note and thought fondly how like dear Mama’s playing it sounded.

  “You ever think of taking up the oboe?” Jenny leaned in the doorway, breathing hard, eyes glittering from behind slit lids. “I bet there was a letter today and you hid it.”

  “Go soak your head.” Mary finished off a complicated trill she never should have tried in the first place. Trills always gave her trouble.

  “What’s for supper?” Jenny demanded.

  “Whatever you feel like, baby.”

  The minute the word was out, Mary was ashamed. She had committed a cardinal sin. But the damage was done, and it was great. It wasn’t fair to call Jenny a baby. She wasn’t one.

  In a falsely jovial tone Mary tried to mend her gaffe. “Maybe Daddy’ll take us out. Or how about if we defrost some of Mother’s chili? That’d be good.” They had not touched any of the food their mother had left for them. Everything was there, neat and tidy, as she’d left it: a row of little plastic containers, each labeled with its contents. When she returned at last and opened the freezer, there it all would be, a testimony to the fa
ct they’d managed fine, on their own, without any of her provisions.

  But Jenny, wounded, was not to be sidetracked. She thundered up the stairs and slammed the bedroom door. When she came back down, Mary knew, she’d probably look like Buddy Hackett. She always looked like Buddy Hackett after she cried. Ordinarily Jenny wouldn’t cry about being called a baby, but she was unsettled at their mother’s going.

  After a while Mary crept up and listened at the door. All was quiet. She eased the door open. Jenny lay collapsed on the bed, one arm above her head, the other tucked under the pillow. Tears lay in the little pockets under her eyes. Sure enough. Cheeks fat from crying, eyes made small by weeping, Jenny was taking on her Buddy Hackett face as she slept. A wave of guilt washed over Mary. It was her fault. She was the older one; it was up to her to behave like a grown-up, whatever that meant. She should look out for poor skinny little Jenny. She should be selfless, keep the home happy.

  Jenny’s eyes snapped open. In a ferocious voice, she said, “Ass!” Then, turning on her stomach, she plugged her thumb into her mouth and closed her eyes again.

  All tenderness flown, Mary said, “All right for you. Don’t be such a—” and again the word “baby” came to mind, but valiantly she pushed it away and settled for “jerk” instead.

  There’s something wrong here, Mary thought on her way downstairs. Our mother is off doing her own thing, and we’re home, doing ours. Only we’re not happy. Is she? It would be interesting to find out, which she probably never would. Perhaps she would discuss it with her father, she thought, pretty sure she wouldn’t. Their father, always a quiet man, had become quieter since their mother’s departure. He asked them if they needed any money, anything, asked them what they did during the day. Once he’d said something about getting a sitter for them. They had both howled so loud he’d told them they reminded him of a couple of coyotes. They were too big for a sitter, they protested. Much too big. Wasn’t Mary sitting herself? Ridiculous.