Friday, November 6, continued
“Don't do that,” Willa said.
“Which part?”
“The whole thing.”
Jo found a paper cup on the radiator, took off the lid, found the wrong kind of coffee, and put it down again.
“It's a routine.”
“It was my marriage.”
“I don't say he didn't leave you. I turn it around.”
“You do say he didn't leave me.”
“Nobody thinks—”
“Mae does.”
Jo glanced toward the theater doors.
“Mae knows what a joke is.”
“You washed my hair.”
“Yes, I did.”
It sounded, absurdly, like an answer to an accusation that she hadn't.
Willa moved aside for a man carrying a ladder. Jo drew her in by the sleeve so he could get past. The touch was quick, familiar. Willa pulled her arm away a second too late.
“You said you wouldn't tell it.”
“It's been ten years.”
“Has it stopped happening to me?”
Jo folded her arms. “You've said I ought to charge you rent for keeping you in the act.”
“I was joking about what you'd already said about me.”
“And it was funny. I laughed. I didn't send you a lease.”
“The dress,” Willa said. “The hair. The scissors. You weren't doing a bit then.”
Jo's face changed, and for a second Willa thought she had reached her.
“No,” Jo said softly. “I was your mother.”
They looked at each other.
“Then leave that there.”
Jo put her hand on Willa's forearm.
“Sweetheart, I have spent my whole life trying to find something to do with the things that happen. What would you like me to do instead? Just have them?”
“For once.”
Jo took her hand away.
“We're going to have a wonderful night. You can get up there and answer me. You can tell them I'm impossible. They know. Make it funny.”
A voice from inside called Jo's name. She turned her head toward it, then back.
“Don't give this up because you're angry with me.”
She waited. Willa could have made her wait longer. Instead she went back into the theater and collected her coat. Mae had moved the bag from the seat beside her, saving Willa's place.
Willa didn't sit down.
At the table onstage, her two copies lay exactly where she'd left them, white side up. She could have turned them over and put them in Mae's hands. She stood looking at them until Mae said, “We can do yours another time.”
“It's ready.”
“All right.”
Willa picked up the pages. One had a damp ring near the edge. She slid them into her tote without offering them.
“Another time,” she said.
In the lobby she took her phone out to order a car, saw the price, and put it away. The bus would take forty minutes. She could sit through forty minutes. There was a bench under a poster for an old musical; she sat at one end and watched the empty ticket windows.
A man came in to ask about parking for a show the following week. The woman at the window opened the blind a little and told him. He needed to be told twice, and she told him twice, in the same voice. Willa liked the woman suddenly and unreasonably.
She went out before anyone came to find her.
On the bus she took the two copies from her tote. She had put a good deal of work into the set. Three different endings were crossed out on the last page, and one had been rescued with an arrow. There were things in it she knew would work at the Bellwether. Nothing from the hotel. Nothing her mother had given her.
She tried to make herself interested in the new sentence about the passenger. She could hear only Jo saying, This was the only thing committed to staying with her.
It was a better line.
At home she put the pages on the floor beside the sofa and opened a recording from June. Her own voice came out of the phone too brightly. She was asking the room how many of them drove, a question she had stopped asking because the answer was always nearly everybody and she didn't know why she made them do it.
She watched herself find the first laugh, watched the tiny lift in her shoulders when it came. She hadn't known she did that. She replayed it. It looked like relief. It looked embarrassing.
Halfway through, her mother had left a comment: That's my girl.
Jo hadn't said that to her when she'd called about the set. Willa had looked at the comment for days, waiting to feel only pleased.
She stopped the recording and put the phone face down.
For eighteen months she'd managed to talk to Jo only when there was something practical to say. A birthday. Beth's tour dates. A question about something Frank had owned. The rule had lasted because Willa hadn't called it a rule. She hadn't said to anyone that her mother was no longer allowed to ring whenever she thought of a new way to describe a daughter's failure to keep a roof over her head. She'd simply stopped answering during teaching hours and allowed the teaching hours to spread.
There had been work. Real work. She'd been making the rent when Jo's eviction joke went up online. People sent it to Willa as though it were a photograph of them together.
Now she had asked for her mother to say Willa Harker, she's funny. Her name was on Mae's page. She'd been so close to the kind of problem she wanted: which line first, which jacket, how long to wait for a laugh at the back.
She went to the sink and washed the coffee cup she'd left there in the morning.
The easy version would be to do her twenty and be good. Let them see her as she was. She set the cup on the rack, then took it off again, dried it and put it away.
She went back to the sofa.
Friday night
She wrote HE LEFT ME across a page in her notebook. Underneath she wrote OF HIS OWN FREE WILL, then crossed that out. It seemed unfair to make his decision sound impressive.
The small lamp beside her sofa lit half the page. She had moved it here from her bedside table because the overhead light made her feel she should be cleaning. A plate with a dried crescent of mustard on it sat on the floor.
She tried saying, “My mother's retiring. We've all handed in our notice.”
Not bad. She wrote it down. Jo would like it.
She tried, “I didn't send my husband away for an ocean view. We just grew apart. He grew toward the door.”
That sounded like something she would say at Rafi's while the bartender washed a glass. She could see herself smiling through the same seven minutes for another ten years. Rafi might increase the fee to fifty. The fries would keep getting worse.
On her phone there was a photograph from Beth, taken at the apartment: Willa sunk into the green chair, holding her glass against her chest. Her eyes were shut. Beth had written, Sedated successfully.
She zoomed in. In the corner behind her own head, the boxed alarm stood on the counter.
She wrote, My sister is so organized.
It was a sentence that made people sit back. You could hear the rest before it came. She drew a line through so and tried again.
Beth took a corkscrew on her keys. Beth had leased an apartment, furnished it, cleaned it, bought the coffee, and only then invited another human being in. Willa could not buy shampoo without picking up the one she hadn't liked last time. Their mother called Beth in an emergency and Willa when something needed to be made of it afterward.
Willa wrote three lines. The third made her laugh out loud.
She read them again, slower. She pictured Beth in the green chair, saying, Here will be home.
She closed the notebook and washed the plate. Then she dried it, put it in the cupboard, sat down, and opened the notebook again.
She got up to try the new opening standing. Her living room was too narrow to walk across it without looking for the coffee table.
“My mother gave me a childhood. She's still touring it.”
She wrote that down, then put a question mark beside it. A good line and already exhausted. She could hear the nods. People liked you to put a thing clearly. Then they wanted another thing.
“My sister and I had the usual family roles. She was the good one. I was downloadable.”
Better. Maybe. She tried it without smiling, then smiling. The second was worse.
The rest of the answer wanted to be a list: what Jo had said, what had really happened. Willa could see the audience listening politely while she opened a series of small cases and asked them to agree. Each case had her mother in it, looking better under the light.
She made tea and forgot to drink it. At nine she ate Simon's bread cold, holding the foil under it to catch the crumbs. She could have called Beth. Beth would listen. Beth would be at home, possibly next to Simon, sitting on the sofa that no longer had a rival.
Willa picked up the phone, looked at the apartment photograph again, and put it beside the notebook.
She had the chair now. Not a line about it yet, but the shape of a person being replaced by a chair. The chair was innocent. The chair was what anybody would choose. Beth had sat in it with her hands on the arms like a woman waiting for a photograph to be taken. Willa could see her face.
She began writing faster.
At eleven she texted Rafi. Any chance of ten tomorrow? Need to try new stuff.
He replied, Eight. You're not a penis joke. We don't have unlimited time.
She called her mother.
“I'm working on the answer,” she said when Jo picked up.
“Good.”
“Rafi's tomorrow. Come hear it.”
“I'd love to.”
“Bring Mae.”
Jo was quiet for a moment.
“All right,” she said. “What time?”