Saturday night, November 7
Rafi called her name.
Walking through the little lane between tables, she saw people turn. A woman at the back said Harker? to the man beside her, and he pointed, not at Willa but toward Jo's table. Willa stepped onto the low stage.
She adjusted the microphone and let it squeal just a little.
“Sorry. That's my mother. She can smell an empty stage.”
Jo's laugh rose above the others. Willa looked at her, then away.
“My mother's retiring. We've all handed in our notice.”
It got a decent laugh. She moved into the bit about holiday dinners, being raised in a house where a conversation couldn't end until somebody had found the closer. Two people near the back were still ordering. She couldn't see Mae around the pillar unless she stepped left, so she stepped left.
“She offered me the opening slot at her farewell. I said, Have you considered a band? She said, Why would I feed five people when I've already damaged one?”
Jo laughed hard enough to lean forward. Willa hadn't known until then how much she wanted that exact sound.
“When I was little, she used to try material at breakfast. You think you want a funny mother. You haven't seen a woman hold a pancake until you give her something she can use.”
A small laugh. Jo nodded, accepting it as a fair exaggeration.
“I had ordinary teenage problems. I didn't want to talk about them. She didn't either. She wanted to do them regionally.”
The man nearest the bar looked at Jo. She raised her glass to him, and his laugh came late, detached from the line.
“I could say, Mom, I need some space, and she'd say, Fine. How much can we seat?”
That worked better. Willa waited, smiling. The room knew what kind of family they were in now. She could run this way for several minutes. She had written several minutes.
She did the line about growing apart and Ben growing toward the door. A laugh, thin at the edges. Somebody clicked a lighter outside the open back window.
“My mother says I sent him home because room service was late. I wish I were that efficient. Normally I give a sandwich three chances.”
The audience began listening in a different way. They were waiting for the anger now. She could hear them waiting.
“I love my mother,” Willa said. “I just wish she'd stop doing my material before it happens to me.”
A good laugh. She could end that section there. She could go to the mattress.
At Jo's table, Mae had bent to say something in her ear. Jo nodded without looking away from the stage. They were talking about Willa. She didn't want them to stop.
“My mother has two daughters,” she said. “I'm the cautionary tale. My sister Beth is the emergency contact.”
Jo put her chin in her hand.
“Beth is what happens when anxiety discovers a calendar.”
A woman at the front gave one short bark of laughter. Willa knew she had found somebody.
“I mean she gets things done. In our family, if you say, I can't go on, Beth says, Fine, but we'll need to cancel the parking.”
More people came in with her. She heard a chair leg scrape; somebody had turned all the way around.
“She's so good at leaving places. My sister is leaving her husband. She's got an apartment.”
Her voice came back from the speaker. Jo's hand fell from her chin. Then she smiled, waiting.
Her mouth was dry. She put a hand around the microphone stand and felt its nicked paint under her palm.
“She's furnished it. Bed, lamp, coffee, towels. When Beth leaves a marriage, the new life is open for a soft launch.”
The woman at the front folded at the waist. Mae laughed. Willa saw her whole face now, the way she looked at the stage instead of around the room.
“She showed it to me. Very emotional. Just the two of us. She said, ‘Don't sit in the chair. I want to be the first.’”
Willa held the silence a moment, looking across their heads as though Beth were still guarding the chair.
“I'm an unmarried woman with a paid-off toaster. I know a rival when I see one.”
Jo put her hand over her mouth. People were laughing across one another now, laughter arriving from the back after the front had begun to recover. Willa moved the microphone closer.
“My sister isn't looking for another man. She's found a chair with lumbar support. The chair says nothing when she eats crackers for dinner. It doesn't have plans for the kitchen. If you buy it a little matching stool, it doesn't say, Who's this for?”
She moved a little farther left. Mae could see her without leaning now.
“She's got a smoke alarm in the hall and she's bought another for the bedroom. I said, What's that for? She said, Safety. Safety. This woman has a backup plan for the thing that screams, Get out.”
The laugh lifted her. It was physical, a broad rising pressure under her ribs. She waited inside it, one hand open, with more time than she had ever had onstage. Nobody was ordering a drink. Jo was bent over the table, shoulders moving. When she raised her face, she looked astonished.
Willa couldn't hear the next line in her own head. She didn't need it yet.
“I didn't know you could separate responsibly. I thought you were meant to stand in a drugstore at eleven at night buying one toothbrush and a package of ham.”
She'd bought the ham. She had stood by her own refrigerator and eaten it out of the package after coming home from Atlantic City. It got a laugh, but they were still with Beth.
“Not my sister. She has prepared for being alone. She's bought two wineglasses. They don't match. That's her wild period. In six months she'll be drinking orange juice out of something marked flour.”
“The apartment's so clean. Even the things she's just bought look as though she's keeping them for best. I asked, Where are you going to put all your stuff? She said, What stuff? That's how good she is. She's left the clutter a house.”
She hadn't written the last part quite like that. It came more easily out here, with her mother's face turned up toward hers.
“My family's full of women preparing for independence by doing all the work ahead of time. You should see my mother retire. She's booked a theater so we can watch her stop.”
Jo laughed and pointed at her. Willa put a hand out toward the table.
Jo slapped the table. Willa laughed with her. She hadn't laughed like that while doing a set in years: her own laugh, loose and rather stupid, getting in the way of the words.
“And it's nice,” she said. “It's a really nice little place. You go up there and you think, Actually, I would leave me for this.”
The audience came with her through it. She could feel the room waiting to be given somewhere else to go. She took them to the driving car, did the mattress, and for the first time it was less than the thing before it. Still good. Not the biggest thing she could do.
Rafi stood where she could see him and tapped his wrist. She found the Christmas line and left to applause before she had worn out the room. Her whole body was hot. In the hallway she leaned against the wall and shut her eyes.
Rafi came through carrying an empty glass.
“Well,” he said.
“Too much?”
“You went over. Nobody died.”
“How much over?”
“I don't know. I was listening.”
He went back to introduce the next act. She stood there another moment, holding the notebook she hadn't opened.
In the little bathroom she ran cold water over her hands. There was no space for the notebook beside the basin; she held it under one arm and watched the water wash a gray line of ink from the edge of her thumb.
For years she had been able to tell whether a set was good by the things that stopped mattering. Her shirt, her hair, the size of her arms when she lifted them. Tonight there had been no body at all for a minute, only the room and the next thing she could give it.
She turned the tap off with a paper towel because it wouldn't stop dripping unless you pressed hard. She could hear the man onstage waiting for a laugh. He had reached the part of his act where he said, It's true, after every sentence.
On her phone Beth had sent a picture of a plate. A very small piece of food sat in its center with a yellow dot beside it.
Your brother-in-law has taken me to a restaurant that charges by the absence, Beth had written.
Willa looked at the time. The message had come in while she'd been onstage. She typed, Looks filling, then deleted it.
She could say she'd used a little of their afternoon. She could call tomorrow and explain properly. The water had begun dripping again. She pressed the handle down, put her phone away, and went back into the room.
The floor near the bar was sticky. Somebody touched her elbow to say that his sister was the same. She thanked him. He asked if her mother was as much fun at home, and she smiled without answering. For once he didn't need her answer. He was already telling the woman next to him that Willa had been very good.
Jo got up when Willa approached the table. She took her by both shoulders, which made Willa brace for a kiss. Instead Jo held her away and looked at her.
“The chair,” she said.
Willa smiled.
“Don't do the stool so quickly. Let them see him first.”
“Him?”
“The stool. That's a husband. You found him. Give him a second to stand there.”
Willa could see it. The little stool turning up beside the chair with all its modest demands. She laughed again.
“You've got that look,” Jo said.
“What look?”
“Like you want to go back on.”
Mae pushed the empty chair out with her foot.
“Sit. Tell me what else you've got.”
Willa pulled her notebook closer and sat between them. The next comic was waiting for the room to settle. Beside her, Jo uncapped a pen.