On Monday the first people through the door asked whether Mae was coming.
Nora was helping Inez arrange the front row. She had a chair in each hand, and for a second the question seemed to have been addressed to someone else.
“No,” Inez said. “This is the show on the listing.”
The man who'd asked held up his phone. “I saw her name.”
“Writer for Mae Bell. Nora's writing for her. And performing here.”
“Oh.” He looked at Nora, then the chairs. “Right.”
His wife said it would be nice to see new people. They took a table near the front, and the man put his coat on the chair beside him as if making a reservation for the person who wasn't coming.
Nora carried the last two chairs to the wall.
“I put it clearly,” Inez said.
“I know.”
“He asked in a comment. I said no there, too.”
“It's fine.”
Inez looked at her.
Nora made herself stop arranging the same chair. “It is. I said you could use it.”
“You want me to take it off next time?”
“We'll get through this time.”
Inez nodded and went to help Gloria with something at the bar. She had work clothes under her coat, black pants and a plain blouse, not the yellow sneakers. She'd left her shift early enough to get the room ready and had spent the first part of the afternoon arguing over a canceled comic's replacement. Nora had sent three lines of material she wanted to try. Inez had sent a running order, a request for a microphone check and a question about whether Nora wanted water on the stage.
It was possible they did not have the same evening ahead of them.
By eight twenty the room was more than half full. Not packed, not a line around the corner, but enough people for Inez to count them twice and say she could cover the small extra expense she'd promised Gloria. Some were friends. Some came to her monthly show. A few were there because they'd seen a famous name and had decided to stay after they learned it wasn't that kind of ticket.
Nora put her pages on the back table. She knew the beginning without them. She'd rehearsed the plates, the emergency contact, a few minutes about buying food for one person and then inviting imaginary people to dinner in the grocery aisle. There were things in it she wanted to find out about. She had almost forgotten how different that felt from wanting a room to endorse a conclusion.
Inez came over holding her phone.
“Can I record tonight? Your set, I mean. So you can see it. If we wanted to put anything up I'd ask separately, show you first.”
Nora looked at the little tripod folded underneath.
“Yes. For watching.”
“Right.”
“I was terrible last time.”
“Then it's nice nobody filmed that one.”
Inez said it simply, not rescuing Nora from the thought. She put the phone at the back, where it could see the stage without blocking somebody's dinner.
Nora went to the bathroom. There was a new lock, a complicated little slide somebody had installed too close to the frame. It took her two tries. She washed her hands and stood in front of the mirror until she caught herself checking for a person who looked like she should be here.
She wore the green shirt. It was only a shirt. She was allowed to put it on without having to become a different woman inside it.
When she came back, Gloria pointed at the stage and asked whether the stand height was right. Nora checked. She knew which part to turn now. She adjusted it, said a sentence into the microphone and felt the sound come back from the room. A man near the bar glanced up, then returned to the conversation he had paid to finish before the show.
Inez opened at eight thirty. She thanked people for coming, dealt with a chair scraping loudly across the floor by looking at it until the person stopped, then settled into her own material.
The new ending worked. Inez stayed the dance teacher long enough for his patience to become personally offensive. She let one knee carry her toward the edge of the stage, then pointed at the space she'd left as if she could report it to somebody.
Nora laughed. She was pleased in the uncomplicated, greedy way she got when a thing she'd noticed became visible to other people. Inez looked toward the back for half a second and grinned.
The next comic did a short set about apartment viewings. He had a loose, friendly delivery that made his worst jokes sound like something he'd just remembered and wanted them to enjoy. He ran over by thirty seconds, apologized to Inez instead of the room, and left to a good response.
Nora stood. Her legs felt practical. They could get her from the back table to the little step. Nothing larger had to be settled before she did that.
Inez introduced her by name, with a brief mention of the writing work and a promise of new material. Nobody shouted. There were enough hands clapping for Nora to feel something like welcome.
She took the microphone out of the stand without hitting anything.
“I got divorced,” she said. “I don't recommend it as an organizational system, but it does make you go through the cupboards.”
A little laugh. She looked at the woman beside the reserved coat, not asking her for anything.
“We divided the plates. I thought that would be easy. Half and half. But apparently I'd spent the whole marriage qualifying for the small ones.”
The woman smiled. Nora could see the man beside her considering whether to laugh. She did not wait for him.
“I used to give him the bigger dinner. He'd say, ‘That's a lot.’ And I'd say, ‘You need it.’ Because I knew. I was the dietary authority on this man. Meanwhile I'm eating three potatoes and watching him put my sacrifice in his mouth.”
The laugh came in a place it hadn't at home. Nora waited. It was a little untidy, different people arriving at different times. She could do something in that space without filling it.
“He'd get up and ask if I wanted another potato. I didn't want another potato. I wanted him to know why I couldn't possibly have to ask for another potato. So I said no. Then I'd do the dishes angrily, as a second course.”
Inez laughed at the back. The room loosened. Nora felt the ordinary extraordinary relief of not having to make them know the whole marriage to get them to understand that woman.
“The shopping took longer to divide,” she said. “I kept buying a cabbage. That's a married vegetable. You need somebody in the house who can be blamed for the other half.”
A few people laughed. The man by the coat took a drink.
“Then bananas. Six. On a Wednesday. Like I'd met somebody.”
The woman next to him laughed suddenly. Nora looked at her.
“Not anybody special. Just somebody willing to be in my kitchen before Sunday.”
The woman said, “Freeze them.”
Nora nodded. “That's what everybody tells you. Don't make less food. Buy a second climate.”
It got a smaller laugh. Nora stopped trying to improve it.
“I did freeze them. In the skin. I opened the drawer and thought, well, something's died in here.”
The woman's laugh came back, louder. Nora held the invisible dead banana away from her by its stem. For a second she wanted to keep talking to this woman about her freezer.
She went on to the emergency contact. Her mother wouldn't answer a blocked number; Nora tried Ellen's suspicious hello, then softened it halfway through. She could see the blue scarf. The end passed without much happening. She took a sip of water.
Then somebody near the front said, “What about Mae?”
Nora looked over. It was the man who had asked if Mae was coming. His coat was still beside him.
“She's had her dinner,” Nora said.
A good laugh. Even he smiled.
“You wrote for her fifteen years?” he asked.
“I still write for her.”
“That's a nice job.”
He could have meant it. Nora heard the charity in it anyway.
Nora said, “Sometimes.”
“Kept you working, then.”
Nora put the water down.
At the back Inez leaned forward. Nora saw the movement and could still have chosen the next thing on her page.
“Yes,” she said. “I was customer retention.”
The laugh was tentative. They weren't sure where she was taking them. Nora wasn't sure, either. But she had written a version of the next line last night, and she could feel it arriving without having to work for it.
“You know when Mae says, ‘Bring your terrible week. I'll put it next to mine’?”
The wife nodded. She had seen the little preview from the production, or an earlier variation, or she simply believed this was a thing Mae would say.
“I wrote that.”
Nora let the fact settle.
“That's not a confession. It was a job. She wanted you to know you belonged. I had a deadline.”
A laugh, sharper than the one about the plates. It traveled fast from the front table.
Nora changed her stance. Mae lived somewhere just below her ordinary voice, in the extra breath before an affectionate word and the little tilt that told a listener they were the one she meant.
“Bring your terrible week,” she said in Mae's voice, opening her arms. Then she moved one hand down to the invisible terminal. “And how would you like to pay for storing it?”
The room laughed. Nora hadn't known she could do the shift so cleanly.
“She's very generous with your problems. There's a rack at the door. We can hang your father issues up beside your divorce. Just keep the ticket. We are not responsible for anything that happens to them during the show.”
Somebody made a shocked happy sound. Nora could see the man's wife leaning forward. Not toward the idea of Mae now. Toward her.
She saw the hotel bathroom.
Not all of it. Mae's face in the mirror. The dress caught at the back. Tell me they were stupid.
Nora heard the words in exactly the right rhythm.
“I'll tell you something about Mae,” she said.
At the back Inez stopped moving. Near the bar someone put down a glass so carefully that Nora heard its base touch the wood.
“We did this corporate thing once. Terrible room. They'd eaten, they'd had their little awards, they'd congratulated the man who'd invented the photocopier or whatever the fuck it was.”
A laugh.
“Afterward the man who'd booked her says, ‘Sorry. They're just tired.’”
Nora let Mae come into her face, the private, unguarded impatience, the terrible need to have the room's failure be something other than her own.
“Don't tell me they were tired,” she said. “Tell me they were stupid.”
The impression landed before the line finished. People recognized Mae in it, though this wasn't the Mae they had seen. That was part of what made it feel valuable.
“Not a bad audience. An unpaid balance. They'd had the full service and failed to provide the agreed admiration.”
Nora offered the imaginary screen to the man in the front row. He laughed and leaned back, enjoying being selected now that he knew he wasn't the target.
“You'll see some choices here. Brilliant. Life-changing. Best you've ever been. If you select Tired, it brings up a page that says, ‘Are you sure you're not stupid?’”
The laugh was larger. Nora waited without being told.
She remembered Mae crouched on the tile, holding Nora's foot on her bare knee so the bandage would stick. The fries between them. The house with too many bedrooms on the silent television, Mae making a voice so awful that Nora had food in her mouth and couldn't safely laugh.
She waited for the laugh to finish. She wasn't giving them that part.
She turned the screen back toward herself.
“If you're not happy, you can speak to the writer. The writer is me. I offer a full refund on any feelings you believed were hers.”
The woman by the coat slapped the table. Nora's heart was beating so hard she could feel it in the hand holding the microphone.
“All this time you thought you were getting a personal connection. You were getting very competent office support.”
She made the support voice brighter.
“Your admiration is important to us. Please stay where you are. Somebody with an actual feeling will be with you shortly.”
They laughed again.
At the back the little light came on. She'd been going nearly nine minutes. The time surprised her. She had not been counting it by how much longer she had to endure.
She returned to the terminal once, made it ask whether the experience had been worth recommending to a friend, then looked at them and said, “That's a separate charge.”
The applause started before she thanked them. She stood through a moment of it. People were looking at her. She wanted another moment.
She put the microphone in the stand at the right height for the person following her. Her hand was steady until she let go.
Inez was coming up the side of the room. Her face held surprise and excitement and something Nora didn't want to identify while the applause was still going.
“Holy shit,” Inez said quietly.
Nora smiled at her.
Then she walked to the back, hearing people say her name without needing to explain who she worked for.