When they said her name, the room made more sound than she knew what to do with.
Nora walked into it. She reached the microphone, took it from the stand and had to wait while people kept clapping. There was no sensible place to look. She found the back of the room and then a woman halfway up, laughing at something the person beside her had said. Nora wanted to tell them she hadn't started. Instead she let them finish being pleased with one another.
“Hello,” she said.
The word came back at her. Large, then familiar.
She moved the stand as they'd rehearsed. Her hand didn't shake. That seemed suspicious, as if some delayed invoice for the steadiness would arrive halfway through.
“I got divorced. It's been very good for my knowledge of the cupboards.”
A laugh. Not all of them, but enough. Nora felt it meet her and didn't step in front of it.
She began with the plates, the woman giving away the big dinner and then watching it be eaten. The first laugh let her leave the plate alone. She went on to the mugs, arranging them too gently, making the house hear how carefully she wasn't breaking anything.
“They all survived,” she said. “We didn't. But I could lend you six matching cups if you've got people coming.”
The woman halfway up laughed. Her companion tried to say something and got a hand held up to him. Not now. Nora saw it and almost hurried to give them another line. She waited instead.
She passed through the groceries to the freezer. At home she'd cut a line about banana bread. Here she tried something shorter.
“Everybody said, Make banana bread. I didn't want a hobby. I wanted breakfast.”
A laugh, larger than the line got in rehearsal. Nora glanced down at the imaginary frozen bag and couldn't immediately remember what she'd meant to say after it. She lifted it by one corner, repelled by the thing she'd carefully saved, and the laugh came back.
She put it away without improving it.
The emergency contact came next. She put a form on the invisible counter and tried to choose a person who could collect her from a building, not a person who could explain how close they'd once been.
“It says relationship. I wanted to put Answers phone.”
She made the little box with two fingers.
“Very serious relationship. We've been answering each other's phones for years. Sometimes we even know who's called.”
A laugh came from a part of the room she hadn't expected. She turned slightly toward it and felt the room widen. The light was still bright, the cameras still there. Her body had more to do than be afraid of them.
Someone said Mae's name.
It wasn't loud enough for everyone to hear. Nora heard it, which was enough to make the little form in her hands disappear.
She went to the favor errand. The lampshade, the parking, the peculiar need to have a person admire the trouble you had taken after telling them it had been no trouble. She did not speed up. It required effort now. The other name was in the space between sentences.
“And then you're holding out the little screen,” she said. “Thanks. Thanks so much. You're a saint. Please don't choose saint unless you can commit to it. It involves candles.”
Somebody called, “Get the manager!”
The room laughed. A second voice said, “Bring her out.”
Nora looked toward the wing.
Mae stood behind the mark where they'd agreed. Nora could see the pale edge of her face, one shoulder, the hand which wasn't holding anything now. She was ready. Not already coming. Nora could make the turn and offer the space. The full question was there, complete in her mouth, familiar enough that she could say it without thinking about any part of it.
Her elbow began to lift.
The man from Monday was visible now, seated closer than Nora had noticed. He was grinning. His wife had both hands around a program. These were the people who had bought next Friday as well. They wanted to see the voice meet its owner. They had asked her for that in the corridor, politely, as people asking for the thing they liked.
Nora's hand came up, then closed around the imaginary handles of a bag.
“I've already explained this to one person,” she said. “I can't start again with a more senior person. I've only got this amount of unreasonable in me.”
There was a laugh, uncertain in places. Mae remained where she was.
“Where is she?” a man called.
“In her own show,” Nora said. “I'm the delay before it.”
It was a larger laugh. It could have been an exit. Nora could still hand the room across to Mae and take back the permission to be good together.
She pulled the stand back within reach and clipped the microphone in. Then she took hold of the imaginary bag again with both hands.
“Actually, I'm the customer. That's the problem. I've come in to return something and I need everybody to agree how badly I've been treated before they'll look in the bag.”
She set it on the imaginary counter. Not the device. A bag with weight, with handles she'd been refusing to put down.
“Fifteen years,” she said. “I'd like to return fifteen years.”
A sound came from the front. Recognition, or appetite. Nora could hear how easily that beginning still promised the thing they'd come for.
She looked at the person beyond the counter, not toward the wing.
“Have you used them?” she asked in the plain voice she'd found with Inez. Then she became herself again, still holding the handles. “That's a very personal question.”
The room laughed.
“I'm just asking if you've used the years.”
“Not as intended.”
“But used.”
Nora looked into the bag.
“Some weekends. Quite a few weekdays. I didn't know there'd be questions.”
She let the complaint stand in her shoulders. A woman carrying an enormous return through a shop, determined to be believed before anybody inspected what she'd brought.
“I have my receipt. I can show exactly what she took.”
The front of the room stirred. Nora saw the man from Monday nod.
“And then I've got these other bags,” she said. “This is everything I bought because I didn't feel like saying no. This is every call I answered when I could've said I was in the bath. This is actual bath time. I didn't take the bath, obviously. That would have interfered with the resentment.”
They laughed. A woman clapped once. Nora had to stop because a laugh was coming at the other end of the room, much later than the first. She stayed at the counter and let the woman with the bags wait.
She straightened into the clerk's plain, tired stance. “Are you returning all of it?”
“Ideally.”
“And what's wrong with it?”
“I wasn't there.”
Nora looked down at her own shoes, the bag still suspended from her hands.
“Well, I was physically there. I was often very well dressed to be somewhere I now claim I never went.”
A laugh. Not everyone. The Monday woman had stopped smiling. Nora could see it without knowing what it meant yet.
She put the bag down.
“I'm trying to keep the money,” she said. “I should mention that before this becomes a complicated refund. The work money, all mine. I earned it. The nice hotels, mine. The thing where somebody else stands in front of a room to find out if my joke's shit, I'd like to keep that, too.”
The laugh was loud enough to cover the little fear which rose in her after shit. She wasn't making a confession in a quiet room. People were enjoying something. She could still take it wherever she wanted.
“You can't keep the good parts and return the fifteen years.”
“I've been told that's what separation means. You keep the television, you stop watching the same program.”
A man laughed very loudly. Nora waited, looking at the bag. Something had begun to move and she didn't know yet whether it would carry her through the next part.
“What's in that smaller one?”
Nora shifted her hand, protecting a second bag.
“Personal items.”
“You'll have to show me.”
“No, I bought these separately. My friendships are nothing to do with this transaction.”
A murmur went through the room. Nora could hear a voice beginning, then stopping because the people near it laughed at the line. She was speaking faster. She made herself look at the person beyond the counter.
“You've included them in the refund.”
“That was a packaging decision.”
The laugh was sharp and small. Nora wanted another one. She opened the smaller bag.
“There's a hotel in here,” she said. “I took a hotel into a little club on Monday. That's not usually the way round. Usually you take the club back to the hotel and complain about it.”
Some people laughed. Some were very still now. Nora knew the warmth in her face would be visible under the lights. She kept her hand inside the imagined bag.
“My friend had a bad night. She asked me to stay with her afterward and tell her the people were stupid. I stayed. I told her they were stupid. I was very good at that job. Nobody asked me to introduce nuance at two in the morning.”
There was a laugh. Nora almost made Mae's face to help it land. She didn't. Her own face had to remain the face on this side of the counter.
“She put a bandage on my heel. I had bad shoes. We ate fries. I left those parts at the hotel. They didn't fit in the little bag I was taking to the stage.”
The room was quiet enough for Nora to hear somebody's program being folded.
“I wrote the terrible-week invitation. That was paid work. It wasn't proof she faked every feeling.”
A woman near the aisle leaned forward. The man beside the Monday woman shook his head. Nora could see it clearly now. He had not come to watch her look into the bag.
“So was it all bullshit?” he called.
The words reached farther than his earlier requests. People turned. The room had acquired a new question it couldn't dispose of by laughing at the one before.
Nora held still.
She could make the full turn. Mae was there. Forty-five seconds inside the time, a manager with a pen, two women proving they could take a joke. The exact sentence had never been harder to avoid. Nora could feel it pressing against the beginning of her answer.
Nora looked at the man.
“You liked it on Monday.”
It came out quickly, meaner than the line she'd refused to do. His wife folded the program in her lap. Nora could see her own signature on the other piece of paper sticking from the woman's bag.
“I believed you,” the man said.
The room went quiet around him. Someone near the back said, “Let her talk.”
Nora kept looking at the front row.
“She did the set I'd given her only for feedback. That part happened. I put more in the bag.”
The man sat back. His wife kept folding the program, making it smaller. Nora waited until she stopped. There wasn't going to be a sound which made the answer enough.
Her hand began to move toward the wing. She brought it back under the bag instead.
“It's going,” she said.
She looked down. The bottom of the imaginary bag had begun to sag. Nora tried lifting it by the handles, which only made the bottom stretch farther away from her.
“No, don't inspect it again. I've only just got everything back in.”
A woman near the aisle laughed. Nora looked at the clerk who still wouldn't take the return.
“Can I have a bag?”
As the clerk, she leaned forward to inspect the bag, her face flat and baffled. Then she became the customer again, offended that this should need explaining.
“A different bag. This one knows too much.”
The laugh came unevenly. Nora lowered one hand under the softening base. That left the handles hanging from the other, pulling the top toward the counter while the bottom tried to get away.
“Both hands,” someone called.
She obeyed, so quickly that a laugh broke over the movement. Now the whole thing sat in her arms. She couldn't see over it.
“Is there a charge for this?” she asked. “I can't get to my money.”
She shifted it to one hip, freed a hand and immediately had to catch the bottom again. The woman in the aisle laughed harder. Nora held still until the object stopped trying to collapse.
In the clerk's voice she asked, “Could you put it down?”
Nora set it down. Something rolled. Her head followed it, then her hand, too slowly. She caught one invisible thing, lost another and ended up bent over the counter with her elbow keeping the rest in place.
“I've got a perfectly good bag,” she said, in the reasonable voice of a woman preventing a shop from closing. “You can see I've got a bag.”
She held up the two handles. There was nothing beneath them.
The laugh surprised her. She was standing in front of a room holding the one part of an object she could no longer use. Nora glanced toward the front. The man wasn't laughing. She stopped looking for him to.
She folded the empty handles once, found nowhere to put them and tucked them under her arm. Then she began gathering what she'd spilled. Two hands, several small things, one piece which wouldn't fit the way it had before. She tried to make a neat pile and had to abandon that to catch the thing rolling toward the edge.
“They give you this,” she said, lifting the unusable handles a little, “so you feel like you're leaving with everything.”
A few people laughed. Nora didn't repeat it. She got both arms around the collected weight and drew it against her hip.
The time signal was in sight. The lampshade return was gone. The bag had to come with her.
The clerk looked toward the door, waiting for the customer to leave. Nora looked that way, too, then tried to turn without losing anything.
“Could you hold it?” she asked.
The clerk's face changed. Nora saw what she'd asked and corrected herself.
“The door. The door.”
The laugh reached her as she tried to get moving. She took one step, caught the bundle on the imaginary doorframe and had to turn it sideways. She couldn't get out elegantly. She had to lift it, take it with her.
The laughter grew. She waited for room to move, then put the invisible weight down at last.
She took the microphone from the stand.
“Thank you,” she said.
She said her name again, put the microphone in the stand and missed the clip.
There was applause. Nora heard both its presence and its gaps. Someone near the front remained seated with his hands folded. The woman halfway up was clapping. Nora didn't make either person stand for the room.
The second try worked. She walked toward the proper exit, past the place where the case had been at dress, and the light left her face before the applause stopped.
Mae was off the mark.
Not gone. Waiting farther back so Nora could pass. The corridor beyond her looked dim and too ordinary, a bottle of water on a case, a headset resting on someone's shoulder.
Nora stopped for half a second. Mae looked at her without giving her the answer the room hadn't.
“They're ready,” Jo told Mae.
Mae nodded. She passed Nora, close enough that their sleeves touched, and went into the light.
Nora stood where she could hear. She wanted water and didn't want to ask for it. Jo put a bottle in her hand and moved past to watch the next entrance.
Mae reached the microphone. The room greeted her, some voices louder than the applause. She waited until a man called her name from the other side of the theater.
“I'm here,” she said. “I've been here all evening. It's a very long way to come back.”
The laugh wasn't enormous. She let it be the size it was.
Nora could see a strip of the stage on the monitor. Mae stood with one foot forward, the little stance she used when she hadn't decided whether to let a sentence become a confession. Then she adjusted the microphone and began the audition-chair piece.
It was not the dinner. The chair was there in the way she sat without sitting, the effort of a woman instructed to relax by people with clipboards. She found the first laugh in the ankle, one tiny visible adjustment which made the whole relaxed pose look expensive to maintain.
Nora smiled before she knew she was doing it. Mae went into the next line too fast and lost a response. She stopped, looked toward the imagined casting table and tried a different sentence. It worked better.
The person on the monitor remained somebody Nora knew. Gifted, frightened, able to hear a room and still sometimes make the wrong choice about it. She could not tell from here how the rest would go. There was a whole set ahead, time which belonged to Mae and to the people who had come for her.
Nora unscrewed the water. She drank. On the monitor Mae made the chair smaller and herself more determined to fit it, and the theater laughed without Nora having to supply another word.