Good Riddance(69)

“Of course. I liked him very much . . . I even entertained a secret thought that it was too bad you two can’t get together.”

Had Jeremy been the source of that “can’t”? I didn’t ask. I said, “Funny coincidence—Dad’s running into him.”

“Not really. It was at Pick-a-Bagel. Isn’t that a block or two from your building?”

“Yes, true—”

“You know your dad. He’ll strike up a conversation with anyone.”

“And I guess it was natural that the conversation would get around to me, either my birthday or my hidden acting talent?”

“Your dad thought the lessons would be fun. Not like the chocolate course where you had to buy supplies and do homework. And, most important, you might meet some new people.”

That wasn’t supposed to sting, but it did. Now I knew: The gift wasn’t the flattering career counseling I’d taken it for; it was to get me out of the house, make friends, meet the similarly lonely and unmoored.

“You still there?” asked Kathi.

I said yes. I was on a walk with Elton John; sorry if I sounded distracted.

“I hope it’s okay to say this: You have your whole life ahead of you. You can dip your toes into so many different things. You might even come full circle, discover that your true north is teaching.”

E. J. was squatting and staring back at me with an apologetic look I recognized. I unrolled a plastic poop bag and a backup one. “Unlikely,” I said. “Did you know I was fired from my Montessori job?”

“Your dad told me.”

“For bullshit reasons!”

“I heard that, too.”

“But I’m fine. I might have a case—just need a little distance on that.” Thinking I’d sound motivated and mildly adventurous, I added, “Next weekend I’m getting out of the city, doing some exploring in New Hampshire. And even going to a wedding up there.”

“In Exeter? That one?”

Had I already mentioned that? Or had Jeremy told my dad about our upcoming weekend? I said yes, that one.

“I wondered if you’d be going.”

“Wondered when?”

“When I heard about it from your father.”

“And how did Dad hear?”

“From the invitation.”

“He got one?”

“In his email.”

I was still processing this exchange as being about an ill-considered invitation that my dad had sent straight into the trash until Kathi said, “Do you know what you’re wearing? The invitation said cocktail attire.”

“You’re going? Dad actually accepted?”

“He felt he should. The groom isn’t only a Pickering High grad, but he’s also now a state senator representing Pickering.”

I stumbled through a litany of questions: Did they really want to go, considering the complications? The podcast? The drama that could unfold after a few drinks?

“Your father feels it’s a way to right a wrong.”

“Which wrong?”

“The one he refers to as storming the State House.”

“And going to this party erases that? Retracts what the Concord Monitor wrote about the two of them going at it?”

“He feels—and maybe you should talk to him directly—that the invitation was a sincere apology from an ex-student to his old principal. And your father is big enough to let it be water under the bridge.”

“What a hypocrite!”

“Your father?”

“No, Armstrong. He had Dad dragged from his office and arrested!”

“But the trespassing charge was dismissed, correct?”

“I still don’t consider it water under the bridge.”

“Did I misunderstand? I thought you said you were going to the wedding, that it was just the getaway you needed.”

I said yes, true, I was. I didn’t tell her what my own reasons were—that Peter Armstrong was keeping me afloat. And thanks to a white lie about a fully booked inn, Jeremy would be sleeping one bed away.





35


Take Your Seat, Daphne



We began by lying flat on the dirty rehearsal-room floor, doing stretching exercises, then breathing from the abdominals, then moving and swaying around the room in a fashion I found not only awkward but embarrassing. Was I really about to impersonate colors?

“Orange!” our gray-haired, ponytailed teacher called out. “Blue!” And inevitably the downer, “Black!” Bodies sagged. Fingertips brushed the floor. Why was everyone else so into it, so earnest and eager to please?

Next the lecture: Acting is reacting. Good acting is listening. Feel it from the inside out. Mining what you are. He himself, in the late 1990s, had read the stage directions while rehearsing Sanford Meisner. In a single evening with that brilliant practitioner of the Method, he’d gleaned infinite wisdom about the “reality of doing.”

Next: Each would get a folding chair from a stack against the wall, then reach into the paper bag containing our clues. This, we were told, was the Who’s Knocking? exercise. One by one we’d leave the room, close the door, then knock in the manner of the character named on our folded piece of paper, returning only when someone guessed the correct identity.