When We Were Animals(31)

Absorbed as I was in my map, I hadn’t heard Mr. Hunter enter from backstage and leaped up when he spoke to me.

“What’s that you’re doing?”

“Nothing,” I said and quickly gathered my materials, clutching my map to my chest. “Working. There’s no play practice tonight.” I knew the schedule, you see. I liked to know in advance where people would be and where they wouldn’t be.

He stood with his hands in his pockets, gazing at me with a foreign, unreadable expression. Under a tweed jacket, he wore a button-down shirt that had come a little untucked over the course of the day. He looked younger than my father, but I couldn’t tell by how much. He had told us that he grew up in a small town outside Chicago, and I had always wondered why someone from Chicago would come to a town like ours. He had a ragged growth of stubble on his chin, and his eyes always looked like they knew more than he was telling.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve been wanting to talk with you.”

“What about?”

“What do you think about trying out for the play?”

“Me? I can’t act.”

“Everybody can act,” he said, shrugging. “Everybody does act.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“The best kinds of actors are the ones who perform so often—so religiously—that they don’t even realize they’re doing it.”

“I guess,” I said.

He would not take his eyes from mine for a long while, and I found I couldn’t take mine off his, either—as though some unbreakable current connected our brains.

Finally he breathed in deeply, stretched, and looked up into the rafters.

“Anyway,” he said, “think about it. All acting is just lying. You know how to lie, don’t you?”

I said goodbye and rushed out as quickly as I dared. The sun had gone down, and the overhead lamps had buzzed on in the deserted parking lot.

Everybody else believed they could see my very soul. So why did I feel so blind?

*



It’s true that I am a Christmas baby—or at least close enough to count as one. I was born on December 23, Christmas Eve Eve, and so I am one of that breed for whom the celebration of existence gets irrevocably tangled up with garlands and lighted trees and window displays. No one likes a Christmas baby. The occasion requires that people purchase two different kinds of wrapping paper. It is too much celebration altogether, and it makes people queasy with indulgence.

Throughout my young life, my father did his best to make my birthday special—so we never put up a Christmas tree until Christmas Eve, the day after my birthday. There was no talk of the holiday at all until that day.

This year was special, because it was my sixteenth birthday, and sixteenth birthdays put you in a different category from the one you were in before. In the morning, my father told me we could do anything my little heart desired. But actually I was feeling a bit unwell, and all I really wanted to do was stay indoors and make pizza and watch movies on television and pretend that the world outside didn’t exist.

“Done and done,” he said and made me waffles.

Then he brought me a little wrapped box and dropped it on the table in front of me.

“I’ve been saving it for you for a long time,” he said.

I undid the wrapping paper at the taped seams (I’m not one of those people who tear through wrapping paper willy-nilly, as though ferocity of consumption equaled appreciation of a gift) and set it aside. It was a jewelry box, and inside sat a little silver locket with floral engravings on the outside.

“It belonged to your mother,” said my father. To look at it seemed to pain him. “I gave it to her when we were sixteen. Now I’m giving it to you.”

Inside there were two pictures that kissed when the locket was closed. One was of my mother and the other was of my father—both when they were my age.

“Her name was Felicia Ann Steptoe,” he said, reciting the bedtime catechism from my childhood, “and she wore long orchid gloves at our wedding.”

It occurred to me on that day that my mother was actually closer to me than if I had been old enough to remember her when she died. She existed entirely in my own brain—she was that close. She was lovely inside there, always posing, always beautiful. She was happy as could be.

I thanked my father for the present, throwing my arms around him and hugging him so tightly he pretended to choke.

“Now you just relax while I do the breakfast dishes,” he said.

“Wait,” I said. “I need to know something.”

“What’s that?”

“What time was I born? I mean, exactly.”

“It was in the morning some time. I don’t remember.”

“Is it on my birth certificate?”

“I’m sure it probably is.”

“Can we check?”

“On this day, we seek to indulge,” he said, wiping his hands on a kitchen towel.

He went to the closet in his office and thumbed through the file cabinets to find what he was looking for. I followed him and sat in his desk chair, watching.

Eventually he found the manila folder he was looking for.

“Ta-da,” he said.

Then he took a pale green document out of the folder and scanned it quickly with his eyes.