Tom Lake

We passed Mr. Martin in the parking lot one night […] I could tell he was trying to calculate the potential for damage.

“Fifteen will get you twenty, Mr. Haywood,” he said finally, his voice neither leering nor scolding, just a helpful piece of information passed along. […]

Jimmy-George removed his hand from my waist and laughed, so I laughed too, even though I had no idea what Mr. Martin was talking about. Years later, I heard the expression again on a set and it made perfect sense. Mr. Martin had been concerned for Jimmy Haywood’s safety. […]

I blame myself for what happened. I was hideously disloyal to the person I loved in order to be with a person I didn’t love at all. But I was also sixteen, and as sure as fifteen will get you twenty, sixteen doesn’t stand a chance against twenty-two.

Two years later, Emily decided Duke was her father, Maisie decided Emily had been possessed by Satan, and Nell decided she wanted to be an actress who would never come home again, though that might have happened anyway. Thanks to his ubiquitous presence in the world, the man I’d spent a summer with took up residence in our home, and still I thought of him remarkably little.

Since then my husband has whispered his dreams to me alone, in the winter, in our bed late at night. Emily and Benny would marry and join the farms. We would fix up the little house, put on a proper porch, a new kitchen, a real master bedroom, everything on one floor. Joe and I would move to the little house and give our house to Emily and Benny so they could have children here, children who may one day marry the children of the Otts or the Whitings nearby, weaving together an ever greater parcel, because even if a person can’t work the land they have, they will still want more.

Hazel heads up the hill to the cemetery where generations of my husband’s people are buried behind a low iron fence, and for whatever reason I follow the dog. […] The cemetery is the highest point on the property and would have been the logical site for a house, the way it overlooks the trees and the barn and all the way to the edge of the lake, but those first settlers gave the best land to their dead, the very first a two-year-old named Mary. One by one they followed her up the hill until twenty-nine of them were resting beneath the mossy slabs, and there they wait for us to join them. That’s what life was like back in the day, you buried your children, your husband, your parents right there on the farm. They had never been anywhere else. They had never wanted to be anywhere else.

“[…] Hazel, listen to me. I’m going to tell you something important, you need to be brave.” I then explain to the dog how I have told myself for so many years that my career fell apart because I wasn’t any good, but now I’m starting to think it all fell apart because I had ceased to be brave. “If this were a movie, I’d be drowning in regret right now. But I’m telling you, Hazel it doesn’t feel anything like regret. It feels like I just missed getting hit by a train.”

The small New Hampshire town where I’d grown up was as white as Grover’s Corners. In my class at school we only had Aly, who came in the ninth grade. We treated her the way we might have treated an alpaca, which is to say with fascination and solicitude but no actual friendship […] The University of New Hampshire was only slightly better than our high school, and Hollywood was only slightly worse. […]

So I followed the dancer in the snappy Boy Scout shirt towards the building, running ahead to open the door because the way she and Duke were talking they would have walked straight into it. I was going to have a boyfriend who crackled like a downed power line and a girlfriend who was Black. I was even more of an adult than I could have imagined.

There is no explaining this simple truth about life: you will forget much of it. The painful things you were certain you’d never be able to let go? Now you’re not entirely sure when they happened, while the thrilling parts, the heart-stopping joys, splintered and scattered and became something else. Memories are then replaced by different joys and larger sorrows, and unbelievably, those things get knocked aside as well, until one morning you’re picking cherries with your three grown daughters and your husband goes by on the Gator and you are positive that this is all you’ve ever wanted in the world.

Nell covers her face with her hands and moans. “Oh, Saint Sebastian! I can’t bear it.”

“What are you talking about? He was happy!” I say. “Sebastian never expected to win.”

“He did,” Nell says. “Even if he never admitted it, he thought he might. He wanted to.”

Maybe she’s right. Saint Sebastian was twenty-nine when we met, and it was Duke who told me the story about McEnroe. At seventeen, Sebastian must have thought of himself as someone who would make it. The number of things I’d failed to grasp back then was as limitless as the stars in the night sky.

I am making our three daughters quilts from my grandmother’s dresses, from their grandmother’s dresses and my dresses and the dresses they wore as children. I started collecting the fabric when I was a child because even then I knew I would have daughters one day and I would make them quilts. My daughters will give these quilts to their daughters and those daughters will sleep beneath them. One day they will wrap their own children in these quilts, and all of this will happen on the farm.

[Joe’s] thinking about what will happen to the farm without another generation of family to protect it after we’re gone, after Emily and Benny are gone. He is thinking about Emily and Benny being gone. He is thinking about the developers who relentlessly sniff the perimeter of our land, the strangers who knock on our door in February to ask if we wouldn’t rather spend the winter in Florida. They are the enemies of stone fruit. They would leave just enough trees in the ground to justify calling the place Cherry Hills or Cherry Lane, then pull the rest up and build pretty white summer houses with picture windows and wraparound porches, places we could never afford. And that’s the good scenario. The bad scenario, the one where the trees eventually die? Joe isn’t thinking about that one and I know this because I’m not thinking about it either.

[Duke] has a pipe and he lights it and when the flame pulls down we can see the drug hit him, the color draining from his face, his nose and eyes streaming, and then the look of relief that breaks over him, a violent gratitude, like he wasn’t sure it would come for him this time and it came.

I want someone to tell me how that was acting. I want someone to tell me how many people were on the set, and how many of them understood what was happening. They had to wait until the golden hour when the light was perfect because there could be only one take. He couldn’t do this thing twice. I wonder if Sebastian was there, but he couldn’t have been. Sebastian would never have let that happen.

All these years later, I feel like I let it happen.

“Could you walk at all?” Emily asks. Why does it matter so much, the way she’s looking at me this minute? Like I am on the tennis court curled on my side and she is there, her hand on my shoulder.

I learned so many things that summer at Tom Lake and most of those lessons I would have gladly done without. The hardest one had nothing to do with Duke or plans or love. It was realizing that I wasn’t Emily anymore. Even if I’d gotten to play the part on Broadway with Spalding Gray, there still would come a time when I’d be finished and someone else would take the role. Many someone elses could do it just as well, because look, Pallace on her second night was every bit as good as I had been after years of practice. Day after day she had watched me in rehearsal and then made the decision to do the part her own way.

In retrospect, my inability to put it together was its own sort of gift. I would understand what they were doing soon enough, at which point I would finally understand what I had done to Veronica. Veronica had such a small part in the story and still I loved her more than everyone at Tom Lake put together. She stayed with me after the rest of them had faded, maybe because we remember the people we hurt so much more clearly than the people who hurt us.

“Was I in love with Sebastian? […] No,” I say. “I wasn’t. I was in love with you.”

“You weren’t in love with me then.” But he pulls me to him and I put my head on his chest, I rest my head on the old blue T-shirt he wears to bed.

“But that’s how it feels now, looking back. Now I think that I was always in love with you.”

After Joe falls asleep I stay awake, thinking about Capri and the sea and the boat, about Duke, and the moon on the water. […] I think how hard it must have been for [Duke] to not turn around but he kept swimming for as long as he could go. I let him go. Not that he was ever mine but still, I let him go.