Laura Lamont's Life In Pictures (5 page)

N
o one ever moved into Hildy’s room. Sometimes it was offered to one of the actors, a new recruit off the train who’d never been to Door County, and she would say yes, nodding at her unbelievable luck, but by dinnertime she would have heard the story and chosen to sleep in the cabin with three other girls. Elsa was seventeen and as tall as Josephine, who never did marry the cherry farmer. Instead Josephine moved into a small apartment in Fish Creek that she shared with a friend from school, a pretty nurse. She came home every weekend to help with the shows, and carried enormous vats of food for the actors. Josephine was as strong as their father, and never wore any perfume, so she smelled like him, too, musky and clean at the same time. It was the ninth summer since Hildy. That was what they said, since Hildy. Not since she died, or anything even more specific, and therefore worse. Just since.

That summer, Elsa was Gwen in
The Royal Family
, though she felt she could have played any of the parts equally well, and had memorized the entire thing from start to finish. The play was about a family of aging actors, each of whom was more narcissistic and self-obsessed than the last. Gwen was the family’s ingenue, the starlet in training, and got lots of funny, screwball lines. Elsa’s favorite was “Name me two seventeenth-century stockbrokers!” It always got a laugh.

The young man John cast as Perry, Gwen’s hapless fiancé, was Gordon-from-Florida. He had a last name, but no one knew what it was. Florida was a funny place to be from, not that Elsa had ever been. She still hadn’t left Wisconsin for longer than a one-day trip into Chicago, when her father was so nervous about her safety that he wouldn’t leave her side, even waiting for her outside the ladies’ room in the restaurant where they had lunch. All she knew about Florida
was the boll weevil and the ocean. Gordon’s parents grew oranges, which he found about as exciting as eating oranges, which he hadn’t done since he was a child, thanks to overexposure. Gordon had run away at seventeen, the previous year. He still had a slight suntan, as though those seventeen years of beachy sunshine had soaked into his skin and would never fade, no matter how much he wanted them to. He saw the Cherry County Playhouse as a perfect halfway mark in between Florida and California. Gordon was planning on taking the bus to Los Angeles as soon as the summer was over, trying his hand at motion pictures.

They ran lines at the picnic table behind the barn. As a character, Perry was very stiff, but Gordon was doing a good job of making him likable—attractive, even. It was still cool out, and they both had sweaters on as well as sunglasses. That was what Elsa loved about Door County: Even on the prettiest days, you could never forget you were in Wisconsin. There was a clarity to the air that she was sure didn’t exist in other states; it didn’t seem possible. She had the feeling that Gordon-from-Florida had no idea where he was, and couldn’t find it on a map even with a couple of flashing arrows.

“I think Perry’s a dope,” Gordon said.

“Why? Because he’s a stockbroker?” Elsa picked at her lunch, cheese sandwiches Mary had made, with fat slices of brown bread and a swipe of mustard.

Gordon pulled his face to one side like Groucho Marx. “Because he doesn’t know how lucky he is to have Gwen.” He waggled an imaginary cigar, and shot his eyebrows up and down.

Elsa laughed. “Is that right,” she said, without adding a questioning lilt to her voice. She knew it was right, just as she knew from the moment that Gordon-from-Florida walked into the Cherry County Playhouse that she would walk out with him at the end of the summer, walk all the way to California if she had to. John and Mary
would fill their house with surrogate children: all of them alive, all of them equal. Girls and boys from Egg Harbor and Ephraim and Sturgeon Bay would arrange the pillows on the benches and pass out programs, and Elsa would be on the other side of the country. It wasn’t that she was in love with Gordon-from-Florida, whose last name, she would have to learn, was Pitts. Instead, it was that Elsa looked at Gordon and saw a kind and perfectly normal face. Gordon looked like he could wind up a leading man, which made Elsa feel like she might be in love, after all—wasn’t that how it happened? A girl, a boy, and a long bus ride? If it were a play, Elsa thought it would have a happy ending.

“I think Gwen knows just what she’s got,” Elsa said. She slipped off her shoe and found Gordon’s foot under the table. She was playing the part of a love-struck girl. Elsa thought of Hildy and the way her body had undulated with pleasure at the sight of Cliff. Elsa wiggled on the bench. She would get better at it; she would practice.

Gordon drank his lemonade and stared at the table. His cheeks turned from tan to peach to nearly purple. He wasn’t brawny like Cliff. Gordon was the opposite—small features on a small face, everything crammed together toward the middle. By the time he looked up at Elsa, his cheeks pulled wide into an unguarded smile, she knew that she would get exactly what she wanted, because he wanted it too.

They waited until the season was over—it was the end of August, and flowers spontaneously burst into blossom over and over again. Mary and Josephine made batches of fried chicken, and after the ceremony in the barn, everyone in town came to eat corn on the cob and to celebrate little Elsa Emerson becoming Elsa Pitts, riding off into the sunset on a cross-country bus. There wasn’t any worry about Gordon turning out like Cliff, because Gordon was no Cliff, anyone could see that. Josephine pulled Elsa aside and enclosed her in a long, silent bear hug, her thick arms clasped at the elbows around
Elsa’s back. Neither of the girls cried, at least not after raising their faces from each other’s shoulder and blinking into the sunlight. Mary gave Elsa and Gordon each a hard, quick squeeze and went back inside to start the dishes.

John drove the couple and their meager suitcases to the depot in Chicago, where they boarded a creaking bus and waved enthusiastically at him through the tinted windows. Elsa watched as her father hugged himself in the parking lot, the first time she’d seen him cry since Hildy, now nine years gone. On the bus, Elsa and Gordon settled into their seats. They kissed on the cheek and then stared straight ahead, both anxious to see the ocean and the mountains and all the stars in the sky, which would surely light their way.

An hour into their cross-country ride, Gordon was fast asleep with his head against the bus window. Elsa snuggled up next to him, but found his shoulder too pointy to rest against. A few rows in front of them, a mother and daughter were having a quiet discussion about the daughter’s upcoming wedding. They were talking about flowers: peonies, zinnias, all showy, big blossoms. Elsa thought of her mother’s face at the wedding, as clear and calm as if she’d been watching a bird hop around the yard through the kitchen window. For a split second, she had the urge to get off the bus while Gordon was asleep, to slip off in Minneapolis or Colorado or Wyoming and just vanish into the night. Who would miss her, really? Not Gordon, not her mother. Josephine smiled only at her roommate, the first in a series of plainly pretty women, this one with a long, dark braid down the middle of her back. But then Elsa thought of her father. She couldn’t let him lose two daughters. Elsa was going to do great things in California—she was going to do enough for two whole lives. That grassy patch behind the barn was going to have a big, brass plaque one day:
ELSA EMERSON, MOVIE STAR
. Her father would stand next to it and point it out to tourists passing through. It would be almost like having her
home. Elsa stayed in her seat. She balled up her jacket and wedged it under the back of her neck. Gordon was snoring slightly, not unpleasantly. Elsa watched his chest rise and fall for a few breaths, and then she turned back toward the front of the bus and closed her eyes. She didn’t care about the mountains; they would still be there in fifty years, or a hundred. All Elsa cared about was arriving. She was going to step off the bus and into the waiting arms of the world.

T
he bus station in Los Angeles looked like all the bus stations before it, except turned inside out, with no ceiling, no roof, only sky. The buses pulled into slots poking out into a long, gray street. Elsa hadn’t known it was possible for the sky to be overcast in California. Gordon was asleep on her shoulder, as he had been for the last several hours, and she slid him back onto his own seat. The bus stopped, and all around them passengers leaped up, grabbing their satchels and suitcases and heading for the door. Elsa waited, staring out the window. She could have woken Gordon, but she wasn’t ready. The buildings on the other side of the window weren’t tall, but they were endless; over the tops of the squat, white buildings across the street, there were rows and rows of roofs poking into the sky behind them, and behind them, ad infinitum. Elsa didn’t know which way was north. It was after dark, nine o’clock. If Gordon never woke up, then maybe she would never have to get off the bus, and it would slowly turn around and take her home.

“Hey, we’re here!” Gordon’s mouth was next to Elsa’s ear, his breath warm and stale. He pushed his body against hers and craned his neck, looking around to all sides. “I guess the buses don’t pull up in Hollywood, huh.”

Elsa didn’t know what Hollywood looked like, or whether it was actually even a proper neighborhood, or just an idea, like heaven. She’d been afraid to sound too disappointed. “Well, sure,” she said, and hoped that that was noncommittal enough.

“Let’s go. My friend Jim said he was going to pick us up—I just have to give him a call,” Gordon said, stretching in the now-empty aisle. They were the only passengers left on the bus. Even the driver was outside. Gordon moved aside to make room for Elsa. She smoothed out her skirt and dusted off her hat, which had been sitting in her lap since they left Chicago. It was her nicest hat, a brown felt cloche with a feather pointing toward the sky, and she just knew it wasn’t going to be good enough for Los Angeles.

“I’m coming,” Elsa said. She put her hat on and followed her husband off the bus. It was still funny to think of him that way—as her
husband
, which felt like such a heavy word in her mouth. Elsa found that it was amusing to say aloud to strangers, who wouldn’t find it odd at all that she was married. The idea that she was married still seemed like a great big joke, a fiction she was able to pull over her head like an oversize sweater.

Gordon’s friend arrived an hour and a half later. Everyone else had vanished into the night, hopping into waiting cars or humping their bags down the street into an unknown future. Only Gordon and Elsa were still sitting on their suitcases on the empty street. A car pulled up and a young man stuck his head out the passenger-side window.

“Hey, Gord-o!” he called out, and whistled. Gordon jumped up,
sending his suitcase toppling to the ground, and ran over to the still-moving car. Elsa stayed put. After the car stopped, its brakes screeching into place, she watched the two men embrace with a firm clap on the back. Gordon had already forgotten about her, Elsa was sure. He would have been just as happy to throw himself into the backseat of his friend’s car, pour some whiskey down his throat, and enjoy the sunrise on the beach. She watched him talk and laugh for a few minutes without even turning around—Jim was an actor too, of course, and Gordon wanted to hear everything. They’d been friends as children, which wasn’t very long ago, no matter how you counted, even though Gordon and Elsa were married, as Elsa was barely seventeen and Gordon only nineteen. Maybe by the time she was twenty, it would all be old hat, being married and living so far from home, but she doubted it. Elsa looked down at her left hand. Gordon had found the band somewhere in town—he wouldn’t say where—which meant it hadn’t come from the jewelry store in Sturgeon Bay. She wasn’t even sure it was real gold. Elsa liked the feel of it, though, the small metal reminder that she really was someone new. It was enough for her to get up off the narrow edge of her suitcase and walk over to Gordon and his friend.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m Gordon’s wife.”

For the next week, Elsa and Gordon stayed at Jim’s apartment, sleeping on a stack of blankets on the floor. Elsa still got confused when people talked about Hollywood, because she still wasn’t sure if they were talking about the neighborhood. Jim’s apartment was as small as her parents’ bedroom, with a shared bathroom in the hall. When Jim was out, Elsa and Gordon had sex on the blankets, because it seemed like one of the only things they
could
do without any money or a car. By the time they got their own place, Elsa was already pregnant, though she didn’t know it yet.