A Thousand Acres_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [112]
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WHEN CAROLINE WAS ABOUT FOURTEEN and I was twenty-two, already married for almost three years, she came over after supper one evening, and said that she’d been given the lead in the high school play, over all the other older girls. She was to play Maisie in The Boyfriend. Maisie was a flapper, and had to sing and dance and wear sleeveless flapper dresses. Daddy, she thought, wouldn’t like it. I agreed to cover for her rehearsals, and also to pick her up at school two hours after the school bus left. I told Daddy she had a special English project, not too far from the truth, since one of the English teachers was also the drama coach, and I helped with her farm chores when she was late. During rehearsals, I got in the habit of going early to get her and sitting in the auditorium for fifteen minutes, watching her.
She was terrible. She had obviously been picked for her voice—she had the most songs to sing, and every other girl on the stage was shrill and off-key compared to Caroline, whose pitch and volume were at least respectable. But she spoke her lines stiffly and her dancing—two Charleston numbers and a waltz—made me wince. When she had to kiss the boy lead once, a thread of saliva stretched between them as they moved away from one another, and caught the light. Everyone on the stage snickered, and the boy turned red. Caroline remained mercifully oblivious. She didn’t get any better, either. All the way through the dress rehearsal, her dancing was awkward and her voice pitched every line high at the end, as if she were asking a question no matter what she was saying. I dreaded opening night and was glad that I’d kept her project a secret even from Ty. I called Rose at college that night and together we thrilled with whispered horror over the coming humiliation.
The next day she acted completely normal—no stage fright, no anxiety. She came over before school to get the costume I had been altering, an aquamarine flapper dress with feathers on the shoulders and rhinestones around the hem, and she ate the crusts of toast off my plate, using them to wipe up bits of jelly, and she talked idly about a boy who wasn’t even involved in the play. She went off to the school-bus stop with the dress slung casually over her shoulder. I had been intending to get Ty to go to the play with me at the last moment, but I decided to go alone. I sat in the back, near the door. The auditorium was full—lots of feed caps—and there was our name right in the program for every farmer and every farmwife and every person in the township to read.
But the audience inspired her. She knew exactly how to sense us without ever looking at us, exactly how to let us see her smile and cavort and flirt. She even knew how to kiss the boy lead in our presence, and to make him kiss her so that he seemed gawky from passion rather than youth. She kicked up her heels and sang to the back row, and at the end they gave her a standing ovation. Afterwards, I was giddy with the pleasure I felt in this unexpected sight of her. We would bring Daddy. Ty and I would kidnap Daddy and just bring him and sit him down and give him this surprise. Caroline was as calm as ever. Ty could come, she said, but only Ty. Daddy still wasn’t to know. I disagreed about his approval. I thought he would be swayed by the others in the audience, by the obvious manifestation of her talent and energy, but that wasn’t it. She just wanted this life to herself, and she swore me to secrecy.
She acted in another play in her sophomore year, The Crucible. She played the second most important of the accusing girls, and had no song to sing. Once again, her performance was stiff until opening night, round and full after that. But the stress of secret rehearsals and performances was too great—there was always the chance that someone would mention to Daddy at the feedstore or the implement dealer’s that he’d seen her in the play. So she took up debating, which Daddy considered odd