A Long Day at the Theater, Megan Lange

58 A LONG DAY AT THE THEATER Megan Lange

Sometimes the days feel shorter than they are long, and I am in the unfortunate position of having to determine for myself and my family which it is. A short day or a long day. Calvin encourages me not to worry so much about this, but it’s difficult not to worry about something as important as the length of a day.

When I was a girl, I liked to go to the theater. So, when I was a woman, I became an actress. I could play anything. The directors told me I had the perfect face, the perfect voice to be anyone. I could metamorphose; I could become whatever I wished to be. I met Calvin in the theater. I was eighteen and he was twenty-five, the director of a small play his friend wrote. I didn’t believe he was twenty-five when he told me he was, and he didn’t believe me when I told him I was eighteen.

“It’s a short one,” I told him sadly, sitting in front of the bay window and watching the birds outside on the feeders. He hummed, setting down his newspaper.

“Every day is long,” he said. He sounded grumpy like he was upset with me. I started to cry, and he didn’t like this. He stood up and began to shout at me, but I was already in the throes of it. Each tear made the day last a bit longer.

My last day on stage was when I was twenty-three. I was pregnant and Calvin and I were soon to be married and I couldn’t very well be trouncing around on stage every day with a baby on my hip. Those last days in the theater were woefully short. Calvin and I were married, and he got a job at the cannery in town with other men. These men had rough hands when I shook them at company parties. These men had known nothing but work since they

could tie their shoes. Calvin hated real work. Every day dragged on for him, longer and longer than the one before.

“Tomorrow is going to be—”

“Enough,” Calvin said and pounded a fist on the table. His hands were rough now, not like they were when we were married. Years in the cannery made him strong, carved him into one of those hardworking men. “Enough about the days, Pamela! Enough. The next time you talk about the days—”

I stopped paying attention to him right about then and started to focus on the tablecloth. Margaret Marie was the baby’s name, or it would have been, but she was stillborn. That day was the longest of them all. We painted her room that same shade of mint green as the tablecloth. I think she was stillborn, or maybe a woman I played in a play had a stillborn baby. Maybe she was alive and well with children of her own now. Maybe I’d wanted her to be stillborn.

I sat in my nightdress all day that day because I knew it was supposed to be a short one. Calvin asked me to please get dressed, but I told him a mother in mourning needs to do what she needs to do. It takes time to collect herself after such a tragedy. Who knew a bike accident could be so tragic? Margie was only six when she crashed her bike off a rail bridge and into a pond. She hit her head on a stone and floated down the river, never to be seen again. My costume for that show was a nightdress made of crisp white fabric that smelled like it had been in some old lady’s closet for months or years before the costume designer left it hanging in my dressing room.

I was working on a little painting of a green bicycle in the drawing room later that afternoon. I was a far better actress than I was a painter and my hands ached with the small strokes. My hands were strange these days. They looked stippled with makeup, dark spots and wrinkles lining them, bones shadowed to look gaunter and more apparent for the audience. The phone rang. “Calvin dear, can you answer that please? I’m not feeling well.” I called out to him as if he were in another room, but he was standing by the window, lost in thought. On the stage you call out to someone even if they are only

feet away to show the audience there is space between the two of you. Calvin sighed and took the phone off the hook.

“Hello, Mags,” he said. He kept his voice low like he didn’t want me to hear him, but I heard him very well. “No, she isn’t. I don’t think you should bring the boys over today.”

I couldn’t hear the woman on the other end, but that name was familiar. I wondered if she was from the acting guild. I didn’t like the idea of playing an old woman, but if I didn’t have to audition it might be fun. The theater was so distant. I missed it terribly.

“Tell her I’ll do it,” I said, waving my paintbrush at Calvin. “But don’t make me sound desperate.” He sighed.

“We’ll talk later, Mags. All right, we love you. Tell the boys we love them too. Say hi to Bill.” Calvin’s lips curled in distaste at that name, and I wondered who he was. A stubborn actor, no doubt—directors hate stubborn actors. Calvin never did get along well with his actors, except me, of course.

I didn’t wear black to Maggie’s funeral because I knew she would have wanted everyone to be wearing happy colors. We held black umbrellas even though it wasn’t raining. We wanted everyone to look and think that it was raining because that made the whole affair so much sadder. The pastel green of my dress made my blue eyes bright, even from the back row. I tried not to look sad like a mother in mourning, but happy like a woman in love. People gave me looks, but they didn’t understand I was only doing what Margie would have wanted. They gave me nasty looks because I was a star and they weren’t.

Eventually that long day came to an end. While we were lying in bed, I rolled over to watch Calvin. He was still awake, staring up at the ceiling. “Calvin?”

“Yes, dear?” he said. He sounded tired. Why wasn’t he sleeping?

“When I die,” I said, my voice so quiet I almost couldn’t hear it, “bury me next to Maggie, will you?”

He opened his mouth like he had a lot of things he wanted to say to that, like he was just boiling over with words for me, but then he closed it

again. Resigned. Defeated. “Okay, dear.” He rolled over so I couldn’t see him anymore.

I sniffled and whimpered all night wishing for my baby, wondering vaguely at the pretty woman in the picture on my nightstand. She looked a bit like me, but she wasn’t. She had two little boys at her side and a man that was not handsome enough for her. So unfortunate when a leading man cannot meet the quality of the leading lady. I stared at the photo for hours, even minutes, and hoped that lady never knew what it was like to lose a child.