I shut off the kettle and opened the refrigerator. “Do you want some cider? It’s fresh; I bought it over the weekend. I can heat that and put some cinnamon sticks in it.”
Usually she loved this fall beverage, but of course she shook her head. “No. I just want you to call Raul and tell him I’m out of the show.”
“It’ll be okay with you when the play opens in New York in eight weeks and you aren’t in it? You won’t regret this?”
She shook her head.
“I think instead of calling him, we should go down to the studio together tomorrow morning and tell him in person.”
“No,” she shrieked. “I can’t. I don’t want to see him.”
On some mental checklist I noted her reaction to my suggestion, not sure yet what it meant. Why was that such an abhorrent idea? I sat back down at the kitchen table, next to her. “We don’t have to do it when everyone else is there, Dulcie, but you have to see Raul and tell him yourself.”
“I said I won’t. There isn’t some stupid rule that I have to.”
“No, not a rule. But it’s common courtesy. He chose you out of three hundred and fifty other girls. He’s been working with you for months. You can’t just disappear without explaining why.”
“You tell him why. Mom-” She strung the word out so it hung on the air. If she had been younger, I would have acquiesced. Instead, I wondered what was really going on and why she wanted me to take over. Was it just a regression to wanting her mother to take care of her so she could feel like a little girl, all safe and protected after her foray into the unfeeling, the critical?
I didn’t think so. Even when she was younger, Dulcie had never been the kind of child who wanted me to fight her battles for her. She’d never relied on me to handle her confrontations, nor had she been afraid of them. If anything, like my ex-husband, she seemed to get stronger when faced with adversity.
“Raul thinks I’m an idiot. An idiotic baby who had the worst stage fright than anyone ever had in the whole world.”
I felt like a warrior who wanted to slay this dragon that had threatened my loved one. “He called you an idiotic baby?”
She shook her head.
“What did he say to you?”
“He told me…” She didn’t finish.
“Dulcie, it’s okay. I won’t embarrass you with him. Just tell me what he said to you. I need to know.”
Still, she hesitated.
“He told me…” she whispered.
I took her hand and held it between mine. Our fingers were almost the same length. I remembered a diminutive hand that used to grab onto mine with fierce strength. “What did he say, sweetie?”
“Nothing.”
“Come on, tell me.”
She burst into tears. I didn’t think she could have that many tears in her. I scooted my chair closer to hers, gathered her into my arms and stroked her back.
“I…let…him…down… Oh, Mom… He won’t want me to work with him anymore…”
Finally, I saw the first glimmer of what was really going on. How could I have been so dense?
“Dulcie, all these weeks you’ve been asking me to pick you up from the studio ten or fifteen minutes late. Was it really because you didn’t want me walking in on a rehearsal or was it something else?”
She looked up at me from under her thick lashes that sparkled with tears. “I just didn’t want you to see me making mistakes.”
“I believe that was one reason. What I am asking, and you know it, is, was that the only reason?”
She didn’t have to say a word. I could see the answer in the way she looked away from me.
So many times during the last two months, I’d arrived at the studio to find Dulcie working with Raul on her part. They weren’t alone-there were always other cast and crew around getting ready to leave and talking to one another-but she clearly was spending more time with him than the other kids were. I knew that was because she had the lead. But did she realize that was the only reason? Was she seeking him out because she needed help or because she wanted the attention he gave her?
“He never minded that I hung around after rehearsals to talk about my part.” She was still in my arms and spoke her words into my neck. I could feel her breath, hot and moist, on my skin.
“I’m sure he didn’t mind,” I told her.
Dulcie didn’t say anything else.
She wasn’t eight or nine years old. She was thirteen. And now I knew she had a crush on Raul Seeger. Which was why my daughter was devastated that she hadn’t lived up to her director’s expectations.
“You have to call him for me, Mom, and tell him I’m quitting.” Her words were still muffled.
“Dulcie, Dad told me that the review also said you showed incredible range in your singing and you had serious star potential.”
“They were just saying that.”
“If they were just saying that about the good part, then why weren’t they just saying that about the bad part?”
“I…don’t…know.”
All I had wanted from the beginning was for Dulcie to stay in school and put off having an acting career until after college. Now I was about to convince her not to give up the play, because this wasn’t about her stage fright anymore. It wasn’t about the play being too much pressure for her.
It was a conflict of heart. Her first. And I was not going to let my thirteen-year-old daughter give up her dream because she was embarrassed in front of the man she had a crush on-her director.
She was sitting up again. The tears had stopped but her face was stained.
“Can’t Raul work with you on the stage fright? I’m sure he’s had lots of experience with other kids.”
“He said he could. All I had to do was ask.”
“But?”
“If I asked him to help me Mom, he’d know how weak I was. He’d know I wasn’t good at it and that I couldn’t do it without him.”
She was looking at me when she said it. And the way the light was shining on her face, I could see myself at the table reflected in her eyes.
“Well, that’s okay, sweetie. It’s okay to ask him for help. For him to know that you need him. He won’t think any less of you.”
I was hearing my own words. Knowing that I wouldn’t think about them now, but that they had their own resonance for me, too.
“I don’t know,” she said hesitantly.
“Did you like being in the play-once you got past that first scene?”
She nodded, now almost ashamed to tell me, some part of her realizing that she had not been quite honest with me about the crisis.
“The problem was in the show on Saturday night, right?”
She nodded.
“What happened during the matinee on Sunday? Was it as scary?”
“Well, part of the time I worried about screwing up.”
“What about the other part of the time?”
She got up and went to the fridge and pulled out a soda. “I guess it was okay,” she said with her back to me.
“Okay? That doesn’t tell me much. What was it like?”
She popped the top and turned around. “I wasn’t really there. Mary Lennox was. I was sort of seeing what she was seeing. It was like the play was real, and what was real disappeared.” She’d forgotten the embarrassment and was reliving the exhilaration of having slipped into another being’s soul and inhabiting it for a while.
“Your grandmother used to tell me that,” I said. A pang of loss, like a minor chord, reverberated inside me. You don’t ever stop missing someone you have loved, you simply learn how to make the longing for them a piece of you. You learn that missing them is the part of loving them that never leaves, but that doesn’t mean that every once in a while it doesn’t catch you unawares and shock you with its potency. “So I guess you are going to have to stay in the play,” I said.