A Stillness in Bethlehem(15)

If Candy could make life be like anything at all, she would make it be like these rehearsals, where people smiled and nodded at her and talked to her about recipes and nobody was ever angry with her for a minute. She reached into the pocket of her jacket and took out the wadded sheets of paper that were what they were going to rehearse today. She didn’t mind rehearsing, but she didn’t really need to. Unlike Reggie, she had learned to read and read well. She had read the script four or five times a day since the day she had been given it, seven months before. She had everybody’s part memorized, and the business and the stage directions, too. Other people hadn’t, though, so she was careful to bring the script with her. She wanted to look normal.

The basement door opened behind her and Cara Hutchinson came in, the front panels of her good navy wool coat flapping in the breeze she created with the air lock. Candy checked out her hair—silver-blond, blunt cut—and her dress, and sighed a little to herself. Cara Hutchinson played John the Baptist’s mother and Mary’s cousin Elizabeth, and when they weren’t onstage Candy couldn’t talk to her at all. Cara Hutchinson was also seventeen years old, but she wasn’t married. She was a senior at the regional high school, vice president of her class and a member of the National Honor Society. She got her picture in the paper a lot, getting awards or being sent to national student conferences or giving her opinions on who should be President and what he should do when he got elected.

Cara put her coat on a hook, hanging it carefully from the silky tab at the back of the neck. Then she sat down on the bench and began to kick off her snow boots. She wasn’t particularly pretty—that was why, in spite of a long and vigorous campaign, she hadn’t got to play the part of Mary—but she had something, and Candy could recognize it. She smells expensive, Candy always said to herself, and left it at that.

Cara shoved her snow boots under the bench and wriggled her toes in her black leather pumps. “My feet feel like hell,” she said, “but I had an interview this morning, and I didn’t want to look like a hick. I’ve applied to Smith, did I tell you that? They like you to talk to their alumnae when you’re applying, and I had to spend the morning with this perfectly idiotic woman who spends all her time trying to save some kind of owl from development. I mean, I’m all for environmentalism, for God’s sake, but you ought to have something else on your mind at least some of the time. I’d have gone home to change except that I didn’t have time. I was supposed to have time, but I got caught up. Because of Tisha Verek and closing down the Celebration, you know.”

“Mmm,” Candy said, looking away. Candy knew what Cara thought—which was that Candy didn’t understand half the things that Cara said—but it wasn’t true, not exactly. Candy George was not stupid, although most people thought she was. It was just that she felt as if she were holding a large heavy boulder on her shoulders and her head, and the effort took so much energy there wasn’t enough left to do anything else. The boulder was always particularly heavy when she was around Cara Hutchinson—almost as heavy as it was when she was around Reggie himself. It would have been even worse around her father or her stepfather, but they were both dead.

The basement door opened again and in came Mrs. Johnson, who was playing the innkeeper’s wife. She gave a suspicious middle-aged look at both of them and began to unwrap herself from her shawl.

“Are you two the only ones here yet?” she demanded. “Honestly, I don’t know what’s gotten into people these days. It used to be an honor and a privilege to have a part in the Celebration.”

“We don’t know that nobody else is here yet,” Cara Hutchinson said. “We haven’t looked into the auditorium.”

“We don’t have to look into the auditorium,” Candy said. “There aren’t any other coats here.”

Cara whipped around, contemptuous. “What does it matter if there aren’t any coats here? They could have brought them with them into the auditorium and left them on the seats. They could be wearing them. It’s cold in here.”

“Oh,” Candy said, flushing. “Yeah. Well.”

“Don’t say ‘yeah,’ ” Mrs. Johnson said automatically. “It makes you sound cheap.”

Cara Hutchinson coughed. “Well,” she said with false brightness. “I’ve just been talking to Candy here about Tisha Verek. Have you heard about Tisha Verek, Mrs. Johnson?”

“Everybody in town’s heard about Tisha Verek,” Mrs. Johnson said. “Benjy Warren called Franklin Morrison and Franklin called Peter Callisher and everybody at the newspaper overheard it. Lord, but isn’t this just like that piece of baggage. Doesn’t even have the decency to hide behind her man. Just goes right out and does it on her own, and sits back and waits for the rest of us to applaud.”