1
The line began to form in front of the great double doors of the Milky Way Ballroom at just after six in the morning. By ten, when the rain started to fall, it went to the end of the block and around the corner and to the end of the block again and around the corner again. It was at least four women across. Nobody could pass through any of those stretches of sidewalk except by walking half in the gutter.
Olivia Dahl was standing at the window of the third-floor office when the lightning first lit up the sky. She had been in the office since six herself, but not always in the window.
CLIPBOARDS, she had written across her steno pad, and BALLPOINT PENS, as if she were about to forget, either. This was the first day of the new season, the day without which the season could not happen, and Olivia, as always, had had a perfect memory for details.
The phone buzzed on the desk behind her. Sheila Dunham’s voice came into the room like battery acid over a bullhorn. That was a metaphor that made no sense. Olivia didn’t care. It fit exactly.
“I don’t know where the hell my blue dress is,” Sheila said. “What the hell did you do to my blue dress? And I don’t care if Oprah is God, she’s a fat pig and I don’t want her near the auditions. Why the woman thinks she has to make a statement about everything on the planet is beyond me. Find my blue dress, for God’s sake, or I’m going to fire you.”
Sheila wouldn’t fire a stock boy on audition day. She would not fire Olivia ever. Olivia knew it. She stayed where she was at the window, watching the rain come down in sheets and the women hold newspapers over their heads for protection. There would be at least another forty-five minutes before the doors opened. Even then, only a few of the women would be let inside at a time. You’d think some of them would have watched a weather forecast before they’d come out this morning.
“Olivia,” Sheila’s voice said.
Olivia turned her back to the window and leaned against the sill. It was impossible to see faces that far down, anyway. She straightened her skirt and put her hands in her hair. She was fifty years old, but she was as rail thin as she had been in the second grade.
“Stupid cow,” she said. She said it, looking straight at the intercom on the desk. “Somebody really ought to slit your throat.”
2
Back home, Janice Ledbedder had promised herself that she would not let herself get caught in The Midwestern Thing. “The Midwestern Thing” was what she called the need to be nice all the time, even if being nice meant losing out on something for herself. She had been nice about her boyfriend going out with her very best friend. Now she didn’t have a boyfriend or a best friend, and she spent a lot of her time thinking about ways to kill people. She had started to worry herself. Maybe she was exhibiting red flags. “Red flags” was what they called it when somebody started behaving very weirdly, right before they got a 30.06, and shot up everybody they’d ever known in school.
The rain was very thick, but Janice had an umbrella. Very few other people did. Janice was nervous about being in Philadelphia. She didn’t think it as bad as New York, but it was a city. Black people lived here, and people who didn’t speak English. It was nothing at all like her little town in South Dakota. That was another part of The Midwestern Thing. She couldn’t help feeling out of place.
Next to her there was a girl in a green raincoat with no umbrella, and with nothing else, either, not even the newspapers so many of the girls were holding over their heads. The girl in the green raincoat was a blonde and very thin, and she looked oddly familiar. The rain had plastered her hair to the sides of her head. There were rivers of water coursing down her cheekbones into her neck.
“Here,” Janice said, shoving the umbrella sideways so that it covered the other girl’s head. “You can’t stand out here like that. You’re going to die.”
“Thank you,” the blond girl said.
Janice looked around to the front of the line. The doors were still closed, but they weren’t too far back, only three or four rows from the front. Janice looked at her watch. It was a Timex watch. Everybody in Marshall, South Dakota, got a Timex watch when they graduated from junior high school.
“It’s quarter to eleven,” Janice said. “That’s not too much longer to wait. Aren’t you glad you came out early? The girls at the back are going to be a mess by the time they get inside. You should be all right, though. I mean, you know, you need to dry off a little, but you’ve got the raincoat, and it’s like I said, it won’t be much longer. Of course, I’ve been here all night. It took everything I had just to get the bus ticket down here. I had a little money left over, but when I saw what the hotels cost I nearly died. Who’s got that kind of money to stay in a hotel room? I’m Janice, by the way. Janice Ledbedder. I’m from Marshall, South Dakota. You’ve probably never heard of it.”