For me the kiss is enough, but Amy spies two stagehands hanging by the side door smoking down Marlboros and somehow persuades them to let us inside. The evening performance is still hours away and you can see the ‘what the hell, why not?” gears spinning in their minds as they lead us backstage. Playing at the Booth that night is Broken Glass by the great Arthur Miller, one of his later plays, one I’m not then familiar with, but that name—Arthur Miller—is like an eight-ounce bottle of vodka chugged in three frantic gulps. My head spins as I walk out on the stage. The set is minimalist; heavy black drapes along the back wall, a wooden bed, a nightstand. Amy hangs back, watching me; the stagehands ignore us. It is my first time on a New York stage, and as I look out into the dark theater, the empty orchestra seats, the red carpets leading down the aisles, the balcony looming in the shadows, my head begins to the fill in the blanks. I see actors on stage, props, a different set—instead of a drab 1940s apartment I see a make-believe arcade, something like Dizzy’s Game World, the boardwalk arcade back home in Holman Beach. I see an old man polishing a pinball machine, a beautiful young girl sweeping the floor, and a pizza delivery boy holding a brown shopping bag and a liter of diet Coke.
I don’t know it yet but it’s the opening scene of Anything but That, a play I will write that summer that will eventually win my second Young Playwrights Award and earn me a summer fellowship at Yale before I start college at NYU. All that is still to come, but I can feel something growing, the people and the words moving around my head, chunks of dialogue taking shape, the rising action, the climax, and then this happens, and then this….and somehow I know that Amy is the key, the inspiration, the muse… and thank you very much, Arthur Miller, for the use of your stage.
As we exit the back door, squinting into the daylight, Amy tells the two stagehands that soon they’ll be working on one of my productions, Donatello Marcino, remember that name, and one stagehand shrugs and lights another cigarette while the other waves and says, “Good luck, kid! We’ll see you around!”
. . . . .
A final moment: Amy, Sarah, and I on the beach, a blanket spread beneath us on the sand. The full moon glistens; waves roll over the shoreline, back and forth, like a heartbeat. Sarah holds her cone with both hands, the maraschino cherry lodged atop a swirl of vanilla as she licks the rainbow sprinkles one by one, the wafer cone steady in her tiny hands. I kiss Amy and taste the fading tang of Peach Schnapps; her eyes are tired and dreamy; she hugs her knees and gazes toward the ocean, its dark horizon vast and eternal.
“Do you see it, Duck?” Sarah asks, pointing at the water.
There are rabbits on the pockets of her jeans, funky yellow stars across the front of her T-shirt. Curly bangs droop over her forehead.
“Yes, I do,” I tell her, because this is our game. “It’s a unicorn, right?”
“Right!” she says, delighted, although had I said a puppy or an elephant or a certified public accountant, her answer would have been the same, because this is our game. “A purple unicorn, with green hair!”
“And a pink horn!”
“And glasses!” she squeals.
“And a necklace made of seashells.”
“And a baseball hat.”
“And he’s riding a surfboard,” I say.
Sarah giggles, almost dropping her cone, and I cup her hands as she licks the melting vanilla trickling down the back of her fingers.
“His name is Elmo,” she says. “He’s a good surfer.”
“He’s the best; but look at those big waves behind him. Watch out, Elmo!”
“Watch out, Elmo!” Sarah cries.
Does Elmo make it? Of course he does; Sarah and I go back and forth, building Elmo’s story until Amy breaks in with “Elmo has a headache. Elmo went home!” But not even that stops us. He has a purple headache, and he needs new shoes before he can walk home, orange shoes, and on and on until Sarah finishes her cone, the treasured maraschino cherry the last thing she eats, her thumb and forefinger scooping it from the cone’s pointed bottom and popping it into her little mouth, her eyes looking up at me with the world’s most satisfied smile.
“I love ice cream, and sprinkles, and cherries, and you,” Sarah says, and within minutes she is sleeping, her face resting on Amy’s lap, her perfect little feet burrowed in the sand.
-6-
Back home in California, in my bottom desk drawer, was a picture of Amy on her sixteenth birthday, an actual photograph instead of pixels on a phone, the edges curled yet the image Kodachrome sharp: Amy standing by the counter at the Jaybird holding a slice of pizza, her brown eyes flirting with the lens, her mouth posed in this everything-is-possible smile, her lips a glossy pink, a funky gold hoop dangling from her left ear. Her jeans, frayed at the knees, hugged her hips like a second skin, her Nirvana T-shirt cut off at the sleeves, arms in full-summer golden, her purple-streaked hair draped in waves across her shoulders. She looked happy, sober, untroubled; perhaps even innocent. Sweet, beautiful Amy—at the Jaybird then …and now, standing by the reception desk at the Ocean County Medical Center, head down, checking her phone, her jeans still painted onto those sexy hips, her dark hair cascading to her shoulders, a black t-shirt stretched tight across her chest, purple toenails poking through her flip-flops, her face still glowing sweet-sixteen, her lips
