Beatrice took a breath. “All of those reasons are certainly broad.” She glanced down at the notebook page on which her sister was steadfastly transcribing her ideas. The clichés, nothing if not resilient, were massing once again; perhaps a more drastic approach was required. “Now let’s try going deeper, too. Let’s try finding some darkness, some interesting conflict.”
“Conflict like how?” Maggie asked. “You mean fights backstage?”
“Well, that’s one sort, but I was thinking of the more internal kind.”
Beatrice deliberated, but only briefly, then raised an unseen hand and placed it over the tiny hidden camera.
“And by internal, I mean the conflict you feel as a theater tech. The inner conflict. Doing all that hard work, but never really getting recognized. Not getting the appreciation you deserve. Having to stay in the wings the whole time.”
Maggie had stopped writing, but she was still gazing at the half-filled page, as if she had found a menacing pattern there.
Beatrice’s voice rose slightly. “Who spends all those hours painting and hammering and sawing? You do! But do you get to come out and take a bow? Do you get the applause?”
Maggie looked up. “At the curtain call, the actors point to us and we stick out our heads and wave.”
The uncombed heads popping out, and the shy, puckish, manic waving—Beatrice could see it perfectly.
“That’s nice,” she said. “That really is. Those moments of recognition can feel wonderful.” And she meant it, too—she did—but how could she help but also mention the injustice, the indignity, of being always the stagehand but never the star, always on tiptoe, the gentle mover and fixer, condemned to forever facilitate the dazzling achievements of someone else? Not too different, she saw, from her own line of work. On some days, at least. So she should know! “It just sounds hard to me,” said Beatrice.
Maggie tapped her pencil against the kitchen table rapidly. It was clear that something had begun to stir and glow inside her, as hoped. The slow bubbling of ambivalence? The surfacing of secret trouble? Maggie finally held her pencil still. Without looking from her notebook, she said, “So you want me to write that I don’t like being a theater tech?”
Surprised, Beatrice realized it was merely resentment she’d seen stirring, with herself as its object.
“Oh, Maggie, that’s not what I mean. I’m not trying to put words in your mouth. I don’t want to take something you love and turn it into something horrible. I just wanted to help you explore the ways in which this experience might be complicated.”
“Not everything is complicated.”
“But it is! It is!” cried Beatrice. “At least it is in writing. In good, interesting writing. Which is exactly what you’re capable of, and what they’ll be looking for in your essay.”
She thought with despair of the small masterpiece that Emily Radinsky had turned in as her last book report, a sixteen-page first-person narrative imagined from the perspective of a minor character in Elie Wiesel’s Night. It was so beautifully written, so profound in its understanding of family and loss, so simply and astonishingly great, that Beatrice had wept when she read it. She could almost weep now, just thinking of it, and looking at her earnest, resentful, circuit-breaking sister, and knowing how the good people in charge of enrichment programs everywhere would be banging down Emily’s door, and not hers.
“Okay,” said Beatrice, brightly. “Forget complicated. Let’s try thinking about this from a different angle.”
With a soft rustle of paper, Maggie turned to a new page.
AS A VERY YOUNG CHILD, she had been a biter. This was a source of consternation to her mother, developmental interest to her father, and to Beatrice, bottomless delight, serving as it did as proof of the baby’s badass nature, and augury of transgressive acts to come. She liked to think that Maggie’s early exposure to excellent and angry music had possibly played a role. Not just in terms of the biting itself but also, gratifyingly, in the general lack of remorse. “I bite Eli,” Maggie would announce upon arriving home from the playground. “I bite Josh. I bite Georgie. I bite Priya.” Sometimes she’d try to bite Beatrice, too, her chin jutting forward and a wild look coming into her eyes, but this did not in any way diminish Beatrice’s enthusiasm. She just learned to move quickly out of reach; the attacks were swift and for the most part unpredictable. “I bite Mama,” Maggie would say. “I bite Calvin.” Looking on mildly from the sofa, their father said, “The real question is, what is she trying to tell us?”
Maybe she was trying to say, My teeth hurt. My T-shirt is scratchy. I don’t want to wait my turn for the slide. I’m sick of the park, of the trees, of the picnic benches. I’m tired of sunshine and shade, of pita bread in plastic bags. I’m sick of my car, my yard, my crib, my house, and the friendly, baffled people who live there. The strange smell embedded in the carpet. The long dark painting above the fireplace. The breathless feeling in the air, as if everyone were about to turn around and disappear. All of them: the boy peering at his turtle in the tank, the girl clattering down the stairs and singing at the top of her lungs, the man hovering in the doorway, finger tucked in a half-closed book, and the woman making fireworks explode in the huge battered woks that teeter on the stove. Noisy, large, and omnipresent—so why does it feel as if one day they might all disappear?
Maggie clamped down on her father’s salty forearm. Beatrice laughed. Calvin grimaced. Mama said something reproving. It was directed at Beatrice, not the biter. “Why did you bite Papa?” asked their father, looking into the eyes of the little girl. “Can you use your words and tell Papa?” Maggie pulled away and careened across the
