In One Person

miss rehearsals now and then, and the performances—the actual shows put on by our town’s amateur theatrical society and Favorite River’s Drama Club—never overlapped.
    In rehearsals, Kittredge would pretend to botch a line just to have my mom prompt him. “O most dear maid,” Ferdinand misspoke to Miranda in one of our rehearsals, when we were newly off-script.
    “No, Jacques,” my mother said. “That would be ‘O most dear
mistress
,’ not
maid
.”
    But Kittredge was acting—he was only pretending to flub the line, so that he could engage my mother in conversation. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Abbott—it won’t happen again,” he said to her; then he blew the very next dialogue assigned him.
    “No, precious creature,” Ferdinand is supposed to say to Miranda, but Kittredge said, “No, precious mistress.”
    “Not this time, Jacques,” my mom told him. “It’s ‘No, precious
creature
’—not
mistress
.”
    “I think I’m trying too hard to please you—I want you to like me, but I’m afraid you don’t, Mrs. Abbott,” Kittredge said to my mother. He was flirting with her, and she blushed. I was embarrassed by how often I thought of my mom as easily seduced; it was almost as if I believed she was somewhat retarded, or so sexually naïve that anyone who flattered her could win her over.
    “I
do
like you, Jacques—I certainly don’t
not
like you!” my mom blurted out, while Elaine (as Miranda) stood there seething; Elaine knew that Kittredge had used the
hot
word for my mom.
    “I get so nervous around you,” Kittredge told my mother, though he didn’t look nervous; he seemed increasingly confident.
    “What a lot of bullshit!” Elaine Hadley croaked. Kittredge cringed at the sound of her voice, and my mother flinched as if she’d been slapped.
    “Elaine, mind your language,” my mom said.
    “Can we just get on with the
play
?” Elaine asked.
    “Oh, Naples—you’re so impatient,” Kittredge said with a most disarming smile, first to Elaine and then to my mother. “Elaine can’t wait to get to the hand-holding part,” Kittredge told my mom.
    Indeed, the scene they were rehearsing—act 3, scene 1—ends with Ferdinand and Miranda holding hands. It was Elaine’s turn to blush, but Kittredge, who was in complete control of the moment, had fixed his most earnest gaze on my mother. “I have a question, Mrs. Abbott,” he began, as if Elaine and Miranda didn’t exist—as if they’d never existed. “When Ferdinand says, ‘Full many a lady / I have eyed with best regard, and many a time / The harmony of their tongues hath into bondage / Brought my too diligent ear’—you know,
that
line—I wonder if that means I have been with a lot of women, and if I shouldn’t somehow imply that I am, you know,
sexually experienced
.”
    My mom blushed more deeply than before.
    “Oh,
God
!” Elaine Hadley cried.
    And I—where was I? I was Ariel—“an airy Spirit.” I was waiting for Ferdinand and Miranda to
exeunt—separately
, like the stage direction said. I was standing by, with Caliban, Stephano (“a drunken butler,” Shakespeare calls him), and Trinculo; we were all in the next scene, in which I was invisible. With my mother blushing at Kittredge’s clever manipulations, I felt invisible—or I wanted to be.
    “I’m just the prompter,” my mother said hastily to Kittredge. “That’s a question for the director—you should ask Mr. Abbott,” she said. My mom’s agitation was obvious, and I suddenly saw her as she must have looked years ago, when she was either pregnant with me or already my mother—when she’d seen my
womanizing
father kissing someone else. I remembered how she’d said the
else
word when she told me about it, in the same perfunctory way she had corrected Kittredge’s purposeful flubs. (Once we were in performances of
The Tempest
, Kittredge wouldn’t muff a line—not a single word. I realize that I haven’t acknowledged this, but Kittredge was very good onstage.)
    It was painful for me to see how easily undone my mom was—by the slightest sexual suggestion, from a
teenager
! I hated myself, because I saw that I was ashamed of my own mother, and I knew that whatever shame I felt for her had been formed by Muriel’s constant condescension and her chiding gossip. Naturally, I hated Kittredge for how effortlessly he had rattled my damaged mom—for how smoothly he was able to rattle Elaine and me, too—and then my mother called for help.