June Read online

  Clyde reached out the window and knocked the side of his car. “What’d I tell you, old man? First the movies, next the moon.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Eben replied. Lindie looked up at her father’s tight jaw. He might appear carefree from the road, but he didn’t up close.

  Clyde nodded to her. “Will you tell your pops to have a little fun? I swear, it’s all figures and sums these days.”

  Eben put his arm around Lindie’s shoulder and squeezed. “I’m not as bad as all that; tell him, kid.”

  Lindie squirreled away. “I’m going to watch the movie get made too, Uncle Clyde.”

  Clyde pointed at Lindie like she was something special. “That’s my girl.” He put his foot on the gas and eased off down the block.

  Eben followed Clyde’s departure with a solemn gaze. Before Lindie had the chance to follow, he picked up the brown leather shoes that had been sitting on the porch since the weather’d turned warm. “Cat bath first. And a proper shirt.” Maybe there was still a chance of getting cast as an extra, even though Lindie knew she’d never look like Thelma Weadock or Donnagene Lutz, with their Breck-bathed locks in those perfect Jesus waves, with their button noses and beribboned ponytails, and skirts giving way to smooth calves.

  Ten minutes later, Lindie was clean enough and wearing a pair of her father’s boyhood pants and a collared shirt that did an okay job of hiding the bumps growing on her chest. She had shoes on and a glass of milk in her belly. “Do you want to come?” she asked Eben halfheartedly. She couldn’t stay mad at him for long; he was so much better than any of the other fathers.

  But he tapped his book and shook his head, and Lindie stepped off the porch.

  “Oh, Linda Sue,” he said, which stopped her cold, because he never called her anything but Lindie, not unless he was talking business, “you might take this and present it to one of the men with the clipboards.” In his hand was a sealed envelope.

  “What’s this?”

  “Apatha’s idea. One of her best.” And he smiled and she scowled as she remembered the job Apatha had mentioned, and stuffed the envelope into her pocket.

  —

  Bobby and Walter, little Paul Reveres, had pulled the quiet neighborhood out of its daily rituals and into the electric new. Lindie joined the strange parade toward Center Square. More primping girls tore past her—Gretchen Beck and Ginny Sherman and that preening, stuck-up Darlene Kipp, who stuck her tongue out and pointed her piggy nose up to the clouds as she breezed by. Behind Lindie, Mrs. Freewalt herded along her four little Freewalts. Old Mrs. Bretz and older Mrs. Dowty leaned heavily on their brass-handled canes. Tommy Tinnerman and Chuck Schnarre raced by, dodging a tongue-lashing from one of their mothers. And Mr. Caywood and Mr. Abernathy, in their wool suits, had decided to take the long way to Main Street in order to see all the excitement for themselves.

  Center Square was St. Jude’s oasis, six square acres of emerald lawn sliced through by the old canal. A refurbished canal boat floated in the trough of water that cut along the park’s northern edge, where a tunnel then took the canal out under Main Street and into the country, north toward Lima. Small towns in the rest of the country had paved over their old-fashioned trolley tracks and filled in their locks, but the St. Judians clung hard to their unfilled, mucky mile of the Miami & Erie Canal. In 1861, it had been the most efficient way to move commerce in the nearly landlocked state. Now it did little more than let off a stink in the summer and provide a skating track on the coldest Ohio days. But the St. Judians didn’t mind. That Hollywood had come to town only confirmed their good sense to keep things as they were.

  Above Center Square, at its north side, Main Street was easily reached by climbing any number of sets of stairs, which led up to Illy’s (the town’s single restaurant), or Schillinger’s Drug (where the soda fountain was), or the Dry Goods or the county clerk’s or the Majestic Theater, where Lindie would sometimes stay for six hours at a time, watching the cowboy movies loop.

  The western side of the square, where she stood now on Front Street, usually offered a view of the high schoolers flirting in the band shell, of children playing tag below the clock tower as it rang out the hour, and older couples strolling together below the elm groves that peppered the far reaches of the green. But standing there on the first day of Erie Canal’s shoot, Lindie was half-convinced she’d traveled back in time. To her right, on the southern edge of Center Square, Memorial High was ground zero for the costume department; already, her classmates were emerging from the main door dressed like their grandmothers, in jewel-toned dresses with long sleeves and high necks. Some wore wigs, some little hats high up upon their foreheads, and they giggled to each other, oblivious to Lindie as she made her way through them. A young man with a clipboard and a megaphone directed the costumed hordes to the eastern end of Center Square.

  Lindie took advantage of a break in the man’s announcement and asked where she’d find the extras casting. He looked her over for a moment. “You’re a girl?” he asked, drolly.

  Lindie was seized with panic and regret—she should have worn the strawberry dress. She knew she was blushing—she could feel herself turning red as a tomato—and stammered a frustrated “Yes sir.”

  He cleared his throat. He was trying to figure out how to put this delicately.

  Embarrassed as she was, she knew all at once that he was right. She’d look stupid with a wig pinned onto her head and a blue gown flouncing around her. She’d trip and fall after even one step in those girlish shoes. But she couldn’t walk away, not now. Of anyone in this town, she deserved to help make this movie. She needed it so much more than the Darlene Kipps of the world.

  Lindie pulled the envelope from her pocket and shoved it at the man.

  “And what’s this?”

  “I’m fast, sir,” she said. “I can run. I know every back alley of this town and the name of every person who owns a business. And the name of his son and his dog and his wife, for that matter.”

  He lifted the megaphone to his lips and called out to Mr. and Mrs. Fishpaw, the old couple who were always reading the newspaper together on their porch on the corner of Maple and Pine. “That way,” he said, waving his clipboard toward Chestnut. “Please make your way to the town hall.” They obeyed. He looked back down at his clipboard, then up at Lindie, startling as if seeing her for the first time. “And what do you want from me?”

  “I want you to read it,” she replied, still holding out the envelope.

  He considered her request, then decided to open the letter. It was backward to Lindie’s eye, but she could see it had been written in a steady hand. He held it to the light and examined it carefully. “You’re a friend of Mr. Shields?” he asked dubiously.

  “My father fought with him in the South Pacific.”

  He pursed his lips. “He speaks highly of you here.” Then he folded the letter up and handed it back. She wondered what Alan Shields—whom she’d never met—could have written, but she wasn’t about to question it when the man cocked his head toward the set behind him, where men were lifting lights onto scaffolding and a crowd of extras was gathering. “Tell Casey you’re a P.A.”

  “What’s a P.A.?” Lindie asked, already pushing past him into the heart of things.

  He laughed drily, as though he pitied both her ignorance and her fate. “You’ll see.”

  June bowed her head in prayer. The dining room was a large, dark rectangle at the back corner of the house, designed, she sometimes thought, to make one feel as though one lived inside a jewelry box. The walls were brown tapestry, the mahogany table designed to seat twenty, the sideboard a floor-to-ceiling triumph of curved tiger maple and paneled glass. Under her mother’s watch, the thick chocolate curtains stayed closed against the daylight, so the chandelier burned above; the leaded-glass window which led out to the small back porch was the only indication that the sun had come out to greet the new month.

  Every few minutes, Apatha would come through the pantr
y door bearing a pitcher of juice or a new dish of butter; it was all June could do not to get up to help the dear old woman. But not today; today she would obey. June could feel her mother’s eyes scrutinizing every square inch of her body: the open collar, the thin blue belt. She folded her hands in her lap, ready for the verdict. But, as the quiet moment neared its end, she smiled to herself. No tongue had been clucked her direction. She had done well.

  “You must excuse us earlier than usual this morning, Uncle,” Cheryl Ann began, deciding that grace was finished. “It’s a special day for June. She’s engaged to one of the Danvers boys—you recall?—and today he returns from his travels.”

  June was certain Lemon had no idea about, or interest in, her affairs, but, for her mother’s sake, she accepted a hearty spoonful of eggs and replied, “The nine o’clock bus, is it?” Uncle Lem gaped and sputtered, more than half of his eggs already on the bib Apatha had sewn from oilcloth. June wished she could feed him. But she wouldn’t try it, not today.

  “The nine o’clock from Columbus,” Cheryl Ann repeated. This information had been relayed nearly a dozen times in the day before, a pleasing fact plucked from the simple, folded letter which now sat beside Cheryl Ann’s grapefruit spoon.

  June could vaguely remember a time when Cheryl Ann had been beautiful; it might not have even been that long ago. But since Marvin’s death and the loss of everything she held dear, the woman’s lustrous hair had grown thin and her face had been swallowed by a conspiracy of chins. Her back hurt and she made sure June knew it. She often passed wind and rarely excused herself. June didn’t begrudge her mother the genuine heartache she’d endured, but it was the way Cheryl Ann kissed her disappointments full on the mouth that appalled June, though she’d never have admitted as much to even Lindie.

  June watched her mother shove a sausage into her mouth while she prattled on about changing the floral arrangement in the front hall especially for Artie’s return. She asked, without really asking, what recipe June thought Apatha should use to make the roast on Sunday: “I’d prefer her to use Mother’s recipe, but not if she ruins it again. What gives her the idea she knows best?” June knew Apatha could hear through the pantry door. Cheryl Ann knocked on the mahogany tabletop, pleased with her intolerance. “She’d be sitting right beside me if she had her way.”

  Most of Lemon’s eggs had made their way to the floor. But Cheryl Ann dished up another pile for him as though it hadn’t been torture to watch him wrestle with the last batch. “I’ll confirm the church with Reverend Crane, and ask Clyde again about the reception hall. We have plenty to do, now that we know the date is firm and the rooster has come home to roost—what do we have, thirty-some-odd days? Hmm? June? June! Stop mooning.”

  “Yes, Mother, thirty-three days.” June watched her mother crest the next speculative wave, fluttering through seating charts and the menu and what flowers they might use and having June fitted again with Mrs. Jamison, because June had gotten nice and fat in her happy engagement, hadn’t she?

  June pushed her eggs around her plate. The wedding, she reminded herself—the wedding would be wonderful. Artie’s big brother, Clyde, was paying, and he’d promised she could have any kind of cake she wanted. No expense spared! Clyde was a rich and handsome bachelor. June supposed he must feel protective of her and Cheryl Ann, must believe that marrying them into his own family would be a way to help out the family of his wayward war buddy, like saving the two women left on a sinking ship. Not to mention that Clyde obviously loved his younger brother, Artie, because why else would he be going to all this trouble? Clyde Danvers was the man who got things done; June supposed she liked the feeling of being a necessary aspect of one of those things. She hadn’t felt necessary in so long. And so what if the prospect of the wedding filled her with pleasure, and thinking of Artie himself made her feel, well, a hollow unknowingness? She believed that her simply taking the leap of faith that she could be a good wife to tall, quiet Artie Danvers might be enough to get them both through the first year or so, and by then she’d probably love him anyway, because that was how it worked.

  The grandfather clock chimed the half hour. Cheryl Ann jumped, her hand fluttering over her heart. She frowned at June’s full plate and shook her head, wiping her mouth with the cloth napkin. “Time to go, time to go.”

  “But the bus isn’t until nine,” June objected, then, wondering why on earth she was complaining about getting free of her mother early, stood. “No, you’re right, I should leave extra.”

  June watched Cheryl Ann ring for Apatha, remembering what her father had told her before he’d redeployed, when she’d come in to his carpentry workshop and begged him not to leave, not again. “When something seems impossible, find a part deep down inside yourself that’s strong,” he’d said, wrapping his large hand around June’s, then tightening his grip. “Clench it, like a fist.” It had hurt, to feel him squeezing her fist so tightly inside his own. But she had understood.

  The movie people were strangers, but Lindie didn’t need to know their names. They fit together like gears; it was plain to see that if any of the pieces of the mechanism malfunctioned, it could be replaced with a die-cut replica. The camera operator operated the camera, and the costume department sewed the ladies into their long, bustled dresses, and the cinematographer was the man with the small telescopey thing in front of his right eye. The studio had even brought along a fellow whose sole job was to wrangle the ogling crowd; most St. Judians between the ages of one and a hundred had come to watch the show. Lindie had never taken crowd control to be a skill until she watched this man handing out flyers that called for more extras in the days ahead; then, just as a wave of excited whispers threatened to crest over the relative quiet, he hushed the onlookers with one Svengali-like look, and she understood he was a master of his profession.

  There were plenty of job-related nicknames—Scripty or the “script girl” was not a girl at all but a bookish-looking woman who noted every alteration to the script with the pencil that was otherwise tucked behind her petite ear, Crafty was where the crew got their meals, and P.A. stood for production assistant, which was a glorified name for the person who could, and would, be asked, at a moment’s notice, to count two thousand silk buttons out for a seamstress, or move ten crates of apples a half dozen times until the director and the production designer agreed on their placement in the background, or make sure the flowers for the leading lady’s dressing room were delivered at 10:00 a.m. on the dot. In short, a P.A.’s work was exhausting, thankless, and underpaid, and Lindie loved every second.

  Casey was in charge of the P.A.’s. That first day there were four of them, and Lindie was the only child, only local, and only girl. She certainly hadn’t appreciated how influential that letter from Alan Shields had been; once she handed Mr. Shields’s letter over to Casey, he’d reluctantly told her to go tell the horse and wagon that it needed to move to the other side of the square in order to be in the shot. Casey was youngish—couldn’t have been but a few years beyond June—but just as mirthless. He wore brassy wire-rim glasses and a grave expression, and, if he didn’t see you running, he was glad to remind you how replaceable you were.

  Lindie was happy to ask how high when Casey said jump. In her first hour on set, she ran two messages to the lighting crew, took a note from craft services up to Illy’s restaurant indicating they’d be in need of a case of Coca-Cola come noon, discovered she didn’t have authority to deliver that letter, went back to Illy’s to tell them to forget it, returned to set to discover that Crafty did, in fact, need a case of Coca-Cola after all, and could she also ask Illy’s for some 7UP, and went back to Illy’s to reconfirm that she’d be back at 11:30 to somehow shoulder two cases of glass-bottled soda back to set on her ninety-pound frame. Then she jogged down to the Memorial High gymnasium before anyone asked for Dr Pepper.

  The vast room with the shiny wood floors was just as hot and loud as it was in the winter months, when it was jammed with the sweaty basketball team
and the hollering cheerleaders. Dresses, shoes, racks of hats, and a dozen members of the costume department, pincushions tied to their wrists, filled the floor. Someone had dragged the lunch tables into the long space; on one, hundreds of men’s shirts waited to be ironed; on another, shawls were sorted by color. On the bleachers waited a thrilled scrum of St. Judians, eager to be transformed. Lindie ignored the jealous pit in her stomach when she saw that mean-hearted Darlene Kipp was one of the lucky ones.

  Lindie presented herself at one of the lunch tables, where a man with a pin between his lips crouched at the feet of pretty, young Mrs. Sudman, already transformed into a vision of the last century in a cerulean gown. Without lifting an eye, the man, named Ricky, shoved a tomato pincushion at Lindie and told her to pin up the back of the wide dress. “If they’d sent us here a week ago instead of sitting us on our asses out on the lot,” he seethed, as though Lindie knew what he was talking about, “I’d have all these finished by now.” On the table above him, scores of taffeta skirts were draped, in deep shades of evergreen, eggplant, and plum. Lindie whispered that she didn’t know how to sew.

  “I’m not asking you to sew,” he said, sounding more like a peeved friend than a punishing father, “I’m telling you to pin.”

  So pin she did, and though Ricky fussed as he went over her uneven pinning with his needle, he didn’t fire her. He was a grown man but funny in the way even Lindie’s father wasn’t funny. He talked sometimes like women talked—“Oh, sweetheart,” and “Honey, if you ask me…”—but he was also firm in the way of men, especially when he called up the next girl for her fitting. Lindie stayed by his side as they hemmed four more dresses, and her skills improved.