Page 48 of Playworld

I laughed. She laughed too. Our breaths made a single cloud. Her curly red hair framing her face from beneath her stocking hat was snow-dusted, her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes were very blue. I could now appreciate how large they were.

“Are you still doing that show?” she asked. “The Saturday one.”

I was surprised she’d watched it. “Yes,” I said. “We just finished our fourth season.”

“Did you always want to be an actor?”

“Not really. I kind of fell into it.”

“It must be so interesting to live in New York and do movies and television.”

“I’ve sort of always done it, but yeah, sure.”

“What’s the best part?”

I considered this for a moment. “I like seeing the difference between rushes and the final cut. Of movies.” If Leo were here, I would never have considered talking to Bridget like this. I was talking to Bridget like this, I thought, because she was Bridget.

“Rushes?” she asked.

“Dailies. After we wrap, they put together all the day’s shots for thedirector to see, in case they need to reshoot. But it’s all broken up, in bits and pieces. And then you see it straight through months later, after the editor’s put it together, and you realize how good everyone has to be at their job for a movie to get made.”

“Everyone?”

“The cast. The crew. Gaffer, key grip. Best boy…”

She chuckled at my list.

“Dolly grip. AD. Prop master. Production designer—”

“Wow,” she said. “You know a lot.”

Maybe it wasn’t so bad, being an actor. “It takes a lot of people to make a movie, let me tell you.”

“You aresolucky,” she said. “I’m gonna live in New York when I grow up.”

That she wanted such a thing made her seem grown up already.

We stood very close to each other, breathing in the falling snow. “Are you…headed somewhere?” I asked.

“I walk the golf course every Christmas Day. I’ve been doing it since I was seven. It’s my tradition. I try to leave at the same time every year and think about how my life is different.”

“Huh,” I said, fascinated. “How’d you decide to do that?”

“I don’t remember,” Bridget said.

“That’s really cool.”

“Well, if you leave at ten in the morning next Christmas, I’ll see you at the ninth hole, and we can tell each other what’s different in our lives between now and then.”

“Deal,” I said.

And we parted.

I did not run into Bridget on the back nine. Stomping my boots in the garage, I wondered if I was simply going faster and had arrived at my grandparents’ well ahead of her pace. In his study, Grandpa was practicing Spanish. He had his reel-to-reel going. The woman’s voice asked, “Donde han ido los niños?” A tone sounded, and my grandfather repeated the question with almost comically perfect enunciation. The woman’s voice said, “Los niños estan jugando en la playa,” and the tone sounded again. In the kitchen, Oren, Mom, and Grandma were making the Christmas meal; I spied the turkey, golden in the oven, and dreamedof my favorite part: the wings. In the living room, Dad was asleep in front of the midday news. In my room, I hung up my overcoat, lay on my bed, and thought about Bridget’s invitation to meet the following year. How would my life be different then? It was, I quickly concluded, impossible to know. Or was it? I could become a better wrestler. I could ignore Coach, do the moves I wanted. I could go to wrestling camp this summer and learn more new ones if I didn’t doThe Nuclear Family.But whether I did the show was not in my control. So I was back to square one. I could hear the television in the living room, the anchor’s drone. It was day 418 of the hostage crisis. What if it never ended? I thought. What if those fifty-two people never came home? What choices did the hostages make, day in and day out? Whether to talk? To eat? Could those even be considered a course of action? By any metric, they were such tiny decisions, they barely made for a story at all.

—

The next morning, Dad announced that we’d leave for New York the following day. Saying so seemed to lift his spirits even further. He had been more upbeat after we’d run into Fountain, and it also spurred him to get home, as if being back in Manhattan might somehow stoke Fountain’s creative process, make him write the musical with a major role for him faster. My father’s suitcase lay on the bed, open and nearly packed. He made the long-distance call to check his service, to which Mom said, “No one is working over Christmas,” and to which Dad replied, “It isn’t Christmas anymore.”