The Mare

Paul

I had an aunt named Bea. She was a strange, frightened person. She was small, with a pretty, big-eyed face, but also huge, clumsy hands that I think she picked at. She was a terrible cook and once when my sister complained about a soggy grilled-cheese sandwich, Aunt Bea went into the bedroom and cried. She could play the piano and she acted in a community theater version of The Cherry Orchard, playing a jilted servant girl; she actually thought this was going to be the start of an acting career. My uncle went to see every performance and sat proudly in the front row; he was too charmed to notice the pathos of the ambition, not even when they wouldn’t let her act in another play. He reminisced about The Cherry Orchard for years, every single time we went to visit, while she just sat there and stared. Then their marriage went through a crisis and she got a little crazy, would hide under the bed sometimes and refuse to come out.

Both she and my uncle are dead and I don’t normally think about them much. Then Ginger decided that she wanted to act in the children’s community theater; they were doing A Christmas Carol, and she wanted to play either the beautiful Ghost of Christmas Past or the depraved hag who steals Scrooge’s curtains when he dies. I thought it was wonderful until she told me why: She wanted to invite Velvet’s whole family up to see her perform. She was hoping Velvet and her brother would want to act in the theater too, and that Mrs. Vargas would realize what a wonderful place this was to live. And she couldn’t even tell the woman how much she’d have to pay for a carton of milk!

My God, I thought. Under the jaded, ex-addict exterior, the wan, toughened survivor I’d fallen in love with, who could listen to and talk about the saddest, most brutal experiences at meetings — under that was Aunt Bea! I’d married Aunt Bea!