To The Power Of Three

Ninth grade
17

Thirty years ago, back when Thornton Hartigan was still wondering if he would ever find developers and investors for the acreage he had acquired so stealthily, a New York couple bought a large, run-down farm in the nearby Monkton area. Harvey Bliss and Sylvia Archer-Bliss were the kind of people described by their new neighbors as artsy, which is to say they wore a lot of black and kept their sunglasses on while shopping at the Giant. They also had an asexual quality, the comfortable air of a couple more like friends than husband and wife. But they were split on what to do with their new property. Harvey dreamed of a restaurant, while Sylvia wanted a dance studio.

“A real one,” she said, “for serious students, not potbellied little girls tiptoeing around in leotards.” Sylvia had been a dancer, her career stunted by her uncompromisingly plain face. She hinted to her students that the song in A Chorus Line, the one about the dancer who transformed herself through plastic surgery, had been inspired by her own career. The claim was dubious, but Sylvia’s talent was genuine, and the dinner theater that she and Harvey eventually opened was so good on all counts that it was possible to forget, as a Beacon-Light critic wrote, that one was at a dinner theater.

The dinner theater led to a school, which eventually inspired a summer day camp in partnership with the Glendale Arts Festival, and Sylvia found herself enduring the amateurish children she had hoped to avoid. The parents were the real problem, as many were uncomfortable with the program’s rigid meritocracy. Shouldn’t the summer program be more inclusive? wheedled the parents of the hammier students, those whose only talent was a profound lack of embarrassment at their ineptness. Isn’t participation more important than professionalism when young children are involved? Sylvia, who had learned to tone down her New York candor after years in the Maryland countryside, pretended to accede to their wishes by creating two casts for each show. The parents were appeased, more or less, although one bossy mother insisted on having the last word. “Don’t call the different casts ‘A’ and ‘B’ or ‘One’ and ‘Two,’ as the children will infer that one is better than the other.”

And so the summer they turned fourteen, it happened that Perri was in the “Creamy” cast of Peter Pan, while Kat and Josie were in “Crunchy.” You could argue all day about the relative merits of creamy versus crunchy peanut butter-and the cast members did, with almost everyone swearing allegiance to crunchy-but the bottom line was that everyone knew that Perri was the standout, which meant Creamy had to be the superior cast. Kat and Josie had attended the camp only because Perri begged them to, intent as ever on the trio’s staying intact. Yet Perri voiced no objections when they were placed in different casts.

Josie’s parents were all for Sylvia’s day camp-it solved the summertime dilemma of making sure that Josie, now allowed to spend her days alone, did not fritter her time away. The fees were steep, but affordable since Josie had dropped out of the Gerstung gymnastics program. It was Mrs. Hartigan who balked, pointing out that Kat was shy and self-conscious, with no aptitude for performing.

“She says I just want to do this because Perri is doing it,” Kat confided at the campfire one weekend afternoon.

“So?” Perri asked. “What’s wrong with that?”

Josie knew but didn’t say anything. Her own parents had said similar things, if less directly. Of course you can go to drama camp-if that’s what you really want. “But you’re allowed to have your own ideas,” her mother added, as if Josie didn’t know that. “You don’t always have to do what Perri says.” The thing was, Perri had the best ideas, and she had so many of them.

So the girls went to drama camp, where the ratio of girls to boys in their age group was roughly six to one. Despite these lopsided numbers, the counselors stuck to their plan to stage Peter Pan, which had only three female parts. (And one of them, Tiger Lily, lost her big number because it was judged irredeemably racist and insensitive, with its peace pipes and pidgin English and chorus of “ugh” s.) But Sylvia decreed that if boys could play girls in Shakespearean times, then girls could play boys’ parts today. Not just Peter Pan but Captain Hook and Mr. Darling, Wendy’s brothers, even Smee. Nonetheless, most of the girls wanted to be Wendy, except for Perri, who sought and was given the “Creamy” Hook.

Josie was a nonspeaking lost boy, until Sylvia realized how agile she was and asked her to take the part of Michael, Wendy’s brother. “You don’t have a dancer’s personality,” Sylvia said, “or even a dancer’s arches. But you move very well. And that’s important for flying.”

Flying! Actual stage flying! It turned out that Sylvia had called on old contacts to obtain the patented wire system, Flying by Foy, used by theatrical companies whose actors needed to take flight. Even Perri was jealous, for Hook did not fly at all, and Josie was exceptionally good at flying, even better than the girls chosen to play Peter in either cast, so good that Sylvia urged the Patels to let Josie audition for a Baltimore production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which needed flying fairies. Josie could tell this bothered Perri a little, and she felt bad because theater wasn’t important to her, except for the flying. It was a relief to soar through the air again, given how her instructors at Gerstung had not encouraged Josie to pursue gymnastics competitively. She had the technical skills, they told her parents, but not the mental ones. She choked at meets, flubbing moves that she executed flawlessly in practice.

As for Kat, she asked to be Nana, the sheepdog nanny. She liked dogs. Moreover, she liked being hidden inside the huge, shaggy costume. “Eight hundred dollars for theater camp,” Mrs. Hartigan said, “and we don’t even get to see your face.”

They performed the play four times, with Creamy taking the night shows and Crunchy the matinees, the stars in one cast appearing as chorus in the other. The Sunday matinee was especially lethargic, and the girl playing Mrs. Darling disappeared mere minutes before curtain. (On a bathroom break, it was discovered after the fact.) The result was a show that opened on an empty stage and remained empty, the pianist in the pit playing the strains of “Tender Shepherd” over and over again. “Do something,” Sylvia muttered to no one in particular. Kat, waiting in the wings for her entrance, took this admonition literally, removing her dog’s head and beginning to sing the lullaby in a pure, true voice that no one had ever suspected of her. The voice soared out like birdsong, serene and effortless. Then Mrs. Darling showed up, and the play went on, although it never quite recovered from its limp, improvised beginning. Perhaps it was because people in the audience kept waiting for that beautiful voice to return.

“Did you know that Kat could sing like that?” Sylvia demanded of the Hartigans afterward. Mrs. Hartigan shrugged, still miffed about her daughter’s costume, but Mr. Hartigan said he believed Kat could achieve any goal she set for herself. Three months later he moved out, proving that Kat could not, in fact, achieve any goal she chose, for she certainly would have rescued her parents’ marriage. But that would happen in the fall, after Labor Day. The rest of the summer was spent in blind devotion to Jesus.

Not Jesus per se, of course, but Jesus as embodied by Peter Lasko, in Sylvia’s centerpiece production, the one performed throughout August in the Glendale community center. The girls, accompanied by Mrs. Kahn, first went to the show because of their newfound devotion to theater. Before the lights went down, Perri was a little superior, telling Josie and Kat that Godspell was second-rate, with a treacly, unmemorable score, not at all in the class of Stephen Sondheim, someone of whom she now spoke incessantly, almost as if they were dating. She also told Kat and Josie that some Jewish parents in Glendale -“Not yours,” Mrs. Kahn interjected-had tried to talk Sylvia out of mounting it, saying it was a flat-out attempt to proselytize. So the play already had a certain forbidden aura before the first notes sounded on the shofar and the cast began moving through the audience in preppy clothes that Sylvia had chosen in an attempt to rethink Godspell’s hippie legacy. Throwing fake money in the air-the stock market was still riding high-they began to exhort the audience to prepare for the way of the Lord.

And then Peter Lasko bounded onto the stage, dressed in khakis and a button-down shirt, instead of the traditional suspenders and Superman T-shirt that Josie knew from the CD’s cover. “Interesting concept,” whispered Perri’s mother. “I guess at the dawn of the new millennium, Jesus is a CEO.”

Josie had no idea what Mrs. Kahn was talking about, nor did she care. She thought Jesus was the best-looking boy she had ever seen. Could such a person really have emerged from Glendale High School just a few weeks ago? Would there be other boys like that at the high school? The show unfolded before her dazzled eyes, and even a more objective critic than Josie would have to admit that Peter Lasko was an extraordinary performer, almost too extraordinary, for his professional sheen revealed the limitations of the rest of the cast. He was like Perri in Peter Pan, with a sweet tenor that was better than anyone in Josie’s current collection of CDs, even Nick Lachey of 98 Degrees or the boy who sang about the angel. (It was okay to like Nick Lachey back then, especially if you were fourteen.) Josie’s nonexistent theatrical ambitions caught fire as she watched, inspired not just by Peter’s obvious talent but by the realization that the stage was a place where a boy really might take one’s hand and sing, You are the light of the world. And where a girl could lasso that boy with her mink stole-“Traditionally it was a feather boa,” Perri’s mother whispered-and bring down the house with the line “Come here, Jesus, I’ve got something to show you.”

Upon learning that Peter Lasko was a lifeguard at the Glendale pool, the girls began spending long afternoons there, splashing hilariously in the five-foot section, which happened to place them at his feet. At the campfire, in their bedrooms, the girls rehearsed the sexy number, the one with the mink stole, swooping around and shimmying their shoulders. At least Perri and Josie did those things. Kat insisted she wasn’t interested in boys. She said it was silly, to talk about love at fourteen, when most grownups couldn’t figure it out. She said she never planned to marry, or not until she was really old, thirty or thirty-five. Her parents were still together then, but fighting more and more. Up in Kat’s room, under the sloping eaves, Josie had heard Mrs. Hartigan screaming at Mr. Hartigan and Mr. Hartigan responding in a lower, pleading voice. Kat stared at the ceiling as if she couldn’t hear anything.

“I don’t want to get married either,” Perri said. “But maybe we should have boyfriends, once we go to high school. Lots of girls in middle school had them.”

“My father wouldn’t let me go out with boys yet,” Josie said quickly, as if this explained everything.

“There are ways to have a boyfriend without a parent knowing,” Perri said. “You didn’t have a boyfriend because no one liked you that way.”

“Shamit did,” Kat said. “He gave her a card on Valentine’s Day, and that little tiny box of Godivas.”

“Shamit doesn’t count,” Perri decreed, and while Josie agreed, she was annoyed at Perri’s firmness on this topic. Why didn’t Shamit count? Because he competed in things like science fair and spelling bee? Because he was Indian? Because his parents were Indian-Indian, Sikhs with accents and odd ideas? It was one thing for Josie to assume that Shamit had chosen her for her last name, another for Perri to say it out loud.

“Why did you fall in love with Daddy?” she had asked her mother.

“Because he was drop-dead gorgeous,” her mother had said promptly. “And exotic. I never saw anyone like your dad until I went to Grinnell. Actually, that’s not quite true. When I was young, there was a magazine called 16, and it used to run features about a young actor named Sajid something. I could never figure out what he was famous for, other than appearing on an episode of The Big Valley. But he was so handsome. Maybe that’s why I fell for your father, all those years later, because of my unrequited crush on the mysterious Sajid.”

She then produced a photograph from college, and Josie could almost see that her father had been attractive once, if not her idea of drop-dead gorgeous.

“He played rugby,” her mother said dreamily. “Senior year, we found an apartment off campus and furnished it with items people put out for bulk trash-tables and chairs that looked perfectly good with just a coat of paint. I made deep-dish pizza from scratch, and we had our first dinner parties, if you want to call them that. Our curtains were made from Indian tablecloths, and we served Bulgarian wine that cost two dollars a bottle.”

It was so much more than Josie wanted to know, yet also less. She wanted to be assured that her romantic horizons were as open as anyone’s, but her mother’s anecdote seemed to suggest that the only 100 percent American boys who might like her would be in pursuit of some exotic fantasy figure they had seen in a magazine. And the Indian boys, the Shamits of the world, would like her either in spite of the fact that she had an Anglo mother or because of it. She couldn’t win.

“I’m going to go out for cheerleading,” she announced after Perri brought up the subject of boyfriends. “Freshmen can try out for junior varsity at midyear.”

“Cheerleader? We’re not cheerleaders,” Perri said.

“I could make it,” Josie said, aware that her use of the first-person singular was cruelly accurate. She could make it, while Perri, with her gawky height and complete ineptness at all sports, would be hopeless. “I’m good at that kind of gymnastics-cart-wheels and round-offs. And I’m light, so I could do the things they need the smaller girls for.”

“You’d be great,” Kat agreed. “Do you think our parents would let us make a little fire here, grill hot dogs and roast marshmallows?”

“We can ask,” Perri said, “but they’d probably insist on supervising.”

It did not have to be said that no activity, no matter how desirable, was worth bringing outsiders to their circle. Even if they did not consider themselves the Ka-pe-jos anymore, even if they visited the circle only once a month or so, the place was still sacred.

When Kat’s father moved out, she refused to talk about it, even to Perri and Josie, and she stopped eating. By the end of their first semester as freshmen, she was almost too thin-and too beautiful, if such a thing were possible. Kat’s fat had been like Nana’s suit, hiding something gorgeous and true, and Josie was almost worried for her friend as she observed the commotion she created in the high school. Kat, however, seemed oblivious, wearing her old clothes, ill-fitting and baggy as they were, and ignoring the boys who buzzed around her. And it turned out that cool kids didn’t have boyfriends and girlfriends anyway. Everything was about hooking up, hitting this or that, friends with benefits. Given that choice, Kat preferred safe, platonic relationships with boys they had always known, such as Seth and Chip.

Her only concession to her new body was an increasing physical ease. She began running and going to the gym. She asked Josie to show her how to do some of the simpler gymnastic tricks, and although they never said it was a secret from Perri, it somehow became one. Yet when they both made the JV squad freshman year, Perri congratulated them wholeheartedly, and no one seemed more impressed when Josie scrambled to the top of the pyramid, her tiny stature finally an asset. Similarly, when Perri landed the role of Joan of Arc in The Lark, a remarkable honor for a freshman, Josie and Kat attended every performance and sent her roses at the final curtain call. And in the school talent show, they appeared together, doing their own riff on the updated version of “Lady Marmalade,” although they were not allowed to dress quite so provocatively.

They had trumped the system, built a friendship that transcended the confines of the school’s cliques. Yes, they were cheerleaders, but they didn’t take it seriously, and Perri may have been a drama geek, but she wasn’t a geeky one. They ate lunch together and continued to see each other on weekends. It began to seem their friendship could survive anything.

Then Peter Lasko, home from first year of college and back in his lifeguard chair, had fallen in love with Kat. Perri had always said she wasn’t jealous in the slightest, and she did have a sort-of boyfriend of her own that summer, the boy who was playing Beau to her Mame in the summer production. And when Peter dropped Kat, brutally and swiftly, their friendship continued as if it had never been interrupted, as if Kat hadn’t spent most of the summer with Peter. There were no recriminations, no envy. If anything, Perri seemed to forget that she and Josie were the ones who had once hung around the community theater’s rear entrance waiting for Peter to emerge. She told Kat he wasn’t anyone special, that Kat was better off without him. These were the right things to say, of course, and Perri said them with uncharacteristic tenderness.

But if Josie were pressed to find the precise moment when things began to fall apart, she would go back to that summer when Perri was Mame, when Kat was newly thin, when Josie was learning to fly to the top of the pyramid-and Peter Lasko had taken Kat from them, however briefly. Although they never acknowledged it out loud, it proved that something, someone, could come between them. Separated once, they were all the more vulnerable to being separated again.