Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jan Elizabeth Watson was born in Washington, D.C. and spent nearly a decade in New York City, where she received her MFA from Columbia University. She has worked extensively as an editor, copywriter, and adjunct professor of creative writing. She lives in Maine and has one child, a daughter. This is her first novel.

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Asta in the Wings

Tin House Books

Chapter One

On the last day, the day before everything changed, my mother told me her theory about the movies. It could have been a theory about anything else ... Mother was always bursting with ideas. A few weeks earlier, she had expressed her thoughts on evolution, which included her conjecture that the towering dinosaur remains in the Museum of Natural History were not dinosaurs at all, but a hoax-a man-made likeness built from human bones.

On this day, however, the subject was movies. I was guilty, I think, of not listening closely enough; I was only seven years old, and greater things beckoned to me. I was busy awaiting the arrival of an insect, concentrating on the sodden strip of bathroom tile-the one just alongside the tub's foremost clawfoot-from which earwigs or silverfish might emerge. Balanced on my haunches, head lowered till my face grazed the floor, I whispered this urgent enticement into the cracks:

"Come out, you big bug."

Above my head but below the lip of the tub, my mother's hand agitated the water. She had a habit of spreading her fingers and raking through the bubbles as if they were in her way.

"Turn the page for me, Asta," my mother said. "I'm about to reach the 'All the world's a stage' speech. Try saying it with me."

I hopped up to stretch my arm over the rim, to reach over the white crop of bubbles that foamed to my mother's shoulders. She kept a tea tray perched on her knees and had positioned her book (a compact Shakespeare that morning-it had been compact Shakespeares for more mornings than I could count) atop the tray with one dry hand.

As was customary, I'd been enlisted to provide the second hand. This task was not bothersome to me. I liked to be in the bathroom at that hour, for the bugs most often emerged just after dawn; I also liked the simmering sound of the bubbles, the sticky presence of steam and vapor in that enclosed space. I even had a fondness for the pages of As You Like It, yellowed and softened to the exact texture of muslin. I knew that my touch-my turning-had contributed to that.

"Smooth it down, I can't quite read it," Mother instructed once I'd flipped the page in question. I smoothed it, and she shifted in the water, placed her limbs in better alignment-better to PROJECT THE VOICE, she'd often told me-and began to read aloud.

"'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players,'" she quoted with a piquant trilling of Rs. "Go ahead, Pork Chop, try saying it with me."

I didn't respond. Instead, I lowered myself till I lay flat on my stomach and peered aggressively into the rotted tile; I poked at one corner and found it pliable, claylike.

"Is it just me, Asta, or does that line contain a falsehood? Something a little bit off? What word in this line sounds phonybaloney to you? 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players?'"

That got my attention. I turned my head in her direction, liking a challenge, as well as the word baloney (I was hungry), and found myself wishing I had a smart-sounding answer to give.

"Stage?" I hazarded.

"No, merely," she said. "Do you know what merely means, Asta? It means nothing more than. You are merely seven years old, and that is one way of looking at it, a correct way to use it in a sentence. But in this context, doesn't it seem fallacious? It is no mere thing to be a player in these hard times. I know that Mr. Shakespeare had no good reason to anticipate the coming of movies, but still, it seems awfully shortsighted, writing a thing like that."

From the corner of my eye I saw something stirring under the crack: first two pincers and then a long and shining body. Something resembling a shell.

Something resembling EARWIG.

I lay my finger before it and hoped that this creature would take to me, as I'd once seen a caterpillar take to a stalk-on TV.

"Wiggy!" I hissed between my teeth.

"What's that?" My mother's head surged over the edge of the tub; within a split second she spotted my visitor, dipped her fingers into the suds, and sprayed him in one efficient wrist flick. He twitched once, twice, before scuttling back into the tile.

"Foolish things crawl in your ears and eat the insides of your head," Mother said. "You don't want to be courting those."

I considered her words. "They eat heads?" I asked.

"They're not as bad as termites, but still pretty darned pesky," she went on meditatively, as if I hadn't spoken. "What use are earwigs to anyone? It'd be more useful to be a-a fly. Not to court flies, mind you, but actually be a fly! A fly on the cellular wall of somebody's brain! The pest, and not the one to whom the pestilence comes! Now wouldn't that be a switch?"

She placed the book flat on the tray, raised both tremulous hands above the water, and clasped them enthusiastically at her bosom. "It is exactly the thing I wish for you to understand about the movies. This is something my own mother used to tell me. Of course, the world's concerns are different than they were during her time-the Silent Era-but our overriding choices remain the same. And there are only two-there have never been more than two.

"Are you listening, Asta? You can conduct yourself as if you are watching a movie-with darkness closing in on all sides-or, choice number two, you can conduct yourself as if you are acting in a movie, with your inner light guiding you all the way. Given those two choices, and knowing that these are the only two you will ever, ever have, which would you deem the better one?"

"Acting in a movie?"

"Yes! The better one. We can't afford to reduce ourselves to being mere witnesses. There are times when we must take actions that are entirely of our own making." My mother's eyes fixed on the overhead light above the bathtub. The light wasn't on, but she seemed pleased by whatever she saw up there-as if that dull glass circle had nodded its assent.

"Time flies, but I cannot," my mother murmured, staring at the light. She let both arms slump below the fading bubbles, and the tea tray toppled dangerously to one side. I steadied it, and that seemed to revive her a bit.

The wall-eyed look that sometimes overtook her was replaced by a penetrating one.

"Take that away, would you? And hand me my towel, yes, there's a good girl," she said. "Remind me to take a look at you this morning. Your face is almost as peaked as your brother's. I don't like seeing my children looking so pinched." She pressed the drain lever with her foot, and the pipes gave a great belch as the water hurtled toward the eye of the drain. I leaned forward to watch it disappear.

"For heaven's sake, don't let that water touch you," Mother scolded, prodding at my chest with a dripping toe. * * *

Once Mother had toweled off and slipped into her robe, she took me downstairs to the kitchen, and the daily business commenced.

"Really, Asta," my mother said, giving my skirt a yank. "Your dress. Would it kill you to pull it up?" Though I didn't protest, I always disliked the way her fingers went from the lymph nodes under my jaw and armpits to the even more tender ones around my pelvic bones. I'd developed the practice of avoiding her gaze during such probes; I usually stared at the windows, studying the black drapes that were parted to reveal the tar...