"No." The plastic tabletop was hot and sticky beneath her cheek now. The warmth of "Arpege," Gertrude's perfume, drifted across her face. Gertrude chuckled. Her laugh was silk, and it, like her voice, soothed. "I know I can do it." The girl felt the heat begin again behind her eyes. Her neck muscles tightened into a dead ache, and the smell of tears made her throat itch. "But I can't," came out in a sob; a hot tear wormed its way between closed eyelids and stopped in the corner by her nose. Then she could hear Claudius, the villian King, praying onstage. His voice grew suddenly loud, and with vibrant life, "'My crown, mine own ambition, and my Queen'," pierced the heavy maroon. The vibrancy sank to inaudible words. Claudius would be royal in royal purple. The girl closed her eyes tighter, and the tear rolled off the bridge of her nose onto the plastic. Gertrude spoke again, "I remember an audition once;" the words came out unhurridly. "I knew it by heart." She laughed softly and made a little "tsk" clicking sound against her teeth. "You're not doing THAT badly, you know." The director's voice cut through the darkness and ripped the spell of Gertrude's silk. "That's all kiddies. Seven o'clock tomorrow night." The scent of warm perfume touched the girl's face again; then Gertrude was gone. The girl moved her head, and the tabletop's sticky plastic pulled at her cheek. "It isn't the lines, Gertrude," she whispered. "I've got the lines cold." After a while she walked to the center of the downstage area and sat on the third gray step. From somewhere in the empty theater the director came and stood looking down at her. "O.K. Baby," the sarcasm was still there. "What's the matter?" "I don't know." She watched her fingers wind themselves around each other. "The words don't come out the way I mean to say them. Everytime I move, I feel ridiculous." Her hands loosened, and the fingers were still for a second. "I can't find her this way." "And you won't, so you might as well stop looking." He spoke quietly, but with an almost sarcastic finality in his tone that said, "We're through messing around kid. This is it." She forced her eyes to move from her hands. The redwood of his shoes had faded to the color of sundried clay. One shoe stood on the step below and the other on the step above her. She looked up at him. The ivy league hat belonged behind the wheel of a sports car or on a Sunday golf course. 22 "It's as good as it's going to get," he said. She shook her head to speak, but he stopped her. "Look," he said. "Have a little faith in me as a director. Would I ruin my show on purpose? The scene is O.K." She dropped her eyes again. "But it isn't O.K." "The trouble with you is that you're trying to be Gertrude or Hamlet or Claudius. They've had twenty years of experience. You're eighteen years old." She watched his clay shoes walk up the stairs toward the switchboard backstage. His voice sounded muffled through heavy curtains: "Now go home and forget about it for a while." The yellow work light snapped out. The shoes walked across the squeak in the stage floor and out a door above which one single bare light bulb lit the word EXIT. She sat on the third gray step and listened to the soft groaning of old building and empty theatre sounds. Dust and tears began to taste like powered clay. She looked at the bare light bulb above the EXIT until she saw only a wet yellow ball. Then she shut her eyes and watched silence and clay and wet yellow shrink slowly into black. Three nights later Claudius stood in the center of a lavender spotlight, and the purple of his robe grew intense with soaked-up light. Royal purple and bearded, he rolled out the thunder that vibrated in the listening air, "'Delay it not, I'll have him hence tonight..'" From the darkness of the left wings the Queen of Denmark watched. A few steps away and closer to the stage the girl waited behind a heavy maroon velvet teaser. She did not listen to the thunder. The velvet of the curtain was hot in her hands. She could feel the stiff, whisker-like pile move back and forth as she worked her fingers in the material. She pulled the curtain hard against her face and felt the heat in her eyes mix with the heat in the velvet. The curtain was tight against her body. At the waist of her long white dress one of the paper flowers she had tucked into the belt was digging into her skin. The sharpness hurt. She pulled the curtain against her body until sharpness became numbness and didn't hurt anymore; then she released the curtain. "'Here's rosemary, that's for remembrance'," she whis- 23