Beginners, Please

The thing about being an understudy is that you are paid to be ready for a disaster you are not allowed to want.

Two years. Seven hundred and thirty nights of arriving at half past six, signing in, and going to a dressing room that is not a dressing room but the end of a corridor with a mirror screwed to the wall.

Nell knew the part better than Margot did. That was not arrogance, it was arithmetic. Margot had learned it once, under pressure, in three weeks, and had been performing a memory of it ever since. Nell had learned it every night for two years, watching, and had never once been allowed to be wrong in front of anybody.

She knew where Margot dropped the word almost in the second act because it had never been comfortable in her mouth. She knew the breath Margot took before the letter scene was a quarter beat late and had been since the Tuesday her marriage ended.

She knew, because she had nothing else to do with her evenings but know.

At six forty on a wet Thursday the company manager came down the corridor with his phone still in his hand, and Nell was standing before he had said anything, because you can hear the walk.

"Margot's not coming in."

"Is she all right?"

He looked at her for slightly too long. "You're on."

Later she would go back over that pause, the way you go back over a stair you nearly missed. At the time she was already moving.

The wig fitted. The shoes fitted, because they were hers, they had always been hers, they had been made for her two years ago and worn by nobody.

At the half she stood in the wings in the dark with her hand flat on the cold of the brick and listened to eleven hundred people making the sound eleven hundred people make when they do not yet know that something has changed.

There would be an announcement. There is always an announcement. At this performance, the role of Isobel will be played by.

It did not come.

The house lights went down and the announcement did not come, and Nell understood, standing in the dark in another woman's wig and her own shoes, that nobody out there was going to be told.

The music started.

She went on.