Other Voices by Lois Breedlove

Author:Lois Breedlove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: younger man, conflict of interest, suspense, small town romance, university professor, Marine veteran, second chance
Publisher: L.J. Breedlove
Published: 2022-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Gail walked into the theater at precisely 6:30 p.m. The five young women who were to read the play were milling around backstage — hiding from the big empty theater. She didn’t blame them. The theater always seemed cavernous when it was empty. It was meant to be full of people excited to see a play performed.

She smiled at the women when she found them. They, to a woman, gaped at her.

“Gail?” Becca said. “My God!”

Gail laughed. “If I have to speak about a play I’ve written, I’ve got to dress the part, don’t you think?”

“You look great!”

The other women murmured their agreement.

“Thank you,” Gail said, with a small curtsy. “So, let’s talk about the play. Observations? Thoughts?”

They found seats in the green room to lounge on.

“It really moved me,” said Lynne, a young Black woman who was just finishing her first year in the MFA program. “I hadn’t ever thought about how women see themselves differently as they age.”

“Did you find them believable?” Gail asked, settling in. The play was about one woman looking at a catastrophic event in her early adult life, and how her perspective changes as she ages until she’s no longer sure what even really happened.

The first character, which Lynne would read, was pre-event. A carefree teen. The second character was the young woman shortly after the event. What that event was wasn’t made explicit. It didn’t really matter Gail had thought when she’d written it. All women had such an event. A failed romance. A miscarriage. A career setback. A parent’s early death. It was the nature of growing up. And that was what she wanted to convey. Events changed you. And then the changed-you has to reconsider the event in light of who you are now. And then it all changed again.

Each woman has her moment of truth, her moment of crisis. The stages of a woman’s life, Gail thought: maiden, mother, crone. But no one tells you that changes you from one stage to the next.

In the final scene the woman is old.

“I cannot remember now the actual facts of the event that sent me on this course. I cannot tell you what day it was, or when it happened. I think it was in the fall. But maybe I am wrong. I cannot tell you who was there. People who mattered very much to me at the time, I know. People I might have even thought I loved. But I have lost their faces and their names to time. I cannot give you the facts that many prize. I can only tell you that it changed me. And the woman I am and have been for 50 years is not the woman who was before that event.

“But I am not the woman who first looked back and saw that that day was pivotal to who I became either. She was all righteous anger and fury at the injustice of it all. I remember her fondly. But I am not that woman either.

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