The Paper Wasp by Lauren Acampora

Author:Lauren Acampora [Acampora, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802147080
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2019-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

When filming finally began, you spent full days on the set. I loved watching you act. It was a revelation each time you began speaking, your body inhabited by some pliable force, your face alive with someone else’s thoughts. You seemed to physically shrink in size, to become tiny Joan. You were, in fact, gifted. You possessed the uncanny ability to empty yourself at will, to serve as a receptacle for others to fill. Your tools of emulation were built into you, just as the tools of creation were built into people like Perren and me. Yours was the lesser role, but a crucial one, and one for which you were perfectly made.

I loitered behind the ranks of fatigued production assistants, and from time to time our eyes would meet, as if across a galaxy. After a few days of this, you told me to go home. If you needed me, you’d call. There was enough to do at the house, you said in your Didion voice.

In truth, there wasn’t enough to do at the house. After food shopping and laundry, I had time to spare. I adopted the role of household chef, creating the midwestern dishes I thought you’d crave, slow-cooker stews and pot pies. I took landscape maintenance upon myself, hydrating the rosebushes and citrus trees within the water-use guidelines for drought. I discovered the names of the plants that you’d never learned. I removed the defunct wasp nest from the downspout, admiring the drab beauty of the fibrous gray swirls, the dark hole that led to hidden pavilions. Of the two of us, I was the observer of the natural world. I was the one who noticed the growth and decay always in flux around us, who perceived so many small noises at night. We were part of it, too, although we liked to consider ourselves superior—evolved and orderly. We liked to believe our consciousness gave us supremacy, but the truth was that we were animals, mysterious to ourselves.

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