Page 3 of Potion Sickness

“Gave them to my paralegal. She put them on the reception desk. The receptionist was thrilled, so in a sense Damien Carter was finally successful in sending flowers to a woman who actually wanted them.”

Gabe laughs. Addie, who has been following this conversation in the way children tend to do, with total attention and no context, chooses this moment to contribute.

“Is Damien the one who says ‘maybe’ wrong?”

The table looks at her.

“Emma and me watched from the lobby,” Addie says. “When Dad picked up Ms. Archer’s drill. The Macbeth man said ‘maybe’ really weird. Like, ‘mebbe’. Englebert made him say it nine times.”

“MAY-be,” Englebert says. “The gentleman has spent so long acting for cameras that he has forgotten that words have backs as well as fronts. On a soundstage, one can murmur. In a gymnasium hall with the acoustics of an aquarium, one must project. We are working on it. He is not unteachable. He is merely unaccustomed to being told he’s not finished learning.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about him,” Hannah says.

“I am unfailingly generous. It is one of my burdens.”

* * *

I make eggs, and the eggs go quickly. Hannah makes a second batch without asking. Lily eats the middles out of three pieces of toast and constructs the crusts into what she says is a fort.

Emma has brought her clipboard. To be fair, Emma always brings her clipboard. Today’s page says ‘PLAY -- PROBLEMS’ at the top, and under it there’s a numbered list I can only partly read upside down, though I can make out item four, which says ‘CURSE (REAL?)’ with a box next to it, unchecked.

“It’s for the record,” Emma explains. “Everyone keeps saying the play is cursed. Nobody is writing down any evidence.”

“What’s the evidence so far?”

She consults the list. “The castle fell over twice. Mr. Fitzgerald’s ladder broke. The lights went out on Thursday. Somebody’s car got towed. And Ms. Pelham’s wig caught on the exit sign and she had to be rescued.”

“This could all be coincidence.”

“Maybe,” she says, clicking her pen. “But every single time something bad happened, somebody said the name inside the building first. I have the dates.”

The rule – the actual, ancient, honored-by-real-actors rule – is that you don’t say the name of the play – Macbeth – inside a theater. You say ‘the Scottish play’, and if you slip, you go outside, spin around three times, spit, swear, and knock to be let back in.

Englebert explained this at length to the assembled company on the first day of rehearsals, in his fullest voice. He narrated the whole history, including a boy actor who died in 1606, some riots, and a gruesome list of injuries down four centuries of productions. The company listened respectfully and has since broken the rule an average of nine times per rehearsal, because the play is called Macbeth, the lead character is named Macbeth, and the word Macbeth appears in the script approximately five thousand times.

So, every time a flat falls or a fuse blows, someone shouts ‘Who said it?’ and, of course, someone always did, and Englebert makes the guilty party do the whole ritual in the parking lot. By now half the cast can do it in with the efficiency of a NASCAR pit crew. Ms. Pelham holds the record for fastest completion. Ms. Pelham is sixty-eight.

“He made Vivian do it,” Hannah says. “She’s the director. She said the name of her own show on her own stage and a twenty-pound cat sent her to the parking lot to spin around.”

“And did the lights fail again after she complied?” Englebert asks.

“No.”

“I rest my case.”

“The lights failed because the Community Center’s wiring is from fifty-something years ago and someone plugged in a fog machine, a coffee urn, and a space heater on the same circuit.”

“And yet.”

“You can’t ‘and yet’ the electric grid, Englebert.”

“I can and I did.”

We don’t press the matter any further because we’ve all silently agreed not to hand Englebert any ammunition, but the fact is that this is Duskboro, and in Duskboro the line between superstition and mundane municipal malfunction is thinner than it is elsewhere. When a bunch of people gather nightly in one room to chant about toil and trouble and double-doubling, I would not personally guarantee that nothing bigger is listening.

“So, I heard back,” I say, into a gap in the curse litigation. “From the magazine. New England Byways. They want the theater piece.”

Hannah puts her spatula down. “Mari! That’s great.”