Karen can almost remember the grey sectional sofa her father used to leave her on when she was a baby. There was a lamp beside it, the column some kind of ceramic equivalent of faded brass, the pleated shade still wrapped in no longer perfectly transparent plastic. How she stared up at the frosted bulb beneath it, while her mother napped in the next room and her father typed in this one; how her eyes drank in the constant milky light until she fell asleep. Dear God, she thought now, why didn't I go blind?
On family occasions, she is always reminded of this surely by no means uncommon fascination. Uncles, aunts, and cousins tease her about her destiny, as perhaps they would not had she become a furniture sales rep or a civic engineer. Somehow, her connection with the theatre invites a little obvious foreshadowing. And when she complains, everyone takes turns to say she's getting a mite gloomy.
At Trinity College, where she did a double major in history and English, she had begun to think she would be happiest with the life of an academic. Her marks were good enough for graduate school; she had even made some notes for a master's thesis on Christopher Smart; it looked as though McGill would accept her. And then, in the summer break before her final year, as she and her best friend, Brenda, were driving a reconditioned Corvette (Karl's, as it happens) through the Laurentians (looking for some guy's cottage that was actually several panels of the map farther north), she had a revelation, Karen did.
They had taken a room at a little bed and breakfast. It was a close, humid evening. The television on the screened-in porch seemed to entertain the local mosquitoes enormously. Brenda suggested a walk across the town square. There was no cinema or bar that they could see, but there was a cinderblock schoolhouse with a signboard and a poster. Some itinerant repertory theatre company was putting on the suitcase version of South Pacific. Since they were late, they had to sit in an awkward corner at the far left of the front row. Brenda's attention was drawn immediately by the sailors' costumes, all of which were so high-seamed in the crotch they looked like plaster moulds from the medical faculty. For Karen, who wasn't sure she liked men that much, it was more interesting to watch the goings-on off- and above-stage, in the scaffolding that held the lamps and reflectors and, sometimes, two agile, fiery-haired women, the lighting technicians.
"Now, they must have a head for heights," she whispered, puzzling Brenda somewhat.
