Everything lately has been narrowing the space between who she is and who she would like to be. Yet with all this, she is nonetheless currently huddled in the musty back seat of a Lyft that smells as though a large animal has recently defecated, the event then masked with a spring bouquet spray. And her teeth are chattering hypothermically from twenty minutes inside a cooler with a woman who will never leave her girlfriend. Jody has Dana in every real-life way, while Cate and Dana are confined to small vignettes they’ve become adept at creating and decorating. What bewilders Cate is the potent distillate of emotion generated by these small pieces of time. She has little direct observation of Dana in the world. She has to study her small remarks and references. In the cooler, for instance, she asked if Cate was going to the Women’s March.

Yes, she told her. The one here. With Neale and her mother and Joe. Did Dana think it was going to be big?

She thought so, and she was hoping it would make every person feel part of the bigness. The way unions work.

“I don’t want to wear the pussy hat,” Cate told her.

“Hat not mandatory,” Dana said, and pressed a wrapped sandwich into Cate’s hands. It now rests inside her backpack, on her lap, inside the Lyft. Cate knows it will be egg salad made with duck eggs, aioli, capers Dana pickled herself. Bread baked in an oven in back that looks like the entrance to hell. The sandwich has to stand for so much, there is such a burden on it.

flat white

Rooting around in an antiques shop in the Village, Cate has found a gnarly gilded picture frame. Perfect for Vita’s living room. She can fill it with a portrait of some ancestor. Ancestors were something Vita wasn’t short on. Cate really shouldn’t be bringing this in herself. She has a prop master; this is technically his bailiwick. But sometimes she goes a little off-road, lured in by a thrift shop window. Cumulatively, over the years she has been extremely unthrifty in thrift shops.

Due to a small schedule snag, they have the theater for a luxurious two whole weeks before the play opens—now down to a week and a half. And after today, they will see how the sets hold the actors without confining them. That’s always Cate’s first priority.

Lauren spots the frame as Cate brings it in. She thinks it’s possibly too ornate.

“We like your idea of the living room being overstuffed. But we want to stay shy of distraction.”

Molly comes over. Cate assumes she’s going to weigh in personally on the frame. Instead, she looks briefly at Cate and blinks a question to the surface. “Could you run and get me a coffee? A flat white?” It’s a wonder no one has killed them by now.