“I love thinking of Vita getting Virginia into bed. Seducing someone so physically vaporous. So graceful and elegant, so inexperienced. Then add in the fragility from her mental illness. She absolutely needed someone to touch her. I like thinking of her being helped out of her long skirt and dowdy underwear. It’s the first time in a while I’ve been so ramped up about work. Not since the last play I did for Adam. I’m thinking this will be sort of a fresh start for me.”

shrimp platter

When she has turned off the ignition, Cate spends a few minutes lingering in the driver’s seat, gathering herself up. During this short pause, the car cools and the shrimp platter, which has been bumping around on the passenger seat on the way up to Evanston, nice and close to the heat vent, now gives off a pale pink odor. A day in the refrigerator has brought a gray tinge to its initially vibrant pink. She sees that several shrimp have worked loose from their tight, military formation around the central cocktail sauce cup. She pries off the plastic dome, cracking it in the process, and tucks the deserters back into place. Which only makes them look tampered with. The whole display has now acquired a sullied aura. Also, it seems to have grown since she got it. Only now does she see on its label SERVES 8. She goes around and gently lifts it out of the car like it’s plutonium.

“Really?” This is Ricky’s response to the shrimp. “Did you win this somewhere? Like a shrimp festival?”

“I found it in the alley,” Cate tells her.

Her mother puts the platter on the counter, just above, Cate notices, the slide-out garbage drawer. Poised for whisking. The counter is new, made of blue-tinted, polished concrete, banded with a matte-finish metal. She hasn’t seen this before.

“I left a message on your phone,” Ricky tells Cate. “I wanted to remind you to bring anchovies. I forgot to pick them up at the store.” An essential component of the Caesar salad Cate makes for any occasion.

“I so didn’t get that.” She’s on shaky ground here, as she hardly ever listens to her voice mail, just looks at the call log and guesses what the messages probably say. Then she looks around and sees the entire kitchen has been totally remodeled since the last time she visited. “Hey, this looks great.” She wipes her hand across the cool surface of the counter; it’s like worn rock in an undersea grotto. She looks down. “Wow. This floor.”

“Repurposed basketball court.” Ricky’s beaming now. “It’ll survive the nuclear winter.” This house is her mother’s masterpiece, constantly being revised and improved on. Her next-door neighbors hate her. Their children, they complain, have spent their whole childhood under a dust cloud, their hearing shredded by the din of power saws.