She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan Page A

practice with Clark Clifford and Paul Warnke. In 1968 he was national campaign chairman for Eugene McCarthy; in 1972 he held the same position for Edmund Muskie.
    â€œHe was there in the trailer in Manchester,” Grace said proudly, “when Muskie cried in the snow.”
    In short, the Finneys had a long tradition of championing noble, lost causes. Grace’s father had died in 1978 of Lou Gehrig’s disease. Her mother, Sally, had died in 1984 of emphysema.
    Tom Finney had liked to smoke cigarettes and tell stories after dinner, just like my own father. They would have got along well, our fathers, even though my dad had been a Republican delegate to the national convention in 1952 for Robert Taft and had voted for Nixon three times.
    â€œHow do you get over missing your father?” I asked Grace as we ate our salades niçoises. “What’s the secret?”
    Grace looked at me with her large green eyes. “There’s no secret, Jim,” she said. “It just hurts. After a while, it hurts a little less.”
    I could tell from the way she said this that she didn’t especially like the fact that bereavement was something we shared. It wasn’t the thing she wanted me to find interesting about her. But she shouldn’t have had to worry about that.
    Grace was half Dutch, half Irish, equal measures elegance and salt. She drank Jameson’s Irish whiskey and could whistle with two fingers in her mouth. She liked Little Feat, the Nighthawks, the Seldom Scene, and Bruce Springsteen. When her car broke down she could open the hood and fix the engine by herself. At black-tie theater galas, she wore elegant gowns and pearl earrings; she moved through a room with a poise and style that made people turn their heads and blink. She had shoulder-length blond hair, an infectious laugh, and freckles.
    After dinner, we went to see the final performance of
As Is
at the Studio Theatre, where she was the production manager. I sat in the house afterward and watched the crew, including Grace, tear down the set. They were a tight group, the Studio crowd, and I felt a little like an outsider, in spite of the fact that Grace very nicely introduced me to everyone. From the lighting booth, during the show, I had seen the manager of the theater, and the director, and the light board operator, all eyeing me with suspicion. They weren’t in the mood to start sharing Grace with anyone.
    At the end of the night, a large crowd of people from the production had burgers and beers in a local diner called Trios, which was run by three elderly women who called you
“hon.”
By my count there were at least two other guys there auditioning for the part of Grace’s boyfriend. Her
real
boyfriend was now in the Peace Corps, serving out the year in Africa. She thus viewed all her suitors with tender suspicion.
    Toward two A. M., Grace remembered that she’d neglected to throw a large bag of trash from the theater into the Dumpster. So we all—the other boyfriends and I—climbed back into a car and drove to the Studio and waited in the parking lot as Grace hauled a large bag of trash out of the theater and toward a giant Dumpster. We all offered to do this for her, but she just looked at us as if we were crazy. “I got it, I got it,” she said.
    The Dumpster was so large that she had to climb a small wooden ladder to get the trash bag in it. Up the rungs she went, as we watched from the Honda. Grace reached the top of the ladder, threw back the lid of the Dumpster, and teetered.
    The driver of the car, aka Auditioning Boyfriend #1, said, “She isn’t going to—”
    â€œNo, don’t worry,” interrupted Auditioning Boyfriend #2 with authority. “I’ve seen her do this before, lots of times.”
    Grace windmilled her arms around.
    â€œ
Lots
of times,” said AB #2 again, to make sure we got the point.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “It