Stages by Donald Bowie

were born. Nothing.
    Later, at home in her mother’s kitchen, Kathy helped put the clean dishes back into the cabinets. She couldn’t help but think how deceptive stacked dishes were; still warm from the drier, their pattern so familiar, they were the idea of order itself. Humble and useful, always arranged the same way, like the lives of so many ordinary people. Until they encountered chaos, and were shattered, and swept away.
    “I wonder if they’ll send the family some posthumous medal,” Kathy said. “And if they do, I wonder where Aunt Joan will put it. In with her silver, maybe?”
    “If I were your aunt, I wouldn’t want to know from medals,” her mother replied. Wanting to change the subject, she said, “What are you going to do in the fall? About your acting career, I mean.”
    “I was going to see if I could get into some regional company,” Kathy said. “But now…I’m not sure.”
    “Do you think you might be able to find something around New York?”
    Kathy didn’t respond right away.
    Her mother said, “Kathy, you seem way off somewhere. I know this has been hard on you. It has been for all of us. But when something like this happens, you just have to learn to live with it. It’s got to be incorporated into your life somehow, because after all death is a part of life.”
    “Walter’s death wasn’t, Mom,” Kathy said. “If you die a natural death, that might be a part of life. But Walter’s death was unnatural. He was just…chewed up, by a machine gun.”
    “Well, there’s nothing we can do about it,” her mother replied.
    “Have you ever heard the line, ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’?” Kathy asked.
    “What was that, something Kennedy said before he was shot?”
    “I had this friend—well, sort of friend—at school,” Kathy said. “He said I wasn’t just a German Jew, I was Viennese. And by that he meant that we’re the kind of people who were still in the hotel dining rooms with the fresh-cut flowers listening to string quartets while the Nazis were already starting to round up people.”
    “That one sounds like an anti-semite to me,” said her mother.
    “No, he isn’t an AS,” Kathy replied. “The worst thing you can say about him is…that he’s part of his own problems. But it’s me I’ve got to worry about, not him. Mom, I just feel that I have to do something. ”

21
    David’s local draft board had ruled that his acting classes did not qualify him for a student deferment. He was in the process of appealing their decision to reclassify him 1-A when he met Sandra Sackett.
    She had been attending the evening workshops for two weeks. Her first three nights she’d propped herself against a wall like a mop left by one of the cleaning women. Then, toward the end of her second week, she reluctantly participated in a scene that demanded of her only four lines.
    The classes were being held in a loft above West Forty-fourth Street. Seen from the street, the actors appeared to be moving silently through a murky aquarium. And inside this greenish pool in the night, Sandra Sackett’s four lines, when at last they were spoken, emerged from her mouth like tiny air bubbles rising to the surface.
    “Can’t hear you,” someone yelled.
    “A little louder, please, Sandra,” said the coach.
    Sandra half covered her eyes with her hand and muttered her lines a second time.
    “Can we mike this scene?” a woman suggested.
    She projects like a hummingbird because she’s not much bigger than one, David thought. He kept watching her in spite of himself. She was a waif, with the chest and legs of a quail, and she was wearing clothes David thought he had seen in photographs of women relatives taken during the Depression. She had on a belted blue dress with white polka dots that hung down below her calves, and black shoes with laces and thick, blunt heels. David knew that dress, white saucer-shaped collar and all. It was exactly like the