by Meghan Tifft
The play is about celebrities dying young and turning into angels, and fallen angels coming to earth from hell to become pop celebrities. The teacher wrote it with one of the students. He made his puppet to look like a pop celebrity who recently died, to everybody’s fervent shock and denial. I can’t be dead, he has his puppet say, tap dancing around the coffin with ringlets bobbing, everyone told me I was immortal. The play is called From Hell to Breakfast and the coffin is the centerpiece, a portal back and forth between the idolatrous and the arcane, the consecrated and the debased, the destined and the damned. Where are the lines? Where do they get crossed? When does surrender leach its way into servitude? When does salvation plot a path of trespass? When do trumpets turn to shrieks and when do shrieks slip into serenade? The play is about music and it uses music as a metaphor and it is, of course, a musical.
Lucinda likes her role. She plays an angel eating breakfast after ascending to heaven. The first scene is her sitting up inside the coffin. So is the last scene. The coffin is laid flat. She sits up, then stands, beaming and resplendent, and swishes over to a table where a breakfast is laid out for her. Her breakfast is a feast of light. The effect is produced by placing several glass paperweights on a glass table underlit by a bare bulb. Other characters in the play eat various other breakfasts. Breakfast happens a lot in the play as characters follow their journeys in and out of the astral and the corporeal. Lucinda is now so used to getting in and out of the coffin that she feels discomfited using Dracula’s. Everybody does, because they all know what the coffin is used for—because she told them, when she was trying to explain why she had a coffin they could use as a substitute. She now thinks they all probably suspect she stole the other one for some deranged purpose—probably so she could show them this one. She has no idea what happened to the other coffin, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have something to do with its disappearance. This she doesn’t tell them. She is trying to be helpful.
Lucinda’s friend Lauren likes to take peeks into the coffin, in a way that makes Lucinda suspicious. She often pinches a sack in her fingers that droops open at the mouth. Lately she has been carrying this sack to class. She calls it a ragamuffin sack and she says it is her mother’s handiwork and she keeps taking things out and sharing them with Lucinda, as if they’re talismans for life, or for art. Once she had a dirty sock. “This is for the trolls,” she said, casting prophetic looks at the guys. “It’s so they don’t notice me.” Lucinda peered at her a moment, wondering if this was a joke and maybe she left the sock in there after a costume change, and she realized, suddenly, that this girl was cunningly gorgeous, beguiling in a wily, chase-down-an-alley urchin way. She is one kind of opposite of Lucinda. Where Lucinda is lank and luminous as ethereal shreds of cloud, Lauren is tawny and alive as a scampering mouse. Her role in the play is a fallen angel who returns to become a pop celebrity. She makes Lucinda feel like acting is some reversion to a runabout childhood—a place of pure and absolute plundering. It seems like Lauren’s childhood goes on and on without restraint or reservation, and Lucinda tries to learn what she can from this. It’s unnerving and it’s inspiring. Sometimes she can’t tell when her friend is acting and when she is just being herself.
Lucinda watches closely when Lauren looks into the coffin. She herself also takes furtive peeks, because she knows there’s something going on with it. She keeps finding things in there. After Dracula leaves for the night or when she wakes up, she might walk past the closet, and there will be something cast down around the bottom, like a piece of shed accessory or dropped trash. Part of her is afraid that each thing is materializing, on its own, and that it could happen any time and in the middle of class. It’s as if Lauren divines this too and is waiting at the lip of fate for something to present itself. She hopes it doesn’t happen in the midst of rehearsal. She hopes Lauren hasn’t already taken something. Tonight, before Rory knocked she found a long loop of some supple snake-skin coil, with perforations in one end, like a belt or a strap.
“What do you think this is?” she asked Lauren, testing.
Lauren clicked her tongue. “A garrote? A dominatrix whip?” It seemed like she was playing a game. Lauren always seemed like she was playing a game.
“I’m serious.”
“I don’t know. It looks like a strap.”
Last night, it was the shirt. A whole shirt. She had Dracula try it on and he didn’t seem to recognize it at all. The night before it was the velvet bow that she was sure she had seen on Vanessa’s big slab of hair at the viewing. She wore it and he didn’t even notice. Before that it was a half-eaten packet of sunflower seeds, the kind you buy in bulk to get lots of tiny snack packs. Where are these things coming from? What’s he doing in there, or beyond there? There’s always the possibility that she finds these things because she herself is doing it—throwing clues to herself in some blackout madness and then waiting to be lured back by her subconscious to find them. Anything is possible. That’s the whole problem. The truth exists but it is infinitely big.
In the same manner, Lucinda sometimes thinks of the other mysteries that enfold her. She thinks she might be the one who killed Vanessa. She thinks she might have made Richard’s daughter disappear.
She tries to think of the last time she saw Vanessa, and it gets slushy. Was it the time she met her outside the theater? The day she was so upset about the key? Lucinda remembers she was trying to find a way into the Russian’s apartment. She was trying to find evidence that would exonerate her. Evidence of some girl other than her. Some girl existing in a separate and parallel space to hers. Anything to tell her she wasn’t the girl. She wasn’t the one he was talking to.
Sometimes, drifting off to sleep, Lucinda would jolt awake with a hot slosh of adrenaline and know the Russian had just barked something through the wall at her, a hard blot of breath to tell her how intimately he knew she was there. Other times he would actually say something: I know what you have. Little liar. And then he began folding out reams of Russian on her, almost as if he were daring her, taunting her with riddles and facsimiles. What was he talking about? At some point it occurred to her that if he was talking to her about anything then it probably was the key.
“What key?” Vanessa had said, trying to parse through Lucinda’s blather that day.
“Well—” she squirmed. “My dog ate it.”
“What dog?”
“He’s—dead now.” Lucinda felt her expression crimp and Vanessa scrunched her face in sympathy.
“I’m so sorry,” Vanessa said.
The key was the one that the Russian had dropped, when she found him using it on the wrong apartment door.
Whoops, he had said, looking up at her and then at the door. All of them look the same, don’t they? That had not been the way to ingratiate himself with her.
It was a long time ago. It seems like that now. She remembers how Vlad was always street cleaning the mat at the Russian’s feet with his snout, licking at the Russian’s shoes. Lucinda was always suspicious. It was like there was something there that the dog was keen to sample. The Russian sometimes bent down to greet him and the dog did the same thing to his hand. What did he have on his hands and his feet? Did he work in a meat factory? Lucinda always wanted to ask.
What she had asked Vanessa that day had not been the most savory thing to ask.
“I just need—” She didn’t know why she was doing it.
The dog had died on the way to the vet—the vet specialist. The regular vet had said they couldn’t do anything, and it was too dangerous to perform exploratory surgery on a dog that old. And too expensive.
“It’s out of town,” Lucinda said.
Now Vanessa was making a bad odor face. Lucinda really just needed a car to get there. Vanessa rattled her new car keys. She had a new car. An old new car, but still—Lucinda wondered how she was able to afford that.
Lucinda sipped a gruel of breath. “I don’t have a car,” she said.
“Oh—you need a ride som
ewhere?” Vanessa said.
Lucinda felt all the unspoken words churn. Would she bring a shovel? How would she remember the spot? She was planning on having Warren help with the rest.
Now, when she can’t help it, she says to Dracula, “I’m nervous.”
He looks at her like this disclosure is what makes him nervous. “What are you nervous about?”
Lucinda detonates her eyes, like she wants him to already know. She flounders to cast a net wide enough to catch the feeling. “I don’t know.” She goes fractal with the effort. “The play,” she says finally, by default.
“Oh, yeah,” says Dracula. His tone says that the play is the last thing on his mind. “Well, try and think past the play,” he says, notching his hat down over his eyes. “Like when you throw a punch at something and you focus on throwing past it. If you do it right you hit the thing you weren’t even aiming at with a kind of explosive contact you didn’t know was possible.” He demonstrates, cheesily. “I learned that in boxing class.”
“I don’t really want to explode,” Lucinda says, sucking air. She is dubious about this boxing class Dracula is pretending to be taking, ever since he came home one night with yeasty, rising knuckles that had no shape. He says it’s to help with the unchanneled aggression—at least until they can find a night to do their test. She knows he got the cupcake knuckles trying to do the test without her and once again failing. She wonders if he’s really working when he says he is. She wonders how he got that hat. She wonders if he still goes to the bus depot, where that concessions girl used to watch him watch TV. She wonders how he got that food stain on his shirt.
How can they afford a boxing class? she asks. You’ll never believe this, he says. I just found five hundred dollars taped under our mailbox. I think the Russian did it by accident. He waits a pregnant pause, probably to see if she’ll shuck her gaping face and suddenly remember she forgot to tell him about that. But Lucinda waits a beat too long, and now it’s too late. So now we can make rent. Lucinda tries not to look dumbstruck at her own folly. She did that. She knows she did. Dracula says that now she can relax and focus on the play.
She is pretty sure that Dracula wants her to focus on the play because he actually wants her to think past the play. He doesn’t think the play matters. She is perturbed that he doesn’t think it matters. And now it’s not just the play, but also the coffin. They are not going to find the one that went missing—she knows they aren’t. Somehow she has to get this one to the theater on the night of the performance without Dracula noticing. How is she supposed to do that? Her mind is spitting and stubbing on broken bits of strategy at all times. Every time Dracula talks to her she tunes out. Right now she is simply agreeing with everything he says until the play is over and she once again has her wits about her.
Lucinda thinks about calling Warren about the coffin—since she didn’t yet avail him for the dog she might for this. He’s good at all these tricks. She also thinks about asking Lauren. In her paranoid planning she has realized something. Warren and Lauren would get along really well. She doesn’t often try to introduce her brother to somebody she knows. There was one time she brought a girl home to meet him and it didn’t go so well. She looked too much like Lucinda, he kept saying. He wouldn’t stop commenting on it until they both felt frisked and fed upon by his vociferous scrutiny. But in this case Warren and Lauren have a similar quality, something that makes her think they would just fuse. And Lauren looks nothing like Lucinda.
“Want to come to my mother’s for dinner Sunday?” she asks Lauren at rehearsal. She is pretty sure Warren will be there. She feels stark and reckless asking this question, almost indecently assertive. Maybe it’s because of her grisly lack of friends right now. Maybe it’s her state of brazen desperation. She might just want a buffer. She has no idea what her mother plans for Dracula.
Lauren hardly considers before saying, “Better yet, why don’t you come to my mother’s for dinner tonight?” It’s not actually better—it defeats Lucinda’s secret purpose. She watches Lauren flounce her arms inside her black feathered lycra. She looks like an eccentric sack of trash. “It’s not a party or anything,” she says. “I was just going to ask you after rehearsal. Isn’t that funny that you asked me?”
“Ha,” says Lucinda. She can’t say much more because her throat clots. She is wary of going to anybody else’s house for dinner, because she doesn’t like to eat. If you do that at home, that’s one thing. If you do it at somebody else’s house, it’s rude.
“Well, I have to take the coffin back,” she says. She hopes Lauren won’t see it as an excuse and have her feelings hurt.
“Oh, I know. Rory can bring you back to the house in the truck after. He’s my brother.”
Lucinda gapes. “He is?” Rory looks and acts nothing like her. They don’t even really talk at rehearsal. He’s just a few feet away from them, in his pop celebrity wig, nodding at some advice from the teacher, frowning and looking like a deranged Fabio.
“You know what you should do?” says Lauren, glancing with her across the room. “You should give him that strap for a headband. That would look so killer.”
Lucinda feels like she’s been caught in a solicitous trap. Rory has been helping her out with the coffin, Lauren wants her to come to dinner—it’s a perfect double-teaming. She can’t possibly refuse. She doesn’t exactly answer Lauren about the dinner but she assumes it’s affirmed. As the night goes on she finds herself wondering if Rory even knows about the invitation. He looks chastened, and throughout the rehearsal he seems hackled and petulant, as if maybe the teacher’s advice was really more of a scolding.
When Marty finally trots over to her, she’s disconcerted. He’s been doing this all night and the play is in three days—what more could he be modifying at this late hour? “And for you, my lithe Lucinda,” he says, without any hint of innuendo. “How about—can we do some more hand action? Just a smidge?” As he talks, he’s doing his own hand actions, rubbing dry palms together. Are these the ones he wants her to do?
She looks down, dubiously.
“When you’re eating breakfast and you say your line, I want you to say ‘light of the cross,’ and just flick your hand, imagine you have a fork in it, like people do at the table, when they’re eating. ‘Light of the cross,’” he demonstrates. “Not that gauche. Very slight and—” he flutters his fingers—“just, small and insensate like you do, with your splendid sense of subtlety.” Lucinda likes it when he refers to her splendid sense of subtlety. She is subtle. She has felt it.
Across the stage, Lauren nods and smiles—not at her but at Rory—as she takes sly peeks into the coffin.
Lucinda knows there is something infinitely empowering about her own subtlety, about the intricacies of inflection that fold open when she isn’t herself. Her body is something she can wield upon the lines of speech, a pointed chisel that etches in the real meaning of the words.
Lauren looks as if her smile has gone stiff. She looks as if she sees something she shouldn’t.
The teacher brings her back with an ecstatic snap. “Yes—that’s it! How did you do it so exactly?”
“What?” Did she do it? She guesses that she did.
“So deft,” he says, as she tries to extricate herself from Marty’s enthusiasm and get over closer to the coffin. Lauren isn’t making any moves to verify her finding. Maybe Lucinda imagined it. “You’re talking to the light of the cross, like it might be a dinner companion, but then also you’re talking about it, murmuring aloud your approval and satisfaction like it might actually be the meal. That is it. The mythical innuendo, the mystical switch we’re always flipping.” Marty is verily beaming. He is talking more gibberish. “Flip your switch, Lucinda. Just keep doing that over and over again.”
This, Lucinda thinks, is the whole problem. What makes her good at acting seems to be the same thing that makes her bad at living. When in rehearsal she slips into spotlit brilliance, she hardly feels she deserves the credit. When in life she passe
s behind billowing curtains, she hardly feels she can evade the blame.
Now she is listing her eyes along the empty cavity of the coffin. She smiles at Lauren. There’s nothing there.
The Knife
There’s a lot of seaweed on the beach tonight. The crash of cold water, the stars and moon, thrown up into the sky’s everlasting gamble with the tides, the grim tribulations of the waves—that’s about it. Dracula keeps walking, waiting for a few things to make sense. The blood. How it was just suddenly there. And the knife. How it was just suddenly gone. Later—when he got home. He had brought the knife with him, for some ill-conceived extra measure. It was not a smart move. It must have been outside the diner where he lost it.
A whole odious can of worms wants to wriggle out from there, but it’s late, and he’s killing time, and it’s hard to stay focused. The thing about the beach is that it reminds Dracula of his childhood. Except he doesn’t remember his childhood.
Dracula turns around. He’s always turning around, before he can even catch himself. He adjusts his hat, as if to screw himself back into a pole position. He is coming to hate going out because of how constantly he keeps swiveling out of himself, out of his center of being. Some of it is guilt, he knows, because of what happened. He can’t go back to his job anymore. He has to keep a low profile, and he keeps looking over his shoulder. But really, he has to admit this has been going on for longer than that—this feeling of being trailed, sniffed out, almost by an auxiliary part of his own self, limping off to the side of him, a lame appendage he has to attend to over and over, just so he can try and reel it in. He can’t shake the sense that somebody else is always with him. He knows enough now to know that it’s not Lucinda.
The knife is what concerns him about Lucinda. Lucinda had it hidden in that vent. Not from him, he had to assume. He knows she took it from her mother.
It used to be that Lucinda would leave the knife laying all about, and whenever she wanted to perform some housekeeping novelty she would snag it up and occupy herself—ribboning up old caulk from around the tub, stabbing hazardous icicles off the mailbox to safeguard Vlad, flicking cakes of mud into the breezeway from her boots, peeling bananas he knows now she didn’t eat, and impaling her ubiquitous blocks of bubble gum to feed to herself while they were watching a TV show. She’d been living off of nothing but sugary gum for months now, but she hasn’t even been chewing gum lately. It just snuck up on Dracula that the knife had faded abruptly from use. She was using a letter opener on mail now. Where had it gone? All of its voluptuous pleasures and thrifty economies were suddenly missing from their life, dropped down a secret stairwell. Why was she now living without it? Or why was she now performing her secret life with it outside of Dracula’s observance?
