by Meg Wolitzer
“At the time that Aristophanes wrote it, the Peloponnesian War was in its twentieth year,” she said. “Maybe you can relate to the frustration and desperation that the characters feel. I mean, here they are, in the middle of a long war—in their case, a civil war—with no end in sight. And such a war, to these women, seems like a no-win situation, not to mention a really depressing one. Imagine if there was a new war right now, and your fathers and your boyfriends were all sent away. Suddenly we’d all have to get along without them. Some of them, many of them, would be killed. Men in their prime—dead. And if the war seemed to go on and on, and the reasons behind it didn’t even make sense to you, then what would you do? Really, tell me. What if the government declared war with . . . Canada?” she asked. “Known forever as the Maple Leaf War. Or even Maple Leaf War One, not to be confused with the later Maple Leaf War Two. And the men said, ‘Well, we’re men, and it’s our responsibility to go and fight.’ Would you just accept their decision, and say, ‘Goodbye and good luck’?” She looked around the room, trawling for an answer.
“I guess I’d have to, but first I’d try to convince them not to go,” said Laura Lonergan from the second row.
“And how would you do that, Laura?” Fran asked. “What do you think you could say to convince them? What do you think you, a mere high school student, a taker of SATs, a minor, someone who can’t even vote or drink and maybe can’t even drive, could do?”
“We could beg them,” someone said. “We could plead our case. Be extremely insistent.”
“We could march on Washington,” said someone else.
To which Jeremy Stegner said, “My parents and I marched on Washington against the war in Iraq. Which did nothing. They just went ahead with that war, and now we’re still stuck with it.”
“Why do they always say ‘march on Washington’?” someone else asked, but no one knew the answer.
“Come on, let’s keep thinking about this topic, everybody,” Fran said. “Let’s try to come up with some viable ideas.” Around the room, the kids rustled and stirred. “How else could women in particular stop a war? How could they change the world?” she pushed. They shrugged and looked at one another in mild embarrassment ; they knew what she was getting at, but none of them had the nerve to make this vaguely political and dull conversation directly sexual, at least not yet. Jen Heplauer suggested a telethon.
Fran said, “Maybe you would have to try something ingenious that would really make a statement. Something that would deprive the males of what’s most important to them. And I know you all know what that would be. Because, look, although this is an ancient Greek play, it’s also a strong and hard-hitting and comedic but dead serious piece of art. Some people think of Lysistrata as an important feminist text; other people think it basically mocks women and doesn’t take them seriously at all as potential agents of change. Whatever you happen to think, you’ll find that its themes are still sadly relevant today, what with our lousy wars, and that’s why I chose it. My point is: men still fight wars. They still fuck up the world—excuse me, I mean screw up the world. Oh, please don’t tell mom and dad that I said that; they’re still recovering from my choice of play. They probably would have preferred Arsenic and Old Lace. And men still, above and beyond anything else, want sex from women. Yes, it makes them weak in the knees. You may find it hard to believe, but even I, your forty-two-year-old drama teacher, have a husband whose knees I have weakened every now and then. He’ll probably need arthroscopic surgery one of these days.” There was blinking, confused silence. “A joke,” Fran said again.
Here, a few of the kids around the auditorium laughed uncomfortably, and Lucy Neels put two fingers in her mouth and whistled.
“But the women of Greece said, ‘No, we’re not going to take it anymore,’ ” Fran Heller continued. “They said, ‘We’re certainly not going to take it lying down.’ They used their cunning and their allure and the fact that they had one thing that their men could not bear to live without. And they agreed to withhold it until the war ended. So that’s the central premise here, and I wanted you all to understand the sensibility behind it. Marissa, why don’t you and the others from the opening come up onstage with your scripts and take a shot?”
“Maybe that’s not the best idea,” came Marissa’s voice. “I’m not prepared. I’ve only seen the script during the audition.”
“It’s okay not to be prepared,” said Fran. “Getting prepared is what we do in the theater. Do you know the book An Actor Prepares? No? Not to worry. Come on up. We have to start somewhere.”
Marissa Clayborn reluctantly rose; she was as tall as a Greek column. God, Dory thought, all the girls had secretly sprung up in height, even as the teachers and mothers had gotten squashed and lost height and calcium, their bones ground down with an invisible pestle. Why hadn’t Dory drunk milk when she was young and still had a chance to save herself in the future? She instantly knew the answer to this: because when you’re young, you don’t really believe you’ll ever be anything other than young.
Dory sat in the back row of the auditorium in her swollenlooking down coat and a scarf made of rust-brown and mustard-yellow wool. She remembered being drawn to this scarf when she’d seen it at the Saturday flea market in the parking lot behind Chapter and Verse, but lately she’d come to feel that it was the textile equivalent of lentils in a stew: good for you in some way, but never completely lovable. Though the girls liked her pointed, caramel-colored boots, most of them would never have worn an earthy, no-nonsense scarf that hid the wonder of their bodies.
Marissa Clayborn leaped onto the stage, kicking up a little dust with her long legs under the dim lights. Behind her came her obedient followers. They stood in a line, all different sizes and shapes and weights. Some had a beauty that could make the men of Athens or Sparta or the greater New Jersey area lay down their swords; others were less showy; some appeared slumped and afraid.
Fran indicated a particular point in the script, and the girls began to read aloud. Dory tried to watch, but it had been a really long day, and soon she nodded off, as perhaps the audience would do when it came time for the performance. Who could listen to classical language for very long these days, when the world had become peppered with shorthand, and everything was completely fast-moving and ADD? Who could bear to be thrust back into an ancient, snoozy era, unless it was to be involved in some virtual-reality civilization game, where you had to fight to stay alive, and where every move could put you face-to-face with a three-headed dog, or an entire sandaled and raging army?
Dory Lang felt herself fall asleep in the soft seat. This became one of those intense little afternoon naps, and suddenly Dory’s eyes opened and she grunted like a sow, and was brought roughly into the present moment, in which the girls onstage were in the middle of their scene. They had begun to act, as opposed to just reading lines. Their voices lifted in indignation, or at least enunciation:LYSISTRATA: Then I will out with it at last, my mighty secret! Oh! sister women, if we would compel our husbands to make peace, we must refrain . . .
MYRRHINÉ: Refrain from what? Tell us, tell us!
LYSISTRATA: But will you do it?
MYRRHINÉ: We will, we will, though we should die of it.
LYSISTRATA: We must refrain from the male altogether. . . .
Dory was fully awake. Marissa Clayborn continued to speak in a stirring, almost British stage actor’s voice, and Dory leaned forward in her chair to listen:Nay, why do you turn your backs on me? Where are you going? So, you bite your lips, and shake your heads, eh? Why these pale, sad looks? Why these tears? Come, will you do it—yes or no? Do you hesitate?
MYRRHINÉ: No, I will not do it; let the War go on.
LYSISTRATA: And you, my pretty flat-fish, who declared just now they might split you in two?
CALONICÉ: Anything, anything but that! Bid me go through the fire, if you will; but to rob us of the sweetest thing in all the world, my dear, dear Lysistrata!
“Thanks, girls,” Fran
Heller said, raising a hand. “You can stop there. And now would the rest of the cast please come up onstage so we can see how you all look when you’re together? Chorus of Old Men, please stand to the left, and Chorus of Women, please stand to the right.”
So all the girls and the scatter of boys stood together nervously and artlessly. Quite a few of the boys looked short, Dory noticed, like vulnerable humans among a superior species. There, now, was Willa in the middle of the Chorus of Women. Her red hair glittered in discrete threads. Dory watched as Willa stood, her body outlined under the row of unsubtle lights.
That night was the night the spell took Dory Lang. Before dinner, Robby had gone out to shovel snow, a task he generally took on without being asked, and so over time, tacitly, it became his task. It was December, and the weather was already messy. He scraped piles of snow around the small white house so that he’d created a narrow, curving path from sidewalk to door, while Willa and Dory watched from the kitchen window. Robby hadn’t worn a hat; the tips of his ears seemed lit like little flares.
“It’s so cold out there,” Dory said. “Your dad looks miserable. Do you want to go bring him in?”
Willa, who clearly did not want to do this, went to the side door and waved to him. “Dad!” she called flatly. “Enough!” Robby looked up at her after a long moment, as if he’d been in a shoveling reverie, lost in the crunch and release. Then he shrugged, planting the shovel straight into the deep snow on the lawn, and walked toward the house, his face at that juncture of pink and blue, streaming with cold-weather tears. The family sat down to dinner, and Hazel wandered the floor below the table, trawling and licking.
At first Willa was very quiet at the meal, but at some point she seemed to open up, as if the warm and delicious food had loosened her from her teenaged moorings and reminded her that her family wasn’t so bad. Recently she’d been very private and closed; tonight signaled a subtle change, and Dory was pleased. It was as if, in the middle of the meal, Willa had made a conscious decision to be a little more generous with her parents.
“Marissa,” Willa suddenly announced, “not only has the lead in the play, but she was also asked to be in Who’s Who of Today’s American High School Students.”
“Well, don’t be too impressed,” said Robby. “That’s kind of a scam. They get you to buy the book, and of course it’s really expensive. It’s probably made of embossed leather or something. From special free-range cows.”
“I doubt it, Dad. Oh, and also, Lucy Neels met a boy on a teen tour over the summer,” Willa went on. “And now he’s texting her all the time. It’s like a constant onslaught.”
It was as though one of them had asked her, “Tell us, does Lucy Neels receive many text messages?” There seemed to be no segues in conversations with adolescents; they talked about whatever was on their minds at the moment without making some kind of logical leap from the last thing. “He texts her basically every two seconds,” Willa went on, “and he lurks around, bothering her on Farrest—his avatar is this emo gremlin—and they barely know each other. He lives in New York City. They met at the Louvre, actually standing in front of the Mona Lisa.”
“That seems a little stalkerish to me,” said Dory. “I don’t like the sound of it.”
But Willa switched topics again and was now saying that Carrie Petito had gotten her navel pierced, and it had grown infected. “The irony here,” Willa said to her parents, “is that things got really critical only because her parents had forbidden her to get any part of her anatomy pierced other than her earlobes. So she had to hide it from them, and basically not take care of it the way she was supposed to, and that’s how it got infected. In fact,” Willa added, “I bet she wouldn’t have even wanted to get anything pierced if they hadn’t made such a big thing about it in the first place.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” Dory said.
“Never make your children crave the mundane,” Robby quietly pronounced.
“So the infection grew worse and worse,” Willa said. “What’s the word, ‘suppurating’? And then the other day we were all standing around in the locker room before folk dance started, and Carrie pulled up her blouse and showed it to us. It was like a horror movie.” Willa described the way she and her friends had stood staring and shaking their heads, saying, “I’m obviously not a doctor, Carrie, but that looks pretty bad to me,” and, “Carrie, you have to do something about that, ASAP.” Then they were called into the gym, where the nice gym teacher Ms. Winik turned on the recording of sprightly klezmer music, and all the girls linked arms.
That seemed to be the end of the conversation, but after a moment longer at the table Willa added quietly, “We were getting kind of hysterical there. We thought that maybe Carrie would die or something.”
“Oh no, that wouldn’t have happened,” Dory said. “Definitely not.”
When Carrie Petito had showed her friends the small, blackened crater of pus beneath her blouse, the girls had contracted in terror, probably reminded of their own mortality. So a few of them had apparently staged an “infected navel intervention,” Willa explained. Then she relayed the rest of the story, which had a happy ending involving IV amoxicillin and two loving, attentive parents who had reminded their daughter that she should never be afraid to come tell them whatever was bothering her. “Anything,” they said sternly. But Dory thought the Petitos probably suspected, with sorrow, that their daughter would no longer tell them much of anything at all, and had not actually been telling them much of anything for years.
Robby and Dory listened to Willa, and they reiterated their own views; she could tell them not only anything, but everything. Though some information might shock them, they would rather be shocked than ignorant, and no matter what they found out, they would always love her. Maybe, finally, Dory thought, Willa would take this conversation as an invitation to be more open about Eli. Maybe Willa would let her mother in once in a while.
The Langs were done with their sudden speech, and Dory patted her mouth with her napkin. Then Robby said he had to get down to his student papers. “The Odyssey awaits,” he said. After the conversation about Carrie Petito and Lucy Neels and Marissa Clayborn and the high school play—after a batch of Odyssey papers were graded, and a rusted nugget of steel wool was taken to a pan, and the dog was let out into the yard—Robby and Dory Lang got into bed.
They were entirely ignorant of what was about to happen to them, or, rather, what was about to happen to Dory. At first she yawned; she reached out in bed and touched her toes, which seemed very far away.
“When I was shoveling snow before, you know what I thought about?” Robby said. “All the middle-aged men who drop dead of heart attacks doing that. This simple activity, and their life just ends. I thought of how it could be me.”
“It wouldn’t be you.” This was unbearable; she didn’t want to have to think about it now.
“It could be. And I wouldn’t get to hear about girls with infected navels. Willa seemed like she was going to burst into tears, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, she did,” said Dory.
“She’s so sensitive to everything. Just a bunch of unprotected nerve endings. No myelin sheath. If I died while I was shoveling snow, what would happen to her? And you? Not to mention me?”
“It hasn’t happened,” Dory said. “You’re healthy. You’re not going anywhere for a really long time.”
Robby slid closer, and it was then that he began to turn her toward him, and then that the wind that had secretly shoved its way inside the house found Dory Lang, and the spell struck her. Robby tried to kiss and touch her face and her mouth and her neck and her pale, pretty breasts, but she felt much too cold for that, and her teeth chattered once, after which she was fully, thoroughly enchanted, and as a result she would have nothing to do with this tonight, and she stopped him then and there.
That was how it happened. Dory Lang kept stopping her beloved husband night after night, until finally he no longer asked, and until what they’d had
together and what they’d done all these years became something from the past, a lost piece of their joined life, a delicious meal they’d once eaten, and were possibly about to forget.
Part
Two
7.
All over town, the spell did its work. No one knew, of course; how could they possibly have known? Even in the absence of a spell, no one ever really knew what went on in anyone else’s bed. No one ever really knew what went on in anyone else’s kitchen, or bathroom, or upstairs hallway. What actually happened there, and what got said. Couples might put on clown wigs and prance around. Entire families might kneel and chant and eat root soup. Who really knew anything about how other people lived? You might tell a friend some details, but of course you would always carefully choose which ones to reveal, and you would tweak them in some vain or self-protective way. I watch him sleep sometimes, you might say. His mouth is open. Or, We have this song we sing.
For a long time, before the spell came over her and changed her too, Leanne Bannerjee, Ph.D., the school psychologist, led a social life that rivaled that of her students. They would have been impressed, had they known its complexity. They would have been awed by the fact that young Dr. Bannerjee was not monogamous, and had no desire to be. She who spoke so frankly to them about “staying safe” and “thinking with your head, not with some other anatomical feature,” was easiest to imagine with a handsome and trim Indian boyfriend—someone who looked like a male version of her, and to whom she’d soon be engaged.
