Enthusiasm

by Polly Shulman

  “You do?” I said. Had my secret somehow gotten out? A tingling alarm swept over me, accompanied by a soft cascade of relief, as if something tight had loosened. I felt tears well up in my eyes.

  Mom put her arms around me and stroked my hair. “I’m sorry, honeybear. I’m so sorry. I know it’s been tough on you with your father gone and money being tight. You take it so hard—you’re such a grown-up kid. But it’s not your job to take care of everything. That’s up to me, I’m the mom here. And honey, I promise you it will all be all right. I’m not going to let us starve. And I’m not going to stay dependent on your father, either. I realize Helen’s Treasures isn’t working out the way I hoped, so I’ve been looking for a job. No, just listen. I’ve had a few offers I could have taken, but I held off because I was waiting to hear from the one I really want, teaching art. But even if I don’t get it, there are other things I can do, so you don’t have to take everything on your big little grown-up freckled shoulders. Okay, honey? Shh, shh—there, there. Better now? I was going to wait to tell you until I heard about this job for sure, but you’ve seemed so stressed that I thought I’d better talk to you now.”

  As she spoke, I felt the relief and tension swirl around within me, trading places like a couple in a quadrille. My secret was safe! A reprieve!—yet a disappointment too, to find myself once again deeply alone.

  I wiped my eyes and pulled myself together. “That’s great, Mom,” I said.

  Next it was Amy’s turn. On Tuesday she cornered me behind the sewing machine, where I was doing my math homework. “I know why you’ve been so sad lately, sweetie, and I’m touched, I really am,” she said. “I know how disappointed you must be after all these years alone, and especially with all the help you’ve been giving me getting the room ready. I wish I had good news for you now. But I promise, your father and I are doing everything we can, and I’m sure we’ll be successful sooner or later.”

  “You are?” I asked, not sure what she was talking about. I had a strong hunch it wasn’t anything good, though.

  “Oh, yes, we’re doing everything we can. After we lost the baby, we went to see a new fertility specialist in New York who has an excellent track record with couples in our situation.”

  I stared at her. What was she talking about? What baby?

  “We’ve been following his instructions carefully—which, I must say, we’ve both enjoyed,” she continued, with a coy smirk that made my stomach lurch. “And on the plus side, at least until I get pregnant again, I can help you carry your things down to your new room in the basement. Have you chosen what color you want yet? I thought I’d paint this room a nice pastel yellow, since we don’t know whether it’ll be a boy or a girl. I always think yellow goes with everything. What do you say, should we stencil a border of ducks just under the ceiling, so your little brother or sister will have something to look at? Or stars on the ceiling?”

  For a long time I was speechless. The I.A. didn’t notice—she was too busy planning where she would put the changing table and the bassinet. To lose in one stroke my status as an Only Child and my airy (if sewing-machine-ridden) bedroom! To be banished to the basement! So that was why she’d been emptying out that dark little room downstairs—not to hide away her sewing machine, but to hide away me!

  And what could my father possibly want with another child, when he hardly bothered to talk to the one he already had?

  Ashleigh caught me Thursday morning as I was exiting the window for an early run. “Hang on, Jules,” she said, climbing down to meet me at the tree’s roots. “I need to talk to you.” (Oh, no, I thought, Ashleigh too!) “Is something the matter?” she asked. “Are you okay? I almost get the feeling you’ve been avoiding me. Did I do something wrong? Is there any way I can make it better?”

  I was overcome with guilt. My best friend had taken the trouble to get out of bed before her alarm went off just to express her concern about me. She had even used ordinary speech, rather than her high-flown Austenish. She heaped blame on herself—blame that belonged to me. I sternly resolved to take myself in hand. My period of pouting must cease. What were my feelings for a guy I had spoken to only one night, compared to the chief friendship of my entire life?

  “I’m sorry I’ve been such a pill,” I said. “Of course it’s not you. Family things, and other stuff like that. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”

  Ashleigh looked at me keenly. “Other stuff like that, hmm? I think I know what’s wrong. It’s Ned, right? You’re depressed because you can’t see him. I know exactly how you feel. I wish I could see Parr too. E-mail helps, but it isn’t enough. I wish we could be together in person! Under that dignity of his—that beautiful athletic bearing—he has such depths of kindness and strength, such good humor, such true manliness . . .” For a long time she continued in that vein, brushing twigs from her pajamas, as I forced myself to listen, and even to smile.

  Chapter 10

  Et tu, Samantha? ~ An Encounter with a Pirate ~ We prepare Speeches ~ Forefield again ~ Disaster.

  And where was Samantha during my period of grief? Not around very much, especially after evening gymnastics practice got moved to Tuesdays, the time when I was most likely to see her. In my worst moments I considered hunting her down and laying my troubles at her feet, but in the end I always balked. My pain felt too raw.

  So when she firmly straightened the drooping feather on my flapper hat as we were helping set up for our fathers’ Halloween party and said, “Cheer up, Julie, I know how you feel, but it’s not worth breaking your heart over,” I almost dropped my bowl of gummi syringes.

  Halloween may seem like a grisly theme for a pair of pediatricians to choose for their annual party, but it’s very popular with their young patients. The greatest draw, I think, comes from the possibility that if they chose, Dad and Dr. Liu could spike the tomato juice with real blood.

  “What’s not worth what?” I stammered, thinking, Not Samantha too! Was everyone in my life hell-bent on interpreting my pain to suit their own needs?

  “Cute blond princes up on a hill. Not worth crying over. The world’s a big place—even Byzantium’s a big place, comparatively—it’s crawling with guys if you really want one. You don’t need to get stuck on one particular unavailable guy. Unless you enjoy the melancholy, of course.”

  Sam is uncanny. It’s as if she reads minds.

  Ashleigh arrived before I could answer and dragged me off to help her arrange the jack-o’-lanterns to mimic the lighting effects of early-nineteenth-century candelabras. Then other guests arrived and kept her busy explaining that she was Jane Austen—Jane Austen, the writer—not a witch, a ghost, or Martha Washington.

  Was Sam right? I wondered. Did I enjoy the melancholy? This was certainly a good time of year for it, with gusts of autumn wind blowing the storm clouds around and slapping the fallen leaves wetly against one’s knees. I decided to take Sam’s remarks to heart. When Ashleigh and I went to Emily Mehan’s Halloween party the next night, I even tried flirting with Seth Young from my English class, the managing editor of Sailing to B. He was wearing a pirate costume, which made him look almost palatable. The red bandana he wore on his head gave his olive skin an appealing glow, and his blousy pirate shirt made him look lanky instead of skinny. An eye patch completed the romantic picture; I noticed for the first time that he had a nice nose. But his self-importance kept popping out from beneath the dangerous swagger he affected, and when he put his arm around me in the Mehans’ backyard, I shrugged it off. Sam’s advice might be good, but my heart just wasn’t in it.

  Ashleigh’s mother came to pick us up before Seth could make any further moves, so I was spared having to reject him definitively and make future Sailing meetings awkward. At the lunchtime meeting the next day, he sat next to me but would not meet my eye. His face retained traces of pirate makeup, principally eyeliner, which I found obscurely embarrassing. When the fourth-period bell rang, I left quickly to avoid any possibility of conversation. He got up as if to follow,
but evidently changed his mind when he saw Ashleigh waiting for me outside Ms. Nettleton’s room.

  “You’ve got to see this,” she cried, grabbing my elbow and pulling me downstairs to the announcement board, which the Gerard twins were inspecting in postures of excitement (Yolanda, I assumed) and mild interest (Yvette).

  “Look!” commanded Ashleigh with a sweeping gesture.

  “What?” I asked. The twins’ beaded heads blocked my view.

  “Auditions,” answered Ashleigh joyfully.

  “Auditions?” Why would Ash care about auditions?

  “At Forefield, for their musical,” she elaborated.

  “Forefield, get it?” said Yolanda. “The boys’ school. That means not a lot of people auditioning for girls’ parts. Wholly crisp—no Cordelia Nixon or Michelle Jeffries, ’cause they’re in West Side Story, and who else from here is going to bother? I bet if we just show up, we can get parts, and if you can carry a tune, you can be a star. How about it, you want to be the heroine?” she asked her sister.

  Yvette shook her head. “You can be the heroine. I’m playing the most important part,” she said.

  “What part’s that?” said Yolanda. “They’re not going to let you be the hero, silly, they have plenty of boys. And it says here, ‘Directed by Benjamin Seward.’ ”

  “No, silly, the audience.”

  I thought Yvette had the right idea. Acting in a play—a musical, no less—was a frightening thought for someone as shy as me, not to mention the danger of a painful meeting with Parr. How much easier it would be, if Ash would only let me, to stay home and brood.

  But that, I told myself, I must not do. No, seeing Parr and Ash together might be good for me, like cauterizing a wound to make it stop bleeding. In fact, I found myself almost hoping that I would see Parr: surely, a tempting little voice whispered, it would help me get over my troubles.

  The next problem Ash and I faced was finding suitable monologues for our auditions.

  Ash naturally first thought of Darcy’s proposal in Pride and Prejudice—the speech that begins, “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”

  Unfortunately, as we found when we consulted the book, that’s also where the speech ends. Jane Austen tells us that “the avowal of all that he felt and had long felt for her immediately followed,” but she doesn’t specify what he says. The rest of the scene takes the form of a dialogue between the proud hero and offended heroine—deeply interesting to readers, but useless to auditioners.

  We considered and rejected various alternatives, such as Mr. Collins’s letter announcing his visit to the Bennet family and Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s howl of disapproval at the thought that Elizabeth might become her niece by marrying Darcy. They were all either too brief or too deeply embedded in the novel’s plot to stand alone.

  “The problem is, it’s a novel,” I argued. “Don’t you think we’d have better luck finding monologues if we looked at plays instead of books? Or movies, even.”

  “No drama could be more dramatic than the works of the great Miss Austen,” said Ashleigh dismissively.

  “Let’s at least go down to the video store and see if we get any ideas,” I urged.

  She shot me the Mad Gleam. “My dear Julia, I believe you may have hit upon the solution! Perhaps some playwright or screenwriter may have supplied Miss Austen’s missing words!” We rented three different Pride and Prejudices. After some discussion and much poking at the rewind button, Ash picked the Colin Firth version of Darcy’s proposal and scribbled out a transcription.

  For my audition piece, I chose Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech in Romeo and Juliet. It’s part of a scene in which Mercutio, my favorite character, mercilessly teases his cousin Romeo about being in love. He attributes Romeo’s mooniness to a visit from Queen Mab, the fairy responsible for dreams. I chose it because I knew it practically by heart, having written a paper about it for the Nettle. Still, I tended to agree with Yolanda that the play was at least as silly as it was beautiful. The whole tragedy was so unnecessary! If Romeo and Juliet had just talked to each other, nobody would have had to die.

  Besides being easy for me to memorize, the speech also had the advantage of being by Shakespeare, and therefore tough for a modern girl to deliver and even tougher for a modern listener to follow. Although I refused to let myself flub the audition on purpose, I secretly hoped that the difficulty of the material would keep me from getting a part. Then I’d be spared the pain of watching my best friend’s budding relationship with my lost love.

  Mrs. Gerard drove Yolanda, Ashleigh, and me to Forefield for our auditions. As the car wound up the drive toward the school on the hill, I felt my insides quadrilling in a way that couldn’t be explained by mere motion sickness.

  “Break a leg, girls,” said Mrs. Gerard, dropping us in front of the R. McNichol Robbins Theater Arts Center, behind the main classroom building. We pulled open the heavy bronze doors and followed signs into the theater, where a group of people clustered near the stage.

  A spotlight reflected brightly off the hair of a slim, tallish figure, transforming my inner quadrille into a gymnastics meet. When he stepped aside, however, I saw that he was not the person I half hoped, half dreaded to see, but a brown-haired boy about the same height.

  “Ashleigh! Julie!” called a male voice from the other side of the room. It set the trampolines going again briefly until I recognized it a split second later as Ned’s bass. He bounded up the aisle to meet us. “You made it! Come meet Benjo and Ms. Wilson.”

  Ashleigh introduced Yolanda, and we followed Ned down to the front of the theater. Aside from one pale creature in a Sacred Heart uniform, we three were the only girls. “Hey, it’s Erin from Sacred Heart,” said Yolanda, running up to greet her. Chris Stevens—the boy who had shared my planter at the Columbus Cotillion—lounged beside Erin. He winked at me. Boys of various sizes punched each other and squirmed, or sat apart reviewing their monologues; some stared at us out of the corners of their eyes.

  Benjo turned out to be the tallish, brown-haired guy who had so alarmed me. After a few minutes, during which a bell rang somewhere and additional aspiring actors arrived—including another Sacred Heart girl, this one quite young—he called for silence and addressed us. “Okay, let’s get started. I’m Benjamin Seward, and I’ll be directing Midwinter Insomnia, an original musical by Barry Davison, with music by Ned Downing and lyrics by Grandison Parr. That’s Barry over there, and Ned’s next to him, and Parr—where’s Parr?—oh, I guess he’s still at fencing practice. Anyway, most of you know Mr. Barnaby, our faculty adviser, and Ms. Wilson, our musical adviser.” He indicated a bald, bearded man with a barrel chest and prominent ears and a slender, petite woman with straightened hair pulled back into a knot at her neck. Benjo continued, “When I call your name, please come up onstage and give your music to Tyler at the piano. All right? Alcott Fish.”

  A small boy presented himself, cleared his throat, sang “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” in a pretty soprano, recited a speech from the same play, and sat down again. The four directors whispered together, then called the next boy.

  During the auditions that followed I had time to imagine various dire scenarios in which I fell off the stage, forgot my lines, changed key halfway through my song, fainted, laughed hysterically, or compulsively shouted fire; at last I decided to dull my thoughts by running through my speech over and over in my head.

  When Erin’s turn came, I stopped and paid close attention. By then Shakespeare’s words in my head were beginning to sound dangerously like nonsense. She sang “My Favorite Things” with all the corn-syrup sweetness it deserves; her speech, from The Glass Menagerie, was similarly well articulated, sincere, and over-sweet.

  Next came a striking boy with a dark complexion and a beautiful baritone. Then, after a few so-so singers and two pretty good younger boys, it was Yolanda’s turn. Her rich alto, surprisingly
sultry in someone so young, made a strong showing in “Too Darn Hot,” from Kiss Me, Kate, and her speech from Raisin in the Sun moved me almost to tears.

  Ashleigh, too, acquitted herself well, with a loud and tuneful rendition of “Take It Back” and a loud and passionate rendition of the Darcy proposal.

  Then it was my turn. I made it onto the stage without falling over and handed my music to the boy at the piano. Things started out well enough, but I began to have second thoughts as I sang “It’s All Right with Me.” “It’s the wrong time and the wrong place,” the song begins (How true, how painfully true! I thought). But when I reached the part about trying to get over someone by throwing myself into someone else’s arms, I felt Chris Stevens watching me slyly. By that time I wished I had chosen something else—anything else.

  Still, despite my embarrassment, I managed to pronounce the words clearly and stay in tune. Relieved, I started in on my Queen Mab speech—but that too felt far more problematic on stage than it had in the safety of my attic bedroom. “She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes,” said my mouth, while my mind, racing, chided me: What made you think it was a good idea to give a speech about fairies at a boys’ school? How’s that going to go over? I glanced cautiously around the audience—another bad idea. There was Ashleigh grinning at me, which had the perverse effect of making me more self-conscious; there was Chris Stevens, winking with his long cat’s eyes; there was a little boy chewing the end of his pen and another sprawled out over two seats with his eyes closed, both radiating boredom; and there in the back—oh, horror! Had he been there the whole time?—stood Grandison Parr, tall and golden, looking right at me.

  I panicked. My voice dropped to nothing. I rushed and mumbled my way to the end, stopping abruptly and cutting off the last three lines (which are kind of obscene anyhow). I dragged myself off the stage and sank into the dusty velvet seat beside Ashleigh’s, where I wished I were dead.