Ready to Fall

by Marcella Pixley

  We can feel each other’s hands, and through our hands, the steady pulse of our hearts, the warmth of blood and life. Donna Pruitt claps from the audience. Let’s go, she says. It’s time to begin rehearsal. And we do, each of us falling into our characters as though they were our own gleaming spirits, our words, Shakespeare’s words, filling the auditorium like golden feathers on the wings of an angel.

  READY TO FALL

  We arrive in the auditorium hours before the curtain rises, hours before the magic begins. We shuffle somberly into two even rows before the stage as though we were pallbearers carrying a coffin between us.

  It feels strange to be so near the magnificent set in our street clothes. The stage lights are off and the houselights are on, and for now it’s just us, the cast, together for one last time before the show.

  Donna Pruitt stands with us, feet flat on the floor, breathing the possibility and impossibility of what we are about to do. Together, we feel humbled, like supplicants approaching an altar with the great gears and chimneys of Ravi’s steampunk Denmark rising behind us in the dark.

  “Are you ready?” she asks, her beautiful voice awed, hallowed, hushed, as though we were about to give birth or die together.

  We nod and assemble our arms so we can take each other’s weight without dropping our most precious cargo, each one of us grabbing another one’s wrist, a web of arms, waiting for the shock and impact of falling weight.

  First we catch Donna Pruitt, her long, angular body falling backward without hesitation. Glorious.

  Then we catch Griswald, who is so certain and so joyful in his falling, I think he would have leaped into our arms if we had let him.

  Fish makes eye contact with every single one of us before falling.

  Smitty falls screaming Geronimo!

  Ravi falls after a perfect pirouette.

  When The Monk falls, he falls with all his rage gathered in his bones, his body rigid and heavy. And all the others fall with all their beings as well, whatever they carry with them. Gertrude and Claudius and the Gravediggers and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the Lords and Ladies and Attendants. They all leave and then return to earth, one resurrection after another.

  One by one, each kid goes up on the stage, turns their back to the group, and crosses their arms across their chest.

  “Ready to fall,” they say.

  “Fall away,” we say, our voices triumphant, because we know we will catch them whenever they choose to let go.

  “Falling,” they say, in various voices, strong, whispered, shaking, joyful, an entire rainbow of voices.

  And then, one at a time, they let go of the earth and they fall backward into nothingness. It is a miracle. We catch them every time. We allow no harm to come to them. We cradle their bodies in our arms and we bring them safely into heaven.

  And then, finally, it is my turn.

  Fish squeezes one of my hands. Ravi squeezes the other.

  I leave the group and take the long walk up the stairs and onto the stage. The set is dark. A marvelous sleeping metropolis. Then I turn and look down at my friends, who are assembled just below the apron of the stage in their two even rows, their faces calm and ready. The Monk nods imperceptibly. Fish has tears in her eyes.

  I don’t know who came up with the rule that a grave should be six feet deep. When you are standing at the edge with your father’s arm around your shoulder, and they lower the casket slowly down, six feet seems like a fathom. The coffin is a ship sinking to the bottom of the ocean before it is allowed to settle. And then comes the first shovelful of earth, a sound so horrible that you look away because no one could possibly sleep through this kind of thunder, so it must be true. She is not coming back. I put my hands across my chest and feel my heart beating. I look down at my friends, who are waiting for me to speak my one line. The only one that matters. Then I take a deep breath and turn my back so I am facing the dark gears and factories rising up like the gates of heaven on earth.

  “Ready to fall,” I whisper.

  “Fall away,” they say.

  I gather everything good that is inside me that came from her. I gather everything that is strong and everything that is courageous and everything that has a heart and that can trust that when I fall, the people I care about will be there to catch me.

  “Falling,” I say.

  And then, because I am finally ready, I fall backward from the stage and into their arms.

  THE FALL OF A SPARROW

  Electricity. The feeling of an audience on the other side of the curtain. The buzzing murmur of their voices fills the auditorium. Unseen. Expectant. There is the commotion of ticket sellers and ushers handing out programs. People settle into their seats. We can’t see them, but we know they’re out there, our families and friends taking off their coats and getting seated, looking for our names in the program and then finding us, smiling. Backstage, we get into our costumes and help one another with makeup and hair. Ravi spikes The Monk’s hair so that it is standing straight up.

  “I look like I just put my finger in a socket,” says The Monk.

  “Deal with it,” Ravi says. “This is the way I want you.”

  “That’s what she said,” says The Monk.

  “That’s what he said,” says Ravi, grinning.

  “Places!” calls the stage manager.

  “Thank you! Places!” everyone calls back.

  And then the lights flicker and we are silent.

  The curtain rises.

  The audience gasps when they see Ravi’s set. The gears. The clockwork. The factory chimneys spitting steam and smoke. Their delight is an electrifying sound, pure appreciation. Astonished. Like opening a present. Lifting the lid off a velvet box and seeing, for the first time, the diamond you have been waiting for your whole life. A promise of even better things to come. Engagement.

  And then the show begins.

  The Monk is phenomenal as Hamlet. He has always been wonderful in rehearsal, but now there’s something wild and raw about him. His father, the king, is dead. Hamlet paces the stage, his eyes haunted and shining. He is alive in his grief, the way sometimes immense sadness can make a person seem even more human than they were before, the way we can sometimes see ourselves more clearly in another person’s weeping and that is why we care so deeply.

  I am the ghostly father of this confused, grieving boy. I know he loves me. He always loved me when I was alive. But when I haunt him, treading in his footsteps, folding into his shadow, he lashes out at me like a caged animal, uneasy and furious. In act 1, scene 2, when it is time for his first soliloquy—O, that this too too solid flesh would melt—Hamlet doubles over and rocks himself on the bare stage, crying so hard it seems that his insides are about to leap from his mouth or seep from his ears, his eyes, like blood.

  I try to comfort him. I kneel behind him and try to stroke his tears away, as only a parent can, but he pushes me backward and screams. He wants to be alone in his sadness. Angels and ministers of grace defend us! His sadness is heartbreaking and familiar. I see myself in it. It swallows him the way it swallowed me. It tears at him the way it tore at me.

  When I finally speak at the end of scene 5, revealing myself as the king come back from the dead—I am thy father’s spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night—Hamlet falls on his knees, reaches out, embraces me, burying his face in my shoulder because until this moment I had been a memory, a nightmare, a worry gnawing at his brain for all these days and now, finally, I am real.

  When I haunt Gertrude’s bedchamber I am still real, even though she cannot see me standing there. She was my wife, but she has betrayed me by moving on to love another. Hamlet takes her chin and turns her face toward mine, pleading with her to recognize me. Do you see nothing there? he says, gesturing toward me. Nothing at all, she says. Yet all that is I see.

  I am the Ghost, fabulously un-ghosted. Hamlet grabs his mother’s bare shoulders and berates her. O shame! Where is thy blush? Gertrude pleads with him to stop. She
tells him These words like daggers enter in my ears, and though invisible to her, I gaze at her familiar, beloved face, a face I will never touch again for as long as I live.

  And this is where something extraordinary and unexpected happens onstage.

  I begin to cry.

  At first it is not noticeable. I try to hold back my tears. But then I climb into the bed with Hamlet and Gertrude. I wrap my arms around them and hold them as they break each other’s hearts the way only a parent and child can do: O Hamlet, thou has cleft my heart in twain. I rock them in my arms as if to say It’s okay, I love you both, this is who we were.

  It is only a brief moment onstage. Even though Gertrude can’t see me anymore, even though our lives on this earth have changed forever. We still are who we were: the mother, the father, and the son. I realize that the tears are perfect. They rise from inside me (both Max and the Ghost), silent at first, but then powerful, the sound of my own raw grief coming and coming from the bottom of my gut, from a wordless, animal place, unhindered, like a wolf raising his face to the moon.

  Gertrude still doesn’t see me. She sees only what is there. But when I reach out to touch her hair with my fingertips, when I blow on the back of her neck with my ghost’s breath, she feels me. Her hand reaches toward me blindly, and I reach toward her with my hand, so close you can feel the electricity. Be thou assured, if words be made of breath, and breath of life, I have no life to breathe what thou hast said to me.

  I feel the audience leaning in to listen. They are present in each breath as my sobs subside and I move back into the shadows, leaving them to live without me. Act 3 folds into act 4. Act 4 bleeds into act 5. When Ophelia walks onstage, we are a triangle just as Donna Pruitt said we should be. I see Ophelia through Hamlet’s eyes. How lovely she is. And how impossibly out of reach. And when Ophelia dies offstage, I am there, suspended in Hamlet’s grief. Grief resonates through his words, masquerading as madness. By the end of the play, grief has wrapped its pale hands around the throat of every character: Polonius, Ophelia, Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, and finally, finally, Hamlet himself. Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

  In the last moments of the play, I step out of the shadows one last time. I watch the Soldiers carry Hamlet’s body from the stage, my face full of grief, and compassion and wisdom. Because I know what comes next. I know the impossibility of picking up the pieces. I know the impossibility of moving on. Now, there is a death march. Each body is carried by four Soldiers. They walk, stiffly, their eyes downcast. A dirge. The long, low notes of the death knell rise from beneath the stage and fill the entire auditorium until every member of the audience mourns, some of them weeping, some of them clutching their hearts, the living carrying the dead, a somber parade of corpses and lovers trying to find their way on this earth. And then there is me. The Ghost. Walking slowly behind the line, following them, one step at a time, until there is no one left onstage.

  ENCORE

  The curtain falls. The audience breaks into uproarious applause.

  The curtain rises again.

  They are on their feet still calling for us. They clap and stamp their feet.

  We come out onstage one at a time.

  They shout for each of us in turn, me and Smitty and Griswald and Ravi and Fish, getting progressively louder and more boisterous until The Monk finally walks out, exhausted, humbled, and then they scream Bravo! Bravo!, the entire auditorium ringing with appreciation. The Monk bows. Someone throws a bouquet of flowers onto the stage. He picks it up and holds it in the air, triumphant. Then he gestures back to the stage manager, who walks out from backstage, bows, and then runs back behind the curtain; he gestures to the person doing the lights. He gestures to Ravi, our costume designer extraordinaire. Ravi twirls and curtsies. He gestures to Donna Pruitt, who is sitting in the front row clapping so hard it looks like she is going to rise into the air.

  And now we all take a bow together. The whole cast. One, two, three, bow, and when we come up, the audience is still shouting, amazed by their own joy in us, astonished by how completely they have fallen in love. They stomp and scream and we drink it like ambrosia.

  I peer over the footlights and into the auditorium. I see Dr. Austerlitz. I see Dad and Grandma and Lydie and the twins standing together, screaming at the tops of their lungs. Soleil is holding Grandma’s hand and leaping in crazy circles, her pigtails flying. Dad is whistling and clapping so hard, I can almost hear it from the stage. Way back near the entrance, I see a familiar-looking man with a beard and dark sunglasses and a baseball cap and a trench coat with the collar up to his ears. He is smiling with crooked yellow teeth. When he sees me looking at him, he gives me a thumbs-up.

  Then the curtain falls and we run backstage to leap around and hug each other and scream at the tops of our lungs.

  The Monk grabs me in a headlock, screaming, “I love you, man.”

  And then, because my whole being wants to do it even though it’s awkward, I hug him hard, and he hugs me and now we’re pounding each other on the back and laughing and crying and Ravi comes bounding up to us, and then Griswald and Smitty, and we are all shouting and spinning, a huge, whirling “Hava Nagila” circle, a gypsy ring, raucous, triumphant, elated. But Fish is nowhere to be seen.

  When the spinning finally dies down, and most of the cast has retired to the dressing rooms to get back into their street clothes, I look for Fish. She’s not backstage.

  I jog down to the dressing room and get changed out of my costume. The place is full of commotion, people talking in loud voices about what went well, what didn’t, they are shouting their favorite lines in outrageous accents, throwing discarded costumes around, wigs, duffel bags, shoes. Lots of actors are at the bubble mirrors taking off their makeup but I don’t see Fish anywhere.

  I run out to the foyer where the ushers and the ticket sellers are closing up shop.

  There are Baldwin students standing around the bulletin board with all our head shots, trying to figure out who was who. There are parents waiting for their sons or daughters to come out so they can congratulate them. Groups of people snapping pictures and giving bouquets, but Fish is nowhere to be seen.

  Dad and Lydie and Grandma and the twins are standing by the door, waiting for me. Lydie hands me a bouquet of yellow roses.

  “You were outstanding,” she says.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  My dad pulls me in for a hug.

  “You were amazing,” he says. “You brought out so much in that character that I didn’t even know was there.”

  Some of the other girls who played ladies and townspeople head out the doors together. Fish isn’t with them.

  “I’ve seen Hamlet onstage before,” says Dad. “I watched the old Laurence Olivier film, I studied the play in school. But Max, you brought things to that character that just seemed so much more … more…”

  “More personal?” supplies Lydie.

  “Yes,” says Dad. “More personal. And more real. And much, much more sad. I don’t know how you did it. I don’t know if Shakespeare meant for it to be this way. But you were just outstanding.”

  “Your dad was crying through most of it,” says Grandma.

  “You were?” I ask, surprised.

  “I was,” says Dad. “Seeing you up there made me think about Mom. It made me think about how much you’ve grown. How far you’ve come.”

  And now he is crying again, smiling foolishly at his own lack of control, tears flowing completely free. He points at himself and smiles and cries and doesn’t even try to stop himself. Luna and Soleil put their arms around him and lean their blond heads against him. Grandma strokes Luna’s hair, and Soleil purrs like a cat.

  “Come here,” says Lydie to me. She holds her arms open, and I step in for a hug.

  “I’m proud of you,” she says. At first I remain rigid, letting her do all the hugging. Her hair smells like peppermint. I relax into the hug. I put my arms around her shoulders. Then I put my h
ead in her hair because this is the part I miss the most. Then everyone is hugging, Luna and Soleil and Grandma still gathered around Dad. Lydie holding me and stroking my head.

  “Enough of this!” hoots Grandma, finally. “How about we go get ice cream?”

  “Ice cream, ice cream,” chants Luna.

  “There’s a great place around the corner,” says Lydie, wiping her eyes. “Let’s take Max out to celebrate.”

  Everyone seems very happy about this idea, especially Grandma, who is swinging Luna’s hand and singing, “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.”

  All around us there are actors leaving the auditorium with their parents, heading toward the dorms to get their things for spring break. I spot The Monk with his parents, who are not surprisingly both over six feet tall, and there is Griswald with his parents and Smitty and Ravi with theirs, all my new friends looking young suddenly next to the adults who love them. But I don’t see Fish and her mom anywhere and suddenly I realize what must have happened. Her mother didn’t come. She didn’t manage to get out of the house to see Fish onstage.

  “You guys go,” I tell them. “I have something I need to do here first. I’ll meet you there, okay?”

  “Sounds good,” says Dad. “But don’t wait too long. It’s getting late.”

  “Hey,” I say, elbowing him. “Live a little.”

  “Touché, young man,” says Dad. And then he opens the door for the rest of them and they all wander out into the surprisingly warm night, a breath of almost spring.

  CURTAIN CALL

  I find her backstage, wrapped up in the black velvet curtain. Somehow, she has pulled it around herself like a fort so I can’t see her, but I know she’s there because I can hear her sniffling and I can see a rounded bulge in the curtain where she is sitting with the very tips of her toes showing because the fabric does not quite hit the floor of the stage.

  “Can I come in?” I ask.

  “Okay,” says Fish. “But don’t unwrap me.”