The Hungry Season

by Greenwood, T.

  “You sure?” she asked again.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Okay then, there’s leftover moussaka in the fridge from last night. Make sure Finn has some salad with it. And water. No soda.”

  “What are you doing in town?” he asks, but she is already out the door.

  In the car, she rehearses the monologue she has prepared. It’s the same one she used to use in all of her auditions. It is amazing how easily the lines came back to her, the words engraved somewhere in her distant memory. It’s the piece from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the first play that made her cry. She and Sam were trying to have a baby when they went to see it at the Old Globe, and Honey’s hysterical pregnancy, the loss of something that wasn’t even real, was so vivid to her then. Everyone thought Honey was crazy, but Mena knew exactly how she felt.

  She looks in the rearview mirror as she parks in the dirt lot behind the Town Hall. Her face looks older. She can’t remember the last time she really looked in the mirror. She’s worn the same makeup for so long, she barely needs a mirror to put on the brown kohl eyeliner, the mascara, the smudge of blush. Her eyes look sad, turned down at the corners. There are lines now at their edges. She blinks hard and clears her throat.

  Inside the Town Hall there are about twenty people milling about.They all seem to know each other. She finds herself quickly sizing up the competition, an old habit from back in the days when she was always auditioning for something. One woman is about six feet tall with dirty blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. She’s rail thin, and her face reminds Mena of a horse. The woman she is talking to is her polar opposite: short, round, with a black bob and moon face. There are several men sitting together in folding chairs, chuckling and drinking coffee. Most of them are older, probably auditioning for the part of the Old Man. There are a couple of high school girls giggling in a corner, skinny girls in sweatpants and sneakers, messy ponytails. A young woman in glasses, sipping coffee from a ratty plastic travel mug. A guy about her age, reading a newspaper: black hair, the scruff of a new beard. And a woman she is pretty sure is in charge of things, bustling about with a stack of scripts and a clipboard.

  “Do I need to sign up somewhere?” Mena asks the woman who approaches her.

  “Yep, just put your name here,” she says, gesturing to the sign-up sheet. “You here for the summer?”

  Mena nods. “We just bought a place up at Lake Gormlaith.”

  “New York?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Are you from New York?”

  “No,” she says.

  “Oh, most summer folks up here are from New York.”

  Mena is uncomfortable. Maybe she should just turn around and go home. “I’m Mena,” she says instead, smiling and offering her hand.

  “Lisa,” she says. “I’m directing the show. Do you have a monologue?”

  “I do.” Mena nods nervously, reaching into her purse for the tattered script. Just in case she couldn’t conjure up the lines from memory.

  “What we’ll do is let you do your monologue, and then if we decide to have you stay for callbacks, we’ll ask you to read for the specific part.You know there’s only one female character in this play?”

  Mena nods, feeling deflated.

  They audition for the Old Man role first. She finds herself assessing each of the actors: too tentative, too quiet, too loud, too over the top. She figures it will be the man she saw smoking a cigarette on her way in. He’s got a great gravelly voice, kind eyes. They’ll need to work with him on his projection though.

  Next they audition for Eddie. There’s a kid, maybe twenty, who is painfully flamboyant. He ends his monologue from Rent with a deep bow. A few guys mumble through their parts and then the guy with the newspaper stands up.

  “I’m Jake Rogers, and my monologue is from Shepard’s Buried Child.” His voice is quiet, a little unsure. But as he speaks, he seems to gather confidence. By the time he has finished, Mena looks at Lisa and sees that she is grinning. This guy is good. Really, really good. Even for a community theater. He sits back down when he’s done and picks up his paper.

  They audition for the role of Martin, a small part, and then for May.

  Mena is the last to go for the women. The others—the tall one, the short one, the high school girls—are not as bad as Mena had anticipated. The woman with the long face does a piece from Streetcar that could have been a train wreck but was actually pretty moving. Mena stands up and feels her knees quaking. It’s just a silly community theater audition, she reminds herself as she walks to the front of the hall.

  “I’m Mena Mason, and I’ll be doing a monologue from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

  Lisa nods, signaling for her to begin. And then, as the first lines come, she loses herself. The words are like magic, transporting her. She is Martha, drunk and angry and frustrated. She is desperate and fierce. She thinks about what happened between her and Sam the other night. She recollects that wasted rage. When she is finished, her heart is beating so hard she’s sure that everyone will hear it. That it will give her away.

  Lisa asks everyone to hold on for a few minutes as she and the assistant director, a kid who is probably home from college for the summer, make the first round of cuts.

  Mena goes outside for some fresh air. It is dark outside, the porch light the only illumination. “That was great,” the short woman with the black bob says. “You act before?”

  “A little bit.” Mena smiles. “Your piece was lovely too.”

  “They should pick you for May and Jake Rogers as Eddie, but they don’t really like to cast summer people. The locals get mad if they don’t recognize the actors.”

  “Oh,” Mena says.

  “Good luck.” The woman smiles warmly. “You do really deserve the part. Don’t take it personal if you don’t get it.”

  It seems like forever before Lisa calls them back in. “We’d like Oscar, Frank and Larry to stay. Jim, Kyle and Jake. Hanna, Ashley and Mena. The rest of you, we need a crew. Stage manager, props, costumes, that kind of thing. If that’s not your thing, we’re doing Oklahoma! again this fall, and we’d love to have you back.”

  “I’ll stage manage,” the girl with glasses says.

  Mena feels an old rush of excitement as she stands up to read lines, first with Jim (a lanky guy with cowboy boots) and then with Jake Rogers. She thinks she’s doing well, but she is incredibly nervous—as if getting this role suddenly matters more than anything in the entire world.

  “Okay, everybody,” Lisa says after about an hour of mixing and matching of actors. “I’ve got your numbers.We should have our decision by tomorrow night. Rehearsals start on Tuesday and run for six weeks. The show opens August sixth and runs three weekends.”

  In the car on the way home, Mena sings. She used to do this when the kids were small, drive them around at night to try to get them to sleep. Especially Finn. He was so restless. She’d drive from their house to the freeway, north on the 5 to La Jolla, and then back again. Usually she could get through the entire sound track of Grease or Godspell or The Music Man before Finn fell asleep. Franny was easier. Always so much easier.

  When she pulls the car into the driveway, she sees the light on in the loft. The lights in Finn’s room are out. She opens the door quietly; if Sam is working she doesn’t want to disturb him.

  “You back?” he asks.

  “Uh-huh,” she says.

  She should tell him, share this with him. She remembers the way it used to be when she came home from an audition, buzzing the way she is right now, hopeful. They’d stay up half the night sometimes talking about what would happen if she got the big part in the new Scorsese film, whether or not he might be able to go with her to whatever location they would be shooting at. Before the kids were born, there was always the possibility of something big happening. At any moment, their lives might become enormous.

  But she can’t tell him. They have an unspoken agreement between them now. They are not allowed
to get their hopes up anymore. It’s too hard when things don’t work out. The disappointment is too much to bear. They’ve made the mistake of optimism before. The error of wishful thinking. And so she says, “I’m exhausted. I’ll leave a light on. Good night.”

  Finn doesn’t know anything about growing weed. In San Diego, Misty could always get them hooked up. He actually met her when he was looking for pot. It was Christmastime last year, only about six months ago. It was at a party somebody was having up in Mission Beach; he’d gotten a ride up there in the hopes of scoring a dime bag for Christmas. He’d started smoking pot to help him sleep at night, but now he liked the sort of peace and quiet it brought to his brain during the day too. The forgetting.The possibility of having to endure their first Christmas without Franny straight was not an idea he had wanted to entertain.When he walked into the party, he recognized Misty from school right away. He couldn’t figure out who she could possibly know here. The crowd was all surfers and burnouts.

  “What are you doing here?” he had asked her.

  “Same thing you are.” She shrugged. “My friend Mary Jane invited me.”

  She said she knew a guy who knew a guy, and a few minutes after disappearing into a bedroom at the back of the house with Finn’s money, she came out with a small bag of weed and two beers.

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said, looking around as if there might be some reason to stay, and then took his hand. They walked to the boardwalk and sat down on the seawall.

  She was pretty high on X that night, and she just wanted to kiss. For hours and hours they kissed. He remembers the way the boats in the bay were lit up, like floating Christmas trees. She lit a joint , inhaled and then kissed him: blowing the smoke into his mouth as she did. And then there was that warm happiness, that lovely distraction. He could have stayed like that forever, the sand cold on his feet, her hair warm in his hands.

  He loves Christmas at the beach. A lot of people might think it would be weird to be somewhere so warm during the holidays. That Christmas couldn’t be Christmas without snow. But it’s all he’s ever known. White lights in all the shops. The giant tree decorated with beach balls by the pier. The Christmas parade down Newport Avenue: Cub Scouts and bagpipers, the Geriatric Surf Club, the hot rods and Harleys. Sometimes it would be cold enough to need a sweater, and they’d get hot chocolate from the Lighthouse, the ice-cream shop near the end of the street. Christmas in San Diego was Franny’s favorite time of year too.

  After Franny started taking ballet, Mena would take them to see The Nutcracker at the San Diego Ballet every year. Finn used to bitch and complain, ballet for Christ’s sake, but Mena insisted that they all dress up and go. And it actually was kind of great. Before the performance, they’d have dinner at Mr. A’s. It was the one time every year that they went somewhere fancy for dinner. Mr. A’s was at the top of one of the buildings near downtown. From up there you could see all of San Diego: the bay, Balboa Park, even Coronado. And the best part was that the airplanes landing at Lindbergh Field flew so close, you could almost see the people inside. His father always got the duck, and his mother always got salmon. Franny ordered lobster tails. Every single time. God, they were such creatures of habit. Finn ordered something different every year. After dinner, they would go to the ballet, which, though Finn would never admit it, was always sort of magical. Franny watched the ballet on the edge of her seat, her eyes reflecting the lights. Rapt.

  “I want to be Clara,” she said. Determined. Certain. And then, when she was twelve, she got the role. The youngest Clara ever cast.

  That year Finn and his parents went alone to Mr. A’s, and it felt strange without Franny there. It was never just the three of them anywhere. Without Franny, it was like they didn’t know what to say. How to act. Finn ordered the lobster that year, but he didn’t like it very much. He had them package it up for him; he figured he would give it to Franny later.

  Watching her dance was not like anything he’d ever seen. They’d been going to The Nutcracker for ages, but this year was different. He felt the way Franny must have felt: transfixed. Mesmerized. He sat at the edge of his seat the entire time, and at the end, when the cast came out to take their bows, he felt his throat swell up. Embarrassed, he had to squeeze his eyes shut for a second so he wouldn’t cry.

  Afterward, they’d piled into the car together, the entire back of the station wagon full of flowers that people had given to Franny. His parents and Franny were buzzing and laughing. Franny kept talking about how she had messed up during the party scene. She could never, ever accept a compliment, not even when she was a kid. Finn didn’t speak the whole way back to the house. It’s hard to say what he was feeling that night, but now he thinks it might have been the night he realized that Franny was different than he was. That while he was just a regular twelve-year-old kid, Franny was extraordinary. He was so proud of her he could barely stand it; his skin felt stretched tight. But he also felt like she was slipping away. He’d handed her the tinfoil swan with the lobster tails inside, but she said she was too excited to eat. He knows now, that if he’d been smarter, he would have realized that this was the night they started to lose her.

  After his mother takes off into town and his father goes up to the loft to work, Finn decides to sneak out to look at the plants. He hollers up to his dad,“‘Night!” and goes to his room. He turns on his stereo to mask the sounds of his escape. He has discovered that his window opens easily and almost noiselessly; it’s not painted shut like some of the others in the house. And the screen pops out easily too. So in just a few seconds, he’s standing outside. He could run! He could run all the way into town, start hitchhiking back to California. He could be hundreds of miles away before his parents even woke up. But what the hell would he do when he got there? He has friends, but all his friends still live with their folks. Misty’s parents aren’t about to let him crash there. He isn’t even sure if Misty would want him to come back. The last time he talked to her, she’d sighed a lot. He’d been the one doing all the talking. And finally, she’d said, “Hey, I gotta go. My mom’s home.”

  It’s chilly out tonight, but the moon is full and bright. A few more of the camps across the lake are lit up. He imagines that by the Fourth of July this weekend every camp will be full of people. He is careful to walk around the cabin, out of his father’s line of sight, should he happen to look out the window. Finn shoves his hands in his pockets, looks back one more time and then starts walking toward the field.

  It’s dark, with only the moon to illuminate his way. He thinks he should have brought a flashlight with him. He remembers the lighter he has in his pocket and, as soon as he’s out of sight of the house, he clicks it. It hisses and then lights up. He gets to the field quickly and finds the first plant.

  He holds the lighter up to the plant. He has no idea how this green plant becomes the stuff he smokes. He’ll need to do some research. Some reading up. That ought to be a challenge here.

  Franny’s favorite book when they were kids was The Secret Garden. He thinks about this as he makes his way back to the house: Franny curled up in their father’s lap on the couch as he read to her. Finn would sit on the floor, pretending to be absorbed in his LEGOs or Transformers. But he was listening too. He remembers lying in bed at night trying to imagine finding a secret door hidden by ivy behind their house. Franny would like this. He wishes he could tell her what he’s found.

  Sam doesn’t feel anything at first. After Mena leaves he takes two of the capsules with a glass of wine and waits. Finn is listening to music in his room. He can hear it wafting up to him in the loft. It reminds Sam of California. Sublime, he thinks. When he’s sure that Finn is in for the night, he starts looking for something to help things along.

  He’s got no pornography here. No Internet. No magazines. He’d tried this before, a few months back when they were still in California, one night when the house was empty. He’d browsed the Internet for hours. He’d looked at tame stuff: supermodels, bikini mod
els, even artists’ models.When that didn’t work, he’d looked at hardcore stuff too: women with other women, women with objects, women with animals (though that was the result of an accidental click of the mouse). He remembers how it made him sweat, as if he were twelve and stumbling upon one of his father’s Playboys. How it made him blush. But despite his efforts, there was simply nothing. He felt nothing. He had turned the computer off finally, his skin raw from rubbing. His eyes wet.

  He picks a book off the shelf. Anaïs Nin. The old standby. He’d found a tattered copy of A Spy in the House of Love at a yard sale when he was a teenager. There were many nights when he went to bed curled up with Sabina. He could remember the quiet anxiety of turning the lock on his bedroom door in case his father came checking on him. He could remember the headlights from the dirt road cutting through his room in sharp white flashes. He can almost remember the way it felt to be sixteen. Alive. And tonight, as he scans the paragraphs, he does feel something familiar. A relic of some other time. A tingle. An ache. A whisper of desire. Desire, his old friend. He closes his eyes and concentrates.

  As he reads, his heart is pounding hard in his chest, his mind is reeling. He can’t stay focused on anything long enough. Not the words on the page, not on his own flesh in his hands. Nothing. God, this is fucking misery. It’s as if someone has flipped a switch, turned everything that was once electric inside him off. And in this awful darkness, he can’t find the breaker to restore things. He’s stumbling around without a flashlight in an unfamiliar house. Everything is treacherous.

  When he hears the screen door open, he sits up, trembling. He shoves the book back on the shelf. Straightens himself up. His heart is pounding hard in his chest.

  “You home?” he asks.

  “Uh-huh.”

  He wonders when they both started keeping secrets. He used to hate secrecy. He promised Mena early on that with him there was nothing to discover. That he would always tell her the truth. But this was before there were things that could hurt between them. Before there was a need to keep things to himself. She does it too, this concealing. It’s as if they are both constantly, constantly protecting each other from harm. Tonight, he doesn’t know where Mena has been. He doesn’t even feel like he has a right to ask. The rules are different now. Everything has changed.