by Tracy Letts
SHRINK: Do you have other things you’re not mentioning?
MARY PAGE: I’m still a person outside of this room, you know. I still live life even when you’re not watching me.
SHRINK: You seem defensive.
MARY PAGE: Because you seem upset!
SHRINK: I’m not upset.
MARY PAGE: Your tone is very accusing.
SHRINK: I want to know why you feel like you need to protect me from certain information.
MARY PAGE: It’s a minor detail.
SHRINK: I don’t consider it minor. Decisions like those, though it may not affect you today, in your day-to-day, they can impact other decisions you’ve made in your life. Does Sonny know? Was it his?
MARY PAGE: No, it was before I met Sonny, it was college.
SHRINK: Does he know?
MARY PAGE: He’s Catholic.
SHRINK: What does that have to do with it?
MARY PAGE: No, he doesn’t know.
SHRINK: But what does that have to do with it, that he’s Catholic?
MARY PAGE: He’s devout. Not devout, he’s a believer. He believes that stuff, he would think that I’m going to hell. I don’t know, maybe not literally. He would have an opinion about it.
SHRINK: So what if he has an opinion about it? Isn’t that a conversation you get to have?
MARY PAGE: Get to have, no, I don’t want to have that conversation.
SHRINK: Why, because you think he’s right?
MARY PAGE: He has his beliefs and I have mine.
SHRINK: And you can’t talk about the difference in your beliefs?
MARY PAGE: I don’t want to.
SHRINK: Why not?
MARY PAGE: There’s a lot we don’t talk about. By agreement.
SHRINK: You’ve both agreed to that?
MARY PAGE: Yes.
SHRINK: Stated agreement.
MARY PAGE: Tacit agreement.
SHRINK: Tacit agreement. So he doesn’t necessarily know what he’s agreed to.
MARY PAGE: There are things we don’t like about each other but it’s not a good idea to pick at all that. We both work full time, we’re exhausted, the freaking kids drive us up the wall. Louis is a disaster, he’s eight years old and still wetting the bed. Sonny and I don’t have the energy to sit around and talk about our feelings.
SHRINK: So you and Sonny don’t discuss the difference in your beliefs, you don’t talk about your feelings, as long as you’re both separate but equal, everything’s fine.
MARY PAGE: Yes. Yes.
SHRINK: Except everything is not fine, is it? I mean, there’s a reason you seek out these extramarital affairs. And you don’t like them, they don’t make you feel better. According to you.
MARY PAGE: My life with Sonny is a life, it’s a part of my life, but it isn’t my whole life, I have a different life aside from my family, and we’ve discussed this, you and I have talked about compartments, and ways in which I might integrate the different lives. Oh, I’m exhausted, this . . .
SHRINK: No, now you’re getting at something, finish that thought.
MARY PAGE: I can’t. “Compartments.” “Integrate.” Now I talk like you. What bullshit words. What a nothing problem. I just found out my college girlfriend Lorna died from breast cancer last month and I’m sitting here talking about compartments. The truth is you and I pretend I make decisions about the direction of my life. I don’t. I haven’t. I didn’t decide on any of it. All of it happened to me, and I went along with it, and I, I . . . I never affected anything, I never altered the course. Like some bird. Like a migrating bird. I just did what seemed natural.
SHRINK: And something about that feels wrong to you?
MARY PAGE: No. (Not challenging) Did I say wrong?
SHRINK: Seems like it bothers you.
MARY PAGE: Eh. Maybe. (Laughs, thinks) Just seems like, why did I bother, you know?
SHRINK: Bother with what?
MARY PAGE: Why would you ever get upset about anything, any decision, any dilemma, any job, any relationship, any anything, why lose sleep over it if it’s all just accidental? Someone else could have written my diary.
SHRINK: You feel that unexceptional.
MARY PAGE: I am unexceptional.
SHRINK: You know, Mary Page, I hear you say this, about feeling—
MARY PAGE: Mm, it’s just Mary now. No Page.
SHRINK: This is new.
MARY PAGE: Mm-hm.
SHRINK: Why did you do that?
MARY PAGE: I don’t know.
SHRINK: You don’t?
(Mary Page shakes her head.)
Well, I find that interesting.
MARY PAGE: Really? Not everything means something. I just got tired of it, explaining it. Spelling it.
SHRINK: But here, don’t you see, you just finished telling me you didn’t feel as if you had agency in your own life, and yet you changed your name.
MARY PAGE: I didn’t change it.
SHRINK: Well . . . yes, you did.
MARY PAGE: I . . . okay, I . . . okay, yes.
SHRINK: You don’t find that significant.
MARY PAGE: I don’t. I do not. (Pause) And if I did . . . if it was significant . . . it’s not very significant. When I talk about not making choices in my life, I’m not talking about . . . appearances.
SHRINK: So what are you talking about?
MARY PAGE (Exasperated): Really? You don’t know?
SHRINK: You tell me.
MARY PAGE: Ughh . . . I, I don’t, this is the stuff that just feels like navel-gazing to me, and I—
SHRINK: Well, here we are, you’re here, let’s . . . gaze at it.
MARY PAGE: Okay. Sorry, what’s the exercise?
SHRINK: You’ve said that you don’t feel you’ve made choices in your life. And I want to know what would your life look like if you could make all the choices. Make them, remake them. Tell me, if you’re calling the shots, calling all the shots.
MARY PAGE: Okay.
(Long pause. Thirty seconds, actually.)
I didn’t do a good job of saying what I meant originally. Anything I say now is going to sound small, and immature. Because if I say, oh I’d live in Paris, I seem shallow, like my surroundings are the cause of my problems, or like I’m grousing about the lack of opportunities when I know in reality I’ve had a lot of opportunities. I just think that as a woman, a lot of our roles get stipulated for us, and there’s only one way to be a wife, be a daughter, be a mom. Be a lover. Even my affairs, you know, you’d think that might be the one area of my life where I could break out and just be the person I am without the play-acting, because you don’t have anything invested in the affair, there’s no future or potential, so why not just drop it and be who you really are, but even there, I’m acting out a part, this easy girl, kind of dirty, won’t make trouble. And it’s horseshit, it’s just playing a part for whoever the guy is, acting for him like the reason I’m doing this has something to do with sex. Sex with him, specifically, like he has anything to do with it. I mean the sex is fine, all of it works, and maybe I even get turned on by breaking the rules, but none of that is why I’m there. I’ve never once, not once in my life, had sex because of lust. The only reason I’ve ever had sex is shame, guilt, power, attention. No one will ever know that. No one is ever going to see me. Sonny and the kids are never going to see me. I’m not the person I am. I’m just acting like a person who is a wife and a mother. I know what that means, I know the levers to pull to be that person. I’m a great actress.
SHRINK: You’re not the person you are.
MARY PAGE: No.
SHRINK: Then who are you?
MARY PAGE: I don’t know.
SHRINK (Quietly): What I’m asking you is, who is the person pulling the levers?
MARY PAGE: I don’t know.
SCENE 6
2015.
Mary Page Marlowe is sixty-nine.
The Nurse (Mary) is younger.
A hospital room. Lexington, Kentucky.
NURSE: You eat lunch yet?
(Mary Page rolls her eyes. Beep. Nurse removes the thermometer.)
MARY PAGE: Do I still have one?
NURSE: You want lunch?
MARY PAGE: Do I still have a temperature?
NURSE: Yeah, just the same.
MARY PAGE: I ate lunch. It was awful.
NURSE: Did you eat it? What did you have?
MARY PAGE: Yes, I ate it. Turkey and gravy. The gravy was glowing yellow. It looked like something from The Nutty Professor.
NURSE: Did you want something else?
MARY PAGE: No. Are you new?
NURSE: No, I normally do weekend nights here.
MARY PAGE: What’s your name?
NURSE: Mary.
MARY PAGE: Hi, Mary.
NURSE: Hi.
MARY PAGE: I’m Mary Page.
NURSE: I know. Where’s the Page come from?
MARY PAGE: Family.
NURSE: Was that your daughter in here?
MARY PAGE: How could you tell?
NURSE: She looks just like you.
MARY PAGE: You got kids?
NURSE: Mm-hm. Five.
MARY PAGE: You do not have five kids.
NURSE: I do.
MARY PAGE: Can you remember all their names?
NURSE: Yeah.
MARY PAGE: You look too young to have five kids.
NURSE: Not really.
MARY PAGE: Well . . . I’m happy for you. Five children, that’s a bounty.
NURSE: Big family. My grandmother has two hundred great-grandchildren.
MARY PAGE: Wow. She was fruitful, and multiplied.
NURSE: Yeah. She’s still in Guatemala. But we’re all going down there next year.
MARY PAGE: Wow.
NURSE: You got other kids or is your daughter your only one?
MARY PAGE: Just one, just Wendy. She has two kids. Small family. My husband said, “We’re like the Kennedys but without the children or the power or the money.”
NURSE: What does your husband do?
MARY PAGE: He’s dead.
NURSE: Oh.
MARY PAGE: So he doesn’t do much.
NURSE: I’m sorry.
MARY PAGE: He died a few years ago. Four years ago.
NURSE: I’m sorry.
MARY PAGE: I miss him. We weren’t married that long, just a few years. He was my third husband. I wish I could have found him sooner, but . . . doesn’t work that way.
NURSE: Three husbands.
MARY PAGE: Yeah.
NURSE: Can you remember all their names?
(Mary Page laughs heartily.)
MARY PAGE: Andy. He was the best one. (Pause) I’m dying. (Pause) It’s okay. I know it. You can say it. It’s okay. I’m ready.
NURSE: That’s good.
MARY PAGE: I’ve had a good life. I’ve done a lot of the things I wanted to do. There were some places I wish I could have visited, but. I still got to go some places, see some things. I liked my work.
NURSE: What did you do?
MARY PAGE: I was a CPA.
NURSE: Oh. You liked it?
MARY PAGE: Yeah, I liked it. I never made a lot of money, and the politics in the office could get pretty . . . I struggled with a lot of that. But I liked doing taxes.
NURSE: Really? That seems like the boring part.
MARY PAGE: No, that’s the interesting part of the job. Client comes in, drops a shoebox full of paperwork on the desk, “I made this much,” feds withheld this much, and all of it seems pretty impersonal, but then you start to get into that shoebox and pick apart that paperwork—this receipt was for this dinner, this charge was for this birthday present, this was for flowers, this was for travel—like working a puzzle and putting the pieces in place—and sometimes it all comes together. All the numbers add up.
NURSE: Do the numbers always add up?
MARY PAGE: No. The numbers do not always add up. (Pause) I wasn’t a great mom. But I liked it. I liked being a mom.
NURSE: So . . . no regrets, that’s good.
MARY PAGE: I didn’t say that. Couple of doozies. But who doesn’t? Who wouldn’t do some things different if they could?
NURSE: Right.
MARY PAGE: It takes such a long time to figure some things out.
NURSE: What did you figure out?
(Mary Page smiles, looks away, shakes her head. The Nurse hands her a box of tissues.)
MARY PAGE: Thank you, Mary. (Pause) What are your kids’ names?
NURSE: Felipe, Marina, Sofia, Alfonso, and Ernie.
MARY PAGE: Good names. Ernie.
NURSE: Yeah . . .
MARY PAGE: I like it.
SCENE 7
1996.
Mary Page Marlowe is fifty.
Her face is bruised. She wears a soft cast on her wrist.
Her husband, Ray, is around her age.
Their home. Lexington, Kentucky.
MARY PAGE: She says Mr. Lopresto is going to live though he’s in pretty bad shape, still in the hospital. He doesn’t have any close family members raising hell with the DA’s office. Angry family members, especially if they have money, can be influential in things like this. She said that. But Mr. Lopresto is single, he’s a widower, no children, and if he has any close family, no one’s come forward. Um, two things are considered “aggravating factors”: my third DUI within five years, and the fact that I blew a point-three-two.
RAY: Jesus—
MARY PAGE: But she said the DA doesn’t want to go to trial, for a lot of reasons but mainly because I’m a fifty-year-old woman, and so they’re willing to plead me out.
RAY: And so what does that mean for sentencing?
MARY PAGE: The judge still has a lot of discretion. The lawyer says . . . “sentencing guidelines in terms of length of incarceration.” Mmm, “only have to serve twenty percent before eligible for parole.” Eligible. No guarantees there.
RAY: But what are those sentencing guidelines?
MARY PAGE: Five to ten years.
RAY: Oh my God. Mary Page.
MARY PAGE: But the judge apparently still has some leeway. The lawyer thinks I could get ten years, but then if you consider the twenty percent, I may only serve two years. She kept saying “one or two years actual time served,” but she doesn’t know, she can’t make those guarantees.
RAY: I’m, I’m sorry, I don’t know anything about this—
MARY PAGE: Let me finish. Mm, “judge’s discretion . . . fines, community service.” Restitution for the victim, I guess the court can order that I pay a certain amount of restitution. How that would impact any kind of civil suit brought by Mr. Lopresto she couldn’t say. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. And I’ll lose my driving privileges for . . . well, for a long time. Maybe for life, who knows. That’s it.
RAY: What if we fight this?
MARY PAGE: There’s nothing to fight. There is no case that I am going to win in court.
RAY: You could plead not guilty.
MARY PAGE: I would be found guilty. That is a guarantee.
RAY: Why a guarantee?
MARY PAGE: Because I’m guilty.
RAY: A lot of guilty people don’t go to prison.
MARY PAGE: I would be found guilty. They would find me guilty.
RAY: What about the patrolman? Wasn’t he supposed to say what the charge was when he arrested you?
MARY PAGE: He makes the arrest and gathers the information but the charge is determined later.
RAY: Did he read you your rights?
MARY PAGE: You’ve asked me that three times now. Yes. He did.
RAY: He was very rough with you. Isn’t there some option where we could get it thrown out if we could show he had been—?
MARY PAGE: We’d never be able to prove anything like that.
RAY: Why not? You were bruised, you had those bruises on your—
MARY PAGE: I’m still bruised, my whole body is one massive
—
RAY: I’m talking about your wrists, you had those bruises on your wrists from where he—
MARY PAGE: I blew a point-three-two. I can’t get on the stand and challenge the word of the cop. That point-three-two is going to be like a neon sign over my head. I’m sorry, Ray, I am going to do time.
RAY: Is there some sort of facility where you’d be housed with women who are nonviolent, that sort of thing?
MARY PAGE: There is no country club option. I’ll most likely go to the state penitentiary at . . . Pee Wee? She kept saying Pee Wee.
RAY: Pewee Valley, it’s outside Louisville.
MARY PAGE: I’ll be in the general population. She also said I might serve some or even all of my time at County. She said they often put nonviolent offenders in County but that I’d actually prefer the penitentiary.
RAY: Why is that?
MARY PAGE: Um, they have programs, work programs, recreation. Counseling. County is just a lockup and a year or two is a long time to spend in lockup. It’s twenty-three hours a day locked up.
RAY: How soon do we have to make a decision?
MARY PAGE: What decision? There’s no decision. I told her to call the DA’s office and get the ball rolling.
RAY: Why did you do that?
MARY PAGE: I didn’t see the point in waiting.
RAY: The point in waiting is so we could talk about it first.
MARY PAGE: Ray, I’m telling you everything she said, but there’s no decision to be made here. I am going to do this time.
(Pause.)
RAY: Goddamn it, I told you to get some help! Didn’t I?! I told you that your drinking was out of control! You’re killing yourself!
MARY PAGE: Is this why we need to take some time? So you can yell at me?
RAY: Yes! So I could get a chance to . . . fucking deal with this! My wife is going to prison, and I . . . I don’t get a say in it!
MARY PAGE: No. You don’t.
RAY: The night of our wedding, for God’s sake, when you got so goddamn hammered, you passed out at your own goddamn reception!
MARY PAGE: Is this really the time for us to have that argument?
RAY: I was humiliated! Forget everybody else who saw it happen, my mother watched me and Wendy picking you up and carrying you out to the car!
MARY PAGE: I think I’ve apologized for that—
RAY: I’m not asking for an apology! I’m saying it was an indication that maybe something is wrong and that you need help!
