I mentioned this question of whether love requires grand gestures to Tori when she called me that evening to check in on me and try to convince me, again, to bare my soul to Michael one more time, even if he was with Diana now.
“From what I saw last weekend when I was home, I still think there’s a chance for you two. After all, you were both happy until the trip this summer.”
“But we argued all the time,” I pointed out as I combed tufts of the shag throw rug in our bedroom with my toes.
“You squabbled all the time. Because you like squabbling. Squabbling is not the same as arguing. You actually agree on all the big things.”
I looked over at Tori’s empty bed, wishing for the thousandth time that she was there, and flipped over on my stomach, almost squishing Teeny the zebra-striped cat, giving her a good excuse to bite my heel. Not that Teeny ever needs an excuse to bite someone.
“What do you mean, ‘all the big things’?”
“You know—like what’s important in life, what you want out of life. The way the world works and how you deal with it. You and Michael actually think pretty much the same on the big things, and that’s what matters. Yeah, Michael comes from money, but you made too big a deal about that. It’s not like that mattered to Michael,” she said.
I flipped over and sat up, suddenly feeling more awake and aware than I had been since coming home from the Cape.
Tori continued, “But the Baroness in the show is right about one thing: you have to tell your partner how you feel. You don’t need a big gesture, but you do have to be willing to open up and not just snark your way through everything. You have to be … vulnerable … which you hate being.”
I protested, “I was pretty vulnerable the night our relationship crumbled to pieces. I mean, I was naked … ”
“Emotionally naked, George,” she corrected me. “You have to let yourself be emotionally naked. Look, I gotta go, but think about what I said. And Trey thinks Michael is still definitely feeling you, you know.”
“No way,” I said, but a bubble of hope floated up in my chest like a tiny cork in a very big lake. “What makes him say that?”
“Same reason I think so: the way Michael looks at you when you’re not paying attention to him.”
I snorted, “Yeah, I can see how thinly veiled contempt can be confused for undying devotion,” and heard Tori sigh.
“And that is exactly what you need to stop doing,” she said. “Stop turning every feeling into a joke to protect yourself.”
“That’s exactly what I did,” I admitted. “That night especially.”
“And you’re doing it now. So knock it off! Just stop. I love you, but I gotta go.”When her voice disappeared, I hit the “end” button on our conversation but lay there on the floor thinking about it, with Teeny sitting on my chest like a feline succubus.
***
When I got back to school after the weekend, I brought in bags of pumpkin chocolate chips cookies for each of my friends to thank them for being my friends and generally tolerating me even at my worst. Gary ate all of his right away, but Dave said he would save them and put them in his T-shirt pocket. I wondered if he could tell I was making a serious attempt to show what he had called my “gooey center.” Shondra, at least, grinned at me like she knew I was up to something. Diana hugged me with one arm, and Michael just frowned.
I guess my cookies can’t compete with oyster stuffing.
In history class, I thanked Mrs. Parker for the helpful comments and feedback on our project when she returned our papers. She seemed stunned, blushed, and twiddled the beads of her necklace for a moment before moving on to deliver the next group’s grades. Michael stared at me for a moment like I had managed to grow a second head out of my neck and then smiled. I guess he was finding my mood swings amusing.
I guess I found him a little amusing, too, because at rehearsal that afternoon, as I sat in the third row and watched Michael onstage for the first time, I couldn’t help but smile in sympathy at his obvious discomfort. He and his teammates were rehearsing the party scene but were dressed in their street clothes like everyone else today and they were being such good sports at having Ms. Duvall move them about onstage like chess pieces to get the blocking right. (I was learning a whole new vocabulary through the show, like “blocking” and “downstage.”) His self-conscious stiffness would serve him well in the Nazi officer scenes but looked a little too rigid in the party scene. Unless he was playing a social phobic. Surely they had those back in the 1930s. I mean, Freud was Viennese, after all. Watching him try to look comfortable onstage—or at least less like he wanted to escape—made me think about what Tori had said about being emotionally naked and how actors had to bare their emotions; even when they were playing someone so different from themselves they must have to tap into something inside to make it seem believable. Michael’s struggling made me recognize that I wasn’t sure that I could do it, either. I felt for him.
But the self-consciousness seemed to melt away when Diana was on as Liesl, singing So Long, Farewell. She looked so pretty, even in an ordinary soft pink sweater and skinny jeans, and her voice was truly sweet, like a little bird’s. Alicia, on the other hand, caterwauled onstage like a sick moose. It was hard to listen to, and not just because by now I had heard and seen the show so many times I had everyone’s part memorized.
After rehearsal, as I was helping Andy with his boot buckles and overcoat, Spencer came up behind me and announced, “You should be playing Elsa, the Baroness.”
“That is ridiculous,” I told him, patting Andy to send him.
“With you, Elsa would be funny,” Spencer insisted while he tagged along as I herded my little lambs out to meet their mothers in their minivans. “She’d be witty and grand and self-centered. Not whiny and nasal and annoying.”
“Well, Alicia can do self-centered just fine,” I said, waving goodbye to a van full of kids and remembering belatedly that not twenty-four hours before I had sworn to be more emotionally honest, not petty. But what if all of my honest emotions were petty ones, though? I mentally shrugged off that suspicion and reminded him, “She’s going to be fine. And she’s not going anywhere.”
“Oh, well,” he sighed. “Thank you for encouraging that hot group of running boys to join us. For that, you deserve a special place in Longbourne High School theater history,” he added as a red sports car pulled up to the curb. He got in with a wave goodbye, and then Diana and Leigh arrived at my car and I drove us all home, thinking that playing someone “witty and grand and self-centered” might be fun, actually, even if I were terrible at it. I might be just as stiff as Michael onstage, or maybe it was the thing I needed to get out of myself: being someone else for a while. And scripted lines were bound to put me in a lot less trouble than my own words usually did.
***
Two days later, fourteen days before the first performance, Alicia quit the show.
Ms. Duval announced this and as she and Ms. Parris huddled to figure out what to do, everyone shared their theories about Alicia’s decision. From my seat in the audience, I heard Curt scoff, “Maybe she knew she sucked,” and before I could enjoy a good laugh at the irony of this, I saw that Spencer was on the lip of the stage, gesturing toward me.
“Georgia can do it!” he was insisting to Ms. Duvall as Leigh looked on, stunned. Diana, on the other hand, heard and hopped in excitement at the idea while the two teachers tilted their heads and studied me like curious birds. “Georgia has been here every day,” Spencer continued. “She knows the show as well as any of us. And she has a nice voice. At least as nice as Alicia’s. I’ve heard it.”
“I don’t … I can’t … ” I stammered as he and the two directors began waving me toward them.
Ms. Parris sighed out, “What choice do we have, really?” which didn’t exactly encourage me to thank the heavens for making my idle wish to be in the show come true.
“We have two weeks,” Spencer reminded everyone. “Georgia is the only who can
save us.”
Ms. Duvall pushed her glasses up her nose and reached a hand out to pull me up from the darkness.
“I’m not sure we can do it without you, Georgia,” she admitted, and before I knew it, I was onstage, and Diana and Leigh were each squeezing one of my arms and cheering.
Their enthusiasm almost made me feel like I could do it, until a familiar voice—often lovable, often infuriating—rang out from the aisle where Michael had come to rehearsal late.
“Georgia’s going to sing?” he asked, with the kind of horror with which one would ask, You’re going to let that guy cut off your arm? “She’s going to sing? And dance? Georgia?”
I could see his smirk from where I stood, even amid the glare of the stage lights.
I was mortified. Terrified. But I couldn’t back out now, not with Leigh and Diana and Spencer looking so hopeful, not with Michael looking so smug.
“Okay,” I said with a helpless shrug. “I’m in.”
Everyone clapped as I turned red and felt the lower half of my body threaten to collapse. But I kept standing, figuring this was the last round of applause I was likely to hear. It felt good.
I’d be sure to remember it during my first curtain call when people threw rotten tomatoes at me instead.
19 Being the Baroness
I regretted my decision almost immediately, but I couldn’t really blame Spencer for roping me into playing the part. I could have said “no,” and I probably should have, because it turns out that being onstage and acting like someone so completely unlike yourself is really hard, just as I’d suspected when I had seen Michael appear so cadaver-stiff onstage. Now I feared that I’d be just as immobilized by fear—but I had to sing and dance up there. I had to say words that moved the play along. And remember them.
When I shared my worry that I would never make a halfway convincing Baroness with Leigh on the way home from my second rehearsal, she said, “You have to stop focusing on the differences between you and her. That’s what’s making it so hard.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, scratching an itch on my nose with one hand.
“I mean you have to try to find the similarities between you and Elsa. Something you guys have in common. She’s pretty quick-witted, right, in the way she talks to the captain? And she’s pretty contemptuous of Maria at times, thinking she’s just a stupid little nun with no knowledge of the world.” Leigh looked at me meaningfully as I pulled the car up to the curb in front of our house. “And don’t you sometimes think that about me?”
“No! Well, not anymore,” I admitted.
“Just imagine you’re used to getting what you want,” she advised before heading up to her room. “And you want the captain. Think of something you want.”
I figured Leigh knew what she was talking about, and it was pretty easy to imagine something—or someone—I wanted. So when I should have been writing my Spanish essay, I sat on my bed and pored over the script, grateful that Elsa was only key to two scenes, really; I looked for anything she said or did that I could identify with.
I found one right in my first dialogue in Scene Nine. The captain, a rigid, humorless navy man, says to her, “You’re quite an experience for me.” I could imagine, back in the days last summer when he loved me, Michael laughing and saying the same thing when I tried to get him to eat almond cheese or tempeh bacon. And Elsa responds, “Somewhere in you there’s a fascinating man,” which is insulting, I guess, but that’s how I felt about Michael when I first met him. He was a preppie who seemed like the world’s biggest snob until I got to know him. There were moments when he would surprise me, like when I found out about how he had gotten kicked out of prep school to save his friend Los’s scholarship, or when Los and Shondra and I had smoked pot with him in his backyard. And like Elsa the Baroness with the captain, when I’d caught those glimpses of this other Michael, I’d found them exciting. And still did, unfortunately.
So maybe I could make myself talk to Spencer, the captain, as if I were talking to Michael. I would pretend that I could win him back with my wit and charm.
And it must have worked, because the next day when I said those lines much better in rehearsal, Spencer hugged me afterward and said, “I told you, you could do it.”
Singing, however, was an entirely different matter. I can talk, for sure—maybe far too much, in fact—but despite Spencer’s endorsement, I fully believe that I am among those who could not carry a tune in a bucket. And the lyrics to the songs I had to sing as Elsa made it even harder for me. While I had liked the irony of How Can Love Survive, when Elsa sings about romance and drama and star-crossed lovers, I had a much harder time with No Way to Stop It, when Elsa and Max advise the captain to cooperate with the Nazis. That was much harder to imagine myself doing. I didn’t feel confident at all that I could pull off this part of my role, and it didn’t help to see Michael in the wings everyday now, watching, just waiting for me to sing a sour note or fall on my face. At least most of my dance moves were executed on Spencer’s arm, and he was wonderfully supportive, laughing with me every time I turned the wrong way or dipped when I should have swayed. Each day, with each rehearsal, my respect for my sister Leigh grew to titanic proportions. She’d played the lead role in two school productions in a row. She made it look so easy, but it isn’t.
“It’ll be easier when you get your costume,” Diana reassured me. “It helps you get into the part. When I put on Liesl’s dirndl skirt, I felt much more like a little girl. It helped me to feel Liesl’s innocence.”
I was about to tell Diana that she seemed to be just as sweet and innocent as her alter ego so it couldn’t be much of a stretch for her to play the part, but then I realized that she probably wasn’t that innocent, really. Her dad’s very public betrayal of her mother had to have been hurtful and humiliating, and his corruption was a topic on the news every day, at least locally. Instead, I nodded and suggested that she come with me to my appointment with Violet, the LHS graduate and fashion design student who came home to help costume the shows. I was as nervous as Michael and the cross-country team had been when they’d been fitted, because I was pretty sure that Violet had a transformation in mind that would make me virtually unrecognizable and as sick as I was of being me, I wasn’t sure I was ready to be a hot blond aristocrat instead.
When I got to the wardrobe room, Violet looked me up and down and began pulling things from rolling racks. And then we played dress up. I put on ball gowns and fancy, tea-length gowns and elegant everyday dresses from vintage clothing stores and I have to admit it was really fun. Diana took pictures on her iPhone until she had to go onstage and promised to send them all to me.
My metamorphosis continued the next day, when, in between rehearsing scenes, I met with the two local beauticians, also LHS grads, who would be doing our hair and makeup. Brad and Rhonda transformed me into a worldly European goddess in a sleek blond chignon, with brick-red lips, cheekbones to kill for, and lots of black eyelashes. I gawped at my image in the mirror. Cinderella’s fairy godmother could not have pulled off a bigger transformation. If I hadn’t been conscious the whole time I would have sworn they’d grafted some glamorous person’s head onto my neck.
“Parfait!” exclaimed Brad, who seemed to lapse into French when he was excited, and he high-fived his partner, Rhonda, who instructed me, “Go show it off, girl.”
I took a tentative step toward the backstage area, still dazzled by my makeover, and practically collided with Cameron, who didn’t recognize me and stared so hard that I guessed my face was shining bright red even despite all the makeup.
“Whoa!” he exclaimed, and he did not sound unappreciative.
Because Cameron had stopped so abruptly Michael almost bumped into him. He just stared for a few seconds as I felt my insides squirm like worms in a can waiting to be impaled on a fishhook.
Finally, he said, “Wow—you don’t look like you,” giving Cameron a little shove as they walked past.
Spencer reassured me when I
joined him in the wings, “You look like Tippi Hedren. Or Janet Leigh. You know—Alfred Hitchcock-movie blond gorgeousness? Your ex was just slain by your fabulousness.” He, Dave, Gary, and Leigh were more appreciative than Michael, and Diana snapped another picture.
Diana had been right. My total transformation helped onstage; I looked so much like someone else that I couldn’t be myself. It didn’t make me dance any better, but that blond wig made me feel a little more powerful somehow, like there really was “no one quite as wonderful as I,” as I had to sing in my last big scene.
Still, when I was alone in my room at night with all the makeup removed and my own brown hair on my head, I was too nervous to sleep. And I knew that if I tried to draw now after I had sent in my application to the Rhode Island School of Design, anything I put on paper would only make me think that I had no business picking up a pastel crayon, let alone applying to art school. So I dug in my closet and found some knitting needles and yarn from last Christmas when my grandmother had tried to teach me how to knit. I couldn’t remember how to even get the yarn onto the needle to start, but I desperately wanted something to do with my hands so I looked up knitting videos on YouTube and spent a few nights working on the world’s longest and ugliest scarf, with Teeny pulling it apart from the other end as I worked.
As I knit, I kept replaying the sight of Michael gaping at me in my Elsa, Baroness Schraeder costume. He’d said I didn’t look like me. And I couldn’t tell if he had thought that was a good or bad thing. I realized that as happy as I had been to look like someone different, and to pretend to be someone different for a while, I still wanted Michael to like the real me.
***
Snark and Stage Fright (Snark and Circumstance Book 5) Page 18
