Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  I stood in the darkness, stunned, trembling, until I heard my grandmother sigh in her sleep, and I exhaled. I thought, Okay, now I know. She was home but she might as well have been in the Sudan. She wasn’t going to help.

  Worse, she was angry with me, as if I were the only one behaving reprehensibly or letting anyone down here. And if she was mad about being lied to, I had no idea how bad it would be if she knew what I had actually done. She might never speak to me again. I thought, I have to get out of here. I heard Titch’s voice in my head say, Abort, abort.

  I went to my mother later that week and said that I wanted to go away for the summer with Titch to the Cape, that we had a plan and a place to stay, that I wanted to do the drama workshop and I needed her help to pay for it, that I would do anything if I could go. And blessedly all my mother said was, Okay, if that’s what you want to do. She was sitting at the kitchen table, frowning at a pile of electrical bills when she said this, but she never tried to go back on it.

  So at least I had a Plan B and she didn’t squash it.

  CHAPTER 10

  In the first week on the Cape I was going through the motions of the classes, settling in to the house in Truro and spending time with Titch, but running underground alongside and threaded through this, I was secretly, busily, and incessantly feeding my crush on Sarah.

  She didn’t seem even remotely acquirable, but that was beside the point. I had no end goal. I’ve never really connected crushes with outcomes. After all, my first crush was on Ingrid Bergman. She predates everyone else, because I was four when I was allowed to watch Notorious on my grandparents’ fuzzy black-and-white television. I think I was supposed to be asleep on my grandfather’s lap. I usually was because he emanated warmth from his front like a stove, so it was a cozy place to be. But I was awake. Actually, I was spellbound. Her autobiography was the occasion of my first theft from the public library at nine and I stole it mostly because I liked to look at her pictures so much, although her story was a good one too. But her face, that beautiful face: the irresistible soft bit at the end of her nose; the shape of her lips; the look in her eyes, dreamy or kind or full of delight; the way her jaw always looks a little swollen like she’s a glamorous day away from having her wisdom teeth removed. Woody Guthrie wrote a song about Ingrid Bergman. He probably wasn’t the only one, either.

  If I could have, I would have written a song about Sarah, finding some way to spill out what I noticed about her in class in the first days: the sudden smile, exactly as shockingly bright as the sun when it springs out from behind unrelenting clouds; the way her hair fell and the futile, impatient gesture she made of pushing it back; her frown; the way she repeatedly touched her chin with her index finger and thumb, or the back of her hand; her stillness and the guarded way she sometimes held her shoulders; her radiant, controlled intelligence, like the blinding beam of a lighthouse bearing down on you. The softness of her cheek. The springy curl of her earlobe. The way she scowled and bit her lip in concentration. The alert, sometimes wary movements of her head and neck. The way she walked, game, boyish, and straight-ahead. All of it. It was a new variety of desire I was cultivating, just waiting for any opening, any invitation, to break out in wild Technicolor blossoms like some crazy mutant cross-pollinated tropical flower.

  I didn’t try to convey any of this to Titch.

  Titch has never been what you might call a demonstrative person. Actually that might be the world’s biggest understatement. I’ve seen her cry twice. Occasionally, grudgingly, under duress, she might hug someone, but she’s like a cat whose whole body recoils even as it arches upward toward your palm. I can count on one hand the number of times I have hugged her. The last time was about two years ago. At dinner at her house, she got into a fight with her stepfather, Randy, after she stuck a fork into her hamburger, held it aloft, and began eating it delicately around the edges in a circle. He yelled at her about her table manners and sent her to her room without letting her finish her food. I left too in solidarity, found her on her top bunk, and climbed up.

  “You don’t know how lucky you are that your father left,” she said, not looking at me, choked up. “It’s a luxury.”

  “What do you mean a luxury?”

  “The luxury to ignore his existence the way he ignores yours,” she said. The beginnings of a smile crept into her voice. “Or to hunt him down and kill him. Either way.”

  I gave her a hug, which she tolerated, but barely. Because it was one of those astonishingly rare occasions that she let herself be touched, even as it happened I tried not to breathe, not to disturb her. Her ribs were sharp. She pulled away almost immediately and said, “I fucking hate him,” and that was the end of that.

  But when we arrived on the Cape this summer and climbed out into the glaring June sunshine in the parking lot of the Land Ho restaurant in Orleans, Titch linked her arm through mine and pulled me toward her. We were loopy from the long drive, the car littered with empty soda cans and wrappers and crumpled maps and mix tapes. In a moment of completely uncharacteristic affection, she started to sing the theme song from Laverne and Shirley, which we used to sing together on the playground in fourth grade. She sang boisterously, massacring the opening—One two three four five six seven eight shlmiel schlmazel hoffentat incorporated . . . we’re going to do it—and then she spun me around in a circle, singing the ending at the top of her lungs, laughing, And we’ll do it our way yes our way make all our dreams come true (truuuuuue) and we’ll do it our way yes our way make all our dreams come true for me and you. I was so surprised by this that I couldn’t even join in. I was laughing and protesting, fumbling and falling over my feet. With a big closing flourish, her whole face grinning widely at me, she said triumphantly, Hey, look at us, here we are, we made it!

  Which is exactly how I felt, not just as it crystallized in that moment but more and more each day we were there.

  Already in the first week the drama classes were beginning to fall into a rhythm, like the patter of our daily diction exercises. What a to-do to die today at a minute or two to two, a thing distinctly hard to say but harder still to do. Titch delighted in the tongue twisters and would croon, gobble, and chuckle them gently as she went about the house. Rubber baby buggy bumper, she might chant softly while folding laundry. Tell me another! she would cry. Oh, What a to do-to die today. Red leather, yellow leather, red leather, yellow leather. How much wood would a woodchuck chuck? Toy boat, toy boat, toy boat. And sometimes at breakfast, mixed biscuits, mixed biscuits.

  After we had performed together in middle school, Titch had done several more plays with me—most of them in community theatre and one at Dartmouth, as two of the wide-eyed girls in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. But when we reached sophomore year, Titch had taken one class in painting with the pale, fanatic, hollow-eyed art teacher, Arthur Hill—he looked like my idea of Sherlock Holmes, but with ripped jeans and without the hat, tweed, or pipe—and she had promptly dropped everything extracurricular to join the slightly eccentric elusive cult of artheads who lived at the west end of the main second-floor corridor, behind the swinging orange door that led to the art room. “Do you wish you were doing the workshop with me?” I asked her one morning, in our kitchen, at the end of the first week. I was holding a Xerox of a script in one hand and trying not to drip honey on it from my toast.

  “Not a chance,” she said. “Acting used to make me break out in hives, remember? God, even thinking about it now is going to make me come all over in red bumps, just the thought of it. If I were still acting it would make me constipated and give me anxiety attacks. Why are we even talking about this? My heart rate is accelerating. Look at me.” She lifted her chin high and yanked the top of her T-shirt down. Her clavicle was a little pink in splotches.

  “Okay, I get it,” I said, “but you were good at it. And sometimes I miss doing it with you. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “It’s not worth the suffering,” she
said, crossly. “Nobody’s looking at me when I paint. And anyway. I’m right here.” She stood up, cleared her throat, and walked to the counter, cracking the knuckles of both her hands efficiently. She stood with her neck erect, looking out at the bird feeders.

  I used to badger Titch sometimes about why she wanted to be friends with me anyway or even about what she felt about anyone, because she was so staggeringly uncommunicative. Any teasing along these lines always made her clam up, frown, and say she didn’t know, stubbornly.

  If I kept pressing she might say she regretted having chosen me or she might flash all her mouth hardware at me in a grotesque face. It was like being bejesused by a truck horn or lots of shiny lights, like being dropped headfirst into Times Square at night like the giant apple on New Year’s Eve.

  Shut your maw, my grandmother used to say more or less affectionately when I chewed with my mouth open, so that’s what I’d scream at Titch then, Shut your maw! Covering my eyes with my hands in mock horror, like the light from all that metal in her mouth might blind me. Sometimes, if she was in the right mood, she would chase me all around the house with her lower lip stuck way out, gnashing what was left of her teeth.

  It was pretty spectacular in there, the crowning achievement of our infamous local orthodontist, Dr. Palientello, or Dr. Pal as he mirthlessly encouraged his patients to call him. Dr. Pal had taken one look at Titch’s mouth and he’d seen a chance to build something really special, a kingdom all his own with a drawbridge in the form of tiny chains that dangled between her upper and lower teeth. Titch used to make small mournful doodles on notebooks about the horror, the metallic city, inside her head. We made up the names of the tiny people who lived there, their fiefdoms and thwarted romances (it was very Scottish, her mouth).

  Titch used to sing all the time. She would sing her heart out in her damp basement, singing along with musical albums—Annie, Oklahoma, Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady. She loved everything about musicals. She even liked to reenact the musicals with me, whenever she could persuade me to do it. I’m not much of a singer, but I liked being on the makeshift stage of her back porch. We had a good time holding forth there together, and even brought in audiences, mostly family of course. But the dental work wrecked this for her. She stopped singing. She got a little more grudging, like some bitterness had gotten in with all that metal and she could always taste it. She would hide her mouth and duck her head.

  Even just standing at the kitchen window in Truro, she had her right hand up to her mouth, her right index finger curled over her upper lip. Her hands always flutter up to cover her mouth when she smiles or talks or eats or laughs, like a person with a contagious disease who doesn’t want to breathe on you, so that all those years of hard work have almost never been rewarded by the sight of her perfectly aligned teeth. It makes her seem more furtive and cagey than she already is, the way she hides her mouth—and that’s saying something. I’ve never told her this, but her hands are beautiful and that gesture, that habit of shame, is surprisingly graceful.

  “I’ll run your lines with you though if you want,” she offered then, making a face out the window at the bird feeder. “What’s on this week? Is that still Cordelia?”

  “I have to do the Cordelia monologue off and on all summer, but this is a scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream with Helena and Hermia. I’m Hermia.”

  “Isn’t Hermia the little one? Though she be little she is fierce?”

  “Yes. But that’s why they call it acting.”

  “Good luck with that,” she said, laughing. “Now. I’m going to make some coffee because we’re here and nobody can tell me not to and I don’t care if it stunts my growth. Also, I really like it. Don’t tell my mom. Do you want some? I think you have time before we head in. Besides if you’re going to play Hermia, you could use a little stunting.”

  I crossed my eyes at her, and she laughed and grabbed two mugs from the cupboard that were cheerily monogrammed Jennifer and Jeremy. When she had filled Jennifer and presented it to me, she intoned, “Go forth, oh little one. Be fierce. And bring me home another tongue twister.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Every morning we had movement and vocal warm-ups of various kinds led by a rotating set of characters, including Sarah in her capacity as our group’s assistant. Then we spent the three hours before lunch with a visiting artist, usually a director, acting coach, or a movement or voice specialist. In the afternoons we worked primarily with the core group of resident teachers who circulated between the groups from week to week.

  At the very end of the first week, which we in Group 6 had spent primarily with Bertie Benbow, all six groups gathered to meet the visiting directing instructor, Mary Olden, who would be with us for week two. I had overslept and was late to class. She turned out to be a woman in her fifties who had a body like a baby elephant. She talked about the tension between what you see and what you hear on stage, about how it’s more interesting to see someone look at their watch as they say I love you than to see someone blowing a kiss while saying I love you. She asked us to provide a creative visual analogy for the class, for what we were doing at that moment. I raised my hand.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “We’re cannibalizing,” I said. “It’s like we’re standing over the operating table, dissecting your parts, trying to figure out whether what’s in your liver is useful, you know, poking around for knowledge, inspiration, ideas, maybe whole organs to consume.”

  She laughed abruptly, almost angrily. Her eyes were cold and heavy-lidded, like the eyes of a reptile.

  At the end of class I asked her what I’d missed.

  “Get the assignment from someone else,” she said, and walked on, lumbering up the stairs.

  What I’d missed was an assignment to create a composition over the coming week using at least two of the elements—fire, water, earth, air—and specific chunks of text from Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts, which I found incomprehensible.

  “But that’s what’s liberating about it,” Doug said in our small group when we sat around on the floor trying to figure out what to do.

  “Yeah, liberating,” drawled Shisha Pope, who was tall and black and beautiful, with astonishingly well-muscled legs that went up almost to my shoulders. She was commanding on stage, although she didn’t always know what to do with her hands, which, like her feet, were large. She could be very silly and had a fabulous deep giggle, but she was serious when she was working and she scared the shit out of Doug.

  “Don’t you think so?” he asked, turning to me. He had flushed a deep, determined red.

  I murmured something indistinct. Doug, the overeager mouth-breathing Edmund from the first day, had taken an unfortunate shine to me.

  Nicky Pickler, a skinny blonde dancer with a dancer’s tics and grace, said, “I think we should just figure out who’s saying what. Just assign the text.”

  Nicky liked to look bored and above everything, but she was always checking everyone else out. She had beady little eyes that roved up and down everyone, constantly. Sarah had told me on the day we went out for coffee that she had privately nicknamed Nicky the bean counter, and I was so grateful for this confidence that I found myself regarding Nicky the bean counter with great warmth, which undoubtedly confused her.

  “I don’t think there’s an easy or obvious division though,” Ann said.

  “I think we should do something in the ocean. You know, to embrace the elements!” Emily volunteered. A spasm of pain crossed Shisha’s forehead, which happened almost every time Emily spoke.

  Early on, maybe already on the third day, Emily had asked if I wanted to get lunch and I said sure, okay. The instant we were walking out into the sunshine, I knew it was a mistake. She smelled powerfully of patchouli and neediness. While we ordered from Mac’s window, I remembered the previous day’s class in Improvisation with Jorge Meringue, a high-energy teacher of the kind that makes
me most apprehensive. He had us throw out a word to the person standing up in front, who would have to riff on that word, doing a kind of physicalized monologue made up on the spot, with certain verbal and physical constraints, like not using the word “and” or hopping on your left foot. (Sometimes I think acting teachers create these exercises for their own sadistic entertainment. For instance, I know that’s true whenever they want you to be an animal. I hate a lot of things, but that is way, way up there on the list. If you saw what it was like in a room with students bouncing about as rabbits or pretending to prowl like cats or wriggling over carpets like snakes, you would understand exactly what I am talking about. I bet people—perfectly talented people—have left the acting profession altogether because they were asked to be an animal one too many times. I am not kidding.) In the improvisation exercise yesterday, when Emily stood up for her turn, buoyant like a sturdy balloon, someone yelled out the word, euthanasia. She started talking, bouncing her hips from side to side and it took a moment before I heard snickering and realized that she was chattering earnestly about the hardships of children in Asia. YouthInAsia.

  My French fries were cold almost on arrival and I pushed the plastic basket away.

  “Are you going to throw that out?” she asked me, in an edgy way.

  I watched her eat them two at a time. I was thinking about friendship, about how unlikely it is and how much I don’t really like people. Emily jiggled nonstop, and had a habit of making a small noise in her throat, a small grunting sound. She could not go more than a minute or two without making it, although she seemed to be totally unconscious of what she was doing. I got so I couldn’t hear what she was saying when she was speaking because I was anticipating that sound so much. All I could hear was the pulsating erratic muted bass line of grunt . . . grunt and each time, I tensed with irritation and dread. At least when she ate there was less of this noise. During the reprieve I looked over at her carefully.