Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  We were on an unnamed mission, ferocious and tender, giddy and determined. She tucked love notes and flowers, pears and secondhand books in my bag. She could look at me across the room and I would be flooded, my heart beating foolishly at the thought of the sourness inside her elbow or the soft baby hairs at the nape of her neck, the focused concentration of her gaze, the unexpected softening of her face. She could be watching a scene in class with attention and I would be able to see only her face swimming toward mine through a heated haze, to meet up at the pillow.

  Out of class, sometimes all night long, we talked a blue streak. I can’t tell you what we talked about because mostly it was random stuff—careening between the fantastical, the totally specific, and the crazily big picture—like whether there was a limbo and what it would look like; which names of the Greek mythic figures would make good names for cars (the Ford Medea); whether Meryl Streep really was as great an actress as all that (I said yes, in Silkwood, Sarah, yes, in Out of Africa); our family dramas; what names we would give our children (she was partial to Ben and Lily); what rules applied to dreams; how jeans should fit; the relative merits of Chrissie Hynde, Simple Minds, Tom Waits, David Bowie, the Smiths, Stevie Wonder—maybe Sarah’s hands-down favorite—and Nick Drake (“Just no,” was all Sarah had to say about Nick, and when pressed: “Too sad”); absolutely anything we’d read, or heard, or seen; where we would travel and live and how we would spend our lives. Nothing and everything, all-over-the-map talking.

  I can tell you what she was like when we talked. She was like a big cat cub. When she spoke, she snapped off her words, pouncing on her tail, biting it soundly, and then looking up, pleased, not admitting to pleasure. Sometimes we would scrap conspiratorially in conversation, biting one another’s tails until we were caught in a tailspin, round and round in dizzy, batting, contradictory joy.

  She could be very severe. This thrilled me. I wanted to be her target; I wanted her to take me for dinner, to wrestle me down so that I could surrender, neck presented, belly up, her occupied territory, her plaything. I wanted to carry my love for her in my teeth and drop it at her feet a hundred times a day.

  I attempted this in class but only cautiously, only as much as was seemly, by unobtrusively leaving the occasional cup of coffee at her elbow, or a shared sweater at whatever spot she had chosen on the floor. She did not acknowledge any of these gestures directly. She was always focused on the work in the room, serious, attentive, and professional. I had a new ease in classes, brought on by having survived the first round of performances without too much to be ashamed of, but mostly because I was chosen. And more than that, I had a whole new life, a secret splendid explosive life.

  I thought it was a funny thing, our kissing, because as far as I could tell most people didn’t seem to think that’s what we were doing or could be doing. It didn’t occur to people. At the same time I was thinking I can do this and if I could, anybody could. I actually wanted to march up to people sometimes and let them know, no kidding. It made me want to take girls and kiss them on the mouth, because I had discovered that I could and I thought it was very likely it simply hadn’t occurred to them that they could too. Doing this will break your world open, I wanted to say, looking over during class at Emily’s woebegone, overeager face, or Ann’s furrowed, pinched one. You have no idea. There will be a before and an after like no other.

  It’s strange to do something you have never seen done. I didn’t know if it was peculiar to wish this, but I wished there were pictures of Sarah and me kissing. Or a short film with a handheld camera, like the black-and-white ones Titch has of herself running around the yard as a toddler in her striped playsuit, or naked jumping in and out of the wading pool, hamming it up. Not a long film, just to see what it looks like from the outside. I’d never seen two girls kissing, not really. Not in any real sustained way. It felt different from kissing a boy and I knew it must look different too. I do know it was pretty and I wish we could have stepped outside it once in a while to admire, or just to know. I didn’t know I could be so hungry to see something or to have something seen.

  CHAPTER 14

  One person and only one person in the workshop knew almost immediately.

  Three days after Sarah and I came back from the first weekend in New York, all the members of Group 6 were eating lunch companionably outside at the picnic tables, with seagulls screaming occasionally in the background. Sarah was with us, casually, at the far end of the table. I was wearing my hair up at the back of my head, which had prompted a mindless conversation about haircuts.

  “You should cut your hair,” Emily cried, with her usual suffocating enthusiasm. “You would look so sweet with bangs. My friend Paul cuts hair and he’ll be up this weekend. You should totally have him cut your hair.”

  “She’s not going to cut her hair, she’s not getting bangs,” Sarah said abruptly, as though goosed, but reluctantly, into this conversation. “Don’t do that,” she added to me.

  “I’ve got to get back,” she said then, standing gracefully and sweeping up her paper trash in one hand. The others began following suit, chattering.

  Shisha was seated next to me when this happened. She watched Sarah’s departing back with her head tilted to one side, and then turned to me.

  “How long has that been going on?” she asked. She seemed amused.

  Startled but deeply gratified, I said, attempting nonchalance, “Oh, a while.”

  She kept looking at me steadily, a look with compassion, verging, I thought, on something almost like pity, which made me confused and uncomfortable. I felt my face getting hot. I thought maybe I was supposed to say something, but I didn’t know what.

  “What?” I said finally, with more irritation than I meant to. She just shook her head gently.

  I didn’t know Shisha very well, but I knew in a roundabout way that she had a girlfriend. Judith. I’d seen Judith because she sometimes came to collect Shisha at the end of the day. And one day there had been something about the way Judith had her hand on the car door as Shisha got in that smacked of possession, and not of the car. Judith lived in Boston, but she came out most weekends to their rental place in Orleans. She was a slightly terrifying white woman in her forties, skinny and erratic, with a hard, lived-in face, and a throaty laugh. And then there was the day, in the first week of classes, when Shisha had had a long stretch of bruises on her ribs and I asked her how she got them.

  “Oh, Judith loves me,” she said as though that was what I had asked about. She was pulling her T-shirt over her head and spoke through the cloth. “But she’s jealous and she’s got a temper. You know. She can get mean.”

  I did not know, and I shied away entirely from the conversation like a skittish horse. It spooked me. It was actually inconceivable to me at the time that one woman could hurt another this way, so the fact of what she said—what it meant—fell right out of my head the minute she said it. Or maybe it was Shisha herself who made it seem inconceivable, with her happy, deep laugh and those legs that could kick you into next week.

  “Be careful,” she said that day at the picnic tables, with such kindness that I couldn’t take it amiss, although I balled up my napkin in my fist, feeling baffled and cross. I stared down at my feet through the slats in the table. My toes looked blunt and stupid in their sandals.

  “Your first is a big deal,” she said, “that’s all. She looks like a lot of work.”

  “Well, who isn’t?” I said defensively, exhaling heavily through my nose, in a small tizzy. My first? How did she know these things?

  Shisha stood up. “That’s not what I meant,” she said. She sighed. She was very tall, standing there. “Look, I like you,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “By the way,” she called back over her shoulder, when she was about a dozen steps down the road, “she’s right. Never bangs for you, no bangs. Much better without.”

  The only other people who had to kno
w right away lived right next to Sarah. When we got back from New York, whenever we weren’t at the workshop Sarah and I spent most of the time at her place in Wellfleet. It was handy for the program, because all we had to do was roll out of bed and dash into town. Since I could borrow Sarah’s truck for longer trips, I told Titch I wouldn’t need the car. I went back to the Davidsons’ to pick up clothes and to feed the cats, but spent almost every night at Sarah’s. And because Sarah’s life was crowded with people and places to be, my dance card was immediately full as well.

  She lived in a small apartment in the top of a house that had been converted as a result of a Massachusetts program to reclaim old, falling-down houses and transform them into low-income housing. The collection of apartments had year-round tenants paying low rent. Sarah and Eddy were in the top two apartments, and Dennis was on the ground floor. Eddy was the boss at my weekend job at the catering outfit in town, and Dennis was a finish carpenter. The decade that the low-rent order had been in place for the apartments had passed, but no one had moved on or showed any signs of ever moving on, and Luke, technically owner and landlord, showed no signs of asking for more money from the group that was essentially his family. Luke lived in the small house he had built adjacent to the apartments. The three men had all moved permanently to Cape Cod sometime in the previous two decades and they were settled into their ways with and alongside each other. They groused a lot about one another, but in a friendly, grubbing sort of way, the way your favorite uncles talk who drink too much and have grand, failed schemes. A fair number of conversations revolved around winning the lottery.

  The three of them had unofficially adopted Sarah two years before when she first came to the Cape, and now they folded me into the mix by extension and apparently without hesitation. All of them—and everyone else I met who lived year-round on the Cape—worked multiple jobs to stay afloat. At least one of those jobs was guaranteed to be catering to the rich people, the summer people. The people whose houses sat like giant empty insults, dark all winter, huge vacant windows eyeballing the town. Everyone who really lived here turned some kind of trick in the tourist circus, throwing pizza, or tiling floors, feats of carpentry, roofing, bartending, and waitressing. And as far as I could tell everyone had at least one other true vocation: painting, sculpting, translating, writing, making movies, breeding dogs, working a boat.

  Luke was the hub. It was impossible to tell how old he was. He had a thickening middle and a face that had lived outdoors, that had been turned up to the sun, worked out in the sun. There was a picture of him on his strange-fangled Scandinavian refrigerator with its freezer on the bottom. In the photograph he has longish shaggy dark hair, blue bell-bottomed cords, and is squinting happily with his head tilted back in the sunshine. He might be in high school. There’s a crease in the photo that runs across his heart. He looks as though he were stumbling around arms extended feeling the soft air the way girls in elementary school used to pretend to be Helen Keller when they weren’t busy drawing horses in their notebooks.

  The first Sunday after I met Luke he had a big plan, which did not, it would turn out, distinguish that day from any other. The big plan was to build a chicken house. Never mind that he had no chickens. (Details.) He would buy chickens. He would use the chickens to heat the downstairs/greenhouse/basement of his little house and to create a fabulous source of compost. He had been researching how to make this happen and had found a woman on Martha’s Vineyard who had created an ecological system based on a chicken house. He had spoken with her, but had then promptly decided that he could improve on what she did. His construction would be bigger, better, smarter, and more effective, something he was now calling the chicken cathedral. (Chicken house is thinking too small, he had confided to me that morning in the radish row).

  Sarah and I went into town to buy a Sunday newspaper and by the time we came back Luke was stretched out on his back on the lawn fast asleep with one arm thrown up over his face, exhausted by his own ideas. I learned, gradually, that this was the way: the chicken cathedral embraced in a rush might get returned to off and on but would have to share the table with an infinite number of ambitious plans, vying for Luke’s attention like so many mistresses.

  To say that Luke was a guy who knew his own mind is like saying Hitler had some notions. I’d never met someone so set in their ways, so convinced of their rightness, so easily rattled by variation or adjustment. The use of the wrong brush to scrub the dishes brought on palpitations. This didn’t strike me as a sign of age though. He seemed like a person who as a child would have had fixed opinions on everything from how to tie shoelaces, to which was the right glass for juice, to what kind of balls bounced best. He would absolutely have had his own system for winning foursquare. He had shown up an authority. He had reasons, rooted in a science of efficiency and rightness all his own, but at the same time, he was one of the slowest, dreamiest people I had ever met. If his entrenched sense of correctness hadn’t been coupled with enormous pleasure and curiosity about the world, it might have been insufferable. As it was, he did irritate plenty of people. Shoulders stiffened when he helpfully pointed out the better way to nail in a board, or to park a car. Plenty of people—including Eddy and Dennis—couldn’t resist baiting him from time to time, although I always thought this was like shooting fish in a barrel: you could misuse “hopefully” in a sentence, and watch him shudder in his agitation to set you straight. The ease of provoking him made it seem like poor sport. If you listened instead, even marveled at the apparently limitless reach of his idiosyncratic knowledge, you could appreciate the sweetness, the energy with which he responded to the world. Besides, he was inclined to like me, so he often gave me a heads-up so I could defer without being confronted or challenged or corrected. He might say, jovially, “You’re not one of those people who . . . ” (doesn’t know how to clean out a cast-iron skillet; would put any old thing down the toilet and not respect the plumbing; would use a butter substitute). I had a distinct, unexpected advantage with Luke because of my grandmother, who taught me to clean with vinegar and baking soda and to take care of old things, who made a practice of recycling her teabag at least three times and never used the drying machine but hung everything on the line. The information I could bandy about that my grandmother had imparted to me—like how to nibble on red bee balm, or what to do about Japanese beetles—was received with great interest. I would know I was secure in Luke’s affections when he declared one day, She’s not one of those people who doesn’t know how to bank a fire! I was so happy to be not one of those people, to be one of these people, happy neither to agree nor disagree with his dictums but remain mute and contented, buoyed along by his faith that I shared his worldview. I wanted him to love me as he loved Sarah. Loving her had made me love him instantly, emphatically, almost painfully.

  CHAPTER 15

  When we entered the third week of class an array of new teachers joined us for shorter increments, usually for two or three mornings to hold forth on specific topics. On these occasions, the groups were all mixed up together. It was fun to be in the same room as students we had seen only on the night of the Gertrude Stein performances. Two different people came to talk to us about auditioning in the first full week of July, the first a casting director from a New York agency named Marg Hawthorne.

  As we were arriving for the first session on auditions—leaving our bags lined up against the wall, along with jumbled piles of sweatshirts and notebooks, shoes and scripts, water bottles and coffee cups—Nicky Pickler the bean counter sidled over to me.

  She said with characteristic shrewdness, “This woman is a really big deal. She casts Woody Allen’s films and a lot of series. It’s a big deal if she likes you. She’s very well connected.”

  I looked at the woman who was a big deal. Although she wasn’t fat at all, she reminded me of our elementary school librarian, Jean Keen, whose chin capsized into her neck. This woman was small, round-cheeked, with the same combination o
f dryness and softness. Dryness in the skin, but softness in the cheek. She looked like she would know how to train dogs.

  Those students who had headshots had set them out on a long table by the window. Everyone else eyed them with private judgment and curiosity.

  Sarah’s headshot, which she’d told me was an old one, made her look like a young Jane Fonda, not in an idiotic pinup way, but because she had that breathtaking stark naked gaze that Jane used to have, something a little stripped down. Not workout Jane, not 9 to 5 Jane. Jane with the seventies shag haircut that’s so ugly that her face looking out through the hair is even more plainly beautiful. Marg paused in front of the headshot and then looked over at Sarah assessingly.

  “It’s a good picture,” she said, “But it won’t get you any comedy work.”

  Sarah turned pink around the ears, but bent over the picture and asked Marg a question I couldn’t hear, the back of her neck serious and intent.

  In the sleepy slog of that afternoon we had scene work together with Group 4. I was assigned a scene from a Wendy Wasserstein play. Marg Hawthorne presided over us. She sat patiently through various versions of the same scene, in which one character approaches another at the end of their college friendship to say goodbye. The scenes droned on.

  “Why the faces?” Marg asked when we had sat through three versions, everyone lolling on the floor of the library’s spare room and picking at the hairy carpet thread.

  “Sometimes you get stuck with material you don’t respond to, but it’s your choice how you handle it, what you bring to the table. You can make me attend to the phone book if you have to. And you might have to.”