Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  It happened when I wasn’t paying attention, during the stretch of weekdays when I was inside, cantering to trochees, rehearsing lines, breathing into my soft belly, or on Saturdays, cutting baguette rounds, washing endless dishes, staying up very late at night. Sometimes I liked the mindless rhythm of cutting and chopping at work, the washing and drying, the squawking radio perched above the giant double sinks, the soapy water underfoot, the clatter and bang and smell of frying. Increasingly, with the arrival of summer, there would be a whiff of the outside, especially in late afternoon, of the lazy sunshine and, just out of reach, the sea coming in through the screen. That made work a little harder.

  Then one day I stepped out the back door of Jake’s Edibles to join Eddy in the gravel by the dumpster where he was smoking. The screen door whined and banged, and the world broke open over my head.

  I said, “It’s summer,” blinking, dazzled. Eddy just squinted at me, not unfriendly, and sucked in hard like his cigarette was an asthma inhaler or the very dregs of a joint. Eddy was a good enough guy, not talkative, with a slight hangdog look. He never had much positive to say about the Cape, although he had spent his whole life here and had lived in the apartment next door to Sarah’s for the last ten years. If you didn’t know he was a co-owner in the catering business, you’d never have guessed because he was kind of diffident and hollowed out, like maybe he didn’t get USDA pyramid nutrition in his formative years. His skin was slightly yellowed and he sucked on his teeth when he worked, but in the kitchen his hands flew. He was very, very fast. He was not exactly a fan of Sarah’s, although he wasn’t mean about her. They seemed to have a mild, joking antagonism. When he saw me watching the screen door for her he said once, A lot of trouble. I ignored this because it was my trouble and if it was trouble, if she was trouble, it was trouble I wanted. Besides, although he seemed unprepossessing to me, he was rumored to have had a long string of random girlfriends and he didn’t seem like a particularly reliable guy to be dispensing romantic advice. We stood outside basking, in amicable silence.

  All my life I have felt like spring is a relentless gauntlet of budding and blooming, growing and chirping; it assaults you. That busy, feverish cheer gives me a hectic, fractured lonely feeling, a sick sadness, a real spring fever. Even when there are moments of exhilaration, spring is still a hard, bright green, indigestible lump in the chest, the whole rabbit that the python swallows.

  Summer is different. If you pitch forward into spring, you fall backward into summer. It’s a wide expansive hammock, an endless space, a cavity opening under your feet. When I was little it was terrifying because there was no end to summer, no clear definition or way to navigate that wide open green madness, nothing but dreams and heat and loneliness yawning in front of you from the end of one school year (the screen doors in, the lilacs blooming) until the start of the next (a dark narrow promise, a shutting down in the fall). The space in between school was the distance to the moon, measured in broken book spines. But this year, this summer, for the first time in my life I wanted to drag my heels in the dust, to make hard grooves, to slow the time down.

  What this meant is that whenever Sarah said, “Let’s—” I would say yes. There was all the time in the world and still not enough time in the day, the summer, the universe for her. So that hot Saturday night when she said, Let’s go to the drive-in, I said, Yes. Let’s.

  We got there after the first feature had started, and the air outside had begun to move a little, the promise of coolness coming in through the truck’s rolled-down windows. Between the two movies, I went over to the concession booth and waited in line on the trampled grass. Almost immediately I saw Titch walking toward me with Camille, the first person I had spoken to—or rather who had spoken to me—on the very first day of the drama workshop, and a few times since in passing. I said, “Hey!” And Camille nodded her head at me gloomily. Titch stopped behind me in line and Camille continued on in the general direction of the restrooms without pausing. When she’d gone by, I tried to smile at Titch, but she didn’t smile back at me.

  I said, “I didn’t know you guys were hanging out. She’s gone to smoke, right? She smokes like a chimney. Camille.”

  Titch just stared in the direction of the lighted counter in front of us, at the backs of people’s waiting heads, as though I had not spoken.

  I said, “You know she listens to Twisted Sister too. It’s not ironic either.”

  When she still didn’t turn her head, or speak, or crack a smile, I said, “What is this, the silent treatment?” And her eyes finally swung toward me.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, “are you talking to me? Are you trying to be funny? Because you’re not funny, Nina.”

  “Okay,” I said, startled, raising both hands in mock surrender.

  Titch was looking hard at me now.

  “What?”

  “Did you get my message?”

  “No,” I said, but for some reason it didn’t sound at all believable as I said it. I was thinking guiltily that the light had been blinking on the machine when I had gotten back to the apartment that afternoon, and I had ignored it.

  “Okay.” She looked away from me. The big screen behind her had begun to flicker to life again with the opening credits of the second movie.

  “What did you call to say? Is everything all right? Titch?” And when she didn’t answer, “What’s the matter with you?” I asked, irritated.

  She snorted. “You’re such a jerk, you know that?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. What did I do?”

  “It’s not so much what you do,” Titch said, “as what you don’t do.”

  “Yeah?” I said, exasperated. “Like what don’t I do?”

  “Well, you don’t call. You don’t come home. You don’t listen to your messages. You don’t talk to me. You disappear. You know, little things.”

  “I’ve been really busy, Titch,” I said, and my voice sounded self-righteous and unconvincing.

  Her face was lined with contempt. I wanted to smack her.

  “Anyway, you’re here having a good time, right? Maybe you should just do that.”

  “Yeah,” she said evenly, sarcastically, “why don’t I do that?” And she turned and stomped away from me.

  I stood there with my arms dangling, like a fool, watching her leave.

  Titch abandoned me in the second half of eighth grade, after we’d been best friends for four years. It was the worst, really the worst pain I’d felt at school until that point. I would roll over in the morning, my legs leaden with despair, and lie there in a tangled, cobwebby haze for a few minutes before I’d remember what was wrong.

  She had taken up with a cluster of popular girls who all wore L.L. Bean boots and men’s tweed overcoats from vintage stores. They weren’t staggeringly pretty individually. Once I was lab partners in Chemistry with one of them, Nicole Peske, and close up I was surprised to find she was not particularly shiny or remarkable. She had kind of a squashed nose, thin lips, and one of her eyes was smaller than the other. But collectively all their shortcomings were more than equalized. Any flaws only added miraculously to their combined sheen. The sheer devastating power of all of them bunched together—with their long gleaming hair, their laughter, their linked arms, their eyes all turning toward you at once—it could flatten you like a truck. Just thinking about it would make you want to shrivel up and die. When they walked down the hall headed out of the school it was like a flock of barn swallows turning tail, all their matching coats flaring out behind them.

  I had fantasies of becoming a knife thrower and felling them one by one with a knife lodged smoothly, and hard, between their tweedy shoulder blades. I would round the bend in the hallway by the senior lockers, dressed like I was in a western. (Like the cowboy on the cover of my grandmother’s paperback copy of Owen Wister’s The Virginian, which I was reading at the time. Right down to the
boots and spurs and the shadowed face. I imagined it like that.) My knives would split the air, brilliant indecipherable flashes, whizzing by the principal’s office. I could see how one after another each girl’s mouth would be caught in a wide open O, her arms flailing out in slow motion, her body plunging forward facedown, one after another, all of them, downed like so many bowling pins. I even practiced knife throwing in the garage with an old rusty Swiss Army blade that I found in the toolshed, until once I scratched the side of the jeep enough to warrant notice. I had so much hatred and violence in my belly for them that sometimes I thought I would throw up. I thought I might even enjoy throwing up.

  All I ever did in retaliation really was to steal stuff from Titch’s locker once or twice. Her locker combination was my birthday, and mine was hers. When I discovered she hadn’t changed the combination my throat seized up. I took her calculator, which I disemboweled in the driveway before burying the evidence, and one of her mittens, which I cut into small pieces and then flushed down the toilet for good measure. Also I prank called her home in desperation over and over. Once her mom answered and said kindly, Is that you dear, into the phone, which left me silently gasping with anguish like a hooked fish. Anyway Titch came back to me the next fall, which now that I thought about it probably gave me a false sense of my own power. In this moment, as I watched her narrow back disappear into the milling people at the Wellfleet drive-in, I didn’t want her to go but I didn’t want to go after her.

  “I just saw Titch,” I said to Sarah, when I got back to the truck.

  “Are those Junior Mints?” she said. “Really? Well, where is she? Oh, peanut M&M’s. That’s more like it. You take those. Does she want to join us?”

  “No,” I said, “no, she doesn’t. She came with Camille. And anyway, she’s mad at me.”

  Sarah raised an eyebrow. “About what?”

  But at that moment a building exploded on the screen and her attention jumped forward. “Noooooo!” she cried, happily. I looked at her profile in the movie light, and laughed. I couldn’t help it.

  When we got back to the apartment that night and Sarah was brushing her teeth in the bathroom, I pressed play on the answering machine. Titch’s voice rose hopefully, uncharacteristically breathlessly from the black box. She sounded about six years old.

  “Hi, um, it’s Titch calling for Nina. Nina, I just wanted to see if you wanted to go to the movies, I was thinking maybe it would be fun to go to the drive-in? I haven’t been since we went to that one in Fairlee, whenever that was. I could pick you up, say around 8? I don’t think it starts till late, um, until it gets dark. I don’t know what’s playing, but I don’t really care. It would be really nice to see you. Anyway, let me know.”

  I called her right then to say I was sorry, but she wasn’t home or she wasn’t picking up the phone. I left a message. She did not call me back. I felt guilty, and relieved.

  CHAPTER 17

  We were already nearly at the fourth week of the program, in the middle of July, with five weeks left of the summer. At this momentous juncture we in Group 6 finally arrived in front of the head of the program, the director Bill McNeil, for the first time. He didn’t look any friendlier or more awake than he had on the first day, but he was all ours for five full days and a kind of thrill of possession rippled through the group. He doled out harsh criticisms and we flocked to him for more.

  “What are you doing?” he asked sarcastically of Doug one day, when poor Doug was struggling through a Chekhov scene. “You are acting like a crazy person. You are like Frankenstein. Solyony is all heart. He might be the heart of Three Sisters. You are strangling the life out of this part. You are turning him into a robot, a soulless, useless, pathetic robot. Don’t take what’s on the page and stop there, like a moron. Don’t you know anything? You can’t play what’s on the page. What’s underneath? I am telling you—I am telling all of you, LISTEN UP PEOPLE—Anton Chekhov is a genius. You should be so lucky to be cast in any of his plays. You are unlikely to find better material in your entire miserable careers than what this playwright delivers. So don’t fuck it up.”

  Doug was his favorite target. I thought Doug might actually make Bill McNeil pull his own hair out. The angles of Doug’s head were so unattractively blunt—like someone had put him together from unfinished slabs of clay—and his breathing was so labored with effort that I frequently felt sorry for him. To his credit, although he huffed and puffed and blundered through his scenes, he never stopped trying.

  Shisha was the only one who could reliably make Bill McNeil laugh sometimes, although he didn’t think she took acting seriously enough—“It’s not enough to half-ass it! I can tell when you haven’t done the work!” he would yell at her—but he left her alone more often than not. Geoffrey too he usually treated more as someone who had already passed a test. The rest of us, though, were on the receiving end of varying degrees of nonstop antagonism and criticism.

  To Emily: “You are going to have to gain a lot more weight, or lose it. You have to be really fat or not at all. Otherwise you’ll never work in this business.”

  To Ann: “You are always like a mouse. A crazy, scurrying mouse. Stop it. Straighten up and stop squeaking. I mean it. I can’t bear it. Your voice is hurting my ears.”

  To Chris: “Jesus Christ, stop trying so hard and being so drippy. It’s painful to watch you. You make me want to kick you. You are like a wet noodle. Stop emoting so damn much. Grow a fucking spine.”

  To Nicky: “I have no idea what you are doing up there. Just none. Are you related to these people? I have no idea. Is this person your husband? Do you like him? Do you wish he wasn’t your husband? Does this seem like important information to you? Did you make any of these choices in this scene? Because I’ll be damned if I can tell what you’re doing. For the love of God. Make. Some. Choices.”

  And I got: “Don’t be so bloodless. Make a fucking mess for Chrissakes. What are you afraid of? There’s no room for fear here. There’s no room for caution. Don’t be so careful. It’s all technique and brain with you. Take some chances. Show me something!”

  And to all of us, almost every day: “What was that? That was abysmal. That was such crap. Oh, God that was bad. There was not one redeeming moment in that entire scene. Haven’t you learned anything, any of you? Go away. Don’t talk to me. Do it again.”

  It was the way I imagined boot camp to be, although to be fair my entire understanding of boot camp comes from the movie An Officer and a Gentleman, specifically the scene in which Richard Gere gets fantastically covered in mud and hosed in the face by his drill sergeant. With Bill McNeil nobody escaped the abuse. But spurred by the criticism, most of us tried to up our game. We also began to feel like we were in the trenches together, in a new way. The best any of us could hope to get from our sadistic sergeant was a kind of grudging noise of acceptance, a “that’ll do” kind of grunting acknowledgment, and if you heard that you’d be high as a kite all day afterward, everyone else shooting you envious glances. Much more often he would launch a full-on attack. We didn’t care; we were converts to the school of Bill McNeil.

  For five days, it was all Chekhov all the time. It was new to me, and I loved it. Somehow what looked so dolefully, beautifully Russian on the page made everyone wildly cheerful in the room.

  Occasionally, Sarah would fling her arms wide—coming down the steps from the apartment for example, on the way to class—and cry out some Chekhovian line, like How are we going to live our lives? She was kidding, and she was not. One time she issued this battle call, and I cried, to match her, “Bravely and hand in hand!” Which she loved, and then that became the answer. Call and response, a game we liked to play.

  How are we going to live our lives? one of us would say.

  Bravely and hand in hand! the other would reply.

  Out of nowhere, the less context the better, with the confidence of angels.

  How are we g
oing to live our lives? Bravely and hand in hand.

  When we had to bid Bill McNeil a reluctant farewell the next week—he did not give us a backward glance—we settled in to work on contemporary drama scenes and monologues. This was much less dramatic than our full immersion into Chekhov, but still we were all digging in deeper because of our time with the Russian. Just about everyone was making braver leaps, and we were cheering each other on in the leaping.

  On the second day we were assigned a number of two-person scenes by our visiting acting teacher. I was opposite Shisha in a scene from Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine. We had to play the scene as though one character was absolutely in charge and then play it again, with the power dynamic reversed. It seemed like an elementary and uninteresting demonstration of the importance of choices, the need for clarity, whether you’re acting or directing, and the ways in which the best writing isn’t set but allows the balance of power to shift from moment to moment or to upend altogether. It depends on who’s calling the shots, who’s seeing the story, and who’s telling it. It turned out to be surprisingly fun, especially to watch how different people interpreted the question of being in charge. I liked working with Shisha, who would almost always do something unexpected and who was always game. We wound up laughing a lot.

  “That’s such a good exercise,” I said to Sarah, who had been deep in the much more discouraging world of Harold Pinter all afternoon, trying to help Ann and Chris, who were struggling with a scene from Pinter’s Betrayal. I was exuberant, bouncing from the class.

  “What do you want for lunch?” I asked, pulling my shoes on.

  “I don’t know,” she said, distracted, looking around the empty room. “I should really finish clearing up in here.”

  “I say we get sandwiches and make it to the beach. We can get to Newcomb. Come on, there’s time.”

  She shook her head, her hair swinging, but there was a helpless look on her face that I was familiar with, and I smiled, chin out, Cheshire-like, jubilant.