by Federle, Tim
Monica reaches into her purse and pulls out a pack of cigarettes, hightailing it to the door. Doesn’t she want to watch our faces as we’re kept or cut? Isn’t the chief interest of being in charge that you can enjoy the crushed or giddy reactions of your subjects? I won’t ever understand adults, I swear.
“Number fifty-nine, do you have any special skills?” Mark, one of the bearded casting assistants, says. Garret Charles has called Mark over, in Monica’s absence, and is now whispering into his ear.
“I’m a straight-A student,” number fifty-nine says, a boy whose socks are pulled so high, he may’ve actually lost a bet with someone.
Mark laughs and scratches his little beard, saying, “That’s wonderful, but I think Mr. Charles is looking for special skills that could apply to a Broadway musical.”
“This is Broadway after all, children,” Garret Charles says, tilting his head down to peer through the tiny glass of his tiny glasses, perched on his tiny sharp nose that could probably pick a lock if tilted the right way.
God, his accent is something else. If I tried to impersonate a British person, like that, Libby would tell me I’m working too hard and ruining the scene. “Let the words do the work,” she said to me once during a two-week summer intensive on Arden of Faversham.
“Well,” number fifty-nine continues, “I’m a straight-A student and I played Seymour in my middle school’s production of Little Shop of Horrors, Jr. And my parents said I was the best thing in it, and so did my history teacher, Mrs. Cahoon, and that was the last thing she ever saw, because she was killed in a hot-air balloon accident in France.”
“Oh, my,” Mark says, and moves on to the next number on his list. I’ve figured it out already: They’re only following up with the children who they haven’t made their final decision about. Whose fate is hovering in the air like a bee.
“Number eighty-eight, do you have any special skills?” And really, just like that, number eighty-eight performs a forward handspring, landing in the splits. The room erupts into applause, but number eighty-eight isn’t done, not by the half of it, calling to Sammy at the piano, “Do you know ‘Slow Boat to China’?”
And Sammy, quite amazingly, does seem to (not that I know that song), and begins thumping out a beat. And number eighty-eight—still in the splits!—spins out of them, onto her back, and yells “Faster!” to Sammy, which gets a nice big laugh out of Mark and Marc, the bearded boys. Number eighty-eight ends up—and I’d need to watch the whole thing on slow-mo to really understand how she even thought of it, let alone pulled it off—balanced on her chin, legs in the air, arms out in an upside-down T, looking like Mr. Jesus Christ himself jumping headfirst into a river made out of a dirty wooden Broadway audition floor.
Number eighty-eight flips up to her feet, which had shone in the air, shone as she spun, glittering in the light. I hear the clickety-clack of metal, and—my God—number eighty-eight is in tap shoes, launching into a series of time steps so accomplished, I feel at this point like I should be paying money to watch the routine.
And just as soon as she’s done, somehow backhand-springing directly into line, her feet in a perfect “parallel first” position, Garret Charles makes a small notation next to her name on the clipboard.
And in order, I suppose, to destroy her, he simply says, “Okay.”
If an act like hers only gets an “okay,” what the heck am I going to get when they get to my name? A death threat?
By now, with Monica back in from her smoking break, Mark scurries out of the way and Garret stands. His body snaps and crackles in so many places, he sounds like a bowl of Rice Krispies. My stomach growls.
“Number ninety-one,” Monica calls out to me. “Any special skills?”
I clear my throat and catch a quick look at myself in the mirror: that new red shirt and those jeans, my boring new slip-on shoes. Everything feels like it’s a size too small for me.
“I can walk on my knees.”
And I really can.
When Libby and I workshopped our two-person Fiddler on the Roof, for the private performance we put on for her mom right when she started getting sick, I decided to stage the famous Bottle Dance. In the musical Fiddler on the Roof, a rambunctious Jewish father has to marry off his daughters, and during one of the ceremonies, the town villagers place a series of real live glass bottles atop their heads, pushed into the divots of their felt hats. Arm in arm, these men—because what woman would be willing to look this ridiculous?—perform a series of leg dips and crawls—knee walks—all the while making sure their bottles stay securely balanced on top of their head.
Libby told me that in real life, if the bottle fell off and crashed to the floor, tradition dictated that the village children didn’t get Hanukkah presents for, like, three years or something awful.
“I can walk on my knees, or crawl on them, I mean,” I hear myself say.
Garret Charles hands the clipboard to Monica and says, “Well, this shall be interesting.”
“Sammy,” I want to call out, “Keep playing Slow Boat to China, but reroute that canoe to Russia,” but instead I just step forward, out of line. Cindy with the braces snorts. I start to bend my knees when, with a pinch, the new jeans stop me, tugging at the crotch.
Too tight to perform any kind of trick.
My big chance, ruined by denim.
“Children: a lesson,” Monica says. “When auditioning for a new musical, it’s very, very important to wear clothing that allows for movement.”
“I could—I could change,” I offer. “I could put on a pair of shorts,” thinking I might pop my head into the hall to scream at Aunt Heidi, “GET BACK TO OLD NAVY AND JAYWALK IN FRONT OF YOUR EX-BOYFRIEND THE COP IF YOU HAVE TO, JUST GET ME A PAIR OF LOOSELY FITTING SHORTS THAT ALLOW UNINHIBITED, JEWISH-WEDDING-DANCE-TYPE MOVEMENT.”
Garret Charles looks at me, peering again through his glasses, and says, “Changing your garments won’t be necessary.”
I should have just stayed in my Thug outfit. The Thug outfit would’ve, at the very least, allowed free movement. I could probably have nailed one corner of it into the floor and disappeared within, performing all of Fiddler on the Roof as if under a summer stock tent.
Mine is the last number they call today, the team so clearly distraught at the lack of special skills displayed before them, they’re just going to chuck our whole group.
“Okay, children!” Rex Rollins says, taking the clipboard from Monica. “Please take your belongings into the hallway, and wait with your parents for just a moment. We’ll confer and then come out to announce the next step. But you all did a sensational job!”
Ridiculous. Only one of us did anything near a sensational job—spinning on her chin—and the rest of us either peed our pants or couldn’t move in them.
When I return to Heidi (after finally running to the bathroom myself), she looks up from her cell phone and rises from a creaking wicker seat. “What’s wrong, Nate?” I suppose I look like I’m about to cry.
I suppose I’m about to cry.
I suppose I cry.
I’m crying.
“It was horrible. They hated me,” I say. “It wasn’t anything like what I thought an audition would be. They were just—just looking at us, and trying to intimidate us.”
Heidi just stands there, probably afraid to touch me in case it makes me cry harder, and a girl standing next to us—number seventy-six, a tall girl who, earlier, ran around on her hands and then, for her special skill, kicked number seventy-seven in the eye—says to me, “It wasn’t so bad in there. When I auditioned for The Lion King, they cut me just because I’m not black.”
“See,” Heidi says, clearly not believing the words as she says them, “it could have been . . . worse.”
Rex Rollins spills out of the door frame, with Mark and Marc flanking him like slices of wheat bread, and—yup—claps his hands at us.
“First off, congratulations to the parents for raising a bunch of wonderful kiddos!” One of the mo
ms shouts “Hear, hear!” and earns polite applause. “As I already said in the room, casting a new musical is such a delicate process because there are so few slots for so many kids. We could probably cast the national tour of E.T. just out of this group of fifty kiddos alone!”
A dad looks up from his BlackBerry and says, “When does the national tour go out?” And Rex Rollins says, “It was just an expression! We’ve got to get this show open on Broadway first!”
The “Hear, hear!” mom yells, “I smell a Tony Award!” And the whole hallway is just so confusing to me, everyone pretending to be friends when really nobody is friends, when nobody wants anything but this chance, this job.
“Will the following numbers please stay,” Rex Rollins says. “You’ll be asked to sing in our afternoon group, at two p.m., after the creative team takes their lunch.” And I swear to God one of the pee-pee-pants boys yells out, “You deserve a wonderful lunch!” and Rex Rollins does his signature curtsy.
The BlackBerry dad isn’t so into this guy, and holds his daughter tight.
“Breathe, Nate,” Heidi says, and hands me back my bookbag. And that’s when I see it, hanging from a wire ring looped into a zipper: my lucky rabbit foot from Libby. I squat and, despite hands that are sweaty and shaking, unspool the ring from the zipper. I hold the rabbit foot so tight that I bet some distant, footless bunny must be wincing or shouting.
I remember the day Libby gave it to me: we’d arrived at sixth-grade drama class to find it had been replaced by a study hall. That another arts program was axed, deemed “frivolous” by the school board. We were supposed to be doing Peter Pan for the winter musical, and I was basically dying to play the title role, but it was canceled too. And when I got home from school that day, crying into my pillow, Libby’s shoe careened into my window (our secret hello). She was in the yard below, holding this old rabbit foot. Given to me toward some future fortune.
“. . . number ninety, number ninety-three, number ninety-nine, and number one hundred. Please stay.”
“Wait,” I say, turning to Aunt Heidi, “did they say ninety-one? Did they keep number ninety-one?”
Her face falls, and she just shakes her head. “No, Natey, they didn’t. I’m so sorry.”
But I can barely make out her words on account of the jubilation around me, children jumping up and down, into and out of their adoring parents’ arms. One girl—the tumbler, number eighty-eight from before—actually crawls up her father like he’s a tree, and ends up atop his shoulders, cock-a-doodle-dooing from on high, to celebrate being kept for the next round of auditions.
This girl would make a heck of a Peter Pan.
“Keep in mind,” Rex Rollins says, clapping us quiet, “this is only the first round. And all of the children who were cut today will be totally right for another show.”
But I see a boy with one leg very clearly longer than the other, limping past me, with a giant hunchback taking up the rear, and I wonder: What show is this boy right for? Rex Rollins is just lying to us.
“Nate,” Aunt Heidi says, “I think we ought to get going. Honestly. We’ve got to get you on the next bus to Pittsburgh.”
And when we turn the corner into the elevator bank, there’s Jordan Rylance, coming back to the studio with his mom in her awful faux-leopard coat. Her mouth lifts and she says, way too loud, “Did you get a callback to sing later, too?” and I just shake my head no, that they didn’t see anything worth liking about me.
“Sorry,” Jordan says, shoveling a Subway sandwich down his throat.
“Are you,” Mrs. Rylance says to my aunt, “Nathan’s mom?”
And Heidi, who is holding the elevator door open, says, “No, God no,” and then looks at me. “I just mean I’d be a terrible mother.”
The door starts to close on her, and she motions for me to board the elevator. So much for my lucky rabbit foot, still gripped in my palm like a handgun. So much for it watching over me and bringing a future fortune.
Through the shutting steel doors, Mrs. Rylance pops in her beaming face and looks right at me: “Well, better luck back in Jankburg, Nathan.”
“It’s N-n-nate.”
“I have to get him to the bus!” Heidi says, about to swat Mrs. Rylance’s head away.
And Mrs. Rylance turns back to Jordan, I see in the sliver of light closing before me, and puts her arm around him and says, “The bus?”
And they laugh and laugh, I can hear, laughing at me and my stutter and my family that takes buses. Laughing clear through my sixteen-floor ride to the lobby, out onto the wet streets, back to Port Authority.
To return home a sopping soldier in tight new clothes.
Returning Home a Sopping Soldier in Tight New Clothes
“Do I have time to stop at Applebee’s?”
But I already know her answer.
“No chance. First of all, you’re twenty minutes from the bus taking off”—I think Aunt Heidi’s saying these words, but she’s five feet ahead of me again, jumping over tourists and around strollers, and these are only the approximate consonants and vowels I’m making out above the rain and wind—“and second of all, Applebee’s is inedible.”
Walking the reverse path to Port Authority, everything that seemed exciting on the way into town now seems frenetic, dangerous, wound up too tight. Maybe because, I dunno, to stop moving so fast might make you realize what an impractical home New York actually is.
Where are the trees in which to hide from your parents?
And when we push past the Montego’s sandwich-board advertising man, and I say hi—he did, after all, alert me to the worst outfit I’ve ever purchased, and that at the very least makes him a unique friend—he doesn’t even recognize me, just grunts and shoves another pamphlet into my hand.
“That’s a real paper waste,” I say to him, “because you already gave me one of these.” He probably doesn’t recognize me in these tight clothes, and I don’t blame him.
“Well, pal,” Aunt Heidi says, now standing with me just inside the ancient swinging doors of the bus station. “We should find your gate, and then I have to run. I’m already late.”
“For what?” I say, ringing water from my bangs onto the floor.
“Aw Shucks,” she says. “Downtown. I’m a hostess at a kitschy oyster place, called Aw Shucks. Which probably sounds gross to a kid.”
“It sounds delicious,” I say. “I’ve never had an oyster, and it sounds delicious.” The chance to win a pearl; the chance to taste something different than kielbasa or chipped-ham cafeteria sandwiches.
“Well, that’s very brave of you. Maybe if you ever make it back to New York, I can make sure you try an oyster. It’s kind of a kitschy place”—she already called it that; this must be her routine—“but the food is fresh and we’ve got great weekend drink specials. There’s even a Sunday-night cocktail called The Heidi.”
“What does it taste like?” I say.
“Regret and a dusty womb and a little splash of orange juice,” she says. Heidi’s said this to all her friends. Or on first dates, I bet. Bragging about a drink named after her, to somehow justify working at an oyster place instead of following her acting dreams. I just know it.
A group of businesspeople pushes past us, and Heidi says, “Come on, let’s move,” and after she buys me my ticket home we zoom through the Greyhound bus terminal, passing a Hudson News and an Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, a T-shirt shack and a sports-jersey store.
A boy could spend a whole year having fun in a place like this.
“I feel weird putting you on this bus,” Aunt Heidi says, likely soaking up the same characters I am.
Exhibit A: Wearing a fur coat and flip-flops and dragging a cat carrying case, a woman next to us is holding a hymnal and will likely want nothing more than to sit next to me and convert me to Christianity by the time we reach Philadelphia.
Who needs an Exhibit B with this kind of Exhibit A?
“Don’t worry about it, Aunt Heidi,” I say, “I made it here by myself,
and I can make it home, too.”
Wait! Back up, Nate. A T-shirt stand!
“Can you hold my place in line,” I say to Aunt Heidi, “so I can run and get an ‘I Heart New York’ T-shirt for Libby?” It was all she asked for.
Aunt Heidi looks at her cell phone and sighs. “I’m already late for Aw Shucks, Nate, so run. And be here in two minutes. I’m serious: two minutes. If you don’t get on this bus, there’s no way you’re making it home at a reasonable hour, and I just—this isn’t how I want my reunion with your mom to start.”
Good. She’s considering any kind of reunion at all. This is good.
“Do you have a men’s extra-extra-small?” I say to the guy at the shack. Libby buys all of her clothes in men’s sizes so she can get the absolutely tiniest version and feel positively skeletal.
“No, boss,” the guy says, twiddling a mustache, “only men’s medium and men’s extra-extra-large.” He holds out a T-shirt, black with that signature red heart, and I say, “How much?” and he says, “Thirty dollars.”
I gasp. “Thirty American dollars?”
And knowing I won’t buy it, that I’m just another offended tourist, he goes right back to his cell phone, texting away.
His cell phone. His Nokia cell phone. Plugged into a kiosk outlet.
“Sir, sir!” I say, shouting perhaps, from a half foot away. “If I give you, um, ten dollars”—shut up, Nate—“can I, like, throw my phone on your charger for a minute?”
He twists his face at me and says “ ’Kay, Boss,” unplugging his phone and holding out his hand. I burrow into my bag and pull out my ancient Nokia, my bag of money, too, and by the time he’s got it plugged in—the familiar Asian chime of a charging phone comforting me—it’s been a full five minutes since I left Aunt Heidi.
