You were hemmed in for so long. It must’ve been so hard, no matter how cheerfully you spoke of it, and now I set myself the task of trying to understand you well enough to imagine you. Somehow, though you never experienced it yourself, I think you would understand what is happening to me. I have come this far, and all I do now is study. I have no life, really, outside this room. I’m so strange with others, and I know you felt this, too. Outside my window, people move past in groups. Couples. Music comes from the other rooms. I stare at the pages of my textbooks, and nothing seems to get through to my mind. It’s all surface. I eat out of cans, and drink coffee to stay awake. There are too many things to worry over, and I want only to find my way to imagining you, in your own time. What that must’ve been. The disappointment I feel over Tyler Harrison is in how I built him up in my own mind, having come to the conviction that romance is lying. I know you did that once, too, built someone up in your mind. Well, I’ve begun the play about you, though it’s very rough. I don’t have time to work on it, and that causes a pressure. I’m thinking of not graduating. Can’t concentrate as I’d like, and I have to go home for Thanksgiving and face them, with their polite distance from each other, and him with his new love, his whole new different life. Do you hear resentment? It’s just hurt. I’m only twenty, and the ache won’t quit. I’ve begun to think about Tyler Harrison in an abstract way, as if he were an idea I indulged in for a time, like a daydream.
HELLO TO THE CANNIBALS
A play
by
Lily A. Austin
Dark stage. A single point of light in an apparent distance. Enter a man, dressed in the clothes of the late nineteenth century. This is Henry Guillemard. He holds a sheaf of papers, and walks to the edge of the stage and peers out. He looks at the papers, then peers out again, folds the papers in his pocket, and puts his hands on his hips, an almost impatient gesture.
GUILLEMARD
I’m supposed to try and render West Africa in a little space like this? More to the point, I’m supposed to give you what it was like for her, in such a place.
He paces to one side of the stage and then hunches down. There’s something conspiratorial about it.
She was beautiful. The first thing you ever thought about her, even when she was an awkward, gawky little girl with no social skills at all, was that she was beautiful. The features were fine, not extraordinary. But there was something in the eyes, those eyes of hers.
4
THE WEEK BEFORE THANKSGIVING, Lily traveled on a chartered bus to New York with her theater-art class. While she was gone, Sheri developed an abscess in a molar, and ended up in the hospital. Lily came back that Monday to find the room in a terrible mess, and no sign of Sheri. It was the housing administrator, Mrs. Edgeworth, who told her, in a voice that was stretched thin with disapproval, where Ms. Galatierre was. Lily cleaned the room, and then sat at the window, watching the snow fall on the square of lawn below and on the reddish, white-lined university buildings across the way. The snow came with a slow steadiness that made her long for home. She was leaving Wednesday for Thanksgiving.
She trudged over to the hospital to visit Sheri, who seemed not at all surprised to see her. “I’m sick as a dog,” Sheri said. “Damn infection went crazy. I damn near died.”
Lily sat by her bed, feeling wrong for not having brought her anything.
“Tyler came to visit me twice. He asked where you were.”
The little thrill she experienced was surprising; it left her feeling disagreeably exposed.
Sheri seemed to look right through her. “I thought it was kind of strange, myself.”
“Why?” Lily said. “I am your roomie, after all.”
“I guess so.” Sheri appeared doubtful.
“When’re you getting out of here?” Lily asked. “Would you like to come home for Thanksgiving with me?”
“I don’t know—I don’t think I’ll be out of here before, like, next week. You think you have a little dental problem, and then the next thing you know it’s fuck’n critical.”
“Can I bring you something to read?”
“I got the TV. You know what, Lily? I almost checked out. I had organ trouble from the infection. My fuck’n organs got involved. I hope I never hear the fuck’n word systemic again ever.”
“You look fine now,” Lily told her. “It’s going to be all right now.”
But she did not look fine. Lily went to see her Tuesday, and again Wednesday, in the morning, before driving north. The color had returned to her cheeks, but it was apparent that Sheri’s college career was in serious jeopardy. Tyler had not come back. Sheri talked about him—what little she knew. He hadn’t ever expressed any curiosity about his mother, their mother. She found this disturbing. “Oh, he’s been nice and all that. We’ve even had a few laughs, you know, just kind of teasing around with each other. But he won’t talk about her. His own mother. He gets funny—nervous—at the mention of her.”
“Well,” Lily said, “she left him, after all.”
“You’re interested in him. I see it in your eyes.”
“Can we change the subject, please?”
“What do you see in Dominic, anyway? I mean he’s a funny guy, I guess—”
“Dominic and I are friends,” Lily said.
“You can’t be just friends with a guy. That just doesn’t work. Unless you’re gay. Are you gay, sister?”
“Oh, could we please not talk about this,” Lily said.
The hospital room was gray, with lighter gray trim, and dark blue curtains on the windows. The wintry day outside was the same color as the room. The two of them ended up watching television for an hour. There was always the sense that Tyler might appear in the doorway. Lily saw Sheri glancing that way, and knew that she, too, was waiting.
But no one came.
“I swear,” Sheri said, “you’d think I was dead and buried.”
“I’m here,” Lily said.
“My own brother. I thought this might be the way we got to know each other.”
“Do you think it’s because I’m here?” Lily wondered.
“Why would that bother him?”
She could think of no response.
“I swear, you’ve got a case of weirdness about this guy.”
Lily changed the subject. “Will you ask for incompletes in all your courses?”
“I don’t want to think about that now.”
“Is there anything I can do about it for you?”
“You’re sweet,” Sheri said. “But I’m screwed, blued, and tattooed.”
TWO
1
THANKSGIVING, she had a quiet dinner with her mother and her mother’s neighbor and two friends from the neighbor’s church. Her father called to say he missed her. It was an awkward minute. She hated the sensation of forced affability, the sense of insincerity on both sides. The following day she drove into Washington, where he lived with his new wife in a small apartment off Wisconsin Avenue, to pay a short call on him. The new wife’s name was also Lily, though she went by the name Peggy, her middle name. Peggy explained that her parents had called her Lily-Margaret, and when she reached twenty-one (only four years ago, Lily reflected), she took the shorter name—an act of defiance against the social pretensions of her Southern parents, both of whom had grown up in Nashville society. That was their phrase, Peggy said, and they used it without sarcasm, or a sliver of understanding about how foolish they sounded using it. She said this with an air of tolerant bemusement, as if her own parents were children, and of course she was nervous. Lily found it difficult to look at her, and kept having to force herself not to avert her eyes. Peggy sounded distinctly unsouthern when she talked. She had gone to school in Chicago, and her speech was shaded with what Lily thought of as the flat, hard sound of the Midwest.
Her father and his young wife were working in the new production at the Washington Theater, a revival of Death of a Salesman.
They drafted Lily into going to the play, and
then out to dinner with them. She didn’t take the play in very well, her mind kept wandering away from it, though the audience loved it. Her father played the title role, Willy Loman, coming undone. Lily sat with Peggy in the fourth row of a packed house, and she was forced to smile and nod at various people who worked at the theater: her father’s colleagues and friends, friends of both of her parents, and now Peggy’s friends, too. Peggy waved, and blew kisses, and twice, before the opening curtain, she excused herself to go speak to somebody.
Lily saw the sets—the painted apartment buildings, the hollow walls of Willy Loman’s house—and she was too aware of it all as the practical matter of production. She looked at others in front and to the side of her as the action of the play unfolded. Peggy had done a good job on the sets. In the last scenes, many in the audience were weeping, men and women. The young man who played Biff was too frenetic, Lily thought, and it was during his scenes that Peggy showed some restlessness. At one point Lily leaned toward her and whispered, “Is he trying to be James Dean?” But Peggy gave her an uncomprehending look, so she returned to gazing at the others in the audience. When she could bring her mind back to the action on the stage, she saw that her father was playing Willy with a kind of professional’s restraint, as if to say that everyone in the house was in on the sources of Willy’s trouble and this was a playing out of what they all already understood to be true. It was an almost off-handed performance: he did not play Willy as losing his mind, he said later, but only as losing his way.
Afterward, he took them to a place where he used to meet Peggy, he said, before they were first involved. He spoke those words and then appeared to want to retract them, or at least temper them, for Lily. His hand went to his mouth, as if to wipe the words away. And then he looked down, clasping and unclasping his hands. Lily knew their affair had started out as a friendship; neither of them had seen it coming. It was strange to be the subject of his attempt now to behave as though nothing was different.
She sought to change the subject, and could only think of saying that he appeared to have lost some weight.
Predictably enough, given his chosen profession, he was a man who spent a lot of time working to keep his appearance. He had kept his waistline, and he spent two hours every day on the treadmill. His hair was dyed dark brown. Lily had once looked upon these remedial actions with a kind of proprietary ache for him. Now, it was hard not to feel ill-tempered about it. He seemed so comfortably settled into his new life that it was as though all the years with her mother had never happened at all.
There was a smudge of makeup still in the corner of his left eye, and along the underside of that ear. She couldn’t stop seeing it.
A moment later, he said, “Are you planning to do graduate work?”
“No.”
“What then? A job? Want to try out here?”
She hesitated a little, returning his gaze. “I don’t want to be an actor. I don’t get much joy out of it and I’m not that good at it, in fact.”
Peggy touched his arm, then took her hand away. “You’ve still got makeup on you, honey.”
“I never do get all of it. How does it feel seeing me even older than I am?”
“Oh, stop it,” Peggy said.
He turned to Lily. “What about the writing?”
She shrugged, knowing that she seemed sullen, and feeling unable to do anything about it. The subject was too personal.
“Well?” he said.
Now, she simply wanted to deflect him. “I haven’t written much of anything but schoolwork for four years.”
The three of them were sitting in a booth, in the restaurant, in the soft, romantic music that seemed to breathe out of the walls.
“Well, that’s writing, isn’t it?” He turned to Peggy. “She wrote poems back in high school and won a couple of prizes for it.”
“I wrote poems in high school,” Peggy said.
Lily glanced at her. “Like everybody, right?” She had meant to include herself in this remark, but she could see that the other woman had taken it to be dismissive. “I think I was one of about four hundred teenage girls in my school who wrote it,” she added.
Peggy nodded. “I’m not a poet, that’s for sure. And what I was writing was decidedly not poetry, though I thought it was. But I’ll bet, from what your father says, you were really writing poetry.”
Lily realized her father had been talking about her. The thought both pleased and unnerved her. “No,” she said with a laugh. “Mine was the plain old teenage-girl variety. Like everybody else’s. Nothing remotely memorable about it.”
She drove home in a mood of irritable confusion. Her mother greeted her at the door, looking too heavy in the legs and several years older than she was; she wore a housecoat, and her hair was pulled back in a gray knot. She’d stopped dyeing it. On the coffee table were several days’ worth of newspapers and a lot of magazines, none of which she had found the time to read, or even to page through. The television blared. On the ottoman were a box of tissues, a glass of orange juice, and a paper plate on which part of a sandwich lay. Since the divorce, Doris had relaxed into a kind of sedentary existence that was disturbing to her daughter. She liked living alone.
“How’s the love of his life?” she asked Lily.
Lily, who called her mother by name, like a sister or a friend, said, “Doris, I wish I understood you better.”
“Well, I was curious. She must be something else in bed.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
Doris laughed. “It’s the eighties, darling.”
2
IT’S THE EIGHTIES, DARLING.
Lily had a half-dreaming vision in the night, lying in the bed in the room where she had been a child, and then not a child. She heard her mother’s voice, and felt herself slowly drift toward the blur of motion in her mind, the edge of sleep. One hundred years ago, in 1888, Mary Kingsley would have been twenty-six years old. Lily lay in her own childhood bed and did the math, thinking of a girl of twenty-six, living in the household of a world traveler, a scientist, a physician to wealthy noblemen, with a deeply divided nature, whose interest in his one female child included considerations of her use to him.
No, not a girl—a woman.
Someone who, at twenty-six, could say that her entire life had been spent caring for her invalid mother. Lily imagined her, and began to think of her in terms of childhood. She seemed to see her in the light-muted way of dreams, a thin, tall girl with dark-blond hair, closed up in a house in Highgate.
Scene: Guillemard at stage center, as before. Takes out the papers, and rifles through them. His notes.
Let’s start with, say, 1874. Here they are in the spring of that year, let us say. Mary and her wandering father, George Kingsley. He has been home for a little more than a week. It’s an extended stay this time, two months. You’ll notice that his stride is still long; he still walks with a kind of bounce, a spring in his step she admires without quite recognizing it as admiration. He’s a man with no fear of dangers, not of war, or travel to distant and exotic places, or even of sickness—his heroism during the cholera epidemic in northern Wales, the year Mary was born, is a family story; her uncle Charles Kingsley wrote about it in a novel she has read through several times, though she’s only twelve years old. For her strange, bold father, the parameters of his own island country are too close. He’s restless, even in the comforts of his own house, with its chiming clocks, its books, whose pages Mary spends so much of her time with, its artifacts from around the world. But then there is also, always by now, the sickroom, with its odors of camphor and salts, and the stale breathing of closed spaces. He’s seen so much of everything, seen things in the world far away. When he turns those eyes upon her, she feels their brilliance.
At times she believes she can feel his terror of what her little life might come to, feels it as a kind of weight. She understands that she must keep him from the knowledge of what she’s aware of as an unruly nature, a clutch of unanswerable pas
sions, the secret rages and hungers of her own heart. She shields him from this as certainly as she might stand in front of him to block the sunlight. Her mother is mostly too ill to do much of anything but lie still, and Mary’s job is caring for her. She has learned to pay the strictest attention to the smallest details. Lately George has been spending mornings trying to revive a project he had already abandoned once, before Mary was born, a novel set in the time of Charles II. Having two brothers who in their lives achieved fame for their novels, he has begun to feel the work as a sort of gentlemanly obligation. He is not quite aware of this. It’s made him cross. She wonders if the urge to be away is settling in again, the longing to be elsewhere.
Light fades. Darkness for several beats, and then lights up on a transformed stage: a lane, winding off in the near distance, bordered by trees. Light of a late afternoon in spring. Stage right, the facade of the Kingsley house, a porch and a small garden, a high fence. Mary and her father walk slowly downstage, toward the lane, arm in arm. They pause.
GEORGE
The transport, internally, of metabolic matter within an organism.
MARY
Left aorta, right aorta. Left ventricle, right ventricle. It starts there.
GEORGE
The word?
MARY
Circulation.
GEORGE
An easy one. Where on the globe was the city of Tenochtitlán located?
MARY
South America, specifically, Peru.
Hello to the Cannibals Page 6
