by Dyan Sheldon
LADY MACBETH AT DEADWOOD HIGH
A few brave souls quietly congratulated me on my triumph over Carla Santini with a smile or a nod of the head or a quick “good one, Lola”, but Sam Creek was the only one who made a public statement about the casting.
Sam had been out all week, but on Friday he gave me the thumbs up when I walked into maths.
“The Queen’s been severely wounded,” Sam shouted gleefully. “May she die of serious complications.”
A couple of the other kids glanced our way, but no one laughed or winked or anything like that. I could feel Carla watching us from the back of the room. She was always watching me now, even when she was talking to someone else. But she never gave any sign that she actually saw me.
My counter offensive was to pretend that it was Carla and her friends who didn’t exist. I flapped my cape and laughed.
“We can only hope for the best,” I said loudly as I took my seat. My smile was sour. “I’m afraid, however, that the prognosis doesn’t look too good.”
Sam hooted. He may not have any friends, and he might have missed the first few days of my and Ella’s punishment, but he isn’t stupid. He’d noticed the way the room went quiet when I stepped through the door, and he’d noticed the way none of the others greeted me.
“That’s a shame,” said Sam. He kind of jerked his head in the Santini direction. “You may have to hire a food taster if this keeps up.”
Among the BTWs and BTRs, however, no one said a word.
And when I say they didn’t say a word, I mean not a word.
It took a few days, but by Friday, when the whole school knew that I was playing Eliza Doolittle and Carla Santini was playing Mrs Higgins, even kids who had never heard of Pygmalion were treating me and Ella as if we were the Invisible Girls. Silent and unsmiling, the friends, friends of friends, and would-be friends of Carla Santini passed us in the hallways, sat next to us in classes, and stood near us on the lunch line as though we had ceased to exist. And all with no outward sign of hostility or show of temper from Carla herself. There were no snide comments or black looks; no nasty whispers or back-stabbing attacks. She shimmered around campus like a butterfly, smiling and laughing and tossing her head as though she didn’t have an enemy in the world. But she could pass within inches of me or Ella as though we were air. She could say something to the entire class, and everyone would know somehow that Ella and I weren’t included because we weren’t really there. I got to the point where I could almost empathize with Carla. No wonder she’s the way she is, I’d think as I walked ghostlike through the corridors. She must be frustrated and bored out of her mind. That was when I began to realize that Carla Santini is as wasted in Deadwood as I am – and more or less for the same reason. My spirit and talents are too large for the narrow confines of a suburban world, and so are Carla’s.
“You almost have to admire her, don’t you?” I said to Ella as we walked down the hallway together like prisoners of war being marched through the streets. “Think what she could do if she were in a position of real power.”
Like me, Ella kept her eyes straight ahead of her, as though unaware of the darting looks and quivering silence that followed us wherever we went.
“She’s already got more power than she should,” said Ella. “If it gets any colder, we’re going to have to wear thermals to school.”
“Oh, please…” I pleaded. “These are humans, not ants.” In my experience, human group actions tend to fall apart eventually. “It can’t last.”
Ella gave me a look. “Yes it can. This is all Carla’s doing, and it won’t be over till she says so.”
I laughed again, this time heartily.
“Give me a break, will you? Who is Carla, Stalin? What’s she going to do when people get tired of acting like jerks and start talking to us again, send them to Siberia?”
Ella nodded vehemently. “That’s right. She’ll send them to Siberia – with us.”
I shook my head as we came to a stop outside the auditorium. “She can’t,” I said, dragging reason in on my side. “Carla Santini herself is going to have to start talking to me in a few minutes.” The rehearsals were beginning that afternoon. Which was one of the reasons I’d been able to take the Big Freeze with a certain amount of humour. There really was no way it could last. “And when she does, everybody else will give up with relief.”
Ella readjusted her book bag. “Carla won’t give up,” said Ella grimly. “The only thing Carla Santini’s ever given up on is the concept of letting someone else have their way.”
I, however, was optimistic as I walked into the auditorium by myself. Carla might have been waging a cold war against me during every other minute of the day, but she would have to leave her weapons outside the theatre. The way I saw it, that was the rule. Inside, we were part of the same team. A nation divided against itself must perish; and so must the cast of Pygmalion.
I paused with my hand on the door. Through the thick metal I could hear the rest of the cast reading the revised script and chatting aimlessly while they waited for the rehearsal to begin. I ruffled my hair for that urgent, passionate look, and flung my cape casually over one shoulder.
The silence of the Apocalypse fell over the room as I opened the door. All but a few people were pretending to look through their scripts or brush dirt from their shoes, as if they didn’t know I’d arrived. The rest were watching me and watching Carla at the same time, waiting to see what was going to happen.
Carla Santini hadn’t left her weapons in her locker, as she should have.
She was sitting in the front row, looking at Mrs Baggoli’s revisions. I could tell from the set of her back that she was fully armed.
I called out a general, “Hi!”
There were a few brave mumbles in return.
I came to a stop at the front row. Carla was in an aisle seat, deeply absorbed in what she was reading. I couldn’t back down. One way or another, I was going to make her talk to me.
“Hi, Carla,” I said, as though these weren’t the first words I’d said to her in days. I threw myself into the seat across the aisle from hers. “All ready to start?”
Carla Santini is not a great actor – she’s too self-absorbed for that – but she is a good one. She did the best impersonation of a stone wall I’d ever seen.
Glances were furtively exchanged among our audience.
“What do you think of Mrs Baggoli’s changes?” I asked with so much good humour and interest that I should have been given an Oscar.
Carla looked up then. But not at me. Carla looked at Andy, the boy who was playing Colonel Pickering.
“I wonder what’s keeping Mrs Baggoli,” said Carla, sounding so concerned you would have thought there was a good chance that Mrs Baggoli had been jumped by hostile guerrillas in the English wing.
Andy blinked. It took him a second to realize that Carla was asking him a question. She didn’t normally speak to Andy; he’s overweight and has acne. He looked around uneasily, a drowning man desperately searching for a passing log. Jon, who was playing Professor Higgins, rolled his eyes towards the gods. Everyone else was even less helpful; they looked away.
I raised my voice, just a little. “I saw her heading towards the office after last class.”
Catlike, Carla kept her eyes on Andy, waiting for him to answer.
Andy had gone from uneasiness to a kind of mild terror. You could practically hear his palms sweating. He glanced at me, and then turned back to Carla.
“She went to the office after her last class,” said Andy. He twitched, trying to decide whether or not he could safely move away now.
He couldn’t.
“But school ended half an hour ago.” Carla tilted her head to one side. “It isn’t like Mrs Baggoli to be late for rehearsals. Especially not the first one.”
Andy stared back at her, looking as if he might implode. “Well … uh…” he grunted.
“She had some Xeroxing she had to do,” I went on, warming to
my story. “For us. She has a last-minute change to the script.”
Andy shifted from one foot to the other. “She’s Xeroxing,” he informed Carla. “You know, a last-minute change to the script.”
The delicate, sculpted nostrils twitched.
“What changes? I discussed the revisions with her during lunch period and she didn’t say anything about more changes.”
Andy gulped under the interrogation-strength beam of Carla’s gaze.
“Oh.” He looked at me out of the corners of his eyes. By now everyone else was looking at me, too.
I truly believe that if you have a good, brave heart the forces of the universe will help you if they can. Even though the forces of the universe had been unable to keep me out of a world that included Carla Santini, they were able to do something else. They inspired me.
“She only thought of it last night,” I said. “But she believes it could revitalize the entire play.”
Andy started to relax a little.
“It was sudden,” he said. “But it’s big.”
“Oh, really?” drawled Carla. “And just what is this big idea?”
I dropped my cape from my shoulders and leaned back in my seat.
“She’s writing out Mrs Higgins,” I said with a smile.
Totally forgetting that I no longer existed, Carla turned to me, her face full of scorn. “Oh, hahaha.”
I grinned. I’d known I could make her talk to me.
Not that I actually heard her, of course. Everyone else was laughing too loudly.
YOU CAN CHOOSE YOUR ENEMIES, BUT NOT YOUR RELATIVES
What with starting to learn the new script and being distracted because Ella and I were deep in Siberia, I hadn’t yet addressed the problem of convincing my mother to let me go to New York to see Sidartha. I was so cheered by my victory in the skirmish with Carla that afternoon, however, that I decided to launch my campaign that very night.
I know my mother; she can be handled, but it usually takes some time and I couldn’t afford to blow it because I’d waited too long to start on her. Now it was even more important that Ella and I get to the concert than it would have been normally; this had grown beyond a personal desire and become a righteous cause. I couldn’t let Carla humiliate and ridicule us; I had to go to that party and laugh in her face. I owed it to the rest of the school.
It may seem naïve, but I didn’t really think that persuading my mother was going to be this incredibly ginormous problem. After all, she’d already more or less said maybe. Well, what she’d actually said was, “I’ll think about it.” But I am destined to be a great actor. What’s another thing that separates a great actor from an average one? The ability to convince. Convince the audience that you’re an old woman when you’re only in your twenties. Convince them that you’re a murderer when you’re really mild as a newborn lamb. Convince them that you’re a saint when you’re really Carla Santini.
I took the job of convincing my mother to let me go to the concert as a professional challenge. I was confident that once Karen Kapok had given her permission, the Gerards, with their new, guilty understanding of all she’d suffered, would let Ella go, too.
“Is there something wrong with the spaghetti?” asked my mother.
She’d finally noticed. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been sitting there for at least fifteen minutes, languidly pushing my food around my plate and (as usual) no one had paid me the tiniest bit of attention. The twins (also as usual) had been talking non-stop since we sat down, and whenever they paused for air or to stuff something in their mouths my mother took up the slack, yapping on about earth-shattering things like the phone bill and the noise in the car, totally ignoring my pale, sad, silent visage on the other side of the table.
I gave my mother a wan smile.
“No,” I said softly. “No, there’s nothing wrong with the spaghetti.” I gave her another wan smile. “I guess I’m just not very hungry.” I pushed my plate away. “I guess I’m just in too much pain.”
“Cramps?” asked my mother.
It seemed to me that I was always gaping at my mother in horror lately.
“Mommmm…” I moaned. Ella’s mother would never discuss cramps at the table in front of everybody, even though the only people usually at the Gerard’s dinner table are she and Ella. Ella learned about sex and stuff like that from a book her parents gave her. It was made up of questions and answers, so she didn’t have to talk about it with her mother at all.
“I’m in pain, too,” said Pam. She opened her mouth as wide as she could and shoved her face in mine. “See?” she demanded. “My tooth’s coming out.”
All I could see was half-chewed spaghetti. It was enough to make you gag.
My mother didn’t notice that one of her children was making a revolting spectacle of herself any more than she’d noticed my haunted air.
She reached for the salad. “Well?” she persisted. “There’s paracetamol in the bathroom if you need it.”
“It’s not that kind of pain,” I said flatly.
“What kind of pain is it?” asked Paula.
I smiled at her kindly. Even though Pam and Paula are identical twins, Paula sometimes shows signs of being an intelligent life form.
“I think you’re too little to understand,” I gently explained. “It’s a pain of the heart.”
Paula sucked a strand of spaghetti into her mouth. “You mean like indigestion?” And at other times, the closest Paula gets to an intelligent life form is sitting next to me.
“No,” I said. “Not like indigestion. Like having your heart ripped from your body and thrown on to a pile of rusting tin cans. Like having a red-hot corkscrew twisted into your soul. Like having everything you ever loved or dreamed of rolled over by tanks driven by soldiers who are laughing and singing songs.”
Paula looked at my mother. “What’s she talking about?”
My mother shrugged. “You’ve got me.” She helped herself to garlic bread.
“Maybe it’s a bad-hair day,” suggested Pam.
The twins thought this was incredibly funny. Half-chewed spaghetti and bread flew across the table.
“Girls,” said my mother, but she was looking at me. “What happened?” she asked. “Are you having some trouble at school?”
“School?” I covered my heart with my hands as though I were trying to keep it from being ripped from my body yet again. “How can you talk about something as trivial as school at a time like this?” Hot, bitter tears sprang to my eyes. “Can’t you see that my whole world has been pitched into darkness? Can’t you see that I’ve lost any reason to live?”
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” asked my mother.
“That’s what I mean about this family,” I wailed. “Something like this can occur, and you don’t even know about it.”
“Well, maybe if you told us,” said Paula.
I pushed back my chair. “Do you all live in a cave or something?” I shrieked. “Am I being raised by wolves? Doesn’t anybody but me keep any contact with the outside world?” I got to my feet. “Sidartha has broken up,” I sobbed. “They’re having one last concert at Madison Square Garden, and then they are no more!” I raised my eyes to the heavens and opened my arms. “Good night, sweet princes, may choirs of rock angels sing you to your sleep…!”
Pam slurped at a forkful of food.
My mother looked at me.
“Let me make a wild guess,” she said. “You want to go to the concert.”
Hope dried the tears that blurred my eyes.
“Yes,” I snuffled. “If I could see them play live, at least I’d have that memory to carry me through the long, empty years that lie ahead of me like a road in Kansas.”
“You mean go with your dad?” asked my mother.
Good God! I’d forgotten about him. There was no way I could involve my father in this outing.
For one thing, Ella thought he was dead; for another, he was the last person we needed with us when we crashed th
e party.
“Dad?” I moaned with the suffering of the misunderstood. “I can’t go to a Sidartha concert with my father. I’d die of shame.”
“Well, you’re not going to Madison Square Garden by yourself, and that’s final,” my mother informed me. “You can watch the show on MTV.”
But I wasn’t defeated – not yet.
“How can you treat me like this?” I cried. “I’m your flesh and blood, your first born. You used to lean over my crib in the middle of the night to make sure I was still breathing.”
“Exactly,” said my mother. “I’m concerned for your welfare. You can’t go.”
I tried to make a deal. “I’ll baby-sit whenever you want for the next six months,” I promised. “Free. Just let me go to the concert. Please…”
But would Karen Kapok relent? Do bears drive Volvos?
“Get off your knees, Mary,” said my mother. “You can’t go into the city at night by yourself and that’s the end of it. The answer is no.”
It was worse than mere mortal insensitivity. It was inhuman stubbornness.
What could one broken-hearted teenager do in the face of such parental pig-headedness? Sulking wouldn’t work. I once stayed in my room for a whole week (except for meals, baths, going to school, and hanging out with Ella) and she didn’t even notice. The silent treatment wouldn’t work either. I used the silent treatment when I used the week-long sulk. All that happened was that every so often my mother would look up from whatever she was doing and comment on how nice and quiet it was for a change.
“Please,” I begged. “If you don’t let me go, I’ll die. I swear I will. I’ll just wither away and die.”
“Well, if you ask me, that’s better than being shot at close range by some psycho in Manhattan,” said my mother.
My chair toppled over as, devastated, I fled from the room.
“If Mary dies, can we have the porch as a playroom?” asked Pam.
“Can you believe it?!” I complained to Ella the next day as we walked to homeroom. “I live in a house without pity, in a cheap temple to the meaningless frivolity of contemporary life.” I flapped my arms so my cape moved like wings. “She wouldn’t even listen to me, Ella. She wouldn’t even stop for one tiny little nanosecond and consider me. My feelings. My needs. My fragile hopes and dreams. Me! Her oldest child, the child of the only man she ever really loved.”
