Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen

by Dyan Sheldon

  I hid the cheese under the pile of shoes on the floor of my closet; the fruit under my papier mâché bust of Shakespeare; the crackers behind my dresser; the pickles at the bottom of my dirty clothes basket; the salads behind my bookcase; and the juices under my bed. Then I put on a Sidartha album, lit some candles and lay down to wait for the clarion cry that signified supper.

  It was Paula who called me.

  “Mary!” she shrieked through the door. “Mary, Mom says to come and eat!”

  “Tell her, if I can’t go to the Sidartha concert, I’m never eating again,” I shouted back.

  She returned in under a minute.

  “Mom says to come out now,” bellowed Paula.

  “I told you,” I screamed. “I’m not eating. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever!”

  “If you’re not eating, can I have your dessert?” asked Paula.

  “Have my dessert, have my supper, have anything you want.”

  I could hear Paula shouting as she went back to the kitchen, “Mary says I can have her dessert.”

  The next person at my door was Karen Kapok herself. Banging.

  “What’s going on?” demanded my mother.

  “I’m on a hunger strike,” I screamed back over Stu Wolff singing No more … no more… I’ve found the door…, “I’m like Gandhi, driven to desperate measures by the insensitivity of the British Government. Not one morsel will pass my lips until you say I can go see Sidartha.”

  “You have two minutes to get to the table,” said my mother. “If you don’t, the insensitive British Government is going to take your door off its hinges and drag you out.”

  You have to appreciate the way an unimaginative, practical mind like my mother’s works. She thought that if I was forced to sit at the table and watch the rest of them feeding, hunger would overcome my iron resolve and I would give in.

  Ignoring my pale skin and the dark circles under my eyes, she made me sit through every meal.

  At first my mother kept asking me to pass her stuff: “Mary, could you please pass the salad?”; “Mary, would you please pass the salt?”; “Would you mind passing the vegetables, Mary?”

  When my mother wasn’t asking me to hand her every edible item on the table, she was oohing and ahhing over every atom that touched her lips.

  The twins were even less subtle. They kept waving pieces of food in my face and shrieking, “Don’t you want some, Mare? It’s really good.”

  Recalling my Joan of Arc phase, I refused to be tempted, responding to the crass coercion of my family with stoic dignity and grace.

  “Of course,” I’d say every time my mother asked for something. I’d smile gently as though it pleased me that her appetite was so healthy. “No thank you,” I’d whisper whenever Pam or Paula shoved a piece of garlic bread or a cookie in my nose.

  On Friday, my mother brought in the heavy artillery: she made lasagne, my most favourite dish in the entire universe. Just the smell of it nearly made me swoon. But I was strong and resolute, and full of doughnuts, so her strategy didn’t work.

  Great actors know what real determination and dedication are. Ordinary people, however, do not. They give up easily. By breakfast on Saturday my family had gone back to totally ignoring me as usual. They munched away at their pancakes, all three of them talking at the same time, as if a victim of oppression and injustice weren’t sitting among them, staring at her empty plate, as isolated from their food and trivial chit-chat as a prisoner in a Mexican jail.

  I took this, of course, as a good sign. The twins were already bored with the game, and my mother, also bored with the game, had obviously decided that I’d give up if I didn’t get any attention. My mother’s understanding of the psychology of the gifted is pretty limited.

  I wouldn’t give up. I would step up my resistance instead.

  I sipped my glass of water and smiled at them wanly all through the meal, and when it was over I said I was going back to bed because I was feeling so tired.

  I spent Saturday languishing in my room. I managed to stagger out to sip my water while they stuffed their faces with supper, but a sudden wave of dizziness forced me to leave the table halfway through. “I’m sorry,” I whispered apologetically, “but I’m too weak to sit here. I have to lie down.”

  I was still languishing on Sunday. By then, of course, I was too weak and exhausted to come out to watch them eat breakfast.

  “I can’t,” I called hoarsely through my closed bedroom door. “The room spins whenever I stand up.”

  My mother was her usual cynical self.

  “Why don’t you just crawl out, then?” she shouted back.

  My father called that afternoon, but I was too weak to make it to the phone. By putting a glass to my door and my ear to the glass, I could just make out my mother explaining to my father that she was starving me to death.

  “She’s doing Gandhi this week,” said my mother. “She’s on a hunger strike until I say she can go to some concert at the Garden.”

  There were a few minutes of silence then while my father talked.

  Although my father’s speciality is adorable rabbits, he is technically an artist. This makes him more sensitive and compassionate than my mother, the pot maker. My father would never be able to watch me waste away before his eyes the way my mother was. I had my hopes pinned on him.

  Finally, my mother spoke.

  “I’ll ask her,” she said. I could tell from her voice that she thought my father was being too soft. She always thinks my father’s being too soft. Attila the Hun would have seemed soft to my mother. “Mary!” she called. She put down the receiver and started walking towards my door.

  I flung myself back into bed, jamming the glass under the pillow.

  “Mary!” my mother called again. “Mary, your dad has an idea…”

  My dad’s idea was that he take me to the concert and I spend the night with him.

  This wasn’t the idea I wanted him to have. I wanted him to have the idea that I was mature and responsible enough to go by myself.

  “Oh, ye gods!…” I moaned. “Isn’t it enough that you’ve practically killed me, now you want to humiliate me, too?”

  “Well, what about this?” asked my mother. “What if Cal takes you to the Garden and then picks you up when the concert’s over?”

  “What?” I shrieked. “Like a little kid being picked up from the daycare centre? Is there no end to the shame you want to heap on me?”

  “Suit yourself,” said my mother. She went back to the phone. She told my dad that I’d rejected his offer.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Cal,” snapped my mother. “It’s been a couple of days, not six months. She’s fine.” She was silent for a few minutes and then she screamed, “Mary! Your father wants to talk to you!”

  “I told you!” I rasped back. “I can’t get out of bed. My legs are too weak to hold me up.”

  “She’s dying,” said my mother. “She can’t come to the phone right now.”

  My father called at least two more times that afternoon. He must have gotten my mother worried, though, because when I didn’t come out for supper she finally cracked.

  She marched into my room with a plate of food in her hands. I didn’t even try to lift my head from the pillow. A person melting away from hunger loses her natural curiosity.

  “This has gone far enough,” announced my mother. “I want to talk to you.”

  My mother said that she couldn’t stand by and watch me fade away before her eyes. What kind of mother was she, if she let one of her children make herself ill? She would never be able to live with herself if something happened to me. And there was also my father to consider. He was very upset. I knew how emotional he was, how stressed and pressured he was with work and everything. What was I trying to do, push him into an early crematorium?

  “You’re going to eat tonight, or I’m going to know the reason why,” my mother concluded.

  The long days of starvation made it hard for me to speak.

/>   “The reason why,” I croaked, “is because I’m on a hunger strike.” I turned my haunted eyes on her. “Passive resistance,” I whispered. My mother is big on passive resistance; her brother spent the Vietnam War in jail.

  “A rock concert is not worth starvation,” said my mother. She put the plate on the bed and helped me to sit up. Then she picked up the plate again, and put it in front of me. “Now, eat,” she ordered.

  “I can’t,” I said in a choked voice.

  My mother folded her arms. “Oh, yes you can.”

  I glanced behind her. The twins were hovering in the doorway, devouring cornbread and giggling in their usual childish manner.

  “Make them go away,” I begged.

  My mother looked over her shoulder. “Go back to the table!” she commanded.

  Pam spat a mouthful of cornbread down her shirt, but otherwise my sisters didn’t move.

  I picked up my fork. Hesitatingly, as though I’d forgotten how to use cutlery. I slipped my fork into the mashed potato on my plate. I raised a small morsel to my lips. I paused.

  “Eat it!” my mother commanded.

  I slid the fork into my mouth. But my poor, frail body was unused to rich things like mashed potato with mushroom gravy – I immediately started to gag.

  “Mary’s throwing up!” shrieked Pam. “Mary’s throwing up on her bed!”

  “Oh, how gross…” squealed Paula.

  My mother lost a little of her compassionate manner.

  “Mary can’t be throwing up,” she assured them. “She hasn’t eaten anything in nearly three days. Remember?”

  “Mom’s right,” I gasped. I figured that since I had an audience, I might as well play to them. “I’m just tearing my empty stomach apart.” Choking so much I was turning red, I spat the potato back on my plate.

  “Why do I feel like I’m watching a tragedy in one act?” asked my mother.

  Still choking, I started to cry.

  “Make her eat more,” pleaded Pam. “I want to see her throw up again.”

  “Is Mary going to die?” asked Paula.

  My mother’s brows were knit.

  “It smells like something has died in here,” she said.

  I peeked through my tears and sobs to find her looking around suspiciously, her nose twitching.

  “Am I the only one who smells that?” she demanded.

  Paula and Pam hurled themselves into my room.

  “Peeoiu!” they shrieked, holding their noses.

  “It smells like rotting eggs,” said my mother.

  “It smells like it’s coming from the bed,” said Paula.

  It was rotting eggs. And it was coming from around the bed. Saturday morning, Ella had brought me some leftovers from her supper the night before and I’d stuck the plate under the bed because I wasn’t hungry then. I’d totally forgotten about it.

  My mother dove under the bed like a beagle and, like a beagle, came up with the remains of Mrs Gerard’s mushroom quiche. She looked at it for a few seconds, and then she looked at me.

  That was my cue.

  I pretended to faint.

  OUR MINOR DETAILS GROW

  Despite my unexpected setback with passive resistance, I was in a good mood on Monday.

  Indeed, I was more than happy; I was ecstatic. George Blue made the announcement Saturday night: Monday was the day the tickets to the Sidartha concert went on sale.

  “I’ll tell Mrs Baggoli I have bad cramps and can’t make rehearsal today,” I was saying to Ella as we walked to class. It was a big chance to take, missing rehearsal. Carla Santini was my understudy, after all. It made me nervous, her playing my part. But it was a chance I would have to take. “Then right after school we’ll go to the mall and get our tickets.” I spread my arms and the black velvet fluttered like a raven’s wings. “I’m practically dancing in Stu Wolff’s embrace.”

  “Lola,” said Ella. “Lola, it may have slipped your mind, but neither of us has permission to go to the concert.”

  “Details, details,” I cried as we turned into the English wing. “I’ll just tell my mom I’m spending the night with you, and you’ll tell your parents you’re spending the night with me.” I snapped my fingers. “What could be easier?” It seemed pretty foolproof to me.

  But it didn’t seem that foolproof to Ella.

  “It won’t work,” Ella said flatly. She swung her book bag back and forth between us in a resigned way. “You know what my mother’s like. She’s guaranteed to call your house at least once to make sure I didn’t forget anything.”

  Sadly, I did know what Ella’s mother was like. Mrs Gerard still reminds Ella to brush her teeth. I mean, really. Ella’s sixteen. Was her mother going to move into Ella’s dorm when she went to college so she could remind her to brush her teeth every night then, too?

  “OK,” I said reasonably. “Then we’ll tell them the truth.”

  Ella gave me a sour look.

  “The truth? You want to tell them that we’re going to go to the Sidartha concert, and then we’re going to crash a party where everyone will probably be drunk or on drugs and making out in the bathroom?”

  I sighed. “Not that truth. We’ll tell them we’re going to the concert, but that we’re going with my friend, Shana, and that her folks are going to meet us at the train and escort us to the Garden.” Shana was the friend I told Ella I was seeing when I visited my father. I really did visit Shana when I first moved to Deadwood, but we’d drifted apart, as people do.

  “Um…” said Ella.

  “And we’ll tell them we’re going to spend the night with her,” I went on. “Her parents have been married for twenty-five years. Your parents will like that.”

  “Lola,” said Ella in this mega-patient voice. “What if—”

  “Stop worrying,” I advised. I opened the classroom door. “So we still have a few minor details to work out—”

  Ella snorted. If her mother could have heard her, she would have gone into cardiac arrest. God only has ten commandments, but Mrs Gerard has at least a hundred, a great many of them pertaining to proper behaviour for young ladies.

  “You can say that again,” said Ella. She glanced towards the back of the room, the new location for the Carla Santini Admiration Society. “More than a few.”

  Right on cue, Carla Santini looked over.

  “Lola and Ella are going, too,” she boomed as we took our seats.

  You didn’t have to be particularly gifted as a detective to correctly guess what Carla was droning on about. Even though everybody, including the janitor, knew the whole saga of the Sidartha concert, including every word that had ever been exchanged between Stu Wolff and Mr Santini, it was a routine Carla never tired of.

  “Lola’s mother, the potter, got them invited.”

  “She must be a pretty good potter,” said one of the boys in Carla’s audience.

  They all laughed, even Carla, who had made that same dumb joke herself.

  I was getting pretty good at duplicating Carla’s smile.

  “As good a potter as Mr Santini is a lawyer,” I said, joining in the laughter.

  “Suicide,” hissed Ella. “You’re committing high-school suicide.”

  Alma could do a pretty good imitation of the Santini smile, too.

  “So you must be used to these celebrity gigs if your mother has clients like Marsh Foreman,” she purred.

  “Oh, you know…” I was cool, as someone a little jaded from her life in the fast lane would be.

  Ella groaned.

  Alma gave me a “get-you” kind of look. “What about the concert? Are you going to that, too?”

  I felt, rather than saw, Ella glance my way.

  “Of course they’re going,” drawled Carla Santini. The dark curls rattled. “We fortunate ones with personal invitations don’t have to worry about tickets to the concert, do we, Lola?”

  The classroom door opened and shut, and the cavalry in the form of Mrs Baggoli rushed in. I sat down.

 
“Nope,” I agreed. “We fortunate ones don’t have to worry about tickets.”

  “It’s not for me,” I was saying. My voice was soft and gentle, but charged with emotion and suffering. “It’s for my poor sister.”

  Mr Alvarez, whose name-tag claimed he was the manager of Ticketsgalore, was still shaking his head. “Well, I’m really very sorry about your sister—”

  “Mary.” I smiled a bittersweet smile. “You see,” I whispered, leaning over the counter towards him, my eyes dark with pain, my youthful features etched with tragedy, “Mary’s dying. Of a very rare blood disease.”

  Ella began to choke. I reached out and slapped her on the back, my eyes still on Mr Alvarez.

  Mr Alvarez looked embarrassed. “I’m very sorry to hear that,” he said quickly, “but I’m afraid—”

  “Sidartha’s her very favourite band,” I rushed on. “No, they’re more than just a band to poor Mary. They’re a source of hope and inspiration. A spiritual well in which she can dip her battered soul for nourishment and rest.” My voice became a little louder with the intensity of my emotions. “Sidartha and their music have kept her going through all she’s had to endure in her tortured young life – the isolation, the operations, the coma…” I clasped my hands in supplication. I stared into Mr Alvarez’s eyes. “If she could just see their last concert she could at least die happy.”

  Mr Alvarez pushed a limp strand of hair from his forehead. “I’d love to help you,” he said. “I really would. It’s very sad about your sister—”

  “Mary,” I breathed. “Her name’s Mary.” I smiled bravely. “She’s only eighteen.” I bit my lip. “Eighteen, but never nineteen.”

  Still gasping slightly, Ella wandered away to check out the posters on the walls.

  “Really,” said Mr Alvarez. He was almost pleading. “If there were something I could do to help you, I would. But there isn’t. I simply don’t have any more tickets.”

  I was leaning so close by now that I could smell the traces of Mr Alvarez’s lunch (fish and garlic).

  “But there must be some way,” I insisted, forcing back a sob. “Someone somewhere must have tickets left.”