Girl, Unstrung

by Claire Handscombe

  “I could listen to you all day,” Libby says. “I know you can’t, ’cause of your wrist, Clara, but I’d love to just sit here and read while you play.”

  And it’s weird, but I wouldn’t mind that. It’d be okay not to have her full attention or even that much of it. Today it felt like I was doing this just for me. For the pure joy of it. And it felt good.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The next day, Monday, Libby wants to play Scrabble, so we sit down with half-drunk cups of tea at the table in the living room, under the mirror that’s supposed to trick us into thinking the room is bigger than it is. She can’t believe Scrabble isn’t something I’m into. It’s not that I’ve never played. I know the basic gist, but words aren’t really my thing, you know? I leave the bookishness to Rosie and wait for the best novels to get made into movies.

  There was a while in middle school when I was really into the spelling bee, and that’s why I have way better vocabulary than most kids my age, but really that was for the fun and adrenaline of the competition, not for the words themselves. It was before I switched from violin to viola and got serious about music, so I had time to read through the dictionary and make index cards to test myself and write out a load of words in a load of different colors. I came second in the fourth grade and lost with voyage, which seems so obvious now, but I don’t know, in the moment, there was all the pressure, not to mention that I was only nine years old. In the fifth grade I won (triceratops) and went through to regionals. Epistrophe flummoxed me, though, and I missed out on nationals, which still irks me.

  Anyway, so aside from that little interlude, words aren’t really me. School subjects in general don’t really do it for me, they’re just things that get in the way of viola practice, but if I had to pick one it’d be math. I like the logic of it; I like that you’re either right or wrong and nobody can pretend otherwise or say “that’s an interesting point of view, but have you considered this other angle?”. There are no angles in algebra. (That’s geometry.) There are no angles in spelling bees, either. You do your homework, you perform, everyone recognizes your superior preparedness, the end. Sometimes I wish music was more like that.

  Libby, on the other hand, is all about the words. Her first novel came out last year and her second one is due to her editor soon, so she has to fit her writing around her teaching. She reads more in a month than I can imagine reading in a year, which is probably why she and Ebba have so much to talk about. Well, that and their shared adulation for my father the Not Very Famous Actor.

  “Do you still think about him?” I ask her, as we pick off the previous game’s Scrabble tiles from the board.

  She sips her tea. “Who?” she says. So maybe that’s my answer. When you’re in love with someone they’re all you ever think about. The word “he” can only refer to one “he”, because he’s the only one that matters, the only one alive for you in the whole world. Like in the Pride and Prejudice movie – the actual movie, not the BBC miniseries, which Rosie and Ebba wrongly insist is better and love to sit under their shared blanket and watch over and over while drink cocoa. (Again: California, people. It’s only cold because of the overzealous AC.) Anyway, in the Keira Knightley version, there’s this scene where they’re all dancing at one of those fancy balls, but the way it’s shot, everyone disappears and it’s just Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy dancing. That’s how it feels when you’re in love with someone. Like the whole world could stop and you wouldn’t even notice it. Lin-Manuel Miranda himself could have walked past my locker when Tim was talking to me there and all I would have seen was a blur.

  So if the word “him” doesn’t make Libby think of dad immediately, then Dan can probably relax. On the other hand, maybe she’s bluffing: what? Who? I don’t know who you could possibly be referring to. But that’s not what Libby’s like. She’s more into wearing her heart on her sleeve at all times. What you see is what you get. WYSIWIG, she calls it.

  “My dad,” I say. “Do you ever think about him?”

  “I think about all of you,” she says. The plastic Scrabble tiles make clicky, tappy sounds as we throw them into their pouch, handful by handful, and they all knock against each other. “I think about that summer in Pasadena with you guys, yeah.”

  But that’s not what I’m asking and I know she knows it. Libby is not an idiot.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I mean, I assume that you do since we wouldn’t know each if you hadn’t come to stay.”

  She’s still looking at the board instead of at me.

  “Do you still,” I say, taking a deep breath and going for the cheesy question. “You know. Have feelings for him.”

  Libby’s hand is deep in the Scrabble pouch now. She’s mixing the letters with her hands over and over. Click, click, click.

  “You know how some people have crushes on TV characters?” she asks me.

  I do. Since, before I let myself get distracted by Tim, I never had time for real boys because of the whole LACHSA-Juilliard-Symphony plan, the only crushes I allowed myself were the ones on Matthew Saracen from Friday Night Lights and Bailey from Party of Five reruns.

  “When I came to California,” Libby says, “it was kind of like I was going behind the fourth wall. You know what I mean by the fourth wall?”

  You don’t grow up with actor parents without knowing what the fourth wall is. It’s, like, the thing between you and the audience, the boundary between the real world where the audience is and the imaginary world you’re creating. With TV, it’s the actual television set that contains the imaginary world. With plays, it’s basically the stage. When you break the fourth wall, it means that the actors talk to the audience, when really the characters they’re playing aren’t supposed to even be aware that the audience exists out in the real world, because if they knew about the real world that would mean they’d also know that they themselves were imaginary and then you wouldn’t have characters on the stage so much as you’d have puffs of smoke where their brains have exploded.

  “Yes,” I say to Libby. “You mean you felt like you were in a play or something?”

  “A film, maybe,” she says, which is trippy in itself, since writing a film – a movie – was what she was supposed to be doing with my dad. “As if it wasn’t really real. Or that’s how I think about it now, anyway. Once I was behind the fourth wall, it felt totally real. But now your dad’s like a character in a TV show. I’m on the other side of the fourth wall again. He’s safe behind glass. Like a fantasy – if that’s not a weird thing to hear about your dad.”

  I shrug. It is, totally weird, but on the other hand, I did ask. And I know what she means. A lot of people who come up to my dad tell him they love him, but they don’t even know him. They love the characters he plays, but that’s not him. Or maybe they think they know him because they’ve seen interviews, but that’s not really him, either. That’s a character he plays, too: charming Thomas Cassidy, funny Thomas Cassidy, slightly flirty Thomas Cassidy. (That makes me a little queasy.) My dad’s not real to them. He’s behind the fourth wall, and sometimes it feels like we’re all there with him, in our imaginary goldfish bowl of a universe, existing just so we can be gawked at.

  “So you ship him and Ebba now,” I say, thinking about how our lives would play out on TV, like in The Truman Show.

  “I’ve always shipped your dad and Ebba,” she says. “It just got confusing for a while when I was there behind the fourth wall with them too.”

  “Why?”

  “Because your dad is incredibly charming.”

  “No.” I know that. Or at least, I’ve gathered it from Twitter. “Why do you ship him and Ebba?”

  Libby puts the green Scrabble tile pouch down and disappears into her and Dan’s bedroom. Then she comes back with a book I recognize from its cover right away, a man and a woman in shadow against a sunrise. Ebba’s memoir. She reads me the lines I’ve avoided reading in the book I’ve only pretended to look at.

  Ebba’s description of dad is actually, I have
to admit it, beautiful. It’s all the more beautiful because it’s real. She tells us, the readers, how terrible his puns are, how he nearly burned the house down with a frozen pizza, how he couldn’t cook. (He can now, pretty well, but, you know: laziness.) How he loved it a little bit too much when other people loved him. But also how his terrible puns made her laugh in the end, how he came alive on stage, how his wanting to be great made him somehow charismatic, attractive not in the sexual sense (ugh) but in the sense that people wanted to be around him. She loved him: it’s obvious, even to me. Even though she left him and broke his heart, which I can’t fault her for since it led to my existence, unless there’s some alternate universe in which I am Ebba’s daughter, or maybe fan fic for the TV show that is my family. I think my brain is actually going to explode. I swear I can feel smoke beginning to seep out of my ears.

  “Yeah,” I’m forced to admit when Libby is done reading. “That’s lovely.”

  “You’ve read it before, though, right?”

  I’m quiet. Somehow I feel like no is not going to be an acceptable answer.

  “I’m not really a books person,” I say instead, though that’s probably even less acceptable. I take a sip of my tea, forgetting it’s stone cold by now, and nearly spit it back out.

  “Oh, Clara,” Libby says. Pronouncing it right, because she’s the only person in my life who always does. “You have to read it. It’s one of my very favorite books.”

  “Because it’s about dad?”

  “No,” she says. “Not because of that. Or at least not only because of that. It’s not really about him, anyway. It’s about Ebba, it’s about Ebba and Adam. It’s just – it’s a beautiful book. It will help you to understand Ebba. It made me feel like she was worthy of your dad. Like if I couldn’t be with him, it would be okay if she was.”

  I don’t know if it’s because she’s been so honest, but suddenly I feel like I want to be honest too. Even if it’s ugly.

  “I don’t really want to understand her,” I blurt out.

  Libby smooths the Scrabble pouch out on the table and looks at me carefully, like she’s trying to read something in my face. I am inscrutable. She should know this by now.

  “What are you so afraid of?” she asks me.

  From out of nowhere I have that horrible pain in the back of my throat, the pain that means I’m about to cry no matter how much I don’t want to.

  “I’m afraid she’ll leave us,” I blurt out. I don’t think I even knew that until this moment. I’m sniffing now. But that’s not all I’m afraid of. I’m afraid that she only loves me because she has to. I’m afraid that I was right about her being pregnant and that she won’t care about me once the baby’s born. I’m afraid that I’ll always be in dad’s shadow. That I’m swimming around in the goldfish bowl but no-one is really looking at me, and if there’s one thing worse than being gawked at, it’s being ignored. I can’t really say any of this, though, because I’m crying now. It won’t come out coherently.

  Libby disentangles my hands from my cold tea cup and squeezes them in hers.

  “I wish I could promise you she won’t leave you,” she says. “Life is hard sometimes. Things happen that we don’t expect, you know? I know she would never deliberately hurt you. I know that your dad loves you very much and she does too.”

  “That’s not very reassuring,” I say.

  “Okay,” she says. “Look. Here’s the thing. I was in love with your dad. I was head-over-heels, can’t-think-about-anything-else in love with him. It was real to me then. And I thought it was going to work out and when it didn’t, it was so incredibly painful. It broke my heart. Love does that.”

  I’m bawling now. I know love does that. I was head-over-heels, can’t-think-about-anything-else in love with Tim. I was an idiot, but there you have it. And wow, did it end up hurting, in every conceivable way. It still hurts. Libby gets up to fetch a tissue and presses it into my hands.

  “The thing is,” she says. “It was worth it. Even with all the pain I felt. It was worth it, you know? You’ve got to open yourself up to love. Sometimes it will hurt. Sometimes it won’t work out. But you’ll miss out on so much if you don’t. Don’t close yourself off.”

  “I wish it was you,” I say. I’m just realizing this now. Libby is the best. I wish she was my step mom. The reason I’m mad at Ebba is that she’s not Libby.

  “Oh, lovely,” she says. “That’s so sweet of you. But I’m here the other side of the fourth wall. Of the Atlantic Ocean. And Ebba is wonderful, I promise you. Read her book.”

  “She doesn’t understand me.” I’m grasping at straws now. I know that’s not fair. When she sat on my bed and told me about her ballet injury, I remember thinking she might understand me better than anyone. I sound whiny right now, even to myself, like I’m just coming up with excuses. But I’m also thinking of last fall, that time she was watching me play my viola. Who does that?

  “You’ve got to give her a chance,” Libby says. “Sit with her and be honest. Like you’re being honest right now with me.”

  “What, and tell her I’d rather dad married you?”

  She laughs, through her nose, the way dad does sometimes. “I wouldn’t suggest you lead with that.” She’s quiet for a while, and the only sound is my sniffing. “You know, I’m not perfect I’m not even close to perfect. Ask Dan sometime to tell you all the ways I’m not perfect. I bet your dad could give you a list. Ebba, too, actually. It’s easy to idealize someone when they’re not there to let you down. Like a TV character, in fact. Ebba’s there, in your world. I would give anything to spend as much time with her as you get to. She’s not perfect, either. But she’s real. She’s in your world. She loves you. And why wouldn’t she? You’re great. Have faith in yourself, too, Clara. Have faith that people will like you if you let them get close.”

  Is it possible to somehow feel simultaneously punched in the gut and enveloped in a warm hug? I guess it must be, because that’s what I’m feeling right now.

  “I don’t think I have the energy for Scrabble tonight,” I say.

  “That’s okay,” Libby says. “There’s always tomorrow. Want to pick a movie to watch instead?”

  I choose The Fault in our Stars, so I can cry some more and Libby will think it’s because of the movie. I hate being this pathetic. Also, Ansel Elgort is kind of cute.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  On Wednesday, I get up and dressed and ready to visit Hampton Court, but by the time I come out of the bathroom people are rushing past the living room huddled under umbrellas and it’s raining too hard to go anywhere. So while we wait for the rain to stop, we try Scrabble again. Libby gets the board out from its cardboard box and this time there are no playing tiles to remove since we did all it a couple days ago, so I don’t have time to think thoughts that lead to heart-to-hearts that lead to tears that lead to a movie that leads to more tears that lead to a splitting headache.

  We get straight to it. Libby jiggles the bag of letter tiles and we each pick out one to see who’s going to start. I get B, so I win that round, since it’s closer to the beginning of the alphabet than the Q that Libby gets, even though the Q is worth 8 points to the B’s 3 and I think it would be more logical to win the opening turn on the basis of the number of points. But rules are rules, and I’m certainly not about to argue with them, especially when they benefit me.

  We listen to a Brahms sonata as we play; viola music helps me to think. I have this theory that it’s because it lights up my brain with dopamine or whatever the happy substance it that lights people’s brains. It lights up my brain with inspiration and creativity and hope.

  I’m trying to make the longest words I can with the seven letters I have, to use up as many letters as possible and cover as many special squares on the board as possible: Double Word Score! Triple Letter Score! Libby know a trick or two and I start to take notice of them. Like, say someone puts the word CAT down. You can add an S onto the end of CAT and start a whole new word with it, lik
e this:

  C A T S

  U

  G

  A

  R

  Or you can end a word with the S, like this:

  B

  A

  S

  C A T S

  Or you can even have an S in the middle of the word, like this:

  C

  A

  U

  C A T S

  E

  That way, you get the points of the new word you made, plus the points of the old word you added the S to. And if the S happens to be on a double word score square, then you double the points for both the words. So it’s words, but it’s also math, and it’s also strategy, and dopamine is firing in my brain, or it’s doing whatever it is that dopamine does, and it’s not just the viola music. This is fun – the tactics and the scheming. At first I was just doing it because Libby seemed to really want to play, but now I’m genuinely enjoying myself. My proudest moment is adding the x to make xi and ox, like this:

  H O B O

  X I

  S

  L

  A

  N

  D

  It’s on a triple letter score and x is worth 10 points, so that gets me sixty-two points, thirty-one for each for xi and ox.