by Susan Choi
During the quick-change something else has changed. It’s happened just as quickly and just as wordlessly. Whether because they shared a task, or because they did it well, or just because they had to touch each other’s bodies too efficiently to leave time to think, somehow the static between Karen and Sarah is gone. It’s as if someone turned off a white-noise machine Karen hadn’t remembered was on. While David gives notes, Sarah comes out from backstage and drops down in the chair next to Karen, and she isn’t sitting opposite to Karen, haunting or besieging, she’s just sitting there. She looks tired and slightly green beneath her permanent tan. Karen tries to recall her obsession with Sarah but can’t retrieve the feeling-state. Losing that is like losing a limb. She feels light, not a lightness of heart but the lightness of being cut loose and set adrift in a void. At last, says Karen’s inner therapist, so much more cost-effective than a real one. At last you’re done crawling around inside Sarah, measuring all of the ways that she wasn’t a good friend to you.
“Are you excited to be having a baby?” Karen asks Sarah when rehearsal is finally over and everyone is leaving while also talking, milling, smoking, and drinking.
“I don’t know,” Sarah says. “I felt like I had to have one.”
“You felt that you had to have one? Or you thought that you had to have one? Thoughts are often false. A feeling’s always real. Not true, just real.”
“I thought I had to have one,” Sarah says after considering briefly. “I really don’t know what I feel.”
“I had one,” says Karen. They’re back outside now, getting into Karen’s car, on their way to The Bar, where Sarah will pretend to pay attention to Karen while only paying attention to David, and David will pretend to pay attention to everyone while only paying attention to Sarah. Is this why Karen lets slip her secret—because she wants to break into this circuit of David and Sarah, and seize attention, at last, for herself?
No. She lets it slip because she does. Don’t ask her Why now? Ask her Why not every moment up to now?
They have the car between them. Sarah looks across its top at Karen, perhaps meaning to pretend to have misheard, as people sometimes do to buy time, when they think that what matters is how they respond, and not that the thing has been said. How to tell them their response doesn’t matter, in fact isn’t wanted? “Please don’t say anything,” says Karen. Her own voice sounds harsh in her ears, and clearly startles Sarah even more. Well, so be it. Karen watches Sarah struggle with her unwanted position—no way to prove her goodness and caring, no way to disprove her discomfort and guilt. They look at each other so long across the top of the car that the other actors and Martin and David and the tech people come babbling onto the sidewalk, and the moment is taken away, it doesn’t end so much as stop. And that is satisfying to Karen, because nothing ends as in “completely to shut” from the Latin conclaudere. Nothing does that.
* * *
I ALWAYS LOVED opening nights. When I was little, before my parents split up, my mother and Kevin and I would go to opening nights at the outdoor theatre in the park and sit on a blanket eating peanut butter sandwiches and exclaiming in excitement every time something happened onstage that my father had done. If a flat glided in from the flyspace, or a set piece rolled in from the wings, or even if a pool of light appeared, if it was something he’d worked on we clapped as if the show’s star had made an entrance. We hardly paid attention to the actors or the story. The whole production seemed to be a coded message to us from my father that confirmed our importance, our special place on the hill that formed most of the theatre’s seating, its grass mashed flat from all the other blankets and all the other picnic baskets spread out under the pinkish night sky.
Ever since then I’ve been looking for that same secret message, that same confirmation that I matter most to whoever is sending the code. I’m sure all of us look for that message, although some people seem to receive it so early they don’t recognize it’s a message. They don’t wonder who sent it. Their own importance is that well-established to them. But I’ve never been like that and doubt that I’ll ever be like that. Once you’re old enough to recognize a hole in yourself it’s too late for the hole to be filled.
The bar/performance space’s women’s dressing room was a janitor’s closet with a bare lightbulb in it, but even though only I used it, because I was the only woman in the cast, when I opened the door and turned on the bare lightbulb and found a bouquet in a vase, I didn’t think it was for me until I read the card. I had no friends in this town where I’d been born and raised. The only people I knew were involved in the show. I’d told my father I was David’s props master, not that I’d be acting onstage, because I didn’t want him to come see the show. Having someone in the audience who knows who you are is a certain reminder you’re acting and I hadn’t wanted to know I was acting.
The note on the bouquet said, “To lovely Karen from her lucky leading man. Break a leg, Martin.” Reading the note, I knew that Martin had never forgotten. Over the past several weeks I’d convinced myself that he’d forgotten everything that had happened between us, but now I knew he hadn’t, and that was harder somehow to digest than the thought that he had.
They were gorgeous flowers, actually. Karen put her face in them, and closed her eyes. It was a very self-conscious gesture she’d seen actresses do on TV and in movies but never had the chance to do herself. Then Karen put on her costume, the dingy jeans and hoodie of a runaway, and did her makeup, which was a lot of grayish powder to make her look starved and unhealthy. But she didn’t feel starved, she felt full. She was already acting. She stayed in the closet as long as she could because she didn’t want to see anyone else. She wished that she could do the play alone.
Somebody knocked on the door. It was Sarah. Sarah squeezed in and shut the door behind her. Sarah had made herself glamorous for the opening night of this show in which she served as a backstage dresser for the space of one minute. Just like when they were young, Sarah had glamorized herself painstakingly in the style of someone who has not made an effort. She was wearing stovepipe jeans with big rips at the knees, motorcycle boots, a slashed and draped top made of hoodie material that fell off one shoulder to expose her bra strap like the outfit in Flashdance, and gigantic bohemian earrings. Her hair was parted far to one side so that a lot of it fell in her face. Maybe her outfit was an homage to the eighties. She looked just like she’d looked in high school, except better, because the bones of her face had become more defined. Karen hoped David hadn’t seen her or he’d be passed out drunk in the light booth before intermission.
“Mr. Kingsley is on the comp list!” Sarah said in outrage, as if even he should have ceased to exist once she’d pretended to write about him.
“He always comes to David’s shows. They’re good friends.”
“How is that possible? How can David even speak to him? ‘I won’t rest until you cry’—remember that?”
“He said that to David, not you.”
“That doesn’t make me less angry about it.”
“He was trying to help David get in touch with his emotions, and maybe it worked. David became a director, and he’s really good at it and loves it. I’ve heard him call Mr. Kingsley a mentor.”
“You’re the last person I would have expected to drink the Kool-Aid.”
“What Kool-Aid is that?” Karen said, because she can play dumb just as well as the next girl, particularly when discussing the person here called “Mr. Kingsley.”
Sarah gave Karen a Look. “Mr. Kingsley is part of what happened to you,” Sarah said, as if Karen deserved to be scolded for not holding the past to account.
“And here I thought he was part of what happened to you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sarah said after just a slight pause.
“Did you really expect me to go along with your revision? With David it’s one thing. He never knew in the first place and somehow still doesn’t. But come on. ‘Take five, sweetie’? Th
at’s rich, how you kept that and added a bow tie.”
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” repeated Sarah, who never could act her way out of a bag. By contrast, Karen knew she was going to be good. She could feel it. Tonight was her opening night.
“Five minutes!” someone called from outside, knocking sharply on the closet/dressing room door.
“Get to your place,” Karen dismissed Sarah, turning away.
Nothing feels safer than watching a show from the wings. You might think it’s a matter of upbringing, of Karen’s childhood in the theatre that she mentions so much, but anyone can be made to feel safe hidden in the wings, watching the spectacle sideways, from outside the circuit the actors and audience make. The warmth of that circuit warms you but asks nothing of you. Karen loved her very late Act One entrance for how long it let her be a watcher in the wings, but she’d never felt so disembodied and free as she did tonight, ready to step out onstage and until then a being of pure curiosity shining her light on the darkened unknown. All these weeks of rehearsal she had willfully ignored the fact that Martin was the author of the play but now the play spoke to her in his voice and she understood something about him. Why, asked the actors onstage, had their friend killed himself? And why not? asked the others who argued with them. It was his Self to keep or destroy. Why should customs or, God forbid, laws interfere with the ways we dispose of our Selves?
Because we’re none of us alone in this world. We injure each other.
Why should another be injured by choices I make for my Self?
You’re choosing for another when you make choices. We overlap. We get tangled. You can’t help but hurt.
That’s a load of BS! Anyone tangled with me got that way by a choice of their own. If I shoot myself, they had fair warning.
What warned them?
The plain knowledge that I wasn’t them.
The world is me and not me, Karen’s therapist said. It’s a difficult lesson to learn. Even over her therapist’s voice speaking inside her mind Karen heard her cue spoken and walked onstage into the light. Her body was a wire bringing shock to the actors onstage just as much as to the audience out in the house. She did it. She felt the air crackle, and felt a curiosity to answer her own. That electrification took place that can happen in shows when the Selves in the room overlap and deliver their shocks across spaces of air. The act ended and backstage as if under a noiseless glass dome Karen loaded the blank gun and set it in place. Sarah came backstage glittering and gesticulating with her fingers and moving her mouth in ways associated with eagerness and excitement but whatever it was she was saying Karen chose not to hear. Karen had no need to speak to her dresser. The lights went down when intermission ended and came up again at the start of the act and the scenes that led up to her scene came and went and then Karen stood gazing at Martin through the eyes of the Girl who stood gazing at Doc, and Karen understood the injury that bound them together and knew that Martin understood it. Martin/Doc “seized her in a violent embrace.”
Through the door, staring sightlessly out as the audience cringed from the stormclouds that formed on her face. Door shut, Martin in his chair, Karen on her marks, hot light throwing their shadows against the drawn blind. Shadow play. Karen raised the gun, sighted, and fired. With a strangled bellow and shriek Martin fell from the chair with his thighs and his hands tightly clamped at his crotch, and kept screaming and writhing once hitting the floor. Karen opened the chamber, looked in the cylinder, pressed the chamber back into the frame, took aim and fired again. Now Sarah was onstage with them in Doc’s “room” behind the scene flat and screaming also, if not in the same way as Martin. “Oh my God!” Sarah screamed, and, “Doctor! We need a doctor—” Sarah’s usual smoky murmurousness was now shrill and high-pitched while Martin’s usual jagged singsong had gone moaning and low. From the house, scraping chairs and stamping feet and disputing voices and David, briefly flinging open the set door and looking at them before he went shouting away.
“What really pissed me off about what you wrote,” Karen tried to tell Sarah as Sarah knelt screaming by Martin, as if Sarah had just one stage direction but was going to do it for all she was worth, “is how you wrote so much just like it happened, and then left out the actual truth. Why even do that? Who do you think you’re protecting?”
“Oh … God…” Martin was keening, curled like a fetus on the floor, a fetus turning like a wheel. The way he was writhing in pain had him somehow rotating in place.
“What have you done to him?” Sarah screamed. As usual, not listening.
“You won’t die,” Karen reassured Martin. “You just won’t be the same.”
Trust Exercise
I ENDED UP sorry I went.
I’m so sorry to hear that. Can you talk about why?
It was crowded. They had to simulcast it outside in the lobby. Even then, there were people who didn’t get into the building at all. I got in. I’d arrived really early. I was so nervous, all I thought about was what I would say. Then I wound up in this mob. There must have been four or five thousand people.
That might feel overwhelming.
I didn’t care about him. I was there for the audience. I just never guessed how large it would be. I felt like a fool afterward. Like I could have ever spotted someone in that crowd. Or like someone could have ever spotted me.
You were nervous about going and the fact that you went is what matters. Even if the outcome wasn’t what you had hoped.
I don’t know what I hoped. I know what I said I hoped, but did I really mean that? I was terrified it would come true. And then I got there and saw there was no way. And that made me wonder if I’d wanted it at all. If I’d set myself up for a disappointment that I’d actually hoped for.
Why do you think you would do that?
To tell myself I’m doing something.
You are doing something. You’ve done a lot of things, and they’ve all been very difficult things.
Thanks. I think that’s all for today.
That’s all the time you want for today?
Yeah. Thanks. I have to be someplace soon actually. Thanks for listening.
Of course. We can
* * *
CLAIRE CLOSED HER laptop. Then she foolishly felt she’d been rude. It wasn’t as if she’d closed a door in someone’s face. Whenever she opened the laptop again, there would be the reminder to tip and rate. Just thinking of it made her open the laptop again to complete the transaction in case, as she suspected, the amount of time she took to tip and rate was kept track of for whatever reason. As usual she clicked “30 percent” and “five stars,” which represented the satisfaction level exactly opposite to hers. Like most economical options, this one didn’t work.
Then she closed the laptop again. Then she reopened the laptop immediately so the screen wouldn’t lock, closed the window inviting her to schedule her next session, and reopened the window to the school’s Facebook page. She played the video of the tribute again. The same way she’d scanned the roiling, roaring crowd that afternoon, while feeling shorter and shorter and smaller and smaller and less and less able to hold her ground and not wind up trampled even wedged in a seat, she now scanned the depths of the video’s frame, feeling as if she saw nothing. Even when she hit Pause to comb over each frozen granule, she couldn’t seem to see a thing.
It hadn’t been the same building she’d gone to almost three years ago. That building, squat and ugly with its bad old ideas about what might seem modern, had apparently already been declared obsolete the day she’d pulled open its doors. The ground had already been broken on its massive replacement. She hadn’t known. There might have been an architect’s model of Our Future Home! on display in the lobby, in fact it seems almost certain there was, but she hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t realized that the building might vanish, that its people might vanish, that she might lose her chance. When she’d left on that day almost three years ago, definitely not having seen an architect’s model
of Our Future Home! on display in the lobby as she plunged blindly back out the doors, Claire hadn’t dreamed it might be her last chance. She’d thought okay, today wasn’t her day, but she’d gotten somewhere. She’d stopped short, but she’d gotten somewhere. And another day she’d get farther. And she’d keep getting farther, a bit at a time, until she finally reached there, that place she was trying to go. It never crossed her mind that the building itself, where her answer was housed on some yellowed page or in some squeaky-drawered file cabinet or maybe just in some old person’s wandering mind, could disappear, its ugly gray stones demolished and thrown into Dumpsters and carted off to the beach to become a fake reef for some project with oysters.
The new building where the tribute was held was huge, bright, beautiful, the opposite of the old building which looked like a bunker except for its goofy marquee. The new building stretched out over fake hills that had been built on the site and then planted with expensive-looking native blond grasses. Parts of the building, like the front, started at the normal ground level and were tall as a cathedral while other parts, around the sides, were low and halfway set into the ground with glass sections that opened directly onto little fake meadows of the native blond grasses that eventually rose into curved steps and formed an outdoor amphitheatre. The new building, in its resemblance to a LEED-certified eco-resort located in some northern European paradise like Finland, had actually taken Claire’s breath away through a painful compression of her rib cage and lungs. It felt like a mockery of her perfectly adequate childhood that buildings like this now existed to serve as high schools. Claire had graduated high school only ten years ago but the building made her feel as though she’d graduated in a previous century that had thought a lot less of its children, or maybe had just thought a lot less of the way that it thought about children. This building emanated a smugness that if Claire hadn’t already felt sick with self-doubt would have made her feel sick with disdain.