In the Wake
Page 9
ELLEN: Okay . . . but—flawed as it is—it is the system that gives the best quality of life to the biggest number of people.
JUDY (Rueful laugh): Okay, Ellen. First of all, you know that’s not true. Look at health care. And education. And whatever else—it’s just not true. Second—isn’t this the thing you rail against? The blind assumption that this country is good, even when it’s behaving badly? Isn’t this what you want? To find the blind spots, look at what’s really happening, and to go deeper?
ELLEN: Yes.
JUDY: You talk about what people take for granted—you take for granted your own worth—you take for granted that you are worthy of love. Who but someone who completely believes in that could live the way you’ve lived? Who else could make the choices you’ve made? You can criticize marriage and have “expansive” thoughts about relationships, not because you think the system of marriage is wrong, but because you don’t need it. You don’t need to be reassured you won’t be left. Most people, they don’t know that. They don’t believe that. Look at how shocked you are. How can that be the case? How did you get this far in life without having your heart broken?
ELLEN: I don’t know.
(Ellen steps back into the present.)
(Dawning) I don’t know why I thought . . . I mean, it’s obvious, it’s obvious, it’s obvious.
The thing about the blind spot—is . . . you can’t see it.
It doesn’t matter how much you try.
. . . That’s what makes it a blind spot.
(A beat.)
So . . . So . . . What? What can you do?
(A beat.)
Look at your wake, I guess—at the damage you’ve left in your wake . . . And try to figure out what was really happening when you were looking forward, trying so hard, thinking you were paying such close, careful attention.
Scene 6
Projections: Fragmented images of Katrina and its aftermath.
September 2005. Ten months later.
Danny and Ellen are in their living room, getting ready to go to the beach. Danny is singing a happy, meandery, going-to-the-beach song he’s making up as he goes along.
DANNY (Singing): Going to the beach. We’re going to the beach. What’s more fun than the beach—
ELLEN (Holding the sunscreen): Did you get the tops of your ears?
DANNY: Yep— (Singing) There’s sand and sun and a big roller coaster—
ELLEN: Did you get the tops of your feet?
DANNY: Yep— (Singing) and some washed-up syringes and some other kinds of trash at the New York beach! Love the beach! I love the beach! (Spoken) Hey! We’re going to the beach!
(Ellen points to a plastic grocery bag. He picks it up.)
What is this?
ELLEN: I cut up watermelon.
DANNY: Ah! Good thinkin’, Linkin’.
ELLEN: It’s the beach. You’ve gotta have watermelon and you gotta have your unread New Yorkers.
DANNY: Spoken like a true outdoorswoman.
(She ties a sweater around her waist and picks up an overflowing tote bag and a plastic grocery bag with more stuff in it. Danny picks up another grocery bag and two folded beach chairs he’s rigged with belts to be carried like a backpack.)
Ready. Ready?
ELLEN: Yeah.
(She looks for her keys.)
Where’d my keys go? They were here.
(Danny looks, too.)
They were right here. Where’d they go?
DANNY: Don’t know. I have my mine.
ELLEN: I know but— (Continuing to search with increasing frustration) obviously, I need my keys. Would you go out without your own keys?
DANNY: Well, they’ve gotta be here somewhere.
ELLEN: They were right here! They were right here!
DANNY: Well . . . I . . .
ELLEN: No, I know, Danny! I—
(Suddenly she is sobbing. Overcome.)
Sorry.
DANNY (Suddenly so weary): Oh. Ellie . . .
(He gets the Kleenex box and puts it next to her.)
ELLEN (Struggling to get a hold of herself): No. No. No. No. No. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. (For a moment getting control) Okay. I’m good. I’m good. I’m sorry. I’m sorry about that. I’m totally fine. Just . . . (Starting to lose it again) let me get a drink of water.
(She goes to the kitchen to drink some water. She returns, cheerfully ready to go.)
Okay. Let’s go.
(She picks up her bag and heads for the door. Danny gathers his things to follow her. She is again overcome. Danny waits. Ellen, sobbing, face in hands, speaks to herself.)
Oh my God. I want to just go to sleep and wake up in ten years.
(Danny unceremoniously drops the bags and the chairs and begins to put things away.)
What are you doing?
DANNY: Putting these away.
ELLEN: No! Danny! We’re going. I’m fine. I’m totally fine. Come on, come on, come on, come on, let’s go. I’m so fine.
DANNY: You’re not.
ELLEN: I really want to go. I really do. Come on. Once we’re at the beach, we’ll feel so much better.
DANNY: I’m going out for a walk.
ELLEN: No. Danny?
DANNY: Ellen, I’ll just go take a walk and you . . . do what you need to do and . . . we’ll go to the beach another time.
ELLEN: Danny, wait.
(He stops, looks at her. Waits.)
I know it’s horrible that I’m like this.
(Danny nearly laughs at the understatement.)
No, I know, Danny . . . I know. But I’m getting through it. I’m trying to get through it.
DANNY: What do you want me to say? This isn’t about me. You’re crying over your keys!
ELLEN: I know—but it’s going to get better. I swear.
DANNY: But—you’re not here.
ELLEN: I am. I’m right here.
DANNY: No. You’re not . . . in this . . . relationship.
ELLEN: Of course I am.
DANNY: Not . . . Not . . . Not in the way I am.
ELLEN: Danny, that’s not true.
DANNY: Everything I do . . . in my daily life . . . my, my . . . long-term and short-term . . . I don’t know. Thinking? Planning? All of it is based on my assumption that we’re . . . making a life together—
ELLEN: Yes . . . Yes.
DANNY (Continuing): But you don’t do that! You don’t have that assumption.
ELLEN: I . . . do.
DANNY: No. You want to be out on your own, and you like having me as your support system— //
ELLEN: No. That’s not what I— Danny, that’s not fair!
DANNY (Continuing): But you’re on your own, and you’re willing to let me writhe, Ellen, let everybody around you writhe, while you go out into the world, pushing boundaries, taking what you want.
ELLEN: Okay, I know I push toward the thing I want—but you have to push me back. I do listen and I do want to know what you need and you know that that’s true. But you have to tell me.
DANNY (Incredulous): I did.
(Ellen is puzzled for a moment. Then:)
ELLEN: And . . . I chose to be with you. I am in this relationship, Danny. I think about it all the time! I . . . I do things for you . . . For us. . . . I planned this—tried to plan this whole . . . trip to the . . . Oh my God, it sounds so lame, so stupid. But every day . . . I did choose you.
DANNY: Choosing me doesn’t mean just being here in this room!
ELLEN: That’s not all I’m doing, Danny, that’s not fair. Listen, if we want a life that’s big and complicated // then—
DANNY: That’s what you want.
ELLEN: You do, too. That’s why you’re with me, Danny. Look—this moment is hard. But we have to just keep moving forward. We can’t undo the choices we’ve made over these past years—we wouldn’t want to. We’re going to find our equilibrium again—
DANNY: When?
(He waits. Ellen has no response.)
Why am
I waiting? There’s always going to be something new pulling you away.
ELLEN: No—
DANNY: Yes! Because you want everything!
ELLEN: I . . . Yes.
DANNY: YOU CAN’T CHOOSE ME AND HAVE EVERYTHING. THAT’S NOT CHOOSING!
ELLEN (Struggling to understand, to keep up, scared): That’s not what I . . . That’s not how I . . .
DANNY (Suddenly he understands—the fight is done): Ellen . . . I know you love me.
ELLEN: I do love you! I love you so much!
DANNY: I know. God, it . . . it fucking kills me . . . I’ve been waiting a long time—
ELLEN: No, Danny—
DANNY: —because I love you, too, and I really . . . I really think I’m the one you should be with. //
ELLEN: You are! Danny, you are!
DANNY (Continuing): But it doesn’t matter now because, we’re somewhere—I don’t know where— But things are . . . different.
ELLEN (Terrified. Unprepared): Danny . . . ?
DANNY: I . . . have to go out. I’m going for a walk. We’ll talk . . . when I get back.
ELLEN: Okay.
(Danny leaves.)
Scene 7
Ellen steps back into the present, with Judy.
ELLEN: So . . . I’ve been working . . . And that’s good. I’m busy. It’s good. (A beat) I miss Danny.
JUDY: I know.
ELLEN: I feel like I can handle this as long as I feel like it’s going to change, but I can’t do this indefinitely. I keep waiting for things to turn, to shift—but what if it doesn’t change? What if all I feel is loss? Oh, Judy, how much further do I have to fall?
(A beat or two.)
JUDY: When I work in the camps, my job, as protection officer, is to try to make sure people aren’t being denied access to food, water, shelter, medical aid, because they’re women or because they’re from ethnic minority X or Y. My job is to try to make things a little more fair. That’s all. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I think the reason I keep going back is because these are places where no one thinks fairness is the natural way of things. The people I work with are desperate for fairness, for stability. But none of them believe it’s a default setting that is automatically reverted // to.
ELLEN: I know these // things—
JUDY: Wait.
(A beat.)
I know that my refusal to have . . . hope . . . is damaging. It hurts me. It hurts people around me. I do know that. But I don’t know how to let go of my rage. The American assumption that things always work out for the best—it’s a willful blindness I cannot understand. I know you know these things, Ellen. But your question—how much further do I have to fall? That’s an American question. It’s the question of someone who has never really assumed she would fall at all.
(Judy exits. Ellen, on the precipice of the void, speaks to herself, and now also to us, trying to work out—what happened?)
ELLEN: The blind spot is right here. I know that it’s here. And everyone can see it. But I can’t see it, I can’t see it, I can’t see it. All I know is that all the things that worked for me for so long—my way of moving through the world—failed me.
I wanted to be brave. I wanted not to be scared of change or disruption. I wanted to be brave enough to risk what I knew to walk toward what I didn’t know. I wanted to feel more, know more, have more demanded of me, I wanted to love more. I wanted more connection, more intimacy, more family . . . I thought if I could make myself brave enough to stand in an unknown place long enough . . . walls would shift, doors would open, a new way would show itself . . .
(A beat. A bone-deep realization:)
What . . . did I think risk was?
What did I think it was?
How is it that I built my life around an idea of “risk”—but never, never imagined I could lose the things most precious to me?
I thought I was golden. I thought I was limitless.
But now . . .
(Talking herself through her fear:)
This is where I live.
This is where I live now.
I’m afraid.
This is where I live.
I don’t know this place.
I’m afraid.
But this is where I live.
(Willing herself to accept the terrifying void, to let it be whatever it is, to take it in.)
Look! Look at your life.
What is here?
What do you see here?
(Starting to see . . . negative space.)
Nothing.
In the dizzying grief I feel for my family . . . I can see . . . the shape of my love. I can see, from here, the pulsing, bursting beauty of it. In this keening, aching loss I feel . . . I see the shape of my desire. Oh! I can see it from here.
I said I wanted more . . .
(Beginning, finally, to see) Maybe this is what more looks like.
END OF PLAY
EVA WEISS
LISA KRON is a writer and performer whose work has been widely produced in New York, regionally and internationally. Her plays include Fun Home, a musical adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel, written with composer Jeanine Tesori; The Ver**zon Play; In the Wake; Well; 2.5 Minute Ride and 101 Humiliating Stories. Her honors include playwriting fellowships from the Lortel and Guggenheim foundations, the Sundance Theatre Lab, the Lark Play Development Center, the American Voices New Play Institute and the MacDowell Colony, as well as the CalArts/Alpert Award, a Helen Merrill Award, and grants from the Creative Capital Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a founding member of the OBIE- and Bessie-Award-winning collaborative theater company The Five Lesbian Brothers. She serves on the board of the MacDowell Colony and the Council of the Dramatists Guild of America.