Dixie juts her chin out belligerently.
Earlier that day Dixie was one of fifteen girls who auditioned for various parts in the new school play. Now, in the small room behind the stage, Mr. Pratt and his student director are poring over the finalists. Dixie has had a starring role in many of the school productions over the course of her three years at Carmine-Casey. Among her dramatic talents is the ability to swoon on command.
“I don’t even know what the play is,” Dixie says. “Does anybody know what the play is?”
“It’s an original Liz Warren,” Andie says, her eyes unfocused and glancing between her drawing and the features in Dixie’s profile.
“Ugh,” Dixie says, deflating. “Not Liz. Why doesn’t anybody stop her? She can’t be the only one writing plays around here.”
“Well,” Andie says, “she is.”
“Why don’t we write a play, Dix?” Caroline offers.
Dixie frowns. She has been in two of Liz Warren’s plays already. There was a lot of staring in both. As an actress, it isn’t very fulfilling to spend all your time staring into corners with “near grief.” In one of the productions the crew had to put a little piece of iridescent tape on the wall because the director said Dixie kept staring in the wrong direction.
She practices her staring now. But her attention is distracted by a freshman girl trying to do a cartwheel. She scowls.
“And,” Andie continues, “she’s directing this one, too.”
“No,” Dixie says, shaking her head resolutely. “Huh-uh. No way. It’s bad enough I have to read her words. I’m not going to act the way she tells me, too. Forget the whole thing.” But she doesn’t make any move to leave. In fact, she glances over at Andie to make sure she’s still drawing and raises her chin again, the stick of the lollipop poking up at an angle like a flagless pole.
The four girls are quiet for a while. Then lethargic Beth, who has been napping, finally sits up and rubs her eyes.
“I was having a strange dream,” she says, yawning. “Do you want to know what it was? I was dreaming that I was shaving my legs, right? Except that when I got to the tops of my legs I kept shaving because I had hair all over my stomach. Gross, isn’t it?”
“You’re an animal,” Dixie says, taking the lollipop from her mouth and pointing it meaningfully at Beth. “That’s what that means. You’re like a wolf or something. Now I bet you want to take a big bite out of Caroline.”
Caroline laughs and tumbles off the edge of the stage, pretending to run away even though no one is chasing her. She goes a few yards, and then she comes back.
“So anyway, what’s this play called?” Dixie asks.
“Salmonburger,” Andie says.
“Salmon what?”
“Salmonburger. It’s based on the Oresteia.”
“The what?”
“It’s a Greek tragedy.”
“Oh god.”
“Something about women. Or birds. I don’t remember.”
To anyone who might be watching her, Dixie looks as though she’s just been asked to hold a stranger’s baby—her face is twisted in confusion, her palms facing up, her shoulders frozen in mid-shrug.
“Salmonburger?” she says.
“Salmonburger,” Andie says.
“Salmonburger,” Beth repeats to the rafters.
“I don’t like salmon,” Caroline says absently. “My mother makes salmon loaf. It’s like meatloaf but with salmon in it instead.”
She bends over to fish a pebble out of her shoe. When she does so, you can see the trim of her underwear beneath her skirt. The girl, Dixie thinks, is a disaster full of sexuality.
“What monologue did you do anyway?” Beth asks disinterestedly. “For the audition, I mean.”
“I did Cleopatra,” Dixie says. Then, closing her eyes and raising the back of her hand to her forehead: “Oh, my oblivion is a very Antony. And I am all forgotten.”
Caroline giggles, and Dixie remembers to raise her chin again for Andie’s drawing.
“Mr. Pratt said I was engrossing. That’s what he said.” Then she lowers her voice and crinkles up her face in imitation of the drama teacher. “Dixie,’ he said to me, ‘that performance was really quite engrossing.’”
“That’s a good sign, isn’t it, Dix?” Caroline asks.
At that, all four girls look toward the door of Mr. Pratt’s office, which remains stubbornly closed.
The door has been closed for almost an hour now—since well before the last bell of the day. Liz Warren got out of her last class by telling her biology teacher, Ms. Doone, that she had important school play business to attend to. Ms. Doone simply nodded and smiled. Now, in her senior year, her teachers no longer question anything she does—she has gotten straight As in almost every single class at Carmine-Casey. Because her teachers believe that seriousness is a quality built into her basic circuitry, she is above reproach. If she is not in class, there is no doubt that her reasons are entirely valid.
Now she sits opposite Mr. Pratt, hunched over his desk where a list of names lies between them. She has her forefinger planted like a carpenter’s nail on one of the names, and she is waiting for him to say something.
“I don’t know, Liz,” Mr. Pratt says finally. He is a thin wisp of a man, his spectacles sitting low on his nose and his hair, what remains of it, like a feathery circlet from temple to temple around the back of his head. He looks pained much of the time—not so much physically as spiritually, as though he is carrying the grief of some distant history in the creases of his face. The girls have heard from reliable sources that he’s never been married, and the popular belief around school is that he’s gay.
“I don’t know,” he says again, looking at the name under Liz’s finger. “Martha is a wonderful girl. She understands the play, maybe in a way that the others don’t….”
“But?” Liz asks.
“But don’t you think her performance…lacks something?”
“Like what?”
“She’s too…self-conscious. Too afraid to be dramatic. It’s as though she’s embarrassed of drama. Too worried that she’s going to be…sincere.”
He looks up at Liz, his face seemingly in pain—suffering in the hope that Liz will agree.
She can’t bear to hurt him. Besides, she knows what he’s saying is true. This is why none of her friends has ever been able to break into the school productions. They resent having to take the performance seriously.
“Okay,” she says, lifting her finger and sitting back in her chair. They look at each other across the table. “Okay. But Dixie Doyle? What about Lauren Schaffer?”
“Dixie can do it.”
“But all she wants—” She stops herself. When talking to Mr. Pratt, she sometimes forgets she’s talking to a teacher. She lowers her voice and starts again. “Don’t you think she’s just interested in getting attention?”
He smiles. “That’s what we used to call charisma. And no matter how scintillating the writing is, you’ve got to have somebody delivering the lines who can…”
He doesn’t finish his thought. He doesn’t have to.
Liz wants to make him understand. She wants to make sure he knows this isn’t just some petty personality clash—that Dixie Doyle really isn’t the right person for the lines she’s written. She’s willing to go over it again and again until he’s convinced that she’s seeing things straight where this is concerned. But it already feels like she’s said too much. She can see herself from the outside, and she looks an awful lot like a whining schoolgirl. So she determines not to argue anymore.
Instead, she says, “Dixie probably won’t take it anyway. Does she know I’m directing?”
“Look,” Mr. Pratt says, and now he’s the one leaning forward—the conciliatory comfort of the modest victor. “I know you two don’t get along. But…”
She knows what’s coming next. She is going to have to learn how to work with people she doesn’t always like. The only concern of the director is the producti
on itself. If she wants to be a successful director, she has to figure out how to compromise. Et cetera. She doesn’t like to be lectured to. Even more specifically, she doesn’t like to be someone who needs to be lectured to. She wants to tell him it’s okay, she gets it, he doesn’t have to continue—but she doesn’t know how to stop him without sounding like a poor loser.
Instead her mind abstracts itself. She begins to think about what it will be like to direct a show. She remembers something her older brother once told her before she went off to camp in the eighth grade. There was a trick she could do, something to test her mettle. (The phrase still calls to mind what it did for her back then: a malleable piece of metal being bent until it snaps.) During the sing-alongs, when everybody is clapping, she should clap in the same rhythm but on the offbeat, in the spaces between the clapping of everybody else. If you did it loudly and consistently enough, he explained, everyone else would be thrown off. And then you might hear a smattering of confused rhythms for a second or two while everyone readjusts to your clapping. That’s the point at which your offbeat becomes the on beat. And nobody in the room, he said, would know what happened. Nobody would know that you were the one controlling their clapping.
When she thinks of directing, that’s what she thinks of: everyone clapping to her rhythm without even knowing they are doing it.
“You know, Liz,” Mr. Pratt is saying, “I’m really looking forward to seeing what you do with this production. I really believe you can accomplish great things with it. That’s one hell of a script you wrote. You’re a very talented young woman.”
“Thanks, Mr. Pratt.” She knows that these compliments are meaningless. She has heard them before. They are code for I recognize you as one of those fragile students who needs a lot of positive reinforcement to stay afloat. Sometimes the praise from her teachers seems almost sincere. But mostly it makes her cringe. She’s smart—okay—but whatever success she may have, she believes it will only lead to higher expectations, expectations that, at some point, she will not be able to fulfill. Then what will she do with all their disappointment? Tote it around in her knapsack? She would prefer if people just wouldn’t compliment her at all.
Mr. Pratt takes a ballpoint pen and puts a little arrow by Dixie Doyle’s name, and now the cast list is complete.
He rotates in his chair to the computer keyboard and begins typing up the finalized list. While he does so, he can feel Liz’s eyes on him. She is sitting there taut as a ball of rubber bands. She has always been a high-strung girl, he thinks to himself, but this process is pushing her to the precipice of her own abysmal anxieties. He knows that she is not used to relying on other people for her success. She hates having to put the fate of her play in the hands of someone like Dixie Doyle. Which is why, deep in his chest, he feels a tingle of joy at forcing the issue. It will be good for her to be relieved of a little control.
He finishes typing the list, prints it out, and then takes a thumbtack from the drawer of his desk.
“Are you staying here?” he asks.
“Is that okay?”
“Sure. I’ll be right back.” Of course, he knows she doesn’t want to face their eyes—the eyes of all the girls in the auditorium who are about to be disappointed. Or even the eyes of those who aren’t. He would pay good money to see Liz Warren and Dixie Doyle’s first interaction after the final cast list is revealed, but he supposes he will not be privy to that.
When he comes out of the office, he purposefully avoids looking at any of the girls. He marches over to the corkboard on the wall and tacks the list to it. Then he turns and offers a generous smile to everyone and marches back into his office.
“Now we wait,” he says to Liz. “We’re trapped in here until the screaming stops.”
Outside, Caroline rushes up to Dixie and says, “Dixie, look, there’s the list!”
Dixie takes the lollipop out of her mouth and glances over to see if Andie is finished drawing her profile. Then, through the open auditorium door, she sees Binhammer walk past. She wonders briefly if he will come to this show. He normally doesn’t attend the school plays, but maybe if she told him that it was important to her…
“Dixie,” Caroline says again. “The list!”
“So go see what it says,” Dixie snaps back.
Caroline scurries off to the group of girls huddled around the list and scurries back.
“You did it, Dixie! You did it again!”
Dixie does not change her expression.
“Congratulations, Dix,” Beth says. “Do you want to get some coffee now? I’m starving.”
“Yeah, congratulations,” Andie says. Then she hands Dixie her profile. The eyes in the picture are glistening.
chapter 7
The next day, on the back stairs, Binhammer comes across two girls throwing dice in the corner. As soon as they hear him they scramble to attention, all giggly and red, but not before he can see where those dice go. They are wrapped up tight in the palm of the one on the left, a tall senior with bright curls and, suddenly, a look of disenchanted experience. They stand there frozen as he approaches.
He normally doesn’t take these stairs, which are in a dingy corner of the building away from everything else. But he has been avoiding Ted Hughes all day. He is anticipating, reluctantly, the formal introductions that he knows must take place at the big department meeting this afternoon, and he’s in no mood to hasten the inevitable.
And now on these back stairs, he and the two girls with the dice stare at each other with expressions of obligatory glumness.
They are enthralling, these two glowing daughters of the social elite who have just been crouching like dockworkers at craps. He imagines them in their skirts and expensive shoes, tossing quarters on the sidewalk, rolling their own cigarettes, heckling the passersby.
“Give them to me,” he says to the tall one, indicating the dice in her sweaty little palm.
“But Mr. Binhammer—”
“Give them.”
He confiscates the dice—even though his impulse is to leave them be—and as soon as the tall girl puts the contraband in his palm, they both go scurrying off with their hands over their mouths as though they are trying to outrun their own bodies.
He stands there for a few minutes, studying what he has sequestered. The dice are actually pink plastic, and they have letters instead of dots on them. On one are the words KISS, LICK, SUCK, STROKE, SQUEEZE, BLOW, and on the other, FINGERS, TOES, GENITALS, CHEST, STOMACH, EAR. He turns them over in his hand, making different combinations and smiling to himself. Then he puts the dice in his pocket and continues to his next class.
His ninth-grade class goes by quickly. It is filled with girls who squirm in their seats and always seem to be trying to get out of their clothes. They tug at their collars and roll up their cuffs, they slip off their shoes and scratch the ankle of one foot with the white-socked toe of the other. Sometimes they even rest their feet on the crossbars of their desks, unconsciously hiking up their skirts and exposing their polka-dotted underwear. Unlike the seniors on the stairs, these younger girls seem to have a mechanical physicality that chugs along without shame. To these girls he is an object, a piece of furniture, a nightstand or a commode that they are obliged to stare at for a certain amount of time every day—like forced meditation. For the freshman class, he is a splinter in the minds of girls who are all body. They pluck at their bras while they are talking to him in the same way that they do standing before their vanities in the morning.
And when they file out of the room today, they leave behind the mild perfume of girl sweat.
Just as the last of them has gone, the door opens again and Lonnie Abramson’s head appears.
“Department meeting, darling, after school. Don’t forget.”
She winks and is gone before he can respond.
Then the classroom is quiet, and it sounds like the inside of his own head.
Next up is his senior class, and he wonders what Dixie Doyle is so cheerful about. S
he says hello to him as though they were reunited lovers. During class, when Liz Warren is contributing an insight about Emerson and Kate Chopin, he finds himself distracted by Dixie’s fingernails, which seem to be painted with purple glitter. When he realizes that Liz is finished talking, he tries to fake his way through an adequate response, but he must not be very convincing because she merely shrugs and turns her attention to the window.
He has lost Liz. Again. And he must fill the minutes until the end of class. As he gets up and stands before the room to read a passage from The Awakening that describes the protagonist’s suicide, he fingers the dice in his pocket and remembers his first year at the school—recalling how dynamic he was, how he would never sit down as long as class was in session, how the girls with their sharp, pointy voices would poke at him all day and he would hunger for their attention, like an addict in a cloud of fluttering hypodermics.
When the bell rings, he feels like he has made no progress. Forty-five minutes have elapsed, yet he and these girls have gone nowhere. They have all stood still together.
Something, he thinks, has sprung a leak.
Okay, he says to himself. Okay. And the day goes on.
Fifteen minutes after the last bell of the day has rung, glancing cursorily through a pile of papers to avoid the inevitable, he finally decides he should go to the department meeting and finds himself on those dingy back stairs for the second time today. The halls outside the conference room are uncomfortably quiet—like an awkward pause in a conversation—and he can hear Sibyl’s laugh even before he gets there. He can tell from the sound of it that she’s covering her mouth with her hand—something she does when she’s trying to maintain her decorum.
In fact, in the conference room at that moment, what Sibyl finds herself laughing at is something that Ted Hughes has just whispered to her, his voice sudden and confident, as though they were already intimate friends. Sibyl looks at the other women while leaning in closer to him. She is suddenly conscious of the territory her body proscribes.
Hummingbirds Page 5