This Body

by Laurel Doud

  What was left was a new pulse, a new rhythm, but this time it was her very own.

  Nothing is as it seems. And that's okay. Thisby did not kill me, and I don't have to hate her.

  There was a tap on her shoulder, and a voice said, “I'm sorry, but you really do have to give it up this time. You can buy one. Only twenty-five dollars.”

  Katharine pulled it from her face with a sweaty sucking sound. She stumbled up — he steadied her — and handed the viewfinder to him wordlessly.

  “Are you all right?” he called after her.

  The headline group was playing when she returned to the grass, their images projected on the giant screens. The rhythm was still with her, a descant to the meter playing from the stage. She was feeling drunk, stoned, out-of-bodied, but not isolated. She was suspended among a larger entity. Maybe I am stoned. I … I feel so big. Her arms stretched out across the whole amphitheater. Oh, the things I can sense.

  She could almost see anticipation taking shape in the audience. The pit continued to circle in the dark like molasses while the rest of the crowd stood, singing and dancing, but they were waiting for something. When the music seemed to be over, and the band had walked off the stage, the audience yelled and clapped and demanded attention. The promise was unfulfilled, the anticipation not satisfied.

  The group returned to the stage for the encore, and when the opening guitar riff was played, the entire assemblage screamed. This is what they had been waiting for. The crowd began to sing along, and Katharine found herself listening to the lyrics:

  Today I'm gonna live the life I never had.

  Play the adult I'll never grow to be,

  Pray like the child I'm never gonna have.

  I think I deserve to take that trip,

  So that I can connect the two and create me.

  The last chords died out. The curtains closed, and the lights came on. The multitude was satisfied. They would leave now.

  Katharine stood still as the crowd collected its possessions and drained down the walkways. She watched the people leave, and she felt satisfied too. It was almost love. She smiled at the Winter People with their seared red skin and their silly outfits. She wanted to pat the Hardbodies on their goosepimpled brown arms. She felt a part of all of them, part of the pattern. They had shared something. An Event. Community. Peace. Love. And understanding.

  Maybe their generation isn't so bad.

  It was after midnight when they drove out of the parking lot, the taillights of the cars in front of her strung out like a centipede crawling toward the freeway. They had already transferred Gert and her luggage to her cousins' car, and Quince was curled up in the backseat, her eyes closed.

  Katharine was glad Quince was quiet, because she was occupied elsewhere — having a conversation elsewhere.

  Katharine had died. Thisby had died. But Katharine still had a life. Her own family were like shape-shifters; she couldn't seem to hold them long enough in her mind to know what she wanted from them. Maybe she had a life with the Bennets; she and Quince were forging something good. But maybe not.

  Maybe it was just a life for herself.

  “I think I deserve to take that trip,

  So that I can connect the two and create me.”

  Act 3, Scene 2

  All the world's a stage

  And all men and women merely players:

  They have their exits and their entrances;

  And one man in his time plays many parts,

  His acts being seven ages.

  — JACQUES, As You Like It, 2.7.139

  She had felt the immortality of a teenager as she drove north from the concert with Quince, sleeping a couple of hours at the Dunnigan Pit Stop, which was just off what Katharine remembered from childhood as Temp 505, which connected Highway 80 and Highway 5. She had no idea when the 505 had gone from a two-lane country road to this four-lane highway with its sides blasted clean of anything human, no billboards or signs for gas, food, lodging. She missed the reptile zoo in the rundown barn, the nut-and-dried-fruit stalls and the Burma-Shave signs.

  DON'T LOSE

  YOUR HEAD

  TO GAIN A MINUTE.

  YOU NEED YOUR HEAD

  YOUR BRAINS ARE IN IT.

  BURMA-SHAVE.

  She had felt invincible, the darkness rolling around her, Quince laid out and softly snoring in the backseat. Maybe it was the strength that the concert had left her with — or the release it had given her. Maybe it was the speed and power she felt through the steering wheel of Anne's car.

  Or maybe it was just the height.

  She remembered cruising her hometown's version of Sunset Strip with her high school friend, Eve White, in Mr. White's beat-up GMC truck, country music blaring from the tinny speaker. Eve had listened at home to acid rock on the local FM station like every other self-respecting teenager at the time, but sitting high up in her daddy's truck, she seemed to put on a different face, singing along with Tammy Wynette and novelty songs like “Dropkick me, Jesus, through the goal posts of life, end over end, neither left nor to right.” Sometimes Eve would scream out the window at someone who had pissed her off, “Don't fuck with me, bubba. I got two fuel tanks and a fourth gear that'll turn you into roadkill.”

  It had felt a little like that.

  Ashland overlooked a valley of patchwork farmland, and the mid-morning heat had the smell of mountain elevation. Katharine had been too restless, too energized to sleep after they had put all their stuff in their room at the bed-and-breakfast where Anne had made reservations, the Cowslip's Belle. In a cowslip's bell I lie. Quince, who was not under the same restraint, fell into the daybed and was asleep again within minutes.

  Katharine walked the two blocks lined with red-and-yellow banners on the lampposts into the center of town, passing by stores with names like Puck's Doughnuts, All's Well Herb, and a restaurant called Quinz, which made her laugh. She climbed a long stretch of stairs into a bricked quad framed by festival buildings. A wooden sign proclaimed an oddly roofed edifice surrounded by ivy-covered walls as AMERICA'S FIRST ELIZABETHAN THEATRE.

  There were people standing silent in the quad, many holding cardboard signs. Katharine stopped by a gentleman whose sign read WANTED: 2 FOR HAMLET. TOMORROW and asked what was playing that night.

  He looked at her blankly. “It's Monday,” he replied after a moment's hesitation.

  Katharine didn't see how that answered her question, so she waited.

  “Monday's a dark day,” he tried again, but Katharine was still confused. “There are no plays,” he said, and then added with some irritation, “Never on Monday.”

  So she crashed a tour group that stood near her and was told again that there were no plays on Mondays, that the area they were in was called, appropriately, the Bricks, and before each evening performance, there was something called a Green Show, where performers danced and sang in the Renaissance style. She learned that a vomitorium was not a place to get sick in but a ramp underneath the audience that actors entered and exited the stage from. Rumble pots produced fog, squibs were tiny explosives to simulate gunfire, and gels were colored plastic filters placed in front of lights to produce colored beams.

  I'm ready for my quiz, Mr. DeMille.

  Robert and Anne arrived sometime in the late afternoon while Katharine was sleeping. Quince tried to get her up with temptations of dinner, but Katharine just waved her away. She awoke again sometime later, the evening fading. It took her a while to remember where she was, but she got up with an air of expectancy once she did.

  She walked back to the town square and beyond it to a grassy area, heralded by a sign that said LITHIA PARK. Night was falling, and people were packing up their picnic baskets and blankets. A creek ran chorusing alongside the park, and Katharine could feel the humidity rising up from the lawn as she walked farther in. She took a turn on the swings, something she hadn't done since Marion was a toddler and needed to sit in Katharine's lap while they gently swung back and forth. She could feel the
phantom weight of Marion on her thighs and felt oddly comforted.

  The old-fashioned lampposts that lined the walkways around the park had diamond-webbed, wrought-iron shades. They gave the park a timeless, magical feel. She wouldn't have been surprised if they were gaslight and a lamplighter had appeared in top hat and waistcoat and lit each one, wick by wick. Or even if Mr. Tumnis, the faun from the books The Chronicles of Narnia both she and Thisby had read as children, popped up and waited under one of them, his long tail draped over an arm that held his umbrella. It would start to snow, cold and soft, and if she turned around, she would see the wardrobe she had spilled out of into his magical kingdom.

  And all things would be possible.

  She blinked and shook off the fancy. The electric lights in the lampposts that had turned on simultaneously steadied in their 500-watt incandescence, the sound of automobiles could again be heard from the street, and the moist heat of the ground rose up around her.

  But that night in her dreams she had a sense of softly falling snow.

  “Will you come with me to the Exhibit Center? I want to see what costumes they've put out this year,” Quince asked Katharine after their breakfast with the other guests of the Cowslip's Belle. The two other couples, a gregarious brother and sister and their quieter spouses, met at the Cowslip's Belle every year. The brother and sister looked a great deal alike, their salt-and-pepper hair binding them inexorably to the same gene pool, and Katharine imagined Ben and Marion meeting like this in the future. The short cuts in the siblings' language, the shared experiences, the towering faults in one's memory when the other remembered better, made Katharine wistful.

  Maybe Quince and I will sound like this someday too.

  The owners of the bed-and-breakfast, Sybil and Basil, seemed to be old friends of the Bennets. Basil even kissed Anne, called her “fair Helena,” and launched into who was playing her part in this season's Midsummer. “She's not the best Helena I've ever seen, but she's not the worst.”

  Anne played Helena, not Thisby?

  Sybil turned to Katharine and asked, “So what do you think of Ashland after so many years?”

  “ ‘I like this place and could spend time in it,’ ” Katharine recited from Thisby's diary.

  Quince huffed. “Jesus, Thiz, it's ‘willingly could waste my time in it.’ ‘I like this place and willingly could waste my time in it.’ Can't you remember anything?”

  Robert looked embarrassed, and Anne was angry. “Be quiet, Quince.”

  But that's what Thisby wrote. I know it was. I got it right. I guess I just can't be sure Thisby did. But then, getting quotes wrong seems to be in character, so no one is suspicious.

  The Exhibit Center turned out to be a museum of memorabilia: furniture, set-design drawings, props, and costumes.

  Katharine heard laughter above her and climbed up to the loft area to investigate. The loft was low-ceilinged and contained a lounge chair, a dressing table with a mirror, an end table with a simulated bowl of fruit on it, and a straight-backed chair with worn crimson fabric riveted to pale-colored wood. A profusion of theatrical costumes hung from wooden pegs, and people were playing dress-up with them.

  She saw Quince standing at the opposite wall, tossing a crushed velvet hat onto the faux gold-leaf chaise longue. Two women and a man were watching her. Quince had assumed a supercilious attitude to address them. “If we offend, it is with our good will. The actors are at hand and by their show, you shall know all that you are like to know.”

  The man was checking a piece of tape at the nape of a heavy red cape with gold braid. “Julius Caesar, it says.” He threw the cape to Quince, who caught it and swung it up around her suddenly erect shoulders with practiced ease.

  “Cowards die many times before their deaths; / The valiant never taste of death but once. / Of all the wonders that I yet have heard, / It seems to me most strange that men should fear: / Seeing that death, a necessary end, / Will come when it will come.”

  The man took away the cape, and a woman handed her a beaded shawl. “Taming of the Shrew.”

  Quince draped it across her shoulders and haughtily addressed the air in front of her. “They call me Katharine that do talk of me.”

  She stepped forward, spun, and lectured her ghost with sarcastic patience. “You lie, in faith; for you are call'd plain Kate, / And bonny Kate and sometimes Kate the curst … / Hearing thy mildness praised in every town, / Thy virtues spoke of, and thy beauty sounded, / Myself am moved to woo thee for my wife.”

  She spun back, all fury and emotion. “Moved! In good time, let him that moved you hither, remove you hence.”

  A couple of people clapped.

  “Hamlet,” someone called out from behind Katharine.

  “Oh, God, too many,” Quince gasped, dropping the shawl to the chaise longue. “Brevity is the soul of wit.” The audience laughed.

  “Cleopatra.”

  Quince looked around, grabbed the bowl of brightly painted fruit and held it on her head like Carmen Miranda. “My salad days when I was green in judgment.”

  Katharine called out like a teenager requesting a song from her favorite group, “Midsummer, Quince. Do Midsummer.”

  Quince looked at her oddly but then shifted into a grinning prankster and said ingratiatingly, “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended: / That you have but slumber'd here / While these visions did appear. / And this weak and idle theme, / No more yielding but a dream … / So, good day unto you all. / Give me your hands, if we be friends, / And Robin shall restore amends.”

  Her audience blinked and seemed to yawn and wake up as if they had indeed been asleep. Katharine looked behind her and found the staircase packed with staring faces, two of them being Robert's and Anne's, peering over the loft floor. Quince suddenly looked self-conscious and began returning the costumes to their pegs.

  “What a show,” said one of the men as he passed Katharine. “They ought to put her on the stage and let her do all the parts.”

  Katharine found herself grinning and bouncing around Quince like a fawning groupie. “Quince, you're amazing. I had no idea you were this good. You should come up to that youth program here next summer.” On the backstage tour, the guide had mentioned a two-week seminar in August at which high school students learned firsthand the workings of a performing theater company. “You're the right age, though you probably could teach it. You should be on the stage. God, I was transfixed.” Even as she spoke, Katharine realized it probably wasn't something Thisby would have said, but she didn't care. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Anne and Robert Bennet standing there, watching her, their faces stone still. But still she didn't care; she hadn't cared since she had gotten to Ashland, and it felt good not to.

  Don't fuck with me. I've got a full tank, and the road is mine.

  Quince glanced at her parents, and they silently turned and left.

  Katharine and Quince went downstairs — the Bennets were nowhere to be seen — and out onto the sidewalk. Quince was quiet until she stopped and turned to Katharine. “They want me to have another plastic surgery next summer.”

  It took Katharine a while to understand her. “Why? You look great.”

  “Right.” She turned and walked on. Katharine followed. “They think my face has stopped growing, so they want to try and put the divet back.”

  “The divet?”

  Quince brushed angrily at her upper lip under her nostrils. “You know, the shape in your lips. The divet. The dip. The one you have. The one I don't. Shit, Puck's got two of them.” She flopped down on a bench. “I'm tired of surgeries. I'm tired of hospitals. I'm tired of them thinking that my face has stopped growing but not being sure. And I'll just end up with the same old nose. All for nothing.”

  Katharine stared at Quince's profile, set off by the pearl blue of the Ashland sky. I never knew so young a body with so old a head. “So what do you see when you look in the mirror?”

  Quince mimed a scarface with a slash
ing hand.

  Katharine fished for something to say. “I think you're a very attractive young woman, Quince. You're smart. You have wonderful bones, great eyes. And you dress really interestingly.”

  Quince gave her a scathing look.

  “No, I didn't mean … It's a line … Oh, never mind.”

  They sat in silence for a long time until Quince said, “Why didn't you ever like me?”

  … Kewpie was in the hospital again, so we didn't do anything. She's got something wrong with her kidney now. Mom was gone a lot and Granma spent Christmas Eve with us. It wasn't the same. She called me a spoiled brat and didn't I care about my sister? Puck got after me too …

  “Maybe it was because I was jealous. Mom spent a lot of time with you.”

  “But you had Dad. You always had Dad.”

  “I think Mom was harder to please. Dad was too easy.”