by Laurel Doud
The Bennets wanted Thisby back, but she was dead. She's dead! And who was Katharine? Who was Katharine now? I can't go back, but how can I move forward? Robert was right; she was never going to figure out who she was until she excised all the alien things.
It's just that I'm not sure who'll be left.
Katharine kept her eyes closed, and while the Bennets silently watched her, she mentally flew away north to her home. Except it wasn't her home, it was Diana's home; and her family lived there, without her. They had moved on, without her. And they were going to be all right, without her.
She thought of her advice to Ben — live your own life. It seemed so trite, so sixties, but that didn't diminish the truth of it, and it sounded as though Ben really might go to Wyoming. She hoped he would. Philip would hate it if he did. Maybe she'd visit him there. I hear Harrison Ford has a ranch in Wyoming too.
She knew that Ben really did feel responsible for his mother's death — that he wasn't just auditioning another personality — and she could imagine what a truly awful burden that must be. But if he could move on, then she could try to move on from her own guilt too.
No, there was no going home again. Not that home anyway.
In the back of her mind, she knew she had always expected she would be transformed — somehow, some way — back into her old body and her old life, and all this would be as a dream. After all, that's the way it always happened in the movies and books and plays. You learn what you're supposed to learn and then you always get to go back — eventually.
But there was no going back, she realized, and there weren't too many other choices. She was tired of fighting her battles alone. Never weaken! hadn't helped her. Maybe she needed to give up a little of herself, give up a little of her power to someone else, to allow someone to help her. Maybe life wouldn't be better, but understanding might be. Was that worth the energy it was going to take?
That was the hope. Wasn't it?
Katharine opened her eyes in Thisby's apartment, watched over by Thisby's family, and nodded to them. “Okay,” she said.
Act 5, Scene 3
To sleep, perchance to dream — ay, there's the rub.
— HAMLET, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, 3.1.64
June 20. Midsummer Night. Witches and fairies will be abroad after dark, granting wishes or causing havoc as they choose. Tomorrow is the summer solstice. She has come full circle. Her father used to say, “If we lived here, we'd be home now.” But she didn't live here, and … I'm far from home.
In her head, she has erected a garden wall made with heavy rectangular stone bricks, the cracks mortared and sealed tight, dense ivy springing up the sides. The wall closes off a dark and overgrown path, one she doesn't want to go down or even peer into. When she can't stop herself and steps a foot closer, a faint voice from behind the wall calls out, “Wait. I can help. Please.”
She shrinks away, and the voice cries, “How can you be so callous, so heartless, to ignore me?”
Easy. Easy.
Katharine has been getting straight for 245 days. It hasn't been easy, nor is success assured. Anne and Robert are keeping their hope close to their chests this time. As is Quince. No question now that I'm not the blessèd child.
She sits in Thisby's window seat, a thirty-two-ounce plastic coffee mug by her side. The moon is pale-bright, and in honor of Midsummer Night, the Bennet house is bedecked with greenery and hanging lights — Thisby's room in rosemary for remembrance, pansies for thoughts, and violets for faithfulness. Katharine has checked for columbines and rue, symbolizing ingratitude and repentance, but finds none.
Supposedly if she places the flowers under her pillow tonight, she will dream a little dream — about her true love.
When she received the invitation to Midsummer — the first time in eight months to the day she would see the Bennets outside their family-therapy sessions — she accepted it with as much wariness as it was probably given.
And when she knocked on the front door instead of going around to the kitchen entrance, it did not surprise them. And that did not surprise her.
Quince answered the door and took her bag quickly, as if to avoid any attempt at a more physical greeting. Katharine didn't dare touch her.
Anne and Robert received her in the living room, surrounded by their cool and perfect world. They exchanged their greetings pleasantly enough, but there was no mistaking that even though she had been clean for eight months, this last fall from grace had hit Anne and Robert hard. Real hard. Katharine couldn't remember feeling more awkward, more unsure, more tentative around them.
Anne and Katharine prepared the Midsummer dinner together. Katharine felt her first déjà vu in this body. Quince sat on the stool, with Oberon curled up like a tricolored snowball at her feet. Katharine hardly petted him, so clearly was he Quince's dog. It made her want to cry.
“I don't want to go to UCLA,” Quince told her mother for the third time. “I don't care if they have a great drama department. I wanna go someplace away from here. My own school.”
“Quince, for heaven's sake, no one's going to say, ‘Aren't you Robert and Anne Bennet's daughter? Gee, I saw them in that play twenty-five years ago.’ No one's going to say, ‘Aren't you Puck Bennet's sister? He sure was a great pre-law student.’ ”
“They might.”
Aren't you Thisby Bennet's sister? She sure was a fuckup.
“Yes, they might, but they won't. UCLA's a huge school. You'll make your own mark.”
“But I don't want to go to UCLA.”
Anne sighed. “Quince, we'll talk about it later. I'm sure Thisby isn't interested in listening to us argue.”
Quince turned squarely toward Katharine. “Well, what do you think I should do?”
She squirmed. “I don't know, Quince.”
Quince got up and left, Oberon leaping up after her.
Watching the shadowplay outside the window, Katharine leans farther back into Thisby's seat cushion and takes another sip of coffee from her mug. She has discovered something else recently. She is no more capable now than she was when she was a mother of telling Quince, or anyone else for that matter, what to do. You're doomed to go through it alone. You don't go through something so you can help someone else avoid it. You can't tell anyone anything. You're on your own.
She couldn't believe how self-righteous she had been last summer, how incredibly arrogant. She thought she could save everyone. Quince, Goodfellow, Marion. Ben. Yes, even Thisby. She could make it all right. With age and experience and perspective, she could make it come out all right in the end.
But life is messy. And noisy.
Katharine tried to repress the voices in her head when she first went to see Dr. Hudson, but like so many times in this body, once she gave up, let go, things went easier. She realized that she could use her life and Thisby's life and her life as Thisby as a kind of metaphorical existence. The truth, the facts weren't important. They would only end up destroying her and both her families. She realized that by using the voices, giving them audible speech, their power over her waned. That left the voice that whispered. It wasn't going to be bound and gagged so easily. It became even more forward, more determined, louder, making her offers she could hardly refuse. It offered to take away the hurt — a drink would file down those rough edges so easily. But Katharine was beginning to believe that listening to the voice that whispered was treachery and that trying to avoid pain was really the art of dying. Feeling pain was a sign that she was alive, Dr. Hudson said, and Katharine was open to that possibility.
Katharine has an image of Anne and Robert after she left the Midsummer dinner table, collapsing into their seats, too exhausted to move, asking themselves how they are ever going to get through the next day, and lamenting that it is so awkward, so tiring to be around their own daughter. They are also thinking about the remark Puck made to them the day of the intervention, after Katharine had agreed to a daily drug-and-alcohol test, to see Dr. Hudson, to get clean. “Mom, commit her, for Chr
ist's sake. How many more times are you going to be taken in?”
Then Katharine has a different vision after she left the table: Anne and Robert look at each other and sigh, but it's more a sigh of, Well, that wasn't so bad, was it? We've weathered the worst of it. We did the right thing.
Whichever scene really happened, Katharine knows that in the back of their minds, there's a small voice that constantly cries, What did we do wrong? What didn't we do right? What could we — should we — have done to save her from all this pain?
This will. This will save her. Katharine's going to let their love and loyalty and responsibility for Thisby save Katharine. She's going to take their love and use it for herself. That's why she's here.
Katharine hoards this knowledge like a squirrel stockpiling his nuts.
But 50 percent of all the nuts hoarded by squirrels are lost because they forget where they put them …
Recovery had the comfortableness of routine. She had her sessions, the daily journals Dr. Hudson made her write, her exercise classes at the local gym. And she got through the day.
She had been right, though; her fears had been real. Her life isn't that different. She's sober, and that's all.
If only I could be dreamless too — because something is happening. She's under siege, and she's afraid to be alone. It's getting increasingly harder to stay away from the wall she has erected, the one she has so carefully built up to protect herself from the things that were destroying her — the one she now fears is keeping her away from something else that she might need. But to acknowledge that need, to open herself up to it — isn't that opening herself up to this body's other demands? Isn't denial of all the appetites her safest bet?
But she can't get away from her dreams.
She's been dreaming a lot lately. The dreams are often about Thisby, and they are always a variation on the same theme. Thisby stands in front of Katharine in Katharine's old body, only now it's roast-meat for worms. The skin sags, scarred and flaccid under her eyes, and the bone sockets are showing. Her lips are stretched back in a sneer, exposing the rotting gums. She shouts expletives. They spew from her mouth like so much filth. You counterfeit module, you monstrous malefactor, you triple-turn'd whore, you dissembling harlot, you measureless liar, you hag of all despair, you pernicious bloodsucker of sleeping men, you inexecrable dog, you deformed and vile thief. I want my body back.
She's afraid to go to sleep — to sleep and then to dream, alone.
The coffee has grown cold in the mug. Katharine realizes that she has been waiting for the sound of Quince's knock on her door, but it hasn't come. It's late, and she slips between the sheets of the bed but keeps on the night-light.
She hears footsteps and the muffled voices of Thisby's parents coming down the hall. The sounds stop in front of her bedroom door.
“Thisby? Are you awake?” asks Anne, softly enough so as not to wake Katharine if she isn't.
“I'm awake.”
The door opens, and the blurry silhouette of two people blocks out the faint light of the hallway. “We're glad you came this weekend,” Anne says. “We just wanted you to know that.”
“Thanks. I'm glad I came too.”
“Well, good night.”
“Sweet Midsummer Night dreams,” Robert says, and as the door closes them off, he adds, “about your true love.”
Katharine lies on her back in the semi-darkness. She realizes that she had forgotten how nice it is to have parents, to have that feeling of having a buffer, a higher authority — if you so need it — in her life. She did feel safe here — and loved, as much for being Katharine as for having been Thisby.
Suddenly she sits up and grabs a fistful of petals from the flowers on the bed stand. She lifts up her pillow and lets them drop like tears to the bedsheet.
Act 5, Scene 4
The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.
— FIRST LORD, All's Well That Ends Well, 4.3.84
She wakes up in the morning to the smell of crushed rosemary and violet. She nuzzles under the pillow to cloud her face with the scent. The dream comes back to her, so vivid, so bright, she thinks she might have fallen asleep again and, like a natural dream state, is in the dream and inside the dream, around and outside it, victim, master, slave to its course.
Katharine stands in front of her garden wall, the mortar green- and gray-tinged, warning of disintegration. A voice calls from the other side of the wall, and even though Katharine knows it comes from just a few feet away, it sounds faraway and from the depths below.
It says, “Katharine, Katharine, let down your hair.” The voice is familiar; Katharine knows she knows it but she doesn't want to acknowledge it.
She responds, “Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin.”
“Then I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down,” it says suddenly loud enough to make Katharine jump.
A small hole appears between the stones. Something is growing stronger on the other side and wants through. She knows now who it is. She knows who the wall is separating her from. It's her true love, just like in the myth of Pyramus and Thisby. She envisions Goodfellow, then Philip, True, even Hooker, then an embodiment of all of them. But she's afraid. For some reason, she's scared to come face-to-face with the person on the other side.
Katharine jams her finger in the crack, and the wall tightens around it, causing it to ache with such a familiar pain that it feels normal. But someone is poking at her finger from the other side. It's like a rat nibbling at her fingertip. She pulls it out; the wall tries to patch itself, but someone punches through the hole, and the wall, like a soft avalanche, crumbles.
Thisby stands on the other side, in her own body, a singular smile on her face. The wall that lies in chunks between them — the wall that was once the voice that whispered — is now silent. Thisby prods a stone as if to make sure it is truly detongued and looks up at Katharine with a beatific smile that makes Katharine want to simultaneously laugh and cry.
Katharine gathers up her quilt and sits wrapped up in the window seat. The dawn has barely broken, but there is a clarity to the morning that predicts the fairness of the day. That same sense of transparency illuminates her mind. She feels on the edge of sanity.
And it hurts. But it's a razor's edge kind of hurt, so clean, so thin, the blood wells in tiny popbeads along the score; it aches, but it's bearable.
The loathing I have felt for both of us …
The cut throbs, and she thinks about retreating, a part of her wishing she could edit her life as she sees fit, splicing, retouching, so everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.
But another part of her says, That that is, is. There is a new strength in her, a combined resolve. Thisby is not mad at me; she does not begrudge me this body. She never has.
She pulls out Thisby's diary from her overnight bag. Every day she writes in her own journal, but it's Thisby's diary that she has taken to carrying around with her wherever she goes, like some sort of talisman. She hasn't read it since the beginning of last summer, almost a year ago, but now she looks at Thisby's last sentence in the last entry
that fucking fairy kiss
and knows she can turn the page over.
June 21.
It wasn't Thisby in my dreams who said all of those horrid things to me in my putrefied body. I should have figured that out long ago. All the quotes were correct. I should have realized what that meant. All the quotes were correct; Thisby would have never gotten them right.
But I would.
I also used to think the voice that whispered was really Thisby, as if she resided like some dark half in my brain — if cut open, they'd find another pair of eyes staring out from the skull.
But no. That wasn't Thisby either.
It was me. It was me who wanted to be the fuckup — and blame her. What a convenient alibi. I was tired of being good, of being there, of doing the right thing. I just didn't want to acknowledge it, admit it.
Thisb
y isn't dead and stagnant; she isn't some malignant eyeball in my brain. Thisby is still alive and speaks to me. She has always spoken to me.
I just didn't know it was her.
I thought she had nothing to offer, nothing to say, nothing to teach me. But in many ways, she was my best conscience. She did know better this time. She certainly knew better than I did.
Now I see she speaks to me directly with her blood, her skin, the very filaments that make up her connective tissue. I don't know where the one of us ends and the other begins.
I find I can write as easily with my left hand as my right.
We are truly blood sisters — and we are truly ambidextrous.
I thought that it was like the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisby, a wall separated me from my dream lover — part Philip, part Goodfellow, yes, even part Hooker.
But it was Thisby the wall separated me from.
And the wall was the voice that whispered.
And the voice that whispered was me.
There's a tentative knock on her door, and Quince softly calls through, “Thisby, are you awake? Can I come in?”
Would it be more humane, Katharine thinks, to sever all ties, now that she knows what she is going to do, what she now has the strength to do? Would it be better to cut off the Bennets completely? Now instead of later? Would it be better for all of them in the long run?