by Dyan Sheldon
Professor Gryck’s smile hovers on her lips as if looking for a safe place to land.
“Excuse me, Ms Beeby?”
“I mean, women write literature too, right? It’s not like it’s a college fraternity or anything like that. They’re allowed to join.”
Everyone else stops talking, drinking, chewing and even swallowing. It’s possible that one or two of the contestants are holding their breath. Someone clears his throat.
That someone is Mr Solman, who looks as if he is either about to laugh or cough. “Well, of course they are,” he says, with the positive joviality you’d expect from a representative of a powerful corporation. “There’s nothing excluding women from the great community of the written word. Not nowadays. And they do.” Because Gabriela is staring at him with a face less blank than stony, Mr Solman’s words are slowing down and his eyes keep darting to Professor Gryck. “Write. Literature. Very good literature.”
“Then how come all the writers who’ve been mentioned are men?” Gabriela asks again.
Professor Gryck comes to Mr Solman’s rescue. “There are many major writers who are women, as you well know, Ms Beeby,” she says, her voice as stiff as starched cotton. “Jane Austen… Virginia Woolf… George Eli—”
“Then why aren’t any of them up for Great American Novelist?” insists Gabriela.
Professor Gryck glances at the others, allowing herself a small but humourless laugh. “Well, for openers, they’re all British.”
Gabriela rolls her eyes in an exasperated, annoyed-by-a-snag way. “You know what I mean. I haven’t heard anyone mention one woman. Not even quickly. Not even because some famous male writer liked her stuff.”
Professor Gryck folds her hands, leaning forward slightly. “Perhaps you’d like to mention some then, Ms Beeby.”
Behind the writers’ group, a young woman sits by herself at a table for two, finishing her meal and flicking through the book on Babylonia that Professor Gryck bought in one of the museums they visited (and which she thinks she left on the bus). Remedios has been as unsuccessful as Gabriela at completely ignoring the conversation at the contestants’ table, and so has found herself almost sedated by it. But now she looks up with amused curiosity. Is it possible that things are finally going to get interesting?
Much to Gabriela’s surprise, there seems to be even more information on that high shelf at the back of her closet, put there unbeknownst to her by Mr Sturgess and suddenly, if inexplicably, discovered by Gabriela, for into the silence that has engulfed them like a giant plastic bag she suddenly hears herself say, “Maya Angelou… Edith Wharton… Alice Walker… Harper Lee… Kate Chopin… Toni Morrison… Anne Ty—”
“No one would argue that those novelists haven’t produced some very fine work,” Professor Gryck interrupts her, “but I don’t know that any of it can be considered truly great.”
“Why not?” asks someone nearby – but not so near that Professor Gryck can tell who it is. “What criteria are you using to measure greatness?”
Professor Gryck sits up a little straighter as her smile becomes noticeably thinner. “I’m afraid the simple fact is that, on the whole, women tend to write more domestically and personally – about relationships and that kind of thing – while men deal with the larger, more profound issues.”
“Like what?” This time there is no doubt who spoke.
“Like everything, Ms Beeby. War… philosophical and existential questions of existence… power… meaning… government….”
“And those things don’t involve relationships?”
The only ones smiling are Delila and Remedios.
“Well, yes, of course they do. What I meant was that women are more concerned with the emotions … with love stor—”
Gabriela nods. “You mean like ‘Romeo and Juliet’? ‘Anna Kare—’”
“Good Lord, will you look at the time?” Professor Gryck waves a hand at the waiter. “I’m afraid we can’t have dessert after all. We’d better get going or we’ll be late for the play.”
As far as Gabriela is concerned, the good thing about the theatre is that it’s dark and no one is going to ask her to say anything. She can just sit there, invisible and mute, and in a couple of hours they’ll be on their way back to the hotel and she can go to bed and forget this day ever happened – at least until the morning. As soon as the lights dim, she starts to relax. Gabriela has only been to a real theatre once before, and that was to see the musical so mocked by Jayne at breakfast. This play is not a musical. It is also long and convoluted, making it difficult for Gabriela to tell who is who and what is what. The actors are dressed in modern clothes, but they don’t speak like real people speak – or even like the unreal people in movies speak. Nor do they have microphones, so that you have to listen really closely to hear what’s being said. But even when Gabriela hears what’s being said she isn’t always sure what’s going on. There are at least two characters who, as far as she can tell, never actually make an appearance.
Gabriela falls asleep.
As soon as they emerge from the theatre, Professor Gryck makes it clear that her limited supply of patience and forgiveness has officially run out. “You’ve been trying to make me look a fool all day. Are you purposely trying to undermine me? Is that what you’re doing?” she demands. “I’m an academic so I’m used to backstabbing and treachery, but not from my students!” She might possibly understand that someone who has spent the day trying to get arrested might be so tired from her efforts that she falls asleep in one of the greatest plays ever written, but did Gabriela have to snore in the middle of one of the most beautiful and moving speeches in the English language, as well? “You could have heard a pin drop!” Professor Gryck keeps saying. “A pin drop! But what did we hear? We heard you snuffling like a pig after truffles!”
The other phrase she keeps repeating is “insult to injury”.
And indeed, even as they finally enter the hotel, Professor Gryck is saying, “As if that wasn’t enough, you had to add insult to injury!”
“I said I was sorry,” says Gabriela, who has – and who very much is sorry. “It’s not like—”
Gabriela was about to say (also not for the first time) that it wasn’t as if she’d deliberately snored during a tense moment on stage. The reason she doesn’t finish this sentence is because it is right then that she notices a tall, skinny scarecrow of a woman in pink pedal pushers, pink baseball cap and a shirt that identifies her as a member of a bowling team in Long Beach, running towards them, shrieking, “There you are! At last! Oh, praise the Lord you’re alive! I was beside my wits!”
There is no doubt in Gabriela’s mind that this badly dressed woman is shouting at her. She’s looking right at her and waving her arms. Who else could she possibly be shouting at? Oh God! Now what? Who on earth can this creature be?
Professor Gryck, also reduced to silence by the sight of a hysterical woman – who clearly wouldn’t recognize a Norse saga if it appeared in her bowling bag – charging across the lobby of The Xanadu like a runaway ball, would also like to know who it is.
Interestingly, there are two people in close proximity who can answer that question. The first is Beth. Shoeless again, she is limping towards the elevator with Lucinda when she hears an all-too-familiar voice screeching loud enough to be heard on the other side of the valley. Is there nothing that isn’t going to go wrong with this day? The second is Remedios Cienfuegos y Mendoza, who is directly behind Delila and Gabriela.
The shock of seeing her mother’s sister where she very much shouldn’t be makes Beth scream as loudly as if she’d walked into the kitchen and seen a rat scampering over the counter. As we all know, when faced with a dangerous situation, the natural response is either to fight or to flee. Beth chooses flight, but turns around so quickly that she smacks into Lucinda and knocks them both down.
Remedios has been looking forward to going to her suite and watching a movie. Before something else goes wrong. But the galumphing figure hurt
ling towards them pulls her up sharply. Clearly, something else already has gone wrong. But she is used to thinking quickly and acting even more quickly. So she leans over the shoulders of Gabriela and Delila and says very clearly, “Ladies, that’s Aunt Joyce.”
Although it wasn’t Gabriela who spoke, Delila looks over at her. “Well damn me, you do have an aunt.”
Of course she has an aunt. It’s amazing that she doesn’t have several uncles and a dozen cousins as well, all of them dressed like they’re on permanent vacation and loitering in the lobby of The Xanadu. What the heck is this woman doing here? Now. Hasn’t this day been bad enough? The moment is slightly reminiscent of the time she wore that wrap-around skirt to Bessie Malarch’s party and it unwrapped itself as she walked into the room. She does exactly what she did then. She takes a deep breath, and – metaphorically this time – picks up the skirt. “Aunt Joyce!” cries Gabriela. “What a great surprise! What are you doing here?”
“What am I doing? Your poor mother’s worried sick. She’s been calling all day and—”
Another scream, this one sharp as a glover’s needle, cuts her off.
This scream, too, was made by Beth. Otto, on his way to the elevator to retreat to the calm and safety of the El Dorado Suite, automatically stopped to help Beth and Lucinda up from the floor. So much for giving aid; she nearly blew his ear off. When Gabriela and everyone else in the lobby looks over, several glamorous young women are gathered round two other glamorous young women in a heap on the carpet. (There is no sign of Otto, of course.)
“Would you look at that?” Aunt Joyce gives a snort of disapproval. “One of those starlets drunk like you read about in the papers.” She shakes her head. “I thought this was supposed to be a high-class hotel.”
“So did I,” says Professor Gryck.
By the time either Gabriela or Delila thinks to wonder who told them that the woman in pink was Aunt Joyce, Remedios, too, is gone.
There are things that are easy to believe… and there are things that are hard to believe… and then there are things that are really hard to believe
Once Aunt Joyce is assured that Beth is fine, just very busy, and that there is no need for concern, and Gabriela has been put on Aunt Joyce’s phone with Lillian Beeby to apologize for leaving her own phone behind today and to assure her that she is just very busy and there is no need for concern, Professor Gryck takes the league-champion bowler for a soothing cup of tea in the hotel’s café. “The girls have an extremely big day tomorrow,” she tells Aunt Joyce. “They have to get a good night’s sleep.”
Gabriela and Delila stand side by side, waving goodbye as the elevator doors close, and then ride to their floor in ruminative silence – Gabriela thinking about tomorrow and Delila thinking about today.
But as soon as the door of their hotel room shuts behind Delila with a click like a Colt revolver being cocked, she says, “OK, Beth, I’m tired of dancing around in the dark with a blindfold on. I want to know what’s going on. And this time I want the whole unabridged story.”
Gabriela doesn’t even have enough strength left to groan out loud. “There’s nothing going on.” She throws herself on her bed. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, yes you do.” Delila stands over her, arms akimbo. “You know exactly what I mean. I’m not stupid. You’ve been as weird as a beard on a goldfish all day. And I want to know why.”
“Your poetic imagination must be on overdrive,” says Gabriela, “because I’m not being weird and there’s nothing going on.”
“Am I a mushroom that you think you have to keep me in the dark and feed me crap?”
“Delila, it’s late. You heard what Professor Gryck said. We have a big day tomorrow.”
“We had a big day today.” Delila starts ticking off the day’s major events on her fingers. “One: you, Beth Beeby, the girl who’s allergic to the word ‘cow’, drank two cappuccinos at breakfast.”
“I’m not allergic if the milk’s in coffee.”
“Yeah, sure.” If Delila’s expression were a fruit, it would be a lemon. “Two: you, the girl who wouldn’t stand up to a daffodil, started a food fight.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“No, you didn’t. And that can be number three. Because last night you apologized for something every five minutes, but today the first time I heard you say you were sorry for anything was after you fell asleep in the play. Which was about three dozen times too late.”
“There’s more than one way of saying ‘sorry’.”
“Not for the Beth Beeby I met yesterday. She said sorry, sorry, sorry like it was a mantra.”
Gabriela’s expression is distinctly on the lemon-side itself now. “You know, you’re wasting your talents being a poet. You should be an interrogator for the CIA.”
“Forget it, I’m not taking the distraction detour.” Delila holds up both hands. “I’m going to skip over all the minor things like spontaneously running up into the hills and how much you don’t know about books and paintings and stuff like that, and how you bought make-up, and how you’d argue with the President. I’m going to go straight to the big fat cherry on today’s seven-layer cake.” She leans forward, speaking slowly, as if expecting Gabriela to read her lips. “You didn’t even know who your own aunt was, Beth. You just stood there gawping at her like you were a deer and she was an oncoming car with really bright headlights until that woman said it was Aunt Joyce.”
“That’s right! I completely blanked that.” Gabriela sits up, trying to bring back that moment in the lobby. “There was somebody behind us. Somebody who said ‘Ladies, that’s Aunt Joyce’.” Why didn’t she pay any attention? She didn’t even think to look round. Now it’s her who’s gawping at Delila. “Who was that? How did she know that was Aunt Joyce?”
“Don’t change the subject,” says Delila. “I don’t care who that was or how she knew your Aunt Joyce. What I want to know is who you are and why you didn’t know her.”
“I’m Beth Beeby.”
“Yeah, right. And I’m Emily Dickinson.”
“Look at me! Who else could I be?” Gabriela gestures at herself. “You think there are two people in the world who look like this?” Skinny; pinched, sharp features; seriously myopic; anaemic complexion; dull, lifeless hair; toenails like claws and fingernails that look like a chewed cob of corn. “You know it’s me. I look exactly the way I looked yesterday.”
“Even plain looks are only skin deep,” says Delila.
Gabriela sighs. It has, indeed, been a long day. The last reserve of stubbornness and fight she had left was used up on Aunt Joyce. “You’re not going to believe me.”
Delila plops herself down on the opposite bed. “Try me.”
And so Gabriela tries. She tells her story simply, adding no trimming or embellishments – and offering no explanations.
Delila sits in total silence, listening to Gabriela’s story the way families once gathered around the radio in the evening to listen to the latest instalment of their favourite shows.
“Well?” Gabriela asks when she’s finished. “Don’t just sit there like you’re having your portrait painted. What do you think?”
“What do I think?” Delila, of course, had no idea what story she was going to hear, but she definitely wasn’t prepared for the one she heard. “I think you should be writing science fiction, that’s what I think. Girl, I’ve heard some wild stories. I mean, there are people who say they’ve seen the Virgin Mary in Bayside, which, you know… Bayside? That’s pretty out there. But this one beats them all.”
“Only it happens to be the truth.” Gabriela’s mouth pinches with resignation. “Didn’t I tell you, you wouldn’t believe me?”
“It’s not that I don’t believe you, exactly.” Delila, after all, does have a grandmother who believes in angels. “I know there’s more in Heaven and Earth and all that stuff. But it is a little hard to get my head around the idea that through some mysterious process you got switched with somebody else.
I mean, I haven’t checked lately, but last time I looked we were in The Hotel Xanadu, not The X Files.”
“But you said yourself I’m different to how I was yesterday. If I didn’t get dumped into Beth Beeby’s body, what do you think’s going on?”
Delila shakes her head. “Danged if I know. We don’t have this kind of problem in Brooklyn.”
“Well, it happens all the time in Jeremiah. We drop into each other’s bodies the way the rest of you drop into coffee bars.” Gabriela is beginning to show a flair for creative writing that she never knew she had. “We don’t even bother going to movies or concerts or anything. If we want something to do we just say, ‘Hey, let’s be so-and-so for a couple of hours tonight’.”
“You don’t have to get all sarcastic.”
“And you don’t have to act like I’m making this up. Just because something’s really unlikely doesn’t mean that it can’t happen, you know.” Gabriela flaps her arms in exasperation. “I mean, do you think it’s easy for me to believe it?”
“No, I don’t. But it’s different for you. You’re the person it’s happened to. So, even if it seems impossible and improbable, you know it’s true. Whereas the innocent bystander doesn’t have that advantage. The innocent bystander – which, in this case, is me – has a serious belief challenge going on.”
“Oh, my God! How could I be so dumb?” Gabriela jumps to her feet, smiling for the first time in quite a few hours. “I can prove it. I can prove what I’m saying’s true, can’t I?”
“Really? And how are you going to do that?”
“Simple.” Gabriela reaches for the phone. “We’ll talk to the real Beth Beeby!”
Beth and Lucinda also ride up to their floor in a preoccupied silence. Around them, the other girls talk about the party – the amazing clothes, the super-cool people, and how the night couldn’t have been more perfect if they’d dreamed it – while the more memorable moments of the evening (memorable because of how horrible and humiliating they were) play in Beth’s mind like a slide show and Lucinda checks her arms for bruising.