by Annabel Lyon
“All right!” I say. “This will work! Let’s keep going!”
After rehearsal is over, Sam and Merry and Regan and I go to The Shot.
“Why did we cast Raj as the Fool?” I say loudly, rhetorically. “Because he’s funny! If he’s not going to try to be funny, what’s the point?”
Regan and Merry are flipping through the laminated booklet chained to the counter that shows all the kinds of tea. Sam is ordering a hot white chocolate.
“What even is that?” I say.
“Cocoa,” Sam says. “Made with white chocolate. It goes with my boots.”
“I wasn’t saying anything,” I say. “I really just wanted to know.”
Sam makes a face at me and I make one back. I’m glad she’s here, and Merry too. I can be more relaxed around Regan, more like myself, when they’re here.
“Dark roast,” I tell the counter girl when it’s my turn.
“Has anyone ever told you about decaf?” Regan asks.
Sam snorts. “Nothing!” she says when I give her Mom’s raisin face.
Merry gets chai. Regan gets rooibos. The four of us get the table with the cushy chairs under the blue glass chandelier, by the fireplace. Suddenly, for a moment, sitting in the best seats with my three friends, I feel like a rock star. Sam asks Regan what she’ll do for spring break, which is next week, and she says she might be seeing her mom. I get that night-sky feeling I get sometimes with Regan, of an enormous black universe, all cold and empty, with just one or two stars glittering through. Then Regan asks Sam back, and Sam says going to Seattle with her family.
“How about you, Merry?” Regan says.
“We go skiing in Whistler,” she says.
“Oh, Merry, you are not,” I say.
“Yuh! We ski in Quebec. We brought our own skis from home. Daniel come with us.”
“You know how to ski?” I say.
She giggles and claps her hands.
“How about you, Edie?” Regan asks.
I know Dex has already signed up for a week-long intensive ballet camp, so our family will definitely be staying home. Nothing comes between Dexter and her ballet. “I’ll be working on the musical, I guess,” I say. “Now that our Fool won’t act funny, I’d better do some rewriting.”
“It’ll be okay,” Regan says. “I think it’s better to let Raj do it his way. You don’t know what it feels like to be a character until you’ve had to live with it for a while. You can’t make people conform if they don’t want to.”
“I guess,” I say. Regan is wearing a strapless pink satin prom dress with a line of iron-on peace signs on the bodice, her army jacket, and steel-toed boots. Her hair is currently purple. I’m going to argue with her about doing what people expect of you?
“Let’s talk about costumes,” Regan says. “I want to go to the fabric store over the break and draw up a budget. I want to start sewing soon, too. I can’t do ten costumes overnight.” She pulls a folder from her satchel. “I’ve made some sketches.”
Sam scootches closer so she can see. “You drew these yourself?” she says. “They’re amazing.”
Colour comes into Regan’s cheeks, like Auntie Ellie when she talks about Daniel. “Thanks,” she says. She actually smiles shyly at Sam. “This is my thing. I love fashion and, like, fashion history. Sketching, making designs.”
“Do you design your own clothes too?”
Regan’s smile fades. Uh-oh—she thinks Sam is making fun of her. She stands up and grabs her jacket and bag. “You can keep those,” she says. “They’re copies. I have to go.”
“What happened?” Sam says, panicked, as Regan clomps out of the shop in her big boots, her dress swishing. “What’d I say?”
“She does that.” I pick up the drawing on the top of the pile. As it happens, it’s the Fool.
Merry looks over my shoulder. “Raj!” she says, clapping her hands again.
It is Raj, but it’s also not Raj, somehow. Regan knows how to do those long, lean, sketchy fashion drawings, all specific in the clothes and vague in the face. It’s Raj in jeans and a hoodie, hands jammed in his pockets, slouching, his face in deep shadow.
“That’s it?” I say. “That’s his costume? That’s the Fool?”
“You have to see the others,” Sam says, passing them to me. I look at Goneril and Regan, and Cordelia, and then Lear.
“Oh my god,” I say. “These are amazing.”
Sam hands me back the Fool. “Now do you get it?” she asks.
“The one has the wings,” Merry says. “Like a fairy, the one I love.”
“Cordelia,” I say automatically, sheafing through the pages again.
Merry takes the sketch of the Fool. “No wings. He different.”
I look up at her.
“He makes me feel sad,” Sam says to Merry. “Do you feel that way too?”
Merry’s looking at me.
“He is different,” I say.
I’ve just had either the best or the worst idea of my life. I’ll have to go to the library to find out which.
“I’m going to the library!” I yell. “Goodbye!”
“Hold on!” Mom yells back.
She’s downstairs doing laundry. Dad is at work. Dex is gone for the day with her ballet gear in her pink ballet bag. She’ll be gone for supper too, Mom says, at a friend’s. I assume this means Mean Megan. I’ve got my copy of King Lear, my notebook, Regan’s sketches, my bus pass, my Google map, Mom’s cellphone, and ten dollars for lunch. Mom’s letting me go to the university library on my own for the first time ever.
Mom comes upstairs and studies me, frowning at my favourite green hoodie. “Is that going to be warm enough?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say firmly. I know Mom would be happier if I’d just go to our local branch, but I searched the catalogue online last night and found nothing I could use. The university library has everything.
“You couldn’t just use Wikipedia?” Mom says.
“Mom, I’m fine.”
“I know.” She gives me a hug. “Can I see that phone?”
“It’s turned on,” I say. “The volume is set to high. It has four bars of battery.”
“You know how to—”
“Yes, Mom. I know how to use a cellphone.”
“I know you know,” she says, smoothing my hair back from my forehead. “You remember where I told you to go for lunch?”
When I told her last night I wanted to take the bus out to UBC by myself, we printed up a map of the university and Mom circled everything I would need in red pen: bus loop, Main Library, and the Student Union building with the food places.
“Don’t talk to anybody,” Mom says. “Phone me at lunchtime and let me know how you’re doing.”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”
“Sure you don’t want me to drive you?”
“No!” I give her a hug. “No, thank you!”
“That’s better,” she says.
The bus ride takes a long time. I’m used to taking the bus to places close by: Sam’s house, the mall with Dex and Merry, the swimming pool. First I take the local bus to the SkyTrain station by the mall, and then I transfer to the big university bus. It’s an articulated bus, which means it’s extra long and bends in the middle. “Articulated bus,” I whisper to myself, finding a seat halfway down, just ahead of the bendy bit. I sit there for the next hour and the bus fills up and empties out and fills up again. I don’t want to pull out my map and look as if I don’t know where I am, so I spend a lot of time discreetly watching the list of stops posted over the exit doors. The last stop is the university loop.
Main Library has a grand reading room upstairs, with long wooden tables and high ceilings and stained glass. I’m easily the youngest person here. I go to the information desk, like Mom told me, and a friendly Chinese librarian with six facial piercings (nose, top lip, eyebrow, other eyebrow, bottom lip, tongue) gives me a sticker with visitor on it to wear on my hoodie. Straight down a narrow staircase are the stacks,
where all the books and movies are. I already have my call numbers from the work I did online last night, and just have to find the books. A couple of people look sideways at me as I go by, but I’m not so nervous now. I like libraries.
I find a carrel at the end of the aisle where my books are and get down to work. I read; I take notes. I read about medieval European jesters, Chinese jesters, Indian jesters, Tongan jesters. I write down some of their names: Muckle John, Birbal, Archibald Armstrong, Jeffrey Hudson, J.D. Bogdonoff. I read about Punch and Judy, commedia dell’arte, Till Eulenspiegel, and the opera Rigoletto. I read about Renaissance fools, who were either “artificial” (clowns, jugglers, dancers, poets, comedians, mimes, singers) or “natural” (crippled, handicapped, insane). Henry VIII had one of each: an artificial named Will Somers and a natural named Patch.
I stop reading and taking notes and spend a long time staring at the graffiti penned on and scored into my carrel, thinking about Patch.
At noon, I pack up my bag, quickly study my map so I won’t have to pull it out while I’m walking, and head for the Student Union building. It’s busy in here, and I walk around the food places twice before I get brave enough to go buy anything. Eventually I find a place where I can get a chicken sandwich from a fridge and a coffee from a row of Thermoses and then line up at a counter to pay, like in a grocery store. Fortunately, it’s not raining, so I don’t have to worry about finding a seat. I take my lunch outside, sit under a tree, and pull out Mom’s cellphone. She answers on the first ring.
“Where are you?” she demands.
“Under a tree. Eating a chicken sandwich. Did you know Queen Elizabeth I once rebuked her own court jester for not being hard enough on her?”
Mom says she did not know that. She asks if I’m warm enough.
“I have coffee,” I say.
She laughs. “I knew you were going to love the university. You sound as happy as I was when I first went there. Books, coffee … How’s the library?”
I say, “Oh, my god.”
She laughs again and says not to be late.
I finish my sandwich and sit for a few minutes in the weak sunlight, enjoying the last of my coffee. I watch the students come and go and try to imagine their lives: dorm rooms, meal plans, budgets, class schedules, studying in the library, going to the movies with their friends. Going on dates, writing papers, slowly but surely zooming in on what they want to do with their lives, what they want to spend their time thinking about, what they want to know. I could like it here; I could love it. I could study literature, maybe, or theatre. Renaissance theatre. I think of Mei and understand her for the first time. I think about Shakespeare and spending all my time reading Shakespeare. I think of the names of his fools: Touchstone, Trinculo, Feste, Yorick, Puck, Grumio, Tom O’Bedlam, Fool. I think about artificials and naturals. I think about Raj. I think about Patch.
I think about Merry.
Merry will never go to university, never have a dorm room, never write a paper, never spend the day reading in the library, never feel the world get bigger and bigger when all she’s doing is sitting in a carrel reading some old books.
I toss my lunch stuff in the recycling and go back to work.
Upstairs in the big fancy library room are computers, and this time I’m braver. I find a free one and take a seat. There’s something that’s been in the back of my mind for a long time, something Sam said to me months ago. I never felt right looking for it on the computer in Dad’s den, where someone might walk in and see. I’m not sure why—I just knew it was something I wanted to do alone.
I put on the headphones. It takes me about fifteen seconds to find the video clip I’m looking for, as if it’s just been sitting there waiting for me all this time. Mr. Harris, in the costume of a king—black cloak, crown, sceptre—kneels on a stage, holding a girl in his arms. She wears what I now recognize as the traditional Renaissance fool’s costume: patchwork jacket, pants with different-coloured legs, three-cornered hat with jingle bells. She too holds a sceptre, even though her arm is limp and it looks as if she’s either dying or dead. There’s no sound, only Mr. Harris, his face contorted, crying over the girl fool. Then the video disappears and a sign comes up saying: From 1981, a rare performance of King Lear in which the characters of Cordelia and the Fool are conflated, or dual-roled, according to Renaissance tradition.
I look up “dual-roled” in an online encyclopedia: it’s when one actor plays more than one character in the same production. Sometimes, the encyclopedia says, theatre companies might be short of actors, so they have to double up. Sometimes, though, the playwright might intend for one actor to have several roles, to show how the characters are similar in ways no one might otherwise have expected, or understood.
When I get home, Mom gives me a hug.
“I thought of something for Merry to do in the play,” I tell her, but when she asks me to say more, I tell her it’s a surprise.
Embraceable You
On the last Wednesday in May is the dress rehearsal. After that are four performances: Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday matinee, and Saturday night. The Leadership students have run ads in the local papers, hung a banner that says KING LEAR: THE MUSICAL on the side of the gym, and sent flyers home with every student. The three evening shows are already sold out and the matinee is filling up fast. Mom and Dad and Dex and Grandma and Aunt Ellie and Daniel have tickets for Thursday night. Dex is skipping her ballet lesson to come.
“You don’t have to do that,” I say when I find out, even though if she didn’t come I would feel like a little brown slug.
“I’m looking forward to it,” she says, in that serene, grown-up voice that makes me want to flick her in the head. “I’m going to bring someone, okay?”
“Whatever,” I say.
She opens her mouth as if she’s going to say something else, but hesitates. I open my mouth to tell her I don’t care about her stupid date, but hesitate. She’s trying to be nice; maybe I should be too. We look at each other for a few seconds with our mouths open and then we both turn away.
By Wednesday morning, I feel like a carrot, with everything I have to keep track of shooting out of the top of my head in big fronds. I have to go to my three morning classes, then lunch, then the afternoon is free for the rehearsal. Everyone in the school not involved in the musical has two choices: come watch or do homework in the library. All the teachers will be there, and it’s a pretty good bet that most of the school will be too. I think longingly of the library, how cool and quiet and empty it will be this afternoon, what a pleasant couple of hours I could spend there if I didn’t have to spend the afternoon as Edie Snow, the Human Carrot. I would much rather hide in the library with a book: Edie Snow, the Book Potato.
My first class is math. I spend most of it thinking about Merry. She didn’t seem nervous when we walked to school this morning, but I’m not sure she knows how to be nervous. When I asked her if she was ready, she just said, “Yup.”
She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt and a light jacket. I have my green hoodie for her to put on later.
“Did you solve for x, Edie?” Ms. Cray, my math teacher, says, looking over my shoulder.
I tell her not yet.
“Nervous?” she says.
I say, “Yup.”
She smiles. “We’re all looking forward to this afternoon. All the teachers were talking about you in the staff room this morning.”
I say, “Ack.”
She looks a little closer at my work and the smile fades. She squints a bit. “Oh, dear,” she says. “Do you maybe want to finish this later?”
“Is it wrong?”
“Sometimes when we’re nervous, it affects our concentration.”
And sometimes when there’s only one of us, I feel like saying, we talk as though there are three of us. But I know she’s trying to be nice, like Dex, and I should just shut up and let her.
My next class is French. “Est-ce que tu t’inquiètes, Edie?” M. Belliveau asks
.
I say, “Pourquoi tout le monde me demande ça?”
“T’es pâle,” M. Belliveau says matter-of-factly. “Are you going to throw up? Do you want to go to the washroom?”
“No, but yes,” I say. He lets me go. I spend the rest of the period in a washroom cubicle, reviewing my lists.
My last class of the morning is biology. We’re doing the parts of the cell. I quite like the parts of the cell. I like looking through the big microscopes at orange segments and paper and my own hair. For today’s lab, we’re supposed to look at saliva. The boys lick the slides; the girls gob onto them. Sam, my partner, makes a neat drawing while I look over her shoulder. “We should do mucus,” I say. “To be different.” I clear my throat a few times.
“No mucus!” Mr. Dhalliwal, our teacher, calls.
Around the room, guys look disappointed and say, “Aw.”
“You’re weird, you know that?” Sam says. “You think like a guy. What are you going to wear tomorrow?”
“What am I what?”
“Don’t we all have to go up onstage to take a bow?”
“No!” I say. It hadn’t even occurred to me.
“I’ll help you pick something out. Come to my house tonight—I can loan you something.”
“I have clothes!”
“You have T-shirts,” Sam corrects me. “Here, copy this quick. There’s only five minutes left and you haven’t filled in your sheet at all.”
I copy her drawing and label it and then it’s time for lunch.
“Coming?” Sam says, but I tell her I have to go do something.
I find Merry eating her lunch with her friends in the special class. “I’m ready,” she says, standing up as soon as she sees me.
We go backstage, just her and me. The scenery is already up, but no one’s here yet; they’re all still eating lunch. “Put this on,” I tell her, giving her my hoodie. I have to help her with the zipper. “No makeup, okay?” I say. “I don’t know how, and we don’t want to ask for help because we want it to be a surprise.”
She says, “I’m a good surprise.”
“You sure are.”
I get her to sit in her usual spot, by the CD player in the wings, and watch people start to trickle in. Regan appears, breathless, with great armfuls of garment bags, and we start herding our performers into a room where she can help them with their costumes. Raj shows up in jeans and a hoodie, looking glum. “Perfect,” Regan says.