Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  This past spring though, when Titch approached her mother with the idea that she and I spend the summer before our senior year out on the Cape, Ruby had grudgingly conceded that she could probably help us line up restaurant or catering work. We all knew she wouldn’t concern herself with us more than she had to when we were out there, but I could tell that it made Lois feel better that she was around in any case. We were too old for camp, Titch argued, and we neither of us had any interest in being counselors. I had worked scooping ice cream at the Ice Cream Machine in town the summer before and Titch had worked as a library page, but we could hold the same kinds of jobs on the Cape and it would be much more fun.

  Around the same time that Titch was hatching this plan, one of our teachers—Mrs. Habernathy, English Lit and Spanish—had talked to me about going to a summer drama workshop. I had taken three acting classes, two with her and another with Mr. Hall, and I had been in all nine of the high school’s shows since I’d been there. She said it might be time for me to think about some serious acting classes outside of high school, because I had exhausted the offerings there. She said I needed more voice work and some proper training, and it would look good on college applications. She was keen on a program at Middlebury College, where she had gone as an undergraduate, but she had heard that there was a relatively new, promising summer acting program on the Cape that drew lots of good theatre people from New York out to teach. The two other possibilities she came up with—one in New York, one in London—seemed much less plausible and much more expensive. When these two pieces came together—what I might actually be able to do on the Cape and the possibility of employment for both of us—Titch and I had a momentary fit in the hall outside the cafeteria at school, throwing our hands up in the air, jumping up and down, shrieking with excitement.

  Ruby couldn’t help us with housing, though, which she said was very hard to come by in the summer season. She made it clear she was not going to stick her neck out for us even to ask around and she certainly wasn’t going to invite us to live in her small, shared place (not that we would have wanted to do this anyway). Once we looked at what it cost to rent a place, I knew it would never happen. I didn’t even bother asking my grandmother and I tried to forget about it. There was no way we could make that kind of money even if we were working fulltime all summer.

  But Titch, with the slippery, studied awareness of a child of divorce, moved on to her dad, Bob, as soon as she had gotten her mother to agree to the plan. I don’t know how she put it to him, but undoubtedly she made him feel like we had this great dream and he was our last hope to make it come true. She’s his only child and he’s a sucker for her, which is part of his charm, at least for me. It turned out that he knows some people called the Davidsons who have a house in Truro, but who were spending their summer in some even more fancy remote beachy place in Nova Scotia. Somehow shell-game Bob finagled it so that Titch and I could housesit for the Davidsons for the summer. Titch spoke to Mrs. Davidson at length and obviously did a persuasive job of sounding extremely responsible. Which, to be fair, she is. In return for the house, all we had to do was agree to feed the birds, and take care of their two cats and many plants.

  It seemed almost too good to be true, but by the middle of May everything was falling into place. My grandmother and my mother had agreed that I could go with Titch, and we had her old brown Toyota Tercel to get about in. I was signed up for the nine-week acting workshop and was planning to put in some hours every weekend for a catering outfit with the twee name of Jake’s Edibles, where Ruby knew the manager. Titch was planning on focusing on her art, on painting and building sculpture and installation pieces, as well as working part-time for a sandwich shop in Wellfleet. We had big plans to go to the beach, and explore, and play. We could not get over the amazement of striking out like this together for the first time.

  More than that: I was looking for a way out, a sanctuary, which Titch knew and only Titch knew. She never said anything to me about whether that was part of her thinking up the Cape Cod plan—I don’t know if she knew how desperate I was to find a way to hide or to get out of town—and I never asked her about this. But I was grateful to her all the same. I felt like I had miraculously stumbled across the escape hatch.

  The day after I met Sarah at Ruby’s party was the first day of the drama program. Everyone gathered—about sixty or so of us—at a gallery overlooking the harbor in Wellfleet. The top floor was ours for the duration of the summer, but today as it turned out the last exhibit hadn’t been entirely cleared. As we sat on the polished pine boards, called to order like kindergartners, large canvases of what looked like floating labia in angry orange or extraterrestrial blue frowned down at us from the walls. A middle-aged woman, balanced precariously on the balls of her feet, launched into a welcome speech. She had distracting white hair, a kind of dandelion fluff that seemed to float straight up and undulate gently above her scalp.

  I didn’t hear anything she was saying. I was busy hugging my knees, wrapped in a growing funk of certainty that signing up for this workshop was a ghastly error. I heard my grandmother talking once about a friend who had been a priest and then lost his faith and opened a brewery. The way she said lost his faith made me think he had set it down somewhere like a suitcase full of once valuable things he just couldn’t bear to drag any further. Not like he had misplaced it, but much more like he’d sat down on it in a deserted railroad station, had a good cry, and thought, I can’t carry this one more step. I had this feeling myself about acting, about being an actor, that it was a hugely valuable weight that I might be about ready to leave behind at the station. I could feel a lightness but also a terrifying emptiness about stepping away from it. What if it was a sign of fundamental weakness on my part? What if everything in the bag, my doctor’s bag, my bag of tricks, could never be replaced once I put it down? I could not admit this to anyone. But I thought I might have lost my faith. Either that or I was anxious and afraid at having to prove myself at this moment in this place in front of these unknown people. Or both. It was hard to tell. Whatever the reason, I felt sick.

  “—tremendous honor to have the remarkable director Bill McNeil with us to lead the workshop in its third year—so exciting—tradition of excellence here on the Cape—top theatre artists and professionals—Juilliard—voice—casting agents—movement—so excited—”

  And then applause as a guy with small mean blue sunglasses slunk to the center of the far wall. The glasses, which sat on top of his head, looked permanently attached, like vestigial horns, or stunted antennae. (All through the workshop, all summer, when he’d pause and grimace, he always looked like he was waiting to pick up some frequency on his broken antennae. Wince—where’s the fucking signal?—wince.) He had a gritty, hungover whisper and nursed a large paper cup of coffee. Although Introductory Woman clearly expected him to speak at this point, all Bill McNeil said was cheers, raising his cup to us in an unsmiling salute. Flustered, Introductory Woman began explaining that there would be six groups and that each group had an assistant or two, who were all talented actors coming to us from top schools and programs here and abroad.

  “It’s like camp with counselors,” said the girl beside me, slightly disgusted. Her legs were stretched out straight on the floor and she was folded neatly over them, her chin on her frayed leg warmers. She looked like the bad seed, punked-out, pockmarked younger sister of Jennifer Beals. Her black hair dye had seeped past her hairline and stained in front of her ears. She had large breasts that gave off a hot, damp smell. When the first group was listed, she unhinged herself in the middle and got up. Her name, unexpectedly, turned out to be Camille. “They’re singing my song,” she said glumly when called and clumped away to join her people. I had a terrific longing to grab her ankle as she went by and be dragged along with her. I was seized by fear, convinced that my name wouldn’t be called, like in junior high before a game of softball, thinking no team will pick me.

  But I
was in Group 6, as it turned out, and eventually I heard my name. I went over to the wall where Group 6 was beginning to gather. A tall, beefy guy smiled nicely at me and said his name was Geoffrey “with a G.” Beside him, a small girl with dark hair and a furrowed brow said, “I’m Ann,” and held out her hand, earnestly, and formally. I wanted to say, “Ann with an A”? But I restrained myself. Eventually there were eight of us altogether, five girls—me, Ann, Shisha, Nicky, and Emily—and three guys—Geoffrey, Chris, and Doug. We were one of the smaller groups.

  The classes for the workshop were going to be held all over town. We were given paper maps with arrows and crude drawings of the waterfront and buildings. It looked like we were going on a second grade birthday party treasure hunt. The first afternoon for Groups 5 and 6 was scheduled in the basement of the First Congregational Church, Classical Monologues with a tall skinny Englishman from LAMDA (the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art). These people only speak in acronyms, like the federal government.) This Englishman had clownish, flapping elbows and identified himself as Bertram Benbow, no kidding.

  I had woken up that morning waterlogged with wretchedness. Titch dropped me off in town and it was all I could do not to beg to go with her to the beach instead. It was worse than being dropped off on the first day of school. The numbing dread made me very calm, almost sleepy, but completely out of it. By the time Bertie Benbow said brightly, Group 6, here’s your section leader! that afternoon, I thought my head was going to be too heavy to lift off my knees. But then I heard her voice.

  “So it won’t take long for those of you who are new to the area to find your way around,” Sarah was saying, poised, pleasant.

  My chin flew off my chest and I sat straight up. Sarah’s mouth kept moving, but I had no idea what she said because the actual fact of her in the room was so much more dazzling than whatever she was talking about; the whole room was shimmering with refracted light.

  On break I went over to where she was collating pink schedules.

  “I didn’t know you were an actor,” I said. She gave me the briefest of smiles, looked down at the pile of papers, stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, and bit it. For some reason, this gave me courage.

  “Do you want to go get coffee after,” I said wildly, recklessly. I thought I’d better ask before I stood up to perform and forgot everything I knew in front of everyone. She looked surprised. Then she said yes.

  On that first day she did a monologue from The Two Noble Kinsmen—I hadn’t read the play but she played the Jailer’s Daughter. She was strong on her feet, full of quick changes and verve Bertie Benbow said after and he was right. Verve. I was worried she wouldn’t be good so I couldn’t look fully at her, but I studied her calves, which appeared to be spring-loaded, and listened to her voice. She was good. Bertie applauded it afterward and then took the monologue apart beat by beat, lovingly, as though he were unfolding a complicated piece of origami.

  One after another each person stood up to deliver an under-3-minute classical audition monologue. We had been allowed to use sonnets and one person in our group—Chris? I was pretty sure that was his name—had gone this route, but I thought listening to him that I was right not to because most sonnets answer their own questions so tidily that it’s hard to find a foothold, an entryway. A tall, slightly overweight blonde girl with knee socks and plaid skirt got up next (what was this? Private school? Did she take the British thing too much to heart?). That was Emily. She was the first of two Juliets, possibly the world’s most predictable choice.

  I had struggled to find a monologue, precisely because I didn’t want to jump in with Juliet, or Viola’s ring speech from Twelfth Night, or anything from As You Like It. I love As You Like It, but I figured that there would be at least one Rosalind taker and maybe even one Phoebe. It looked like I was going to be right about this too: the pale dark-haired girl—Ann—had already stood up and held forth as Rosalind, sincerely if slightly woodenly, her wobbly ankles turned in and collapsing a little. Listening to her reminded me of when Titch and I played Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It in a scene for the Shakespeare Festival when we were in eighth grade. We had started to memorize poems in fourth grade that we recited at school assemblies. This was Titch’s idea originally, but it turned out once we got started that I was the one with the insatiable hunger for performing. I liked the reliability of everyone’s having to look at me, of their having to pay attention, even if restlessly and for a short stretch of time, even if only under the eagle eyes of our teachers. We had moved on to performing scenes and plays together in her backyard in middle school, and we read through a lot of Shakespeare together, skipping lightly over the histories and most of the tragedies the same way I skipped all of War when I read War and Peace. I have never had a problem skipping the bits that I don’t like or that don’t interest me.

  But that day when we swept on the stage bantering as Rosalind (me) and Celia (Titch) something new happened. We were performing in heavy tapestry costumes borrowed from the Dartmouth College costume shop, which smelled like a combination of peppery undergraduate perspiration and mothballs. I remember being wrapped in that smell feeling maybe for the first time that all the pieces of myself—and I mean my unruly limbs and my haywire thoughts and my guts and my sweaty frantic incoherent ambition and my breasts, everything from my challenging hair to the bones in my feet—all these usually jostling warring pieces drew in and pulled together. It felt wonderful, for that moment, the ease of it. I couldn’t remember ever feeling that way before, that all of me was in agreement and working together. The high in that moment was extraordinary and I chased it, in school plays, in classes, in local productions, in plays at the college, anywhere that offered the chance to feel that unity and lucidity again.

  On a whim, three days before leaving for the Cape, I picked up King Lear and reread it. I’ve always loved Lear, despite its being a tragedy, and this time I latched onto a speech of Cordelia’s, which was a short one but felt good to say. In the basement of the church while other people held forth, my attention spooling in and out, I mouthed the first lines of the monologue, trying to will myself into its story. The blonde girl was still earnestly declaiming in her knee socks. It’s nearly summertime, Emily, I thought, staring at her dimpled knees with enormous antagonism. An Edmund from Lear followed, the squarely built guy named Doug who either had or was faking a decent Scottish accent. He raged on about being born a bastard. Spit flew out of his mouth and the front row recoiled under the spray.

  I waited and waited through the others, miserably, and finally got up, the last to go. I always mean to volunteer early but can’t manage it. Something about the way other people spring up enthusiastically always makes me feel glued to the floor with reluctance. Once up, I inhaled deeply and lunged through Cordelia’s speech to her sleeping father, the reunion speech to Lear in the final act. This is post storm and devastation, long after her father has cast her out and then her sisters cast him out into the storm. It’s when Cordelia finally sees her father again and breaks down.

  O my dear father! Restoration hang /

  Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss/

  Repair those violent harms that my two sisters/

  Have in thy reverence made!

  (I had somehow decided to place the invisible Lear at the feet of Bertie Benbow. Why had I done this? Madness.)

  Had you not been their father, these white flakes/

  Did challenge pity of them. Was this a face/

  To be oppos’d against the warring winds/

  To stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder?

  (Lear was unconscious; there was no moving him.)

  In the most terrible and nimble stroke/

  Of quick, cross lightning? To watch—poor perdu!—/

  With this thin helm?

  (A drop of sweat fell off my forehead and splashed onto my shoe. I saw it land, mesmerized, apparentl
y utterly unable to lift my head.)

  Mine enemy’s dog,/

  Though he had bit me, should have stood that night/

  Against my fire. And wast thou fain, poor father,/

  To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn,/

  In short and musty straw? Alack, alack!

  (Bertie’s socks did not match. Why in god’s name did I have to notice this?)

  ‘Tis wonder that thy life and wits at once/

  Had not concluded all. He wakes; speak to him.

  As soon as I finished, Bertie stood up heavily. I plopped down on the floor, filled with dark accusatory thoughts. Oh well, I wasn’t the worst, I thought, unwilling to swivel around to check for confirmation on this, and, It’s his fault for wearing those socks.

  “Yes,” he said, frowning down at me. “Yes, yes,” he said again, this time shaking his head. He groaned a little and raked his fingers along his scalp from back to front. If he had had any hair it would have stood straight up.

  “Yes. Nina, yes? You have great facility, Nina, facility with language. Great facility. Yes. Language comes easily to you, you have a feel in the mouth for the words. But there is too much here.” (He clapped his hands on his head, elbows straight out to the sides, eyes bulging emphatically.)

  “You have not connected here.” (He hit himself in the stomach.)

  “Knowing when to breathe” (shooting a fierce look around the room) “is not the same as being on the breath, using the breath. Knowing when to breathe is only the first step—you must be connected to the breath. Stand up, my love.” (I did.)