Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  On the beach, standing high up on the dunes, she said, “It’s so beautiful. How can anyone stand it?”

  The wind was picking up, and the waves were sparkling. It was so bright out that my head hurt. I bounded down ahead of her towards the water, my knees buckling, pitching forward, nearly somersaulting in the sand, calling back over my shoulder.

  “How are we going to live our lives?”

  “Bravely and hand in hand.”

  “Well, get on down here and kiss me.” And she did.

  Bravely and hand in hand.

  I believed this.

  CHAPTER 18

  One night I came home to the apartment later than Sarah, which was unusual because she always had to organize various spaces, and ferry about and cater to the visiting teachers once the day’s classes had ended. But today I had gone out with Chris and Doug to rehearse a scene after classes were over, and then they had decided to order dinner and while they waited for it we had wandered over to Mayo Beach and then we stayed there, longer than we meant to, wanting to watch the sun finish setting.

  “Where’ve you been?” Sarah called from the shower, over the running water, when she heard me come in the door. “Have you eaten? There’s not much in the fridge. I had to eat the old cottage cheese. Who runs this joint anyway? Oh, hey, there’s a letter on the table for you. I found it there when I came in. I think Titch must have dropped it off.”

  I picked it up and the MP’s handwriting lurched up at me. It wasn’t the first letter, more like the fifth that he’d sent. I tried to read the first one, but then I felt ill when I looked at the envelopes and I didn’t want to read any more. I would look over the pages, my eyes completely glazed, unable and unwilling to focus.

  Sarah hated the MP. That crazy sonofabitch, she said when I told her about him and the entire spring, that’s fucked up, he should never have gone near you. I’ll kill him if he ever goes near you again. And she would be very serious when she said this, lean and mean and tough, like she was going to protect my maiden honor in the woods, or like she should be wearing a shirt with cutoff sleeves and the collar turned up, like what the boys from The Outsiders dressed in, clothes she didn’t own and would never have worn. I loved that she hated him. I didn’t bother to straighten out what was certainly an unfair perception of the situation—that he was a monster of exploitation and I was his vulnerable victim. Somehow I was exempt from any judgment in her version, which was fine by me. I basked in her protective rage. He seemed so far away from me when I told her about him that he might have been a grotesque character in a fairy tale I invented.

  “Is that from him?” Sarah asked, gesturing toward the letter with her elbow. She had come into the kitchen and was resting one hip against the counter while she toweled her hair dry.

  “From the MP? Yes.”

  “Are you going to read it?”

  I looked down at it. “I don’t really want to.”

  She wrapped her hair up in the towel expertly, and swung open the door of the woodstove with a flourish, which I countered by shoving the letter in on top of a pile of cold ash.

  “Do you want to do the honors?” she asked, offering me the matchbook.

  I hesitated, and she put her head on one side, looking at me more closely.

  “What’s up, buttercup?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. There was a prickle of guilt or remorse in my throat. I didn’t owe him anything, and it made me feel cross to be harassed by his handwriting, but it felt slightly bad anyway, like a betrayal, to burn his letter, not even to pretend to read it.

  Before I had left for the Cape, by May anyway, things had gotten completely out of hand with the MP. I was flummoxed because it seemed like he should have been able to handle the situation better, or at all for that matter. He was the bona fide fully certified right-there-on-his-driver’s-license adult. It seemed like his extra twenty-eight years should have given him a head start on matters of the heart, like he might have lapped the course a bunch of times and just been able to take things in stride as he loped towards home, but apparently not. Instead he began to cry a lot. He kept breaking the rules that he had originally instituted about contact between the two of us. He was unraveling right before my eyes and it was deeply unnerving.

  For instance, once I was walking uptown with Lynn Nichols for ice cream after school and I saw the MP’s battered blue Honda circling the Dartmouth green and creeping up and down Main Street and I knew he had spotted me and was trailing me. I made Lynn sit with me in the Village Green until I was sure he would have had to move on and even then I detoured through the Hopkins Center and tagged after Lynne to the Howe Library in case he was parked somewhere waiting for me to surface. Where I had once gone looking for him in school, I had begun hiding everywhere and anywhere from him, in school and out. And he had started hunting me down.

  Ever since I had finally told him that I was heading out of town for the summer, he began unraveling over the phone regularly. I had told him he couldn’t call me at home, but he did anyway, sometimes pretending to be other people. It was appalling, but sad too. It made me feel desolate in my bones. When he talked to me, he morphed into some hunchbacked animal, some caved-in beast—he actually whimpered, a sound I’d only heard from him in entirely different circumstances. Here that cry had turned into its unforeseen evil twin noise.

  I couldn’t bear it, but I’d replay that sound in my head the way I was resigned to replay in my head various ugly things I’d seen and heard. I had distilled a loop of ugliness that ran in my head like a short film, kicking off with excerpts from an actual short film, an educational gem about avoiding rape that Mr. Hingham, the school counselor, made all the girls watch when we were twelve. (Because the girls are the only ones who need to be educated about rape. Because it’s going to be our job to get away.) That’s minute #1 on my horror loop—a woman desperately scrambling away in the underbrush from a would-be rapist she had picked up while driving. (Because I was about to pick up hitchhikers when I was twelve and four years away from even getting my license.) That visual stayed with me for a very, very long time. Even much scarier incidents in my own life could not dislodge it. It might crop up when I walked home after dark, or all of sudden when a car slowed down beside me in the middle of a bright and sunny afternoon. Cue tape: that woman’s ragged, panicky, futile breathing, her victim breathing, would thrum in my ears, along with the crashing, flailing, hunted animal sounds of underbrush snapping. That clip would hang around for years, along with soundtrack noises like the tiny gasping sobs of the MP and a whole limping pack of sad, bad, and ugly dog-eared, well-fondled fodder that can make me unsure in the belly.

  Titch, whose bible and constant point of reference is William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, both the book and then the movie, would refer to these kinds of mental intrusions as ROUS’s, Rodents of Unusual Size, the mythical but finally conquerable nasty beasts that waylay the story’s hero and heroine in the Fire Swamp. Titch was fanatical about The Princess Bride from the moment she encountered it, the way most boys are about Star Wars or Star Trek or apparently Star anything. Not that Titch was immune to Harrison Ford, either, but then in Star Wars (or in Raiders of the Lost Ark, or my favorite, Witness) he has the same attitude as the whole of Princess Bride—the perfect ironic lip curl of the anti-romantic die-hard romantic. I tried to follow Titch’s philosophy on scary unbidden thoughts—ROUS’s—mostly I said fuck it to them and tromped on their heads when they jumped up wanting attention. Something about what was going on with the MP made that harder. I was battling some ominous knowledge I didn’t want to let in, that I was flailing to keep at bay, about as effectively as beating off a cloud of gnats in a bog.

  Two days before Titch and I drove to the Cape that bit of knowledge broke open over my head when I was standing in line at the Main Street drugstore to pick up my grandmother’s glaucoma medication. Marianne Franks, the tetchy dry woman who had
lived behind the drugstore counter for my whole life turned to me and said, Now what can I do for you, and right then I fully grasped this much: the MP couldn’t do anything for me, couldn’t help me, because he couldn’t even help himself and so was not grown up as I had understood that state of being. And he was not alone in this. Any of the grown people waiting behind me at the pharmacy could be fakers. Any number of people masquerading as adults might look to me for help, they might be needier than babies, soft in the middle, weak sacks of want. It had nothing to do with age. There was no essential line between adults and me anymore, if there ever had been. More: if I had thought that being with the MP meant that I was grown up, I saw in an Alice-in-Wonderland topsy-turvy flash that actually it meant more about him than about me, that what it really meant was that he was a child. This thought was so dizzying that I clung to the edge of the drugstore counter. Amazing, deeply distressing, not to be believed. But there absolutely, irrefutable in the MP’s tiny cascading moan, that pathetic pleading baby cry, don’t leave me, I need you, as fixed, as certain, as naked as an ugly prehistoric bug suspended in a fossil. Marianne Franks, who was waiting on me, not patiently, held out her hand and asked again. I saw her mouth moving, but the only thing I heard was that shriveled shameful bedroom sound.

  In the kitchen, I turned away from the sound in my head and from Sarah, lit the match, and set the MP’s fat envelope on fire. I watched it burn, my eyes searching for words as the flame licked and curled and smoldered the paper.

  “Hey, sweet girl,” Sarah said, from behind me then, lightly touching between my shoulder blades. “Are you okay?”

  And in the moment when I turned around to her, I was. I was more than okay. Because I knew it wasn’t that I had been running away from the MP—although obviously I had done that too—it was that I had been running to her. It had all been so that I could be with her. I twined my arms up around her and locked my wrists behind her neck at the same instant that she caught and pulled me to her. I slid against her as easily as a fish slips through the warm waters of the Indian Ocean. I could feel my heart pound through her chest, our clavicles and hip bones joined, our pulse points clicked together like magnets. We kissed and I was home. She could do that.

  CHAPTER 19

  That was the week we arrived in the room with director Patty Trout, a woman appropriately enough with damp eyes the size of platters, magnified by enormous red-rimmed glasses. Bill McNeil was in the room when we were gathering, half sitting on the windowsill, smoking and looking around the space without much interest. But when Patty appeared, dragging what appeared to be an enormous ragged carpetbag and a yoga mat, Bill McNeil jumped up and gave her a big hug. They talked together in low, warm voices. He introduced her, and seemed to take it for granted that he would stay and watch her class, although he had never done this before.

  “You’re in for a treat with Patty,” he promised us, smiling maybe the first real smile I had ever seen from him.

  All the groups were present at once this day, and it was sticky in the room, humid with nervous sweat. Everyone was having another run at a Shakespeare monologue, for the whole day. The whole week we had been revisiting the same piece of Shakespeare, for most of us our chosen text from the very first day, in a wide range of classes. We were supposed to say the words over and over and over again until they became our own, stopped making sense, and (we hoped, I guess) started making sense again. I was heartily sick of it.

  Emily from our group went first. She stood in front of the whole crowd, radiating anxiety in a huge smile, before embarking on her text, which, she informed us, was a monologue of Cleopatra’s from Antony and Cleopatra. She looked very much the way a cat does after being set down on the metal table at the vet’s, when it can’t get a purchase on the slippery surface and it begins to purr frantically in a desperate bid for humanity. Emily’s smile was like that purr. I found I couldn’t watch her, because her dread was so palpable and it was feeding my own. Anticipatory fear was blossoming on my palms.

  The thing about theatre is, you never know moment to moment what is going to crack anyone open, what will get someone to go the distance, to let everyone else in, to make the leap or the connection—however you wanted to think about it—to be an actor. At least, I never seemed to know, which is maybe part of why I am not as much of an actor as I wish that I were.

  My first acting teacher was a voice teacher, but she was also an actor herself, or had been. I was nine years old then, and it was before I had ever thought seriously about being an actor, even before Titch and I were reciting poems in assembly and staging scenes in the backyard together. Back then what I thought about doing was politics, about which I had a very dim understanding. All I knew was that politics was what my parents concerned themselves with, what they seemed to take seriously, and what they claimed took them away. By the time I was nine, I had privately boiled down this vague interest in politics into a focused, if crazed, desire to take over the world, which I knew I couldn’t really say to grown-ups—I want to take over the world—nobody was going to find that anything other than alarming. Maybe it’s permissible in a toddler, but not in a preadolescent. So I would say only that I wanted to go into politics. Given an opening, I would spin off on how my role models were people like Gandhi and Frances Perkins. This would make grown-ups fall all over themselves with enthusiasm. Ben Kingsley hadn’t yet played Gandhi, although when he did, it would mark the only occasion in the history of our school that students made a trip to the Nugget, the town cinema, right in the middle of the day. I felt pretty good about that choice. But Frances Perkins was even better. You could always see right away which grown-ups actually knew her and which ones would narrow their eyes and nod knowingly instead. (I only knew about her because of Female Leaders Day in Social Studies. Not even a Unit, just a Day. I guess we were lucky it wasn’t Female Leaders Hour. Also, Maggie Thatcher made that list, and don’t get me started on Margaret Thatcher with her mean little eyes. It was a crap day at school, like so many others.) Frances P. was at least Secretary of Labor under FDR. The first woman in the Cabinet. She was the best part of Female Leaders. Even grown-ups with no idea who she was ate it up when I casually dropped her name.

  A woman overheard this I-want-to-be-a-politician rigmarole at some work dinner party of my mother’s when she was in town. I was spinning like mad and praying to be excused so I could go back to my room, climb out of my dress, and brood on my plans to dominate the universe. But this woman at the party, tall, with too many splotched freckles, like a mutant Dalmatian, kept pushing her hair back and concentrating on me. She had to double over in the middle to see me, her spotty pale moon face hanging at the end of a long tunnel of hair. She was a dancer or something, modern dance, and she said I should go to a voice teacher if I wanted to make big speeches! And she knew just the person!

  This turned out to be a fat dusty Englishwoman named Gwendolyn Murdy who claimed to have coached Vanessa Redgrave, although not, she insisted, to stand up at the Academy Awards and talk about the Palestinian Liberation movement with a fanatical gleam in her eye. I was a little disappointed by that, but figured there was no harm in her. For a voice teacher, she talked a lot more than I did, but one of the things she said in our first meeting and nearly every subsequent one was that I had an “s problem,” which other less well-trained people might call a slight lisp. It was hard for me to see how this was a problem for world domination and I pointed to a number of people—Barbara Walters an obvious contender—who seemed like excellent reasons to hang tough with the s problem and maybe even increase it to a t, u, v problem. Gwendolyn Murdy didn’t get this at all. When she didn’t get something I said, which was often, she would leave her mouth hanging open for a minute, then snap her jaw shut hard and shake her head from side to side violently, wattles flying, like there was water in her inner ear.

  But I liked her and I made half-hearted, dutiful, largely unsuccessful efforts to improve under her tutelage. We ate a
lot of strange German cookies—Lebkuchen, I think she called them—that tasted like gingery paper and reminded me of puffball mushrooms that explode so satisfyingly when you jump on them in the woods. The cookies let loose a similar small poof of air when you bit into them. We sat around, showering powdered sugar on top of the dust in her apartment, which was filled to the brim, just knotted up with fake cloth and plastic flowers, new to me except in graveyards. With Gwendolyn Murdy, I developed a new appreciation for the intricacies of teeth. This was partly because I’d been forced to keep the tip of my tongue touching my lower teeth as I enunciated monopthongs and dipthongs, but also because Gwendolyn Murdy had a big mouthful of English teeth—manic like tall brownstones after an earthquake, just tilting every imaginable which way. It’s the small funkiness in teeth, the gaps, the overlaps, the snaggles that I find compelling; the snowflake teeth, the true originals, that produce their own bite patterns and noises like nothing else, whistles and clicks, brilliant sibilant plosives all their own. Gwendolyn Murdy had singular teeth, but when she spoke a piece of text, she would be transformed, she would be unrecognizable, because what she was saying, the very language, the heart of it, the meat of it, the gist of it, would overtake her funny, dumpy, strange self. When our lessons were finished, my s problem was intact but I had a new and deep curiosity about acting.

  What I observed with Gwendolyn Murdy and ever since then is that a lot of acting is alchemy. And you need alchemists to make it happen, people who genuinely believe in the transmutation of base metals into gold. If you don’t believe that this is possible it will never happen.

  Patty Trout was an alchemist. She wasn’t messing around. In no time she had her first victim, our tightly wound Emily, on her back on the floor with her eyes closed, her arms supporting her lower back, her legs over her head, knees slightly bent, toes turned in toward each other, and vibrating slightly. This might have been a funny sight, the way her bottom and her thighs were jiggling, but nobody giggled. Our restraint wasn’t out of any kind of respect or politeness or even fear about our own upcoming humiliation. It was because the sound that came out of her in that unlikely position, the unexpected clarity, the looseness of her breath, and the lushness of Cleopatra’s language, was marvelous. Only Patty Trout looked unsurprised. It was like she had taken Emily—needy, unhappy Emily—turned her upside down, given her a good shake, and caused a kind of sensuality and a kind of truth to fall out of her. Suddenly Emily’s hunger had teeth.