by Meg Howrey
• • •
David, Klaus, and Tyler showed off—for one another, for the four or five other men in class who will never jump like they do, for the girls, who all gawked. Klaus tied a bandanna around his blondness. David had his eyes half closed. Tyler removed three layers to reveal a Ramones T-shirt. Gillian touched me on the shoulder and we whispered a few exchanges, I said something funny as I always do, she laughed soundlessly. Gillian had a thin gold bracelet on her wrist. I think she always wears it. I’m not sure. I’ve danced with her for six years and I can’t tell you. The universe is filled with things I’ve never noticed.
The crazy lady with the rainbow leg warmers was there today too, Kleenex poking out of the V of her leotard. I smiled at her but she did not smile back. The features of her face were drawn tightly up and out, and she jerked woodenly across the floor, a stringless marionette. She was once a little girl. We were all little girls once.
Leaving, I saw the students pulling on pairs of identical Ugg boots. They would go get Starbucks, and that scone thing they were talking about. It’s totally possible to walk completely away from dance and go get Starbucks. Not everybody can, but it is possible. Preferable? I can’t say. I didn’t envy them their freedom, though. None of us is getting out of here alive.
I was early to meet Mara at Verdi Cafe. Actually, Mara and Roger. I asked Mara if it was okay if he joined. Partly because Mara’s been looking at me in this worried way all week and also because I needed the extra voices. The more noise, the better.
On that note, I took half a Vicodin. It’s not so much that I need it for performance, now. In fact, it’s making me too paranoid and nervous to dance on it. I need it more to start my day, to occupy space in my brain until I can get to performance, and then to make artificial chatter with me after so I don’t have to go back to Gwen’s alone. I thought I wouldn’t need it for meeting Mara and Roger and all, but it was raining, they were late, I didn’t have my iPod, and I can’t read now. Obviously everything in the newspaper is awful but even a stray sentence from a New Yorker left on the adjacent table—When he came home from work, he would make himself a snack and eat it by himself in the kitchen, standing up—I mean, what the hell? Stop right there! You have already plunged me into a fathomless gloom from whence there is no solace and no return, an endless twilight of loss and pathetic aspirations, a forever-empty kitchen where sad little snacks are patiently, lovelessly eaten.
Even imaginary nice sentences: The sun shone. Beauty is all around. My sister is my greatest inspiration. Isn’t there something inherently heartbreaking about all of those?
“Sorry, sorry.” Mara bustled in, dropping her bag on the empty seat. Her coat was wet. She folded up an umbrella.
When it rains, Mara’s hair goes into these mad tendrils, all around her face. She looked like a Victorian paper doll, round faced and ringleted, pink cheeked.
“Roger’s late too,” I said. “What busy lives you all lead. I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes twiddling my thumbs. Twiddling, twiddling away. It’s like tweeting, only more existential. Nothing actually gets sent.”
Mara smiled indulgently, but only with her mouth. From the deliberate way she was handling her umbrella, rearranging the silverware, placing her palms against the menu, I could see we were on the verge of a talk. I thought we pretty much covered things at the Russian Baths, but apparently not.
“First off, we are ordering you some food,” she said.
“I was just thinking we should eat,” I said, talking fast, not really minding what I was saying. “I was thinking about salmon, you know, lox and bagels. I had never heard of lox in Michigan. It seemed so exotic when I came here. The most exotic we ever got with food was port-wine cheddar cheese at Christmas. It comes in like, a tub. It’s fucking delicious. Crackers and port-wine cheddar cheese.”
I moved Mara’s umbrella out of range so I wouldn’t have to look at the little metal rods sticking out from the fabric. Those things could just fly out and hit you in the eye at any time.
“You need to eat,” Mara said. I could feel the overture to Adult Women Conversation beginning.
“We need to eat!” I grabbed the menu. “We’re both completely gaunt. It looks better on you, though. I look like a slightly aerobicized Jane Eyre. But you need vitamins and shit for baby making! Hey, did I tell you I ran into Andrew?”
Mara shook her head. If I had managed to stop shrieking and rolling my eyes, it could almost have passed for typical gossip between girls. I needed Roger to show up though, make it a party, interrupt me, tell bigger, more embarrassing stories. My right leg thrummed up and down, under the table.
“Oh god, Mara, it was so ridiculous. It was early in the morning and I was coming out of Zabar’s—the coffee shop part? And I had my iPod on and he was all, ‘What are you listening to?’ And I was a complete mess. No makeup. Morning breath. And I … I … well, actually I guess it doesn’t really matter at all.”
I grabbed a fork and tapped the table with the tines. No, none of it mattered. That was good, actually. If none of it mattered then you didn’t have to feel bad about a sad man making a sad snack for himself in a sad kitchen.
“No, come on,” Mara said, putting her hand over mine and the fork. “Of course it matters. You haven’t seen him since the breakup. You’re allowed to be upset, Kate.”
“I mean it in a really positive way.” I turned the fork so the tines were sticking into my palm. “It’s actually really liberating. Nothing matters except what you decide to make matter and so I could just say—poof—I don’t matter to Andrew and I don’t and it’s all nothing. And he doesn’t matter to me. And all the little awkward clumsy little mechanical machinations? All those things we do in our minds? None of those matter either. Especially those. So it’s not a sad thing like, ‘Oh boo-hoo, the world has no meaning, what a drag,’ but more like, ‘Hey! Nothing matters! So I can just …’ ”
I used my free hand to make a gesture.
“You can just … what?” Mara asked.
I guess my gesture needed program notes. It could have been the gesture for the end of existence, or it could have been the gesture for carrying on. Luckily the waitress arrived.
Under Mara’s stern watch, I ordered a Cobb salad. “Bacon!” I said, defensively. “Blue cheese! I’m like a wild woman here.”
“Are you sleeping at all?” Mara lifted my hand off the fork, turning it over.
“Read my palm,” I said, thrusting my hand up. I did it a little too fast though, and with too much strength. I almost hit her nose. I think I was almost trying to hit her. She dropped my hand.
“Sorry, too much coffee.” I shoved my hand under my leg for safety.
Mara bit her lip and took a breath. She was going to be careful with me. She had probably already talked over “what she was going to say” with Mike. I could imagine them tucked up in bed, Mike with one hand on the remote, muting CNN while Mara explained how she was worried about me. A memory surfaced, Mara and I in the apartment before Gwen came, lying on our backs in the bed with our feet in the air, laughing about something. That kind of laughter where you laugh and laugh and then stop and then start laughing again and then it almost seems fake that you’re laughing so hard, but then it becomes real again.
“Wendy is dying of cancer,” I said.
“Oh my god.” After a moment of comprehension, Mara’s eyes filled with tears. I watched this jealously, greedily, guiltily.
“Oh my god, how terrible. When did you find out?”
“Last week,” I said. “She’s been sick for a while, but I didn’t know. I mean, I haven’t seen her for a little bit. She told me she was visiting her sister, but I think she just didn’t want me to see her when she was going through chemo. But the chemo didn’t work, I guess. So it’s the end.” I made the gesture again. Yes, it was definitely the gesture for dismissal, for exiting Stage Left or Stage Right, whichever wing you could throw yourself into.
“Kate, I am so, so sorry.” Mara moved
as if to touch me, but I was sitting on both my hands, and it was awkward. She had to half get out of her chair to hug my shoulder. Bones embraced bones. She knocked over the fork, which clattered to the tiled floor horribly, as if it were a thousand forks. Bending down to retrieve it, I considered seriously the notion of staying under the table. It took everything I had to come back up.
“Thank you,” I said, as if Wendy’s dying were a thing that was happening to me. “I didn’t really want to bring it up because, you know … what do you say after that?”
Mara shook her head.
“Is she …?”
“What? In pain? Is it better or worse to be in pain when you die?” I forced myself to let go of the fork. “It’s like you want to say, ‘Oh, she’s not in pain and she had a good life,’ but then isn’t it better, in some way, if the person is in pain, and hasn’t had a very good life, because then they get released. It might look like she’s had a good life, because so many people have just horrific circumstances, you could spend your life in total squalor, running from drugged-out African warlords and starving to death, so who’s going to cry over a Park Avenue heiress making herself a little snack in her kitchen, all alone?”
“You can cry about both those things,” Mara said, frowning, trying to keep up with me as I crashed about the stage, groping for the wings. “One doesn’t mean the other isn’t … just as sad. In its own way.”
“I know,” I said, because I wasn’t making much sense. “It shouldn’t have this big justification, anyway. Death. You shouldn’t have to make grand statements about it. We don’t even know what it is, right? Except it’s not this.” My eyes circled the room. An old woman was vigorously shaking out an umbrella at the front of the restaurant. The cashier was shoving a receipt onto a metal spike. A waitress was taking a giant white frosted cake topped with strawberries out of the glass display case. There were playbills and magazines and newspapers in a pile on top of the piano in the corner. Two gentlemen, one bald, one not, were eating sandwiches by the window, identical Barnes & Noble plastic bags hanging off their chair posts. People, other people. Tables. Posters on the wall. A crumpled paper napkin on the floor. Glass containers of brown sugar, white sugar, fake sugar. So many spoons. An EXIT sign, lit up in green. GO.
“Kate,” Mara said.
“Yeah?”
But it wasn’t what I wanted. Sympathy. Understanding. Or whatever Mara was offering. I didn’t want to be scolded either. Told I was being selfish, melodramatic, that my indiscriminate drug use had to stop. I didn’t want my perspective altered, or my spirits lifted. I didn’t want to eat Cobb salad.
Roger walked through the door, drenched and looking thoroughly irritated.
“Ugh.” He tossed his bag on the floor with a wet thwonk and threw himself into a seat. “I hate rain. I hate it! This place better have cheeseburgers with fries or you bitches are in trouble. Cover me now. I am not sitting here in these wet pants.” Roger took a pair of sweatpants out of his bag and whipped them under the table.
“Poor kitten.” I reached over with my napkin and blotted his face. “Poor soggy puppy.” Keep making noise, I prayed, laughing. Bang drums. Clamor and ring bells for I cannot stand to hear the tired beating of this almost heart. Get me to the event that is neither before nor after. The event that isn’t life.
24.
To dose, or not to dose, that is the question. That’s another play, though. About a prince who goes mad. Or is pretending to be mad and then gets confused and really does go mad. You can see how that could happen quite easily.
I was standing in my dressing room in my Helena costume when my phone beeped a text message arrival. I was so convinced it was Gwen, and I felt such relief, and such anger, that I almost didn’t pick up the phone. How dare she, after all this time, just fucking text me? I snatched up the phone.
SPRINT222freedownloadforyourphone!
I swallowed a Vicodin, to punish myself.
Marius called us all onstage before the performance. He said things. I wasn’t worried about how I would dance. Klaus was excited. His eyebrows were dark with liner, his blondness gelled into a quiff. There were flowers from him in my dressing room. The note attached said, “To the sexy librarian, merde and thank you, from the captain of the football team.” I was confused until I remembered describing our characters like that to him about a hundred thousand years ago. In Klaus’s dressing room is a copy of Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and a DVD of WrestleMania. The card attached to them says, “Dear Klaus/Demetrius: for the development of your duality with love from Kate/Helena.” Just before getting to the theater tonight I remembered to pick up a little bouquet of tea roses for Bryce. Knowing that she would probably keep the card, that it would mean something to her, I threw away several attempts before settling on “Have fun tonight, Bryce. You will be a beautiful Fairy in this Dream. Kate.”
After Marius finished, the stage cleared out a bit. Klaus asked me if there was anything I wanted to run. “I think we should just do it,” I said. “I think we’re good.” Klaus nodded. He trusts me. I sipped water and swung out my hips. Klaus did push-ups in the wings. My feet were cold, too cold. I tried to warm them up, doing a quick series of relevés at the barre. I could feel the floor underneath the tips of my pointe shoes. You’re supposed to feel the floor. You want to. When you’re a student, feeling the floor is painful and you pack the toes of your pointe shoes with padding. In the old days they used lamb’s wool. Now they have these sort of gel cushions you can put in there. I used to cut off the tips of thin socks. As you get older, you need stuff like that less. You just use tape, or maybe half a rectangle of a paper towel, folded over the toes to absorb sweat.
Of such things is my life composed. I am constrained by layers, hooks and eyes and tights and hairpins and satin and ribbons and music that I count, under my breath.
My hands have small discs of calluses at the base of each finger, from holding on to a barre all my life. When I released the barre, my hands smelled like metal.
In the wings, the schoolchildren were lining up. You have never in your life seen such straight backs. Translucent wings, stiff with wire, jutted out behind downy shoulder blades. Someone whispered, “Hi.” I looked down. Stage makeup had swallowed Bryce’s heart-shaped face. “Hi,” I whispered back. I took her small hand in my metal one. There was a little ripple in the line as the girls looked back at us. Over the top of Bryce’s head I saw Mara, backlit from stage lights, screwing her pointe shoes into the rosin box. Mara also had wings, grown-up wings, mother wings. “Merde,” I said to Bryce, because that is what dancers say to one another. When the fairies ran onstage I stepped into the wings to watch Bryce. I wanted very badly for her to be good. Bryce turned in place, ran, dropped to one knee. I saw her eyes quickly check her position in line, making sure she was equidistant from the fairies beside her. She straightened a leg out in front of her and bowed over her foot, toe pointing, wings straight up in the air. Her foot was a perfect arch, her thin hands graceful over it. She popped back up and then down again, over and over, right on the music. Her face was alight, alight, alight.
And then I was onstage. I threw myself at Klaus, who rejected me, so funny! I fell asleep, dejected, on a forest floor, so sad! I awoke and found two men were now in love with me, so confusing! I got in a fight with a girl, so entertaining! I got another dose of flower potion just in time, and then my love loved me back, so sweet! So satisfying! So enchanting!
Then—pop—it was over, and I went back to my dressing room. What now? What now? Luckily I had a drug for now.
There was a little gathering happening on the mezzanine. A champagne toast. It was packed because the student fairies and their parents were invited and of course they were all there. I grabbed a flute of champagne off a tray, looked for Marius.
Abby flagged me down and shuttled me over to three tables where posters of Dream were spread out. The photo shoot was done months ago. Manuel Ortega as Puck, all burnished-copper
sinews, flying over the heads of Gwen as Titania, cradling Roger with Bottom’s donkey head on. Next to each poster was a black Magic Marker. It’s a souvenir, for the students, to get posters signed by the cast. Presumably they will take them home and hang them on their walls until such time as they have ceased to Dream of Dream. How long will this take?
I signed my name. A big swirly K and smaller, delicate a-t-e. Another swirly C and tiny r-a-n-e. I held myself back from forging Gwen’s signature underneath her left foot.
“Kate?”
Bryce’s mother, Jane.
“Congratulations,” Jane said, reaching as if to touch me on the elbow and then not doing it. “You were so fabulous,” she said. “I’m in awe.”
I made the gesture for modesty.
“What a fantastic production,” Jane enthused. “Just enchanting. And so funny! Especially the things for you and your partner, and the Hermia and Lysander. That’s a new partner for you, isn’t it?”
“Klaus,” I said. “He’s new to the company. I don’t know that we’ll get matched up outside this, though. I’m too tall for him. He’s great though, isn’t he?”
“Well, you’re great together. And he’s gorgeous!” Jane winked conspiratorially.
“Did Bryce have a good time?” I asked, trying not to too obviously look around Jane for Marius.
“Oh god.” Jane fluttered her hand again. “I think so. It’s all become so … serious for her all of a sudden. I miss the time when we could give her like, ballet slippers for her charm bracelet. A ballerina music box. I mean, I’m thrilled for her that she’s having this experience, but it’s also a little … God, I sound like such a mom.”
I made the gesture for empathy, although it’s only Bryce’s position that I’ve experienced.
“You have been so great with her,” Jane said. “She just thinks you’re the most incredible person on the planet. And the flowers? She’s putting them in the car, now, so they won’t get crushed. I think we might have to bronze them for her.”