The Uncoupling
The cameras from a couple of local news stations, which had gamely hung around for the first day, had retreated. There was a more pressing story having to do with a potentially toxic landfill over near Morristown. But Alex, the reporter from The Campobello Courier, hadn’t left. He had been pursuing the story, and Marissa had granted him an interview that had taken place over much of the afternoon today and into the evening. He sat on a chair quietly beside her bed now, blogging for the Courier’s website and eating a plate of salmon and couscous that Mrs. Clayborn had kindly put together for him. The drama teacher and the drama henchgirls appeared in the bedroom, and all of them began to implore Marissa to reconsider.
“You swore an oath,” Ms. Heller reminded her, but Marissa remained resolute in her decision not to leave the bed at all. Her mother showed the theater people to the door.
Back at the school, the girls in the play had set up a large-scale, open dressing room in the cafeteria. Some of their mothers were there tonight to help out, including Dory Lang, who after some wheedling had been allowed by Willa to come. Right now none of the mothers knew quite what to do. Some had pins in their mouths, hemming chitons, but most of them, like Dory, were just waiting for Fran Heller to return so they could find out what was going to happen now. The boys, who had been down the hall in the music room with their fathers, joined the girls in the cafeteria. Everyone stood around, feverishly discussing the Marissa Clayborn problem. Some of them said that it wasn’t possible to perform the play without Marissa.
“The whole thing should just be canceled,” Jeremy Stegner said to the room, and there were nods and syllables of agreement.
Now the drama teacher entered the cafeteria with a grim expression, and they all knew that she had been unable to lure Marissa Clayborn up from her bed. “Ms. Heller,” said Jeremy, stepping forward into the center of the room that still smelled from whatever oil had been used to cook lunch. “We were talking, and we thought that, if Marissa can’t do it, then the show should be canceled. People will understand.”
“No,” said Fran Heller. “That is not acceptable.” She ran her hands through her hair. “We have a responsibility to this community. We told them we would put on a play, and that’s what we’re going to do. The tickets raise funds for the school. And anyway, we’re in the middle of a long winter,” she went on. “Everyone needs a play now. Plays bring a community together. We are not canceling this.”
“But who can be Lysistrata?” said Lucy Stupak. “I mean, in all honesty, Ms. Heller, no one even comes close. Marissa is the greatest actor in this whole school. None of us can do what she can.”
“That is not true,” Fran Heller said, even though it so obviously was. She seemed determined, almost desperate, to keep the play alive. After all, Dory thought, Fran had been brought here to do this, and this was her culminating moment, the climax of her year. After the play ended she would be involved in small evenings of one-acts with her more advanced students, but nothing nearly as big as the winter play. “We’re not quitters,” Fran added, as if she’d been listening in on the lingo of the locker room, where Ruth Winik sometimes pumped up her volleyball or basketball players after a bad game. “And we’re going to find a way out of this.” She looked all around the room, taking the measure of each girl. Everyone was very still, allowing themselves to be assessed.
Fran Heller looked and looked, and though it was true that no one here seemed an obvious choice for Lysistrata—no one had the elegance and vocal command that Marissa did—she paused for a second, then said, “Willa, can I see you?”
Willa Lang was the only Willa in the school, but still she put her hand to her heart and said, “Me?”
Dory, beside her, looked up in concern, so Fran said, “Dory, you can listen too. Come on.” The three of them went into a huddle over at the side of the room by the empty steam tables. The drama teacher said to Willa, “I need you to be Lysistrata.”
“What?” Willa said dumbly. The play was tomorrow night. Dory felt her heart flutter and bloom. “I can’t do that, Ms. Heller,” Willa continued.
But the drama teacher was firm. “Don’t say ‘can’t’; hasn’t anyone taught you that, Willa? You’re my best bet. You’ve got that glorious red hair, which I’ve noticed looks good under the lights. Take your shyness and turn it into an intensity. You probably know a lot of the lines just from being at rehearsals, but we’ll definitely give you a prompter in the wings. You will have to work very hard between now and then, and you will have to let me help you.” Willa didn’t say anything. “Of course I can’t force you,” Fran Heller continued. “But it’s a pretty sweet opportunity, and you may look back on it one day and be glad you did it.”
There was no way to know, thought Dory. You bumped stupidly ahead through life, and you couldn’t know if starring in a play, or sleeping with someone, or marrying someone, or picking a particular college, or even taking a walk down a street, was going to lead to happiness or sorrow. How could you know? A mother couldn’t advise her daughter in such matters, except in the most nebulous and anemic way.
“Well,” Dory said to Willa. “Ms. Heller’s right. You may be glad about it one day. On the other hand,” she felt she had to add, “you may not.”
Fran Heller put an arm around Willa’s shoulders and said look, she was aware that it had been awkward between them, what with her breakup from Eli. But there was no need to feel awkward now. The two mothers had their arms all over this girl, whose freckly, susceptible skin seemed to be percolating with panic.
“Okay?” Ms. Heller said. “What do you think?”
“Okay,” said Willa, though no sound came out. Dory was reminded of how Willa’s flute had sounded back in fourth grade, when she’d begun to play. She blew and blew, and her face got red, and only the faintest hoot was conveyed, like a damsel calling for help from a tower in a castle. Willa, almost against her will, was saying yes to the persuasive Fran Heller, who turned to Dory and instructed her to go home.
“It’ll only make her self-conscious if she knows you’re out in the audience tonight. I’ll take care of her from here on in. Don’t worry.”
So Dory gathered her belongings and left. She could not imagine her daughter being able to get up onstage and play the lead—play Lysistrata, she who disbanded whole armies! Willa didn’t have the clarity or directness or independence of Marissa Clayborn. She had been chosen for some reason that Dory couldn’t understand. Maybe it was out of cruelty, Dory even thought; maybe it was because Fran knew she would fail and wanted to punish this girl: She Who Broke Up with Sons.
Shortly before midnight that night, Eli Heller stood out in the backyard of the Langs’ house down Tam o’ Shanter, ankle-deep in the snow, beneath Willa’s dark second-floor window. He tossed up handfuls of pebbles, an act that accomplished nothing and soon gave way to tossing up handfuls of dirt and snow and ice. Willa was awake, reading the Aristophanes script with a tiny book light, the way she’d read many books in bed: secretly, almost illicitly. She spoke the lines quietly to herself, trying hard to feel their meaning instead of just reciting a collection of linked words. She imagined the strong-minded Lysistrata as a bit of a loudmouth like Ms. Heller, but also as someone who got things done, like Marissa Clayborn. Willa thought that she herself was a little bit like Lysistrata too, because both of them surely knew the intensity of what could happen between two people in a bed.
In a quiet stage voice, Willa read aloud:Ah, ha! so you thought you had only to do with a set of slave-women! you did not know the ardour that fills the bosom of free-born dames.
Then she heard a slap, and then another and another, at her window. At first it seemed branchlike, or even like hail, but then it was too rhythmic for that. Willa went to the window as a big clod of ice and snow and dirt hit the pane and made her jump back. Stepping forward, she looked out and saw Eli standing below, lit up by the outside light over the back door. Looking down at the top of his hair and his unmittened hands, she was reminded again that he would not
be hers forever, that he was not hers now, and that her decision had been harsh but correct.
Willa unfastened the window and leaned out. “Eli,” she said. “What are you doing? Go home.”
“I wanted you to see what’s going on with me,” he said. “What you did. You see me at school since we broke up, and you think I’m doing okay, right? You think I must be managing because I’m not lying down dead in the hallway, and I’m not spray-painting things about you on the overpass. Well, I’m not doing okay, for your information .” He pulled a whiskey bottle from his pocket, unscrewed the top, and dramatically flipped his head back to drink. When he was done, he said, “I’ve had a lot to drink tonight, Willa, and that’s not all I had.”
“What?”
“I had some J Juice,” he said in a slightly bragging tone. “I bought it from Doug Zwern.”
“Oh, you did not.” Eli wasn’t the type; only once, the two of them had smoked weed together, and another time they’d shared a bottle of wine stolen from the Langs’ basement, where there was a whole case left over from her parents’ faculty potluck. In both instances, Eli had said he disliked the feeling of being off-balance. But here he was now, defiantly staring up at her in the middle of the night, and with his other hand he took a tiny bottle from his pocket and held it up as evidence. He was agitated and inebriated and tripping, and also probably freezing. She couldn’t leave him there. “I’ll come down and walk you home,” she said.
“Will you go out with me again?”
“What? No.”
“Then don’t do me any fucking favors,” he said. “I mean, really, Willa. Walking me home like you’re the big chaperone. You’re not in charge, Willa.”
But the one who loved less—or acted as if they did—was always in charge, and that was the way the world went. She was in charge, and he couldn’t do anything besides get drunk and take J Juice and have a freak-out in her backyard in the middle of the night.
“I didn’t even like your flute playing, by the way,” he called up to her. “It was mediocre. And what we did together? On the couch in my basement all those times? Totally mediocre too.”
“Eli, stop talking,” she said, raising her voice. “Just stop already.”
“Wow, your voice projects really well. No wonder my mother picked you for the lead.”
“Whatever reason she picked me, it was a mistake,” Willa said, and then she added, “I thought she hated me.”
“No one hates you. I don’t even hate you,” said Eli, and then he lurched away from the window, collapsing a few yards away in the snow, facedown.
“Oh shit,” Willa said, and she slammed the window shut and made her way downstairs in the dark. At the back door she slipped into a pair of boots waiting there—her father’s enormous boots—and clomped out into the yard. Somehow she got Eli up and he leaned on her and she brought him inside. He smelled ridiculously bad, and he had cut his lip when he fell. She put him in the easy chair in the living room, and almost immediately her mother appeared from upstairs, and then her father appeared from the den; what had he been doing in the den so late at night? Everyone in her family was off, Willa thought. Eli belched and closed his eyes now, and said to her parents, “Oh, Mr. and Ms. L, I can’t believe you’re seeing me like this,” and then he belched again and turned his head away, as if by doing this he might become invisible to them.
Willa’s mother got on the phone, and within ten minutes the drama teacher was at their door. Her son was sick-drunk and high, but all three parents decided that he didn’t seem so far gone that he would need to go to the ER, like those teenagers over in Woodvale. Eli turned to look at Willa as he leaned against his mother on the way out. It was humiliating to have to be taken home by your mother, by your mommy. To have to be seen this way by the girl you loved, who had been your lover. He was a big, broad-shouldered boy, and his mother was small, but she could have held up a building right now. Eli’s expression was dog-eyed, full of longing, and on the way out the Langs’ front door he said to Willa, “Take me back.” She said nothing. It was the night before the play, and yet all of them were wide awake. “You’ll do great tomorrow,” he added, as his mother led him away.
15.
Winter, not enchantment, conjured the wind that swung the heavy blue metal doors back on their hinges during the evening of the performance of Lysistrata. Winter, with its strong wind, sent parents, teachers, and children flying inside Elro, grateful to be indoors, though actually, they noticed, it was not very warm in the building either. Still, many of the females who flowed through the doors on that clear, dead-cold February night had already fallen under the enchantment of the spell. The uncoupling had been cumulative over all these many weeks, and impressive in its reach. As the Langs walked in, Dory heard pieces of conversations—beginnings, middles, and ends that highlighted unhappiness and restlessness and unease. She heard, “Fine, I’ll sit elsewhere,” and, “I said we’ll talk about this later,” and, “Not in front of the kids,” and, from a teenaged girl, “Oh, fuck you, Bryce, I mean really, fuck you.” Dory heard it and took note of it, but she and Robby walked on in, opening their coats, standing with the others in the well-lit and slightly underheated lobby. The crowd tonight was on edge, though also muted and cautious.
But those involved with the play—despite the personal relationship unhappiness that many of them felt—had fallen into the state of typical, suppressed hysteria often seen right before high school plays. A few girls darted back and forth across the lobby, giving each other urgent messages about blocks of reserved seats (“Señor Mandelbaum is bringing his paraplegic sister; they must—have—an—aisle!”), and whether they could find a third parent to help out with Lysistrata’s lightning-fast costume change. One boy needed more paper napkins for the red velvet cupcakes that would be sold during intermission.
Backstage, Ms. Heller gathered the cast together and motioned for them to stand in a large circle and hold hands. They did so with extreme self-consciousness; some hands were wet or sticky, others were cold, and still others seemed as if they were burning hot. After a few moments of giggling, or glaring, or extreme discomfort, the cast members calmed down and stood silently in formation in their chitons and sandals, looking for all the world like the participants in the first Olympics.
“Good evening, everyone,” Ms. Heller said in the quietest voice they’d ever heard her use. “I am so glad all of you decided to make it.” There was light laughter, as they realized this was a jabbing reference to Marissa’s absence. “Tonight is going to be amazing,” she said. “I can just feel it. You’ve worked very hard, and this will be the payoff. And it will be worth it. Now I’d like everyone to close their eyes, and I’m going to start sending an electrical charge around the circle. When you feel it, please send it to the next person, and when it’s gone all the way around, you may let it go.” She squeezed the hand of one of the Chorus of Old Men, her artisanal rings digging into his hand so that he jolted to painful attention and squeezed the hand of the girl beside him, and around went the electrical charge, and everyone felt themselves invigorated, and finally they flung their hands apart in astonishment, asking one another, “Did you feel it? I did.”
But a little while later, pacing in the cafeteria with the stage makeup thick and orange on her face, her eyes ringed and accentuated, Willa had a failure of nerve, and she said to Carrie Petito and the two Lucys in a low, sick voice, “They should’ve canceled the play. How can I go out there? I’m a wreck about it. About Eli. About everything. ” Her friends told her that she just had to walk out there and think about whatever it was actors think about when they are trying to give the performance of their lives.
“Here’s the thing,” said Carrie. “Everyone in that audience is going to know how hard this is, what you’re doing; and everyone in the cast and crew is going to be sending you amazing-acting vibes.”
“That is totally true,” said Lucy Neels.
“No, I am screwed,” said Willa. “I should never hav
e said yes.”
“Look,” said Carrie. “Remember in eighth grade when I had that eating disorder and my parents made me join that support group in the basement of the synagogue? I hated it more than anything ; I told them I was going to get nothing out of it. But I went to it, and I did get a lot out of it. It did something to me, and then I didn’t need it anymore. And this,” she said with authority, “will do something to you.”
“It’ll kill me.”
“No it won’t.”
Carrie Petito hugged her friend, and then the two Lucys did too, their narrow bodies pressed into her as hard as girls’ bodies could ever press, sending yet more electrical charges of luck and love.
By ten minutes to seven the auditorium was filled. Dory and Robby Lang headed down the aisle toward their reserved seats in the sixth row. Earlier tonight, when they were about to leave the house, he’d said, “Tonight everyone’s going to say how proud we must be.”
“And we will be.”
“Of course. But one of the things I always liked about us,” Robby said, “is that we weren’t one of those couples who only think and talk about their kids. But now maybe we’re heading there.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. She was worn out from her own insistence on busting up what had been good and solid. Tonight would be about Willa, and that was appropriate. Let it be about Willa so it did not have to be about them.