But right after rehearsals began in that high school in Ferndale, Fran noticed that some of the women and girls suddenly started turning away from men and boys. Relationships broke up entirely, or were simply desexualized, and Fran Heller started to hear about them through the school grapevine. And though no one understood why this was happening to them, Fran began to figure it out. She was open-minded about cause and effect, and she had always intuitively believed in enchantment, and in the powers of literature and performance.
So an amateur high school production of Lysistrata apparently could cast a no-sex spell upon the females in its midst. This seemed, on first glance, as random, say, as the fact that bread mold could be used to cure disease. And yet it made a kind of perfect sense. The idea of a sex strike, of saying no, was powerful and suggestive, and not just necessarily saying no because of a war, but for a hundred different reasons.
Fran couldn’t get over it; she sat quietly, thrilled, chewing on her nails as she watched the effects of the spell that first year, having no idea what would happen next, or how it would all end. But on the night the play was finally performed, the men and teenaged boys of Ferndale had started getting worked up and arguing in the audience about the message of the play—was it insulting to men, was it fair, was it a little too close to their own lives—and one of them had popped up onstage, and another had gone up to bring him down. There was some kind of theatrical scuffle, and then finally a few go-for-broke men had stormed that Acropolis, asking their wives and lovers and girlfriends to take them back, and they did.
After Ferndale, Fran Heller decided she would go elsewhere and see if she could do it all over again with the same results. She had been made to see that nature was sometimes out of balance; she had always viscerally understood this to be true, and had felt it in other moments in her life, such as once, when she saw a baby dressed like a stripper, or another time, when she saw mushrooms growing in a shower stall. But nature could frequently get out of balance in bed, and now she thought she knew a way to rectify this.
It was overwhelming to be able to sense, roughly, what would happen as the cast rehearsed and the spell moved through a town—yet still not know the exact people who would fall under it. All of the susceptible ones seemed to be in some sort of relationship with men; all of them also had some proximity to the play, or to someone in the play, but it didn’t seem to strike them in any particular order. Fran and Eli had landed next in Cobalt, an innocent, not-bad New Jersey suburb. She put on Lysistrata again, and, sure enough, it happened; corrections were made in various people’s sexual lives. Fran told no one about the spell, or about being its conductor, administrator, practically its impresario—no one except Lowell, to whom she told everything, though almost never in person.
The drama teacher realized that she could keep putting on Lysistrata all over New Jersey, or even all over the eastern seaboard if she wanted, working with bright-faced adolescents, teaching them to act, getting their parents to donate sheets for use as chitons. Causing couples to fall sharply away from each other, and then, in the middle of the performance, to fall sharply back. Just as it had done last night, here in Stellar Plains—despite that heart-stopping panic about the lead needing to be replaced, of all crazy distractions—a combination of other, ardent spells always overtook the Lysistrata spell at the very last minute.
She picked up the silver loving cup from where she had placed it on the coffee table, and ran her hand across the inscription on the curved, tarnished surface. Fran had gotten in the habit of taking a small memento from each school, and this one had been a no-brainer. After the kids were all off at the cast party, and after the tech crew had finished striking the set, she had been the last one in the silent school. She’d opened the glass showcase in the hallway outside the auditorium with the tiny key she’d been given at the beginning of the school year, and removed the loving cup from where it had probably been since 1969.
As she sat touching it now, she looked at the words “You Can’t Take It with You,” and she laughed aloud, once, at the fact that, in this instance, oh yes you could. After she’d removed it, she’d rearranged all the photos and objects in the dusty showcase so that no one would notice something was missing, not that anyone ever really looked in there anymore. She almost imagined for a moment that the silver cup had been given to her and her cast, in honor of this wonderful production tonight. “Thank you,” she heard herself saying, and the memory of the entire play from start to finish should have been deeply satisfying to recall right now, except that she could not stop thinking about her son.
It just hadn’t occurred to her that Eli could be a casualty of her actions. In the past he had been too young, or not interested enough in girls, and the play wasn’t relevant to him. Fran had assumed it would always be that way; why hadn’t she realized that one day he might get involved with a girl in the school where she taught; even a girl in the play? And that by entrancing a girl he loved, the spell would bring him heartbreak, even the temporary kind. And then—what were the chances—that the love between him and this girl might be the rare one that didn’t recover.
Eli was independent and intense; he’d always had his own mind, and that was still true now. When Fran had returned home after the play with a do-gooder’s feeling of accomplishment, and the loving cup pleasingly heavy in her shoulder bag, she had sat at her laptop and read her son’s e-mail, in which he told her he’d left. Her head had pounded as she read it. “I’m not running away, per se,” he wrote. “I just want to get on with my life w/o Willa, ok?”
She understood that he had left before the moment of Willa’s dis-enchantment, and before the reunion that Fran had always intended. “Don’t take it personally, Mom,” Eli wrote her, but of course she did. She had raised him alone, basically. They had been incredibly close, and she wasn’t ready to turn him over to Lowell full-time. She simply couldn’t bear it.
But maybe she wouldn’t have to, she thought. Once Eli found out that Willa now wanted him back, he would come home. “I just know that you and Willa will work things out,” Fran wrote back to him. “I can tell she has changed her mind.” But Eli didn’t write back.
Fran had panicked. She’d called his cell, and the voice mail picked up immediately, so she left a message saying, “Please, Eli, take the next bus home. Your dad will pay for your ticket. Call me when you get this. Please, honey, give a call.” When he didn’t call back within ten minutes, she left a second message, feeling ill from the stress of it. God, she thought, she’d become as needy as one of the men who’d been begging the women that winter.
Above Fran Heller on the wall of the living room, the ceramic masks of comedy and tragedy grinned and frowned, just as they had done that night in Cobalt, when the production was over and everyone had scattered, and she’d pulled the masks with pliers from the wall of the auditorium for another keepsake, then put them in her bag and kept walking.
Listen, fair woman, she imagined the masks saying as one voice, as one chorus. Do you really think so many men and women benefit from the extreme intervention that the play brings?
Yes, Fran would have replied, I do. Not everyone is enlightened; not everyone knows how to live.
But what about the young man sprung from your loins? How did he benefit? He is suffering, isn’t he? And he is alone.
But Fran Heller didn’t want to think about her son anymore tonight. She had figured out how to adjust and correct the couplings of virtual strangers, but when it came to her own teenager, she didn’t know what the hell she was doing. No one ever did. Always, he would be one step beyond her; this was how it was supposed to be, but it was as sad as anything she could think of, as sad as the saddest tragedy. Fran Heller made her way down the hallway to her bedroom, and dialed the house in Lansing. Lowell answered, and she said to him, keeping her voice casual and light, “It’s me, babe. Everything okay over there? Yes, yes, good.” She lay down on the bed, for she hadn’t slept in a full day, and she was so tired. Her husband’s v
oice spoke to her from across a great distance, but he might as well have been right there beside her.
In the weeks to come, she would circulate her résumé, hoping that a drama teacher was needed somewhere not too far away. And when she was hired, she would move there and settle in, and it would all begin. Some of the women who lived in that new town, both the younger ones and older ones, would begin to feel puzzled that desire had fallen away from them so suddenly and easily. That for reasons they didn’t understand, they had given up what they’d loved. That everything was different now. But they wouldn’t know what to do about it, and for a while at least, they would just have to let themselves remain suspended and powerless—waiting, as we all do, for the spell to lift.
ALSO BY MEG WOLITZER
The Ten-Year Nap
The Position
The Wife
Surrender, Dorothy
This Is Your Life
Hidden Pictures
Sleepwalking
Meg Wolitzer, The Uncoupling
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